Episodes

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we’re re-releasing our conversation with the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, SgtMaj Carlos Ruiz, and the Manpower and Reserve Affairs senior enlisted advisor, SgtMaj Jacob Reiff during the Modern Day Marine Expo this year. This interview was originally released on our YouTube channel, but the conversation continues to be so relevant and the topics of leadership are so insightful, we decided to get...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring another installment of our Literary Lethality series to the scuttlebutt. In this series, we dive deep into the Commandant’s Professional Reading List, exploring various titles and talking with authors about some of the books on the list. Today, we welcome Mac Caltrider back to the show. Mac talks to us about Orson Scott Card’s groundbreaking sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game is one of ...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Maj Kyle King to the scuttlebutt. Kyle is an artillery officer, former collegiate athlete, and winner of not one, not two, but three Marine Corps Marathons in 2022, 2024, and 2025. His first run through the tape made him the first active-duty Marine to win the men’s division in 39 years. Along with these accomplishments, Kyle was named the Marine Corps 2025 Male Athlete of the Year. Kyle is...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Steven Weintraub to the scuttlebutt. Steven is a retired Marine colonel and the current Chief Strategy Officer at the Veteran Tickets Foundation, more commonly known as VetTix. If you’re like me, regardless of music, sports, movies, the arts, festivals, whatever, it’s always better live and in person. So when I heard about VetTix, I had to find out more. VetTix is a non-profit organization ...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Rob Jones to the scuttlebutt. Rob is a retired Marine combat engineer who was wounded in an IED attack and lost both his legs. Rather than succumb to despair and depression, he asked, what’s next? What was next was him winning a bronze medal in the 2012 Paralympics, riding his bike across America in 2013, and running 31 marathons in 31 consecutive days in 31 different cities in 2017, all of...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring you a very special episode in remembrance of the attacks on 9/11. This is an episode that, frankly, I never thought we would get. To be even more frank, it seemed so unimaginable to me that I didn’t even think to try and track this guest down. Only through Nancy’s hard work and diligence (she’s a journalist, folks) were we able to track Jason Thomas down. For those who don’t know the name, Ja...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. This week, we welcome Josh Chartier to the scuttlebutt. Josh is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who is now the Director of Business Development for Echodyne, focusing on U.S. defense strategic partnerships. Josh and I served together in the UAE, so this is a bit of a reunion for me. One of the nice things about having a podcast is I get to hang out with my friends, but I understand that “hey, do you remember tha...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Col Nicholas Reynolds (USMC Ret.) and Katie Sanders to the scuttlebutt. Col Reynolds came on our show back in Episode 51 to talk about his book, Need to Know, and this is Katie’s first time at the scuttlebutt, and hopefully not the last. Nick and Katie co-authored the book, Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, and we couldn’t be more excited for this book. Col...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. This week, we bring you another installment of Semper Cinema with our review of the Marine Corps classic, The Wind and the Lion. I reference it as a Marine Corps classic because, as every Gen X Marine can attest, clips from the movie have been used as an attention-grabber in just about every class, period of instruction, and formal school. The Wind and the Lion stars Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, and Brian Keith. It...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome 2ndLt Steven Ramirez to the scuttlebutt. Steven is a prior-enlisted officer currently a student at The Basic School. But more than anything, he’s a reader. Steven started the Semper Read Instagram page to share his love of books beyond just his fellow Marines at his unit. What started as just a small social media page ended up being followed by the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. His or...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Stephen Camelio to the scuttlebutt. Stephen is a screenwriter, storyteller, and content creator whose most recent project, Mending the Line – a story about a Marine embracing fly fishing to help him through post-traumatic growth – was the #1 movie on Netflix back in 2024. We interviewed the director of that film, Joshua Caldwell, back in Episode 82. Please go back and check it out. Stephen ...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Robert Newman to the scuttlebutt. Robert is a retired Marine and author of the book, Guerillas in the Mist. As you will hear, he definitely gives the Dos Equis guy a run for his money on being the most interesting man alive. Joining the Marine Corps in the 70s, he started as a mortarman but quickly moved over to Recon. From there, he ended up in Germany in 1983, working for the Beirut Casua...