Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 182 - Hollie McKay

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Hollie McKay is a foreign policy expert and war crimes investigator. She was an investigative and international affairs/war journalist for Fox News Digital for over fourteen years where she focused on warfare, terrorism, and crimes against humanity. Hollie has worked on the frontlines of several major war zones and covered humanitarian and diplomatic crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and other areas. Her globally-spanned coverage, in the form of thousands of print articles and essays, has included exclusive and detailed interviews with numerous captured terrorists, as well as high-ranking government, military, and intelligence officials and leaders from all sides. She has spent considerable time embedded with US and foreign troops, conducted extensive interviews with survivors of torture, sex slavery, and forced child jihadist training, refugees, and internally displaced people to communicate the complexities of such catastrophes and war crimes on local populations. Hollie's columns have additionally been featured in the Wall Street Journal and her writings referenced in innumerable mainstream publications and academic journals. Additionally, she has won numerous foreign press and humanitarian awards. She is acclaimed by her peers as one of the most diligent reports in her field. Qalo Babbel LMNT Better Help

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I recommend getting the variety pack. It's amazing. And no joke has made a huge difference. in my life. That's all on the business side of the house. Let's talk about my guest today. An amazing woman in many respects. Her name is Holly McKay. You may have heard her recently on the Jocko podcast or slightly before that on the Mike Drop, which is Mike Rittland's podcast. Both were fantastic episodes and I recommend you go listen to both. In a nutshell, Holly is an author or a journalist. Born and raised in Australia, made the trek to the United States. She got

feet wet in the journalism occupation and then made a choice a choice to go places and talk to people that I feel most would avoid at all costs for the majority of their life, if not their entire life. She spent time and actively sought out active war zones. She's covered wars in Iraq, Syria, conflicts in Israel, Afghanistan, kind of all over the Middle East, and at a time where it was the height of the ISIS onslaid. She is the author of a book called Only Cry for the Living. And there's no way that I can do an accurate job describing what that book is about or the horrendous nature of some of the experiences that she covers in that book.

So instead of me trying to describe it, I will let her describe it herself. Episode number 182 with Holly McKay. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. Staring at the stars, I was like an I-W-Sker or something. I don't have any experience with that, so I'm going to take your word for it. However, I have so many friends who have gone down the ayahuasca ibup game. Five MEODMT is my thing, yeah.

I haven't done the OBEGame, done the ayahuasca. Did you do the five MEO DMT because you were searching for something to help you to deal with what you have gone through in the past? I think it was that and then just sort of a combination of definitely that and then just kind of, I just think there's something everyone can kind of get from it. And the experience, there's something in there that about yourself that you can learn. That is what people who I know who have used that have described. Most of them, actually, I can walk that back. Everybody I know who has, well, other than Joe, but he's an explorer of a different realm.

Right. And both space, time and substance. Right. And I'm repeating what he says, so I'm not talking negatively about Joe. So all the people I know are all ex-service members. And the five... I did it with like a frogmer from the 70s. That is...

That's part of what they do. They pair it with IB. They go down to Mexico and do the whole retreat. Yeah, I know friends of mine have had amazing experiences in that. I have no experience with psychedelics. I have vast curiosity about it. And if I'm being honest, it terrifies me. Yeah, that's why you should do it.

I've been pitched. that reasoning and my response to that is maybe if the time and the set and setting are correct. Well, the FDA is doing a lot of trials on the psilocybin. And so I'm, you know, I'm thinking of investing in some of the companies, just, you know, small stocks because I think it's going to be the big thing for mental health in the next decade, less than that even. I think it'll be bigger than any pharmaceutical option. Yeah. And so I see that as kind of the frontier now of mental health moving forward now that everybody's kind of aware of what these SSRIs are doing and all this other pharmaceutical crap.

But did you have that experience with the 5MEODMT post writing the book or the experiences that you go to? This is all after. I struggled with, you know, how they talk about this whole letting go of the ego thing. And I thought, yeah, this is fine, you know, I got this. and when you're in it, all these distractions, which you later kind of identify as being part of your ego, come up.

And I had to do it a second time because I didn't think the first time, I found it kind of traumatic, but I didn't think I got that much out of it the first time because I guess the second time I knew what to expect. Okay. The first time, I think I was still really like kind of fighting it a little bit and trying to be like, I've got this, I can take a whole bunch of this and it's not going to do anything to me.

And so I think once I had gotten over that and you're able to process it and know what you're getting into, I think it's a bit of a different experience. But each person's different. So, yeah, it took me a few times to be able to kind of go, okay, this is what I get now. Yeah. One of these days, maybe. Yeah. It's as close as I can go to it. Yeah.

So I listened to your podcast with Jocko. And I'm going to start this one. by saying this one will be a tough one for me this episode as I think it was tough for jaco and I understand why because at the end of this I am going to want to kill people and I think that's basically where jocco was at because the things that you guys talked about are they're at a level a that I have struggled to describe to people unless you've physically been there to see them and and I actively try to not walk away from the person that that I used to be because I'm still the person that I used to be, but I try very hard not to be

defined by the experiences that I had or a job title that I had or the places that I went. However, the way I describe war is if you touch it, it touches you back. So it leaves an indelible mark on you and you probably do on other people as well. But it was hard to listen to you guys talk about the level of evil that you voluntarily went and got very, very close to. So we'll see you. see how this goes. Try to stay out of prison for the rest of the day after we end this. I got a question for you, though. Yep.

How do you describe evil? I think it's a very nuanced. Evil's very nuanced, but if I had to simplify it, it's definitely with the intention of hurting innocent people that have done you no wrong. And yet you somehow find a justification. And they're always a justification in their minds for doing harm on someone that's never done harm on you. I kind of land near there as well. I want people to always believe whatever they want to believe. And you'll, I had people ask me, well, what's the difference between you and the people that you were fighting? You were over there, not me, but like the royal, you know, we, the U.S. militaries over there taking life too. And I fall back to, A, there is a huge difference in not only the ideology of what it is that we're fighting for, but at least in my belief system, I can't stand those that prey upon the innocent. And my definition of evil, falls back on that as well to those that will either pray upon or stand on the shoulders of those

that are incapable of defending themselves. Absolutely. It's very hard to sit back and do nothing about it once you've actually seen it. Right. Absolutely. Indeed. Side note, that has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about. My sister was born in Australia.

Oh, yeah, whereabouts? I'm going to say this wrong, obviously. I'll correct you. I want to say Melbourne, but I know that's not right. It's Melbourne. Melbourne. Melbourne. I got close.

Melbin. Melbourne. Yeah. Very young. My dad was a PE teacher and he was doing an exchange program and went over and they were living on a dairy farm and came back plus one. That's pretty neat. Yeah. Yeah. I think she still has dual citizenship.

Okay. It was before, I believe now they make you pick that you can't have both. I'm both. Okay. Yeah. Show you what I know. Yeah, I got my American citizenship in 2017. What made you decide to do that versus staying an Australian citizen?

Well, I could do both. So it was a gain to me as opposed to anything that was a loss. I mean, I came over here originally in 2006. I was studying, got a working visa, then got my green card, and then you sort of hit that five-year mark. And I was so excited to get my American citizenship. I couldn't wait. So, yeah, to me, it was all positive.

And I think when you're working overseas too a lot, it's just nice to be able to have both. It just makes going to a U.S. base easier. It kind of, you know, if you ever needed help, You sort of have these two governments that can go to bat for you. So to me it was a plus. Generally co-located as well at those bases. Yes.

Yes. Ish. So yeah, it was a plus for me. Did you ever find that a U.S. passport closed doors for you? Totally. So I experienced this a lot, especially going to the Middle East in the beginning, when I'd be with American friends and they would have their American passport. So then I'd pull out my Australian and my treatment was a hundred times different.

You know, and even I think a lot, my fix is like the fact that I was Australian too when I was working over there because then they could sort of be like, oh, she's Australian, she's Australian. It's different even though, you know, Australia is still there fighting the same fight in a smaller capacity, but they've been there since the beginning. So, but I think people just sort of see it as America and then everybody else is separate. Yeah, it seems very polarizing. And the response I have received is vastly different depending on where you are in the globe. So for a journalist, it probably is very beneficial. Yeah, and also with aid workers too. So when I would go and embed, say, with the International Committee, the Red Cross or any of these big aid groups, they loved the fact I had an Australian passport.

