Camp Gagnon - Today's Wars Explained (2024)

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Russia, China, Boeing Whistleblowers, Israel, Haiti, El Salvator: Feels like every part of the globe is currently facing some type of war or conflict, so I got my friend Chris Capelutto from @Taskandpurpose to come on and break everything down. So sit back, relax, and Welcome to CAMP!🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/ Intro and Edit : Christos PapastefanouS/O to our sponsor Bashmouth!- Save 20% sitewide at BASHMOUTH.com with Promocode: ...

Do you think it's likely we will see a World War III? If we were to create a hypothetical scenario of how World War III would happen, this is probably how I would write it. Chris Cappy, former Army National Guard infantrymen, Iraq war veteran and main commentator on one of YouTube's preeminent sources for warfare news, task and purpose. Is there corruption? Absolutely.

I wouldn't want to be somebody who's blowing the whistle on Boeing in the defense industry right now. Saw the whistleblower from Boeing got clipped. I wouldn't be saying something against them. Yeah, we love Boeing. Can we do an ad read? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this podcast brought to you by Bowen. I suck at Airbus.

I was there in Iraq during a weird point where we would carry around with us $100,000 in cash. We were essentially paying them off to not attack U.S. forces. One time they blew up a 19-year-old. His brains were blown out of the back of his head. We had a dog on our base. Roxy was a killer. His dog was eating those brains. That screwed with me.

Talk to me about what's happening at the Southern War. All of this controversy is kind of centered around something. been called Operation Lone Star. It's Governor Abbott's big National Guard push. Is this a directive under Biden? No, that's on the state level. This is why you hear the Fox News in China. They're putting out stories that like our country is that civil war. The biggest question I think everybody has about China is what is their intention. Do you think a war with China is plausible? Yeah, absolutely. It's plausible. Yeah. People don't know this, but the craziest thing I learned is that. Chris Cappy. What's that, Mark? Thank you so much.

being here, bro. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. This is going to be fun. I want to talk about everything that's happening in the world. So I think a good place to start. Tell me of all of the conflicts that are happening, of all the geopolitical movements that are going on right now in the world, which of them is most concerning to you? One of the ones that I think that a lot of people don't pay attention to right now is what's happening in South America. Throughout Latin America, We have a situation where countries are becoming more destabilized, and I think people aren't paying attention to it as much, because it's not as sexy as what's happening in Ukraine and Russia and what's happening with Israel and Palestine. But when you see the signs in Ecuador, right now they're country. There's gangs trying to overthrow the country in Ecuador.

There's in El Salvador, gangs were, it went from one of the six. safest places to one of the most dangerous places to then their government crack down on those gangs by essentially going and rounding up 100,000 people, putting them in prison. And it's kind of, there are great lengths that people will ask their government to go to for safety at that point that we're not paying attention to. And all of this is to say it's creating kind of a crisis at the southern border. in America, that we're dealing with the consequences of all of these destabilizing events. And there's different perspectives.

I like to look at things from different points of view. So there's the one argument is that there's demand for illicit substances in the United States. A little bit too much nose candy that people want to do. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. Yeah. There's an element of truth to that. There's always a bit of truth to both sides, I feel like. Americans love drugs.

We do. Yeah. We like it. And we're funding the destabilizing. the destabilization that's happening. There's the other side of the argument, which is that these countries don't have a handle

on the cartel, and there's corruption, the cartel is taking over. So to me, that's one geopolitical hotspot that I see not getting a lot of attention. Sometimes I'll put out videos on that region, and they won't get the same

kind of engagement. But personally, I feel like it's kind of like a sleeper hit. We're going to hear about it in the coming years. Interesting. So take me through one of the examples, like of one country. Haiti right now is going through a crisis. You got barbecue there. Yeah, what do you know about that? That just seems so wild. It's a really bad situation where they had to even send in the Marine crisis team, response team, to fly in and basically plus up the security at the embassy there. We have an embassy in Haiti. And as the situation falls apart, the government falls apart, they had

their president assassinated there, I believe, recently. Yeah. So the gangs are basically taking control of large parts of the country. And you have the United States government sending in Marines to try to help with that situation. And what happens is we have an interest in keeping stability there. So there's a fair share of military interventions that we do that I would not be behind in hindsight. When you send in troops to Haiti, they're trying to stabilize. the region because partly what happens is there's people in Haiti who will get they'll try to

make their way into the United States which creates kind of an immigration problem a migrant problem and you can understand why they'd want to come here they want opportunity they want a better life for themselves and their family in their countries in ruin like if I'm in their position I'm doing the exact same thing exactly question so as far as Haiti is concerned can you speak to that crisis Like, why is that happening? What is the, what are some of the events that led up to that? And who's this barbecue guy? There's a lot going on in Haiti.

The barbecue guy, he's kind of in charge of the whole revolt that's happening there right now, as far as I know. And barbecue, I think he got the nickname because maybe he likes to eat people a little bit. Yeah, I've read this. Yeah. The Wikipedia entry is hilarious. And even if it's not true, sometimes you want to just kind of like float an idea out there. Yeah. Just to get your enemy like, oh, like, what the hell?

What is he doing? He's eating people? Well, two things on that. One, the Wikipedia entry is hilarious because if you read it, it's like, Barbecue got his name. No one's exactly sure how he got his name. One possible explanation is that when he was a teenager, he would sell fried chicken on the side of the road. Some other scholars, they posit that it's because during massacres, he would light his enemies on fire. Those are two very different explanations.

for the name. Somewhere between the two. Yeah, yeah, right? And then apparently there's a video. I saw a video recently of him, like, eating like a dead guy. Did you see this? Like, literally, there's like a charred, like, corpse

in the middle of Port-au-Prince, and he's like, yeah, this is what's going on. And I don't know if it's just, like, a show of power or what it is, but it's, like, crazy. You ignore the kind of, like, the poverty. You ignore those things at your own risk. And I feel like part of the crisis that we're seeing at the border

comes from the fact that the United States has been very, we get tunnel vision. We get hyper-focused. For the last 20 years, we've been super-focused on the Middle East. And then now,

in the last five years, we've been pivoting to what's happening in the Pacific. And we're doing that at the detriment of completely forgetting what's happening

in Latin America. So you mentioned Ecuador and El Salvador. Yeah. So I'd seen some of the the footage of like these El Salvadorian gang or like a like prison gangs like basically like they were rampant and then government comes in locks up a ton of people and like now the

prisons like you see you've seen the videos of everyone like sitting crisscross like in lines what is going on with with that is that just the Salvadorian government basically coming together being like hey no was like zero tolerance no more of this i'm going to say the president's name wrong i think it's bucgolay okay he came in recently he came in and cracked down hard on the country and the people there love him for it. He came in and he said, I'm going to clean this up. There's other people who say he made deals with the gangs to help make that happen. But from what I understand, he came in and made giant prisons. So imagine if they set up a like a football sized stadium two miles from here. And then a couple of days from then, 70,000 people fill it. Wow.

That's what he did. And El Salvador has a long history. A lot of these places, you could trace it back to the Cold War, where the United States and the Soviet Union both funded different sides of a civil war in El Salvador and in the 1990s. And they just flooded that place with guns, firearms, and training. So what you create in a situation like that is generations since then have had all these issues, all these problems. Al Salvador is interesting because so they have three centuries of being under

colonial rule from Spain and different colonial rule can lead to different situations. In this case, they never set up the economy to be like a functioning economy. It was entirely reliant on one commodity.

Coffee. So what you have is a situation where 2% of the population own all of that aridable farmland and they get all of the money. So this inequality

create a situation where you have far left movement of these communists and a far right movement who don't want to change the land situation and you have the U.S. government and the Soviets backing either side. So Al-Savador has really,

it's been kind of a mess since then. And it's interesting because Bucale, what he did was he cleaned up the situation there. People say they love it. Wow. What was America's interest in that civil war in El Salvador? It's the whole domino theory of they didn't want El Salvador to become a communist sympathetic country. Got it.

That's why what they did is different points of view on this. One is that they sent billions of dollars in weapons and training. And they sent the CIA there to train what are on the far right, what you call them is death squads. On the far left, you call them terrorists. So the CIA historians believe they trained and armed death squads to kill all of these communist sympathetic soldiers in El Salvador. Wow. And then the Russians were obviously promoting a pro-communist idea of the nation? Right.

So the Russians, Iraq, and, yeah, Russia sent $500,000 worth of weapons before this happened. and the Russians all not nearly as much I believe it was 2 billion at least that the American sent several hundred million that the Soviet sent so it's nowhere near the same amount but yeah all this is to say that what's happening in Latin America to me

as just an observer as an enthusiast of someone who finds this kind of information fascinating because I see what's happening at our southern border and I I'm curious, I want to dive deeper, I want to find out why is this happening? Why is their instability in Latin America? How far back do you want to go to figure out where did it start?

I always kind of, I don't know about other people, I feel like I want to find who do I point the finger? Who did this? There's a part of you that wants to say like, oh, it's all the United States fall. And then there's the other part of you that thinks, well, there's other people who are also funding these wars. and instability. So it's a deep rabbit hole. Yeah. So it talked to me about

what's happening at the southern border. Like obviously I'm in New York, all my family and where I grew up is in Florida, which like isn't really affected by the southern border. Like obviously it's very transient.

There's a large Latin population that exists in Florida, like many of which are like Cuban or like, you know, Caribbean in general. So I feel disconnected from like the border. But it's like,

it seems like it's become a really big hot button issue, especially going into the election year. So I'm curious if you can just kind of like speak on what's happening. If you can kind of like explain both sides of it. Like what would MSNBC report and like what would Fox News report? Can you just kind of paint the picture? It's funny. I grew up my formative years I feel like I was I was introduced to listening to Rush Limbaugh. Like that I listened to the him on the radio for hours and hours. And Sean Hannity, those voices.

then you get exposed to the other side and it's like oh they're saying the polar opposite and it always bothered me it was like even as a kid yeah there's the bullshit yeah like alarm goes off in your head and you think well someone's got to be lying right and that's why i like to give both perspectives like you said and that that that to me resonates uh at the southern border it's also we don't even have to say southern border we can just say border we know we're not talking about Canada you know what I mean They're not, right? It's always funny. When people are like Southern border, I'm like, just, we know what you're talking about, you know?

Sure. It's true. Yeah. And especially, and not just the Southern border, but like the Texas border especially is where a lot, because there's Arizona, this California. The Texas part of the border is specifically a highlight of where a lot of the controversy is happening for a number of reasons. One is there's a disagreement between how the National Guard is supposed to be used there. and how the federal border patrol agents are supposed to be used there

is a disagreement on like a state and federal level when it comes to jurisdiction and law and I was in the National Guard, Army National Guard infantry. So, and I've done domestic missions, so it's mobilized in New York City for hurricane relief. It can get,

it can be tough even when there isn't a disagreement like that. So for someone like me who lives in New York, it's a little easy for me to be a little bit dispassionate about what's happening there. Yeah, 100%. I get that. So that's the perspective I'm coming from. Someone who's like, I'm not living there.

I'm not seeing the effects exactly of what people who are living there are feeling like they're dealing with on both sides of that border. But the situation as far as I know it is that in the past few years, there's been millions of migrant encounters where there's a lot of migrant encounters where there's increase, an influx of migrants from Latin America trying to enter into the United States to get a better life to escape violence for a number of different reasons. And what I believe everyone can agree on is that it's overwhelming our ability to care for those people. So if there's too many people that want to cross that border and it gets to a point where it overwhelms the

the inservices for that then it's not good for those people and it's not good for the united states either i'm a strong believer of one of our greatest strengths as a country is that legal immigration this country draws the best and the brightest people so that to me is a good thing. When you look at some of our adversaries like China and Russia, they have a net negative migration in China. They're losing 300,000 people a year. They're coming here. They're trying to escape authoritarianism, communism in that case. They're trying to find a better life here. So to me, it's a good sign that people want to be here. Yeah. But there's, you also see the very divisive video clips. I don't know if you saw recently, there was national

Guard soldiers were overwhelmed at the border. They were, it was a group of, I think, about 100 migrants who pushed them over, kicked one soldier in the knee. They tried to rush and break through a gate. They were cutting razor wire. So all of this controversy is kind of centered around something called Operation Lone Star. I don't know if you've heard about this. It's Governor Abbott's big National Guard push.

and it costs about $2 billion a year. It's about 10,000 National Guard soldiers who are activated for this operation. They're putting up razor wire. They're putting up blockades in the water. There's these big buoys. I don't know if you've seen it across the river there. And it's got to be a difficult mission for soldiers to do

because you're kind of asked to be half police officer, half soldier. So you might have training as an infantryman in the National Guard but now

they're also asking you to be sort of a border patrol agent which you might not have training for. So I think you could see

at that point why this would be such an explosive situation. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I imagine

you probably want people that are working in like de-escalation at the border. Like there's people coming through with like families

and like children coming by. Like, I don't know if you would want someone that's going to like instigate or like escalate a situation and I don't know necessarily what the training is for I mean I'm curious like your your experience in National Guard like would the training teach you kind of how like be diplomatic and deescalate situations like that or like what

would be the protocol so when I was activated mobilized for Hurricane Sandy which happened in New York City about I don't know how many years it would go it was now almost 10 maybe okay so wow yeah So about 10 years ago, Herkin Sandia was activated for a couple weeks. And you see very quickly how fast people, even in a city like New York, you go from people saying, they see you in uniform and they say,

thank you for your service. You give them three days without gasoline or water or electricity. Very quickly, they're saying, screw you. Yeah. And I saw that. And so that's kind of why I have empathy for any police officers who have to deal with managing crowds or deal with the public on a daily basis. Because people were telling me to go screw myself in so many words.

And I felt bad for them because they're saying, I need to drive my mom to the hospital. I don't have gas. and it's my job to tell them, we don't have enough. And I think that's kind of what's at the heart of this whole thing. If we step back at a 30,000 foot view, is that there's a scarcity of resources.

And it's like, how do you allocate them? And then in a position like I'm in, I'm 20-something at the time, it's like you could tell them, hey, I don't have, we don't have gas for you. it doesn't matter. It doesn't make a difference. They're they're aggressive at that point.

