Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 176 - Thomas Nybo

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Thomas Nybo is a photographer and filmmaker who travels the world telling the stories of people in vulnerable and dangerous situations, whether it's the earthquake in Haiti, Ebola in the Congo, poverty in Afghanistan or ethnic cleansing along the Myanmar/Bangladesh border. He's worked in more than 100 countries for UNICEF, The New York Times, Frontline and other clients. He's a regular guest on CNN and was an embedded war reporter in Iraq. HelloFresh Better Help Feals LMNT

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game changer in my jujitsu lifestyle. Now, electrolytes, who needs them? A lot of people. If you've ever heard of the keto flu, a lot of the times that's actually caused by an electrolyte deficiency. Or sometimes it comes with fasting as well. You have a deficiency in your electrolytes. And if you're curing carbs, that can also be a deficiency in electrolytes. And of course, for athletes. or anybody actually who sweats and wants to support their mental energy. If you're going low carb or you're fasting, electrolytes are key for relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. When you're looking for an electrolyte drink, sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, etc.

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We met, of course, over breakfast at the J.W. Marriott in Hong Kong of all places. Met through a mutual friend. We actually talked about that a little bit. And I struggle, like I said, to be able to accurately describe the experiences that he has had. So what I'm going to do is read to you a brief bio that I hope at least gives you some idea of what you're getting into. Thomas Nybo is a photographer and filmmaker who travels the world telling stories of people in vulnerable and dangerous situations. whether it's the earthquake in Haiti, Ebola in the Congo, poverty in Afghanistan, or ethnic cleansing along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. He's worked in more than 100 countries for UNICEF, the New York Times, front line, and other clients. He's a regular guest on CNN and was embedded war reporter at the beginning of the Iraq War.

Stand by. This man is unbelievable. Cleared hot episode number 176 with Thomas Nybo coming at you. I'm looking at danger close now These will look I mean we basically look at We're podcasting right now Thomas All right here you go Basically the same setting

We were in the last time we saw each other Identical Which was at one of the best buffets You know what Instead of saying one of the best buffets I don't know if there's been a buffet that's better There's no equal J.W. Marriott, Hong Kong

Where you and I met Through the gracious introduction of our friend Simon Moore How did How did you two meet, actually? So Simon and I go way back. We actually started at CNN at the same time. And for clarity, I struggle picturing him at CNN.

That's the beauty of Simon. Simon's a really smart guy, but he's freaking hilarious. And right away, he was taking the piss out of me. And I'm like, who is this cheeky bastard? Right? And I'm like, we became great friends working crazy shifts. We played music together. He plays guitar.

I played drums. We played basketball every week. And, yeah, we just clicked. And what were you guys doing there though? So we started out as writers. And even when you started writers, when you first show up, they make you train by running the cameras and the teleprompter. And then you pass a writing test, and then you're a writer and a producer. And by writer, you mean writing what the news personalities are saying.

Right. And even then, it's kind of rewriting. So you take all the wire copy, all the background, and then you've got to condense it into kind of broadcast format. Yeah. So, you know, this is the latest and make it sort of more immediate. And so we did that. And after a while, he went on to business school and finance. He's like, fuck this, I'm out of here.

Yeah, yeah. And then I went back because I started out. Actually, at a journalism school, I was a small town newspaper photographer and writer and wanted to get back into the field. So I started filming and reporting, doing everything, kind of the solo journalist for CNN. And things got a lot more interesting when you're out in the field. field. Yeah. Like, I'm sure you can relate in the middle. There's headquarters guys and field guys. They can talk about the same things and they have, there's an overlap of experiences, but the

overlap is thin. That's how I'll describe that. But you can use the same terminology. Yeah. Yeah. I have almost no exposure to the behind the scenes of mainstream media. Obviously, I'm a consumer of it. actually as little as humanly possible as the days and weeks and months and years go on. I actually personally believe that there's a large level of culpability on both sides of the aisle with their what we'll call mouthpiece networks. I think dividing and driving a lot of the bullshit that's going on. That's a different conversation and I'm not smart enough to figure it out. But I do believe that they should have some level of responsibility for the shit that they say and that comes out of their mouth. And it's not fair either now for whatever network we're talking about for them to say,

well, we draw a distinction between the news gathering and the opinion. Well, the opinion side of things has gotten huge. And people at home aren't aren't. I challenge people to tell me where that line exists. Right. So I hear what you're saying. And again, I'm not smart enough to have a solution for it other than detach from it. But I also would like to be informed about what's going on in the world around me.

It's just, it's challenging. It's like a bombardment of too much information. Well, taking the opinion approach, too, it's a cheap way of providing the news. Like from a bottom line perspective, it's just like, oh, we just get some blowhard, you know, behind the mic, whatever side of the aisle he's on. Good choice of terms. Rumble, right? So sending actually people into the field and learning about, you know, the nuances in different cultures and coming back with something that's not meant to be inflammatory

is expensive, time-consuming. And you have to trust, I would imagine, that your audience is, A, has the bandwidth and the attention span to digest it. I actually think that most people underestimate human beings and their attention span and their ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. Because I hear it all the time, like, oh, it has to be this way because people's attention spans are so short.

I'm like, well, they are short, but also everything is being put into 15 and 30 second chunks. But I know a lot of people who will go on a very, very deep dive on a topic that they are interested in. And they don't need to be told what to believe. They'll say, hey, this is what's going on, maybe make up your own mind, and they'll do that. And I think most people are like that. But I don't know. That's one of the things I'm so excited about with kind of the emergence of podcasts into the mainstream. I mean, Rogan says this all the time.

you see it on your podcast. Anybody can go on, as someone who shows up on, you know, CNN from time to time, anyone can talk about whatever for five minutes. But if you give them... If you even get that. Yeah. If you go three hours, right? If you're full of it, it's going to be pretty clear at some point. I've done a little bit of, you know, the green screen behind you and you show up.

I had maybe 30 seconds to unwrap a very complicated topic with the delay and the earpiece. It was a terrible. Like there's no room in that to even open with what I would want to open with. You're just kind of like, blah, okay. Especially if the reporter or the anchor knows what they want to say before they even heard you. And one of the things I appreciate about you and Joe Rogan is your great listeners. You know, it's just give people a platform, get out of the way. There was a great conversation.

Rogan was talking with Elon Musk about artificial intelligence. I said, Rogan's a smart guy. You know, he did, people don't think that. Elon Musk might be a touch smarter. I know, but that's the problem. He was actually, he was on another planet talking about artificial intelligence, and Joe just looked at him. He's like, man, I'm way too dumb to be having this conversation with you. Do you think that Elon Musk walks around just feeling like he's surrounded by buffoons?

I think he's too gracious to acknowledge that, but on a certain level, he must be. I'm talking about the personal inside voice, just like, how did I get stuck on this marble? spinning through space with these fucking morons. These little chimps, right? The funny thing about that guy, too, is I read his autobiography, and with SpaceX, he'd hire a new engineer, and he'd kind of shadow them for a while, and he'd be with him for a couple of hours, quizzing them on everything they were doing, and at first, the engineers were like, God, why is this asshole, like, doubting my work?

And then at some point it clicked, and they're like, he's actually trying to figure out rocket science like cutting edge like he understands you know and there's not many people like him i i liked him every time that i've heard him on joe and then i saw a tweet exchange which i hope i hope is true and not photoshopped and it was another company saying hey we're gonna race uh spacex to mars he tweet somebody tweeted this and his response was do it pussy i'm like you're a hero you're not the He's the hero that we deserve, but you're the hero that we have. He's earned that. He's earned that, right?

What a fascinating man. No, I mean, I just feel like his brain has to operate at a bandwidth that is, I don't even know if it's comprehensible for somebody like myself. Certainly not. Again, I listen to him on Joe, and he's talking at a high level about mathematics, about physics, about artificial intelligence. That one, when people like him start saying, hey, man, we should be wary of AI. I'm like, okay.

I don't know about AI, but you seem to know about AI. I'm going to listen to you. I'll take your word for it. Yeah. But, you know, and then all the stuff that he's into, if I was lucky and won the lottery, I might have an idea that he probably dismisses in his normal. My idea would reach the threshold of stuff. He's like, get out of here.

Here's a guy where you take anyone who's even smart and they come out of the gates and like, I'm going to establish this company, maybe an internet company, I'm going to hit it big and take it easy. He did like three times. And he gets to a point like after the PayPal maybe it was, where he has this incredible fortune. And then he basically splits it and doubles down on SpaceX and Tesla. And he just doesn't stop. And in his book, it was fascinating.

He's running at such an insane speed. He was turning through so much money. And it was like too big to fail in the sense he had to lean on some of his billionaire friends to meet payroll. Like getting six figure loans. And then if you look at the past year where Tesla's stock has just gone through the roof exponentially. But this guy, his confidence in himself and his ideas is unmatched. One of the similarities, obviously, I don't know the guy at all, didn't know Steve Jobs at all. But, you know, watching from an outside perspective, one of the common traits that I see in people that are that far, you know, they're that innovative and that ahead of the power curve, they don't listen when people like, hey, you can't do this.

That shit is just maybe it bothers them in their private moments, but it seems like they're just in a ship full of Teflon where that stuff is bouncing off. I can only imagine, you know, you watch the documentaries about Apple or the creation of the Mac. People are like, no, this is not a needed product. Okay, maybe change the face of at least the consumer computing, all the stuff that Elon is doing. Pretty sure people are like, no, you can't start a rocket ship company. He's like, hmm, hold my beer or whatever expensive shit he probably drinks. And even then, people think, oh, if you're going to go into something like electric cars,

you need to know how everyone else has done it before you. And they were kind of a joke and problematic and slow and clunky. And YouTube, Tesla, drag race versus any $300,000 Italian sports car. And the power curve just destroys. Like, it's not even funny. The new roadsters, I heard his last podcast with Joe. And it's just, I mean, it's like sub two-second, zero to 60. Have you ever driven one?

No. it's disturbing. First off, you're really quiet because the only fluid in those things is actually the windshield wiper fluid. The amount, when you hit that gas pedal, you would think that it should, you know, like a, like you said, 300, you know, six figure, you know, Italian race cars. It's going to sound very throaty, right, the exhaust. None of that. It just presses you into the back of your seat. And the last time I did, I hit the gas pedal, I didn't even actually want to look down to see how, fast we were going because I didn't want to take my eyes off the road. That's how fast that thing picked up on speed. Unbelievable. Here's one of my favorite Elon Musk stories, too, that just shows you how far ahead of everyone else he is and how little he cares about conventional thinking. I think it was consumer reports did a review on one of his cars, and they're like, we cannot give it a recommendation because it needed to stop within 135 feet going from whatever to zero and and it missed it.

So he calls up his engineers. He said, I need a firmware update in the next couple hours to have it stop before this point, and I need it to update every Tesla out there when they charge it and plug it in overnight. So the next morning, anyone with a Tesla woke up a car with a car. Problem solved. Problem solved. They got the recommendation. Like it was light speed.

He didn't need to get approval. It just happened. And it kind of blows my mind. I think he was the one talking about it, how Tesla. share information. They have a network or a cloud. So that's the driving in theory, of course, is getting better and better and better because, you know, we're talking machines and human interactions. So there's going to be mistakes. But when there is a wreck or mistake, it's beamed. Not being, or I'm sure that's not the term. In my mind, I think it's beamed. Yeah, to all the

to the cloud of the network. So all of the vehicles can either learn to avoid that or just improve their efficacy and efficiency. I mean, that's what I'm talking about. Another, another thing I love about him. So one of the cool things I know this is not an Elon Musk commercial by the way we just really like his shit. And one of the things about that too is is you know we'll get into it but I've been homeschooling my kids since I've been back from the Congo and and one of the great life experiences that I've had and certainly in the lives of my children is my wife had been pestering me. She's like there's going to be a night launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from you know Cape Canaveral in the middle of October like we should go and you know.

typical guy like blew it as far as getting tickets and hotels and all that. And then it was like upon us. And some of us, Simon and me, we had some friends from CNN who wound up at NASA. And I texted him like, hey, can I just show up in person? They're like, oh, yeah, just go to this beach. And we woke up that morning, 555 in the morning. I made pancakes. We jumped in the car, drove seven hours, camped out.

Darkness fell. And this rocket carrying four people to the International Space Station took off. And we watched it, watched the rockets separate and return to Earth, piled in the car, drove seven hours back. Amazing experience. But my point, too, is getting there, they program failure into their development of the rockets to a degree that we've never seen before. People are like, oh, you know, his rocket blew up. Well, yeah. It's like, because he'll push it.

Yeah. Let's push it to the point where it explodes so we can dial it back. He's not a 60% guy. No. He's pushing the 98, 99. He's pushing the boundary and threshold, if you will. What a great science lesson for the kids, too. Oh, it's so true.

And if you want to launch into the homeschooling. Let's get to the homeschool. First off, so we've been obviously communicating back and forth. At some point, I'll probably just read the message you sent me last night because your bio is ridiculous. But what got you into journalism? Let's start back at the beginning. Where are you from? So I'm from Montana.

Born in Bozeman, grew up in Helena, I lived for a while in Missoula, and I've always been interested in stories. Not necessarily nonfiction or fiction, and even in high school. I took a creative writing course at the local college there and was like, this is cool. I'm going to go to college and I'm going to do what it takes to become a novelist. Well, I got a creative writing degree, which was fun to get for me, read and write. Nobody wants to hire an aspiring novelist, right? So I stuck around an extra year and got a journalism degree and wound up shifting to nonfiction. And that was my path.

Wound up. My first job out of school was a small town newspaper in eastern Montana along the Rocky Mountain front. And then after that, took a job at CNN. And that's when I met Simon. Like right away within a week, I'm like, I like the cut of this guy's jib. For sure. and just condensing my story. So I stayed on staff for seven years,

got bored at one point and was going to quit because I was in headquarters and took my six-month gap year, I like to call it, when I turned 28. I said, I'm just putting things on hold, go live in Central America, Mexico, and Cuba and learn Spanish. Had you traveled internationally before that?

Very little. In fact, the one big excursion I had when we were in university, some friends and I were really, really into whitewater kayaking, and it was our first winter, and we were kind of going crazy, and we got a copy of Paddler magazine that had a picture of someone kayaking over 30-foot waterfalls in some rainforest in central Mexico, and I'm like, we're going. I literally rented out my room. We sold all of our stuff. My buddy Shecky, you know, said,

I'll drive down, and we piled everything in, bought a, what was it, a hi-eight video camera in a waterproof case, and drove to Mexico. Two thousand miles. and we shot this. It was what I like to call a spectacular failure. Nothing ever happened with it. I still have the tapes if anyone's listening. So anyway, that was the first real international experience, and we just kind of went out without a net,

shooting over these 30-foot waterfalls, had an amazing time, came back. So that was the extent of my international travel. It had been in my blood, but it was like, man, I was just ready to get out there and being on my own on a limited budget. Like I left with six grand in, I'm so old, Travelers checks and a mountain bike.

Not many people are going to remember travelers checks. Free cell phone. There was a little internet. There was a little bit of, you know, their internet cafes. I mean, I wound up in Cuba, I spent the summer in Cuba at the end of it. I literally had less than $10 a day for everything. And it costs at least $15 a day for a room. But I had met this Norwegian journalist studying Spanish in Guatemala.

And he's like, oh, here's the name of some Cuban doctors. they'll illegally rent you a room. And so I showed up on their doorstep. And I'm like, hey, Morton sent me. Can you give me a room? And they're like, oh, yeah, you know, this is $15 a night. I'm like, great. Everything sounds great except for the price.

I can do $5 a night, but I can pay you two months in advance. Here's the cash. Okay. So then I had $3 to eat, right? Yep. And it was an amazing experience, life-changing. Yeah, I can imagine. You're going to get the true pulse and beat

of what's going on around you at that level. Yeah, and that was the seeds, actually. I became friends with this great Cuban guy named Victor, and he started taking me these underground hip-hop shows. And they got back and started working again at CNN, and another one of my buddies, actually named Simon, Simon Umloff, he's like, oh, I'm doing a story on this new Cuban rapper named Pitbull. Nobody had heard of him.

