Transition back to civilian life is the biggest challenge our service men and women will face in their military careers. America invests millions in training our warfighters to be the most competent in the world. That investment shouldn’t end when the uniform comes off.
The Jedburgh Podcast, the Jedburgh Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation are proud to announce our partnership with the University of Health and Performance outside of Bentonville, Arkansas.
Matt Hesse is the Founder and CEO of University of Health and Performance. This Veterans Day, Fran Racioppi sat down with Matt to share his vision to build a world-class development program to train our Veterans as certified personal trainers. In addition to the hard skills required to build health and fitness in others, UHP is also teaching the business skills needed to become successful entrepreneurs.
Matt explains the process, the details behind each course, why UHP has chosen Arkansas to call home, how he’s building an ecosystem to support all aspects of Veteran transition, and how UHP is leading the way in showing private industry just how valuable our Veterans will be for the next generation of America.
Watch, listen or read our conversation from the UHP gym. Don’t miss our full Veterans Day coverage from UHP. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast, the Green Beret Foundation and UHP on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
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Matt, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for hosting us here at the University of Health & Performance. It’s been several years since we first met. Board member for the Green Beret Foundation, Walt Cooper, introduced us back to the first Sandlot JAX. Since then, we have been trying to find a way. How are we going to come together? How are we going to partner? You are a visionary when it comes to partnership, and we are going to talk a bit about that, but before we get into it, we have to say that this is the kickoff of the partnership between the Green Beret Foundation, The Jedburgh Media Channel, The Jedburgh Podcast, and the University of Health & Performance.
I’m glad to be doing it finally.
We are here in the gym. I’d like to say that we are in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas, but I can say that only because, as I told the governor, I’m from Boston and I live outside of New York now. Coming out here to rural northwest Arkansas, outside of Bentonville, what an amazing place.
It’s a hidden gem that not everybody knows about, and part of our goal is to help veterans understand how awesome Arkansas is because it’s a pretty sweet setup.
We are on a 500-acre farm. You had a vision a few years ago that you wanted to create something that isn’t being done. When we talk about service to veterans and primarily working with transitioning veterans who have to find that purpose for the next phase of their lives. We spent a lot of time on Veterans Day talking about service. What does it mean to serve? Service continues for veterans when they take that uniform off, and it’s a defining moment for I won’t say so many of us, I will say for every one of us. The longer you serve, the harder it is. Who are you? What do you want to be when you grow up, as we say? You had a vision to provide something that doesn’t exist.
You could probably liken it back to when you are sitting in a guidance counselor’s office in high school, and they’re like, “What are you going to do with your life?” You’re like, “I don’t know.” Maybe you’re like, “I’m going to go to the military because I don’t know,” and then you’re back in that same situation because it’s such a big, profound question. “What is the purpose of my life?”
When you’ve had the ability to serve and the purpose that it gave you, there’s nothing greater than serving democracy. It truly is. Veterans created this country, and to go from protecting that with your team, the camaraderie, the tribe, the structure, all of it to it just being gone one day. I know many people who have gone through the transition can relate to that. It’s debilitating. We built this place to help veterans identify and find a new purpose so that service doesn’t have to be over in their lives.
This was a field in a lot of ways. If you build it, they will come and they are coming. We are sitting here now talking about the programs, but we have two classes going on right behind us. The focus has been on this health and performance space. Why is health and performance the inject point for you and the University of Health & Performance into the veteran community?
You can certainly say that health and performance are important from a literal perspective, and people might take it as “They do health and wellness training,” and we do that. The health of your life or the health of your culture within your life and your business and the performance of your life and the performance of your business have to be in alignment with each other.
You can look at the woke era. We came out of companies, and people started focusing on, “I want this and I want that,” and they started giving them all those things because they were demanding it, and performance was not part of the factor. It was like, “We got to make sure that they feel good and happy,” and so the company’s health from a cultural perspective might’ve gone up. I’d argue it went down, but it might’ve gone up, but the performance went down.