And I probably wouldn't have been able to go into places with them if I just had my American because then it puts all of them at risk as well. And I think last time I was in Africa and did some stuff with them. And I think anyone, it was French and American, they were kind of like. Like, ah, no. But Australian having that has been beneficial, except the only place that they really tell me, yes, use your American passport is in Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. They've extremely pro-America. And yeah, so anytime that I was around there and you flash an American passport, it's a opening doors as opposed to closing them. But do you travel with both? I do. Have you ever had to explain?

Oh, God, it screwed me. I mean, I've had my global entry canceled. I've had everything. And I was like, why? What is happening? And I asked an FBI friend of mine when I came back. I was like, they canceled my global entry. I don't know what happened.

He's like, you're probably just using two passports. I was like, yeah, I was. So I kind of screwed the system a little bit. Yeah, and most people are not used to having multiple passports. Jocko actually messed it up when it was on the podcast with you. Oh, he did? He did because he described the U.S. passport as maroon. He had him backwards.

The ones they gave us the military were maroon. And the civilians are just good old blue, yeah. But it wasn't a diplomatic passport. I think it was just a U.S. I don't think there's a military-specific one. I think it was just a U.S. government one. Right. He makes so few mistakes that I just realized I needed to pounce on that immediately.

It's like, like, Jocko said this. They're wrong. How did you link up with Jock? So actually through Sequoia at DeAngelo Publications, and she does a lot of work with Jocco, and he's a Warrior Kid series. And yeah, she said it would be a great fit with the book that I was writing, with the military aspect of it.

But being from a civilian and being from a sort of a human perspective. And obviously, Jocka was very versed in Iraq in the Middle East. And so it was just sort of a good fit to publish with Di Andalou and with Joko publishing. It was a fantastic episode. It was episode 271 for people who want to go listen to it. And I highly recommend that you do. Like I said, it was eye-opening. I had to listen to it in chunks.

I was driving my oldest son to work today, and he was, as most teenage boys are doing, not paying attention to anything that his parents were doing. And then he pulled off his headphones he did. He was listening to his music on. He's like, what are you listening to and what are they talking about? Just put your headphones back on, and we'll have this conversation a little bit later in life.

Yeah. So, again, fascinating. Where you started and what you were doing, and then where it led you. I think one of my favorite parts of the podcast with Jock was when you were talking about the Pop-Tarts. Oh, yeah. Which I find might be a more dangerous industry than being on the front lines of war as far

as survival. Totally. You know, it's so funny. You might have to describe to people what it is. Yes. Brief background of Pop-Tarts. Yeah. So I was fortunate enough.

I was studying in New York. Obviously, I'm Australian. I was studying in New York. I got this random internship at Fox News in New York. I didn't have any idea what it was. This was in 2006. So it was sort of the beginning of that digital era. And I love to write.

And I think I was 20 at the time. And so they said, look, we'll sponsor you. Do you want to go to L.A.? You can have your own column. And basically, we'll throw you to the wolves. And it's all on you. And I just thought, what an amazing opportunity at that age to get. And so I jumped on it and went out to L.A.

And it was literally baptism by fire. I remember my first day there, you know, learning to drive on the other side. side of the road and getting an apartment in Santa Monica and arriving in this just totally new world. I remember, you know, we talked about, you know, it was Paris Hilton and just come out of jail and somehow, you know, I had some Aussie friends of mine that were friends with her and so we ended up spending the summer at her house and all these just bizarre things were happening. And I think it just, I never really took it very seriously. I just thought, oh, this is a bloody circus, you know, and I just, I think that's what enabled me to be able to really do my

job and get really entrenched in understanding how to piece a story together was that I wasn't their friend. I was just sort of part of this sphere of trying to understand the dynamics of something. But very early on, I was also kind of involved in a lot of investigative stuff. So I was lucky in that I got to sort of straddle a general assignment world with the entertainment industry. Did you see people who are also under the banner of journalism going the other direction? where it became less about reporting anything and more about becoming part of the scene? I would say 95%.

It was 95% kissing people's ass. And yeah, I knew very early on it. I had zero interest in that. And I turned down quite a few opportunities at some of those big entertainment networks at the time because I just saw what they, you know, what are you wearing kind of stuff? And it had about zero appeal.

For me, that was just a launching pad to get into journalism, to get my American sponsorship and to be able to kind of take it and run from there. But it was a great training ground because you do smell that bullshit very early on. You learn to navigate these big networks of people where there are just so many layers of managers and agents and all this kind of nonsense. And so you sort of have to learn how to infiltrate that space a little bit. And so it really taught me a lot.

And interview techniques. So if they're throwing Johnny Depp in front of you, you're going to get three questions if you're lucky. So you really have to know what you're asking and you have to be succinct and you have to get it out and get the answer you need to craft a story. And so you can't sort of ditty-dattle around and ask 10 questions and talk about hair and choose or whatever. You really have to get to the point of it. And so I think very young, I had to really learn how to be very direct. Not to use Johnny Depp as an example.

We'll just say anybody who's in that sphere. Is it that they don't want to answer more than three questions or the people, that are around them, that are handling them, don't want to give any one person that time. I think it's a combination of both, depending on who the person is. I think that, generally speaking, it's a rushed process. And you go into a press junket for a film and they will time you at five minutes. And they'll say, last question, you'll have people waving their hands if you continue to go over, which I always did because I said more had to ask.

But I think, you know, a lot of the time, depending on the person, they'd probably love to sit there and chat with you. and there are definitely situations where you can do kind of a full sit down for a lot longer, but generally speaking, it's very quick and it's very sort of in and out, in and out, and they have a lot of people to process. So, yeah, it's usually, they're basically told what they, you know, what their time frame is too. I've only touched that world, and by that I mean, been around it very, very peripherally. I had my head in, I guess, the literal and metaphorical sand for over a decade, popped out of it, With the military background, there are people in that industry.

So, hey, come and do some technical advising. So very, very limited roles. But it was, it was pretty startling to see that world. And I don't think I knew anybody who would have any level of fame before that. And I found that there were two pretty distinct tranches. There were people who were completely and utterly out of their mind and consumed by who they were or who they thought they were. And then there were some actually really genuine people kind of at the same level of fame. And I didn't find that many that were in between.

It was as if you were able to maintain yourself or you lost yourself in that world. I wanted no part of it. I couldn't backstep away from that fast enough. Yeah. I actually found that a lot of the really A-list people were quite grounded and were very level-headed and very polite and very respectful. And it was this sort of CD up-and-coming people that really, you know, thought the world of themselves and were usually the world of themselves and were usually the... the ones that were a little bit, you know, worse for wear. I mean, let's be honest, they would cut their co-stars throat to stand on their shoulders to get

the B level job to get the A level job. I totally, yeah, totally. That's what I saw. And I was like, okay, you guys are cutthroat. I want none of this. And you can have all the fame and all the money and all this bullshit. I would rather be completely poor and have a life rich with experience than all the shit you guys are doing out here.

Yeah. And I would look at that too. And it was baffling to me because they just make so much money pretending to be other people. And, you know, you meet the real people, the real people that are doing stuff. And he's just kind of like, who actually has it better? Because you're making money pretending to be someone. But, you know, someone else may not have much money, but they're actually living a very full life. And I think I gravitated more to the music world, especially when I was younger.

And I thought possibly about going into music journalism because I'd grown up as a dancer and grown up just loving music. And it was just such a big part. It still is a big part of my life in many ways. And I found musicians were often very creative. And it's not really an industry you can fake as much. So I really enjoyed being able to kind of do the music pieces. That was something.

And I would go on little tours with different artists and stuff and really get to know them from the early days. I remember Taylor Swift, she would have been about 15. And she invited me in a couple of, of other people to a little guitar thing and she was just a new girl, you know, her publicist, Paula would stand there with a little card saying, this is Taylor and she's a new artist and da-da, and we went and she would just play a few songs with the guitar for us and then she'd send these beautiful handwritten notes, just thanking us for coming. And so it was just lovely to see

people like her who you sort of saw before that they were anything, just, you know, become sort of the superstars they are today and just really deserving of it, I think, just a really good human being. Yeah, I don't actually know, I know a few people in the entertainment industry, like I've seen in the acting genre. I don't think I know any performance artists. I do think it would be harder to fake. I mean, you can either sing or you can't. Yeah. I don't know exactly what autotune does. I've heard people talk about how good it is, but I'm not, I don't think I'll ever be a singer, we'll leave it at that. Yeah, I don't think I will be either. I think it'll be pretty dangerous. Do you still do ballet? Not in a formal sense. I still, I still,

it's still a big part of my life in that I love it. I follow it. I'm reading a beautiful Susanna Farrell memoir now and she was sort of George Balanchine's prima ballerina and so I still love it. It's still a big part of life and just basic kind of training to keep my flexibility and to keep my feet working. I just taught a class for the first time in a really long time on the weekend in Virginia. So that was kind of a lot of fun. So it's still something I love and it's still a very grounding thing for me, but it's not something I do in any sort of formal capacity. You and Jocko touched on it briefly, but not nearly in depth enough. And that is how savage ballet is. Oh, it's good. But coming up and achieving a level of stardom in ballet.

