YouSaid · the spoken record

Blake Hall

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-01-28
most recent: 2025-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Of Arizona DES said, Hey, Blake, he said, listen, we processed about 265,000 claimants that were paying on a weekly basis. And he's like, I feel it's my job to make sure that we're not paying these out to organize crime and overseas groups. So we're going to run those six months worth of claimants back through y'all in December. I said, okay. So when they did that, of the 265,000, how many do you think even tried to verify their identity?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it makes ransomware look almost insignificant by comparison. We played a pretty central role in stopping fraud during the pandemic. So there's seven states on a record that have credited us with stopping $270 billion worth of fraud. And let me zoom in on the impact that we had. We went into Arizona in October of 2020. When we went in there, this is six months into the pandemic. Arizona had 570,400 new weekly unemployment claims in a state where there's only seven million people, including kids. And the state agencies would tell us, we know it's fraud, not because we have any advanced tooling, but because the bots are filing the claim end-to-end in less than 60 seconds. Because all that you need is a name date of birth, social. You could pinky swear that you're a lift driver and you could start collecting $600 per week. The week after we were introduced, it went down to 6,700 claims per week. And so then Michael Wisehard is the director over there.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Identity is how you make life safer and easier. And here's why it matters. So in April, the Government Accountability Office released a report on fraud in federal spending. This is just federal benefits at the federal level does not include federal dollars, the state or tribal level. They estimated that the government loses $233 billion to $521 billion per year to put this in context, total aid to Ukraine is $65.9 billion. The U.S. defense budget is $824 billion. So if you take about half, it's about half the defense budget lost every year to fraud, just federal dollars at the federal level. It's 2% of GDP in aircraft carrier costs $13 billion. So that's the magnitude of what we're losing right now when we have extraordinary debt of over $30 trillion in interest payments.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they pay me in for how long, and then how much does it cost me to acquire them? And those are your unit economics. You can see companies that skip the stage from two to three. This is living social, raised a billion dollars here in the DC market, went to zero because”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the four steps just really quick. So maybe I can give you the clipnotes. The first one is just pure scientific method form a hypothesis that there's a problem worth solving and what that is. And then the way that you validate the hypothesis is that people are willing to pay you for the solution to solve it. And so until you've done that, you don't earn the right to even figure out if you've got a scalable company. So this constant iteration, this is what most founders struggle with. Am I even working on a problem that matters? You could convince yourself that your baby's not ugly in like every day, but the only way to really validate the problem is meaningful and your solution is the right one is to get people to pay you. And then Jeff Moore has written all this other literature around what part of the market to target. So the first two steps are I have a hypothesis about a problem and my solution for it. And then step two is I validated it because somebody paid me to solve it for them. Now once you've passed step two, it's four steps, the epiphany. Step three is how much revenue do I get from that customer?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Utility. And if we're spending three fourths of our time on identity and login trying to build an app, if we could build this utility, then all these other developers that might want to create experiences based on trust could just use us and then build on top of that. And that's actually the right thing to do. So there are some key moments in terms of how we did the pivot that I could talk about, but like that was the learning.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No wonder identity theft is twice as high. You're showing your social to strangers all over the place. And then I talked to this marketing manager at Microsoft and they were delivering e-learning vouchers to veterans in person and making them bring their paperwork in. And I said, doesn't the in-person redemption defeat the entire point of e-learning? And she said, yeah, we know it sucks, but we don't have a way to know on our website if somebody is a part of the military community, so we're not able to keep it safe. And because we're not able to keep it safe, we can find distribution to brick and mortar channels. And I said, and if you had a way to keep it safe, she said we would bring it online. And then these different retailers said, by the way, it's not just military, pretty much every segment. It's students, it's teachers, it's first responders, it's social influencers, it's beauticians. And that was the aha moment where I said, wow, it's not an app, it's a utility. It's like what PayPal was for the early days, the internet with payments that we could be this identity.