The health and performance of your life or your company need to be in balance. If you give people too much, the performance will go down. If you drive people too hard and you don’t invest in them culturally, then eventually you’ll burn them out. I think life and business are about creating balance, and the health and performance of your life are important.
Fitness is such an important part of not only being a veteran but creating balance but how do you stay focused?
That mental wellness.
In every episode, we’ll do it here so you are going to get the precursor, I finish the episode where I ask my guests what are the three things that they do every day to be successful. I will say eight out of ten times, one of those three is either balance between mental and physical health or physical health. If they feel that I’m physically fit, then everything else comes into play. Everything comes into balance. John McPhee was on as well. I can’t wait for this episode to come out because we did it in the back of a Humvee, and that was a first.
I was like, “You could do that podcast in there.”
We got the ROI on it. John talks about how he’s got to tire himself out because if he tires himself out, whether it be through working out or jiu-jitsu, he’s mentally more focused. Fitness is a critical component of being in the military, and it’s something that is often driven upon you because you have a regimen, you have a group of folks who you are working out with, you’ve created a community every day, and it’s part of your daily routine, but then you transition. When you transition, now it’s on you, like so many other factors in life. In a lot of ways, you have to figure that out. How do I maintain that discipline? How do I do that?
We have all gone through our ebbs and flows since we got out. I got out, and you stay in shape for a while, and then you wake up one day, and you are like, “I didn’t get fat in a day, but I’m fat, and I don’t feel good about myself.” All of a sudden, you flip it back on, and you turn it on. Six months later, you feel great, and then six months after that, you are like, “I’m bad again. I don’t feel good.” Turn it back on.
You need to come to UHP.
I do need to come to UHP. You’ve got to start thinking about, “What’s the new thought process? What does my new life look like, and how am I going to build this routine around that?” You guys do the classes that you have. I want to ask you about the programs here. We have two classes going on right here, two different classes, and you are providing an opportunity for folks to come in. What are they focused on?
The program is broken into four pieces. We have a licensed health coaching platform. You can come here and become a health coach, or you can come here and become a personal trainer. Both those programs are seventeen days long. Within those two programs, the first five days are what we call purpose blueprinting. The purpose blueprinting process is the identification of the things you are passionate about, the things you are skilled at, and the things you have experience in.
Once you have an orientation of those things, then that should help you or our coaches help you find your path “What is my purpose? What’s my why? What am I going to do in the future?” When you have that, you can take the four pieces of the blueprint, how to think intellectually, how to train physically, how to feel emotionally, and how to lead from a values perspective to build a strategy to get after whatever that purpose is. It’s a pretty simplified system that takes a complex question, breaks it down into pieces, and helps you get to the answer pretty quickly.
How do you go about developing that program?
I’d say my life is a Petri dish for what this program is. I was a kid who came from a background of trauma. I now say with hindsight, I didn’t understand it then. I went into the military and found incredible discipline, and it was such an important part of my journey. It wasn’t a long part of my journey. I was only in for six years.
This was a good amount of time.
The majority of that was in the reserves. My mom got in a car accident. I was probably the worst soldier to ever go into the military. I didn’t like listening to stupid orders. I should have been special operations with all you knuckleheads because you get to at least pretend to do the smart shit. No offense to anybody out there that’s in the conventional enlisted force.
I just had a tough time taking orders from people when I was like, “Why don’t we do it like this?” They were like, “It’s because I told you to do it this way.” I’m like, “That’s fucking stupid. I’m not doing that.” I got busted in rank twice while I was in the military. Truly, I was probably the worst soldier ever, but I have come to value it so much, and everybody that served, if they are being honest with themselves, when they look back, they think, “What an incredible opportunity to do awesome shit with great people, and to learn and grow and see great leadership.” It’s awesome.
You said your mom got in a car accident. What happened?
She did. When I was in AIT, she got in a car wreck, broke her neck, and was probably ten more years as a quadriplegic and I took care of her while I went to college using my GI Bill. I’m so thankful for that piece of legislation that put the GI Bill in place because it gave me an education, allowed me to take care of my mom while I was going to college, and when she finally passed, it was probably the tipping point for me to understand who I was.