Because you were talking about you were still in Australia. You were in a boarding school, which was dedicated to the arts, specifically ballet. Let's unpack what a day would look like at this particular boarding school. Right. I still say it was the best years of my life, even though it was crazy and it was just, you know, you put a bunch of, it was a co-ed school, but mind you, the guys were very outnumbered

by the girls, and we had a boarding house, which was relatively small, but it was 20, about 20 girls. But, yeah, it was amazing. So we, it had a Scottish heritage, so they would make us wear these ridiculous uniforms with kilts and berets and all of that, and we'd go usually do some, academic stuff, it would start pretty early, and then most of the day was spent in whatever

stream that you chose. So there was people that were a musical theater, people that were drama, people that were dance, ballet, and then music, of course, and then I was a ballet girl. So, yeah, most of the day was spent just training pretty hardcore. How many hours are we talking? And then we did after school, too. So you're probably looking at, God, and then Saturdays. So you're looking at, So you're looking at it could be up at least 20 to 30 hours a week on top of school and academics and still having to pass the same tests and exams

as ordinary high schoolers were. What type of toll does that take on your body? Huge. And I think I have had every possible injury under the sun and I would have permanent physio sessions. Every other day I'd be at, we had a physiotherapist in the studio that was just there full time.

So every time I've heard people who come from the ballet world, they describe that. Hours, toes that are, you know, the ballet slippers, they look fantastic. They're like, yeah, take those things off. And it's not that it's horrendous in a bad way, but it's the physical manifestation of what it requires. Has it always been like that in ballet? Like, to get to the top, does it require that level of incredible discipline and torture on your body? or is that something that has just attached itself? So military training has changed over time.

They've realized that you don't actually always have to grind people into dust to reshape them into the tool that you need. Like as things evolve, maybe our training can evolve too. I almost feel like ballet has this history of this is what it is. This is what it takes. This is how hard it's always going to be. You know what I mean? I'm trying to figure out. Totally.

So I think in the beginning with ballet, you know, It was very, the French sense in King Louis, and he loved to have this idea of ballet dances. And I think it was a little frivolous back then. They certainly didn't have to have the, there wasn't the weight restrictions, there wasn't the kind of technique that was required. It was more just a lighter entertainment. And I think really throughout the 20th century it evolved. And probably the most famous instructor was a Russian man named George Balanchine who defected from Russia.

I think it was in the 50s now or 60s. And he founded New York City Ballet, and he really revolutionized this idea. He was the one that kind of had this idea that ballet dancers had to be rail thin. They had to have, you know, incredible feet, incredible flexibility. And it really just entirely shifted, I think, the world dynamic of what ballet was. I think since the Balanchine era, it's gone back to a little bit more flexibility, so to speak, in diversity sense. in that is a lot more contemporary the sort of the strenuous technique

is maybe eased a little bit but I would say that this discipline is still there because it is so competitive and yet you can really only make it if you're this sort of ethereal creature.

What does it look like to make it in ballet what is the absolute shooting star? So God that it depends I would say that I mean definitely don't go into it for money so that sort of puts you're doing it really for the passion and the love of the craft.

And it's often a very short-lived career injury-wise. So, you know, being a principal dancer, I guess, in a major company is the pinnacle. I would say that the Russians still do it pretty much the best. Their school, the Bolshoi and the Marinsky Theater are just, the Russian dancers are insane. Their level of technique, their level of flexibility, their level of just, it's a whole other level, I think, even to the United States. But to make it to the top is really getting into one of the top-notch companies and moving up the echelons of that to sort of become a soloist or a principal.

I'm going to take a hard pass on that. Mostly because the outfits, if I'm being totally honest. Those pants, the guys wear incredibly tight. It's not acceptable. Not acceptable. Not here in Montana. You wear those pants out here. Yeah, no, that probably won't work.

Hey, man, what's going on? We don't do that up here. I bet you. I bet you. So when you were, how'd you find your way into ballet, actually? You know, I think it was just, he was young. We grew up in the country. There wasn't really that much to do.

And my mother stuck my sister and I in classes. So, and then. Call that paid child care. Yeah. And then she really forced us to stick it out, though, because for me, I, yeah, got bit bored. I wanted to, you know, go run around and climb trees. with everyone else, but mom would make me, make me stay. And I think you said once you push through the, I'm bored, this is boring, I want to do this,

you find the love for it. I think for me it was also a place to go. So I think I had a fairly undisciplined upbringing in the sense that growing up in the country where I was able to pretty much do what I wanted, you know, that kind of running around until the sun came down type thing. I think ballet was really something that gave me a sense of discipline that I didn't otherwise have. And so I kind of enjoyed it. It gave me structure.

It gave me a place to be. And then as I got older and something I started to take more seriously and once I'd pushed past the boredom of it all, it really, there was something just freeing about that kind of discipline and structure. You found a love for it? Yeah, I did. I really found a love for the music. And I found a love for choreography.

And I found a love for just being able to explore these different things and being able to choose these incredible costumes. and I'd go away a lot on weekends to different competitions. And it just, yeah, you sort of develop this healthy sense of competition, but it was always about just trying to be better and improve on what you could do. And I think that from a young age was really beneficial for me. When you were at the boarding school, which obviously was arts-based, did you have any aspirations to head towards journalism, or did that come later on?

Where did you make the jump between the two? I always love to write. Actually, I published a book when I was very young, I think I was about 12 or 13, that I'd written. Really? Yeah. So a lot of my childhood was spent. My grandfather had a sugar cane farm, the very top of Australia in North Queensland. So we'd have to go away for these really long stretches.

And it was in the middle of nowhere. There was no, you know, it was just nothing. There was no other kids. There was just these big sort of open land. And I couldn't go anywhere. So I really just love to write and I love to read. And so I would spend my entire summer writing a book and again using that sort of creativity that dancing had given me. And so, yeah, I published that when I was about 12 or 13.

And I look back and regretted a bit now because I was so embarrassed of it. Well, not just the book, but I was just so embarrassed about the book even being published in, you know, the newspaper. The local newspaper would come to take a picture and I would just be, oh, I don't want my picture in the newspaper. So I wish that I'd embrace that a little bit more, but that's being 12 or 13 years old. So I always love to write. So that was always something that I had in my back pocket. But I just didn't, I guess, understand what that career necessarily could be. And then the journalism, yeah, it definitely wasn't something I didn't have any desire to sit in front of a television screen and read a teleprompter.

I knew that that wasn't for me. and I don't think sort of any type of camera job would have been for me. It just wasn't something I was interested in. And that actually worked to my advantage because when I ended up becoming an intern and basically everybody wanted to be on camera, so they were sort of shuffled off to do probably quite generic internship stuff. And I was really the only one who sort of stuck my hand up and said, I just want to write.

So I ended up being the only one in the digital area and then the only one who got sponsored. What year was this? That was 2006. And this is it in New York at the... In New York, yeah. I've actually been to that building the Fox News studio there and kind of seen behind the scenes. Not a job I would want either.

Yeah. It's a talent for sure to be able to sit and look semi-normal and read the teleprompter. If people actually think, though, that they're saying maybe what they personally believe, or they're making it up on the fly, they're a little bit misguided. That's what's happening at those places. Yeah. It's a cool building, for sure, though, in an interesting place in New York. in New York, not Queensland, for sure. Definitely not.

Different geography and topography, I would say. Slightly different, although I loved my life in New York. I really did, yeah. I hate that subject. I only just gave up my apartment last year. I can't stand. I don't like being that compressed. I'm not going to say New York is beautiful.