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get like a free blooming onion at the outback we're taking in their paperwork that has their social security number on it. And they would show this form with their social to a stranger to get a fried vegetable.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially new investors. And he said, chin up, we're going to get through this, which I'm super grateful, your best friends in life are super positive when the chips are down and they're for you. And maybe when your heads getting too big, they're pulling you back down to earth to ground you. And Kelly's been that for me. So basically had this learning, which was we couldn't get enough distribution to get the buyer and seller part going, but we were also spending three-fourths of our time on identity, on actually making sure that somebody signing up was in fact a member of the military community. As we talk to different marketers from various firms like Microsoft and Under Armour, they said, we're not really interested in your app or some gated garden for whatever like you don't have enough users to have it be meaningful, but your ability to actually know if someone is a part of a particular community is really important and valuable. We would use that within our own channels. And so a few things happen. I saw that on Veterans Day, veterans.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that sucked. And I was like, I'm not, it got to a low point in 2011 where Kelly Purdue, who's David Tish, introduced us, was our first board member. I was like, Kelly. I was like, I don't know if this is going to work. And he said, Blake. And look, that takes a lot. For somebody who's been through Ranger School or whatever to be on the verge of, I do not quit at anything in my life. So he said Blake first, never say that to anybody.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've just been fascinated by how big companies start. And all the big companies actually start in a pretty focused way. So Facebook started just for the Ivy Leagues first and then students then grew up. Dan Rose, who's on your show, talked a lot about that, that the only student and at some point they opened it up to everybody. And I think their users increased by four or five X. Uber started with affluent riders and black car drivers, right? Very Pinterest started with Midwestern moms paradoxically to get big, you have to focus small. And so I thought there was a void in the market around Craigslist in terms of trust. And because military families move so much that you could have gated community of maybe military and then students. And that would actually be a way to disrupt the sort of peer-to-peer classified and like marketplace space. And so a few things happened. I was giving this pitch. USAA and military.com loved it, but then I call them back and they're like, yeah, fast for us is like two to three years to give it a pilot.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm going to invest like 50K or 75K, they would thematically tell me two things they're like, I don't think, because the initial name of IDMU is TroopSwap. They said, I don't think that this business model is going to be successful, but then they would say, I believe in you, so I'm writing the check. And then they'd be like, by the way, here's a picture of my daughter. This is her college fund. And it's like a baby. It's like, what is that?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, that's so messed up, man. But he insisted on doing it. So he invested a $20,000 check into me. David Tish was one of our first checks in. He ended up becoming really impactful. So he's a box group, one of the best angel investors in the country and then was the first managing director of TechSars New York. And what David Tish did that I really am grateful for is I was talking more about business development and relationships. And he pointed me to this book, Steve Blank, Four Steps, the Epiphany. He said, you really need to read this book to understand how to build a company. And it's wonderful. It's basically like the scientific method for how you build a company stage by stage. And he introduced me to some other folks. And one of my classmates invested $80,000 in me. What was pretty crazy is even like a year into it, as I was raising our angel round where we put together, I don't know, roughly a million dollars in a convertible note. I would continually have investors that listen to the pitch and they would say, I'm going to invest.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing I just want to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew is I spent a summer at McKinsey, and the McKinsey people were wonderful, built a business model, the first phone call at this telecom company, they say $17 million. And I went home. I've been a lifeguard and I've gotten shot at and I've mowed some lawns. Don't do this. He said something to me. He said, you've never failed in anything you've done in your life.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in normal time your friends are dying, you're contemplating your own mortality. Most of us will get there later. I kind of had already been there and then felt like a time traveler coming back. And it really just shifted my whole mindset. And it's why I started ID me because I felt like it was a worthy mission to improve people's lives. I didn't know it would grow to become a multi-billion dollar company like it is today. I just wanted to help the military community that I came from to start. But that's the bridge for how I got from the military to running this technology company.