A lot of times when an event happens where trauma was attached to that event, when there’s a closure to the event, like my mom dying, a lot of memories from my childhood come back with stuff I had forgotten. We teach compartmentalization in the military. That moment is what created the inertia to start building this. I was 32 years old, living in New York City. I sold a company that I built for about eight years. By all rights, I was successful, but it was pretty empty relative to fulfillment and what I wanted out of my life.
That’s when I started doing a lot of reflection work. You go back to the pillar of emotional awareness. A lot of us carry a lot of shit around that we have not let out yet. A big part of this place is helping people do that. Helping people be vulnerable. I went through that myself, and then I took what I learned from that. When I started running our first program, which was a retreat at a Boy Scout camp with little tiny beds and 35 vets that I either knew from service, who worked for me, or who had heard about it. We lived there for a month.
We worked out and talked. There wasn’t a certification in that first class, but pretty quickly, I saw that this holistic, theoretical, and practical application of emotional work and intellectual education, all those things, started to gel. I’m going to call it divine intervention but something happened. At first, I was like, “This is a solution,” or at least the beginning of something that could be special. Trauma released something for me that set this in motion.
You went home and asked your wife and your family to move to northwest Arkansas from New York City. I fly back there tonight, and there’s a stark difference between the two, but it wasn’t easy to build this place.
No. My wife is Australian, and her dream as a child was to live in New York City. She was a very successful PR executive when I met her, and she didn’t agree immediately. There might have been some PSYOPs going on, some maneuvers to get her to see the perspective. There are trade-offs for sure. There are things here that she would say make it a much better place to raise kids. We have 2 kids, 5 and 7, and they love it here. Where else can you take off in a helicopter from downtown Bentonville, fly out to the campus, drive ATVs and excavators, and talk to veterans about purpose? It’s awesome. It’s a great place to live.
Talk about the process of building this place. We were here and we got to go around. We are going on a quick tour after this and will have you talk about some of the various locations that are being built. It is a bit remote, but everything that’s out here is top-notch design and construction. How do you fund bringing everything here?
It wasn’t easy, but that phrase you used, “If you build it, they will come,” it truly plays here. I believe that great visionary leaders are unencumbered by their own, “I can’t do it.” They remove all the roadblocks where most people think linearly “I want to do this. How am I going to do that? I can’t do that because that’s too hard. There’s no way I could do that.”
I have the blessing and curse of being able to see where I want to go. I don’t look at anything other than, “Is it possible?” Here’s the vision. I want to build this amazing place and I check down on, “Is it possible?” What I do is oversimplify it. What I don’t do is recognize how hard, even though it’s possible, the steps in between are. That’s what allows visionaries to say simply, “Is it possible?” Then go, “Yes, let’s do it.” When you pair that with unrelenting determination and grit, I’m not fucking quitting ever. I will not quit, and failure is not possible if you don’t quit.
If you look at it like, “I’m going to pivot until I win, I’m going to find a way,” then you never quit, and you never fail because you are unrelenting. You asked the question, how hard is it to build? We have nearly $20 million of infrastructure here. The majority of that infrastructure was funded by my wife and me, but a significant amount of it was funded by partnerships, and brands like C4. You are drinking some of my partnership there. They’re an incredible organization. Big company, nearly $1 billion business. Dr. Pepper owns a piece of it, but the founder still owns a majority of it. He’s highly involved in things he is passionate about and cares about.
Because he has the scale of influence, he can put his thumb on the scale and tip it and he did that here. We have a significant partnership with them. We have a clinical research lab here. Every university does clinical research work. We are doing it in the human performance space, and we’ll eventually bring it into the tactical space, doing research work on performance. Tactical could be how to improve performance in the special operations community relative to cognitive performance or physical performance. It could also be PTSD work, looking at neurocognitive function after impacts and brain
blasts.