I've been there a handful of times. I actually love going to New York. What I realized by moving here to being in a more rural area is that I really enjoy a little bit of space, which I think we can agree New York is city, specific. is not defined by. Yeah. And I'm with you and I'm at a point in my life where I definitely love the space and I love the quiet and I love that less hustle and bustle life.

And I don't know that I will go back to it ever or, you know, if I do, it would have to be for a really alluring offer. But I think that my time that I sort of spent there both, you know, turning 21 in New York plus the last between 2017 and then up until the end of last year that I was there. We're just really incredible times to kind of be able to go to the city and to be in that sort of vibe and the connections that you make and the friends that you make. And I just think that I'm glad that I had that experience

because there is, New York is sort of a dirty, very compressed place, but there's just something about it that is just, is his freeing in a way, I think, because you could just really be anyone you want to be. Yeah. No, it's almost like a lot of the things you write about in the book. Hard to describe, but if you've been there and felt it, like, oh, I understand.

Yeah. So you start with the Pop-Tart, working for New York. Yes. And then you decide, I am going to go and essentially seek out the front lines of war. Those are very different genres, we shall say. what sparked that, I mean, even the initial thought process. I mean, you talked a little bit about, you know, hey, you realize the BS of the entertainment industry.

We can leave it at that. But that doesn't necessarily drive people to saying, maybe I want to go to the front lines of war. I mean, there's a lot of other options to choose from. What was it that drove you in that direction? I think it was really just curiosity. So I've always been a very curious person. I've always wanted to really understand things at a deeper level. And I just felt, you know, so many friends of mine had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan to serve.

And I just felt that we weren't getting a full picture of what was really happening there. And it bothered me. And I felt that it was just things were simplified in a way that they shouldn't have been. And I had done a lot of investigative journalism, not necessarily in their foreign space, but just sort of locally with politics and a few big stories. So I kind of knew how to piece things together. in a way and I really just sort of push for that opportunity and told my bosses that this was something I wanted to do and they were extremely supportive of that and I think because I was very

self-sufficient I didn't require big crews I didn't you know need to go in there with big teams of people I didn't go in there with security I was very under the radar which I felt to be you know better security policy for me than trying to sort of go in with a bunch of people so pros and cons to it for sure absolutely you and Jocko did a very good job of discussing the pros and cons of that. A smaller footprint can be great until you're in a position where a bigger footprint would be really nice to have and some security personnel. Yeah. How do they teach investigative journalism?

I mean, writing is one thing. The investigative portion of that is fascinating to me. Is it something you fall into that you have, again, like ballet, maybe you get through that initial process and find your own love for it? because I feel like it would be much more of an art form than maybe a skill that is taught. Yeah. No one ever taught me. What I relied upon was other journalists that could sort of mentor me into understanding how to put it together.

So essentially an editor might call me and say, hey, we heard this is happening. Can you look into this? And you really, I think a lot of it's very instinctual. You have to kind of pare it down. You have to look at, well, how can I break this down? Who can I talk to? What doors can I knock on? What court records can I bring up?

What, you know, you go through every sort of background you possibly can on a computer and way back machine in trying to piece together as many sources as you know that might be surround a person. And it's really just, it's like a little jigsaw that you just start to piece together. And somebody might give you a lead here and someone else might give you a lead there. And then you might get completely stuck and go, oh my God, what do I do now? and then you have to let it go for a week and then you come back to it. So a lot of it really does come down to as well, and depending on the topic, is your sources. So you have to be able to, you know, if it's a local crime, you have to be able to have

really good resources within the local police department or you go to the family or, you know, it just, it really depends on the story, but it is, it's instinctual and it's patience. But looking back on it, I definitely think instincts play a really big role. And you have to know how to smell that bullshit and who's telling you the truth and who's not. So that is, and it was always a challenge. And I can't tell you how many stories I would devote weeks and months to that never went anywhere because I could just never put it all together quite right. Is there supposed to be or is there a governing principle when it comes to journalism?

And I guess when I ask that I'm looking at it from the lens of, you know, as a journalist, you could perhaps get information through sources that are not necessarily legal. You know, you could go outside of the boundaries of the law to try to report or gather information. I don't want to say, you know, in the military, we have the UCMJ, right? You violate the UCMJ, you get punished. So it's a buffer that you know when you're getting to the edge of it, and you definitely know if you recognize it when you see somebody cross it. But in the journalism world, is there, are there? principles that are hard and fast like that? Can you break the law in the pursuit of information?

I don't think you can break the law specifically. I just think there are ethical obligations or murky ethics. I was going to say, are they written anywhere? Do we have a Ten Commandments of Ethics and Journalism? No, I know. But, you know, journalism schools and things will teach people, this is what you can and can't do. And I'd always try to stay by those ethics. And I definitely wouldn't do anything that was in, you know, breaking a law, so to speak. It's pure curiosity. I know very little about journalism and I come from a world where black and white is a terrible metaphor for the world that I operated in. But I had a framework to operate from. And I knew as I got farther from the framework it would get more gray or even a different color palette. Yeah.

I was just curious. And then you can look at situations where maybe government entities are the ones that are breaking the law in leaking the information. So then what role do you play as the journalist if you're going to publish that? And their ethical obligations and things like that would often come up. And that would require discussions with my editors, with legal department at work. And there's sort of a team of people that generally have to come in and kind of make a consensus over what the best course of action would be. Well, I could see it getting to a place where perhaps the reporter has a different ethical or moral stance on the information than, say, the publishing organization. Yeah, absolutely.

And I can imagine those conversations could get pretty tense at time. Absolutely. And I remember the San Bernardino terrorist attack, and there was a big ethical issue with that because the police had left the door open for where the terrorists were living. And so it was this dilemma of do you go into the house and take photographs of where the terrorists were living and find clues into what their mindset was, or is that sort of illegal entry? You know, the door's open, but, you know, what is the blurry ethical line here? And it was quite a hoopla for a long time, and you had two very distinct camps on that.

When you got your first, you know, obviously described that you went to the people you were working for and saying, hey, you know, I want to make a shift. This is where I want to go. Or it probably was more along the lines of this is what I want to do. Where was your first trip to a war zone? So the first time I was covering really, I was. I'd been into Syria before, but it wasn't in a sort of a coverage capacity. But I guess the Gaza-Israel conflict in 2014, I was in Jordan at the time. And so I was able to kind of go back.

And that was the first time I was really able to cover something in that sense and really get this baptism by fire understanding of that conflict. Timely given what's currently going on. I don't know if that one, that's going to, I think, be a. also a pendulum that goes back and forth. They're going to have, I think, times apiece and then times of what's going on right now. Yeah, and it's going to be nothing new to what you've seen in the past 30, 40 years, and it's really unfortunate. And I think I can definitely see that from both sides, having been able to cover and speak to people on both sides of that conflict and

definitely see where both points of view have their pros and cons of that. And it's just going to require a compromise that isn't quite there yet. When was the first time that you embedded with U.S. military? So I didn't, I started then after that I was going into Iraq to cover ISIS, but I didn't do an embed. I'm trying to remember the first, because the U.S. weren't in Iraq until much later. 03, it was the initial invasion. Oh, I mean for the ISIS conflict. Gotcha.

So I think I did an embed with them. Must have been 2015 when they first sort of started coming in. To go back a step. You know, I was thinking about this before we sat down. I think I was out of the military before I heard the term ISIS. For me it was Taliban in Afghanistan tied to creating a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, however you want to say. In Iraq, I don't remember ever hearing the term ISIS. I think it was a term that came about.

I got out the last day of June 2013. I think it was after my time. Right. When was the first time you remember hearing that term? I remember it specifically. I remember. I remember being at work on June of 2014. Okay.

And that's when ISIS came in and took Mosul. And that was the first time I'd heard of them. Was this sudden group that, you know, had sort of, quote, unquote, come out of nowhere and had taken over the second largest city. And that was my first hearing of what they were, even though they'd been around for a bit at that point. How would you describe them as a group? When somebody says to you, what is ISIS? What kind of answer can you give to them? There's a lot of conspiracies, but I would say it's an off-sheet of al-Qaeda, and I know a lot of people try to sort of say, well, they're much more brutal than Ankara.