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To see stats around there was so much goodwill trying to get the military suffer from identity theft at rates that were nearly twice as high as a general population. And I can walk you through the story, but that ultimately became the thing that I gravitated towards because I felt it was a worthy mission to solve with my life and that if something happened to me that if God forbid I were to die, I would do it trying to accomplish something that mattered and not being a cog in the wheel at a consulting firm or in banking that's just making capitalism work a little bit more efficiently. And so I think just the nature of risk was quite different. I thought risk was going into an organization where I didn't believe in the mission. I felt like I was wasting my life. I didn't really care about the financial side nearly as much because how could you after coming out of combat? And so I'm super grateful for that. But it was very schizophrenic to go from a time in your life where you're like 70 years old.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Applied to Harvard. I was like, sir, I was like, I haven't used a three syllable word in the last year. I don't think I'm ready to write an essay for Harvard. He's like, You're going to play Harper, or I'm not going to write a letter of recommendation. So all of a sudden, I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm 26 years old. The biggest decision is like where to go on Friday to have a beer with my friends. I just couldn't shake it because I'd seen, I'd been exposed to so much. And I just knew that life is short. You don't have a lot of time. None of us know how much time we have. War had just infused lightning into my bones. Every time you get one of these kill capture alerts, it's just a flood of adrenaline. So in some ways, it makes you an addict. And so I realized, oh my gosh, like I've basically been turned into an addict by this 15 months of like really high intensity tempo. I want to make an impact. And what combat taught me is that you can't take anything with you. So material stuff like who cares? What matters is making a positive impact on someone else's life. And looking for that sense of purpose, I started.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, you'll never see the faces of the people that you say from the car bombs that didn't go off. But man, what an amazing thing to tell your grandkids about that you made a real difference here and an impact for those people. And you go from that. And I didn't believe America's in the strategy is making the world better because we were just creating these power vacuums and everything else. And I didn't want to be a part of taking life or risking life if I didn't feel like we had a strategy and a specific end that made sense. And so I didn't feel I could continue to serve in the military because there wasn't a strategy. But man, I missed the purpose that I felt you don't have to question the meaning of your life when you're trying to get to a terrorist and a phone before a car bomb goes off in a market full of innocent civilians. So went from that scene and got into Harvard Business School because my battalion commander refused to write me a letter of recommendation unless I.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closing chapter in Iraq, which was the last thing that we did, was we were asked to target a vehicle bomb network that had set off, I think at least 17 vehicle bombs in Baghdad. It had killed thousands of people in the British SAS had been targeting them, had not been successful for various reasons, and asked us to help. And over the next two weeks, actually, I think it was like 10 days, we caught nine of the top 10 and the entire level of hierarchy underneath it. It was gone. The last thing I did in Iraq was I stood in front of my 32 guys. all of whom came home, thank God, to their families, which I'm grateful for every day. And I said two things. I was like, pretty sure we all know Iraq, the story of a rock, it probably isn't going to turn out the best. But I was like, but for what we were asked to do, the math is pretty simple. This network killed thousands of people. And if it continued, it would have killed thousands of people more. It doesn't exist anymore. Intel folks come in and say, we've never seen a network taken down this fast ever.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us and you can't help but be moved by that. If you go to Army, Navy and you watch the cadets and the midshipmen who are literally willing to give their life to protect our way of life. It's the most noble thing that you'll see. And I believe firmly that humans are meant to live free and to be a part of a group who's very nature is to be selfless is an incredible thing and it's an incredible thing to be around. I think a lot of Americans are jaded. If you spend some time around our military and folks who put the whole country in our way of life above themselves, you won't help but be inspired and start to feel patriotic about why America is so special in the world.