We are scratching the surface of so many different things here because this place is a canvas. You can do anything. I know we are going to talk about partnerships in a little bit, but one of the reasons I wanted to partner with the Green Beret Foundation so much is because of the population of leaders within it. Green Berets are unique in the special operations community for a bunch of different reasons, but they are the intellectuals of our special operations community. They are dynamic thinkers. I want innovation and dynamic thinkers here because you get innovation out of dynamic thinkers. We’ll talk about that a bit more.
When you talk about this relentless attitude, I call it the relentless pursuit. We use the term “relentless pursuit” in the military, especially as it pertains to the global war on terror, and the common phrase that you always heard was that we were in relentless pursuit of our adversaries all over the world, wherever they were. Eventually, we are going to get them, and when we look at leadership lessons that we take out of the military, that one’s always stuck with me. I think very much as you do that there’s a solution.
I tell my team in FR6, my day job outside of this, that we don’t do everything, but we can do anything. Give us 48 hours, and we’ll come back to you with a solution. It might be way out there, but if we think like that, you can build massive opportunities if you are creative and if you go and find experts because the staff here is pretty impressive.
They are world-class. This place is so much bigger than I am, that inertia and the momentum that started to build here. Those leaders aren’t here because of me. They are here because of the way this place feels, the energy that it’s producing, and the outcomes that it’s producing. I get to be the steward of i. Every day, I am so appreciative that I am in the position I am. It’s a heavy position at times, but I truly believe that this thing is so much bigger than one person and that it is for everyone. Everybody who comes here, when I say, “It’s yours too,” I truly mean it. I want everybody to feel that way.
Outside of the human performance piece and the vision that you have of building these programs in human performance, personal training, and the health coach aspect, you are also looking at vocational schools and entrepreneurism. One of the goals of these programs is to get veterans out there to build businesses.
Back to the Green Beret Foundation specifically, you have a collection and a large number of transitioning leaders who have the ability and the relentless pursuit of success in their DNA. Anybody can be an entrepreneur. I truly believe that if you have that inside of you. The reason businesses fail predominantly is that people quit. It’s not because there’s not a solution, not a path. Maybe it’s linear thinking “I can’t do that, so I can’t do it.” What if you do it like this? A lot of people fail because they get to that point and they are like, “I’m done. I can’t do this.”
I have seen awesome businesses succeed with shitty leaders far less than I have seen shitty ideas succeed with great leaders. That’s why partnering with organizations that have those types of leaders coming out is important. If you could give those leaders the resources from an education and capital perspective to go into their communities, they will start solving big challenges in our community, and the blast radius of this place will get much bigger.
My personal goal right now is to give veterans the opportunity to get out and catch up with their peers as fast as possible, the ones they went to high school with. The reality is, if you served as a Green Beret for ten years and you are getting out and starting your career, I don’t care what the military tells you, you are starting backward from everybody else.
You might have some extreme experience as a leader in military command, structure, and whatever. That is transferable for sure. I fully believe that military veterans offer companies awesome leadership skills, but the reality is your network is small compared to other people who have been out for ten years and were in the workforce. Your experience in those specific jobs is far less, and there is going to be a steep learning curve in addition to the transition itself.
What I’m most excited about is building an entrepreneurship school here, where veterans who are getting out of the military could identify, “I want to study human performance. I want to open my gym, and I want to use that gym as a catalyst in my community to create health and wellness for veterans and everybody else.” I want that person to be able to get out of the military, go through 3 or 4 modules of education, graduate from our entrepreneurship school, and then get $100,000 in funding to open that business so they have no debt.
They then will pay back a royalty to the foundation. As we put more and more of those people out in the world opening these facilities, the inertia that started here in this simple concept of transition will get bigger and bigger. Now, what you’ve done is created a self-endowing system built by veterans that can solve veteran challenges.
If we can get this built in the next few years, we can see a reduction in the thing we all hear a lot about, which is veteran suicide. It’s terrible. Veteran suicide, in my opinion, is caused more by a loss of purpose and meaning and the transition in the identity of who you think you are when you get out of the military than it is by PTSD, brain injuries, or any of the things we are treating as symptoms. The symptom is the loss of the love of life and the purpose of your life.