They have now. And I'm like, let's combine the two and do a documentary on Cuban hip-hop. And he said, yeah, and we could still call up Pitbull. And he's like, yeah, hang out with me in South Beach. And so we made multiple trips to Cuba, moved in with the family of Cuban rappers. So, you know, they're like, oh, you need to pay us. And I'm like, well, we can't pay you to be in the documentary.

But if you want to rent us rooms, we'll do that. And so we spent all this time over three or four trips gathering this great material. And then we passed through and put it on my iPod at the time. And Pitbull got on camera listening to it. He's like, man, if I was living, in Cuba, I wouldn't be a rapper, I'd be robber and shit. And just like offering this

commentary, our favorite group was called Las Cruitas, these tough women. He's like, oh, these women is amazing, talking about ovaries and stuff. Anyway, it was a great experience and it all started the Genesis was just being broke and spending a summer

in a place that most people don't get to check out, even though it's 90 miles from Key West. Yeah. Since that time, I mean, so how many years ago was that? So let's see, when I first went there, it was 99, and I think we released the documentary, this is called a Gorilla Radio, the hip-hop Struggle Under Castro. I think that came out in like 2004.

Okay. So you filmed it in 99, let's just for easy math, let's say, in the 20 slightly plus years since then, how much of it have you spent on the road overseas? I spend six months a year, at least overseas. Okay. I think you can probably relate to this. It got to a point a couple of years ago where people are like, like, oh, you know, isn't it difficult to adjust when you go out? And I'm like, I don't know,

it's kind of more difficult to adjust coming home sometimes, right? I can appreciate that for sure. It's almost jarring, actually. It's completely jarring in ways that are hard to describe unless you've experienced it and spent a significant amount of time immersed in a different culture. And I would say even more so if you're immersed at a much lower economic level. Without a doubt. And you have so little tolerance for 90% of what people are complaining about here? Yeah, I mean, I say this often. You know, people, the United States has plenty of problems, as to all countries. And I can appreciate people, you know, the context through which they view the world,

the problems that they see. I get it. If that's the only problems that you've been around, they seem catastrophic. But it's funny to me to watch people complain about things, the price of gas, you know, and then they'll go in their coffee per ounces astronomically more expensive because they're going to go to Starbucks and pay, you know, a gallon of coffee versus a gallon of gas. Guess what? There's a difference in price.

Or, you know, they're bitching about, you know, the cost of things from their $1,100 smartphone. You know, that's what they're using to you. It's like, eh, I get it. I understand your complaint. I'm not saying it doesn't impact your life. But if you go spend some time in places, to me, one of the biggest examples that sticks out to me is,

because I know you were war correspondent as well. Did you go to Iraq and Afghanistan? I went to Iraq as a war correspondent, but I did like six or seven trips to Afghanistan doing humanitarian work. I mean, how many times have you been at the limits of civilization and they have a light bulb for like a village on a car battery? and they're bathing in the same water that they piss and shit in and cleaning their clothes and, you know, getting water for it.

It's like you spend a little bit of time around that or live. Like my last appointment, we were living in, I don't want to say squalor because that's not the correct term for it, but at the very, at the lowest living conditions that I was ever in for my time in the military, and you come back and you have this realization, I'm going to be just fine. Everything's going to be okay. In the United States, it's one of these places, too, where because of the easy access to credit, you could be broke.

You could owe $10, $20, $30,000, $50,000 and you could live really well for years. Just kind of shifting things around. You've got such margin to kind of get your act together, right? But places where I go where it's just kind of like, if you don't have money that day, your kids aren't going to eat. and there's no getting around that. And people don't really relate to that here. Yeah, the credit system is non-existent. It's, I had actually thought about it from that perspective.

Yeah, the consequences are immediate. It's not something that you can push down the road with compounding interest, which, yeah, that changes the way you live life. I had this interesting conversation with this 16-year-old kid in Afghanistan, and he was collecting garbage, and his family had pushed him to, collecting garbage to get the plastic to sell to recyclers. And his family had pushed him to get a construction job in Iran. And the day that he got there, he was caught and beat by the authorities and kicked out.

And one of my colleagues was like, you know, well, what do you want to do with your life? And he's like, I want to be a doctor. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm like, come on. Like, cut it, man. Just like, be honest with us. He's like, he's like, you guys want to hear that I want to be a doctor. He's like, the reality is I can't read.

Yeah. I can't write. It's not a possibility for him. I'm broke. and the context too people think well you know why should I reach out and help him I had a friend of mine who was given well not a friend of mine but kid I grew up with who's never left like our

the state of Montana he was giving me a hard time for trying to help people abroad and you know I don't know how you could do that and it's like let me let me tell you about this kid if we don't help him and make it so he can provide for his family provide for himself you've got the Taliban if they pay him six dollars a day he's there, right? That's what it costs. That's the price to keep him from joining the Taliban.

$6 a day. Can we come up with something that will keep him from going down that road, right? Yeah, the solutions aren't all Connecticut nature. And I've spent, I've been out of the military for coming up on eight years now, and I spend, I don't know, not an inordinate amount of time thinking about the past, but I'll have conversations like Jack. He just came up. We were talking about old Jack Carr, the novelist who was looking at the arrow in the tree at my house today.

because he missed the target by about 17 yards or meters, whichever one is more. But we talk about our past. And this, there's, when it comes to war, you know, there's three levels. You get strategic, operational, and tactical. I lived in the tactical world. And I was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, but I didn't involve any of the planning. There's a strategic level, like the Department of Defense.

Like, what's our policy? How are we going to do this? I lived in the world of bombs and bullets. I really hope that there are people out there who are putting together solutions that are an order of magnitude more effective than those. Because I think that $6 investment in the long run, depending on what the timeline is, you want to look at this, could make more of a difference. There's a place for both, right, because you can't let the Taliban create an environment where they're just teaching people. I had a guy Nick was on. He's the CEO of the Deliver Fund, you know, talking about human trafficking and people using children to test the pressure on the pressure plates.

Like that person, that's a bombs and bullet solution for that guy. But it has to be this all-encompassing approach. Otherwise, what are we doing? We're not actually going to solve anything. And I don't know if those things are being thought about by people smarter than myself, but I really hope so. Because otherwise, what I did do, it was useless. I want to ask you a question. You had a great blog post that really resonated with me, and I want to know more about it.

You said how much you think about war and being in that environment. And you said, I might misquote you, but killing has taught you more about love and compassion than anything else in your life. And the act of killing has brought out your best self and your worst self. Yep. That's pretty profound stuff. Well, again, I have spent time thinking about my old life. And the decisions that you make when it comes to taking a life or not taking a life, they have gravity. And in the moment, you don't have time to think about that because most of the time you're thinking, it's react.

It becomes very rote in that moment. And I don't say that negatively. And I don't want people to think that the consequences or the decisions don't care of that gravity. but if you come around a corner and there's somebody with a gun, you're not thinking about what that person, you know, is this somebody who just stumbled up in the middle of the night and grabbed a gun and came outside, especially as it's coming up at you,

like, is this a jihadist or is this a dude who just stumbled at a bet? I don't have time to think about that. So it's very black and white from that perspective. But you spend enough time in that world and you see the, you know, you see the consequences. I remember the first person I ever shot was a kid running up a set of stairs with an AK trying to protect his dad. And I watched what happened in the,

we were probably there for another 45 minutes to an hour. And the mother came out as he was tumbling down the stairs backwards and wailing. And I almost shot her too because I thought she was going to go for the gun. And seeing directly, and I didn't, I didn't think about it much in that moment because, again, I turned around and saw a figure with an AK running up a set of stairs and I knew one of my buddies was up there. No chance to think about anything. like that. I do remember thinking in my head slightly smaller than normal body size. And, you know, I would put the age of the kid at maybe 13 or 14. You know, he had peach fuzz on his,

on his upper lip. Then I would make the same decision, given the same information. But it, if that doesn't, if, for me, looking at my sons and thinking about would they take the same action if they if they heard me on a roof, not that I sleep on the roof, but if I reverse that situation, Would my sons do everything that they could to try to run to my aid as well? And they absolutely would. And it allows you or it allowed me to take a pretty deep sounding on, you know, my beliefs. I think I love my children more and life more because of that moment specifically. I see that young man in my kids every time that I'm around my sons and not in like a flashback perspective. But I mean, I remember that it happened every day. Like I said, I wouldn't change the decision. But it allows me to love my son. more, to have an appreciation for life more. And then there's, you know, there's the other side of that is you go on target and things don't go your way. Maybe one of your friends gets hurt or killed.

And you can turn that, you can turn that energy towards hatred and killing for the wrong reasons. I was there to try to make a difference for this country and to erase people off of the chess board. Like, hey, yeah, let's just human traffic some kids to test pressure plates. It's like, fuck you. I would take great pleasure in killing that person, but it can be taken too far as well.

And it's been interesting conversations with yourself later in life. Like, who am I as a person? How deep down that rabbit hole could I go before I lost control? You're an interesting example, too, whether you've consciously thought of this or not, but the more I learn about you, you seem someone like, I'm really interested in the work of Carl Jung and this notion, and this notion of the shadow, right?

And even your boy, Jocko, has talked about it as it relates to, to jihitsu. Yeah. But this kind of darkness, I think, that's kind of, I think within, as he thinks, within everybody, kind of this unknowable part of ourselves and embracing it, which helps us kind of become self-actualized. You seem a really great example of that.

Like you're not, you're not, you're not pushing it out of your mind, but here you are. You know, you're here in 2021. You've got three kids. You're doing your podcast. You're doing your speaking gigs. But this is a part of who you are and what took you to this point. And even to a certain extent, you know, jihitsu, what I love to hearing Joko say, too, you know, people come and I'm like, oh, what should I hear to protect myself?

Get a gun. And this? Hey, maybe you should study jihitsu. But I don't want to fight. study jihitsu so you don't need to fight. Yeah. Right. And also get a gun if you're limited on time.

And get a gun. Right. I would say I'm not intimately familiar with the concept of the shadow, but the darkness in everybody, I think that's true. And I think the most dangerous thing that you could do is ignore that or say that it doesn't exist. I'll be the first person to tell you. I've definitely killed in anger.

And I've done things that I wish I could take back. And I've been in that place where I let that portion of who I am take over. and I'm not going to say that I'm glad that it happened, but it gave me a better or it gives me a better understanding of who I am. And I think it allowed me to be able to love at a deeper level, to connect at a deeper level. And maybe that's just me, and maybe I'm completely fucked up for feeling that way.

But that's the, I mean, I don't ignore that. And when it comes to war, I mean, you were around war zones. If you touch war, it touches you back. I think one of the biggest mistakes people can make is to think that you will either immerse yourself or be proximal to that or involve in it, engage in it directly, and that you're going to be the same. I have no expectation of being the same. I mean, I barely remember who I was in my late teens, early 20s, even my mid-20s.

I think I have a better understanding of who I am now, but I'm definitely not that same person. I'm not the experiences that I have had. They will shape how I feel my appreciation, you know, or my unwillingness to complain about trivial shit. Like, it's all based on those experiences. People come back from those experiences and they're different. And I think the mistake that they make, or part of the mistake that they make is that they're trying to return to who they were. And I don't think that's possible. And I don't know. Again, not smart enough to figure all that stuff out, but I think you're much better embracing those things that you did or had to do or chose to do and try to come out the

other side of that, at least better or better understanding of who you are. I don't know. That's how I view it. It's been a lot of time talking to myself when I drive in my car. Odd conversations. And I never, you know, when stuff like this comes up, I never try to avoid it. I'll try to work my way through it. And then when it goes to bed for a little bit, I'll let it go to bed. And when it comes back up and it wants to either picket me or pester me or, you know,

have the, you know, thinking about the same stuff repetitively for a couple weeks at a time. I just, okay. Like, just who am I to try to ignore that? You know, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that makes me think of something. There was, when I made the shift, so I was at CNN for seven years, and one of, one of my bosses, he was the head of the international assignment desk, Steve Cassidy, a great guy. And he was going to retire, but then he was hired at UNICEF, United Nations Children's Fund to kind of revamp their video film unit and Internet unit.

And he saw some of my reports coming out of Iraq. Like, I was fortunate enough actually to be with the 173rd Airborne Brigade when they jumped into northern Iraq, like filming. filming them with a night vision camera as they jumped out of the plane. And so he was really, he was like, oh, and you filmed all this stuff and you reported. He's like, why don't you come work for me? I'll send you around the world for a couple years doing stories on kids in danger and helping him like, that's interesting. And so, you know, 17 years later, here I am.

But there was an interesting pivot because as a journalist, you identify problems. That's all you do. Problem, problem, problem, problem, you know, the local news. If it bleeds, it leads, right? Yeah. And now all of a sudden, I'm actually getting more personal stories about the most horrific atrocities I've heard of. You know, I spent a couple of years covering the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh along the border

with Myanmar. Ethnic cleansing, women who were raped, children killed, men who were tortured. I mean, one after another. I heard a hundred of the worst stories imaginable. And a friend of mine who goes on this snowboarding trip with me every year, he's a counselor. And he's like, well, you should be trying to be. traumatize. How can you process this? And it's just like, I'm at least part of a movement that's trying to make it better. You know, if we can move the bar just a little bit, it helps me put it

in perspective. And even now, it kind of drives me nuts. And maybe you can relate to this too. You hear people, oh, we live in such crazy times, you know, COVID. Look back at history. When has life not been crazy? Like my grandfathers, both of my grandfathers fought in World War II. One was a medic in France. The other was, you know, in the the trenches, in the Philippines, and, you know, look at their fathers. Look at World War I. Look at the Middle Ages. Look at the 1800s. With the civil, like, when has it been normal? You're talking about something that has never existed and never will exist. But if your heart's in the right place and you're trying to do good, but at the same time, enjoy yourself when you're kind of off

the clock, that seems like a pretty good approach. I think what's abnormal right now is people's ability to outsource almost everything in their life. I'll just get on an app and I can have food delivered. I can get on my phone and research whatever topic I want to without leaving the comfort of my lazy boy and my boxers. Something bad happens while I outsource my safety and security to 911. That's actually what's abnormal. The softness of what's people is what is abnormal. You go back a hundred years, people like, yeah, you need to work that shit out on your own. Yeah. Oh, it's true. And I think that's one of the things. I'm glad you're raising your kids in Montana. And even when I When I grew up here, I still remember the first time I really got punched in the face

was in sixth grade. And I don't recommend that. I hope my kids don't get punched in the face, but it's like, Mike Tyson's famous quote, everyone's got a plan until you get punched in the face, right? Yeah, but did you learn from it. I did learn from it. Exactly. I did learn from it.

And I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but I've got two kids, boy and a girl six and eight years old. One of the things I've said to my wife, and I don't mean this, it can be misconstrued, but it's like, I don't want to raise soft children. I want them to understand, oh, you know, here's a pocket knife and matches. Oh, my God, I can cut myself and burn my fingers, right? Where I'm sure you've got friends, too. I've got friends who led this kind of sheltered existence,

and then they're released into the world, and they're like, oh, you know. It's just like you're doing them such a disservice, right? Well, you can teach kids about pocket knives and matches without them getting third-degree burns and sawing their arm off. Yeah. You know, it's, I forget, uh, my, my jiu jih Tuch's coach, his wife is Icelandic. And there's, I forget the exact quote, but it's like burnt baby doesn't touch the stove anymore. Something along those lines. I think I nailed like 62% of that quote. But the point being,

the mistake being made is a teacher for the future. I don't think it's a good idea to shelter your kids from anything. Failure, success, you know, the ups and downs of life. I, to me, that is what prepares them to actually leave the nest, if you will, and go out and live a successful life as a contributing adult in society. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. That's what I would hope. So when you, so 2001, you were still working at CNN? I was. In fact, I remember I had CNN on. I was off that day. I was living in Atlanta, working at headquarters, CNN Center. I had the TV on. I watched the first plane hit the first tower. I was watching it when the second plane hit and I'm like wow we're going to war right like I just jumped in my truck drove to CNN Center and and at this point I was trying to establish myself as a solo journalist

filming reporting editing on my laptop and they looked at me and I'd covered some wildfires by myself out in California and they said hey we're sending a suburban up to New York City like grab your stuff and get in the car and we're driving up and the guys that I was with were like yeah try to sleep in the car because Once we hit the ground, we're going to be going nonstop for days. And one of them woke me up as we drove by the Pentagon, which was on fire, right? And so I spent like 10 days running around and got down to ground zero. And it was life-changing. It was the smell.