And I don't have the tools to de-escalate the situation. I don't have the training for that. I've been trained only take, you know, close with and destroy the enemy. That's your training as an infantryman. But they're repurposing you to kind of be like an auxiliary cop at that point. Yeah.

It's asking a lot of soldiers. Yeah, it seems tricky. And I also, I mean, especially at the southern border, I get both sides of, like, I can get everyone's perspective, I feel like, at least a little bit. You know what I mean? Like, if I'm, you know, deployed into that area trying to like stop people from just coming through, you know, undocumented, I'd be like, look, I got to protect my country. I don't know who these people are. Like, I'm going to try to stop as many people as I can. And I don't know if people have weapons coming over. Like, I don't, you don't know what's going on. And there's someone with full, you know, determination to get past you. Like that's a lot of pressure. And then secondarily, I can understand their perspective. Like, yo, I'm leaving a dictatorship. Like, my country's overrun by cartels. Like, I've seen my uncle die. My father got shot.

Like, my other family members are in cartels. Like, I can see the pain. And for, I don't know, like, the downside being, like, maybe I get arrested. Maybe I pay fines. Like, maybe I get, like, beat up a little. But the upside is I get to, you know, work for cash in America where there's opportunity everywhere. Like, I get, like, both sides, I'm like, yeah, I get why both people are doing what they're done. And that to me makes the

issue so tricky. And I guess, like, if I'm someone from, like, El Salvador, for example, if they wanted to, you know, immigrate legally, what does that look like for them? Like, I have no idea of what legal immigration even looks like at the present moment. Like, what would they have to do in order to do that, do you know? I know that it's a long process and it also has gotten trickier because there's different rules have changed recently. So if you come, you can apply for asylum. There's different types of migrants. Right. Like, are you a refugee from war? Are you looking for asylum from political persecution? The rules recently changed. There was Title 42 ended. So that changed the kind of the calculus in some migrants' minds where maybe it's more worth it to come

now than it was before. They're running all these different considerations of under the Biden administration, is there more chance or less? There's also during COVID, that's when Title 42 was enacted. It's, I'm probably going to say this wrong. But my understanding of Title 42 is that it's an exception where it let us deport migrants, immigrants, whatever you want to call them, for a health exemption.

basically because COVID was happening, it was okay to send people away. But once COVID ended and we ended Title 42, we now have to consider more applications for asylum. And I apologize if I get the details of that wrong. But what this is to say is that there's this influx. During COVID, not a lot of immigration. after COVID ends,

it's like a, what do you call it? Water at a dam. Where it builds up, it builds up, and you open the dam, what happens? More water than before. So yeah, totally understand where you're coming from. For some people, it's much easier.

It's like, the border needs to be shut completely. Or we should open it more. We should let more people, and it's very easy for some people. And they get very, very, it's one of those issues that for some people, if you don't feel the same way as them, then they feel like you're totally missing the plot. So I get that. Yeah. Yeah, I just don't know what the legal process is. Like, I think most people are on board with that idea in sort of an

abstract sense. Like, yeah, if we make, like, most people should come across legally. Like, if you just said that, like, I think most people would be like, yeah, that makes sense. But I just don't know how hard it is. Like, is it intentionally hard for, like, Central and South American people to get status, like, to, if you, like, apply to be a refugee, like, is it high likelihood you're going to be rejected? Does it take so long because it's all this bureaucracy in the way? Like, if I'm sitting in El Salvador and there's, you know, like, people are getting arrested, not, like, left and right, there's, like, gang violence, da-da-da. And you're telling me, like, hey, it might be a year until you hear back about your immigration thing. I'd be like,

look, let me just go there and then figure it out when I'm there. Like, I'll just, apply for something or maybe I can marry someone or maybe I can get through without somebody noticing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I had my buddy Fernando on the show recently, Fernando Puente. He's, uh, he worked for a long time going back and forth

from Tijuana to basically San Diego, basically escorting people across the border. Like he spent like five, six years doing that and going through like the standard border checkpoints with, uh, basically like stolen

or fake visas or passports and he would basically like guide people. He was a citizen so he was able to go back and forth. But he was able to take people with him and they would just walk through and the Border Patrol agent would look at it and be like, okay, this looks like you and you're coming over for just like a day's work

and they had like their boots and they had the whole like, you know, high vis jackets and everything. And then once they get across, they turn in all of their materials and then they like take a bus and they go to wherever they need to go. So I'm like, I don't even know if you can stop that necessarily.

Like maybe like face. IDing or face scanning. So I don't know really what the solution is. And I also can't get a grasp of like how big the problem is. Like I guess what is the big concern? Like what would be like the Fox News angle where it's like, hey, there's a border crisis and here's what the problem is. If Fox News were to tell you, yeah, there's the very different perspectives on the right. They would tell you that immigrants, migrants coming through. It's an invasion is the words that they would use. And I try to focus on what is what's the language that they're using to describe this. It seems inflammatory. They describe it as an invasion. On the left, they use other words that, you know,

it's a humanitarian crisis that we need to let more people through. So yeah, there's very different perspectives on that. The way I look at it is as a former soldier, as someone who's dealt with public crisis like this, I've seen what happens when there isn't enough resources, not just with gasoline, but I've staffed homeless shelters, for instance, when Hurricane Sandy happened. There's no electricity for days. There's no gasoline. So these homeless shelters are filled up and not just filled up, but they also move into public schools. So we had several public schools in Manhattan where we're running, you know, 200 people out of there. And what happens is, you know, was very quickly, logistics is a huge problem that you probably wouldn't think about. Yeah. But how do you,

so you want to care for people, right? So do I. But then it's like, what's the next question? How do you get 300 cots to Publix PS 114 on the Upper East Side? You need those cots, but more than that, you also need 300 hygiene kits because I don't want to get gross, but I know what it was like to be in that building where no one had hygiene kits, homeless people without it for days. And so if I were to be sympathetic to what people on the right are saying is that, yeah, it's easy to say we want to help people. It's more difficult to say, to not just say, but to execute on how do we get the resources there to care for these people? Because otherwise, is it good for those people to not have water to not have food and no prospect of a job. I think that's why they call it a crisis and not

like, oh, there's a problem at the border. Right. Yeah. And then I hear oftentimes, you know, more conservative people or people maybe on the right would say, you know, we're allocating so much money, billions of dollars are trying to, you know, fix these logistical problems, getting water, getting hygiene kits, getting all of these things allocated to, you know, migrants slash refugees coming over. And then people would say, well, what about, you know, Americans? Why don't we have, you know, things being done for actual, like, naturalized citizens that are, you know, suffering? And it's a decent point. I don't really know what, like, the counter would be.

I guess we do have, like, social services in the United States already that people could, you know, utilize. There, yeah, there's the argument that I think a lot of people don't realize how many social safety nets we have for people. But, yeah, that is definitely a part of the argument. that resonates with people is they feel like, and we don't even have to talk about the southern border to talk about this because it is happening in New York. What happened is Texas spent about $12 million from that Operation Lone Star

to bus many of those migrants from the Texas border to New York City because New York City is a sanctuary state. So they have to, by law, help those people. And I am sympathetic with that. My grandmother immigrated from Spain to New York City. She came here trying to escape war from a dictator, Franco, who was bombing her, who killed my grandfather, fought in the Spanish Civil War. She was orphaned, and she came here looking for a better life. So I'm sympathetic to that. I wouldn't be here if America didn't have sympathy for that and believe

that those people are who we need. On the other side of the coin, you look at, like you said, New York City has a problem where the mayor here now was talking about having to cut back services in police and trash, all these

different services that need to be cut so that they can spend, I believe it's $12 billion that they want to spend over a certain, it's maybe three years or something to help. I might get those numbers, the exact numbers wrong. But there's a lot of,

of money it's going to cost to care for these migrants that are being bust up here it's about 100,000 of them and they're being put up in hotels hotels that cost $500 a night and they're being overflowed into tent tent uh government tent facilities and those aren't ideal what happens when you when you set people up for failure that's what's going to happen and when people are intense and there's this tension in poverty, and then they're getting kicked out of there. You have problems where you see them clashing with the police, and I'm not trying to put blame in any direction.

I'm just saying I can have sympathy for a crisis in New York City. I can see where both sides are looking at this. Have you heard of Fronton Island? There's this island on the border with Texas, and what they're starting to do is what they did was they, for the last few years, there's been gunfire from the carts, warring cartels who are fighting over this.

It's essentially a part of the border that's easy to cross over the river there and it's shallow. So they've set up caches there where they have weapons, drugs. They smuggle people across there. They charge people about $8,000, $15,000 to get them across the border there. So what the Texas Rangers did was they, they call it an invasion of that island. They took over the island. They laid down all this razor wire there.

They did a full operation. And they used drones to record all of it. And this is what they're trying to do to prevent people from getting across. to even end up in New York City. It was this major operation that they laid out there. And to me, it's kind of crazy seeing all this happening

at the border. Is this a directive under Biden? Is it through him or who's actually calling it? No, that's on the state level. And that's where the whole thing becomes messy is that the state and the federal level right now are kind of in conflict with each other. And they're ending up in the Supreme Court over whether or not they can lay down that wire or if they have to legally cut it.

So this is why you hear people in China right now, they're more, I guess, if you want to think of it, like the Fox News in China, they're putting out stories that like our country is at civil war or we're about to be at civil war. Right. And they look at that as evidence of, well, there's National Guard soldiers from Florida and from other states, about, I think it's 12 states that are being sent to the border to help, because they agree with what Texas's push is. So you have, yeah, there's conflict between some of the state governments who have resources. they have control over their National Guard troops, and they can send them to Texas, and they have. And sometimes the craziest thing I learned is that private donors can support those missions.

So you could have like a billionaire, and this did happen, a billionaire who's paying, because when you mobilize National Guard troops, it's expensive. You got to pay for everything for them. So you got private donors paying for these National Guard missions to go to Texas. Which private? donors. They didn't say. It was they had a billionaire donor donated to, I think it was Florida,

one of the states, to support their mission to go help Texas. To me, I just, I just find it fascinating. That's wow. So you have like private individuals, private U.S. citizens, I'm assuming there's American citizens. Right. Yeah. That are basically funding like military factions to go like stop migrants. It's one way of putting it. I mean, it's kind of crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. So that's where the National Guard, it becomes like a kind of a legal battle, really. And I'm not a lawyer. I don't know how the National Guard should technically be used. But it's an issue that's unfolding right now.

It's been the National Guard has gone through transformations. So if you're in the National Guard and I don't know if you've heard much about it, but like it's there's the army reserves then there's the army national guard and they're similar but all the combat arms are in the national guard and if you're in Vietnam a lot of guys

it was a great posting because the National Guard didn't deploy to Vietnam much but if you're in the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan GWAT Global War on Terror Times they kind of used it as like a backdoor draft where we need 150,000 soldiers in Iraq. How are we going to do that without keeping them

there for three years at a time? Well, we'll dip into our reserves. We'll dip into the Guard. So it's always been a weird legal area of how do you use the National Guard and the reserves. Oh, interesting. Wow. And so in your time, you never got moved to the border at all. No. God. No. It wasn't necessarily a crisis at that point. point. I remember when I was in, I got out in 2015, I remember that there was more news about we're going to send more troops to more National Guard troops to the border. And there was all these articles about like whatever state gets activated to go there or troop, uh, total troop strength numbers have been increased from 1,000 to 2,000. And those numbers have been consistently. And those numbers have been

consistently kept the same. So between Biden, Obama, Trump, there's a lot of what people say, and then there's what they actually do. And a lot of those numbers have been just kept the same. Yeah, consistent. Interesting. So across administrations, regardless of which flag they're waving, everyone's been basically doing the same thing at the border. Essentially. There's some, there's definitely, it's not to say that they don't have different points of view. on it. But when it comes to some troop strength numbers and security, national security, it doesn't change a whole lot. There's the perspective that it's a national security crisis at the border, that terrorists are going to flow into the border. Personally, I don't think the

data shows that that's a big concern. Like, if you're a terrorist, you're, you're, you, you, probably have some funding behind you. If you're going to come here and you're going to pull off a major attack, you have some funding behind you. You're coming here. You're doing flight training. You have money behind you. If you're a China spy and you're coming here to spy, you probably are an influential person. You have education. You're not just a rogue agent. Exactly. That's what I think. I think if you're a spy, you want to be, and this is what when we look at the evidence of the people who have been arrested

for spying in the United States, they get close to senators, they get close to industry. Right, what we do in other countries. Exactly. Right. So is it, are they using the border crisis as cover?

Like, do you think there's evidence to support that? There's an argument. People believe it. I'm not going to say it's impossible. I think it's unlikely. And that's what I've learned with covering defense topics

is General Mark Millie, top advisor to the president, thought that Ukraine would be overrun in three days. A lot of experts thought that. It's tough to say if it's going to be, you know, could a spy from China come through the border? Yeah, I think it's unlikely. I think the guy who's desperate, who has no money, who's got everything he owns in his bag over his shoulder

and no identification isn't probably going to be stealing state secrets from the State Department in D.C. a couple of weeks later. Could it happen? Yeah. But I guess if you have funding from a Chinese government agency

or a Russian government agency to try to collect secrets in America, there's going to be other ways for you to get in. Whether it's through like an alias passport or some other means of getting into the country. I guess there's other. There are ways when you have potentially hundreds of millions of dollars behind you in intelligence efforts.

And a lot of times they're here already. They're U.S. citizens. Right. It's the people that are spying from other countries are that. They have money behind them. The people that are coming in, migrating, and then spying. Seems pretty rare. Yeah.

Have you done much coverage on like Chinese sleeper cells or like Chinese foreign agents in the United States? I've looked into it and whatever. I've learned is that there's there was a Cato study that was done on all of the Chinese espionage in the United States. And it's about 1,600, just shy of 1,600 individuals who have been arrested and prosecuted for espionage for China. And the vast majority of them are people who are already here. And then I think it's about 158 who are immigrants from China. And this isn't to say that spying from China isn't a major concern. It is, I think. They're very talented at it. They're very good at it. And it's something that we should be on guard about. But I think we should be

smart about where we put our resources, where we put our attention. There was a famous case of Christine Fang, I believe her name was. She got very close to some politicians in the United States in California. And she didn't get any state secrets, but she did fundraising for some politicians. And she was a spy for China. She ended up going back to China and escaping prosecution. But yeah, there is a concern of Chinese espionage. The whole. pivot to China happened a little bit after I got out of the military. When I was in, we were,

it was USA all day. There was no one who was really a concern to the point where we weren't worried about having armored vehicles, we weren't worried about investing in tanks and hypersonic missiles.