I really think they're all the same. Yeah, it depends on who you ask and what your touch point was with them. Yeah, so they're just a, you know, a terrorist organization, Islamic terrorist organization, and they have an idea of wanting to create a caliphate. which people should Google before we continue on on the podcast because we may be talking about the Caliphate a touch and those who want to have one of those not my cup of tea I will say

now I'd rather pass I would rather pass as well so I'd rather pass as well so I want to go back just so I get the timeline right when you were first in Gaza and Israel what year was that? 2014 okay so fast forward 2015 your first in bed with Americans right that was Americans in Iraq

and then later Afghanistan where were you in Iraq and who Who are you embedded with? So honestly, my embeds are very small. Most of my work is outside in bed, but I did some work in the north where the Americans were based there and also in Baghdad and then also with the Australians in Baghdad. And then I was with the Italians for a little while too and they were in Mosul Dam. And I'm trying to remember if that was it.

And then just I guess the Iraqi army and some of the advice and assist programs in and around Baghdad. Taj, I think we were there for a while and then up to sort of Ramadi area near the border. And yeah, that was with the Marines, I believe. And then, yeah. But my embeds were usually, they weren't necessarily all that long. They were usually just short. I was generally had a very clear focus.

It was usually just kind of wanting to interview the general about particular situations and then kind of get a feel for the work that Iraq was doing. And I think that the press department also, very, what's the word? They're very much wanting to highlight what the Iraqis were doing and it was all about the Iraqis are in charge of this mission and you can take that or leave that.

Well, it shifted, how should I say this? People think, because they were told that we left Iraq, what was about 2010, is, reality is, no, there have always been American boots, well, not always, but there have been

American boots on the ground since the initial invasion in 2003. Was it drastically reduced, yes, it was. But from a policy perspective, it shifted to buy with and through. So it probably was directed or dictated to you that, hey, these are the important talking points because that's what was being told to everybody. Was there an aspect of buy with and through? Absolutely.

But is that also, if you want to play on the chessboard that is presented to you, is that also an opportunity to buy with and through a small partner force to do the things that you want to do? Yes. Right. So there's both that were going on. It doesn't surprise me that they wanted to be, that they wanted that to be the focus for you, because that was what was driving policy at that time period. And that's probably, you know, a lot why I generally spent most of my time either with local sort of forces or different sort of rag tag groups and things on the ground because I just felt that that was an area that I could cover a little bit more freely.

And not that not that I was in any way censored, so to speak, but I just. They can censor you by limiting your access. Yes. It's a step removed. And I was going to ask you that question. When you were there embedded with U.S. forces or NATO countries, how close would they let you get to what was actually going on? Because there's a variety of embeds. Like, hey, you can come and visit our talk, which is tactile operations center.

You can watch from behind these streets. That's very different than sitting in a vehicle convoy or getting on a helicopter and going and actually involving yourself with the local partners. So most of my sort of more combat oriented were local with local groups because, you know, again, the narrative was that the U.S. wasn't fighting on the front line with this, with the ISIS conflict in particular. And so I think it would have defeated the purpose of what they were trying to say if I was going anywhere kind of near a front line with the U.S. Yeah. So most of that I did with either the Iraqi army or with the Kurds or with the Syrians and sort of did that. on my own terms. Probably similar in Afghanistan as well.

Yeah, very similar in Afghanistan. Again, the focus was on what the Afghan troops were doing. And, you know, to be honest, though, I did find it a little perplexing in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Just, you know, you have these wonderful men and women that are going able to serve, and they've spent 18 months there however long the deployment is, and just have never been able to leave the base, like step foot outside of it. And to me, that was sort of a reflection of perhaps what is going wrong in a place like Afghanistan, where, and I would talk to the soldiers and things.

And I was surprised that their limited view or understanding of the politics in the streets of Kabul. And I really had to put that down to that's because they're not allowed to go and mingle and understand how the local people are thinking and what they want and what they feel. And so I sort of think that the perspective then only becomes who is allowed to come onto that base and who's past that clearance and all that sort of stuff. And you're not really getting that full sense. And I think that that was missed a lot in Afghanistan. And I thought, unless you're kind of going to do it properly, what's the point of doing this? It doesn't surprise me that most of them had less of an understanding of the local politics or even a tribal culture versus a democracy, which at least U.S. forces are coming from. And the reason for that is, is it's not made an emphasis in their training.

Yeah. You know, the soldiers that go over there, the U.S. military is very, very good at some things. One of the things they're not great at is nation building, which we have demonstrated many times throughout the course of history. But another one is, and I understand it to a degree, even from my own occupation, we would have a reading list. You know, one of the books that they heavy early on in Afghanistan, three cups of tea. Oh, yeah. Hmm. Do a little research on that author and the authenticity of that book. We'll leave that for a, we'll shelf that for some other time. People can research that on their own. It made the main reading list. And so they'd give you six or seven books. And I remember at Team 3, my last appointment, we were getting ready to go in 2010. And right before they would bring somebody who had a foreign national from that country who they would talk a little bit about cultural things. You know, maybe from an interaction perspective, things that you might expect. Like, hey, if one of the guys, guys comes up and grabs your hand, don't, you know, don't, A, maybe don't be surprised by it,

but you don't have to snatch it out of their hand because a lot of cascading things are going to come badly from that. I was in special operations. That's the level of training that I was getting. We had, I wouldn't say an unlimited budget, but we had the ability at least a little bit to craft our training schedule inside of the parameters that we needed to do. Take it a budgetary level down, a precise level of training, down. And those are the people that you are talking about. I'm not saying that negatively at all. They just had a very different, more broad role in responsibility. And if you don't own it and train it, it shouldn't be a surprise. But then you drop those people overseas for 18 months. And it's possible that they could come back with the exact same

lack of understanding of that country than they went there. And that's, to me, that's not how you I don't know if win is the right term. That's not how you inch towards success, in my opinion. Right. And I definitely felt that that was, you know, and it's not that they want, I mean, of course they wanted to go out and be able to really do their job to the best of their ability. But I think it, yeah, it just was something, especially after Benghazi, things got really locked down even more after that in combat sort of areas.

And I think that it was sort of, in a way, a disservice, even though I do understand it. Yeah. But I think in the overall picture, it's missed. Well, you said it if you're not going to do it right, why do it at all? What's the point? Yeah. There is no point is the answer. And then you could put a tinfoil hat and suit on and say it's all about the military industrial complex.

And the point is we're just going to enrich some people while standing on the shoulders of the young. It's like, okay, I'm not going to go down that hole anymore. Some people can say those things. I don't know. I might have like a tinfoil visor on sometimes, but I'm not going to put the whole hat on because I can see shades of all of that. But it's a tough one. Tough one to describe. Tough one to explain.

And I can't even imagine being on a deployment in either Afghanistan or Iraq and not being able to leave the base for 18 months. It's a very bizarre view if you only see it from behind barbed wire and Hesco's. It's not some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in Afghanistan. In my entire life, we're in Afghanistan. And in Iraq as well too, like along the Western Euphrates River Valley, the beautiful area down there. Pandia Valley in Afghanistan. Oh my goodness.

Hard to describe. Yeah. I've seen pictures of it and you're like, that's nothing. You should see it in person. Yeah. You know, as the sun's just like, holy shit. Yeah. And I feel fortunate to some degree that we, well, we got to go out and interface more than a lot of conventional units did.

Not necessarily interfacing probably in the ways that most people are thinking. But like my last deployment, we were completely doing village stability. operations. We were living amongst doing our best that we could to help going to the weekly meetings, sitting down with the elders, whether or not any of that stuff helped to do anything, at least it's a different perspective. And you're getting out and you're trying to get a better understanding of the country. And if I'm being honest, I left Afghanistan in my last rotation, more frustrated than I've ever been in my life. Because he tries hard as you can for 10 months and you realize none of that is going to change anything. And it's not going to change anytime soon now or

whether we leave now or we leave in 10 more years. It's just, it's Afghanistan. The Soviets couldn't win, you know, no other force is able to sort of beat that. And I think we missed opportunities in looking at the root causes. It was sort of fixated on certain symptoms in Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah, we can, we have the physical ability, I think, as a U.S. military to take almost every chess piece off of the board. And again, you and Jocko talked a little bit about this.