There are a couple of areas here where I want to go a little deeper. You talk about the gap when you get out. The gap’s real. When I got out of the Army, I went to NYU, for the executive MBA program there. By definition, who’s in the class? It’s people who have been in the workforce for somewhere between 10 and 15 years, some for 25 years. You are coming together and have an opportunity to learn from these folks who’ve been in the industry while you get your education, but unlike a traditional MBA program where you have younger folks who might be in it, all these people have experience. What I continuously told myself was I had this set of experiences, which may or may not translate, as you said, but I lacked some very hard skills.
That’s unique that you had the perspective and the consciousness to say that, though. Most don’t.
I knew quickly that I didn’t know anybody outside of the people in the military. I had no network, no experiences outside of the fact that when I graduated undergrad, I went to basic training, spent a decade at war, and then after thirteen years, I’m out in New York City, trying to figure out who I am and what I want to be. Realizing that these people who are sitting with me, although great people, are no smarter. They are no less experienced. They have different experiences, but they know how to operate in the real world, and I don’t.
What I constantly told myself was, because we had investment bankers throwing cash around while I was on the GI Bill, wondering if I could pay rent this month. They’re going to the club, throwing down credit cards. I started realizing they’ve got fifteen years on me. That’s it. What’s my goal? My goal was, can I get there in ten? If it took them fifteen to get here, I had to accept that I don’t get to be on parity after thirteen years in the Army, but can I get there in ten?
That’s such incredible clarity and perspective and it’s uncommon. I wasn’t in long enough to be indoctrinated the way that you were and how you felt. I never felt that way. When I started building this, I was at the height of my rank, an E-4. I did six years, and at the height of my rank, I was an E-4. That will tell you something. I was the E-4 mafia queen. When I started building this, I thought, “I have to get generals here.” I was like, “They were the smartest people in the world.” In certain areas, they are.
In the same way that you recognized that you weren’t knowledgeable or experienced in the right areas, most special operations guys and general officers when they get to the 2-star, 3-star level, colonels, honestly, all of them, their egos are so wrapped up in their rank and what they accomplished in the military that they can’t see that perspective.
Most of them have MBAs. They either got an MBA while they were in service or right after. Now you have a highly educated, I will say, large ego not because it’s a bad thing, but because you were successful in the service, and it’s something to be proud of. If it becomes the defining factor of your civilian life, you are fucked because it doesn’t translate.
Every single person I have ever met who transitioned out of a high-impact military career in the civilian space has struggled unless they found deep purpose in the new mission quickly. Even then, your ego and the identity of who you were in the military are always on your shoulders. It’s always like, “No, you’re fucking smarter than them.” The reality is that you might be smarter intellectually, but the experience you lack compared to them will make you lose every time.
The other thing you talked about is the idea of the pity that people have for veterans and this perspective that they are veterans, so they are crazy, broken, and can’t do anything. That was another thing I consciously told myself too. As I looked around that classroom, I was glad. Doing that program because it did exactly what I needed it to do and that was to jumpstart me into the civilian world.
It gave me exposure where I could look around and say, “This is my peer group in the world, and I’m as smart. I’m more physically fit despite a stroke in my eye and two back injuries, but there’s nothing to feel bad about here. There’s no reason for me to have an issue or any limitations on what I can and can’t do.” The sooner you tell that to yourself as a veteran, even if it takes other people showing and telling you that, that’s got to be done.
I think that the faster we get out of this pity narrative that we are in because it’s also now morphing your brain. It sounded like you had some great mentors or incredible consciousness. Unfortunately, free thinkers are probably more likely in the special operations community than in the conventional force, but let’s say free thinkers are doing an assessment of themselves.
If all the rhetoric out there and the 45,000 nonprofits in the veteran space are like, “You are fucked, you are broken.” They are all well-intended. They are all raising money, mostly for well-intended purposes, but they are causing so many problems. They are using broken veterans who are a small percent of the population as spokespeople for all the rest of us. The reality is most veterans are highly competent, highly skilled, great leaders who want to do awesome, purposeful work. That’s the truth.