It wasn't on anybody's radar when I was in. It was all just, okay, the rest of forever is going to be counterinsurgency missions that we're going to have to do here and there. So the pivot to China to me has been fascinating to watch, to see how that's unfolded. Yeah, I'm curious, what are your thoughts about them as a global player and what they're, you know, the success of like the Belt and Road Initiative and like their plans for the next 10 years? Like how do you see that unfolding based off your research? Belt and Road Initiative, I don't know if I would say it was like a major success.

One point of view is that it was a debt trap. Similar people would also say that the United States does that. But there are arguments that the Chinese government got countries in exorbitant amounts of debt and then kind of holds it over them. And now we're reaching a point where that debt is coming up and these countries like Pakistan are unable to pay on that debt and they're defaulting on it. And from, from, What I've read, I could be wrong, but from what I understand is there's very high interest rates on those debt higher than what the IMF, which is like what the Western version of giving out loans to third world countries or global South countries, would do much higher. 6%, I think opposed to 3%. Could be wrong. But yeah, the biggest question I think everybody has about China is what is their intention? do they want to invade Taiwan? Are they expansionist? Or are they just looking to take on more responsibility for their own security? Are they reasonable or do they have nefarious purposes?

What do you feel like the research has pointed to and could you explain both sides? I don't think anybody really has a good answer for what is child. China's plan. I think the CIA, one of their main jobs, is to figure that out. And they recently, in the last 20 years, they had about, I think it was 100, 100 of their contacts were killed by China when a, they had a intelligence leak and their sources in China were wiped out. Wow. In, I think it was 2010 or 2012. And so they had less idea. They had less, a picture of what is China planning. And the United States brought or voted for China to go into the WTO and to join the world community,

to trade with them, open up, globalization happened. Products became cheaper. For many years, it was a very mutually beneficial situation where they gave us cheap goods and we we wanted that so no one was thinking ahead thinking well what what about when they reach a point where where they become strong enough to become an adversary what's going to happen then i don't i don't know what their intentions are i look at their form of government and they are as a dictatorship it's by one person there.

To me, personally, I don't agree with that value system. So if there's a competition, a security competition between the two, and there's one side that I would like to see lead the global order, personally me, I'd like to see it be the United States and our value system and what we see

in terms of, I believe, in democracy. But I also understand that the United States has done its share of losing credibility in terms of that. Do you feel like China's sort of behavior with Hong Kong or even like the economic behavior with the Belt and Road Initiative would indicate expansionist ideals or even like economically expansionate ideals? We see them opening up a military base in Djibouti recently, which is right near the Red Sea where the Houthis are attacking right now

and stopping global shipping. They're expanding there. They're expanding a naval base in Cambodia. I think what they're trying to do is push the United States out of the first island chain, which is through Taiwan. They don't, just like how probably the United States wouldn't want China over by us.

They don't want us in their hemisphere. I don't know where that stops. Where would they know, no longer want to move forward. I think when we look at their military spending, I spend a lot of my time looking at the defense spending and the trends. They're investing a lot of money into their defense.

They're creating some impressive weapon systems. They're also, I think there's a tendency to think that they're much closer to the United States than they are in terms of they're not really on parity. with the U.S. military, I don't believe. They just got their first domestically produced aircraft carrier. They're investing in

next generation weapon systems, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, their naval navy and Air Force is their big push that they're investing in and also in their hypersonic missiles. Basically what they're trying to do is create a buffer zone around the first island chain that they can make very dangerous for the United States. They saw how what happens when you let the U.S. consolidate forces anywhere.

You let the U.S. build up troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They knocked over Iraq. You let them build up safely somewhere, you're going to lose. China has invested in exactly the type of capabilities to offset that disadvantage. The U.S., on the other hand, our big strategy right now,

and it's crazy how much of this they put publicly available for people to listen to and parse out. But the U.S. is trying to pre-position pre-pro, pre-pro, it's called. We're trying to pre-position stockpiles of weapons and equipment

in that region in the South China Sea before there's even a war because we've learned over the decades that if you don't do that we're at a disadvantage there's tension there because people will point out the United States have bases everywhere what are we doing?

Let's be isolationist. Let's pull back get out, get the heck out of Australia what are you doing there? Japan, why World War II ended forever ago? Why were we in Japan? not thinking about it from a military strategist's point of view where you've already lost the war if you don't have bombers pre-positioned in Japan. You've lost.

So this dream of like America being able to be isolationist is I think naive, not possible if you think that there could be a war with China. Do you think a war with China is plausible? Yeah, absolutely. It's plausible. Yeah, you got, they're both trying to build up. They're both at odds with each other. People overestimate the fact that, oh, your economies are tied together. It's just too much economic

destruction that would happen. History shows us that countries will go to war no matter what, even if it destroys their economy. I think it absolutely could happen. I hope it doesn't. What do you think would predicate a war like that? Like, what could be some of the potential circumstances if you could postulate and then what would that war actually look like? Could you paint the picture of, you know, what that 10 years could be? Fortunately, the United States does this all the time. One of their favorite things to do is run what's called war games. And they imagine exactly, there are people whose entire job is to think about day in and day out what you just asked. And they've run war game scenarios where they actually get hundreds of U.S. naval ships,

together near Taiwan and they run exercises and they tried to game out what would happen. It's literally a war game and they say, okay, China would do this. They simulate it and they simulate it in notional terms. We have a term in the military where we say, you know, it's notionally happened and meaning we're going to imagine that this happened. So the U.S. military ran a war game. Officially they said what would happen if China tried to invade Taiwan, which would really what would be the catalyst for a war between the two, is that the U.S. would lose several aircraft carriers.

They would lose some percentage, 20, 30 percent of their forces, but it would end in a Chinese defeat, is what the war game scenario say. One of the interesting things that came out of that war game is that they believe China would attack Japan first because there's U.S. bombers stationed there. So this makes big news. It brings Japan into the fold. Their people are now upset. They're like, because we have U.S. troops stationed here, we're going to have to deal with potentially getting dragged into World War III here. That's what would happen. An invasion of Taiwan would kick off a conflict between the U.S. and China. And do you have any reason to believe that China,

would invade Taiwan or would launch an attack on Japan? Fortunately, we would have some, we would know a little bit because what's changed between World War II and today is there's satellite imagery, so we would have several months of notice between when China started building up their invasion force, or at least we believe, maybe they come up with some surprise thing

that we haven't anticipated. Our understanding right now is that it would take them a month to build up their forces, on the shores. They would have to, kind of like when you saw Russia invade Ukraine, what they did was

they build up all these forces on the border and they pretended like it was a training exercise beforehand as the cover for that operation. Something similar would probably happen

with China where they would build up their forces on the shore and there's also only several times during the year that they could do this because of the weather.

so there's like a window of opportunity each year that they can attack during. And so we would know in advance, we'd probably see them a year or two before running drills so that we, you know, we're crying wolf saying, oh, look, they're building up forces. Oh, never mind. They didn't. They do that for a few years like how Russia did. That's one way that it could potentially happen. There's other ways.

but that's one possible thing to look for. The U.S. did this with, by the way, a lot of people don't know this, but before World War II, we ran all kinds of war games. We gamed out what would happen if we went to war with Japan. And we didn't anticipate nowhere. It was called War Plan Orange. We had different colored war plans for each scenario. Warplan Orange was one with Japan.

And we didn't, in that plan, anticipate the possibility that they could attack our forces in Hawaii in Pearl Harbor. So there might be some part of this, our plan to stop China in Taiwan. Maybe we're not seeing something there. Do you feel like North Korea is saber-rattling at the moment? I know you've covered North Korea in kind of the way that they've organized their military in the past, you know, a couple of years. So I'm curious what your opinion on North Korea's militarization looks like.

Are they always stoking war? Is there any real threat coming from North Korea? Or is it all just, you know, smoke? North Korea is an interesting situation. There's the DMZ demilitarized 38th parallel where you got about 28,000 U.S. soldiers on one side of the border and all the South Korean military. And on the other side, you got the North Korean military. they've been on both sides a bit of saber rattling where the U.S. runs, I believe it's twice a year. They run military exercises, giant exercises of basically so that you are prepared in the event that if North Korea were to attack, we show, hey, this is what you'd be up against.

North Korea hates that for several reasons, partly because they don't like that it shows the contrast between our equipment, our training, our abilities, in contrast to them, where they're not as advanced in terms of conventional power. So this also puts a strain on their economy because when we do those military exercises, from what I've heard

is it pulls their resources towards the border where they then feel like they have to defend because they think from their perspective that we're going to potentially attack each time

so puts them on high alert stresses and strains their logistics and it's during their harvest season a lot of times so pulls people

away from farming to then have to go to the border intentionally so there's different theories i don't think that we do that intentionally i don't know from north korea's perspective the way they handle it is with they use their advantage that they see what they're where their advantages is with missiles and nuclear power so they fire off some missiles and that's their way of saying don't do those military exercises joint training with south korea

North Korea is a fascinating country. I only recently learned during the 50s and 60s right after the Korean War, North Korea was the more advanced, more technologically advanced side of the border compared to South Korea. They had the advantage in terms of conventional forces. So over the years, what we've seen, is as they have mismanaged their government and there was famines and poverty,

they've turned more to using nuclear deterrent to try to stop what they see as American aggression. So, yeah, the reason, but the big reason, if I were to be concerned about North Korea, it's that they're getting plused up by added relation, they're, they've, a better relationship with Russia and China now, where before Russia and China would kind of work with the United States on sanctions, now Russia and China have every reason to try to work with North Korea. So that, from my perspective, is concerning, that it could emboldened them. Interesting. And how did North Korea diplomatically get Russia and China to kind of work with them? What was like the, what was the strategy? It wasn't really anything that North Korea,

that North Korea did as much as since Russia became an international pariah to the West and a lot of countries stopped doing business with Russia because of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia what Russia did was

okay we can't do business with the West anymore as much what we'll do is we'll turn to North Korea and North Korea just so happened to have solid one million artillery rounds or maybe it was three. Over a million artillery rounds sitting around,

waiting for some hypothetical war at the border that probably won't happen. So when the war in Ukraine happened, you got Russia who is thirsty for artillery shells and you got North Korea who has them. So they sent those shells to Russia to help with the war in Ukraine. And then now you've got this relationship.

that they're building. That's really interesting. So they basically just had alignment. They had this mutual interest against the West and against America that worked out. I always say that one of the greatest things that make friends

is mutually hating somebody. And if you and someone else dislike something together, it's scary how strong that, it's almost more powerful than when you both like something. When you both like, you know, you both,

there's a song or an album that you both are like or a TV show you're like oh i also especially when it's something obscure you're like that's sick but when you both dislike something it is something i feel like i have to remind myself to like don't get so excited about like that negativity yeah and the hatred yeah because you could cozy up with someone that you have no interest being with so i think that's a little bit of what's happening with russia and north korea they mutually hate the United States and China. They all have this common enemy. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are what they're calling the axis of evil or the axis of resistance. And when you, okay, so I read these national defense documents too much, like these white papers that governments release.

And it's funny because they'll tell you exactly why that from their perspective, from France, perspective from the United States perspective why they think Iran China and North Korea don't like us why they have this shared enemy together and the reason they give is because they feel like they say our adversaries feel as though the world order is not in their favor so the international law is basically set up for them to fail since World War II all the laws that govern the seas, territory, how we do international business, how we trade with each other across internationally, it's all set up to favor the United States from their point of view. So we're reaching a point now where some of these countries like China are getting

powerful enough where they can be like, hey, Russia, they're getting to reaching a point where this is from their point of view. They're like, we want to change this world order. We want to dethrone the United States from their position. We want to rewrite the rules more in our favor. Why is all business need to be done through the USD, through the dollar? So that I think is when we feel like war, that there's more war now and that's growing

and that all these countries are increasing defense spending and we're heading towards something ugly, this is, I think, what is boiling beneath the surface. Wow. Now, given all these factors, do you think it's reasonable to conclude, or I guess I'll phrase it this way, do you think it's likely

that in the next couple decades we will see a World War III? I've learned over the last five years that making predictions is a really good way to just, like, be totally wrong. And I don't know if I would say that it's likely. I would say that we're certainly

seeing if we were to create a hypothetical scenario of how World War III would happen this is probably how I would write it right like there's conflict in the Middle East that could hypothetically turn into a regional war because of what's happening between

Israel and Palestine there's that could turn into a greater regional war because Iran the big player and Saudi Arabia in the region are at heads with each other and so if that explodes and then in eastern Europe we have conflict in Europe so if Russia wins in

Ukraine and that potentially gets worse what if France sends troops into Ukraine to stop Russia what if they attack each other that's two nuclear powers attacking each other I could think of a million ways that World War III could happen today that when I deployed to a in 2009, you've never imagined that could be a reality. So, yeah, it's more likely, I'll say. It's more likely today than it was ever before in the last over 20 years. Interesting. And what would be, obviously, these are purely hypothetical,

but some of the potential war games that have played out. Like you had mentioned there's conflict in the Middle East that then is either serving Russia's interest, that Russia benefits from in some way, whether it's through, you know, America reallocating spending or just more increased focus on the region. Why would France then get involved in, you know, basically like a hot war like that? Can I real quick kind of do a rundown on what's happened in Ukraine in case people, if you haven't been following it? Yeah, please.

Russia invaded Ukraine 2022 about two years ago, and they, one argument is that they thought that they would run over Ukraine within three days and just capture the whole country. And that didn't happen. Ukraine put up more of a fight than they expected. They pushed Russia out of Kiev, out of their border there. Then a counterattack happened where Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces back even further in the Dunbos. And this was in part due to help from the United States who had been helping train, equip with weapons systems since 2014. Special forces have been there. National Guard has been there, helping train Ukrainian soldiers since 2014, equipping them with certain capabilities like javelin missile launcher, weapons that are very good against tanks.

