Bryan Stern

• How Bryan Stern survived amid the collapses of both World Trade Center towers on 9-11, and still helped dig through the rubble (7:16)
• The scene on television that motivated Bryan to deploy his team for what was supposed to be one last time (17:31)
• How Grey Bull Rescue saved a South Carolina family trapped in Syria this summer (31:04)
• Why Grey Bull traveled to Russia to save the first living American victim of war crimes since World War II (38:43)
• Why the words "because I go" mean so much to Bryan (46:15)

FRANK BLAKE: Well, first off, it is an enormous honor to have you on the podcast.

The concept of this podcast is saying thanks to people who do crazy good things for others.

Bryan, your story is one not only of doing crazy good things for others, but doing the bravest possible things I can imagine for others.

Thank you for that. Just extraordinary.

BRYAN STERN: Thanks so much. We love what we do. At least thus far, there's nothing that we haven't been challenged with that we couldn't achieve.

From hostages in Gaza, to jailbreaks from Russia, to helicopters, and big airplanes, and missiles, and terrorists.

You name it, we've done it kind of a deal.

We're limited purely by funding at this moment.

It seems to be the only real limiting factor that we have from an operations perspective.

FRANK BLAKE: Amazing. I hope we'll get into some of that for our listeners in a bit.

But before that, I'm always fascinated by founding questions.

How somebody founds the enterprise that they're involved in.

Yours, if I understand it, you served an amazingly honorable 20 years in the military.

You were retired, pursuing a career, and then your career took a completely different turn.

BRYAN STERN: A nosedive.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. Well, a completely different turn.

Can you give the story behind that of what led you to where you are now?

BRYAN STERN: Yeah. I don't come from a military family at all.

My father was a lawyer and a judge. My mother was in fashion and finance.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: No one in my family ... My grandparents' brothers were in World War II and I didn't really know them.

They all passed away, or whatever.

I didn't have any military influence, if you will, which is a little weird.

I joined the Army as a kid really just to make my mother angry, frankly.

I joined the Army as a kid, carrying a rifle as a regular infantry guy.

I got recruited into Army intelligence at a pretty young age.

I came in in the late '90s, Bill Clinton was president.

Had an okay run, but at the end of the day, the beginning part of my career in the military was frankly a little boring.

Nothing was going on. Back then, if you went to Bosnia, you were a steely-eyed killer.

Even in infantry school, none of our drill sergeants had been to war.

We forget that today, everyone's got 15 deployments to Afghanistan.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

BRYAN STERN: Back then, no one knew anything about anything.

Our equipment was old. It was basically World War II or Vietnam stuff.

In 2001, I was doing some things in New York.

We had a place down by 6 World Trade Center.

I was on my way to work on the morning of 9/11, and Tower One was already hit as I came out of the train.

Tower Two would be hit soon thereafter.

I've been at war pretty much ever since one way or the other. I've worked in 80 countries.

I had a really awesome, fun career. I worked on projects that they made movies about.

I flip-flopped between the dark side of intelligence and the dark side of special operations.

Traditionally when you think about special operations guys, you'd think about helicopters, and sleeve tattoos, and all that other good stuff.

The reality is the real good stuff isn't any of that. That's the real good stuff.

That's a lot of the things I worked on.

I tended in my career to work on things that were hard.

Even to this day, Afghanistan is the easiest place I've ever worked, overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly.

FRANK BLAKE: Boy, that gives a sense. That gives a sense of what you've been involved in.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah. I find myself ... I worked the invasion of Afghanistan, worked the invasion of Iraq, worked all kinds of weird special projects and weird things.

I worked at underground facilities, which is a real nightmare.

FRANK BLAKE: This is such a fast journey through an amazing set of experiences.

Go back to 9/11. My understanding is you were injured then.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: And stayed to help people sort through the rubble and rescue folks. Is that right?

BRYAN STERN: In the 9/11 community, which is its own little subculture, there are a very, very, very few group of people that were in both collapses and I'm one of them.

Everyone that was in both collapses tends to have a really funny story.

I was in the plaza right at the base of Tower Two as Tower Two got hit.

For perspective, as the plane flew in this way, I was on the other side.

The exit wound, I was right at the corner.

All the debris and all the stuff fell on top of everybody in the plaza and I was injured there.

Not catastrophically injured, but injured enough. Injured enough.

There was lots of burning stuff that fell on top of us, some big chunks of stuff. I don't really know what hit me.

I was just stunned, to be frank.

I have the benefit of gray hair now. Back then, I was a kid who had no experience in life.

By Army standards, I was bellybutton lint. The accounts that I was working on were the flipping burgers of intelligence.

I was a very junior guy with no decision making authority whatsoever. Nobody was really seasoned, but I was even worse.

What happens is I get hurt and start to get treated and stuff.

Lots of people got hurt. Lots, and lots, and lots of people got hurt. I was one of many, and many people were hurt way worse than I.

Started to get treated and doing our thing, and then somebody yells out, "Oh, my God, it's going!"

They fell in reverse order.

Tower Two collapsed first, which is extremely unfortunate because that's right where I was hurt and that's also right where I was being treated.

We all run. Everybody runs for their lives. One of those moments that you really can't put into words, frankly.