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She took her three kids and she walked down this super dangerous road to the Baghdad International Airport for maybe seven or eight kilometers with like a three and a five-year-old. And she just showed up and she said, I want justice. Now we let her down. The legal system let her down. Everything checked out. We caught the guys she talked about, found a lot of evidence they were tied to al-Qaeda. The car was there. We lost war in our prisons why you serve us for that woman. And that if you believe human rights are universal and what America has is special, then it is worth defending. And therefore, politicians have a sacred responsibility to make sure that our military is used judiciously and to protect our way of life because the men that I just talked about who gave their life, they were just exceptional men who could have had amazing lives, could have had families and accomplished great things in industry. And they sacrificed everything for all of us.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll try to do justice to it because I lost some wonderful friends who were just amazing people that gave their lives for this country. Richard Henke's my interpreter Roy, who died with the platoon that followed us, Garrett Slaughter, Ryan Dennison, just wonderful people. And if you serve this country, it's because you believe that people have a right to live free. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's the core of what we enjoy. But it is protected at great cost. want to protect the weak and the vulnerable”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through it. And I think, man, America is super lucky to have leaders like Phil Schneider. He was decorated for heroism for what he did that day.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunate enough, you went across an intersection that had one of these 500 pound bombs underneath it. And my platoon was the first one to respond to that scene. And it was devastating, as you might imagine. He was just severely concussed, but was just relentless in terms of providing aid to his guys, getting him into the trucks. I'm going to get emotional about it. So I'm sorry. But we raced a few of the guys who were critically wounded to the green zone, to the combat sport hospital that was there. And Phil was just unbelievable when we finally, when his men were taken care of, he was so concussed. He was puking. And he knew that he was about to just pass out and he just grabbed me by the lapels and he said, Blake, my guys, take care of my guys. And that for me is just, that's what it is, right there. His men love him for it. That when the chips are down, you care more about other people than yourself and his like will, even though he was physically really banged up, got him.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charge that directs upwards into the bottom of a vehicle. So there's two elements to this. One was when I saw that that was happening, they would put 500 pound berry bombs underneath that would literally saw a striker in half, like these 20 ton vehicles from front to back, just rip it completely in half to give you an idea of the force. And so when I saw this during the surge, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. The first thing I did is I went to the operations center and give me the infrastructure plans for all the sewage system in Baghdad. And I went out to the truck with my radio telephone operator. And you have a graphic overlay of the streets. And we stayed out there until three in the morning, even though our next mission was like at 6.30 just until I had the final thing done. And once I had mapped it, I pushed it out to all the other trucks in our unit. And I said, for us, we are never going to drive on these roads ever if we can avoid it. And if we do avoid it, you guys are both going to the rooftops. You're going to cut every single wire down to the street. Phil was unfortunate.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my buddy Phil Schneider is my worst day in Iraq. We were in a neighborhood called Dora, which the LA Times referred to as Al-Qaeda's Alamo in Baghdad. And we were 13 months into combat. We took more casualties in two weeks in that neighborhood, like a three by five kilometer box and we take in the 13 months. It was literally hell. There was standing sewage because Al-Qaeda didn't care about the locals. They'd put in so many bombs into the sewer system that the sewage was just spilled out. It was a SUNY neighborhood. You had a Shia Iraqi army military unit that would snipe at people as they went out for groceries and things. And little kids would chuck grenades at us. If there's hell on earth, it was probably Dora. And so the reason that Al-Qaeda would put these roadside bombs into the sewer system is the kind of law of explosives is that the force travels the path of least resistance. So if you have concrete on two sides underneath, but the road is dirt, it's a natural...”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to be credible. That's the most important thing. You have to be credible. You have to care. So when I went through Ranger School, there was a moment, you go through three phases, Benning phase, mountain phase, Florida phase.