That was the early stages of the war. They needed anti-tank weapons. So in the first phase of the war, Ukraine pushes Russia back. Then, now, in this recent phase of the war, things are changing a little bit, what's happening is the war of attrition. It's just kind of a cold look at the numbers. Russia is so much bigger in terms of manpower and equipment. They are now at a point where they can use, even if they're losing 4,000 soldiers casualties a week or a month,

they're able to absorb those losses right now at this point, and they're pushing forward now the Russian forces. So France is looking at this and they're thinking, okay, you have to game out and hypothetically think about different scenarios. What if Russian forces collapse the Ukrainian front line? What if they hypothetically advance to the Nipro River? What if they then move to Kiv? What if they go all the way to the border with Poland? That's what France is looking at. And they feel like they're in a position diplomatically and as well as militarily. And they have nuclear weapons. Them and the British are the two European powers with nuclear weapons.

So France is trying to take a step forward and lead the security situation in Europe. And they're saying they're floating the idea that if Russian forces do, collapse the front line and do hypothetically move forward that they would be willing to send ground troops into the western part of Ukraine. And that's because they are a nuclear power in mainland Europe? There's, I think, two reasons. One of them is that they're an expeditionary force. France is they get a bad rap as like, oh, they surrendered in World War II and they're the

white flags. I think as Americans, we hear that a lot. but the French have been a military powerhouse for centuries. Napoleon and since then they've been up to all kinds of nonsense in Africa, in the Sahel region. They have proven that they are a formidable combat power that can operate outside their border. So they have proven that they can sustain their troops in Africa, 5,000 of them that can operate.

on their own, and not really any other power in Europe has that capability. So they're an expeditionary force, and then, yeah, they also have the nuclear deterrent. They've been investing in, since Charles de Gaul in the Cold War, they built their own nuclear weapons themselves. And they've always been, like, very independent. They wouldn't go with us to Iraq. They said, that's kind of messed up and illegal. We shouldn't do that.

whatever their reasons were, they've always been in a very independent nation. And if you go there, I hear they will let you know. If you go there and you speak English, they will let you know, it's my understanding. So, yeah, our allies in the French are well positioned to be the ones to say to put some doubt into Putin's mind.

It's kind of a, they call it strategic ambiguity. It's like if you were to say to a friend, like, I might hang out with you on Saturday or I might not. You've now introduced some strategic anger beauty into the relationship because you want to create doubt, but you also want to leave the option on the table. And the thinking is that it might make Russian forces consider, think twice about moving forward. They did the same thing when Ukraine was, it looked like they might collapse the Russian front line

in 2022, when during their counterattack, their first counter attack, Russian forces were putting out all, or Putin, his government, were putting out all kinds of warning saying, if you do that, if you collapse the front line,

we will use nuclear weapons. That was their strategic ambiguity. That was there introducing, like, maybe you don't want to do that. It doesn't feel very ambiguous when they're like, hey, we're going to use nuclear weapons

if you collapse our front line. I guess I'm, I'm being hyperbolic. It was more like they had, Putin didn't say it as much as he had one of his high up, one of his statesmen. It was like high brass. I remember this happening where it's like, wait, is it going to be nuclear war? Like, that's what they're basically saying.

So there's theories that maybe the United States and the West didn't send Ukraine everything they could for the very reason of they didn't want a situation where, they collapsed the Russian front lines and you have a situation where Ukraine gains back all that territory. I mean, we have 3,000 M1 Abrams tanks in stockpiled. We sent them 30. We've got hundreds of... We got thousands of artillery shells that we didn't send to them.

There's an argument to be made that maybe the safest bet was to stalemate the front line. Not to give them everything they needed to create a situation that could that's not in the United States interest for Russia to lose that

badly. I mean that these are just theories that we're talking about. Right, but some people posit they intentionally sandbagged to not create so much I guess division within like the Russian force and Stoke a more aggravated war.

I think you could make the argument that the United States and the West was being prudent and not sending everything they could up into the red line, sending everything they could to make sure that Ukraine didn't lose, but also that they don't, you don't want to send them thousands of Abrams tanks. Although I'm sure there's somebody in the State Department who will say, I'm stupid, and they just, they sent everything they could and they did everything that they could. Right, because I'm sure there's logistical problems. There's probably also, like, concerns that, you know, if they lose these regions,

that then the Russians are able to take control of those, you know, like military tools. So then it's like, do you send too much and then potentially get in the hands of the enemy that then's able to... This is what fascinates me. Yeah. Mark, this is what I think about day and dad. I'm like, imagine if you're in the State Department or you're working for General Mark Millie, and it's like your job to say, okay, we need to send X amount. We're going to send X amount of Abrams and it'll get us this in return.

What is that metric? It'll get us 500 Russian tanks destroyed. Or what is it? These are the questions that I, they keep me up at night. Like, what do you do? What's the right answer? They were, they've been thinking about this for longer than I, they've been thinking about this since 2014.

They have these think tanks. you'll read Rand publications where they have arguments. They say, we shouldn't send more exactly what you were saying just now. So we shouldn't send more equipment to Ukraine because it'll be a waste. They're going to be overrun in three days. Why are we sending them javelin missile launchers? Stop. It's a lost cause.

We should be making sure that Russia never invades in the first place. So there's these think tanks in the United States that do these research and a lot of it ended up being wrong. They thought that Russian forces were stronger. They thought Ukraine was weaker. But yeah, these are the things that people are day in and day out. They're weighing these different metrics. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because if you're anything like me, you like a little caffeine kick. You like to maybe grab a coffee, maybe one or two during the day, but you can't always access it. You know, maybe you're going on a hike. Maybe you're at the airport four in the morning. They don't have any coffee around.

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Let's get back to the show. Now, if you were to ask my family, there's probably a high chance that they would say, why are we sending any money to Ukraine? We're sending billions and billions of dollars to this proxy war that's so far away from us that maybe has something to do with us? Like, it could potentially go that way, but, you know, why are we spending so much money on this when we could be spending money internally?

Kind of to the border question that we were talking about before. I'm curious, what would be your counterpoint to someone that holds that position? You know, why are we sending this money to Ukraine when we could be spending it domestically? There's also a cost to not sending the money. There is an opportunity cost of not helping Ukraine.

People think about, oh, it's so expensive to help Ukraine. And I'm just saying from the perspective. Sure. For argument's sake, devil's advocate. Not sending the money to Ukraine, not sending these resources to Ukraine is expensive too, because if Russia moves all the way up to the border with Poland,

it's going to cost us more money. We're going to have to now keep additional F-22 assets in Eastern Europe. We're going to have to pay for that. We're going to have to run extra missions. That's going to stress those airframes. It's going to potentially cost more money. if Russia, if they win, for a number of reasons, we're going to have to reallocate more anti-air assets to that region,

if Russia moves all the way up to the border with Poland. Also, the money that's being used in Ukraine is not, they say, okay, we've sent $40 billion. That makes it sound like we sent them a check for $40 billion. Briefcases with cash, like Mr. Beast. Exactly. I thought I'd watch that video. Yeah.

That's not the reality of the situation. The government is more boring than that. They accountants, bean counters at the government, say that we sent $40 billion worth of aid. That is, we're looking at those tanks that we sent and we're appraising, okay, this Abrams, that we were never going to, it's collecting dust in a warehouse prepositioned in Europe

for this exact reason. It's worth $4 million. So we sent that to Ukraine. That's $4 million that we sent them. but not cash. It's $4 million right there worth of equipment. Then it's also, okay, we're sending them high Mars missiles, let's say,

a long-range missile, rocket. Okay, that costs a certain amount of money, but where does that money really going? It's going to the American defense industry. It's actually a pretty big point of contention between in Europe right now, is that all this money is actually going to the United States, not Ukraine. It's a big point of controversy. These rockets need to be paid for by American

defense companies. So $40 billion, a lot of that is going to pay for American jobs, going to pay American industry. So, yeah, this idea that we're just sending 40 billion to, admittedly, one of a very prior, very corrupt country, Ukraine, has had problems with corruption. there are now, because the United States, IG, Inspector General audits, this money is not, this assets and this aid

is not just going there with no oversight. There's oversight. So if I were to argue against that position that you said, that's the case that I would make. Interesting.

The tanks are already built. They're already being stored. It's not like, it's just cash going, that then they're like divvying up amongst the oligarchs in Ukraine. It's like, oh, no, you're getting tangible weapons and weapons systems that are already pre-positioned for you to receive in the event that there's some type of war.

So at the same time, there is truth to the argument that, like, we are, we are sending cash as well to support their government. We're paying, I believe we're paying the pensions of their government. We're paying for them to stay open, essentially. We are floating them. but it's it is less than I think what people think it is and I think there is also benefits to there's other people there's people who are probably hearing that and saying like oh wait the good side of the story is that we're building up the military industrial complex in America that doesn't sound so great I am sympathetic to that as well I'm just saying from the

point of view of there's also a cost to from American interest point of view to not supporting Ukraine. Interesting. There is also, obviously, I could litigate the other side of the argument, which is that NATO has expanded. I personally was on a mobilization to Latvia. Latvia, of course, right on the border with Russia,

shares a border with Russia. My unit, when I got back from Iraq, we mobilized to Lafayahia to help train a battalion of their soldiers to go to Afghanistan at the time. But weirdly, when I got to, there and I was help when I say help train them it's really like a two-way street it's a NATO exercise we're training each other and weirdly I thought us like war on terror this is we got to we got to beat

the insurgents and they're they're all asking me I mean Riga and Latvia and they're saying well would the United States come to our defense if Russia invaded I'm 20 years old I'm thinking Russia's on our side why are you worried about Russia invading. So we're doing exercises as a NATO operation right on their border. I'm sure there's some people who would say, how would we feel if Russia were in Mexico doing military exercises? So I was a part of a month-long training operation on the,

essentially the border with Russia and we're training together. We've got some hundred armored vehicles, strikers that we're training with. And all I'm hearing from the people there is, that Russian FSP, like the CIA, are probably there asking questions about the capabilities of our vehicles when we did like a

showcase, a demo of the vehicles and we let civilians come and ask questions. Oh, really? So I could, so there's an argument that this is all NATO expansion but I think people in places like Lafayah feel as though if they weren't a part of NATO, Russia would have taken over

that region. That's interesting. Yeah, I guess one position is because Ukraine is sort of courting this NATO idea, Russia all of a sudden was like, whoa, like we can't have NATO coming all the way up to our border. We need a buffer zone.

So we're going to, because we're being agitated, we're going to then actually move into a hot war. Do you think that's a reasonable explanation and what would be a counterpoint to that? So I think just like how I mentioned, if Russia got up to the border with Poland, we would have to put all these assets there, right? Like, I think if you flip that argument, the same is true. If we were all the way up to the border with Russia, they then feel a stress. Right.

And for a longest time, I didn't see entirely that side of the argument. but there was recently an article in the New York Times about how the CIA has been operating about 12, 14 covert bases on the border of Ukraine since 2014. And at those CIA bases, they've been training Ukraine. Ukraine's version of the CIA grew, GRU, training them in tradecraft that they then used to kill Russian soldiers and military officers. So from Russia's point of view, if I'm sitting in their shoes,

I'm thinking, I don't want the CIA on my border. So teaching Ukrainians how to kill our soldiers? Like, yeah, I could see that being a problem. Hmm. And so what was Putin's miscalculation? Why did he think that they were going to walk over them in three days knowing, were they thinking that America was going to blow?

and not send aid? Like, what do you think their plan was? I think they had, if you're, now it's easy to look in hindsight and say, that was a crazy miscalculation for the beginning part of the war, at least. But if you were anyone looking at the situation at the time, it seems obvious that he should,

it would have run over Ukraine in three days. He had every indication that it would. He had taken over Crimea without essentially firing a shot. they in 2014 took Crimea with, they didn't even admit that they sent soldiers. They had little green men they called them at the time.

Then they'd also been fighting in the Dunbos since 2014 and they felt like they had a good idea of Ukraine's capabilities. The idea was clearly a shock and all campaign where they thought, let's attack from all angles and within three days

will be, I think Putin's miscalculation was he didn't realize the level of corruption in his military. Authoritarian governments admittedly have some advantages over democracies. They can, if they say

we're putting the economy towards making artillery shells, it's happening. United States can barely build, they can barely pump out 300,000 artillery shells in a month. Not far from here in Pennsylvania is the main artillery shell manufacturing plant, they've already doubled it. And even that is Russia's creating

1.2 million artillery shells a year. They can do this because they're an authoritarian government. The downside to being an authoritarian government is you have problems like corruption. You have problems where a lot of times authoritarian governments will purposefully keep their military weak so that there isn't any risk of a coup. And we saw there was a coup with. Russia, it's exactly what happened. The Wagner or Wagner forces. The Wagner forces, uh, progoshin, who tried to overthrow him. But like, what I'm saying is his miscalculation was, didn't realize how weak his forces

were because he had been pumping billions of rubles into military modernization, not realizing how much of it was getting siphoned away to the top generals who are selling gasoline, not realizing his forces weren't entirely ready. And then when he invades Ukraine, offensive actions are much tougher. So yeah, they miscalculated in the early stages of the war. Were the financial sanctions taken against Russia successful in any way? Financial sanctions and sanctions in general are a fascinating concept to me because I feel like it's a weapon in a way. It's like a modern concept of a weapon. Yeah, an economic weapon. Right. And it's kind of sort of new in a way where we use it now. We have to rely on it more now

now that there's nuclear weapons. We can't outright fire missiles at Russia. So what can we do? We can fire sanctions at them. And we, in the early stages of the war, I thought, a lot of people thought, like this, they're done. We're taking you out of Swift. We're cutting off your access to all. There's chips, computer chips that they need for targeting. It turned out at this point, it looks like in hindsight, that it wasn't as effective as we thought it was going to be.