At the time, I was in a suit and tie. I'm in plainclothes, I'm not in an Army uniform, I don't do that sort of work.

I had a StarTAC phone, if you remember those. I had a beeper.

In fact, my old beeper I think is sitting ... Oh, no, it's in the other space.

But I had a giant beeper the size of a VCR cassette, you know the old ones?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: It would get messages on it. Back then, it was a very big deal.

Email came to the Army in 2000, this was 2001, so 24 years ago.

Everybody runs for their lives.

I go running up the West Side Highway, and really scared to death. Truly, truly scared to death.

I have never run that fast since, I've never been that scared since.

It's one of those experiences that you can't put into words, the enormity of it.

That was fine. Get clobbered like everybody else does.

Get clobbered with 110 stories of air conditioners, and toilets, and everything.

People forget. Everybody is like, "Oh, it's just a building."

Well, inside that building was a lot of stuff. It was all that stuff that ...

The concrete turned into dust. All the stuff flew all the way up to Canal Street.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: I had wedged myself in between a cargo van and a Jeep Cherokee.

My big thing was, is, I was truly hoping ... I remember running and my whole field of view, as high as I could see and as wide as I can see, was a freight train of stuff roaring up the street.

I recognized that I'm not going to outrun this thing. It's just not possible.

Anyway, I wedged myself in between these things.

My big thing was is, "I hope it goes quick. What I don't want to do is break my arms or my legs or something, or crack my head open, buried alive."

Those are the things that I really thought about as all this stuff is going over us.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: It was my biggest fear. I was okay with being hurt. I was really, really, really afraid of being buried alive.

To this day, when we do our operations, we just came back from Israel doing operations, you will not find me in a bomb shelter.

I won't go to this day. I've been buried alive twice, that's two more than I need to be.

Everything settles. Everything settles and I'm hurt more now.

The whole back of my suit was ripped open, so my underwear's hanging out kind of a deal.

Very terrible. I followed a bunch of people.

I was very, not delirious, but it was hard to understand what was going ... I couldn't see anything.

I had stuff all in my eyes, and my mouth, and my ears, and stuff. I followed other people because I recognized that I'm not too smart, and I recognized that probably they know what they're doing and I don't.

I follow all these people. We kind of all mass, a group of us mass together.

Come to find out, we went the wrong direction.

We went back the way we came, not away from the problems.

In hindsight, it was pretty obvious, but I wasn't really paying attention.

Then a little bit later, a little bit later, it's basically same song, different verse.

It was, "Oh, my God, the other one, it's coming down!"

The same thing, I just followed everybody. I just ran. Everyone went in every direction.

There was a guy in a fireman's jacket and I just paced off him.

The second collapse, people don't understand.

In the first collapse while we ran, we were on pavement and sidewalk.

In the second one, we were running through debris and lunar dust level powder.

Nobody got very far because it was significantly harder to run. Crazy.

FRANK BLAKE: Bryan, just listening to that, I have to say, I'm going to say most of us would go, "Wow, just fortunate to be alive.

"I'm going to hunker down in my life because I've just had enough close calls with death to say that's going to do me for a long, long time."

That was not your reaction.

BRYAN STERN: No.

FRANK BLAKE: Why?

BRYAN STERN: It started off anger. This is my city. I'm from New York, this is where I grew up.

These jerks ruined the skyline.

As a kid, coming out of train in the city, you get out of train, you're trying to figure out where you are.

You look that way and you see the Empire State Building, and you look that way and you see the Twin Towers.

Now I know which way is north, south, east, and west, and I know how to walk.

Now, the whole skyline of New York changed as a result.

It sounds such a stupid thing, but as a New Yorker, as a lifelong Mets fan where I grew up in Queens, the Twin Towers were a true fixture.

It was such an iconic thing.

The idea that these people came to my city and blew up my skyline, and attacked my people and my country, and literally my city, and those idiots almost killed me.

My mother always told me, "Always forgive, but never forget."

I got angry. I lost friends on the morning of 9/11. I have firefighters that I knew.

When funerals were going on and all those things were truly horrific. Truly horrific.

There was no way, as a soldier, that I'm going to lick my wounds and that'll be that.

That's not what we do. You shoot at us ...

One of the folks that works for me always says, "If you come at me with a fist, I'm going to come at you with a baseball bat. If you come at me with a baseball bat, I'm going to shoot you in the face."

Because that's what we do. We don't say uncle, that's not what we're here for.

That's what the Cub Scouts are for.

That's what other folks are for, and God bless them, that's okay. But you shoot at an American soldier, the expectation is we're going to hurt you back.

At the time, again, going back, we didn't know ...

I didn't even know about the Pentagon for four days. There was no communications, no one knew anything.

Instagram wasn't invented yet. Nothing worked, so we heard rumors of different things, but no one actually knew.

A lot of bad information. We didn't know how many people were killed. The rumors.

It turns out, just under 3000 people died. The original numbers that we were told? 40,000, 50,000.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: In these early days, the amount of rage, and anger, and digging in the rubble where the team that I was on that helped dig, we started off wanting to find a survivor.