Society would have you believe that they are all broken, have PTSD, have incredible combat trauma, and need our pity and dollars. “You are so messed up.” It makes sense psychologically. You look at how they might raise money for puppies that are in adoption puppies in kennels and they play a sad song while the puppy is shaking in the cage. People are like, “Fuck, here’s my money. I will give it to you.” The same thing happens for veterans.
Unfortunately, they are doing more damage than good because they are raising money. Our people, mostly run by veterans, are going to companies like Jockey. They are putting missing-limb veterans in their ads. They are saying, “Buy our products because we give money to missing-limb veterans,” and that makes kids think, “I don’t want to serve in the military.” It makes parents think, “I don’t want my kid to go to the Army.” It’s a national security issue now. You are doing two things. You are victimizing the entire veteran population, and you are making kids not want to serve. It’s a huge problem. Back to the partnership strategy, at UHP, we won’t give money to any nonprofit in the veteran space that uses pity to raise money.
One of the biggest challenges of transition is that there’s no process. I remember coming into the Army. I went out of college and had an OCS contract, but you have to go to basic training before you do that. That process started in April of 2003. You go to the recruiter, go through the process, go through the delayed entry program, and that whole time, you are meeting with the recruiter. They are starting to shape your thought process. I went in October of ’03. You go to basic training for 9 weeks, 14 weeks at OCS, and then I had 4 months at the Infantry Officer Basic Course, Ranger School, and Airborne School.
I was in the Army for two years into this process, before I even got to my unit, where they trained my thought process. They indoctrinated me into a mindset. They programmed me, and then I went and got out. I came back from being General Linder’s aide at SOCAFRICA and said, “This is it. Move on and go do something else,” and it was, “Check in once a week, let us know where you are.” I had four months to figure out what I was going to do, watching the clock every day, “What am I going to do today?”
Fear and uncertainty building up.
January 16th, that was it. I was signing out. I went in to sign out, said my goodbyes to my unit, got that done in about an hour, and walked out. I went to out-processing, and some fine lady who I’d never met before and will never see again asked me for my ID card handed me a piece of paper, shook my hand, walked me to the door, and said, “Thank you for your service.” I walked to my car, got in, and started driving away.
The loneliest look.
I got out the gate, looked in the rearview mirror, and started crying because I spent thirteen years of my life doing this thing, and this thing was now over, but the years that I spent programming myself came down to a woman I never knew, shaking my hand in an exchange that lasted about two minutes taking my ID card away. You talked about your identity. I lived in that ID card for so long and someone else took it.
That’s so eloquently put, and when you combine that with you seem to have a pretty low ego about your service, which is great, but let’s take someone that has a high ego about their service. They are pulling out the gate and like, “That’s it? I gave you all this.” They need to have that because it’s who they are, and the combination of that person saying, “Thanks, see you.” A lot of people leave and start to resent, and you are like, “I gave it so much. Why?” I would argue a time that you realize it gave you as much as you gave it, but resentment can often build, and it’s sad.
At the same time, the DOD’s responsibility is to build a lethal fighting force. End of story. If you are no longer part of that fighting force, just like any company, you are leaving, “Thanks. I appreciate your time.” I would argue that there’s a duty, but where does the DOD’s duty stop and the VA’s start? That’s that gap that we, as veterans who have all felt the gap, need to fill because I don’t think that there’s ever going to be maybe a de-indoctrination program. Eisenhower talked about it at one point, and it never got built. I would argue that’s what this place is.
We are taking veterans from far and wide, bringing them here, and slowing them down in a rural, amazing piece of property with 300 bald eagles and trout in the river, and time and space to think about who you are and what you want out of your life and to talk about what you went through. Maybe the gate walk that you did doesn’t have to be so long because you came here before that gate walk happened.