And they're buying a lot of the things that they couldn't get. They're getting it through third parties in Kazakhstan and other former Soviet nations that buy it and then import it to them. Just an article recently about how China is sending them scopes for their firearms and weapons and other more material aid that they weren't in the past. So, yeah, they're kind of skirting getting around the sanctions. Yeah, I remember when it all went down. Like there was like certain oligarchs that like lost their yachts and stuff, which I was like

kind of 50-50 on. I was like, can you just see someone's, like, private property? Like, can you just, like, jack someone's yacht just because, like, they're an oligarch in a country that we're at odds with? I don't know. Like, I went back and forth on it, like, on a moral position. I was like, what is the right thing to do? Like, I don't know specifically which oligarch got his yacht taken. I don't know if you remember this story. A couple of them. And their argument would be is that the United States would say that those oligarchs are the ones that really are in a position. to put pressure on Putin and that by... Fucking with their money,

it's going to then make them push on Putin. And also they would say that they were complicit in it, that the people that they're targeting are the ones that were pushing for war in Ukraine. That's what they would say. Interesting. Now, what are your thoughts on Zelensky? Do you think he's a military mastermind? to see a great leader, is he kind of like a figurative sort of like, you know, moral or like,

like cheerleader, so to speak, for the nation? What do you think his role is and why is he there? It's tough for me as someone who, like I always say my whole kind of thing is that like I'm the average infantryman. I'm not former special forces. I'm not the most high speed guy. I was regular 11 Bravo soldier. That's my perspective. It's tough for. for me to evaluate someone like Zelensky, his position, I think

it was very surprising when he had an opportunity to leave Keeve and he stayed, which no matter what side you're on with that conflict, I think it's, I don't know that I would do that.

If the Russian military was, and they got close. Yeah, knocking at your door. Right. that's impressive that he stayed and that he didn't just bolt when he could have I think that right now people are

criticizing him for he's staying in power but the country is under martial law right now in times of war it's not unprecedented for leaders to stay in power through those times

to keep stability it's it's tough for me to evaluate Zelensky's position. People are criticizing him for not abdicating? For not leaving, because normally he would have, it'd be like if Biden, if we were in war and his terms coming up now

and he was like, well, we're declared martial, I guess this is a bad analogy. What I'm saying is, since his country is in martial law, he doesn't have to vacate. Right. Hmm.

I mean, that makes sense. Like, if they're in the middle of like a very hot conflict. The argument for that is, And there's a lot of theory that goes behind the division between military and civilian and why you have that division. And there's arguments for why during times of war you don't want to change leadership because it could create instability. Russia could use that as a, they could exploit that if they were to run elections right now. They're already trying to have them assassinated as it is.

So it's that's the argument for why they're doing it. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. Like I can see. It's in their constitution to have, to not change power during times of war. Right. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, to me, I'm like, if we're in the middle of a conflict, like whatever's working, let's just keep on riding the wave and we'll figure it out later.

Like that doesn't seem crazy. But yeah, I don't know. I guess some people could see it as like a power grab. There's also when you look at, they also consider things like the polling, information. So if there was widespread, people think that even in authoritarian governments, like Putin just had an election. They think, oh, that's totally a sham election for Putin, right? Yeah, it is. But also, they do look at the polling numbers. They do get a sense for where is he polling. They're not going to release that publicly, but they get an idea of is he at 60%, 80%. That gives him

then an idea of like, can I, can I be more strict with my laws? Can I do another, can I do another call up for mobilization, conscription, drafting? It lets him know how, because you can't do anything, even if you're a dictator. Can't just create a draft for three million people. The people will revolt at a certain point. Yeah, even as an autocrat, there's a fear of a coup. Yes. And so for Zelensky, they ran the poll numbers.

People don't want a new leader right now. They like him. That's what the polling shows. And I think if there was like 90% of 80% of people in Ukraine wanted a new leader, you would, that would be, I'm just from my personal perspective, I feel like that would then be a very different conversation. And you'd hear a lot more about it. But that's kind of my thoughts on Zelensky.

That's interesting. Can you explain? We talked to, I think it was, I can't, I think it might have been RFK or Bustamante. Do you know Andrew Bustamante? He's like a former, CIA operative. But he does a lot of podcast appearances and talks a lot about his time in intelligence and kind of how

sort of like military industrial complex works. And I'm very fascinated by this. And I just learned recently that many of the contracts, maybe exclusively all of the contracts through NATO, as far as arms have to go through American weapons suppliers. So anytime there's some type of conflict and we need, you know, any of the NATO countries need to buy weapons, they need to buy them from Lockheed, from Boeing, from Raytheon, from American contractors. And as a result, those conflicts that are happening, America is actually making money on. Is that a reasonable assessment? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine are the American defense contractors. It goes through Lockheed, Raytheon. One of the big reasons for that is with globalization, I think one of the biggest, biggest strengths of the United States and our defense industry is that it's become globalized. The missiles are, the reason our weapons are so much more effective, I think, than Russia and North Korea and China is because it's an open source collaboration between all of the NATO allies. When you look at how a high Mars rocket, long range rocket is made. It's made in over 30 countries and compiled in the United States. But yeah, the U.S.

defense industry is a giant. It's tough. All of the most advanced weapons systems, you pretty much have to go through Lockheed, Raytheon, the five big. Now, is it true that NATO was required, like through some type of like written or maybe an unspoken contract that they have to go through American suppliers, or is that just the way they would function because they would want to buy the most high-quality weapons? I don't know the exact answer to that. I'd have to look into it. There's definitely an element of who, there's certain weapon systems that you have to go through those five big defense contractors in the United States. So I don't know if it's written in there that they have to, but where else are you going to get them from? Right. I guess you, I'm assuming that

Russia has, you know, weapons contractors, I'm assuming China has weapons contractors, but a NATO force wouldn't, or would they, you know, buy weapons from one of those, one of those forces? No. They wouldn't. No. One of the big things about the sanctions that did hurt Russia was it

hurt their exporting arms industry. A lot of countries don't buy Russian arms anymore. France now became the second biggest arms exporter instead of Russia. Oh, wow. So prior to the sanctions, how did things look economically as far as arms dealing? Russia was number two. The United States was number one in terms of arms exports. And who was purchasing from Russia? There's so, there's a bunch of, especially in the global

South, you got, well, actually, I shouldn't say that. There are, Turkey buys military equipment from Russia. They bought some S-400 systems. I don't know if they do any more, but, but, but, but, you know, Before the war in Ukraine, there was definitely countries in there that were buying Russian equipment. Got it. Because it was cheaper, because they had competitive type of weapons, because they just had contracts. What was the reason? There's different reasons. Part of it is cheaper. Part of the reason they don't do it anymore is because there's an argument that the war in Ukraine showed deficiencies in Russian equipment. Oh, wow. So that's why there's less buying of it now. The S-400 is a fascinating topic of itself. What is the S-400? It's an anti-air defense system,

shoots missiles into the sky to shoot down jets, missiles, it defends against its ground-to-air missile. So Turkey bought it for a number of different reasons. One being that the United States wouldn't provide them with their version of the S-400, the Patriot missile system. So there's a lot of...

The thing that... The reason I think I went from just being a YouTuber who covers firearms and weapons, is because there's a lot of politics and diplomacy that kind of gets intertwined in defense deals and contracts. It's Turkey is buying S-400s. It's partly a political decision. It's partly capability.

There are arguments between the Turkish government and the United States government over, can they produce their own missiles in country? Or do they have to buy it from the United States? So the biggest problem was the United States didn't want Turkey using the S-400 because it could collect data that would compromise the F-35 fighter jet. So you've got all, that's what I love about covering weapons deals and this industry is that it brings in so many different aspects. you never get bored learning about it.

Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. Could you just explain some of the economics behind what people would call the military industrial complex and does America have, some would say, a perverse incentive to stoke war globally? The one thing I would say, if it's very easy to find evidence for that being the case. And I am sympathetic to that argument.

That is a problem that, we need to keep an eye on. But if I were, but that's also a very popular thing. You see people say that the military industrial complexes and they're in control and that all they're the ones that are pushing the buttons deciding what we do and don't do. The politicians do their bidding, etc. Right. The one piece of evidence that I think you would have to explain away is that we have consistently lowered defense spending in our history. So if we look at just recently, the, global war on terror. At one point, I think at the height, we were spending like, I think it was five or six percent of our GDP in around 2008. And we're now down to, I think it's like four

percent of our GDP that we're spending towards defense. Then look back at Vietnam and it was, I think it was 14 percent. We look at World War II and it was like 30 percent, 40 percent. Like North Korea is spending 30, 40% of their GDP on defense. Wow. So what we've done, if you look between World War II and today, we've shrunk the force size. We've gone down from millions of soldiers to, I think it's one million active total personnel. We've, we spend more, I think the term is nominally. We spend more on defense in terms of pure dollars.

but we're also growing the pie. We're more productive. Our GDP has gone up. So as a percentage of how productive we are, as a percentage of how much we pay in taxes towards the government, what they get, it's less. We're spending less and less,

and we're shrinking in some aspects. There might be an argument against that, but I think that when the Cold War ended in 1992, we saw that the political will to just keep pouring money into the military industrial complex went away. When the people don't want

us to just sink money into defense, we don't do it as much. Are there, is there corruption? Absolutely. Totally. The current, what is it?

The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, I mean, he was on the Raytheon board. There's all sorts of revolts. evolving door between Lockheed Martin, Boeing, all these defense contractors. I wouldn't want to be somebody who's blowing the whistle on Boeing in the defense industry right now personally. Like, are they shadowy organizations? Totally. I mean, you saw the whistleblower for Boeing got clipped. Exactly. What do you think of that? Like, did you read into that? I, I, I don't know. It seems

fishy. It seems freaking weird to me. It seems like I wouldn't be saying something against them. But like, like, we love Boeing. Boeing's the best. There's the best. They've never done anything wrong. Can we do an ad read? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this podcast is brought to you by Boeing.

Okay? One of the greatest weapons and aircraft manufacturers in the entire world. Okay, suck it Airbus. Yes. Yeah, also, so yeah, I think there, you need the people to be cheering for it. You need the people to be like, hey, we need to invest in defense to some degree. Because if you don't, the elective officials, their whole job is to just read the air and see, should push him more defense spending. Is that the thing to do right now?

I think in a democracy, you don't get away with just, if the defense companies truly ruled the country, I think we'd be seeing something very different. They don't get their way all the time. I kind of mentioned this briefly before, but I'm curious if you could just like button up. up the topic on a World War III, worst case scenario, potentially even going into a nuclear war, what do you think would be a potential war game that could lead us down that path? Like, what could that look like in the next 10 years that could get us to that point? And do you think that could eventually result in a war on American soil? I don't know that I see it becoming a war on American soil.

I think if I were to create a hypothetical scenario, the one that just jumps out to me is that Russian forces overwhelm Ukrainian troops in the front line. France sends in troops to the western part of Ukraine to prevent Russian troops from taking over all of Ukraine. Those soldiers get into a fight in some way. That then pulls in NATO against Russia. Maybe during all of that, what happens is China uses the distraction because now U.S. forces are pulled to operating in that theater in Europe, more resources are there. So that takes the total manpower we have away from the Pacific. So China uses that as an opportunity to take over Taiwan.

Then we're spread thin. US forces try to prevent, go then to operate in a second theater at the same time. And now in a third theater in the Middle East, Iran's proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and in Syria and Iraq all step up their attacks and now you have

what's essentially three theaters that the U.S. and their allies have to respond to and it's not a guarantee that all of the U.S.'s allies are on board with getting pulled into a war with China and the Middle East that they

potentially see as like that's not our war, it's not our problem. That to me is the nightmare scenario is that the war with Israel and Palestine gets worse and that the war with Ukraine gets worse, China

uses that as a to exploit. Yeah. And then, so that's why the U.S. military is trying, the army is trying to transform from this, from what I was in, in Iraq, which is a counterinsurgency force that's designed

not for high intensity near peer battle they're trying to transform to one that can operate in three theaters at the same time and address those threats and there's some interesting ways that they're trying to

solve for that problem that I could tell you about but to kind of button up that if that answers what you're talking about that's my nightmare scenario and then to the nuclear aspect a lot of times i used to always think like why do we have close to 3,000 nuclear warheads why does russia have like

i think it's 2,700 something nuclear warheads china also over a thousand why so many when you could destroy potentially destroy the earth with just a couple hundred maybe and part of the reason for that is there's air defense networks and systems set up around the world that it's kind of a redundancy problem where let's say we fire all of our nuclear weapons at Russia, they fire at us, our air defense systems are going to destroy a certain percentage of the warheads coming at us. So Russia needs redundancy. They need so many warheads that they can blow up the earth so many times over. And so do we to account for those defensive systems?

I mean, do you think a nuclear war is realistic? Or do you think the casualty from that is just so severe that no kind of, would really actually go that far? It's probably one of the biggest questions that people have pondered over since the end of World War II. Would we do it? I don't know. I have no idea.

A god, I hope not. You see the signs that countries say they're willing to. Russia threatens frequently. The United States has, I forget how many ballistic submarines operate. up one time, but they right now, as we speak, there are submarines traversing all different parts of the world that basically are making sure that they could launch a what's called second strike in the event that the United States is attacked on the homeland and it blows up all of our missiles that are capable being fired from the ground, intercontinental ballistic missiles.

We have subs everywhere, underwater, hidden, so they can fire. So it's like it's the mutually assured destruction scenario. I have no idea. Wow. So there's nuclear warheads that are deployed right now in submarines operating around the world. Yeah. Wow. Just ready to go at any moment.

Just creeping under the water. That's why I didn't join the Navy. It bugs me out. What are they doing under there? How many do you think? Could you estimate? It's like hundreds? No, no, no.

I forget, I'm going to be wrong. They're called boomers. They're these ballistic subs. Yeah, like the meme. but they're the they've they have these vertical launch tubes on the subs that can fire forget the exact amount it's like 15 vertical launch cells that go up and they're just going through the Atlantic water they're just there in case we get attacked and it's a it's a capability that only a few countries have I believe it's France the United States and Russia maybe Austria But it's a, it's a, they call it a nuclear triad where it's, you got air launched, ground launched, and submarine launched nuclear weapons. And you want to have all three so that just in case one gets knocked out, you can use your other too. Wow. So America, Russia, France, maybe Australia,

have this nuclear triad. I've, I've, it's a very limited amount of countries. Yeah. Wow. That's interesting. is definitely one of them that has to us. So it's one thing to have nuclear power, like to have nuclear weapons, but it's a second thing to have submerged nuclear weapons that can do a counter strike at any moment. Yeah.