I mean, it was just kind of overwhelming. I mean, New York City is one of the great international cities, one of the great cities of America. And to see, you know, just this pile of rubble. And the smell is what really stuck out to me. And, I mean, it was. But at the same time, the first story I actually did, as soon as we got in, was just like some candlelight vigils. And these hardcore New Yorkers were like, yeah, normally I'm a misanthrope. I hate people, but I kind of need to be around them and kind of come together.

So there was that energy, which was palpable. But at the same time, just to see these kind of skeletons of the buildings, even the way that they were designed, it was just what remained was eerie. And then to see that evolution and then to wind up, you know, going in. with with the troops into Iraq and just seeing kind of come full circle was an was an interesting journey so I have no experience with journalists overseas because they kept them pretty far from us I'm very curious about I mean I guess all of it I mean what what CNN briefed you with going in like what they expected were you did you have the latitude to report what you wanted did they want to hear certain stuff

how did you embed with the and when did you embed before even going over? It was a long process. I was actually for six months to six months before the war actually started. You know, we did extensive training. CNN brought in a group surviving, you know, hostile areas, some former British special forces guys. And then once I was selected to be an embedded reporter, the military sponsored at Quantico a week long kind of camp, you know, just just so you don't get yourself in trouble, and by extension, the troops that are with you in trouble. As far as editorial control, CNN was just like, you know, play it straight.

And I have one good story, too, that shows you, too. I was expecting to be kind of controlled more by the military. Now, it was like, one thing you can't do is give away your location, right? You can't compromise the mission. And if you remember, Geraldo broke that rule by scratching in the sand. We're right here, and they kicked him out. So that was the big rule. Which I feel like he should have known.

Yeah, come on. You know, I'm even just for your instinct for survival, you might not want a broadcast to the world that I'm right here and I'm going right here. Yeah. But here's a great example. There was an information officer who was with us and we kind of coordinated through him, but they were largely hands off. It's kind of like, we're going to trust you until you give us a reason not to. And I was in the north. So it was a very different experience.

I mean, the Kurds, when we went into like Kirkuk, it was like the liberation of Paris. I mean, they'd been fucked over by Saddam for so long that they were like, yes, right? Like, so it was a very different experience. And there was actually a cache of weapons, and it tested positive for like a chemical or biological agent. And the military said, hey, initial test, this tested positive. I said, okay. And I cleared it with CNN, and I went to air. I mean, you can Google this.

And it was like, ooh, they found it. And to the credit of the military. So, I mean, I own that story for a couple of days, like around the clock. Like, this is what they found. And then while I was on the air, the Army sent someone over and said, follow-up tests, negative. It's not what we thought it was. I mean, it was political reasons. It would have been exactly what they were looking at.

It was a show called smoking gun. But they were transparent about it. It was as it happened. They told me, I told the world. And so I had a faith. There was a good relationship. I mean, there were a lot of people who were like, oh, you know, fucking journalists or whatever. but it's like that's to be expected.

Yeah. So I'm not there. It's kind of like raising kids maybe. You know, it's like I'm not there to be your friend. You don't need to be my friend. Let's just kind of get through this together. I'm here to report on what I see. And yeah.

How long did you stay with them? I was only there about five or six weeks. Yeah. Did you ever go back? I never went back. I mean, I would have. It's funny because that was 2003. It was probably about a year later where I started doing work for UNICEF.

So, and at that point, a lot of the, my friends who were also embedded, it was just like not the exciting mission. Like, you're funny enough, though, you're stuck at some base just to have, you know, kind of an ass in the seat in case something goes down. And one of my friends, Alfonso Van Marsh, was the first one who saw a group of soldiers celebrating, and it was when they found Saddam. So he, like, broke that story. That's the exception. I mean, I knew people were just there for months, just kind of man. these outposts and you know how it is in the military everyone thinks it's like you know like a Tesla shooting off the line but it's just like you sit around you plan you plan again and this is like

a little bit of action well and the war especially in iraq actually even in afghanistan too it took time for that battlefield to mature so i was in uh saudi arabia so down you know south and we flew damn near all the way to the north for uh the first target that we hit and then we worked our way. We did some stuff in Nazaria. We went to Baghdad International after that, but almost no resistance when the war first kicked off. It was more of, they kind of wanted, I think, figure out who we are, how we were going to play it. So not a lot of head-to-head confrontation. Fast forward now, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, full-on fucking insurgency. You know, legit cells of very committed and devout people. Iranian influence when it comes to the

types of explosives, the penetrating devices that they were using on people. And then you think about Afghanistan too. When I first was in Afghanistan in 2002, we would drive around in thin-skinned vehicles. Yes, of course, it was one of the most highly landmined countries in the world. We weren't driving out there. So, you know, thin-skinned vehicles. Fast forward to 2010, you're not going anywhere without, you know, tens of tons of armor around you because the IED threat had just gone through the roof. So both of those theaters, I could see being a little, you know,

boring in air quotes when they first began, but I bet the experience had you gone back in like 06-09. Holy shit. Without a doubt. I mean, exponentially it changed. I mean, especially my experience in the north was completely different. There was very little resistance. In fact, there was very little resistance throughout the entire country

for this first few years. I remember we were pushing, on to Kirkuq and expecting a fight. And when we got there, we went into, uh, in a rocky base. And you could tell the story. There was like, like, like a half eaten piece of bread. You can see him drop it. You could see the beret that was thrown off. You could see the jacket. You can see the boots. I still have the shirt and the beret. Like it was the story. It's like yeah, reverse, uh, stop motion animation right? And they're gone. Yeah. Right. They're still watching, but they're no longer man in the post. And like I said, they came back with a vigor in those later years.

It was full-on jihad, substantially different. And then, you know, anybody who wanted to fight an American, they knew where to go so they could get their kinetic knowledge base higher. And as soon as we think we've got it figured out, they'll take it to the next level. My first trip to Afghanistan, I was picked up at the airport in an armored land cruiser. And I remember tapping on the glass and had this hilarious former Israeli in Kabul, in Kabul, special forces guy who was my driver's, last security guy and I tapped on the window.

I'm like, you know, bulletproof. He's like, we'll stand the shots of three AK-47 bullets. And I'm like, only three? And he's like, presumably we would be moving very fast. But later, I mean, I was on another trip and one of my colleagues was like, oh, we've got this armored vehicle. I'm like, well, you know what happens, right? It's just like the plates and the doors and the class is so fucking heavy.

You've got this crack. So they'll, if we're stuck in traffic, they'll jump on and pour gas in and set it on fire. And then we're trapped in like, Oh, right. Pros and cons. Yeah, right. Highest stakes, you're ever going to play.

We eventually just stopped driving on the roads. We would take very highly capable off-road vehicles, and we would try to drive places where nobody would think you could take a vehicle. So the threat to actually vaporizing was lower. Because it was, I think, in 2010, we were there three days and hit an IED in one of the MRAPs, which completely isolated it. We had to sit there, overwatch it, and, watched as within sight, it was actually ridiculous.

Within sight, they were trying to emplace another IED on a road. Classic story for any of you out there who want to get into the IED scene. Remember where the pressure plate is and remember whether or not you've armed it. Because this older dude was teaching a younger guy. They were burying it. He scooted over and activated his own IED. While they were both looking over the top of it, it was fucking glorious because that's what you get. If you're going to do that type of shit.

But that's, I mean, that's how fast the game was. as you could see it. They're like, oh, boom, these guys, there's probably going to be another force that's going to come to try to recover this vehicle. Like, damn, okay. Like, we need to evolve. Otherwise, we're going to end up to get just vaporized.

One of my favorite field stories from the Andy Stumpf, Joe Rogan diary. Oh, God. I remember when I was with the military, you know, they were like, here's the javelin. And then I heard you talk about it. Yeah, yeah, the javelin.

It's just like, you know, the insurance like, nah, na, na, na, na. But again, you know, why did the javelin work? One, because it's awesome. But two, they had learned that the effective range of 556, which most people were carrying, a couple hundred yards at most. And they're shooting 760.

You know, they're shooting back PKMs. And, I mean, they put Dishkas on the back of trucks and stuff. But they're lobbing in, you know, a belt-fed 300 wind mag essentially from 1,000 yards to 1,500, and they would stand out in the open because they knew, other than a few sniper rifle platforms, there's nothing that could reach out and touch them. So it's not what I was very good with that thing, is that they were so conditioned to being able to just lob stuff. And they would stand there. Like, hey, if you guys could just move a little closer together, I could get this heat signature lock.

And then they would. And then, you know, the rest of the story is history. But again, it's an anti-tank weapon. Can you shoot it at people? Yes, you can. Should you? Absolutely. Yes, you should because it's awesome.

Are you ever going to following your boy Jack Carr's footsteps? My God. No, I'm not going to. Well, first off, Jack Carr writes fiction, which I can get behind. I get asked about books all the time and my honest answer has to be no because what would I write about? So there I was

doing things that a lot of people had done before me in places that a lot of people had been before me and it would just go onto the shelf in a bookstore somewhere surrounded by other seal books like what do I have to add? How about the fiction? Fiction. I don't know if I have a creative enough mind

to put together like he's on this that was his fourth book That's his first one, but I had his fourth in the car because I just finished reading it. But he's got like a fifth, six. I don't have that. He's a machine. He is. And he's had that desire his whole life.

I mean, sometimes I think I have a more than more creative imagination than some, but not that creative. And especially not to put the framework out to do a book. So for me, I don't think so. I think the best I can do and what I try to do, you know, like how I met Simon is to sit down or stand there, depending on what's going on in the presentation, and try to tell. take my experiences and the things, the most important thing about my experience and my experiences is that I was able to make it through them because of what I was taught by my mentors. And that stuff was taught to them by their mentors in a peacetime environment and their mentors and their mentors and

so on and so forth, probably back all the way to the days of the Romans oiling up and fighting each other. That to me is valuable. But those books have already been written too. And there is power in reading those books. I love Jocco's books. But I also think there's, more power in sitting there and being able to have a conversation with somebody because I'll go in with Simon and he'll take me into a lot of a variety of the clients that they have and it's a smaller engagement, maybe three exercise of this table and there'll be 20 people there. And the questions that you get are much more tailored and you just can't get that from getting a book. So I would rather try to pass those lessons and that knowledge on than sit down and try to commit it to a piece of paper

because I also like the fact that you can evolve the delivery vehicle as opposed to once it's done, Unless I guess it's a digital format, you can change as you go along. It's just not in the cards for me, I don't think. One thing I'm really curious about you. My kids, by the way, I think you're like an action figure. Make sure that you explain to them that I am not. You know, set the world record with the wingsuit. You know, you can fly jets, you know, former Navy SEAL.

My kid's now snowboards. Oh, he's not just a snowboarder, but he's a split border. If you're going to do one, you need to do both people. But I'm curious about. here you are back in civilian life, what or who inspires you? Maybe on a daily basis.

Like what does it for you and gets you excited about getting out of bed in the morning? By the way, I have to say, one of the most hilarious tweets, I think, that you did, you know, for anyone who knows Jocko like he gets up at four something. And I think you got up hashtag up

before. For about a week, I was kneeling him. And I let him know that I was going to do that, but his followers have no sense of humor and they're just like, you can't say. I'm just like, wow. That's hilarious. Twitter's not the great medium for me. What motivates me?

I like the fact that I can get out of bed. My body has some miles on it. I have had more interesting experiences than some and far less than others. And that's true of my military career as well, because people always want to talk about combat and all that stuff. I'm just like, listen, I've done more than some and far less than others. And I don't want to ever tread on that. So it motivates me to get up and try to figure out ways to move past it and to figure out what it is that I'm passionate about.

I never thought. So I've been at the podcast. This will be episode 176, 52 a year. Like we're coming up on, and I wasn't that consistent in the beginning. So it's probably close to four years as opposed to the three. But I never thought in a million years I would enjoy it as much. But the chance to sit down and talk to people who have traveled the world or talk about things that inspire them or empower them, like that's motivated. to me. I don't know how many times. I got Kyle Carpenter's book, you know, sitting over there under the

statue of David. And, you know, I left that conversation with him feeling so just grateful that there are people like him that exist who spent three years in a hospital and his, you know, the recovery and all the things that he had to go through. And he has the single most positive outlook and attitude that I think I've ever been around. And the ability to share time with him for three plus hours and to hear about that, like that motivates me. Um, I just want to do better. I want to be a better version of myself. So I look for not necessarily motivation in other people.

I look for it in the perspective of I don't want to measure myself against other people. I want to measure myself against my former self. And I think that might be why I enjoy jiu-jitsu so much as well because although, and I say this as a novice, I often see people ranking themselves against others, which I think is a mistake. Because in the gym system that I train in, there's purple belts that are in their 50s. And there's purple belts that are in their 20s. And that's not the same thing, but it has the same belt. And they want to compare and contrast against each other.

And it's like, listen, that's not going to work because that's not the point of this. The 50-year-old purple belt will become a 50-something-year-old brown belt and a black belt. And he's going to lose to the 20-year-old black belt. But it's where he is in his journey in comparison to himself, not in comparison to others. And that's, I mean, I don't have like this written out. but I think that's my path and how I find motivation. I just want to be better. I want to leave the world a better place than what I came into,

especially for my kids. I love it. That resonates with me, and I think of this quote, that kind of scared the hell out of me and motivates me. It's like the definition of hell is on your last day on earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become. Oh, fuck.

Like that just like, I remember that I was like, oh, that's pretty. Holy shit. That's a stark. That's a very powerful. It pretty much lays it out. Like it's all on you. You know, I mean, we're all going to go through some difficult stuff. But that kind of sums it up, right?

Yeah. I just, I think it's so dangerous to measure yourself against other people, especially on mediums like social media where you don't actually get to see the person. I've had plenty of people who will reach out like, oh, I want to start a podcast. And I want to do it. I want to be the next Joe Rogo. I'm like, oh. Or, hey, you know, podcasting looks like something that you can make money doing.

You know, you do ads. You know, how much money do you make? I'm like, listen, you're not, you're missing the point. Like, I don't do this for the ads. I actually turned down ads for over a year because I thought I'd be selling out by doing that and diluting the product. And then I realize, well, I can buy better microphones if I actually make some money at this thing or better cameras. So they miss the years that it takes to get to that point. They miss the work and they focus on the wavetop.

And I don't know. I think people would be better to look less left and right at other people and just kind of more down at their own. path and make sure that they're making progress on it. Well, the irony of that, too, is if you look at Joe Rogan, which they'll never be another one, people, give it up. There'll never be another one. And here's a guy who just said, I'm going to do this for the right reasons. I'm going to own it all.

It's like the opposite of the old recording artists who signed away all their rights to their material. Like, Rogan's like, keep it. Like, he's been approached by everyone. Let me buy a percentage of your, and you know what it got him? It got him $100 million deal with Spotify. You just go do it, and we're just going to give you a platform. We're not going to own it.

It's a licensing deal. And I'm not saying that to motivate people, but it's like sometimes if you do it for the right reason. And another thing I'm a fan of which what you were saying resonated with me was someone said, Kurt Vonnegut said this. I don't know if he said it's just one of these bullshit internet quotes. But it was talking about when he was a child and he met someone who was exceptional and whatever the field was. And the guy's like, tell me about you. I do art and I do little music. That's amazing.