Tens of thousands of ISIS soldiers can be killed. The ideology, unless you are able to get the correct individuals, the ideology can still live on. Or not even necessarily the individuals. Unless you can correct, I really like how you talked about corruption and how corruption can change people's views when it comes to the decisions that they make. If you don't set the stage properly, then that ideology is, going to continue to live on. If one of those people exist and they have that ideology and the stage is correct, they're going to be able to pull those people across the line. At some point, you know, bombs and bullets are not going to be the solution. Not that I have the solution,

anybody listened to this by any stretch, but I am in a place now where I think bombs and bullets are not enough alone. No, you definitely need the diplomatic aspect, but you definitely, in my opinion, it's just the level of corruption that happens in government that, the for some reason, we, the US has decided that it's so systemic and there's nothing we can do about it and it's just going to exist regardless. So we throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can really do. So to me, terrorism is so often a symptom of it. And I just think unless you're going to get to the root cause of it, you're never going to really deal with it. And I don't have the answers necessarily of getting to that root cause of it. But I think

just throwing money at a government that is going to service themselves and that can be whoever's in power and the different echelons of power. And if it's not going to the people or the people don't see a betterment in their lives, then they're going to get pretty frustrated after a while. And I would like people who are listening to you and I talk about this, I would like them to shift their focus on the U.S. because I can see flavors of the decisions people are making in groups that they're getting behind in the U.S. Right. For exactly the same reasons that we're talking about ISIS. Remove that term. And I'm not trying to make a value comparison between any of these organizations. There are people in the U.S., and I think the number of people

is growing that believe that our government is corrupt at a, I don't know at what depth of level, but you hear them talking about it. And you see small, fringe organizations inside of the U.S. And I'm going to pick one that's recognizable, and I'm not saying this is the only one because I got into a fucking Instagram argument with a guy today about this, QAnon. I made a joke about Q&O. Okay. The guys are like, fuck you, man. How come you're not making fun of the left? I was like, sorry, dude. You caught me at a moment where I was writing this post, and I said that it's hanging on like a Q&On follower in the Reddit threads. It was a joke.

And he got pissed because I didn't list the organizations on the left. And for full disclosure, I think there's idiots on the right and the left. 100%. They're both equally dangerous. Some people will say that the left is more dangerous than the right. I don't know. I'm not smart enough. My point in all of that is I think the more people feel that there is corruption, the more

likely they are to start aligning with those organizations to say things like, we're here to correct the problems. We have the solution for you. Let me identify your enemy. And then they rally behind a cause. And again, they're on the left and the right hand side. But to me, as I was listening to you guys talk, I was looking at it through the lens of an American and watching these fringe organizations like, huh, I wonder what those turn into if that

perception of corruption or the actual corruption continues. Could it ever get to something at the level of ISIS, which maybe you know the answer to this? How many countries do you think have an ISIS presence? Oh, gosh. I would say it's a, to a degree it depends what you pledge allegiance. Yeah. So usually what how we would identify it would say if you've pledged allegiance to former Abu Baghdaddy or you know, I would say it's a huge presence. in a place like Mozambique and parts of Africa, Afghanistan still has its contagion of ISIS, it's still in Iraq and Syria. I would beg to sort of say it's at least 10. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know about any of the organizations in the U.S. It just, for me,

it clicked a little bit. I was like, oh, okay. That at least makes me they feel that the power above them is corrupt, that they feel like the current system is not going to correct itself. So, they are finding a cause that resonates with them. Is that cause correct? I'm not smart enough to make that determination, but I have a little bit of a better understanding of how they can cross that threshold, which to me, full disclosure is fucking insane.

Some of these thresholds. It's cult mentality, I think, and when I think it's really amplified in the US by social media. So the way that the algorithms are constructed with Twitter, with Facebook, they're the ones who sort of rally against this stuff, but they're perpetuating it.

So you can take a relatively benign tweet that might be extremist. It takes one or two people with big followings to retweet it. You have all sorts of, and then all you're seeing on your feed is that echo chamber of people reinforcing this idea. And so suddenly you start to not feel alone. So then you feel a lot more compelled to come out and speak and you feel that you're part of a community. And I think it comes down to a lot of that gang mentality too. So where you're part of a system and you're part of a like-minded group and you're all together. all pushing for something that's that's greater than yourself and I think that's being perpetuated

essentially by the same people who are canceling it out and and I think that's why we're seeing it move so quickly compared to 10 years ago where it sort of would have stayed either fringe or it would have just sort of taken a long time to become anything now it's it's sort of easy to get caught up into into that fold it can make the rounds pretty quick yes and it's pretty easy to say hey let's all get together here. Let's all do this. Let's all do that. And you don't start to feel that anything you're saying is fringe because you have so many people also reinforcing the same thing that you believe and it's, I guess, a shared bonding experience, so to speak. How do you unwind that? It's difficult, I think. Is it even possible to put that horse back in the stable? I don't even know because the

sort of level of disinformation, misinformation, disinformation, distrust in authority, distrust in media, distrust in whoever that I think that people are going to believe what they're going to believe. And I think it is difficult, not to say that there are, of course, certain people will wake up and realize that maybe they were being screwed, but it is hard to wind it down. It's hard to wind it back. And then, of course, then you're running into the First Amendment issues of what is censorship and what is not, and where does that cross a line? And where is it a double standard? You know, you delete former President Trump off Twitter, but you're still allowing the Ayatollah to remain there and all sorts of other horrible dictators around the world. You know, is that a double standard?

I think to me, yes, but, you know, to other people, they might see him as a threat and the others is not. I have cons. I think we're going to be okay. But I have concerns if we can't figure out. a solution to election security that will restore people's faith in the electoral process. I feel like if we have another election cycle like we did where everything is contested and then we're contesting the fact that it was contested and people are lost in all the fray, I mean, I hope there's some very smart people who are trying to figure out a way that can,

because if it goes another cycle of that, I think everything that we're, seeing is going to take another step forward or if we're in third gear now it will go into fourth gear then i start having concerns i think we can correct it but that's one of the biggest concerns that i have three years from now if we cannot figure that out i think we are headed into some rough waters yeah definitely and i think i mean we've got to start i know it's difficult and everything online is hackable to a degree but you know we have to start some forward thinking in in what technologies and things we can use for the voting process and and that will and enable much greatest swathes of the population to pass the civic duty.

So I think we need to start, instead of thinking of mail-in and this and that, what can we do on a technological level? And I think there's a lot of great innovators out there. And to me, that's something that I'm more interested in than trying to figure out the postman's kind of trajectory. Yeah, I want to figure out how we can restore people's faith in a process that has been doing okay. We don't have to say great. We don't have to say terrible. but we're here. You and I are here, Holly. Yeah. Okay.

If you have to show, you know, if you have to show an ID to get a vaccine and everybody's being encouraged to get a vaccine, you know, shouldn't the same standards kind of apply? And as an Australian, you show an ID. There aren't many places in the world that you cannot. Yeah. You know, so. And I saw a list one time of things you have to show an ID for in the U.S. It was a very long list. I think if you, and I, people, of course, will correct. me if I'm wrong. I believe that the argument that I've heard against it is that, you know,

A, not everybody does those things that require those IDs, and it's often difficult for people specifically in lower rungs of the economic ladder or inner cities to get those said IDs. Well, let's figure out a solution for that too. I guarantee you there are dozens, if not hundreds of NGOs, you know, foundations in America. That will give you your ID for free. That will be, you know, pay for your ID. There are so many foundations out there to support that kind of thing. I guarantee if that's what is required, there will be a number of people willing to come up and say,

hey, I'm going to start a 5013C and I'm going to, you know, you can't afford an ID come to me. Yeah. I don't feel it's unreasonable to show an identification card to vote. And I feel that for what I have heard, people arguing against it, that they're solvable problems. So it's solved that. And maybe that will start to,

reinstill that faith in the system itself. I don't know. And then there are people just don't want to, you know, want to evade the government and don't want to be on an extra thing. And I get that, but how do you buy a house? How do you get a lease? How do you get a car? I mean, genuinely, what are you doing to survive if you don't have an ID? How does that work? I would love to know, actually, sit down with somebody who's like, yes, I have no paper trail with the government. I'll have to figure out how to do like a blurry face on that. I never forget this one story in California of hearing a guy who used to drive in the carpool lane with a bunch of government documents

because, you know, quote, unquote, he was an entity or, you know, corporation, so to speak, as our capitalized versions of our names are. And he could not wait to get pulled over for being in the carpool lane. That poor police officer that pulled that man over. I think he lost the case. I think, you know, he went to court with it

and wanted to argue, well, you know, government makes me a corporation, therefore there's an extra entity in the car here. I think he lost. If you have some free time, go on YouTube and look up sovereign citizen police interactions. It's worth a Google and it's worth a laugh. You'll have a good time. The arguments that they make sound pretty good until you put a little bit of rational, reasonable thought into it.

