Andy Stumpf

Andy Stumpf spent 17 years in the U.S. Navy, including time as a SEAL Team 6 operator and a BUD/S instructor. He deployed five times in support of the Global War on Terror, took a round through both legs in Afghanistan, and was medically retired in 2013 — but the retirement was less an ending than a hand-off into a second career built on the same fundamentals he’d taught generations of SEAL candidates: how to stay calm, how to plan, and how to keep moving when everything in your environment is telling you to quit.

In 2007 he lost his best friend, fellow SEAL Jason Lewis, in the line of duty. The promise Stumpf made to take care of Lewis’s family became the through-line of much of what came next. Years later, in 2015, he set a world record by flying a wingsuit for 18.257 miles after exiting an aircraft at 36,500 feet, doing it as the centerpiece of a million-dollar fundraiser for the Navy SEAL Foundation’s Survivor Support Program. The record itself wasn’t really the point. The fundraiser was.

He is best known to the wider public as the host of Cleared Hot, the long-running podcast where he interviews fellow operators, athletes, entrepreneurs, and thinkers about the moments that shaped them. The show built a reputation for unhurried, honest conversation in a podcasting landscape that rewards the opposite — and along the way it made Stumpf one of the most credible voices in the post-military, performance-and-philosophy ecosystem that includes Jocko Willink, Rich Roll, and David Goggins. He also hosts Change Agents with Andy Stumpf, a more recent project in the same long-form vein.

In 2026, he published Drownproof: Eight Life Lessons to Keep Your Head Above Water, which debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller. The book takes its name from the SEAL training drill in which a candidate is hand-and-foot bound and dropped into the deep end of a pool — the lesson being that survival in true distress is rarely about strength and almost always about staying calm long enough to execute the next correct action. Featuring a foreword by Jocko Willink (read by Jocko himself in the audiobook edition) and praise from Jack Carr and Joe Rogan, Drownproof extracts eight life lessons from a SEAL career and applies them to ordinary problems most readers will recognize: leadership without authority, decisions made under fear, the difference between preparation and performance.

Outside of the SEAL Teams and the podcast booth, Stumpf is also one of the more accomplished civilian skydivers and wingsuit pilots of his generation. He has BASE-jumped from the Perrine Bridge in Idaho — the only place in the United States where the practice is legal year-round — and from technical lines across the Alps. On the Joe Rogan Experience, he has spoken openly about a friend he calls Alex, his main BASE jumping partner overseas, who was killed in a wingsuit accident — a description that points to Alexander “Alex” Polli, the thirty-one-year-old Italian-Norwegian wingsuit pilot who crashed near Chamonix on August 22, 2016 while flying the Brévent / Couloir de l’Ensa line, striking a tree at roughly 5,000 feet of elevation. Polli’s death came during one of the deadliest stretches in the history of the sport — fellow elite wingsuiter Uli Emanuele had been killed less than a week earlier. Stumpf has not put on a wingsuit since. He still skydives, but the BASE side of the sport is, in his own words, a question mark. The discipline that drew him to it in the first place — the deliberate calm in the seconds before a wingsuit exit — bears more than a passing resemblance to the underwater knot-tying he did as a 19-year-old in BUD/S.

He continues to be active in the military community through philanthropic work and remains a practicing jiu-jitsu student and hunter. He lives with his family in the United States.