You do all these things. He's like, yeah, but I'm not good at it. I'm not great at any of them. And he's like, well, you don't need to be. And I like the idea, especially getting older in life that, you know, fuck everybody else. Like, if I want to do something that makes me happy, why do I care? Like, I grew up playing drums. I played in a band throughout college.

I played with Simon a few times when we were at CNN. And I'm a total hack on the guitar. When I was in the Congo for six months, we found this local. guy who made handmade guitars for 15 bucks, and I play that thing every day. And at the end of the six months, I suck a little less than when I started, right? And I'm an even worse singer, and I love it.

And I don't care what anybody thinks. And I think there's very little space for that in where we live and with social media, right? But it's just like- Oh, especially on social media. Do the things that make you happy for the right reasons. And don't compare your guitar playing like Carlos Santana.

Right. Because everybody sucks in comparison or another great guitar player. I just know he rips on the guitar. So it's a dangerous world where you spend more time looking at others instead of yourself. Speaking of things that we love, tell me how you got into snowboarding. How did I get into snowboarding? And splitboarding in particular. So splitboarding came after traditional snowboarding.

And for people listening, splitboarding is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a board that split in half. the technology I have been told has leaps and bounds in comparison to what it used to be. I have some friends now were like, yeah, my first splitboard, that was a hacksaw job. They literally would just, I mean, now they're, you know, you put them on the other side. They got bindings for them that can articulate. So they're super easy to, to, so it's basically cross-country skis that you turn back into a snowboard, but we'll get to that. The first time I ever got on a snowboard was on my very first trip to Alaska for cold weather training.

and I had never been on one. I didn't have a helmet. It was on ice. I immediately got turned around backwards and knocked myself unconscious. Whoa. And then didn't touch it for 10 years. I was like, kick the thing off my feet. It went down the hill.

Like this is trash. This sucks. And when we came up here in 2016, my brother-in-law was up here. And we started watching the Jones trilogy, deeper, further, higher. Which, if people haven't watched that trilogy, it's amazing.

actually a guest on the podcast, couldn't have been cooler, had me to his house down in just west of Reno. But awesome dudes. So we're watching it. It was like, God damn it, we need to go try at this. So we went up to the local Mountain Blacktail Mountain and rented a snowboard. And my brother-in-law Jason was, you know, heel edge, like scooting down a little bit, toe-edge, scooting down. And then, of course, linking the heel edge and toe-edge, not the easiest thing to do you would think. And just started. And so I'm almost. my fourth season. This was my fourth season. About two seasons into it, the buddy who got me into Jiu-Jitsu, he is a local sheriff, and he rips on a board. And he was talking about

splits. So I picked up a split on his recommendation and have loved it. And it's cool because the mountain where I ski most, you'll see it when you go up north, or you've probably been out there, the Whitefish Mountain. Oh, yeah, I have. Used to be Big Mountain. That's what they used to call it. People still call it Big Mountain. There's some runs where you can literally, there's little beacon transponder there to make sure your stuff's working. You can zip right underneath it. And then it's maybe a five-minute skin at the bottom so you can get some awesome, I'm going to call it side country, not necessarily backcountry, but you're choosing your own path. You know, you can flatten out if you're not paying attention. But then a bunch of practice of breaking your board from

downhill riding to uphill skins on, and then you can scooch to a lift and do the thing again. So that's been cool. I've done a day of hella boarding, which was amazing. I took my split on that just in case I got bottomed out somewhere. And I've done a day of cat, but it is, I mean, again, it's another one. How do you even describe it? I mean, it's tough. Yeah, it's about my favorite thing in life. And it's funny, my life is set up in such a weird way because I'm gone and then I'm back.

And I felt kind of an opening with this COVID and everyone's just kind of struggling. You know, oh, my kids are miserable and trying to do this Zoom thing and I'm miserable. and my wife is pretty cool and just rolls with it. And it's like, well, we've got this lot. We're going to build a house at some point in Atlanta. So we sold the house we were in. And I'm like, well, let's move to Utah for the winter. And normally I'll get in, you know, 10 days a year.

And now I've got 50. Which is awesome. We're getting eight inches of snow tomorrow. And so I'm going to ride out the season. Last day at Powder Mountain where I goes, April 11th. And then I'm going to do backcountry stuff for nine more days. And this year I got my first splitboard, a Jones splitboard. I was super excited to see.

Is there any other kinds? Jeremy Jones on your podcast. He was the coolest dude, too. But I think, you know, I know you grew up in California, too. There was a book that I loved called Barbarian Days, William Finnegan. He's a guy who writes serious books for the New Yorker, but his passion, he's like in the 60s now, has always been surfing. And so even when he's not in, like, Mozambique or whatever, he's chasing waves around the world. And I think anyone who's into something like that can relate to it.

And I think, you know, during these times when everyone's kind of, you know, hunkered down, it's just like, I don't know, man, do you go there and these mountains are open? And it's been, it's been a good reset. And I don't want to go back to how it was. It's been a good reset for me, too. And I totally can understand how what we're saying to some people. They're like, fuck you, man. I live in an apartment in New York. New York, I'm like, I get it.

I totally get that. And I wish that everybody had, I can split board out of my house. I can skin and do, I mean, they're not, we're not talking like, double black diamonds or anything that's crazy, but I can get that walking from my house. And I understand that that's limited for some people. But what I can tell people, if you have the opportunity, seize it. Because the reset for me to, like we were talking about before we started recording. And I actually, you know, Fridays I'll do Q&A. And somebody was asking me, I think this last Friday about 2020. And, you know, can it, can the, basically the question was,

I had the best year of my life. Can we take these things into 2021 and beyond? And my answer to that is yes, because like I was saying before we started, you don't have any control over what happens to you largely, but you can control how you receive it. You know, at the end of a year of a pandemic, you could be in the single best shape of your life, the healthiest place you've ever been, both physically and mentally. You could have done what you did where you're like, you know what, I don't like living where we live. So we take our family and you're now teaching your kids through experiences as opposed to through Zoom. I'm not saying those options are available to everybody because I do get the differences in situations. But if it's an option for you, I can't recommend.

enough people take it because 2020, you know, there's some things in my life that were horrendous divorce being the top of that list and everything that goes along with that. But at the same time, I am in such a better place mentally and who I think I am as a person, physically, you know, the physical activities that I've done, how rewarding they are. Like it's 2020, the end of it, and the beginning of 2021 are an off ramp to where I want to go. I don't feel like I missed anything. or fell behind it all. So, yeah, get out in the mountains. It's hard to describe.

It is. And one of the joys of my life has been teaching my kids, and they're six and eight. And last year I came out early with my boy, and he really got a taste for it. And that, of course, pissed off my daughter who's like, well, if he's okay at it, I don't want to do it. And so, you know, we were here, and we slowly got into it, and I kept it fun. and it's all back edge. That's the key with kids. It's got to be fun.

It's the toe edge. And just this past week when it all comes together and they're doing turns. I was just like, okay. You know, I might screw up a lot of things, but it's like, I'll stuff got this. Wait till the next season. They're just going to be day one. They're going to destroy me probably.

Somehow, day one, they'll be 50% better even though they hadn't done the activity. And then you're going to be, hey, dad, do you mind if it's just like me and my sister who would go ride because you kind of suck and we're tired of waiting on you. So you'll be rendered. irrelevant really really what one of the great things too is is once you start doing things that are a little outside of the the ordinary other people are attracted to it who are of the same mind you're like oh yeah there are a lot of us who think this same way like I had a couple of friends I was like oh hey there's this crazy place in Silverton Colorado you know this it's it's all double

black diamond they've got an old two-seater chairlift and a helicopter I'm like you guys want to go oh you know most of them are like no and two my guys are like yeah Yes, let's, you know, we spent a day on the mountain in Utah, we jumped in my buddy's car, drove seven hours, crashed, spent seven hours getting dropped off by helicopter at like 13,000 feet. It was amazing. Got, you know, back in the car and drove back to Utah, hit those mountains the next day, and it's just like, that seems like, oh, who has the opportunity to do that?

I can't tell you how many people I talk to who turned that down. Well, they're coming up with reasons not to do it. Another friend of mine, I remember, because I've been doing this guy's trip to Utah for 10 or 11 years, we go out, we rent a big house, and one of my buddies was just, oh, I don't know how you do that. I'm like, because I'm a grown ass man. Like, why? Well, I don't know my, what the fuck. Yeah. You know? See, I mean, that's another one, you know, sitting on the deathbed. I really like what you said about meeting the person you could have become. Another one, you know, looking at, you had to list out all the things you had the opportunity to do that you passed up on. I don't, I know, I, I know I get one lap around the track. That lap is going to be fucking full. The cup, I want to go out with the cup spilling over in the bank account at zero. Yeah, I love it. That reminds me. I forget who was. Maybe May West or someone who said, you know, you only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. Yeah. Right? I'm going to throw out one more quotes as I'll be like the cheesy quote

guy. No, I like, they're good so far. I know. It's like, I got a handful of them that, but they resonate with you. Like I don't go in search of these things, but if I hear something, it's like, that one truly haunts me, I'm like, oh, sure. shit it's kind of all on me it's not oh you know and another one i love and and i'll i'll mention it on facebook from time to time it's just like was a carrowack quote from on the road it's just like be in love with your life every minute of it there's a lot of people out there who are not yeah and it sucks i know it i know it and i love you know it's like especially people you know i i see some i don't know maybe maybe mentally i'm in a different place because half the year i'm like

on another planet seeing insane shit on a daily basis and then I come back here and it's just like you need to find your thing right for climbers you know it's like hashtag feed the rat and I think it's the same thing with like snowboarding right like it's like if you don't have that thing whatever it is maybe it's music snowboarding whatever then you might wind up in a pretty dark place with no escape. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I don't know if I've been that dark and deep into it, but I can understand how people get there.

And I hope they realize that the solution to getting out of it, it's not a thing. It's something that you have to do. Like it'll never be fulfilled by that next, hey, I need to get this and then I'm going to be happy. You have to go and actually change who you are and your behavior patterns, which I don't know if there's anything more difficult. Yeah.

Tell me about UNICEF, because you have been, all over the place. It's been my kind of, the past 17 years, and I'm a consultant, so they just hire me for assignments. I still do some more traditional. Media type assignments, correct? Media assignments. So photography, short films, and I do a lot of media appearances because I'll drop into places where nobody else is.

And so I've got friends at CNN, and they're like, hey, do you want to come in and talk about who you've met and what's going on? you know earthquakes uh ethnic cleansing tsunamis poverty armed conflicts whatever it might be and and the mission even you know a lot of people might be like oh i'm against the u.n well they're they're an independent agency and they don't get mandatory dues from anybody it's all voluntary contributions and their mission is to improve the lives of children in danger or in vulnerable situations around the world. And so one of the ways that manifests itself,

say you're someplace in Africa and there's a warlord who controls some area, well, they might be, well, I'm not going to let in the UN peacekeepers, the blue helmets or whatever, but it's just like, ah, UNICEF, they built a school and they're teaching our kids how to read or whatever. So it's one of these, you know, for lack of a better term, kind of feel good missions.

Like that's what kind of hooked me. Well, adventure was one. My boy, Steve Cassidy, like, I'm going to sing you around the world. and you're going to do stories about helping kids in dangerous situations. I'm like, well, that sounds great. And so it's been probably one of the,

kind of the great adventure, the great adventure of my life in a way, because I've gone to places that I would never otherwise get to go in a safest way. A friend of mine is just like, I was telling him some of what was happening in Afghanistan. He's like, is that safe?

And I'm like, oh, it's totally safe. He's like, did you just use the word, safest? Yes, I did appropriately as well. Right. So, you know, it's been over 100 countries, you know, places like Sudan and Afghanistan. I went to Haiti 50 times after the earthquake. I still have a motorcycle there.

What was that like? Wow, it was interesting because it's one of these situations, too, where you can relate to this, I'm sure. There's dangerous and what appears dangerous. So a year before the earthquake, I'd done a trip with the executive director of UNICEF where, you know, We showed up and we got in a helicopter and there's this amazing doctor, Dr. Paul Farmer, who started this amazing free hospital on the plateau in central Haiti. And so we did this story. And then we were going out for dinner and there was, you know, power outages and violence

and someone had shot at a UN vehicle and it was like, whoa, like this is a little too much. And Haiti has emerged. So fast forward to the earthquake and I just started going there over and over and over. like I said 50 times had a house had an apartment still have the motorcycle and I love Haiti it's one of the most fascinating it's got a wider dynamic range than than other countries people always ask me oh you know like what's what's your favorite country I think if I had to say a place it would be Haiti and it's it's one of these these cases too where you know even when someone's like oh it's a shithole well you know what let me tell you something about Haiti Haiti is this the only country in the

history of the world where an oppressed people, these, you know, Afro-Caribbean slaves, rose up against their oppressor and fought them, beat them, and got their own freedom, right? And one of the reasons they're in a tough spot now is because France demanded reparations. Ironically, that former slaves pay them. And the United States helped make that possible because slavery still existed in the U.S. at the time. And so they didn't want to set a precedent. Like, let's make it really difficult for these guys. And that carries over to today. Is it a screwed up place?

Without a doubt. But it's fascinating. And I love the spirit of the Haitians. And one of my kind of side projects I've been trying to make this kind of gangster film set in Haiti. I'll send you a link. I made a half hour short. One of my best friends, Jean-Pierre Vertus,

he's this actor-model in Hollywood. That is such a fucking awesome name. I don't want to have a name like Jean-Bierre-Vertuz. He's a badass. He's Haitian. And I mean, he's hilarious. He's obviously very handsome

for his modeling work. I remember I was with my kids in Target and he was up there. Oh, there he is in this family. And then he'll do like cool shit. Actually, funny enough, he just sent me, I'm going to have to show you a picture of this. He was hired to, there's some Navy SEAL series

and he was hired as a West African warlord. Probably was SEAL team on CBS. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Which I don't want people to watch. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so this is his vehicle, you know. Yeah. But so he's one of the amazing Haitians that I've met.

You know, we shot this, this film there. And, I mean, everything in Haiti from the music and the art to voodoo. There's my favorite neighborhood in the entire world. It's a slum called Jaluzzi, which is like jealousy. And the idea, whether it's true or not, I'm not sure, but it's a great story, nevertheless, is it's a slum, poverty, obviously, juxtaposed with the rich, section of town, Patwinville. That's the jealousy. And it's, it's, it's over on a hillside. So it's basically a cliff of cement shacks. And I stay at a guesthouse next to it. And one of my friends,

a guy named Asda, he's, he's my, my, my entry point. So I'm with him and it's like, oh, he's, you know, the blonde, the white guy. He's okay, you know, because he's with Asda. And man, we'll spend hours hiking in there and we do filming in there. And so, I mean, everything about hate, it's one of those places. And it's funny. because we bonded a lot of the people that I worked with over the years working there. Anyone who's worked there and really kind of done a deep dive, it's just kind of, you look at each other

and you can recognize that. So it's a special place and even just the spirit of the Haitians. And I remember there came a point where I was actually, early on, we were all camped out and tense. I got fucking malaria there right after the earthquake. How many times have you had malaria? I've actually just had it once. Really?

It's funny, most people don't get it in Haiti. Like, it's a weird place to get it, but I think someone from somewhere else brought it there. And so I was there, camped out. And a friend of mine, Shazana Nourani, who's this amazing photographer from Bangladesh. I'd see him at night. Like, when we're just all editing our stuff, and he'd slip off quietly. And he was paying a guy to take him out on a motorcycle. And I'm like, what are you doing, man?

He's like, I'm not getting what I need during the day. It's like, it's all about light. and I'm like, well, is UNICEF paying for that? He's like, no, but I get, you know, a little money for food. So I live and die by the quality of my work. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I can do that, right? And then when, and I, I know how to ride a motorcycle. I'm going to buy a motorcycle, this $1,000 Chinese motorcycle.

And then another friend of mine is like, oh, there's this Pimsler program. You can learn Creel. I can learn Creel. And, you know, I was always a hack at it, but I remember my friend Azte, I pay him to tutor me, the guy who lives in Jaluzzi. And he's like, okay, this is an important phrase. He's like, it's going to save you. He's like, I'm like, okay, I'm all ears.