And then it's just pure gold. Right. Right. I'll have to check it out. It's worth the time. Back to Afghanistan and Iraq. Wow, we got off tangent, but I like it. Because there actually are, as I was listening to you guys talk, I, I,

I love the experiences that I had from being overseas. I hate some of them as well. They did not make me the person that I am, nor did my job, make me the person that I am, but I am the person that I am because I went through those experiences. I don't know if that makes sense. They left a mark on me for sure. I listen to your descriptions of evil and the things that allowed that evil to take place. And I was thinking more about our country than over there.

Also, a thing I think about a lot when I see a lot of the protests that start in, you know, whether it's the woman's march or whatever, and I just think there's so much, and there are certain many, many things that we all need to address and to fix and, you know, and I'm all about that. But I also think there's this insatiable need for people that I think in a whole, so many people live very meaningless lives, whether that's their job, whether they're just not fulfilled in what they do, whether they're just going through. through this kind of motion of a nine to five, trying to pay the bills, trying to get by, as most people in the country are. And there's this need to feel part of something that's bigger than yourself. There's this need to feel like a part of a revolution.

And so I've often observed over the years things that I, I guess I wrap my head around a little bit because I've seen a different level of extremity overseas, but this sort of need to be part of history or part of something bigger or feel that you're fulfilling a bigger purpose. And you could also say that with the sort of the social justice warrior on Twitter. And so that just is something that I think is also driving a lot of the movements and the extremities we have.

It's just this unfulfilled lives, I think, that people are just trying to find meaning. And a life that is easier than most. In the U.S., right, first world country, the first world doesn't apply itself equally to everybody in this. country obviously but some of the levels of oppression and poverty and pain and suffering that I have seen overseas some of the people that I interacted with said nothing about it and they found an actual fulfilling life in their words not mine living in that environment it's a tough one for me to see people. And again, I am aware that we live in a first world country, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that blanket of being in the first world covers everybody. There's different

economic levels, socioeconomic. It's a tough one for me to watch somebody complaining on their $1,000 smartphone holding a $6 latte about oppression and suffering when I have that other experience in the back of my mind. It's not, I'm not saying that to them it makes it any different, but the difference in optic between the pressure of one of those lives versus the other, it is, I don't have the vocabulary to describe it. I really am a believer in one thing I've observed that's so different, say in the Middle East compared to the U.S. is this family-centric or this community-centric environment that people live in overseas, where people will, you know, they're often living together, first of all. and meals are just, you roll out that plastic sheet of paper and you sit there and everyone eats and it kind of doesn't matter if there are six people there or 16, you know, there's however much

food. And there's this sort of community. And I think that that's something we've lost a lot of in the United States, is this being part of a broader family or being part of a bigger support network. And I think that's what gets a lot of people by with very little in those places is they have strong support systems. You'll see that, you know, with the Yazidi girls, when they were trying to raise money to bring, you know, pay a ransom to get some of the girls to come back. And it was this entire community effort. It wasn't just on the father or something to have to come up with the money. It was him being able to go to the neighbors and the neighbors went to the neighbors and someone else went here and everybody's

sort of pulling in and without question. And we do see that, you know, to a degree here, but there it's just, it's so ingrained and it's something so beautiful that I have in the way that they live their lives, that I just think we've lost a lot of that. They're more connected in many ways from a physical perspective. I think people in the U.S. believe they're more connected from a digital perspective. And it's not the same. It's not. They'll try to support, and there's nothing against GoFundMe.

I've created them for people before for the SEAL Foundation. It's not the same. That digital interaction is not the same. I actually haven't thought about it from that lens when you describe how they will, the meals and together and the community, because they certainly, I mean, I've been to some of the most remote villages. I mean, I can't say necessarily anywhere on Earth, but at least in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, man, they were actually, the people that were living there were very, very tight with no understanding or idea of what was going on in the rest of the world for that matter.

Yeah. I remember where's Osama bin Laden? They're like, who's that? Yeah, I had the same experience. The same experience. That ties into what we're talking about. I know, but that was typical. They couldn't understand what was going on.

Where is Osama bin Laden? They're like, you got a picture? Because I don't know who you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. But, and again, it's so hard to describe the environment that they live in. And what would just be just complete abject poverty here in the U.S. And how they describe their own life in the context of what they even think is possible.

It's a tough one for me. That's one that I struggle with, given my experience, and I usually will just keep my mouth shut because I want to come off the top rung on people a little bit when they start complaining. But war is an interesting thing. Yeah. It's definitely taught me to be a lot more of a minimalist human being, I think.

It strips away what matters and what actually doesn't. And what I need and what I don't. And really how comfortable that I can be, you know, being anywhere. And this idea of, I guess for me personally, home not necessarily being a physical place, but more home is sort of, home is people. Home are the people that you love. And home is where your support system exists. And that can change maybe month to weeks or to a year. But I think that that's what really the work overseas taught me is that it's people. It's not a place. Things don't matter. Yeah. People do. I mean, you could, I have a home that could burn down now. And if I had, you know, my son who's

living with me right now. My girlfriend, I'd be like, you know what, I'm good. I mean, it wouldn't be good for that day. We get a sweet hotel. That's about it. But we're in Calis Bell's to be like an average hotel. But it goes on. You know, it's, you're not defined by the things that you have. What's the fight club quote? Your khakis end up owning you or something. Yeah. Oh, it's a, your stuff ends up owning. The things you own end up owning you. Yeah. The first world I have noticed many times, probably maybe this is more in the U.S. It's almost defined by its excess. and that excess it ends up owning people a lot of the time.

I have fallen, and I'm talking about myself when I say this too. I will start having this very bizarre value of objects that actually at the end of the day mean nothing. And maybe that object is just money for people or the status or whatever it may be. Strip all that away. If you get the people that you care about the most,

I think you're going to be okay. Absolutely. Especially if you have a community. Yeah, and I think for me to, in L.A. in my New York kind of lives, I, you're surrounded by people that maybe have different levels of money and fame. And I'd often look at that and just sort of wonder about the emptiness of it. And I always found that I could relate so much more to, you know, to the women in Afghanistan that were, you know, going through hardships or sitting on the floor than I could to people in Venice Beach with a $12 green, juice sitting, you know, I just, I couldn't wrap my head around that. That just didn't make any

sense to me. And I much preferred, there's an authenticity about these people. And something that I really appreciated too was, I felt that so much in my, in my life, and as a journalist, was, was transactional. So people always wanted something from you, or you were sort of the token, she works for, you know, you weren't just, I wasn't just Holly, it was Holly at Fox. Or, you know, there's this sort of additive that comes to everything every time you're introduced, which really annoyed me. And then everything felt very transactional, aside from a very small group of friends who don't want anything from you. But what I loved about working in these places is you meet people who really share a story with you and they share some really intimate and horrific things

that have happened to them. And they don't want anything from you. They don't expect you to give them money. They don't expect you to, you know, and they're just the most giving sort of human beings. And you'll walk into a refugee camp and I'll be leaving. and some little girl will come and give me the only orange that they, you know, have left in their tent because they have to give you a gift. And I just, it was just a really sort of eye-opening, beautiful thing to see human beings just wanting to give and to talk and to not expect anything in return. It's incredibly humbling and it can reset your optic for how you view the rest of the world. It's powerful. I actually wish that everybody at some point in their life was forced to experience that because I think it would really round the end.

edges on a lot of the energy that, in my opinion, is needlessly spent on things that don't fucking matter. 100%. And all that money you spend on the Starbucks lattes every day, you know, what could you do with that? You could, by the end of the year, probably gone a really lovely, you know, vacation somewhere or have some sort of wonderful life experience with that. Something for sure. Yeah.

How close to the front lines of war were you able to get? I mean on each trip that I've been in definitely, I've gotten to the front lines in a lot of situations. I've always found it interesting, but usually more on the scale of the less interesting aspects of war, I guess, for me personally and what I sought to cover. I found it interesting more in understanding the things that soldiers would talk about or the way that they would think about their families or just sort of the waiting period, I guess, before. any type of conflict happened. That's what I found interesting to sort of sit there in the early morning while they were waiting for the bombing to start and talk to them about their families or how long they'd been there.