Then it turned into let's find a whole body. Then it turned into let's find an identifiable something.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: By the time I left, we had failed in all that and only found parts and pieces.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Finding fingers, and legs, and arms and stuff, as a young kid from New York who's also a soldier, the anger that I felt was demonstrable.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. You serve, you serve overseas. You have an amazing career in the Army. You've retired.

BRYAN STERN: In the Army and the Navy.

FRANK BLAKE: In the Army and the Navy.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: You've retired after 20 years. Afghanistan falls.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: And you once again ... Just describe what it is that led you to set up Grey Bull and do what you're doing now.

BRYAN STERN: It's also related to 9/11. I did 26 years I think in government, something like that, 26 years.

It's August 2021. By now, I've had this really awesome career in intelligence.

I've recruited sources and assets, I've worked all over the world. I've been on SEAL Teams and special operations things, met the president a bunch.

All kinds of cool things. Everything is great.

In the veteran world, we talk a lot about transition.

When guys get out, men and women get out, very often they don't transition very well into civilian life, and all those things.

Because of what I did in the intelligence community, I actually transitioned beautifully.

In my service to the government, I barely wore a uniform anyway.

I worked in offices and hotels, and I traveled commercially, and I was basically a real person, just happened to also get paid by the government.

I transitioned great. I had a great consulting company, I was making tons of money doing all kinds of weird things.

Business development stuff, all kinds of global ... Worked on a couple of movies.

All kinds of cool stuff. Life is good. Life is great.

I'm asked leading up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, speaking of 9/11, to give a speech because I'm a military first responder who's also been around, and I like to talk, and I have a great relationship with the museum, and all these other things.

It's August 2021. I'm working on my speech, which is emotional for me.

Thank God, I have no PTSD, but I think about 9/11 every day as a moment of reflection. Every single day.

I'm lucky to be alive and I live every day like it's September 12th. It's a very emotional daily thing that I think about.

I'm working on my speech and at the same time, it's the withdrawal of Afghanistan.

Which also is an emotional thing. I've buried a lot of friends there. I've spent a lot of time there.

I've recruited dozens, and dozens, and dozens of sources, intelligence sources and assets.

I've done some crazy things for God and country, some that are hard to swallow sometimes, but I spent a lot of time there.

I'm watching this whole thing. I have friends of mine in Afghanistan asking for help.

Now, as an intelligence officer, when I recruit an asset, part of our pitch just like any other sales thing, getting people to buy used cars is very analogous to recruiting an intelligence source.

It's very similar. Different.

But one of the things that we say is, "We will come for you. If you spy for me at the risk of your life, your family's lives, your children's lives, your village's lives, your tribe's lives, all these things, we will come for you.

"We will not leave you behind. Especially if you get in trouble and it's no fault of your own. Especially."

Now we're watching this on TV. I have sources of mine that are reaching out through mechanisms and stuff.

They're saying, "Help me, help me, help me. You promised. You promised."

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: "You promised you wouldn't leave me. You gave me your word."

In Afghanistan, honor and integrity is unlike anything we understand in the West.

It's almost like Samurai. It's a very real thing. Measurable, palpable.

People get killed for honor in Afghanistan. This is a country where, if a daughter has sex before marriage, the father is required to drown her.

This is a very honor and integrity and a handshake really, really means something in a way that we in America don't comprehend.

As a guy who lived on the streets in Afghanistan, I understand where they're coming from. This hurts me deeply.

I'm working on my speech, which is horrible. I'm watching this on TV, which is worse.

I'm getting phone calls, which is the absolute worst. Then it's breaking news on CNN.

It's a military plane taking off from Kabul and there are Afghans falling from the plane.

I asked myself, "What planet am I on? It's 20 years ago almost to the day. The last time I saw that was on the morning of 9/11."

How do you explain to me that people are jumping to their deaths as a better idea than staying where they are?

Caused, oh, yeah, by the way, by some of the same people. That doesn't make any sense to me. That makes no sense.

Yet again, I'm an emotional guy, I get very upset.

That upset turns into frustration, that frustration turns into anger, and that anger turns into action.

We say, oddly, I've done a tremendous amount of weird things in weird places under very weird circumstances.

Most special operation guys haven't. I've built operations, I've designed operations. I've conducted thousands of them.

I've chartered hundreds of airplanes in my career.

As a Navy SEAL, you don't learn how to charter an airplane. As an intelligence officer, you know how to do these things.

I got some friends of mine together. I said, "This is what we're going to do."

I called them up, very upset. I say, "This is what we're going to do. One last blast, one more time."

We may be old, we may be fat, we may have gray hair. We're going to get the band back together.

Get the band back together one more time and we're going to deploy. We're not going to watch this on TV.

We're not going to be spectators to this.

Now, when we originally deployed, it was to rescue our interpreters, sources, commandos, judges, women's rights activists, journalists, people that we knew would be at risk from the Taliban.

That's fine, that's fine. There's a problem. We had a very real discussion about, "What do we do about Americans?"

I made a command decision and I said, "That's not for us."

I've worked in all the units that do this sort of thing. We have buildings of people, buildings of people, of the most deadly, lethal men on planet Earth that will do horrible things to anyone to rescue an American.

It used to be the best way to meet a Navy SEAL, hijack a ship. They'll put a hole in your face. That's the quickest way.