That's one of the big arguments that people have about, like, the defense budget is these things are so expensive to maintain and to keep credible. Yeah. And so, what is it? Do we have 16 of them? It's not hundreds,

but it's something like 16. Wow. And now in my mind, if there was ever a nuclear war or a nuclear attack on America, maybe I'm arrogant. But my first thought is New York City, it would be a place that would like maximize casualties. It would be, I guess, like the most detrimental to like the American moral effort. You know what I mean? Like I think it would like impact like the heart. You know, obviously New York is one of, you know, America's leading cities and therefore globally a leading city. Definitely a financial capital of the world. I'm curious if you've

read anything or if you have any personal thoughts about a nuclear attack on the United States, what would be targeted and what would be like the fallout from that? Personally, if I'm targeting the United States, I'd aim for the Midwest. That's where we have our that's where we have our nuclear missiles and ballistic missiles. And in California is where we have some of our, some of our biggest air defense networks. So that's where I would strike. And then, yeah, then you have the big population centers like New York. Chicago, California. Those are places that would be targeted.

But a population center would probably be secondary to some type of military infrastructure. I think that if we're being targeted at that point, they would be hitting both. They would, it would, well, there's also the argument that there's limited strikes that could happen. There's a whole chain of escalation that people argue would happen. Like, this is all uncharted territory, so we don't. Sure. It's only been used once. We've dropped the atomic bomb twice in combat in World War II.

But the theories that have been gamed out since then is that before you do something like that, you'd see warnings, like a warning shot. Just like how with a rifle, when someone comes up on your position and they're not stopping, you fire off a warning shot. So maybe North Korea drop. drops a nuclear bomb in the Pacific Ocean. Maybe they drop it. Maybe Russia does that,

kind of like as a warning before they say it's a test because many countries have agreed not to stop testing. So if we see them drop an A bomb in the water, that's them saying, whatever, I don't know what's happened, but whatever's happened is a red line for them. And if it keeps going, the next one is going to be on your territory. That's, what some people think. So I don't know that it necessarily would go one day you just wake up and there's a cloud billowing up and New York's gone. I think you'd see some steps of escalation. You'd also, the United States invests a ton of resources in their intelligence agency into tracking signs of they would have some warning. You know how you, when you mentioned, oh, I heard that

there might have been a nuclear strike from Russia. They were tracking, oh, they're moving this into position. They're moving the warhead into position. We would know a little bit in advance. Wow. I mean, that's terrifying. Absolutely. Nuclear war freaks me the fuck out.

Like, more than anything, it's like, dude. But it's also this kind of weird catch-22 where, notice how we haven't had a major world war in 70 years now, more. It's the thing that's ironically, arguably kept us

safe is that we have the capability, but it's also the thing that could destroy us. Yeah, I don't, like,

not to map it and make it into a whole different issue, but like it almost feels like, I don't know, like some people would argue like a gun control thing or like having guns

makes certain places safer because everyone's like strapped up. And it's like, maybe it's safer, but also just one crazy dude to like set off a whole chain

blown up the world. It's like, I just don't know if monkeys need that much power. You know what I mean? That's actually, us as human beings. That's a very good analogy that I haven't heard before. It is exactly like that. It just freaks me out. Because on the one hand, it's like you walk around Texas and you're like, yeah, motherfucker got that heat. Yeah. I'm not going to mess with that. I don't want to get a fight. Like we can diplomatically solve this because I think you might be crazy and you might shoot me. Yeah. But also, even if I try to diplomatically resolve this, you still might just be crazy. I don't know.

Freaks me out. Yeah. I want to talk about your story, kind of like kind of how you came up. And I also want to talk about the conflict in the Middle East. I'll tell you about it, but it wasn't like we were shooting dudes left and right. But I was-winning hearts in mind.

But I was kicking indoors, doing raids, arresting dudes. Like, I did almost die. stepping over an IED. Whoa. I mean, let's just start there. How did you almost die stepping on an IED? It was in the middle of the deployment

and what happened was there was this big in 2009 we didn't have UAVs but not like how today there's UAVs everywhere. And UAV means? Like a drone

like an unmanned aerial vehicle It was this giant blimp that was overhead that had a thermal camera on it that spotted a hot spot on the ground. Those 155 millimeter artillery shells that are so important in a high-intensity war like Ukraine, in Iraq where I was deployed, those were used as IEDs. They were repurposed. They take artillery shells and they would daisy-chain them together with wire, command wire, and then they would wait for you to walk by. and they would touch it off and explode it. And this is their main TTP, their tactics, their way of getting an advantage in this asymmetric war.

We have more firepower, manpower. They have the ability to look at where we do patrols and then set up bombs. So one night we were sent out from our base. We were, picture like a football field. sized base combat outpost and then the perimeter is closed off with concrete walls. That's where I was living on for the deployment. And half the base is Iraqi police. The other half is my company of infantrymen that I'm with. So we get sent out my platoon and we're looking for this hotspot

and my squad leader says that he sees it. I stepped right over it. The only reason I'm alive right here today is because the operator of that IED just so happened to not be at the remote control that night. That wasn't my night. My card didn't get picked up. So what we happened was we just cleared the area. gave like a signal that we had just to not draw attention to ourselves that we'd found the IED, cleared the area, and then EOD explosive ordinance disposal came out, and they blew it up in place.

And I just got lucky that night. And that was a lot of my tour was doing what I would call route security clearance, where we're just, the insurgents would go out, plant bombs. we would go destroy them in place or look for them. And then other days, they would get, not usually us, but the Iraqi police that we were stationed with, they targeted them the most frequently. And so several times, it was one time they blew up a 19-year-old Iraqi police officer

who I had just talked to the day before. We were living on the same base. And his brains were blown out of the back of his head. and they're dragging him back to the aid station and I remember his just seeing the brains coming out and thinking like that doesn't look like real brains and there's like a trail of it we had a dog on our base

whose name was Roxy Roxy was a killer she would go on patrol with us and she had been there for years she'd caught a fragment from a bullet one time and this dog was eating those brains off the ground. That's exactly.

I'm the type of person I'm like a little bit sensitive. Some dudes that I deployed with Stone Cold killers. Didn't mind them. There are so many people who deployed

who saw way worse stuff than me. I'm a type of person where I see brains coming out of a guy that I just talked to the day before this 19 year old dude that screwed with me. That that was awful. People don't know this

but like I was there in Iraq during a weird point where it was right after the surge. We were kind of like the mop-up cleanup crew. The intense part of the war was over. Now it was winding down. A lot of the insurgents had been killed. And we were essentially paying them off to not attack U.S. forces. Oh, really? So we would go on missions where we would carry around with us $100,000 in cash,

give it to various local shakes leaders who are the real people in control of our A.O. We had an area of operations that we were responsible for. And we would just give them cash to, you could say, to help with the economy or create jobs. It was to be like, here, don't attack us, don't fight us,

here's the money. And it's reasonable. Like, they would have less reasons to shoot at us if they have money and they can distribute it to their people. I mean, we're part of the reason why a lot of those people didn't have jobs, so we were kind of paying them off. It was called the Sons of Liberty Initiative, where a lot of former insurgents were then put on the U.S. payroll. And we would go out and do these, it would call them microgrants, and a lot of people would be familiar with those missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sam. Who was responsible in your organization to actually give the money? I was the lowest ranking youngest dude, 19 years old, private, no responsibility. This was on the squad leaders and the platoon leader and the platoon sergeant who were given this directive. Whoa, that's wild. So they would just pull up and be like, yo, here's a briefcase. Yeah. And then those dudes that work with us would then one time a guy, a shake, a leader who's working with us, insurgents drove by, shot him in the head, and then it's my vehicle that then has to pick him up. He's bleeding out the back of the blood, all out of the back of his head, and my buddy is putting a tube down his throat and then breathing for him with this pump mechanism. And this is like my second week there.

And then we spent like an hour in the wash rack with just a power hose trying to get his brain and blood out of the back of the striker. And the whole tour, it was there. His blood was always in the back of the vehicle. So other insurgents would try to take out the shakes that were collecting money. Exactly. Because they were like, yo, you're linking up with the ops. Like we're still trying to continue this effort. Yeah.

So that's where it became a little tricky because it's like. half of the insurgents were kind of willing to cooperate, get on the payroll, call it a day. But then the other half were like, no, we're going to the death. And if they started cooperating with us, then they would then create enemies locally. Exactly. And yeah, we would find the hardcore dudes. Like we would go out on raids where go hit an objective, go hit a house that we got intelligence reports that they're bomb makers. And those dudes are from Syria.

They're from Iran. they're getting money from Iran to fund. They're the hardcore guys, the ones that are, they're not going to take money from the United States. So we would go roll up on them at night, kicking their doors, arrest them. It was a weird feeling because it's exciting

and the adrenaline's going through you. And I remember the first raid I went on, it's, I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't exciting. You're getting geared up, you're throwing on, you're doing the thing you trained to do for a year. And you get into the vehicles, drive to the staging point. Everyone, you drop ramp, get out, your squad leader is yelling at you, you know, follow him, stay on him. You run in a line.

They've planned it all out. They've shown you the maps of which building you're going to hit. and all you want to do is not let anybody down. That's what you're thinking. You want to cover your sector, your peace. You know if you're part of Overwatch or if you're part of the assaulting team, then you just want to not fuck up

and do anything embarrassing. So the first house that we hit, I remember my squad leader that I was attached to for that raid goes to kick in the door and it's like, that's your dream come true. Be a door kicker and do that. And he hits the door and it doesn't open.

And it wakes up everybody in the house. So now our element of surprise is gone. Because you think in your head, like, kick in the door, it's going to kick in. But no, it doesn't. So he kicks it again and again. It's awkward. He like falls.

It's not, it doesn't look cool. And you're starting to get in your head like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. And then finally the door opens. You go inside and you got your light on. They call it violence of action that you want to get everyone in the door as soon as possible. And it's like controlled chaos. And we're average infantrymen.

We're your regular dudes. We're not SF guys who have like, it's a choreography for them. For us, it is shouting and screaming and making up for whatever skills I don't have as a 19 year old and making up with like, get on the, and ground and you feel sick but like you feel powerful in that moment and then the flip side of the coin is you realize

like it's hard it feels gross to say this now but like you realize you're yelling at women and children in the house and you feel weird about that and then okay you do find the finally find the guys in the house and then you realize that you hit the wrong house

in the first place so that happened Oh yeah, it was the wrong. The guy we were looking for wasn't there. So we had to go looking around this whole, like, courtyard of houses. And we're going up on the roof and we're clearing every room. And we're kind of cordoning all the family into, like, one room for safety,

for their sake and ours. And it's just this ugly mess of, like, a, you know, a crap show, if you will. and finally by the end of the night we get the bomb maker the HVT go back to base he's arrested and put in an Iraqi prison on that football-sized outposts I'm talking about and I hear him then getting tortured by the Iraqis

later that I forget it was like days later or whatever when I'm on CP it's called it's like you're on guard duty inside the talk at the headquarters where they also had a prison inside of. So, you know, the U.S., we wouldn't do it. But Iraqis did what they had to do. So the whole thing left me with this feeling of like, oh, what I thought this was going to be, it's not.

That's crazy. And you heard the guy getting tortured? Yeah, he's screaming throughout the night. And because you're on guard duty for the, you're on that CP post. for the whole night. So you hear him, he's yelling, screaming. Do you know what they were doing? I heard rumors of what they were doing that they were putting them up on hooks and shit,

but I don't know. I heard from dudes who had been there before. I only did one tour. There were guys I knew who had done multiple tours, and you don't know if they're just saying stories or whatever. But from what they said, they heard of Iraqis using screwdrivers, power tools on on these guys. So, yeah, the whole, that whole experience left me from feeling certain. This is why I always try to say both perspectives and sides a lot of times, just because I'm like, I don't know, I've been wrong. Like, I didn't think it was, I didn't think it was going to be that way. That's not what I thought the war in Iraq was going to be. So for a while, it left me feeling uncertain about a lot of things. It

almost like destroys your worldview and then you become very uncertain yeah at 19 you're going in being like we're the good guys we're going to go fuck up some terrorists and you know protect our freedom like it's like very clear and then you go there and all of a sudden you're like okay i mean yelling at women and kids seeing dudes get tortured like and again i'm sure this guy that's making bombs killed a lot of people i don't think he's a good guy but like listening to a dude get tortured it's like crazy I miss so much that certainty of knowing that like we're we're right and going to Iraq is a good thing. Yeah. I was the kind of guy that I, before I joined, I was like, they're saying we're going to Iraq for we're fighting over oil.

Yeah, what's more valuable than oil? What's more worth dying over than oil? Like, I was that crazy and just certain. And I miss feeling that certain about something. It's a beautiful thing to be. That blue pill is tasty. Yeah. And so you've got, you spent a year in, and then you didn't have to reenlist,

or like you weren't a part of like a larger contract that made you deploy again? I was deployed on active duty for one year. The way it works in the National Guard is you get activated. You're doing one weekend a month of training with your unit, be it, it's at the state level. So you're training with New York or Pennsylvania for the, weekends and two weeks over the weekend after you do boot camp do boot camp the same way everyone does boot camp um and so i enlisted with the new york national guard but they weren't deploying

for another two three years so what i did was i requested transfer units to pennsylvania because they were deploying right after i got a boot camp so uh my commander was like why are you doing this, don't do this, but okay, I'll sign off and... Oh, you really wanted to deploy. My whole thing was I'm going to get in, deploy, get out. That's what I originally thought. I ended up staying in the military for five years, but in the guard. But my whole original plan was like, I'm probably not going to like this.

Because I grew up on Long Island, felt like there was a lot of the world I wanted to see. There's a lot of things that I wanted to test theories or just my worldview. I wanted to put it through some scrutiny, I guess. I also felt like this was what was, what my country had given a lot to me. And for right or for wrong, I'm going to, when they're asking for people to step up, I'm going to do my part. Why not? If I really truly believe Iraq is a good thing, here, I'll put it this way.