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring you another installment of World of Wargaming with Alex Buck. Alex is a major in the Canadian Armed Forces and an advocate for the benefits of wargaming. Alex talks to us about how he came to be in the armed forces, what it was like to be a Canadian in America during September 11th, his deployment experiences and some of the similarities and differences between Canadian and US militaries, and...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome Timothy Gick to the scuttlebutt. Tim is the founder of the company Not A Very Good Teacher and the creator of the memory adaptation game, Mission Match. Tim is also a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserve, so the concept of developing military-friendly educational games for kids is something that hits close to home. Also, back in Episode 247, our gaming experts did a review of Mission Ma...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. As you probably have deduced from the episode title, this is Episode 250. We said it when we hit 100, and then again when we hit 200, but we’ll say again how honored, and quite frankly, surprised we are to be going now 250 strong. That being said, we recognize that this is not a solo endeavor. So, we want to use this episode to thank our team, the MCA leadership, our guests, and most importantly, you the listener fo...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. This week, we welcome Jonathan Hackett to the scuttlebutt. Jonathan is a retired MARSOC operator, intelligence specialist and interrogator, the author of the books, Theory of Irregular War and Iran’s Shadow Weapons, and is now a student at Yale Law School. He has been the expert guest on multiple news outlets, such as Al Jazeera and CBS News, so I have no idea how we were able to get him on our show, but we are so h...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome the Vice President of the Marine Corps Association Foundation, retired Col Tim Mundy, to the scuttlebutt. With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, we thought it would be fun to bring someone who is the son of, and father of, a Marine. We mention in the conversation how “Hallmark holidays” are not really our bag, but having the opportunity to talk to someone like Col Mundy about the dynamic...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. This week, we bring you another installment of World of Wargaming with two gamers who need little introduction: Aidan and Noah Ruble. These two were kind enough to come on (under threat of much tearing of clothes and gnashing of teeth from their father) and give us their review of Not AVery Good Teacher’s memory game, Mission Match. Our experts give us their review of the game, discuss the game mechanics and how it ...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome 1stSgt Chase McGrorty-Hunter back to the scuttlebutt. Chase is a first sergeant with 11th Marines, the first winner of the Modern Day Marine Obj 1 wargaming competition (now known as the Commandant’s Cup) and our guest for Episode 200. Clearly, we’re fans of this Marine. Chase is here to talk to us about the Marine Corps Association’s Tactical Decision Game, or TDG, Competition. This was or...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and your continued support. This week, we welcome Josh Bates to the scuttlebutt. Josh is a retired Marine infantry officer, podcaster, and author of the book, Baghdad Shuffle, a noir crime thriller set in the backdrop of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It goes without saying that this is a genre-bending story. Josh talks to us about his path to the yellow footprints, serving with his dad, the impetus for writing a book that centers on a geopolitica...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring another installment of our new series, Literary Lethality, to the scuttlebutt. In this series, we dive deep into the Commandant’s Professional Reading List, exploring various titles and talking with authors about some of the books on the list. Today, we welcome Kacy Tellessen back to the show. Kacy talks to us about E.B. Sledge’s quintessential war memoir, With the Old Breed. With the Old Bre...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we welcome David Kneiss and Dennis Mannion to the scuttlebutt. David is the director of the films The Gift and The Siege at Khe Sanh, and Dennis is a Marine Vietnam veteran and the subject of The Siege at Khe Sanh. Both The Gift and The Siege are such beautiful films, and David’s skill as a filmmaker is evident in his winning the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s Major Norman Hatch Award for The Gift...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring another installment of our new series, Literary Lethality, to the scuttlebutt. In this series, we dive deep into the Commandant’s Professional Reading List, exploring various titles and talking with authors about some of the books on the list. Today, we welcome Max Uriarte to the show. Anyone who joined the Marine Corps post-2010 knows the name. Max is best known for his comic, Terminal Lance...

Hey, Scuttlebutt listeners. Thank you for joining us and for your continued support. This week, we bring you another installment of Semper Cinema with our review of the 1970 made-for-TV movie, Tribes. Full disclosure, we chose this movie because we wanted to break the Semper Cinema paradigm and veer a bit off our normal course to go with a movie we knew was less than stellar. And Tribes does not disappoint. Aired as the ABC Movie of the Week, it is basically a boot camp movie, starring Jan Micha...