He's like, people are always talking about you. You know, you're walking around. They're talking about this guy. Who's this guy, you know, with the cargo pants and the shades and the motorcycle? And they think you don't know shit about Haiti. He's like, if you hear him talking, if you think they're talking about you, turn to him and look at him with attitude and say, keep a geysa. Like, what's up?

what's going? What is this? And then keep walking because they're going to follow up questions. But if you say, nobody knows that unless they're Haitian. They're going to think, oh, this guy knows what's up.

Man, I must use that a dozen times. And just keep walking. Then they'll follow up with something. But it's like, oh, shit. Yeah, because I mean, there was a couple times, you know,

when you kind of get targeted by some of these guys, right? And it's just like, you got to just kind of stay one step ahead and getting back to an earlier conversation we had. I like to spend time in the community and part of it too, it's approaching a situation with total humility. I'm a guest here. Like, it doesn't matter what I have in my bank account or what my status might be in the U.S.

like, I'm on your turf and I want to know about your life. I want to hear about your family. I want to hear about your kids. I want to hear about your parents. I want to break bread with you, right? let's eat together and I do that to connect with them

but one of the benefits is when shit turns sideways quite often you've got a little bit of protection from oh this guy's all right you got allies you got allies it's like oh you know outside of UNICEF like he came and they they provided

whatever laptop for the community or they got a guitar for the little guy who was rapping you know and these little things and it's like there's not enough of that in the world and it takes so little right just going out and and listening to people like i remember there was a i think it was like an op-ed in the new york times where someone it was with a u.n agency too this woman wrote an op-ed piece about how horrible experience in Haiti was and i'm like you lived in a compound you never got outside of your your land crews are going to and from the office.

I mean, I know as a woman there are other challenges, but I know this French journalist who's been there, oh my God, for 10 or 15 years, and she's fluent in Creole and she's fearless. And she's got a network of people. It's like, it can be done. But just talking about this experience, and I was like, I can't relate to that.

Like, put yourself out there. And that's a good way, I think, to approach the world in this day and A, Let's not focus on our differences. And even then, it's funny with all this racial disharmony now, you know, I see a lot of white people in particular kind of overreacting. Like it's like, oh, you know, God, it's just like, we just shut up. Like, it's like, they're trying so hard to prove like, I'm colorblind. I don't see color.

And it's just like, you know, I've got a black friend. It's just like, just stop. Like, I take a different approach. You know, my wife happens to be African American. I see color. I appreciate culture. I like knowing the differences between Haitian American and a Jamaican American or someone. I remember in Atlanta, like the checkout person at the supermarket, I'm like,

where are you from? She's like Africa. I'm like, it's a big continent. Like I've been to 26 countries in Africa. Where are you from? And she's like, you know what? You're the first person who's ever asked that follow-up question. Right?

That blows my mind. Yeah. Right? Like, let's just take a little time to get to know people. and I don't know. I can't change much in the world, but at least in my little journey, I like to make those connections.

And I think that's been the single most rewarding part of my journey over the past 17 or 20 years or whatever. What was your experience like in Afghanistan? Afghanistan is a maddening place. And it's, as you know, and my experience is much different from your, like just, I don't know if I can even call it the periphery.

Like my last like three, literally like every single time I was there, there was the, it was the biggest explosion in Kabul. Like it was just getting progressively worse. Yeah. We were there. And then, and then even then, well, where are you going? Are you going to Mazar? Are you going to Kabul? Are you going to Jalalabad?

Like, I remember a week after I went there in the same car that I was in, my buddy Roger, his vehicle was shot at by some clowns who were trying to be ISIS, right? I mean, it was pretty low as far as threats, but it's just that kind of wild card. And there was so many insane situations, but kind of on the periphery. As far as my experience, I mean, I never had any real threats like that.

And in fact, my single best experience there, and maybe you can come back with me sometimes, sometime if you want, there's a place called Bamian. It's like the only safe province there because it's a distinct ethnicity. Funny enough, it's the place where the big Buddhist statues were blown up by the Taliban after 9-11. But they're so distinct, and they know when someone else is trying to come in.

So it's almost impossible for the Taliban or ISIS or any wannabes to establish a foothold. And I spent a week there following the story of a 16-year-old girl who never got the chance to go to school. and UNICEF started this beautiful program. It was an accelerated learning program for girls who were in their teens, maybe even 20, 21 years old, to acknowledge them as human beings and to give them as much learning

in as short a period as possible. And she was part of that program and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. I was interviewing her and she said I was 16. and when it clicked what the letters meant and putting the words together where I could just understand, you know, these

what just seemed like squiggles for 16 years of my life. She's like, I cried. And so that was my experience. And I want you to go with me sometime because I've been trying to go snowboarding there, the mountains surrounding. Now you have me very interested. Bamian.

And there was a precedent too. Some Australians went there like 10 years ago and did a documentary on snowboarding there. And there have been a few instances of the locals. Like once a year they were doing like a ski event and trying to get someone from the local populace to make it to the Olympics. I mean, the mountains are stellar. And I had this insane experience where I saw these snow cat mountains. And I'm like, I need to climb these mountains. And I had a free day.

I remember I was at this compound. I'm not going to say who I was working for at the time. This is, and, and I'm like, I'm going to go out and hike around in the hills. There was a little hill behind us and then this huge, you know, it was at 5,000 meters or whatever peak behind us. You know, and I'm like, I'm going to climb that. I left at 12 o'clock and at 6.20 I'm on top of this thing. I got rained on, snowed on, sleet it on. The last hour and a half was over the snow.

I'll send you a link to it. I actually had my drone and I sent it out and back. I just kind of ski down in my shoes and and I was like oh man curfews at like 10 o'clock fuck I'm not gonna make it and then I was like I'm gonna take a shortcut horrible idea so I'm like because I yeah I need to make it back in time so I take a different route I'm crashing through farms like people are coming out of their huts but it's it's a safe place like I knew that yeah like other people's oh that's so dang I knew these people right like this is the only safe place and people are looking at me like and I'm

crashing through here and I'm like, I just need to make it to that road. I get to the road, there's no cars. And so get out to the highway. I've got 15 minutes to get back. And there are streetlights every couple hundred yards. And I'm just like, this might seem insane, but I'm going to hitchhike. And I camped under a light and I stuck out my thumb. I'm like, I don't even, maybe that means fuck you.

Maybe it means I need a ride, but whatever. Anyway, one car drives by. Next car goes, hits the brakes. I'm like, this is either going to be horrific. Or I'm going to make a curfew. Or I'm going to make curfew. These guys turned around. They rolled down the window.

I'm like, hey, what's going on? And there's like, one of them spoke English. He's like, what are you doing? I'm out of that mountain. I climbed. I need to get back. Do you know where this base is? And he's like, no.

I'm like, well, give me a ride to the, let's go to the airport. And then I can show you and gave me a ride. And we got back there close to it. And I'm like, thanks. And I go. and I turned the corner to get to the base and it's all armed fortresses, right? But there was an Afghan base next to it

and there was some like illiterate guard and I was holding up my badge and he's like, he's like shoving his AK in my face. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I backed up and I called my guy. I'm like, hey, look at your watch. 957. I'm here.

He's like, I just honked your horn. I'm like, I'm on foot. What do you mean you're on foot? I went hiking and he's like, Jesus, great. And so he can. So he came out, calm the guy down, walked in, and it played out. I mean, it sounds kind of crazy.

I mean, you're sitting here. I'm sitting here. But anyway, that's Bombion. The mountains are incredible. I'll send you a link to that drone footage. Okay. Yeah. How much of the rest of Afghanistan did you get to see?

Let's see I did it. Several trips to Mazar, spent, you know, some time in Baumian, Jalalabad, a lot of things. The Panshire Valley is amazing. Yeah. Right. And just the history and just even the, you know, the wreck tanks and. And same stuff. They're doing, I don't want to say, well, you might be doing documentary stuff, but it's all media-based.

All media-based. And what I appreciate about what I do, there's no spin. Like, for me, the purest story is like, get out of the way. I mean, there might be the context. Sometimes there's a program that's helping them. Sometimes there's not. But what I'm interested in, and I think what resonates with people is if I can watch, away from your photograph or a short film knowing a face and a name and what their story is,

then I feel like I've done my job. And more importantly, I've done them right. I've shown them the respect like, what has happened to you matters. And nowhere was that more profound than covering the Rohingya ethnic cleansing. And when that all went down, I'd actually been working in Bangladesh for several years, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, and so we had gone to some of these refugee camps. It existed, and the same stories existed before what really went down, what really got horrific when the Burmese soldiers were torching the villages and systematically raping and killing families. It escalated and being there for months on end and going into these camps and hearing these stories like it's like wow the world needs to know what's happening and it was

just undeniable i mean just like literally i mean the details over and over and i remember one day i we got we got this guy whose whose village had been torched and i'm like can you can you show me where your village is he's like yeah yeah so he got with us and we waited into the river and we got up to the border with Myanmar and he pointed it's like there's where it is and we could in the distance see you Burmese jeeps driving around and as soon as one of them drove past I'm like okay look at my screen show me where where it is we fired up my drone and it it blew my mind and we sent it up and sent it over and showed his torched village like he's like that was my hut right and that I mean I it still just kind of leaves me speechless to this day I mean that's where it all went

down regardless of what anyone's trying to spin it in a particular way like that's where I grew up that's where I lived they burned our place to the ground they killed my family and you just saw it in real time yeah and there was another story of a woman I'll call her Rochelle you know but I met her she was 19 she was part of this this women's group UNICEF set up this this this kind of of club for women who'd been abused, usually sexually, and who'd had family members killed, just so they could kind of, you know, talk about their experience and not have to bottle it up. And so, I mean, when I saw her, she had, and it was months later, she had, she had deep black eyes and, and the blood vessels in her eyes had been burst.

And, I mean, this was a couple months after the fact, still. Wow. So she'd been smashed in the face with the butts of rifles. She had four children, and the soldiers raped her. They took her, her youngest son, threw him in the air, and speared him with a machete. And, I mean, she was a wreck, as he would expect. And so, you know, from time to time,

I spent so much time there, I'd check on her. And it's, I almost feel bad that it took so little to make a difference to her, where she would come to me and she said, you know what, like, I appreciate you hearing my story, and not judging and just giving me a platform to share what happened to me. I want to take you back, you know, to my little plastic and bamboo hut and introduce you to my husband as someone who acknowledges what I'm going through.

And I was just like, whoa. And so she brought me back and I met her husband. I mean, for someone, you know, a Muslim woman to bring, you know, a foreigner there and say, hey, it's a big deal. You know, this guy's part of an effort to acknowledge what happened, to not shy. away from it to say, hey, this happened, it was wrong. What do you need moving forward? Do you need a space where you can talk about what happened? Do you need a way to get food for your kids, to educate your kids? And I followed up with her a couple more times. And right before my final assignment

there, I went and talked to her and her husband had like a respiratory infection in his lungs. And I'm like, hey, if you go to this, you know, MSF hospital, they'll treat him and helped her with a little so he could get some antibiotics. And I was almost embarrassed that she told me this. She pulled me aside and she said, Thomas, I will never forget your generosity. She's like on my last day on earth, I will remember your kindness. And I had done so little. Yeah.

Right? So little. Which, of course, what does that say? That says how little is being done by the world at large? Like, where is our huge? humanity. This is a mother, you know, forget the color of her skin, where she might pray. Here is a human being with children, worst possible things imaginable have been done to her. Let's try to make her situation a little bit better. Yeah. Then that shit's going on in the world right now.

And another story there, which is different and not as horrific. but that moved me just as much in a different kind of way. So my last few days there, I was with one of my translators, and we were just kind of walking around the camps, just kind of checking on people who's kind of going through and processing the whole experience over a couple of years. And I'm like, do you hear that? Like, there's somebody speaking in English, you know,

like maybe a teenage kid, but like, you know, see spot run, see, you know, like in really basic. I'm like, let's find out what that is, because none of the Rohingyas speak English. It's just not part of their world. And so we tracked down this boy. Muhammad was his name. He was sitting in a doorway,

and he had a battered textbook for like a third grader. And he was just going over and over reading it. And he said, what are you doing? He's like, I am trying, you know, to teach myself English. You know, years ago, my brother wound up in the United States. And he's like, I don't have a school. I don't have any money. I don't have anything to do.

He lives in this plastic and bamboo hut with a dirt floor. He's like, all I want to do is learn English. And this is the only book that I have in English and I can't find anywhere else. And I was like, wow. And I got back to our hotel that night and I said to some of my friends, I'm like, hey, let's come up with some books for this guy.

And this wonderful French woman, Manuel, went to the local market and she came back with three books. An English textbook, the alchemist. and another book ironically called The Hunger, kind of a novel. And she wrapped them up beautifully. And we went back to Muhammad the day before I left.

And we said, we have something for you. And it was such a beautiful moment. I said, first of all, and I said this in front of his family. I said, you are amazing. What you are doing, your journey to self-betterment is so insane.

inspiring. You have been given so little and you were trying so hard. I am humbled and inspired and I want just to acknowledge that you can do this and if you keep at it, good things will happen. And this is a small token, but here. And I gave him this package and he opened it up. And it was like I handed him bars of gold. Like the way that he touched the books. And I said, can I take your picture with the books? just give me a couple minutes. And he went back in and he was gone for three or four minutes finding his best shirt. Like he was so proud and beaming.

And again, what did it take? It took listening and acknowledging the humanity of someone trying to improve their situation and another friend buying three books, which cost almost nothing, right? Yeah. And that, that, that motivates me, right? Like, just to go out there.

I mean, the world's a crazy place, but like, come on. Let's, let's, let's be civilized. Let's show a little empathy. Let's show a little humanity. You know, have modest expectations, but just, but keep at it. Yeah. What was your experience like in the Congo? Oh, man.

The Congo, so I've been working primarily in the Congo for the past three years. And I'd done a quick trip there many years ago, but just kind of these windshield tours where we actually met with the presidents of like Rwanda and the Congo and just a quick trip through there. And so my first trip there post sort of the windshield tour was Ebola, right? And I was like, oh, fuck, man. Like here we go. Like you're there to document what was happening? To document Ebola. Fuck.

Right, right. And it was a deep fucking dive. I hope you used a long lens. Man, yeah. And it was like, here we go. I mean, it's kind of like, when you do the embedded thing, people like, oh, you know, weren't you afraid? It's like, you know, I don't know if there's a parallel in the military or not, but it's just kind of like, you need to decide. Am I going to do this and do it unapologetically and just go in?

and if I'm not willing to accept the risks, then I'm just going to step back. And it's just like, I wrestled with it. In fact, one of the few assignments I turned down, years earlier, there was the outbreak in West Africa, and I got a call from an organization. Like, hey, we want to send you there for two months? And I'm like, okay, okay, chill.

Three questions. What are you going to do to inform me of the day? to protect me. What are you going to do if I get it? What are you going to do if I die for my family? There was silence. I'm like, this conversation is over. That is not the correct response. That is not the correct response. It was one of the few assignments. I'm like, not going to do it. And I had good answers to those questions. And so, again, I mean, it's terrifying. You don't want to get Ebola. What measures did you use to protect yourself? The basics, washing your hands constantly, not being in place.

And we'd go out on stories following, you talk about the worst job in the world, like the disinfection teams that go when someone gets Ebola and dies, and they've got to go clean their house and burn their mattresses. And I'm not going in the house, but I'm going up with them. Yeah. So it's funny. I did three Ebola assignments, because I was actually. actually there even doing COVID stuff. And I did a story on the end of the latest Ebola outbreak in the Congo, and it's endemic in the Congo.

So fast forward during the same trip, and it broke out again in the western part of the country. So it's like, it's not going anywhere. But the evolution of protection, they had started to develop some vaccines in West Africa, but they hadn't dialed in the strength. And some of the vaccines were even killing people. Like they, oh, this is too strong. So they dialed it back. I'm like, okay, the data says that this is safe.