When you walk out of it, you know where you are going and you also have a better perspective on why you served, and not just the “Thanks,” and you are gone. Getting left to the problem and getting into the transition offices and even SkillsBridge programs where you can come here first and build a strategy, and we can give you awareness that gate walk is coming, and you don’t have to cry at the end of it. Although crying is great. You should do that.
Sometimes you have no choice. That’s going to happen. It’s the assimilation into the new world, and that’s the gap that has to be closed. Providing that opportunity is what you are doing here. What’s next for the organization because we had everybody here? Governor Huckabee was here. We got a chance to sit down with her. I’m super excited about that. Senator Boozman was here as here from Arkansas, and everybody who came had the same thing to say “I was here last year, and a lot of this was dirt field. It’s changed so much. Can’t wait till next year.” What’s the focus now? We’re going to be back in a couple of months when the next Ridgeline comes, and so I need to know what I’m looking forward to.
A lot of skyscrapers here by then.
We saw a big-ass water tank.
That’s the fire suppression system. In 2025, I’m putting it on the record now. My team’s going to hate me for it, but in 2025, we are going to launch the Veterans Future Festival. It is going to be the largest Veterans Day event in the country anywhere. As you mentioned Governor Huckabee Sanders. Amazing leader. Most people know her as Trump’s Press Secretary, but does anybody spend any time with her? Did you get to talk to her?
We did.
She’s amazing. She is a great leader with a great perspective and loves veterans very much. She gave a beautiful speech. As you heard, she’s committed to this place. Not because of me, but because of the work that we are doing here. When we launch the Veterans Future Festival, with the goal of becoming the biggest Veterans Day anywhere in the country, not to just have a big Veterans Day, but to have a big Veterans Day of influence and bringing leaders here to have the conversation we are having about transition, about entrepreneurship, about fitness, and inviting brands to be a part of that, companies to be a part of that.
We shoot a ton of content out here, and we have a world-class media expert who’s also a Green Beret here Luke Peelgrane who architects these shoots and tries to help connect military content to commercial goods. We have been doing this for partners with Walmart for the last couple of years, and it works well. We want those brands to make that day here, their pinnacle day on campus together.
Veterans Future Festival will have 7,000 to 10,000 Spartan racers racing on our obstacle courses. We are going to replicate Nasty Nick, Green Beret obstacle course here in partnership with the Green Beret Foundation. We are going to hold a race at the Veterans Future Festival, where we are going to bring former operators, current operators, and ultra-athletes to compete and try to create some big competition. Hopefully, each year after, replicating a different obstacle course across special operations till we have them all, and then having one of the hardest races in the world, maybe several years from now.
That’s one of the goals. There’s a bunch of other stuff being built. As I said at the beginning, my mission now is to get the funding vehicle built so that veterans who want to become entrepreneurs can come here and start businesses with no debt. I believe that the pay-it-forward model, where they come here, they get funded, they open a business, the business is successful, and they pay royalties back into a new ESO that’s doing important work that the veterans want done.
Not lobby groups. I’m not going to talk about what is wrong with the veteran lobby space, but if our dollars as veterans are going into this and we are able to shape the policies we want, every one of the veterans I have interacted with would be shaping things very differently than they are now. Maybe a little bit like what Trump is doing in the White House. We are going to break the system.
I look forward to being a part of it. I appreciate you having us here on this Veterans Day. I can’t wait till next year.
I look forward to being back here in a couple of months kicking off the relationship with Green Beret Foundation and making an impact.
I’m excited to continue to invest and donate to you guys. I don’t know if you’ve talked about it yet, but we are committing to a $100,000 grant now, and we are going to keep growing that and making sure that there is funding for Green Berets to pursue whatever they want to pursue when they get out because they are worth it.
We hire almost exclusively Green Berets in my company in FR6, and we are going to continue that trend. I can’t wait. Thank you.
Green Beret Foundation
P.O. Box 25138
New York, NY 10087-5138
15618 Summit Park Drive, Suite 801 Montgomery, TX 77356
Call: at: (844) 287-7133