I made a decision, "We don't need to worry about Americans, between CIA, and the State Department, and special operations, and Navy SEALs, and all the different units that are out there.

"They'll take care of that. Let's focus on people that we know are going to probably get left behind and that have nothing but us."

27 years in intelligence, I was never that wrong about a call. I was fundamentally wrong.

We actually barely rescued ... We did plenty of interpreters and commandos, but what happens is the Secretary of State gets on TV at the time, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense General Austin gets on TV and they say, "August 30th will be the last American boots on ground in Afghanistan."

I go, "Holy cow, this is a real problem."

Because by September 1st, the Taliban are going to run the Department of Motor Vehicles, they're going to own it all because the military won't be there.

This whole thing is going to change. This whole thing is going to change.

Prior to that, the game was get your interpreter or your commando, whatever it was, to the Marines at the gate at the airport, do a challenge password kind of a thing.

Then they would get let through and be put on an Air Force plane and be flown out, which was great.

But we now know that September 1st, that Marine will not be there and the Air Force will not be there, and the Taliban are going to own every single piece of toilet paper in the country.

Everything. They are now in charge.

Whether I like that or I don't like that, that's a fact of life. This whole thing is going to change.

Now, we have a huge problem. That happens and we're forward deployed. We're working the northern borders in Uzbekistan and Tajik-

FRANK BLAKE: You were already there?

BRYAN STERN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we were there for the whole thing.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: Can I just say, before we get to the rescuing of the Americans?

When you were assessing this operation, were you, "Yeah, we could do this, I'm confident?"

This just sounds incredibly risky to me.

BRYAN STERN: It's like anything else.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, it's not like anything else.

No offense, Bryan, but it's pretty unique for almost all of us listening to this.

BRYAN STERN: You know what it's like? There are guys that are gifted with cars. They understand ...

My cousin is like this, a real car guru. He can open up the hood and be like, "Oh, the distributor's doing this, or the oil's doing that," or whatever.

I was cursed with not having a mechanical bone in my body.

I don't have a musical bone in my body either. There are people that look at a saxophone ... My sister plays the saxophone and she sees music.

I see what looks like plumbing to me, that's what I see. When I look at a flute or a saxophone, I see brass pipes that belong under a sink.

Try as I may, it's not my thing.

These kinds of projects, these kinds of operations are very much my thing.

They're not impossible, clearly not, because we've done 800 of them by now.

FRANK BLAKE: How many? How many?

BRYAN STERN: Just under 800. We're at 794 or five as of this morning.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. I want to get back to your initial rescue. What are the numbers of people that you've rescued?

BRYAN STERN: Just about 8,000.

FRANK BLAKE: 8,000 people. Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Including 12 jailbreaks from Russia, five hostages from Gaza, 69 American babies under the age of a month old from a war in Ukraine.

Handicap people, deaf people, blind people.

Our youngest that we ever did were two premature babies from Atlanta, Georgia on life support, and our oldest is 98.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: We've done hairy, bald, fat, skinny. Gay, straight. You name it-

FRANK BLAKE: I'm sorry, I interrupted your narrative flow.

Now, back to the rescue you did in Afghanistan.

BRYAN STERN: September 1st comes and goes and we were really smart. We were smart and very stupid at the same time.

One of the things that we did was we recognized that the military and the government will leave on September 1st because they're telling us they are so we know this.

We assess the situation and we said, "Well, Afghanistan is a crappy country that has been beholden to the world since the beginning of time.

"There are these things called airports in Afghanistan, and surely the Taliban are going to need things. They're just going to."

The best way to bring those things in, at least for some point, is going to be by air and there's many airports in Afghanistan.

Probably there will be a Minister of Civil Aviation of the Taliban. There's got to be a guy.

There's got to be an FAA to work the airports. Let's go find that guy.

Let's try and figure out who is on the list to be the Taliban Minister of Civil Aviation.

We got it down to six people and made friends with all of them.

Each one of them, "You are our only guy that we're talking to obviously. We want to have a very special discussion that only we want to have with only you," and all these other things.

One of the great things about being an intelligence officer is you don't always have to tell the truth all the time to the people that you're trying to recruit.

Part of the game. Don't want to lie, but misrepresentation for the purposes of success is okay sometimes.

Now, what happens is it's September, the military is gone, and it's a mess.

The Taliban have not been in charge for 20 years. Rightly or wrongly, people don't appreciate, they themselves don't know how to govern.

They're like a 14-year-old kid wearing a suit for the first time.

They're trying to tie a tie and they're messing it up, they don't know how, all kinds of silly things.

We know this, but we know that pride is important and honor is important, and we know that they want to do a good job.

They want to look like they're legit and we take advantage of this perspective.

What happens is we land the first plane under Taliban rule and rescue 117 American citizens-

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: ... left behind after the military left.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: That was 794 missions ago.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: From Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Maui, hurricanes.

FRANK BLAKE: Bryan, you have this response after the fall of Afghanistan. You go in, you do a successful operation.

BRYAN STERN: We thought it would be a one and done.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

BRYAN STERN: We thought it would be a one and done.

FRANK BLAKE: You got my exact question.

BRYAN STERN: Get back to work.