And so I got the Ebola vaccine. And you try to be smart about what you expose yourself to. And those stories, you know, you talk about feeling like you're on another planet. There were wards where mothers and their children would be separated. So say a mother contracts it, but has not yet. that passed it on to her children. And so they're being treated and there are some new treatment protocols

where if you jump on it, there's a better chance than not that you're gonna survive it. You at least have a chance. You at least have a chance, better than a chance, but you've gotta jump on it. And the problem is with a lot of these places, especially if you're in some rural outpost

where the people are illiterate and there are a lot of superstitions, you know, it's like, oh, the doctors are spreading it. Oh my God, if you're delaying by days, you're done. Yeah. And even some of the practices, it's just like, oh, we've got to, you know, our patriarch has died and we've got to touch him. Well, that's how it was really spreading.

And so one of the facilities where I spent a lot of time, these women would be behind glass and they were fighting it and I would photograph and film the interactions. They would bring their children and connect through the glass. And you're still not sure. I mean, they've been separated from their children. Maybe their spouse had died from it. And it was like, wow. And it's such a terrifying, scary disease,

especially, you know, the local populations. Yeah. Because it's just like, oh, you're the one who's spreading it, right? So, I mean, those things, if you get that kind of mob mentality and you're out there, you know, unprotected, it's not a good place to be. So anyway, to answer your earlier question,

and it's been sort of like Haiti in a way. I mean, Eastern Congo is truly one of the most fascinating, terrifying places on earth, largely lawless. I mean, there's been nonstop armed conflict. They're different groups. I mean, there are places that we can't go, but even places where you can go. You know, there's one spot that we went to. I think the Italian ambassador was shot and killed a few weeks back.

I mean, this stuff happens all the time. You really have to have up-to-date security reports. It's a largely porous border. It's one of the poorest countries on Earth, but it's also one of the richest countries on Earth as far as mineral riches. My next assignment, I'm supposed to go there in a few weeks. I'm actually just waiting on a visa.

I'm going to go back there for a couple months visiting these mines. What are they mining? Cobalt. Interesting. So, cell phones, laptops, Tesla cars, right? It's this rare, precious metal used in all. all the shit that people don't think about,

where does this come from? Yeah. Well, somebody is mining that and the conditions are usually dangerous. They're not OSHA approved. Right, right. In fact, one of my most fascinating trips in the Congo was we went to the diamond mining region

and you think it's going to be, oh, it's going to be, you know, like industrialized diamond mining and it's just like the Old West, right? No shit. You go down and every couple hundred yards, there'd be like people. kids digging deep into the earth and and I remember I took a picture of this this this guy was like I don't know 1920 years old he had a threadbare t-shirt he'd been out there two months

hadn't found anything but he's just there he's like spiking spearing fish from the river they look like piranha something they're like teet jagged teeth and he's just like roll the dice like I'm just trying to get by to get like that that big break And then they'll get some diamonds and then they'll go to the merchant. And I'm sure they're making a fraction of what they would be worth anywhere else. But it was the dream, right, was inspiring so many people. Like every couple hundred yards, there'd be one of these outposts. It would be a handful of people.

You know, they build a little lean-to with the trees. And they're just trying to make it to get to diamonds or whatever. Yeah. But that's tough to wrap your head around. I know. I'm sitting here listening to talk about this stuff and it's like, fuck. What's fascinating too, I mean, the Ebola was pretty scary, but then you meet such inspiring people.

I remember I did a story we went into, there was a little boy who nobody expected to make it. They're like, this guy's not going to make it. And he had a caregiver who had survived Ebola. So it was believe he couldn't get it again. There might be some exceptions to that, but it's kind of like COVID, right? And so he was going in there, you know, without the crazy protection and meeting with this boy every day. And this boy, five or six years old, malnourished, just barely hanging on.

And he would read to the boy and he would look at him and he was like, you can do this. You can get through this. Like hang on. eat you got to eat and he's just day after day after day and he made it and it was just so beautiful to see that

and there's an army of these volunteers and they almost to a person said the same thing I'm like why are you doing this like you got through this you often times lost a lot of family members and you're in the thick of it like we think you're largely protected against it but you're

volunteering you might get a minor stipend but it's like day after day And there it is like, somebody saved me. I want to be there to help somebody else. And I remember, I'll share this picture with you too. I arranged a reunion between the boy and his caregiver. And it was just so beautiful to see this boy who was just like, he could barely stay awake and to hear his laugh.

And he was kind of chubby at that point, which was such a beautiful thing. I'm like, oh, man, right? Because it was so malnourished and you're just thinking in your head, oh, this kid is so skinny. Well, he was skinny because he wasn't eating because he was like this close to death. And so like Haiti, it's such an inspiring place. Scary with the conflict and, you know, the side deals.

There was a documentary done too that even talked about some of the distinctions between the various military units where it's almost kind of like a franchise. Like it's like they're not all waving the same flag. They might have deals with the local warlords and, you know, they've got, you know, follow the money, right? Like maybe some of this stuff is going to Rwanda, Burundia. Nobody knows. We're at a place, and this old town, this great Swiss guy who'd been there for decades was just like, look at the map. He's like, you can't drive from the east to Kinshasa. Like, it's so difficult, and that's by design, right?

Like, it's like there are places that are not on maps, right? You don't know what's going on. And if you think you know what's going on, you don't know what's going on. Right? I know what I don't know, right? Do they provide security for you? And all these places I'm thinking, am like, are you out here, like,

doing this stuff by yourself, or is UNICEF providing you at least some element of security to go with? No, there are places where if it's hot, we're going to have armed escorts. Yeah. Right? And sometimes we're not allowed to go certain places. But, no, there were a lot of stretches

where it's just like, oh, we're going to, you know, we're making a once daily trip. We're going to have, you know, we're going to have a Jeep with guys with guns in the front and one in back. And yeah. So whenever that's the case, but you also have to be aware, you know, there's stuff that goes down, right? Yeah. Sometimes, too, I don't think there's any, like we were reporting in a slum and someone threw a rock and hit me in the head. Right?

Like, I mean, it didn't do much, but. Could have. It could have. Yeah. Right. And that's part of the deal. I mean, the same stuff can happen, you know, in the States, right? Maybe not as frequently.

But, okay, maybe not then. But the point is, you know, you take calculated risk. Like, I love those security guys, especially in Afghanistan. Like, some of those security briefings are just fascinating slash terrifying. Yeah. But, I mean, Afghanistan, they're not messing around with it, right? Like, we're not, they're not sending us to Kandahar. And even when we went to Jalalabad,

It's just like every single day you're hearing explosions or gunfire, whatever, right? Yeah, J-bad and Abad to the north. Like, you're not messing around in those days. You're not messing around, right? And it's just like I was doing a story on this girl in a school, and there it is like, you got 10 minutes. We had like, two trucks full of soldiers. I'm like, oh, can I walk?

Nope. You're like, you're here, here, get what you need. We're getting out, and that's it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I can see that being the case. when you were there for specifically Ebola, did you have any issues getting back into the States

considering what your job was while you were there? I'm just curious based off the travel restrictions now and the testing for COVID. I mean, you're over there documenting Ebola, like you said, you took the precautions. Did you like self-quarantine your... I self-quarantined getting back. I was going to say.

Because, you know, especially, you know, with a spouse, right? If like one or two of you, you know, both of you go down and you've got two kids, Right. So, yeah, self-quarantied there. And funny enough, with like, COVID, the difficult part was just getting out of the country. When we got to the U.S., you know, because a friend of mine left at the same time, it was like super easy, but it was really, really difficult. Like I went there, it was just over a year ago. It was March and I was supposed to be there for two months. And then a friend of mine who hires me, we become friends over the years, worked in everywhere from Haiti to Afghanistan and Nepal. He's like, You want to stick around for a while? And so I stuck around for six months. I mean, worked every day for six months. And about month five was trying to figure out how to get out of there.

And, I mean, we had to keep, like, it was almost on a daily basis, the route would change. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's just like, oh, you know, finally it's like, okay, you're going to take, you know, this flight from Goma, and you've got to go to Ethiopia and you've got to provide these tests. And then once you're there, you'll be able to get home. but it was not easy. Playing strains on automobiles. Exactly. Exactly.

Where was it, I'm thinking back to the description you sent me yesterday. Where were you living in a garbage dump to document the young girl living in a refrigerator box? So this was really interesting. So during my six-month gap year, I like to call it, I was studying Spanish in the lovely town of Antioquo, Guatemala, and living with a Guatemalan family. There was a woman from Europe who said it at breakfast, She's like, oh, we went to this garbage dump on a tour in Guatemala City, in Guatemala City, Guate. It's like, it's, it's the Wild West.

Also, what is a garbage dump doing on a tour? Man, I don't know, because there were people living, it was like a little village of people living in cardboard boxes inside the garbage dump, getting plastic and metal and taking them. So it was this interesting kind of like little micro economy. And she's like, do you want to check it out? I'm like, I don't want to check it out. I said, I'm going to go back to work, and I'm going to come back in six months, and I'm going to spend a month there.

She's like, yeah, right. And that's exactly what I did. So I'm just like, I'm curious. I'm like, I want to go there and figure this out. And so I took a friend of mine from CNN who was really good at Spanish, and I'm just enough, I know just enough to be dangerous. Like, I've lived in places a long time. So he went with me, and we camped out,

he was there for a couple weeks and then he fucked off somewhere else and I stuck around and I remember the first day we went there I don't know maybe I mean I was I was I was I was young it's probably 29 at the time and we showed up and we just kind of walked the perimeter just to try to get a lay the land and we there was a house that was on the border so the front door was on the street the back door opened up to the dump and we turned the corner and this super intense 18 year old dude wearing a New York Yankees cap his name Cesar was like staring at us and he had like prison tattoos. Like MS-13 kind of shit.

And my boy, I won't mention his name. He's like, dude, we gotta get the fuck out of here. He's like, this isn't safe. I'm like, no, no, no. It's the opposite. He's our entry point. And so I did the talking, you know, maybe just, hey, how are you, you know? He's just like looking at me and I'm like, well, tell me about yourself.

He was kind of off guard. Yeah. totally floored him. He's like, oh, he's like, I was in a gang. I was in prison. Got the tattoos. But now I've got a wife, her name's Sarah, and I've got this little daughter. And I'm like, hey, will you take us on a tour of the dump? All right. It was kind of a novelty. And he took us around and introduced us to people. And then all of a sudden, oh, this guy's with Seesar. Like, he's okay, right? And I saw one little girl. She was tiny. They called her La Puga, which means the flea because she was so tiny.

I saw she was living in a refrigerator box but was like charming the socks off everybody. So I'd go back all the time. When I started, I became friends with her. I'd bring her cookies and started following her and doing her story. I met her and I met a family of four who would get the garbage from the luxury hotels at night and cook fish that was too rotten for the hotels

but fresh enough for them. Yeah. And had an amazing experience. there was a glue sniffer name Ernesto, right? And spent this amazing time. And I was outside of the garbage dump. Then my friend left. And so I literally was there all day, and I'd go at night sometimes.

And I don't know, it seems kind of foolish now, but I remember one night I left. It was like two in the morning. And I was thinking it was all clever. I'd have a hoodie and hide my camera. And this woman, I went back the next morning at like 7 a.m. And there was like police tape all over. It was the sickest thing I've seen up close. So this guy had been captured by a drug gang, shot in the face.

I still have a newspaper article in Spanish from the Guatemalan newspaper. Well, first they kicked in his teeth, kicked in his face, shot him in the face 23 times. It was like little hole punches, you know, he's like. Yeah, that's an overkill. And the back was just, you know. I mean, I crossed under the line and filmed it and went back. And this woman's just like, I'm like, why did this go down? She's like, right after you went past.

Oh, damn. Like they just dumped them. Yeah. Like it wasn't targeted. They were just looking for a place to dump him and what better place than a dump. And then they had spray painted his face too. You know, like this is our drug gang tag.

But it was, you know, I don't know. I think I was a little naive at the time, but it was a great experience. And it was funny. There was another group that was filming there. It's funny. It was one of these cases too. I spoke at my high school graduation a few years back

and the theme was was don't be afraid of failure and I consider this a glorious failure nothing happened with the documentary I used it because I had just filmed a frontline documentary on Hezbollah after 9-11 in Lebanon and so I tried to sell them on this dump documentary

and they're like this is amazing but it's not finished right you got a great start you have all these characters you're in there there was another group that was there a man and a woman and they drive in and their SUV and filmed her in the day and then leave but they were the first they finished it they were actually nominated for an

Oscar good for them that's how it works yep they finished it I didn't I took it back actually that was that was the order like I'd film that and that helped me get the Hezbollah documentary and then right after that came the war so it just it just it wasn't convenient for me um but this this man-woman team was kind of on their victory lap and I went to Georgia Tech where they were were doing a screening, a Q&A, and I sat in the front row, and it was such a bizarre experience, man. I raised my hand at the end of it all,

and I said, I know you. I said, do you remember a girl named La Pula? And they looked at each other like, do we tell them? Don't tell me she's dead. Fuck. They told me in front of the whole crowd.

No. She was raped. She went to the police Police did nothing She was raped again and murdered Andy when I tell you I have cried as much for her as I have cried for the loss of anybody It it hurts me to this day

She was such an inspiration so fearless And I went back actually and tried to track down some of these guys Saystar the former gang bang gang banger murdered Ernesto the glu-sniffer he hallucinated ran and at the bottom of the dump like all the liquids just accumulate into like a prehistoric oily mess and jumped in and drowned in the sludge right like literally three out of five of my main characters fuck dead like it's fucking rough but yeah hearing i still have a photo that i think about of the pool guy. And also I'll send you a link to this this half hour documentary. I'll send you a link

to it. I'm, I'm as proud of it as anything and nothing really became of it. Well, where can people see your work? Like all these stories that you're talking about in the documentation, is there a place where they can go and see this stuff? The best place would be to follow me on Facebook. Thomas Nybo, NYBO. I'm not a Twitter guy. I've got a Twitter account, but I almost never use it, but I document, I share most everything on Twitter. So even if it's posted somewhere else, or Facebook, Facebook, thank you. Even if if I do something for or the New York Times or UnisF or whatever, I usually have a link on Facebook.

And you can follow me. We don't have to be friends. You can follow me and I post, you can have to hear a lot of, read a lot of stuff about me and my kids lately since I've been home since September 1st or I'm about to leave. But that's where I put the stuff. I've got an Instagram account as well, Thomas Nybo.

So those two are kind of where I post things. It's at least a portal towards the stuff you're creating. Exactly. And that's probably the best place. because it's people say, oh, do you take a journal? I don't really do a journal, but I've been on Facebook a long time, and I document just about everywhere I've been on Facebook with different photos and posts,

and I try to make that connection. Like, here's a name, here's a face. Here's why this story is important and means something to me and might mean something to you. It seems like you've spent most of your career in what I think a lot of people would call the third world. If not the fourth. or the fifth, depending on where it's at.

Have you seen any, and I think this is probably largely a rhetorical question, but common themes or narratives in those places, almost regardless of geography, just the life in that station of life, for lack of a better term. That's a great question, and I might have an unexpected answer for you.

When I was in journalism school in Missoula, we did a project once a year on one of the Native American reservations, and it really sparked something within me because that's as close to the third world as I've been in the United States. And I was paired up with this wonderful journalist, John Youngbear, who just died recently. He was one of these amazing photographers. I think he was named College Photographer of the Year,

and he took me back with him to Lame Deer, east of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, east of Billings. And we did a couple trips there. I remember I did a story, I think his name was, Hadley Bigback, wow, I hadn't said that name in 20-something years. We pulled that shit right out of the evening. Man. And I remember because my lead story was talking about him dragging his Air Jordan shoes, you know, dragging his feet across the floor into the classroom.