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before we even went on a mission, we would plan for all the things that might happen. So when it did happen, we knew what to do. I think relentless preparation and learning is just so important because it both inoculates you against risk proactively. But then if you do find yourself in a position where everyone's like, you're in fight or flight, the adrenaline's going, it's really difficult to communicate and tell everyone exactly what you want to do. The more that you've rehearsed that and prepared for it, the better you're going to be able to execute when it counts and the military really drill that into me. And I've carried that particular lesson with me throughout my life.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was relentless in preparation. I had an amazing team where there was a lot of prior selection that had gone into it. So in recon, you get to pick whoever you want. So I had already screened my team for certain skills to make sure that I had a good group around me. But the platoon leader is responsible for the maneuver and for getting the folks to the right place at the right time and orienting them to target. So I spent basically all of my free time studying these terrorist cells. Their pattern was called pattern of life, where they would be on a Tuesday for lunch, what their tendencies were. And it's just like anything else. Humans get lazy and they get complacent. And if you're willing to put in the time, you could really get a feel for how this person operated and where they were likely to make a mistake. It was that. And then just I think the biggest difference between mediocre leaders and great leaders is great leaders plan for contingencies.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Average, and then we caught the head of the Mujahideen Shura Council for Mosul, which is this clearinghouse of nationalist and extremist Islamist groups. And we caught the spiritual leader of northern Iraq for al-Qaeda. So we were designated the kill capture force of choice for northern Iraq by Colonel Townsend, who went on to become a four-star general. But by the end, our success rate was over 90%. And I think by Summetrics was like leading the theater in terms of our efficiency. So there was a lot. That was my first real job. I had a lawn mowing business and like lifeguarding, but that was my first real job.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're overly sort of risk taking, you need to try to mitigate risk and pull it back. But the other thing was similar to entrepreneurship, we were given a novel problem set. And so I had a team, we had a mission, but we had never practiced for using signal intelligence in different techniques to basically be a SWAT team. That was new. And so a lot of it was just the scientific method of having a certain way of doing things and then codifying learning. So when we would come back, we would say what worked really well that we should keep, what didn't work so well. And over time, that led to a lot of specialization. And so maybe the arc in terms of performance, if you can codify learning and feedback loops, the average success rate for these kill capture missions was like 44%, I think, give or take. And in the first three months, we were in the 20th percentiles, which is to say that we sucked. But around month three, we hit.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insane. But then as you get closer to coming home, you start almost like sports. You're playing like not to lose. And so it's really interesting is you take the most casualties at the beginning of your deployment when you don't have a lot of context about what the enemy's doing, but also at the end when you're playing not to lose. It's actually in the middle when I get back as I was about to come home, I would think about what I'd done in the middle of my deployment and my hands would shake because I was just like, oh my God. So there's like these overarching learnings about are you going to be brave enough to put the team and your brothers before yourself. But also it's not even the same. There's these other contextual things that influence groups. And I think as a leader, you have to understand those team dynamics too, because the whole point of leadership is to be inversely correlated with the context. When the team's playing not to lose, you have to counter that with extreme aggression in terms of the mindset to offset because you know where the team's headed.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing you can't know is if you're going to be brave, everyone's scared when you're over in combat or you're not normal if you're not scared. But character is about pushing all that down and doing the right thing for the men that you lead when the chips are down. And honestly, every firefight is different for me just in terms of becoming a man and it's a rite of passage, will I be able to do my job when it counts? And you just don't know that until you're shot at and it changes over time. The military's done a lot of research now to show that over the course of your deployment at like month six or seven, you go into God phase that you've survived enough of combat that you actually will take extreme risk. And when we hit that time mark when we were down in Baghdad, we got into firefights where other captains would come out with us and ride. And I'd be walking around, my snipers would be walking around, laughing, playing, shooting. And they were like, you guys are just absolutely insane.