FRANK BLAKE: What is it that you go, okay, now you're going to do this more as an ongoing commitment?

BRYAN STERN: What happens is we do our first big one, which everybody swore we couldn't do, which is a great way to motivate somebody like me.

Tell me no or I can't and hold my beer. It's a great, great, great motivator for my personality type.

I was great at what I did, but I was a terrible soldier.

All my bosses will tell you, I was what they call a leadership challenge because I don't like no.

I struggle with no. As a kid, I didn't play team sports so I never learned the virtue of losing well. I never learned that.

We didn't have little league where I grew up, so that trait that so many people have, I don't have.

When you say it can't be done, I go, "What exactly can't be done? What exactly? Let's just talk about this problem a little bit."

We thought we were going to be a one and done.

We come home, we come home in September, and everything is great.

We get a bunch of media and all sorts of good stuff, and it's great, and whatever else.

What happened is Americans kept calling who were stuck.

They kept calling, so we keep doing operations, keep doing operations. Some were not so complex. They were complicated, but not-

FRANK BLAKE: Can I ask you, are the Americans also calling our government?

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: And our government is saying, "Hey, go talk to Bryan, we can't do this?"

BRYAN STERN: The government is saying, "Too bad." They're not even saying, "Call Bryan."

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: The agency is done.

It's either go to Pakistan, which is a threat country, go to Iran, which is a real threat country, or go to China, which is not going to work through the mountains.

Oh, yeah, by the way, all the borders are closed. You are trapped. You are trapped.

You were stuck and left behind in Afghanistan, surrounded by the Taliban who like to chop people's heads off.

FRANK BLAKE: Other than Afghanistan, how does word start getting out? That if you got a problem in Haiti, or if you got a problem in Gaza, call Bryan?

BRYAN STERN: What happens is when you get in trouble, you get in trouble and you're stuck somewhere, and you're afraid.

I don't care if it's Afghanistan, or just recently in Israel, or wherever.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

BRYAN STERN: What happens is you and your family call everyone you've ever met, everyone. Every contact-

FRANK BLAKE: You had a recent one in Syria, right?

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

What happened in Syria is there's a family gets stuck in Syria, they're from South Carolina.

That was Operation Graham Cracker. A mommy, a daddy, and an 18-month-old daughter.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: When they went, when they went and where they went, it was safe.

They actually went to an incredibly safe part of Syria, which sounds a little nuts, but Syria's a big country.

There's only a part of it that's a mess. I've been there many times, multiple times.

They go and a bunch of nonsense happens, and a fight happened. Basically, the worst parts of the Bible occur and now they're stuck.

They reach out to the US Embassy, they reach out to the FBI, they reach out to the State Department, they reach out to their congressman, to their senators.

One senator you may have heard of, his name is Lindsay Graham. We named the operation after him, Graham Cracker.

The Lindsay Graham, as the Lindsay Graham, calls the Marco Rubio or the Pete Hegseth, and I don't know maybe the President Trump, I don't know what he does.

They all say, "Too hard. Too hard. Too hard."

FRANK BLAKE: I read an email that you sent. You described this as a "Medieval-level of violence and chaos."

BRYAN STERN: Yeah. There's a religious sect called Druze that we don't really have many in America, but in the Middle East, it's very common.

They're not Muslim, they're not Jewish, they're not Christian.

It's a fourth Abrahamic religion that's very small and very insular. Imagine if Islam met the Masons would be the Druze.

It's like that. It's almost like a secret society almost.

One of the ways that you know a Druze man is they have extremely ornate mustaches, it's part of their culture.

They have these very ... They spend a lot of time on their upper lip.

What the Bedouin tribes were doing when they found Druze is they take a pair of wire cutters and cut off the upper lip, and take the mustache and run around with it.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah. When I say Medieval-level of violence-

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: ... that's what I'm talking about.

FRANK BLAKE: That's a good example. Yeah. How do you get this family out of Syria? Or, you can't say?

BRYAN STERN: Oh, I can. Imagine an organism, like a mousetrap, like a mousetrap.

Where they are compared to where we are, between us are tribes, Bedouins, machine guns.

The Israelis are bombing from the sky, oh, yeah, for fun. Supporting the Druze, I might add.

ISIS is on the ground. The new government of Syria, which is not the best, they're around a little bit, but it's kind of a free for all.

It's a very lawless Mad Max kind of a place where life is extremely cheap.

The price of life is pennies if that. You can get somebody killed in Syria for a cheeseburger.

Literally, literally. That's not a metaphor.

We have to build and design a mousetrap that has to work in harmony. That's how many of these operations that we do are.

Where it's starting off, you have a start point and an end point.

Between there are all kinds of different things that have to happen. Those things have to happen in harmony.

By the way, each of those individual elements are not predisposed to work together nicely.

FRANK BLAKE: It sounds like you're doing amazing movie, after movie, after movie. This almost defies belief.

BRYAN STERN: Our work is very much a magic trick very often. Very often.

In fact in Russia, the Russians call me "Amerikanskiy volshebnik," which means the American magician because we've done things against them that they can't explain.

They can't wrap their heads around how it happened and it's very much like David Copperfield.

David Copperfield one time made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of 3,000 people.