I, out of high school, I went. to the School of Visual Arts for film, studying film. And it felt like there was something missing, some purpose in my life that was missing. And somebody that I was, live with at the dorms kind of called me out on my BS and said, like, if you believe in Iraq so much, like, why are you here at art school studying? Why aren't you over there? If you truly think that that's a good war, like what's stopping you from being there? And I was kind of like, and then I don't know if anyone ever, I've been put in my place several times. And that was one of the moments where I was like, oh, yeah, like, he has a good point. Why aren't I? I am

healthy. I do, like, believe in this country, in this fight. Why aren't I? And so I started looking up like how would I go and yeah that's what led me kind of to join the military wow and how old are you when 9-11 happened I must have been 12 you were in New York I was in Long Island yeah did that play a role you think did that affect you in any significant way yeah because I would watch on YouTube was kind of a new thing and I would watch on YouTube all the time the the the videos of that of the planes hitting the tower and I would get enraged maybe I was angry about something else and that was where I directed my anger but I yeah that that resonated with me it made me angry I was going to school in New York City where that had happened and

yeah somehow drew a connection between that and Iraq would have gone to Afghanistan too if I could have. Yeah. But yeah, that's how I ended up deploying. Was anyone in your family military? No. My grandfather was Korean War veteran. He went to, he fought in Korea, but not like a big military influence. Was that a point of pride within the family? Yes, it was, but also my family is very against the war in Iraq to a degree, except for my dad, ironically, the one who I always grew up listening to Rush Limbaal with, you would think that he'd be like, because it was ingrained in my head growing up

that Iraq is good, Iraq is the just war, but when I told him like, hey dad, I'm going to fight in Iraq, he was like, don't do that. Why would you do that? Interesting. You kind of checked his beliefs. That was a,

I love my dad, and he's a great dad, but yeah, that was a moment of like, oh, wait a second, there's things that you say and then there's things that you believe. A lot of times you say things that you don't believe and don't realize it. When I was in Iraq, for instance, I would always call the insurgents cowards. Like, they're such cowards. They're putting down bombs, exploding them, running away. Like, why don't they stand up and fight us more? And my buddy, really smart dude in my squad was like,

they're not cowards. They're smart. Why would you fight the United States military on, why would you line up and fight us. You're, you know, are we cowards for dropping bombs from 30,000 feet in the sky on them? And I was like, oh, I'm saying things I don't even like know what I'm saying. Yeah, the Vietnamese cowards, or are they strategic for, you know, setting up traps all over the jungle? It's like, yeah, I guess it depends which way you look at it. It's a question of perspective. That's really interesting. And so getting deployed, you, I'm sure you got dosed with perspective really quickly. And then once you came out, did you have PTSD? Do you think you still, even maybe today, have lingering effects of what you saw or where you endured?

I think a lot of people mistake PTSD with like a crisis of meaning when I got back. I mean, not to downplay anybody's problems, but I think what I suffered from was a, what do you call it, like a vacuum of meaning. I was hanging out with the squad, these guys I got to know for a year. I'm with them day in and day out for a year. couldn't wait to get away from them. Then when I'm gone from them, like I, you don't have that purpose anymore.

And without purpose, people go nuts, especially if you've seen some things. And then you can like latch on to that and tell yourself, like, I'm in a bad way because of what I saw or what I did.

And I think it's also just as likely that a lot of troops that are getting out are young and don't have purpose, don't have something to go into, especially not something that's going to live up to, for the longest time, I thought, like, that's the most important thing I'll ever do in my life. Like, and I could see where a lot of people, they end it, or they do something awful because they feel like that's true. That's what's

going to happen. So I got back and I struggled with substance abuse and I wasted my 20s. Just wasted them. Really? Oh, I wish I could go back and work like how I work now, like I did. my 20s. How old were you and you were officially out? 24, 25. So from 25 to 30 something? Yeah. Yeah, just wild. Lost. Yeah. Move to California. Got him a bad crowds. Like, just and there's an argument that like you gain something from that.

But yeah, like after I are, you have no purpose from the military and you're just, like lost yeah I mean I bring this up all the time I spoke with Sebastian Younger the war journalists and obviously documentarian I mean just an author in general he's just an awesome dude I really really like him in his perspective but his perspective on PTSD as far as I understand it was you know it's not the atrocities that you see in war that cause PTSD and in a certain amount of pain it's when you've returned to American society. It's the sickness that we have as an American society that then people really start to feel the effects. It's that you are within a really strong community. As strong of a community and as a

brotherhood is you can really create, you know, doing hard things together every single day is going to create the strongest bond. You have a lot of competence. You are the best person within your specific, you know, platoon or squad doing that specific role and people are relying on you. You're the most competent person. Then lastly, there's a purpose. Whether it's, you know, sometimes have American purpose, it's fighting for your country, it's preserving freedom, it's providing for your family. And then you return to America where there's no real sense of community, especially if you go to New York City, like, I mean, or you go to L.A., wherever you went. There's no real community. Or if it is, like, it requires a lot of, you know, work to keep it together. You're not doing hard things together

all the time to preserve that community. You're not really that competent in your job if you're working, you know, some regular job that you got put into. And lastly, what is your purpose, right? Like, what is the thing that you're working for? And if it's not prescribed to you through the military, some people have a really hard time creating that for themselves. And as a result, that is when the PTSD really sets in. Because it's like, wait, this place where I was where I saw terrible things, but also had the best time in my life,

gave me a lot more comfort than this American society that's way more convenient and comfortable that's making me miserable. And I think, at least based off Sebastian's work, that resonated a lot with me. I was like, ah, that's where the problems really arise. I'm curious if that was your experience. I think there's definitely an element of truth to that. There's some people who they just,

they saw their best friend get killed and blown to pieces and something just switches in their brain at that point and they've lost it. That happens. Like I, my, if you want to say my unit was lucky, like we lost one guy in my company,

was shot like the second week we were there and killed. there are many other units that lost way more than that. So there are some people who, yeah, they can't be fixed. They saw terrible things. But I do think there's also a lot of people that suffer more of the problems with meaning and purpose, like what you said. That to me, I think, was my problem personally. The problem I faced was, like, my squad, I called them on the YouTube. channel I call the viewers, the people that watch the spare parts army. And it's a reference to

the squad that I was with in Iraq, we were called the spare parts squad. We were made up of dudes that were just backfills from like reclassed engineers, dudes that had been out for years who were called back in, stop lost, all these different kind of hodgepodge makeup tossed together guys. and I really grew attached to them and I still stay in touch with some of them to this day. One of them's one of my closest friends. And then when you don't have that for a while, it's very easy to, when you go back in,

like when I started hanging out with my friends that I knew from before that, I noticed that there's a stark difference, like the way you treat each other. And that's reasonable. but it's kind of a culture shock. So that's why with this YouTube channel that I've been working on, like a big part of the message is trying to bridge that gap

between civilian understanding and soldier understanding so that, I guess, so that selfishly I feel less alien from civilians, and I can kind of have more of a sense of community. it's been part of my goal with it's been the greatest thing for me in healing really is this channel is because you can put out this message of like I want soldiers to learn more about the conflicts that they might be asked to be involved in because I clearly knew very little about what I was getting involved in and feel like the world would be a better place if maybe your rank and file dude your average grunt kind of knew more even even if they're just struggling to understand it

like just trying to understand some of the geopolitical, some of the aspects going into it. Like to me, this has built a new sense of community for me. That's really cool. So through your 20s, what was kind of like, was there a bottom out point where you were like, what the fuck am I doing? Like, I'm throwing my life away. And what kind of made you turn it around to then find this new purpose? I had, it was kind of up and down roller coaster where I,

I went to, when I got back, I then went to NYU, went to Tish for film, got out of there, went and worked for the Daily Show with John Stewart. Oh, wow. For, I was an intern, and then I got hired full-time as a production assistant there. What an amazing experience. Like, that was, it was for the last two years of his run before he left the Daily Show and now he's back. But working for him, like, I learned so much about. how production is run, how to make something an episodic machine that you can churn out

week over week, but keep the quality. Like, whether I agreed with a lot of his politics or not didn't really matter because the dude, he believed what he was saying. He's a genuine person. And I learned a lot from working there. Then left there, worked in corporate marketing, corporate messaging for some big, some of the biggest tech companies, like IBM and Cisco. And that was a little more soulless.

And after, while working there, it's this, it's kind of like that show Silicon Valley, where you can be working in like the ceiling, or the like rooftop and no one knows you're still working, but you're still getting a paycheck. And then you lose that sense of purpose again, even though you're working for some big tech company, you're like feeling disconnected from it.

Yeah. And so that was kind of when when I really felt like I hit rock bottom and I'm like doing all kinds of substances. Yeah, maybe tripping balls on LSD like helped me gain some perspective and some self-evaluation that I needed to do. Oh, really? But at the same time, it's like I needed to grow up. I needed to move past all of that phase in my life. How old were you when you were working for the day of the show? I was 23, 24.

I mean, if that's what you call wasting your 20s, I mean, that seems like a pretty solid way to waste your 20s, right? Like, working at the day of the show. Yeah. And IBM. Like, this doesn't seem like wasting. I feel like you're taking liberties with that word. Well, I guess I was not, I was there,

but I wasn't doing the best I could be. Like, I left because I felt like I was terrible there. I was terrible at it. It wasn't a great production assistant. I get what you were saying. But when you say, when you say waste of your 20s,

I'm assuming you're in a bathroom somewhere just like just jerking off to just trying to get heroin. You know what I'm assuming? That's where my head's at. You're at a fud ruckers, just trying to scrounge some coins up. There was a point in California

where it was, I would like find people who I guess were there trouble. Like I would find girls, for instance, that were just trouble. And they had a lot of problems. And I would make those problems my problems. Right. And yeah, like I was working at Cisco, but I also a lot of times wasn't showing up. Right.

I see. So professionally, you're some. Mark, dude, so like being able to get plugged in with, you know, Cisco and IBM doing, you know, like, corporate stuff wasn't tremendously difficult. But in terms of you maximizing your full potential and being the greatest human you could be, you were not doing that in any way. Yeah. Just all, like, the personal life stuff you felt like was failing. Absolutely. That makes sense.

Yeah, I think it's easy for people to look at the career side and be like, dude, you're making money, you got a job. Like, things are good. Yeah, I could see where if you're in a really, if you're in a tough spot, that sounds like, oh. that's great. But yeah, living through it was brutal. I was, yeah, there were some dark times. Yeah. Did you ever talk with John? Did you like connect with him or like did you spend any like one-on-one time with John Stewart? Yeah, we, he would every day, if you knew my name, the first, the thing about the guy is like he knew my name the first day, he's coming over and said, hey Chris, what's up? He would come by and I would, I would leave a chess board out by the side of my desk and every

day he would come over and like do a move or two. We would play chess with each other. Oh, my job was to basically cut up apples and bring it to him and put peanut butter on the plate and get props for him and hand him his script. He would like, people think, oh, he's got these room of writers and he doesn't really do anything. But he'd get in at eight in the morning, leave at 8 at night, he would spend, I think it was two hours out of his day, was just him rewriting everything that the writers gave him. Like, he poured everything into that job. And the thing people don't know about John Stewart was that he would go and visit all the wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. He would go and visit them and make them laugh. There was one of my

best friends from Iraq. His buddy got injured in Afghanistan. Injured in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, John went and visited him in the hospital, like never, he never made any publicity about this. This was just something he would do and for the troops, even though he's one of the biggest dudes against the Iraq War. Like, yeah, he was, he's the real deal. Wow. Yeah, he really cares. That's the sense I get from, like, watching the show. Granted, like, when it was on, I was, like, maybe just a tad too young to, like, really appreciate it. But, like, seeing, clips and stuff on YouTube and just being aware of his greatness. I just got always got the sense that you know, agree or disagree, I think he truly believed and cared about what he was saying, which is

why I think he gets so much credit. I think so many people like, you know, like people agree and disagree with Bernie, but I think a lot of people look at Bernie and they're like, this motherfucker really believes what he says. And as a result, you kind of respect that just as a man. And I look at John the same way. I'm like, I really respect the dude for one, the work ethic, which I had heard before from other people like, yo, the guy really poured himself into it and just, yeah, stood by everything he said and wasn't playing a grift. He wasn't like trying to appeal to like, you know, coastal elite liberals. He wasn't trying to like grift to get like Republican people. Like he was just honest about what his perspective was. And when he left, I think that void is really filled up. I think it was,

it's difficult to replace that because the show was not like a format necessarily. At the time when he was there, it was a point of view. Like, it might as well It's just been called The John Stewart Show Because it was him You know Absolutely.

So I don't like I can get why it'd be difficult To try to fill that void Because it's like Your perspective isn't John's perspective You know what I mean? The Tonight Show Kind of move hosts around

Because it's a format It's like, hey, do this thing And obviously the personality Of the host matters But in terms of just Point of view on political takes Like I don't know if there's really many people

To do it better than John. He's the greatest of all time When it comes to political comedy A guy like essentially invented that kind of genre. And I disagree with him on so many different political issues, but it doesn't matter. To me, I liked that he believed what he was saying. And so many people who are conservative like John Stewart, because he's funny. And you'll laugh at things that at yourself almost.

Like in someone who can do that, that is a talent. And he doesn't just run a party line. Like he will rip on Trump and just like and destroy him rightfully so for the times that he fucks up. But then he's also like, you know, going at like COVID policy and like the Wuhan Center for Disease. Like why are we not looking into that? Like he'll do things that sort of like breach party lines because that's what people do. You know what I mean? Like that's how human beings are.

Like if there's someone in media that is just purely one side or the other side, it's probably because they're running some type of like. financial grift. I don't know if you've heard of people who have noticed this, but it's very difficult to build an audience without kind of leaning on one side or the other. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I even feel that personally. Like not having like some type of like clear niche for this show, I feel like slows the growth. But making money by playing a grift is is a different kind of torture. You can see, I feel the incentive sometimes. When you're making content, you'll feel the push. It's almost like an invisible hand.

It's like, well, if you double down on this perspective where you say this thing and you kind of think it, like you'll earn double the amount. You can kind of rationalize it. Oh, real quick. Yeah. If I just pick a side in this conflict. Take the Middle Eastern conflict.