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything else as soon as you get a little cocky, as in a courtyard talking to some of the folks, and then just had AK rounds hit right over my head, the cinder block was spraying into my face because the rounds were that close to where I was at. And we were immediately into a firefight. That was my first firefight. I'd thought a lot about, will I be brave when it counts and will I care more about the team and my job than about myself I've got 51 more in front of me at that moment in my life. It's amazing to have this conversation because I was just so focused on what was right in front of me to keep my men alive and hopefully myself too. But that's maybe an introduction to first week in Mosul.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strikers or 2010 vehicle. They have eight wheels. They could do about 55 miles an hour. So it's, I think to a layman, it's almost like a lightweight tank with a 50 caliber machine gun on top. And it's got the sound signature of an F-150. It's pretty quiet. And as I'm getting out, the three-letter agency attachment is like, hey, sir, he's like, be careful. This commander is marked as extremely hostile and dangerous. I was like, what Al-Qaeda commander is not?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leadership starts with caring. I remember when I got to Mosul, and still to this day, I'm just terrified of letting my friends down. And so I had 32 scouts and snipers. I'd met their wives and their parents and their kids. And if you make a wrong decision in combat, you could lose like a fourth of your platoon just like bam, your suicide belt just gone. And so the first thing I did actually is I got to Mosul and I went up on top of a hill and I got down on my knees before God and I said there's a verse from Isaiah that says no weapon formed against me shall prosper. And so I claim that promise for my men. And God, it was just amazing to us over the next 15 months. But the mission set, my first firefight was in a neighborhood called Tarer. And as we were going through, it's a northeast Mosul. It's, I think, the same mosque that was there where Baghdadi made himself the caliph of Isis of the Islamic State. And we had a high value target in the neighborhood. And as I'm getting my guys out of the trucks, we're in these.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Iraq from 2006 to 2007. So I fought in Mosul, every neighborhood in Baghdad, Karbala, outskirts of Fallujah, and Lake Tartar. So got the full tour. And our mission over there right before we went into combat in Mosul, we had some three-letter agencies come in and say, hey, listen, forget everything that you guys have learned about reconnaissance and precision engagement. You're just going to be running kill capture missions against senior al-Qaeda leadership. And we're going to give you some equipment and some intelligence assets to help you do that. And the next like 15 months, that's all that we did was run down mostly Al Qaeda vehicle bomb networks. I was 23 years old at the time. And so it was quite a lot of responsibility.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went through RTC at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and in 2000 it was peacetime. It was just a way to pay for school. And then 9-11 happened. And overnight, I realized that when I graduated in 2004, I was going to go war. And I figured if you're going to go to war, you might as well play with the varsity. So I resolved I wanted to be an army ranger. And my mom's from Queens. So grown up, my grandfather on my mom's side had driven me around the city and showed me the Twin Towers and the Chrysler building and everything as a kid. So it was super personal to me, as I'm sure it was to a lot of Americans. And I wanted to defend the country after we had been attacked in that way. I commissioned, I went past airborne school, so to be a paratrooper, ranger school, had a rifle platoon for five months, then was selected to be the Scout Sniper platoon leader, which is the most senior platoon leader position in an infantry battalion. Ultimately, we”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And so for me, I didn't actually want to go into the military, but I felt I needed to in order to serve and learned a lot of lessons along the way that we can talk about, but really grateful for that upbringing because I think it gave me a context and appreciation for what we enjoy as far as our way of life that I might not have had if I'd grown up in a different way.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks, Patrick. I think you're always formed by your childhood first. And I grew up around amazing people in my life. My grandfather was a war hero in World War II, fought and landed at Ancio as a 17-year-old Browning automatic rifleman, standing guard in the Rhine when Germany surrenders one a bronze star with valor for crawling out in front of three German machine gun nests as he was splicing a line that allowed the Ford Observer to call in artillery that beat back a Nazi counter attack that was about to wipe out his battalion, which today would probably be a different medal, but was a bronze star with Valor and World War II. And then my dad served for 30 years, West Point graduate, was brigade commander. And so I think the lens I grew up in was really about purpose and around service. Like a full appreciation of America that what we enjoy in this country is quite rare in terms of our freedom. And those freedoms are supported by the bravery of young men and women who are willing to sacrifice everything at”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source