And it was, it was actually that our theme was housing, and he was homeless. But I was so grateful to spend time with John. And he was a friend of mine. And anyone who spends time with people for, from the reservations like hardcore people who might not escape or assimilate 100%, you know, develop an appreciation for obviously their resiliency, but their sense of humor. I actually wrote this great, I'll share this with you

an obituary for the alumni magazine on John. And one of our fellow students said, described his sense of humor as he had a sense of humor with as few, few moving parts as possible. Right? Like he could give you a look or a couple words. Like he's not going to, and it's just like, yeah. Like you're just so profound.

And the time I spent with him and with Hadley who was homeless and he had impregnated a girl. So it was just like the perpetuation of this poverty. And so answering your question, one of the things, I appreciate about Haiti and the Congo or places in Central America, garbage jumps even like, I have so much fun. Like the celebration of life.

Like people who on a certain level just don't give a fuck about a lot of the stuff that bogs us down. Like they live in an insane life with dangers that most people can't begin to comprehend. You know, like, but the laughter you know, this family that's grilling the fish over the barrel and they think it's hilarious that they're offering me this fish taco and that I'm turning it down, right? Like, I mean, this fish, like, they're cooking it in a metal bucket and it's like flopped over

the side, like, like that place was insane, but it's just some of my most intense moments are in, you know, slums in Nairobi or Jaluzzi in Haiti, these neighborhoods. and and yeah I remember this this weird moment in in Haiti where I did something really stupid I showed up on a Friday and a buddy of mine from the states was living in the nice section of town and I had a house down in a really boring part of town as there's nothing like I'd often be without water without electricity I'm like I'm not going to spend the weekend here so I'm going to go up and get a place at this hotel and it was like a monsoon storm that kicked in. And there's no sewer system. So the streets fill with water. So I'm on my motorcycle racing up the hill. So dumb. I'm like, in my chimp brain, well, if I go faster, there'll be less rain. The danger might increase. I don't know what I hit. A pothole, a giant rock. I hit something that grabbed my front wheel. And like, I was as close to a concussion with not having a because like I went face first into the gravel dirt, whatever,

smashed out the windshield, like scraped up my helmet. Like I've got gravel embedded in my hands. I spent the weekend with a fucking steak knife in the hotel digging gravel out of my hands. And my buddy's like, hey, let's go grab it. I'm like, man, I'm not going to anywhere. I just need some time, man. So I'm like, and it's still a monsoon.

I'm like, fuck. Motorcycle won't start. Some guy drives up a Haitian, he didn't even need to ask. He's like, you want some help? I'm like, yeah, yeah. He's like, okay. My mom lives down the road.

Push your bike, follow me, put it here. I'll give you a ride where you need to go. Well, he worked for the U.S. Embassy, right? So he's kind of paying back. He's like, I don't know who this dipshit is, but he needs some help. But there are so many great examples like that, right? And when you humble yourself,

when you ask them a question and want to hear about their lives, when you learn their language, when you learn how to dance with them, when you learn how to celebrate life, when you learn how to celebrate their losses even, when you have a little bit of skin in the game. And to me, the answer to your question is that is so accessible if you put yourself out there.

I mean, you have to be smart about it. I mean, it's funny, you know, I'm a jih Tzu hack, right? Like, but I wrestled all my life, right? So it comes very naturally. Yeah. I just need to like, oh, I can do a rear naked choke and like pretty much murder somebody, you know? But it's like I feel like I can hold my own. So it's just like I'm always aware shit can turn sideways, but I'm not going to let that define me as a human being, right?

I know that, you know, to some people I'm like, oh, wallet, he's got to have money. but I'm going to put myself out there in a safe way and choose who I spend my time with. Like when someone doesn't want their picture taken, they let it be known without saying any words. It's like, right? And so that area, I love. I love the chaos of natural disasters

and being on the first plane in and being a part of something where it's just like, you're doing the impossible right so we're in the Congo and trying to deliver aid to this community where where this flooded wiped out three bridges and just trying to figure out like how do we get this here right like the bridges are wiped out we can't go around because Rwanda will give us permission but Perundi won't you know just trying to figure this stuff out and then at the end of the day uh we had this funny moment this guy Andreas this this german guy was working with in

Papua New Guinea, Papua New Guinea can be a scary place. Like crazy violent in like a 300 years ago kind of way. Super isolated. You know, the men have a history of beating each other and their women. Huge problems with rape. Like it's just a violent place, especially like the Central Highlands, right? There's a huge earthquake that hit and we were delivering aid. And so we went there, but it felt like we were just kind of on the periphery.

And so I became friends with a helicopter pilot. I'm like, hey, man, can you drop us off in one of these villages where the roads have been destroyed? I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm making a loop. So I told my friend, Andre's, I'm like, hey, man, give us a ride, and then, you know, he'll come back and get us at the end of the day. It's like, great. You know, I mean, typical German, like, well, you know, this is, you know, checks the boxes. This seems doable. And then things went fucking horribly wrong.

So we get there, we go to this village and it's amazing, right? Like just destroyed. So people are living, staying out in the grass, whatever. And even just the tribal fighting is insane. Like I went by one, because I've done, I don't know, four trips there. And I went by and I'm like, what happened here? Like everything was torched, right? Like there was a factory, a rice factory burned to the ground.

I'm like, oh, this Chinese company came and they worked with the locals and they, they, they, they, they work. They cultivated the land and they used the local, you know, talent to build the building and gave them jobs. So what happened? Well, they hired one tribe, but not the other. So the other one burned to the ground. So that's kind of the context. And I mean, there are places where it's almost like a Monty Python skit where it's like every Sunday, you know, the Hatfields and the McCoys are going to meet out on the battlefield. Like you can, you can Google this stuff.

What do they call them? They call them rascals. Like these guys will have like clubs. and bone arrows and they just fight and they're rough like fucking hell I've seen the most horrific scars you know from women

like oh you know so and so accused me of being a witch so they're like I'm gonna take a fucking hot coal and stick it in your arm and if you don't burn your wit oh sorry oh you're burning you're human my bad like weird broken bones

like even in the office with one of the groups that I was working with like this want like the scars you see. It's not like a little black eye. Like, what in the hell did he cut you with? Facial surgery with a hacksaw. The facial surgery with a hacksaw and broken bones. So anyway, so we get in this helicopter with some supplies and we land.

It's like early afternoon. And thank God, you know, we carried these supplies. Like, oh, let's make ourselves useful. And we got to know the director of the local hospital, you know, did some profiles of the local community where they were living. and then it's like, oh, let's better get back to the landing spot, right? So we get back there, plenty of time. Yeah, it's like, whatever, three o'clock, four o'clock, five.

It's getting dark, and I said, I said to my boy, I said, we got to find a place to stay. He said, what are you talking about? I said, that chopper's not coming back. They don't fly at night, man. No, it's not possible. Oh, it's possible. It's possible, and it happened.

What? Let's go back. Like, we literally knew one person who might be able to help us. was the director of this hospital. We got back just as it was getting dark. Like we would have been fucked. And he's like, yeah, I have this old house that hasn't been used in years,

but we used to let visiting doctors stay there. No power, no electricity. It's covered in dust. But we had a safe fish place to stay. Yeah. And then, you know, I mean, it was a funny night because it was called Pamaga. It was like, hashtag escape from Pomaga.

And then the next day, we had to talk ourselves aboard. There was like some Australian soldiers who gave us a helicopter ride and a Chinook to somewhere else, and then they gave us a ride to somewhere else. So it took us about three journeys to get back to where we needed to be. But again, it was, in hindsight, it all worked out. Did you ever bump into that helicopter pilot again? Oh, man.

I'd have a few questions. He's like, oh, I couldn't, you know. He made something up. He's like, oh, the weather. I'm like, clear skies, no wind. It was just some horseshit excuse. Of course it was. Yeah, yeah.

How do you pass all this along to your kids? Like, how do you pass these things that you've seen and these experiences along to them? My approach to parenting and homeschooling since I've been back, you know, September 1st, it's the same. And since they were born in it, and like, I'm sure I'm going to screw up a lot of things. Like, my kids are not on a curriculum. They've got one test that I give them every week. It's an oral examination. It consists of two questions.

Question number one. Are you happy? Question number two, are you excited about learning? That's all I care about. They're six and they're eight. And they're going to be just fine. And they're going to be just fine. What drives me mad is hearing people who haven't spent the time getting to know,

forget traveling to third world countries, getting to know their neighbors, getting to know their community. So when I hear somebody offer a horribly inaccurate description of, of anybody based on bullshit, it drives me mad. So what I try to do with my children is make it all experiential. So here's an example. My wife is African American.

How can I teach them about racism in this country? We went to a family reunion, and I tracked down the family historian. And I said, this might sound kind of weird coming from the white dude in the family. but I want to know the name of the last person in this family who was a slave. She gave me that name and I filed it away and at some point. You know, so that, so when we, it's not just a thing. Yeah. It's like so many generations back and it's the same thing with, I share stories with them, faces and names.

You know, I did a story years ago in Guatemala about desert crossings, illegal desert crossings. illegal desert crossings. It was a really interesting time. It was a place called Altar, Mexico, where people come up throughout Central America and they find their coyotes, the smugglers. It's like so systematized. Their vans with like riding on the windows.

We'll take you to these crossings and here's how it works. And there was a little shelter. And I met this boy from Guatemala. He was like 17 or 18 at the time, Hilberto. But very indigenous. His Spanish was a little rusty. He spoke a different language.

His Spanish was okay, but he was from the hills. And I said, where are you going? Where are you trying to go? Most people are like, oh, Tuxone or Phoenix, you know. And he said, Atlanta, I have an uncle there. I said, you're probably not going to make it because they're cracking down on the border. But if you do, here's my phone number. Two weeks later, I'm watching TV.

My phone rings. I can tell it's a pay phone. Hello, Tomas. Is Hiberto. I'm just to here in Atlanta. What pass? I was like, whoa. And so I became good friends with him.

I said, look, man, I'm going to help you out a little. Like, welcome to my country. Let's go school shopping. Took him to Walmart. Fill up the basket. What do you need? Hey, if you can't pay your rent, because he's living with like 10 other guys

in a shitty apartment. If you can't get work, you know, call me. I'll give you enough work to stay afloat. And so I tell them the story of Hilberto. Hilberto messaged me a couple weeks ago. I tracked him down when I was, in Guatemala not too long ago.

And he brought me in and made, his wife made dinner for me. I got to meet his children. And so I try to share stories with them at every point. And actually, right now, we're supposed to be, I try to do an international trip a year with them. And it doesn't need to be

expensive. We're supposed to be in Chile. We got tickets from Atlanta to Chile for a hundred bucks apiece. What? On Scott's Daily deals. It's called a mistake fair. So if you stay on top of it, you get these random Now, that was an exceptionally good one. So we got deals, but, you know, it was it going to be a 12-day trip, 10 days in quarantine.

They changed their policy. So obviously, we didn't take the trip. A year ago, we got super cheap trips, tickets to Kenya pre-COVID to do a safari, $650. Total? Total. Per person. Wow. We did one.

Their first international, well, their second, because I took my son when he was young to Guatemala on a trip. But we did one. I'm like, I like to, you know, give them a few options. So they feel kind of invested. Like where do you want to go? Oh, yeah. Would you like to go here? Or maybe flying to Amsterdam, go to Belgium, go to Paris,

check out Notre Dame, Mona Lisa, whatever. Yeah, yeah. So took them to Europe. You know, that was like $375 a piece. That's crazy. Everyone gets a backpack. No check bags. Great adventure.

Right? But the point is, I want them to think of people as people. Let's forget the titles, the labels. Let's at least do them the service that show their respect enough

to understand the basics of what's happening and maybe try to understand as best you can why they make the decisions that they make. Yeah, and if you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes and you have that context and understand why they make the decisions that they make, it'll change your perspective of the world, for sure. Easier said than done, of course.

So what are your plans after? Because you guys are now, I don't want to say, you're rag-tagging through Utah because you have a place where you're staying. But what's the plan after Utah? Well, it's funny because I'm just waiting on a contract and a visa. So I'm going to go back to the Congo for a couple months. And I think my wife is going to find someplace where she wants to stay during that time. You guys kicking around ideas yet?

Or you're going to get full control over that one to her? I think she'll probably be with her mother while I'm gone. Okay. when we come back I mean since they were born I've wanted to do a deep dive with them in a Spanish speaking country so we had a part-time nanny growing up in my my first requirement was they need to be a native Spanish speaker and I bombard them with my garbage Spanish on a daily basis so they've got just enough you know where I'm like hey let's let's jump in so I'd like to go back to Guatemala for three, four, five, six months, you know, or longer.

Yeah. I spent a lot of time there. So that's a place. But other than that, I'm just enjoying deciding kind of month to month where we're going. Isn't it an interesting place to be because people will worry about the chaos of that and they'll say, you know, like, don't you feel under so much pressure? But at the same time, it's probably the most free you've felt. in a long time.

That weird juxtaposition between those two things? That's absolutely true, although I think it'd be more important to get my wife's perspective because I made a similar comment to her the other day. She's like, what are you talking about? Like, you live out of a backpack and a duffel bag six months a year.

Like, this is normal to you. But I think a better litmus test, too, is what is the mindset of my kids? And the difference that I see. Like, oh, my God, the horror stories your parents and even even our experience when I was in the Congo and trying to do the Zoom thing where my wife's got to be the IT person and kids are frustrated and you're trying to do this ridiculous schedule a friend of mine his name's Happy Jack and his

wife Kathy they homeschooled their two girls who turned out amazingly well and I got his advice and my takeaway from conversations with him was introduce them to as much as you can when something clicks get out of the way provide some material but get out of the way and let them run wild with it he said maybe you don't need to change subjects three or four times a day you might do the same thing for a day or a week or a month whatever that other thing is will present itself yeah so with with with with the rocket launch that we went and checked out you know that was part of a space exploration so it was whenever we get a chance oh there's a huntsville alabama has this amazing rocket center and maybe i know

someone who worked at wherever and and we're in Utah and just down the road was an amazing dinosaur museum and nobody's in there because they're all terrified of COVID and so this geeky paleontologist had a captive audience of a six and an eight year old and he's like oh and you should go to the University of Utah Museum of Natural History they have this new exhibit on dinosaurs and check out this book or this series of video so it's just like just kind of throw them things to feed their their appetite for learning I've never seen my kids happier I've never seen them more excited about life and and one of the things that I feel is missing as sort of a whatever self-proclaimed storyteller is this absence of an ability to embrace the oral tradition like you think of your grandparents

or your great-grandparents they could tell stories they remember dates and places and details well everyone now is concerned about the next test or this or that and and I'm trying to just get my to a place where they learn about something and it's an ongoing conversation. Nobody knows, I'm so proud to say, nobody knows my children better than me right now, or my wife. We know exactly what they're exposed to on a daily basis,

what resonates with them, if they're not able to grasp a concept. Here's a perfect example. So I read these Jack Reacher thrillers. There's not much profanity, very little sex, a lot of violence, but wrong or right, I read sections to them sometimes. And they're fascinated Jack Reacher,

especially my son. And the other day, he comes up to me, he's like, hey, dad, you want it, there's a new Jack Reacher novel. He's like, you want to hear it. I'm like, hear it? Yeah. And he went and he picked up an unrelated book. And he's looking in my eyes.

And he's like, Jack Reacher, like, what it was? It was called like, Blood Rift or something. And I recorded it on my phone. He spoke for 33 minutes. No shit. No shit. And he can be a shy kid. 33 minutes.

and one of the great things that we did early on was just read to them nonstop and their maternal grandmother really like drilled it in so they're insane readers and I don't care one of the best moments for me I was in the Congo and he's like I was going through your bookshelf and I found this book called Calvin and Hobbs

is that yours? He's like I love it I just crush those things on the same hour and so they just devour that stuff and then he's like, oh, you know, he reads these, it's called Dog Man. I don't know what happened. Things went horribly wrong.