Like with Israel, Palestine. You just pick aside. There's going to be more money in either side than trying to split it and be really nuanced and understand actually what's happening. The algorithm will not, reward that. It's insane. When I worked at the Daily Show, it's interesting because when I worked there, I would like kind of chit. I'd talk with another production assistant there with the lowest

dudes there, not running this show by any means. But I would kind of gripe. I'd say, why is he constantly doing this one perspective when, you know, why isn't he saying this other point of view? And then now that I'm making content and you're doing it at scale and, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are watching, you realize that if you have that nuance all the time and you go down the middle all the time, you really just making it so that both sides hate you. It's really, there's something wrong with the way our ad incentives and the algorithm works where you're really disincentivized from taking also not just a second. point of view, but if you have some points of view that are on this side and some on this side,

let's say you make a video about that kind of leans conservative. You add 100 subscribers for that video. Then you make one on the left. You had 100 subscribers for that video. Like what, how are, how are you going to maintain that? It's, it's something that fascinates me. Um, I try my best. Like growing up, I really disliked that I would always hear just one side. of the argument, just the conservative side. So I try my best with the content that I make to try to give different perspectives. And how long you've been running the channel for? Five years. Wow. Maybe, yeah, just should be five years now, just about. And at what point did it become full time? I, so I was working at one of the big tech companies and feeling a little bit

like I wasn't challenged. And when I saw that task and purpose is a giant, there are a big media company that runs a website, task and purpose.com. When I hired on there, they're military publisher. So I was like, this is perfect.

Guys, like I went to school for film. I'm a veteran. This is my dream job. And they hired me originally just as an editor. This is like someone that would go through footage. and put B-roll together. And I saw it's like, hey, YouTube is like, stuff's happening there.

Maybe we should have a YouTube. And the leadership at the time was saying, like, don't worry about YouTube. Nothing. We're never going to do anything on YouTube. It's not going to happen. And I thought, all right, maybe I'll just start making videos on there. So started uploading videos quickly learned. the best, I don't know if I'm sure other creators have noticed, especially the successful ones.

It's like the comments will tell you everything you need to know. And I was getting comments that were like, this is stupid. Stop trying to be funny. Why don't you tell me something useful about this tank? Because I was making like satirical videos about the striker that I deployed with, like funny, make people laugh about it. And they're like, why don't you actually tell us some capabilities of the vehicle? like part of me was hurt and like you don't like the thing that I made and any other part of me was like maybe they have a point maybe there maybe there's i could parse out the critical the constructive part of this comment and so i tried that advice read in between the lines of like them saying you're an F this stupid that took out the real constructive part of it applied it and i saw an iterative small successful increase. So you're going from 100 views on the video to now 500 views and then kind of repeat that process over a long enough period of time and suddenly there's thousands of people watching. And it was that like I guess I had to go to the place that I least wanted to go to

of like humility of like kind of bending the need to maybe creating something. a value instead of something that just was like self-serving and then through that path the channel started taking off and yeah and now I'm the head of video for task and purpose we're starting up other side channels it's it's really 1.5 million subscribers now we do about 15 million 16 million views per month on average. And yeah, it's really just like, I still am flabbergasted by it because it feels like it happened yesterday.

And what was the first video that really went crazy where you're like, oh, we got to triple down. Like there's a real audience here that's interested. The beginning of the YouTube journey was with the, it was called the NGSW program, the Next Generation Squad weapon. I don't know if you're familiar with the AR-15 or like the M4, M-16.

I mean, I've heard all these words, but I don't know. So that's the primary standard issue rifle that your grunt, your basic grunt is issued. It's an M4 or an M16. This platform has been around since the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, it was issued. It's been, we've had that weapon as our main firearm since then. Before that, it was the M14. So in the M1.

So what the military since, I think it was like, Like since 2018, they've been working on replacing that with what's called the NGSW or the Next Generation Squad weapon. Now they call it the XM7. And so what I did was I started covering that weapon because from a regular grunts point of view, I'm like, how would we like this? It's a little heavier. The round is more powerful that it shoots. Let's talk about the different theories and aspects as someone who's not an expert on firearms by any means. but like, I know what it's like to use them.

So let me give that perspective if I can. And that video did a million views. And I saw that and was like, oh, let's talk more about that program. Talked about it enough to the point where Sig Sauer, one of the creators in that, it's basically a competition. It's like, think of it like a Olympic competition for, and the winner gets a multi-million dollar contract to replace the army. Army's main weapon. So they reached out to me and they said, why don't you come and be one of the first people outside the military to test this weapon to fire it. And so they invited me out to New Hampshire. I got to go on the range, get my hands on this weapon before anyone else has. It's a really

historic piece of history. So I try out the gun, shoot it a bunch of times. rifle and then make a video about it. We're getting millions of views on this topic. The channel's just adding thousands and thousands of subscribers. People want to know about this weapon. And then another, the other, there's three weapons in the competition. The other competitor invites me to come out and be the only civilian to test their version that's in competition to replace the M4. Wow. And when was this?

This was two and a half, three years ago? Wow. Maybe three years ago. So you go out there and try that one too? Tried that one. It's a crazy weapon. This thing shoots the, you know how ammo is normally brass? It's like metal, right?

For bullets, the casing is metal. This, in this prototype, fired a polymer casing. So it's like a plastic casing. You could squeeze it. When you fire it, it's not hot. It's cold to the touch. So their bid, in the three bids, to replace the primary weapon for the military, is this bullpup rifle that fires plastic shell casings. And then afterwards, you could put your finger on the gun, instead of it being hot to the touch like it normally is, it's just cool.

It's like this futuristic, feels like sci-fi weapon. Whoa. Really crazy. What was the name of that company? Their true velocity. True velocity. Yeah. And what was the name of the weapon?

It's the RM 277. Wow. And how was it able to have plastic casings and be cold? So they walked me through the factory and it's insane. They build, you know, 3D printing. They essentially 3D print a cartridge, polymer cartridge, and then they put the gunpowder in, and then they put the bullet on top,

and they got this proprietary system to fix a casing to the back of the bullet, primer and then fix the bullet on the front. It's absolutely insane. They didn't win. What happened was the army ended up going forward with Sig Sauer's bid, the XM7. And the whole, if you ever want to talk, if you ever want to geek out on guns,

I could go deep into weapon systems and guns, but like the whole theory behind it that people might find interesting is that the army's going from a smaller caliber cartridge to something that's essentially two, three times as powerful, gives them two times the amount of range you could shoot out to. And all of this is integrating with systems as tech is,

this is really where tech is changing the defense industry at the tactical level. What's happening is, so computers are making scopes so powerful that you or me, not crazy good shots, could pick up this. rifle, use this new scope that they have that's like a computer powered scope that you press a button and it automatically adjusts the reticle. So all you got to do is you put that red dot on the target and you're hitting targets 800 meters away. Wow. So the theory is that we're switching to a twice as powerful cartridge for your regular grunt because these scopes are now giving them the ability to take advantage of cartridges that we used to use in,

World War II that we didn't use for a long time because it was overkill. So that's kind of the long and short of that whole defense contract. Wow. But you got basically embedded in the whole thing. Got to see it. And that really grew the audience because you were having exclusive access to this very interesting piece of military technology. That's what blew up the base audience.

And since then, I've grown it to include geopolitical topics, grown it to include some social issues, talk about why is the military? military struggling with recruitment right now. Like I, I've just, I'm, to me, I try as much as I can. I want to push the boundaries and see kind of how much can I get out of this niche. Do I want, how much do I want to? It's, the, the audience capture can be a real thing where you feel kind of put in a box, but also it's, it's nice to be in a box sometimes. So, Yeah, that was the original thing, and the war in Ukraine is what I think grew a lot of people who were interested in geopolitical topics. So yeah, that's been how I've kind of grown it.

And now the most popular video is obviously commentary on the Middle Eastern conflict. That was, it's funny, because that was a very popular topic for, I did a couple of videos, a number of videos on that, but then it's interesting. What's fascinating to me is seeing people change and adjust. So the first, I covered that, I stayed up 12 hours making that video, wrote it, produced it, edited it, myself. Normally I have a team of

video editors, people who help do the research. I stayed up all day, made that video. Kind of felt like I presented both sides well. Then, you see you go a month later and you try to do that same treatment, you try

to cover it from kind of both points of view. By then, Everyone has gone to their favorite commentator, their favorite guy or whoever does the, you know, tells them how it is. They've already made up their mind by that point. Wow. So I was able to get in, give kind of a neutral point of view. But a month later, everyone already knows they either they side with Israel or they side with Palestine by that point. And they don't want to hear kind of, oh, well, you could.

consider this or you could consider that so you know what I respect the audience's kind of desires and we'll cover something different or we'll cover that when we truly have something important to say about it interesting so you know that you have one video that's pretty fair and balanced pretty quickly after the conflict starts or I guess starts again for you know and the audience is kind of like oh this is a pretty fair and balanced take thanks for reporting on this like as objectively as can. One month later, it's become so politicized. I haven't seen that secondary video, but hypothetically, let's say it is equally fair and balanced. You're getting killed in the comments from both sides. Yeah, everyone, everyone on, it goes from being like, oh, Chris,

like, thank you for this, you know, neutral, this neutral take. Thank you for that. Really appreciate the unbiased perspective to then you start seeing in the comments. How, how, How could you say this and leave this out? And then that's a signal to me. It's like if people on both sides are mad about things I am saying and not saying, it's like you got me dead to rights because there's a lot of things I'm going to not say. Yeah, this is a 300, 100, 100 year old or a thousand year old conflict that we're talking about. Like, yeah, I'm not going to cover it in this 20-minute video.

And I could even say that. In the beginning of the video, I've said this, there's many. aspects that are important, but we're not going to touch on them all, doesn't matter. It's, I then at that point know, oh, I don't have anything of value to add to this conversation at this point, not about what I'm saying. And I'll come back to this when I have something of value to say, because otherwise, I'm just adding to the noise. And you don't feel some type of like a moral obligation to like say your peace or, you know, say what you believe to be true about the conflict to people that might act.

actually be open. This then, again, in my head, this goes back to the point that, like, am I just kind of stroking my own ego and being like, oh, I'm so, I got something really important to say right now about this. And I always looked at it like, I'm not a news channel. I'm not strictly covering news. So I don't feel like I have to say something always. if a thing happens, a conflict or a war,

if I don't have something of value to add or a perspective or something that I feel like will benefit people, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut because everyone's got opinions. Everyone has a perspective on that war. To me, it's kind of like a Rorschach test. It tells me more about how people, what their values are and what their perspective is

more than anything else. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict especially. But yeah, I try to not get too divisive if I can. Try, if I see in the comments and the like-to-d dislike ratio that like, oh, I'm starting to go a little bit to my own direction. Like maybe I need to bring it back to a place where I can feel more of a sense of community

and feel like a positive vibe instead of every comment is people fired up about a personal grievance that, hey, I don't blame you one way or another. Because wars are so, they're so charged. It's such a charged topic to begin. Of course, there's nothing more charged. Yeah. I think rightly so, right?

Like, there's ideology at stake. There's family. There's life. Like, I think it's, I don't know if there is a more charged topic to discuss, especially something that is so convoluted and complex as this specific conflict. I genuinely, like, I refrain from really even commenting on it in any specific way because I'm a fucking comedian, I don't really have a ton to weigh in on. And secondarily, it's like, I don't know if there's anything you can really say that is not going to lack the nuance that one side or the other side truly believes. And I don't

think that, you know, my purpose with this show specifically is to like create division. Ideally, it's to create unity and to bring people together. So, yeah, I resonate with that, that, that struggle of like you know how to discuss these topics what do you see as the future of the channel and what do you want it to turn into and your kind of role within everything as far as you know media is concerned how do you see that panning out my mission as it is right now i feel like my purpose is to get more troops interested in these subjects to get more regular grunts feeling like, oh, I have an interest in geopolitics. I'm a little bit curious about what's going.

Maybe there's a map? How does that work? What's going on in South America? What's our role in that? Because, yeah, I think nothing but good things can come. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think nothing with good things can come of if Russian soldiers and U.S. soldiers are thinking more about the

conflicts they're being asked to be involved in. And we have this amazing tool with YouTube where we can communicate with each other in ways that when I was deploying to Iraq, I could never talk to someone who is an insurgent, but now I can. I can talk to people who are on the opposite side. And there's obviously dangers and downsides to that. But yeah, my goal is to, I just want people to, I have a passion for these subjects and I want other people to have it as well, to find an interest in that.

Do you wish you had seen your channel before you had deployed? Had it existed, do you think you would have benefited from watching it? I like to think so. That's kind of a lot of what it comes down to is like I kind of, a bunch of what I say on the channel is things I wish I could have said to myself. Yeah. Have you had people from an, obviously, I think you speak from a very American, point of view, which is your point of view as an American. Have you had people not from America

or like you had talked about potentially like quote unquote insurgents or people that are fighting in, you know, in rebel groups, being like, dude, I watch your YouTube video. Like what you said is completely accurate. Or I watched your YouTube video and what you said made me reconsider my role within like my military faction that I happen to be in somewhere in, you know, the Middle Eastern and Russia. Does that, do you have any stories like that? I, in the very early parts of the war, in Ukraine, I spoke with a Serbian soldier who went and volunteered to fight on the Russian side, did a whole, it's like two hour long podcast with him and spoke to him and asked him questions and got to, I wanted to know the perspective of someone fighting over there.

There are people that argue that there's no value in that and that you're just giving a platform to people who are just going to repeat a party line. But yeah, I had that opportunity to speak with someone who, in the early parts of the war, it was before the kind of, there's now all those lines of communications have largely been shut off in some places. But yeah, I got that experience. I get a lot of emails from people who disagree with me, but for the most part, it's in a positive way. And I always try to kill them with kindness. Just kind of be like, hey, I get it. Like, I get why you, you, It's not a ton of people saying you've changed my mind.

Usually you get the responses that are like, you're wrong and here's why. And I appreciate that too. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, Cappy, I'm a fan of the channel. I'm a fan of you. I think you're very genuine person. And I really appreciate not only you coming here today and sharing your perspective and answering all my dumb questions, but furthermore, just the work you do.

And the channel itself, I think, is just so great. And I'm really excited for the future of it. seeing where it goes, and I'll definitely be watching. So thank you so much, brother. Can you remind everyone the name of the channel and where they can find you? Yeah, you can find us at Task and Purpose on YouTube or Capi Army on Instagram and Twitter. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. And thanks for having me on. Absolutely, brother. Next time there's some crazy geopolitical outbreak or some type of military conflict. You'll be the first person I call. And I'd love to have you back. We can break it all down. Awesome. Thanks, brother.