He lined up 3,000 people on a barge, and they're looking at the Statue of Liberty, and they're all looking, and they're all looking, and they're all looking, and abracadabra happens, and poof.

3,000 people will tell you, "I saw it, I smelled it, I was right there. I could throw a baseball and hit the Statue of Liberty.

"I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, I smelled it with my own nose. I'm telling you, he made the Statue of Liberty disappear!"

Probably he didn't actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Well, this stuff is very much the same way. It's a lot of misdirection.

It's a lot of ruse. It's Oceans 11, not Black Hawk Down.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, interesting. Interesting.

BRYAN STERN: Right?

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: It's Donnie Brasco. It's not body armor and machine guns, it's Adidas and a beanie hat.

FRANK BLAKE: But surely, in some of these, in these circumstances, your life has been at risk, or the people on your team?

BRYAN STERN: We don't rescue people from Sweden.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

BRYAN STERN: Every single one of these. Every single one of these.

We've taken hypersonic missile fire, we've been chased by fire planes and helicopters with machine guns.

I got targeted for assassination a couple of times. We got one of them on video, which is super cool.

FRANK BLAKE: Can I ask you two questions? The first is what gets you back again?

Having survived one of these, what gets you doing it again?

Then I got a follow-up question to that. Do you see a point at which you say, "This is enough, this has been too scary?"

BRYAN STERN: I keep saying it, but things keep going wrong in the world.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: I don't control the bad guys and I don't control the policies, it just happens that way.

I miss having a thing called a job and a thing called income, it was nice. And a life.

I used to go on these things called vacations every now and then.

FRANK BLAKE: But you could stop any time you wanted. What keeps you going?

BRYAN STERN: This sort of thing, it's like being a priest.

Being a soldier, it's just like being a priest. Or a police officer or a fireman.

Cops are called to protect, and firemen are called to rescue, and teachers are called to teach, and priests are called to minister, and all this stuff.

For me, I took an oath. That oath was to the people of this great country and it didn't have an expiration date on it.

Other than the financial part, this is what I've always done. I just happen to do it as a nonprofit now.

You know what it's like? You're walking down the street.

You're walking down the street and you see a dark alley. You see three big guys beating up a young girl. There are some people that walk past that.

See that and they say, "I'm so happy that's not me. Thank God. I've been blessed. I'm blessed that I'm not in that situation," and they go on about their day.

There are some people that go, "Wow, that's really terrible. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call 911 and the professionals will come at some point, and I'm going to go about my day."

There are some people that will call 911 and sit and watch.

And report to the dispatcher, "This is what they look like," and all the things, and whatever.

Then there are people who say, "I'm going to call 911. By the time they get here, I'm a really nice guy, but I'll give you a war you won't believe.

"I'll eat your lunch and I'll give you the shirt off my back, but if you hurt my people, that makes me angry and I take it very personally."

I do, I take it personally. I bleed red, white, and blue. I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat, I don't care.

Black, white, purple. I rescued Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Buddhists, Hindus.

FRANK BLAKE: Among this enormous group of people that you've rescued, is there someone that stands out that you just say, "Boy, I think of this person whenever I go back in on the difference I made in their lives?"

Because you have rescued so many people.

BRYAN STERN: You know who I think about? It sounds so silly, I guess.

I actually don't think about the evacuees a whole lot, I think about their families.

We rescued this kid, Kirillo. Kirillo Alexandrov. If you go to our website, greybullrescue.org, we got a case study on him.

He's the first American victim of war crimes alive since World War II.

He was arrested by the Russians, he's from Detroit. 11 counts of espionage, which were all fake.

Tortured every single day for 37 days, almost to death. Okay?

He was not released. We took him. I don't have $6 billion to trade. I can't lift a sanction. I can't do an arms deal.

I'm not above it, I just don't have those kinds of resources.

We did it the old-fashioned way. Now, his mother Gloria sat on the border of Poland for 37 days asking anyone and everyone for help.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Before she flew, the FBI came and visited her, and gave her a challenge coin, a military challenge coin.

And said, "If Kirillo ever gets out, give this to him from us."

That constitutes 100% of the contribution of the U.S. government to get Kirillo out of captivity. A challenge coin.

His mother Gloria sat on the border for 37 days. I was 31 hours away from her in the occupied area and one of my teammates was with her.

I'm able to talk to her, I'm able to talk to her a lot. The idea and the weight of a mom ...

FRANK BLAKE: Wow, wow. That's amazing.

BRYAN STERN: The weight of Gloria ... I've cried with her. I've prayed with her. I've laughed with her.

I've heard her beg and plead, and not believe in me, and be frustrated, and angry.

Knowing that her little boy, her son, he was 25-years-old, I think it was 25-years-old when he was arrested, knowing that he's in the custody of the most sinister intelligence service on Earth that throws people out of windows or gives them biotoxin, or whatever else.

The Russian intelligence service, knowing that he's been incarcerated as a spy and he's not. Knowing that, talking to her, she was my motivation, not him.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. You could go on and on.

You've got to be the absolute best dinner companion on the face of the Earth with the stories you have.

BRYAN STERN: I've got stories.

FRANK BLAKE: Incredibly inspiring and interesting. Who inspires you?