Something happened in a man's half dog, half man, and whatever. It's like a graphic novel. So he's read, you know, whatever, every single one of these. And I can hear, it's a little bit derivative some of the stories, but there's originality, but I hear these phrases, you know,

and then there was no hope. I mean, just, like, you hear like a little eight-year-old, like, these, like verbatim, like, you know, I don't even know if you knows what some of these words mean, but he's excited about it he's I don't know if I can tell a single story for 33 minutes right and my wife did something cool

he did another one and she recorded it and then transcribed it and he drew pictures we said you just wrote a book legitimately yeah yeah yeah and he did another one on one of my trips in my backpack I pulled this out

he'd written had a blank notebook and said adventure of Micah and Daddy. I'm like, but it's only like halfway finish. He's like, it's not done. I'm like, okay. I can dig that. I can dig that. You know, on that note, you asked me if I was going to write a book. Why the hell haven't you written a book?

I mean, a number of stories that you have from the places that you have been, why would you not commit that to something permanent? You could probably relate to this too. I think if I were to do something, it would be fiction. It would take, the details would be what I experienced. but so much of it, oh, sometimes it's even tough retelling some of these stories.

Like I feel that there's a lot of that out there. I'd like to take that reality and use that as details and context for something completely different. You know, maybe a thriller, right? Just it's weird too. It's like, at the end of the day, it's like, man, I just need kind of a break. Maybe that's why I embrace snowboarding so much, right? Like, I just need to make it kind of non-life and death, even if it's a lot. life and death in a different way with people who aren't real.

Like the sum of the experience, even when I start to think about it, it's kind of insane, like just one thing after another, but it's like, man, I don't want to put the time in and the deep dive just living in that to craft it in a way, right? So I think if I were to do something, it'd be, even, you know, a good example is like that the gangster documentary was shot in Haiti, right? Right. I mean, that's maybe too extreme, but there's a lot of, it's actually loosely based on the story of two sisters I met who were living in a tent with their mom after the earthquake. I was like, oh, what if their mom were killed and their brother was alive, but he was a gangster and he was a bit of a prick, but they confronted him and said, it's time for you to step up. Mom's gone. But then his gang leader isn't going to, you know, just things like this where you can remain true to what happened, but then make it a little different.

so it's a little different mentally to create. I get it. Yeah, that would change your, I think that would make it easier to get out of you, those experiences. Do you think the experiences that you have had all over the world have changed to you are? Without a doubt, 100%. I like to, you know, before I like to fool myself that, oh, my six months living out of the backpack, you know, like change me. It's like, man, I didn't have a clue. I mean, it was all kind of Latin American culture.

right and I felt comfortable I knew enough of the language where where I kind of knew who's going on to a certain degree and even if I think back to some of my first assignments like man I was I was like man I'm not sure but like it's it's been an evolution even to get to the point where you feel comfortable basically dropping in anywhere and to spend that amount of time and and I'm not unique in this way there there's a small group of you see a lot of the same people in different you know especially different media or organizations or relief agencies, if there's an earthquake or a tsunami or whatever, you could cross paths at some point. It would be impossible to do what I do and not be changed by it, to not be humbled and touched, especially if your job in particular, it might be different if I were a pencil pusher, an accountant, or someone, you know, just looking at the numbers and it's like, oh, we got to fix the child mortality here or increased vaccinations here, my job is to foster that connection. By definition, I need to make that connection and figure out their story and process it and present it in a way

that does them justice. And so it would be impossible not to be changed by it. Do you have more or or less faith in humanity after your travels and experiences? That's a tough question. That's a tough question and it kind of gets back to Jung as well. Like, I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine a couple nights ago where I'm just like, in some ways, like she was like talking about me like I was some Mother Teresa kind of character. I'm like, I have such a dark side. And maybe that's one of the reasons too.

I love Simon, right? He's the fucking best. Just have an edge to the humor. Like it's, you know, like maybe it's the way doctors joke about certain situation, but it's like, I think I have a fairly realistic worldview, and a lot of it, it's not pretty. And I'm sure you can relate to this. Like, I'll come back from an assignment in the Congo or Haiti or Yemen or whatever. You show up at a party, hey, you know, tell me it.

Man, you get to about 30 or 60 seconds and your audience, some of these, their eyes glaze, glass over, right? And I'm like, what the fuck? Yeah. You know, it's like, it's not pretty. There's not. I remember when I was working in Papua New Guinea, it was a beautiful moment of self-reflection

where I had to recognize and I had to ask myself, why are you doing what you're doing? So I went and I literally, one of the nights before I left, Googled it and there was a wiki page about sexual violence against women and the numbers were insane.

Like nine out of 10 men are beating or raping their women and this, I was like, whoa, that has to be a misprint. And I get there. And we are doing it. stories on these women were seeing the scars, the broken bones, the stories of rape. A friend of mine who worked there for years said,

she was working with teenage girls and they were talking about, oh, when I lose my virginity, and they would describe rape, but not like it was rape, like, oh, that's just how it happens. And I was just like, fuck, man. I was like, humanity, where is the humanity? And I left, and I was like, I can't get out of here fast enough. And then I got another assignment to go back.

And I thought about it. I'm like, why did I feel that way? Why did I react that way? And I came to an important point. I'm like, it's not about if you feel good. It's easy. If there's a flood and someone's house is destroyed and you provide a tent and water and food and clothes

and soap, that feels great and it's fucking easy. What about the woman who's getting raped night after night or whose husband smashes her in the face or sticks her with a hot poker or the girl who's afraid to walk home. What about her? What about you doing the story thinking maybe if I'm lucky

I'm going to move that bar a little bit? And it's like, man, it doesn't have to feel good and at least you're fucking trying and at least, you know, you sometimes like the woman I call Rochelle telling me the story like thank you. Right? Like if you're not willing to put yourself in that spot

then I think I don't know if it's worth being here on this world, right? Like, it's like, you can't fix everything, but you can try. You can incrementally, maybe it's going to connect with one person. Maybe it's not going to work for this woman, but maybe her daughter. I just, I love as, as, well, you know, you've got, you've got one daughter, right? Correct. As the father of a daughter, it completely changed my worldview in ways that,

I am such a fan of girl power and girl empowerment because they're the ones who can change things. Something as simple as the 16-year-old girl in Bombing in Afghanistan, you educate her, you know what? She's in this classroom. It might only be for a couple of years, but she's not going to get pregnant during this time, hopefully. So you educate them, you delay, even by a few years,

childbirth because a lot of these girls 12, 13, 14 years old, they're on their first or second child. Her situation is incrementally better. She's going to educate her daughter. Maybe her daughter is going to start to learn how to read at three or four instead of 16. And that's natural. And then maybe her daughter, right? And so it's such a great investment. So if I had one area where it's like, where do you put the money?

It's in girls. Girls and mothers. but girls you protect the girls and that's that's what drives me nuts too as a man and and i still can't wrap my head around it in poppin new guinea i i talk with these guys in these communities where where rape and violence against women was off the charts and i'd be like you know you've got sisters and wives and mothers and if you allow this to happen these women you love the same shit's going to happen to them. But it's, I, it's, I still can't piece it together. But it's something I think about a lot, right? And briefly, I want to talk too about a guest you had on, who I'm going to see

actually after this. Samantha? Samantha. I was going to thank you for a, Samantha. So this will be the first time I actually meet her. The first time I met her was when she, we actually sat in this room before any of the stuff was actually in here. So for those who, who don't know, Samantha is a woman of African-American and Caucasian background who grew up in whitefish, and she was at a Black Lives Matter rally a year ago post-George Floyd, and this really large white guy was in her face like, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And she took off her glasses, put them on her head, and stared him in the eye. And it's such a beautiful portrait in courage. And I had reached out to her through Facebook and said,

you're an inspiration. I'm going to, I'm going to share your story with my daughter. And we started a conversation. And because of the world that I'm in, I'm like, your story needs to be shared. And I did a post talking about her. And it was shared like 40 or 50,000 times. And a friend of mine at CNN, I'm like, you got to have her on.

Andy, you got to have her on. Yeah. You know, so. No, I took you up on it. Like the second I saw that, I was like, absolutely. And it's wild because, and I'm going to use the word because I think it's, It's powerful. I think she was in whitefish too, growing up.

She was six years old, which is the same age as my daughter. So she's six years old, first grade, and one of her white classmates came up to her and said, why do my parents call you nigger? Fuck. Because they're pieces of shit. Because they're pieces of shit. She did not know what that word meant.

She had to go to her father and have that conversation based on that, right? And it's like, wow. And so her story is so inspiring. And I just want to do anything I can't. And her humanity, she could be so angry at the world. And she's all, it's not about making it about her. It's about, hey, let's be honest about this. I'm going to call people out, but I'm going to give them a chance to make things better to respond in a way that someone in a community should, in a way that they should respond.

So I can't wait to introduce her to my daughter. And my daughter, it might not even resonate with her for years. Yeah, I can say it will later. Later, later. So I love those moments, right? Where it's just like, this is someone, and she's tiny, and that dude was big. And I mean, his fists were clenched. And her father, who's no longer with us had said, look, you're going to be confronted by people who hate you.

Like look them in the eyes. it will force them to acknowledge your humanity. And that's exactly what she did. To have the presence of mind. I mean, if you listen to the video of the encounter, it's even more powerful than the photo. It's like, fuck. Well, it goes back to, you know, my question to you,

do you have more or less faith in humanity? I mean, I have hope for humanity. I struggle to say that I have faith in humanity because I remind myself often of what human beings are capable of and they're capable of the most horrendous, heinous shit that I've ever seen in my life. So I'll maintain hope. Faith might be a stretch.

Because I do believe in the shadow. I'm going to research that a little bit because I like your description of it and it makes sense to me. And that can't be forgotten. I think it's very dangerous for people to whitewash that and, you know, forget that or not acknowledge that it exists in you too. I heard a lecture on YouTube where someone was talking about you and this notion of the shadow. and people think they're so far removed. Like, oh, you know, these, you know, SS guards at a concentration camp. Like, what were they thinking?

It's just like, you are capable of the same behavior as this person. Don't fool yourself. Look at some of those rallies. They've done some tests on this where they had volunteers come in and half were jailers. And the other half were the jails. And within a couple hours, they're treating people completely differently. Mind just a fucking academic exercise largely. It's in there.

And I think you'll be a better person if you can wrap your head around it, maybe embrace it a little bit. I'm not saying you should express it, but at least acknowledge that it's in there. I don't know. It helped me. But getting to your question, yeah, I'm not surprised. I don't have like a blind faith in humanity.

I think I have a very hardened worldview based on experiences that I've had. but I have an enduring faith in the power of the self. And without that, there is no hope, right? Like, I can't control you. I can't control, you know, much beyond myself. Like, I might not even be able to move that needle, like in Papua New Guinea, but I'm going to fucking try. And I'm going to try until my last breath, because what are the alternatives?

right and it's it's it's interesting too may I need your advice on this later on when my kids get of age I try to I try to use tangible you know material goods or personal stories to to educate my children and I was fortunate as I mentioned to have grandfathers who were in both theaters of war and as part of their education. I need to back off a little bit now because it's a little heavy duty, but my grandfather,

who was fighting the Japanese in the Philippines, kept the samurai sword of an officer who was trying to kill him. And I told my son, this is going to be yours. And I explained that story. And your grandfather was not fighting. He was helping fix people

who were shot by Hitler's soldiers and trying to patch them up to get them back in the fight. And there was an SS soldier and my grandfather, when he was leaving, ripped off the swastika armband and the insignia. And I keep it buried, but it's framed in a hidden place just to be like, this is fucking real.

Yeah. This isn't just an idea like this. And it can't ever be forgotten. It can't ever be forgotten. And we're not going to display this, but I just want you to see like your, and blood was up against this and all of these freedoms that we have this flag it comes at a price and that's the price my grandfather the one who was in the Philippines I mean holy shit

one of the things I really appreciated about you and a conversation you had with Joe Rogan and I gave you credit in another podcast I did with a friend of mine Dylan you were talking about PTSD and you said well let's let's lose the D let's talk about post-traumatic stress I I mean, holy shit. Like my grandfather, he was tough. Like, you know, second generation, Montana, like, came from the rent, like, hard-nosed.

He never talked about any of that. And one of the smartest things I did is I grabbed both of my grand, well, the grandfather, grandmother, both sides, and sat him down for five hours. And I got them to tell the whole family history, including their war experiences. But it's just like,

don't think that that was that long ago, Especially with my family. It's just like, my grandfather, your great-grandfathers. They were trying to keep this alive, right? And then the last family member who was a slave, like this wasn't that long ago. Like, this is the world. Don't think that this is some crazy time because you have to do fucking class through a computer. Which does make it slightly crazy.

Yeah, because you've got to go, you know, get Amazon. to deliver all your stuff or, you know, whole foods to deliver your groceries. Like, it's not that bad, right? Like, I'm not saying, oh, you know, back in, but this is the reality. Those lessons can't be forgotten. No. You know, it's, and what more powerful reinforcement of those lessons than the sword or that that arm band?

Yeah. It's, uh, those are good teachers in the right context. I'm really curious, especially since your children are older. how do you share your experiences with them in a way that is, how do you share it with them? They never ask. Wow. I would rather just be their dad.

My kids don't give. Okay. Well, I can't speak for them. What I could say is they've shown no interest in what I used to do for living, and I have no problem with that. I don't have stuff up at the house. I have a very similar wooden flag up at the house. I have no military memorabilia anywhere.

I have a three ring binder that most guys and gals will have. It just has your graduation certificates and all that stuff in there and like your DD-214, the stuff you get at the end of service. But that's it. They don't ask about it. And my rule with them for myself is that I'll always answer any question that they have. And of course, age-appropriate terminology. but unless they ask, you know, I'd rather just be their dad.

I've got another question for you. That's a good approach. You're a very thoughtful guy. Sometimes. Sometimes. Also quite funny. But have you always been, you seem to have things in perspective? Like you've been through, you've had an interesting, like, even the collection of things I was telling my kids, I'm like, they're like, wait a second.

I thought he was like a seal, but then he's got this wing suit, and he can fly jets. You can do all that at the same time. Yeah. It's far less complicated than people think. Uh-huh. But, I mean, it seems like you have great discipline, and you're like, yeah, I'm going to learn how to fly a jet. Yeah, I'm going to do a wing suit. Like, how, I mean, I get the free falling, you know, but how did you make the jump to base jumping to a wing suit?

It was all incrementally. And again, it would be easy to look at just the record jump or the base jumping. videos and say, you know, that's what I want to do. But it takes years and it takes time. I mean, I'm no more disciplined than anybody else is. I trust me, I have my sign weights with discipline. I can be a lazy piece of shit just like anybody else can. I just try to put more in the wind column than the loss. And I try not to be so incredibly hard on myself that I get stuck in the failures and can't celebrate the successes. But most of the stuff I've done in my life, I mean, I could teach a monkey to do legitimately everything that I've done in my life.

I'm not sure that monkey would fly an airplane incredibly well, but I could teach him to flip the switches and all that stuff. But it was all just one step at a time. And that's what I focus on more is those steps. And then oftentimes I don't even realize when I'll hit those milestones because I'm just kind of focusing on the next thing. And maybe that robs me of some of my enjoyment. I'm not sure. What the process is fascinating to me, the end state is.

not really. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. What are you excited about? Life. I'm glad and I feel lucky that I get to get up and do this. Like I've been looking forward to this conversation since we locked it in and just, yeah, just life. I'm glad and excited that I have choices, that I can pick what I want to do for myself. And I'm glad and excited that the consequences of those choices are completely on me as well, because it holds me accountable for the things that I do. But, I mean, there's inspiration out there for everybody.

You just got to look for it. And then, you know, look in a mirror too and find some in yourself. Fantastic. Indeed. Well, we've got to get you out here to, we've been out of it for damn near three hours. Wow. Yeah. That's how you're having a great conversation.

Again, though, I want people to see your content. So the easiest way to find you. Thomas Nybo on Facebook and also on Instagram. Which I'll put a link to both in the show. Fantastic. That'll be easy. We should do this again. For sure.

We also need to hit the mountain next trip. Next trip, yes. The snow up there is trash right now. I'm not going to be caught dead up there on that slush. Thank you for taking the time, man. Thank you. I appreciate it. Cool.

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