BRYAN STERN: All of us. All of us. We're so stupid sometimes as Americans, we really are. We're really dumb. We're very quick, very quick to get mad at ourselves.

Our country is founded by fighting. George Washington, you know, the United States of America did not become the United States of America by bringing lollipops. We fought.

Our founding fathers fought. Part of our constitution is the ability to debate.

If you think about it comically, the First Amendment is so that Italian grandmas can argue about things. That's what it's there for. That's what it's there for.

Where people can argue, and debate, and beat each other up, and whatever. We're a combative people and that's okay.

We're very quick to forget that just because we're beating each other up a little bit, that we're also the greatest country on Earth.

There's a reason why half of Guatemala wants to move to America, and half of America doesn't want to move to Guatemala.

There's a reason why. There's a reason why the migrant parade is a one-directional thing.

There's a reason why in Afghanistan ... This is a true story.

Years ago, I'm in Afghanistan. Many, many, many years ago. I'm going to recruit an asset.

Okay? We agree that I'm going to pay him 100 bucks. We agree that for $100, he's going to do some things for me, and go to a place and do a couple things. Fine.

He does this task and he does it well. I give him $100 bill and he gets angry at me.

And threatens me basically with disrespecting him. I'm shocked.

I have my interpreter with me and I'm like, "What is he so mad at? He did the task, we agreed on 100 bucks. Is he trying to gouge me for more money? What is that?"

He says, "No, no, no. You dishonor him with your $100 bill." I go, "What the hell you talking about?"

He says, "He doesn't know what it is." I go, "It's $100 bill, what the hell you mean he doesn't know what it is? We agreed on 100 bucks, here's 100 bucks. Why is this a problem?"

He didn't know who Benjamin Franklin was and he asks. I go, "Well, who does he know?"

You know what he says? George Washington. I pay this guy 100 one-dollar bills, and he thought it was the coolest thing since ice cream.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, that's great.

BRYAN STERN: In a mud hut in the middle of nowhere Afghanistan, where they've heard about plumbing, but haven't actually seen it work. Okay?

FRANK BLAKE: Everybody knows George Washington.

BRYAN STERN: They know who George Washington is.

FRANK BLAKE: That's amazing. That's a great story.

BRYAN STERN: The American flag is the most recognized symbol on planet Earth.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: I don't care where you go, some goat farm in Botswana.

You don't need to speak a word of any local language or understand the culture, or anything.

You show an American flag and everyone goes, "Oh, you're an American. Huh. Heard of you, heard of you. Huh."

FRANK BLAKE: An important thing for all of us, all of us to remember.

BRYAN STERN: We forget this.

Things like Charlie Kirk, which whatever side of that issue you're on, whatever side of the issue you're on, it is just as wrong for Charlie Kirk to be assassinated as it was for Martin Luther King to be assassinated.

Both of those things are wholly wrong.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: Mind you, we're a country that has the word firearm in its constitution and that's okay. We forget this as a nation.

People ask me, well, why do I do what I do? Because I'm American. We should be proud of that.

I have friends of every shape and size. I've rescued people of every shape and size, and background. Poor people, rich people.

I've rescued a very, very, very, very famous household name celebrity's boyfriend, who's still in the closet, rescued his boyfriend.

That celebrity wanted to give us a donation, but was scared about it being attributable and connection.

I was like, "That's okay, just make a movie about us one day or something cool."

FRANK BLAKE: I got two final questions for you.

The first I ask to everybody who's a guest. It is who's done a crazy good turn for you?

You're going around the world doing crazy good turns for people. Who's done one for you?

BRYAN STERN: Oh, my God, that's a tough one. My old boss Gary, my old boss Mitch.

In my career, I was a problem child. Imagine being my boss. I'm tame now, I'm old.

My late 20s, early 30s, I was not the socially well-adjusted person that's in front of you today.

I've been in trouble a lot in my career for doing the right thing.

The whole doing the right thing isn't doing the right thing, I never understood that. I always thought it was really stupid.

I think it's the dumbest saying ever. There's doing the right thing, period.

My ethical compass is non-negotiable, and my moral compass is non-negotiable.

I learned that very, very, very early on from very, very, very tough men who did the nation's bidding under horrible circumstances and very tough odds, and very tough everything.

They instilled in me this, "You go. You go. You go."

My old partner, we'd been together for many years in business and work, and we've been all over the world together.

This very famous, very notorious CIA officer named Gary Bernstein.

He led the first CIA teams, the first intelligence teams into Afghanistan after 9/11.

He tells a very famous story about his wife. It's after 9/11 and he's already had this great career, and all those other good things.

His wife at the time says, "Don't go. Don't go. Sit this one out. It's not going to be good."

The orders that he was given was deploy to Afghanistan with a very small team, a very small team.

If you're alive in two weeks, we'll send you more help, under Cofer Black, who is director of CTC at the time in CIA.

There's a Netflix thing that just came out where Gary's in this and talking about his with Cofer.

Gary happens to also be from Long Island. New Yorker, just so happens.

His wife came to him and said, "Just sit this one out. Who knows what this turns into?" Ground Zero is still smoldering. This is just a few weeks, 10 days after 9/11. Not even.

He says, "I go. I go because that's what I do, because I go."

What's so much different than the intelligence community ...

The intelligence community and the special operations community are fundamentally different animals.

In the intelligence community, we do things that can't be done and get people to do things that they don't want to do. That's the nature of it.

When you're in special operations, you're on a SEAL Team, and you want to go raid a house.

To get your commander to say green light to go, you need to know which way the doors swing in, the size of the house, how many windows, how many bad guys are going to be there, who you're looking for, how many stories there are.

What's the security like? Are there dogs?

There's a million things you need to know before you're allowed to fly in on a helicopter, land, break down the door and shoot everybody, and do what you need to do.

There's 100 questions you need to have answered before you as a special operations guy can do your work.

In the intelligence community, conversely, conversely. In the intelligence community, my boss comes to me and says, "I want you to go to wherever, I want you to find this guy named Frank. We think his last name is Blake, but we're not too sure.

"He's an older guy, clean-shaven. Clean-shaven, in a house somewhere in whatever."

Like that. If I go, "Well, interesting. Well, what do you know about Frank? Where'd he go to school? What house, what neighborhood? What this, what that?"

I start asking questions, I'm the wrong man for the job.

FRANK BLAKE: Right, right, right.

BRYAN STERN: Wrong man. The wrong man. You see?

These kinds of operations that we do at Grey Bull Rescue are very much like that.

We respond to the threat with a loose kind of idea of what we're going to do.

The recipe is always the same. There is someone in trouble in a place and they need to get to another place through some kind of medium. A boat, a plane, a helicopter, carrying them, whatever.

Other than that, in almost 800 missions, we've never carried out a plan A ever. Ever. Never.

You were a C-suite executive.

Imagine if one of your subordinates came to you and said, "All right, sir, this is what we're going to do. Here's the plan.

"But good news, it's going to fail. Fear not, fear not, we will have a plan B."

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: Well, what is the plan B? "Oh, we don't have one right now. Wait until we get there to figure that out."

Would you approve the thing if somebody came with that? Right?

FRANK BLAKE: It's fascinating. Bryan, we started this conversation by you saying Grey Bull's only limited by the funding you get.

BRYAN STERN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: This is such an amazing story and you're doing ...

It's not a story, it's such an amazing reality, what you're doing. Tell just a little bit about how this all works.

Where should our listeners go to support your effort?

BRYAN STERN: Yeah. Our motto is, "Don't be a spectator."

What does that mean? That means do something. That does not mean you have to get on a helicopter and fly to Haiti with us.

You can donate. Greybullrescue.org is our website. If you don't have money, that's okay.

Go to any of our social media and share, share, share all of our stuff. Why? 82%, 82% of our cases come from social media.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow. Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Okay? I hate to say it, but Facebook saves lives because when you call the State Dept or you call 911, they don't connect you to us.

We're not contractors, so they don't ... Under the table, they do it sometimes.

But generally speaking, people find us through social media because what happens is you get in trouble.

Your wife, or brother, or parents, or whatever you have, or friends start searching and they start googling. They go onto Facebook and they go onto Instagram, and all these other things.

One way or the other, it's 82% of our cases. We debrief them because we do the ops ourselves. We always ask, "How'd you hear about us?" "Oh, I saw you on Facebook, a friend of mine sent you our Facebook thing."

How can people help? We don't get a penny from the government. We don't get a thank you note from the government.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Okay? Not even nothing, which is annoying. We hope to fix that one day, but today is not that day.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah.

BRYAN STERN: Until that happens, we are entirely donor-funded.

If you have a business, we will make you famous. We did $3.2 billion in earned media last year.

If you make something, probably we need it. If you sell something, probably we need it.

If you are a Ford dealership, we need pickup trucks all the time because our stuff gets beat up a lot.

We don't need new, we need nice enough. We need just functional.

If you are in the laptop business, if you are in the cellphone business, if you're in the dry eraser business, if you're in the paperclip business, whatever it is.

If you're in the body armor business, the gun business, the T-shirt business. This shirt got made by somebody with the logo thing put on it.

It doesn't matter. You can help us. The best thing to do is to help us out financially because helicopters do not fly themselves.

Gas costs money, pilots cost money. They just do.

Would you believe it if I told you Grey Bull Rescue has one single paid employee?

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: It ain't me. Yeah, yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: Everyone that you see on TV are volunteers.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow, that's amazing.

BRYAN STERN: Okay? The money ...

If you donated to us in June, I can trace your money to an operation, to a line item on that operation, to a human that we rescued and put you on the phone with that person.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow.

BRYAN STERN: In the history of nonprofits, that level of fidelity has never existed. Ever.

FRANK BLAKE: Bryan, this is an amazing conversation.

You are incredible. You are an inspiration.

As I said, this podcast is built on the idea of thanking people who do crazy good things. You're at the top of the list.

Thank you. I'm sure those families, as you say, are just undyingly grateful.

You're an extraordinary person. God bless you and thank you.

BRYAN STERN: Thank you so much. Don't tell anybody, we're actually having a lot of fun.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, it's an odd definition of fun, Bryan. Thank you. It's amazing.

BRYAN STERN: Thank you so much for having u