But I think from my perspective, I found it much more interesting away from what we call the bang bang. And really the people that were just living these lives sort of on the periphery of it all, that's what I found to be more engaging, I guess. The bang bang is the price. The impact it has on everybody else. the cost. Yeah. They're two very different things. And yeah, I look at it at, I'll use myself for an example. What was the price of war for me? Time away from my family. Deployments, you know, the people

that I loved, overseas. What was the cost? Living through the experience that I did, the decisions that I had to make, even though I chose that occupation, one of those choices led to those decisions. And the weight that it all have, and that varies per person for the rest of your life. The price and cost are very, very different things. I wish as a country and as decision makers we spent more time on the cost than the price. I think it's probably the thing that's left off of the menu when the people sit down and talk about these things, what the country is going to do foreign policy. I think the price is on there. The cost is often left off.

Yeah, and that's definitely what I tried to sort of do with the book is to highlight that human toll and the consequences of that and what happens. what happens when the war doesn't want a war anymore, what happens when, you know, something is quote unquote liberated. You know, how do families pick their lives back together? You know, what happens in the shadows? And I think that's something that I wanted to bring to light and that I felt was better suited to my skills

than, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are going to be much better than I am at identifying the different weapons being used and, you know, how many JDMs were dropped today? and, you know, all that kind of stuff, that's not my forte. My forte is to be able to go into a situation and just really sit and listen. And so, again, it's not about, you know, always asking the question and always talking. And it's just a lot of listening. And I think we've lost that in journalism today.

So often people want to be the story. Journalists want to go in and be the story. And that's the kiss of death. And people would always sort of want to come back and ask me about, what was it like to be, you know, in a dangerous situation or in a suicide bombing? and I always felt, and I still feel very uncomfortable speaking about it, and not that I have a problem talking about it, but it's more, who am I to ever go into a situation and act like, oh my gosh, you know, this, this and this.

When people are living through that every day, they're getting through that with their kids, with their family, to me that is incredible. You know, maybe I've been in a few, but to me that's not a story. What I went through is not a story. What they go through, that is the story. And I think I've just seen it a lot.

And the invent of social media too is this idea of journalists wanting to be the story. And this sort of defeats the purpose of what journalism is. We're supposed to go in there and be neutral observers of a situation. And, you know, certainly I do my best not to draw any attention to myself in that way. But to be able to have a platform to, you know, tell the stories and to really speak to the people there. And again, that's listening. How did it feel to be near the front lines? To really be, again, another thing that's very hard to describe unless you've been close.

The sound, the smell, the communication, the movement, the cadence, the pace of all of those things that happened. And I say that from somebody who has taught to do those things over nearly two decades. And for me, it's still hard to describe what that actually feels like. I mean, maybe you have a totally fresh context on it. So I'm curious how that felt. felt being that close to it. I think for me, it was almost a strangely, a strangely calming experience in a funny way.

And I say that because it obviously wasn't my job to have to fire a weapon and hit a precision target and all of that. It was my job again to observe. And you really are in a situation where nothing else matters except what you're doing right then and there. And you can't be thinking about the bills you have to pay at home and, you know, what you're going to have for dinner

and, you know, whatever else. You really are in, and it's a rare, it's a rare thing in today's very distracted society to just have to have nothing but a clear focus. And that's what I found to be, in a strange way, calming for me. And I think that's why I've gravitated to doing the work because I'm not somebody who, I think you have to have a natural sense of fear.

Don't get me wrong. I think, you know, we all have a natural sense of fear. But to not panic or to not want to run away, or to not want to, I think for me, it was just a sort of very black and white experience, almost of you're either here or you're not, and I knew that I'd made a voluntary decision to be there. Nobody had forced me to be there. I didn't have to be there. I was under no obligation to be there, but I'd made that decision.

And I had to embrace that. I'd made that decision. I think that's always easier for you to do than people who love you, who are often the ones that are panicked for you, I guess. So for me, I just found it really brought out the things that we think about as human beings that are the most important. And I found that to be, you know, strangely serene. Do you ever miss it?

100% every day. Same here. Every day. I think about, you know, I often think, well, where am I going next? What am I doing? What is the next chapter? I don't know. I mean, I'll always write and I'll always write.

and I'll always be very vested in foreign affairs, but will I still be covering a war? Will I be covering a different kind of war? Will I be covering a cold war? But I would go back in a heartbeat to any of those places. And it's not an adrenaline thing. I think that's often a misnomer. For journalists, people tend to pinpoint it as sort of an adrenaline junkie.

And I never found that for me. I think, you know, there is an adrenaline. I'm not going to deny that it exists. but it's sort of this incredibly fast bonding experience, I think, that I found with people. So I came from my life, you know, in the US where I have some great friends, but obviously my family is still in Australia. And so it's almost a lonely life to a degree because you are living, you're working, you're living your own life, you're traveling.

And then I would be in these places where people who never knew you from a virus so suddenly you were the most important person in their life and they take it their job of taking care of you so seriously and you have these incredibly fast bonding experiences and I think that's what I miss a lot is sort of being with people in those moments that you can't describe to people but there's just this sense of of protection and care about each other that it's very hard to replicate in any other situation very well put were you when you started reporting on ISIS I'm assuming before you went overseas you had some idea of what the organization was you'd probably heard the term before you before you went over were you shocked at what you found when it came to the absolute savagery of what

those individuals are capable of yes and then i i was shocked i was shocked um i think yeah i mean when you're burning people in cages and you know for me the yzidis is something i take very personally is you know, when you can just sort of take an entire village of people. You should describe what happened with them and where the Yazidis are from. So the Yazidis generally they live on a Mount, Mount Sinjar, in and around

that area. They're a very ancient religion and so they're sort of a blending of different forms of Christianity and of Islam and they worship a toic and angel. So ISIS considers them devil worshipers and so they justified

taking these women and and men too. They came into the village. It was August in 2014, surrounded the base of the mountain, and, unbeknown to the Yazidis, who were all disarmed because both the Iraqi army and the Pershingya had run away.

And so they were sort of sitting ducks when ISIS came in and really had nowhere to go. So a lot of them were obviously killed at the base of the mountain. Men, I mean, they were just lining up men and executing them. The women all often were taken as sex slaves. And what I found to be so heartbreaking was that many of them had nowhere else to go, but up the mountain. And we're talking Iraq in August. It is brutal.

What she's saying is it's not cold. Brutal. And the crazy thing was, I mean, you had people, as we were watching it necessarily on TV, just starving and dying of dehydration. You had women that were throwing their babies over the mountain because that was going to be a better way to die than to die of... At the hands of ISIS. Yeah. Or to die of starvation. And I thought with all this modern technology that we have,

and we couldn't really do anything about it. You know, I think the Brits started doing some drops, some food drops and water drops in the area, but it was fairly limited at that point. And it was really that moment that brought the US back into Iraq because prior to that, Obama was still calling them the JV team and we weren't, you know, he was determined that we'd gotten out in 2011, we weren't going back.

And then after that, it was just like, we cannot let this continue. And they're such, you know, beautiful, sweet, very peaceful. useful people that were minding their own business in their village and this happened to them. And the thousands are still missing. You know, thousands will never come back. Yeah, they'll be unfortunately probably missing until the end of eternity. And what's crazy to me is that, and this is something I've done a lot of investigative work on, is so many of those women have been, or the boys as well, because they took a lot of the young boys

and brainwashed them and they gave them Islamic names and told them they weren't Yazidi and all of that. But now these people have essentially been given new identities and moved in with families. And a lot of them are in Turkey and other places. And so you have a lot of these Yazidis and these women and little boys that have been brainwashed into this group or brainwashed as a wife or whatever it is. And they're still out there and yet have no recourse of they've been given entirely new identities and little recourse of ever being found. And a lot of the boys, I think, are in jail and have probably been executed as five. is, but they were taken as children, and so it's a really hard, it's a hard stomach. It's a really hard stomach, especially when you start talking about the methodology that they

use, whether it be the drugs that you guys were talking about. What was the name of it? Capitone. Capitone, which was a combination of methamphetamine and what else was it? Gosh, I can't remember. It was methamphetamines, and it mostly came from Iraq and Syria. I'm blanking on the other ingredient, but. Nothing paired with meth is good.

from my limited understand. Yeah, it was mostly, you know, it's an upper and a huge, huge one. So when they're giving it to all these young kids and they're going out to the battlefield, absolutely willing to die and take as many bullets as necessary and just shoot like crazy animals. Sometimes back at their own families. Yeah. I would imagine depending on how long ago they were taken or when they were taken. And that's something that, you know, people say, well, 10,000 ISIS fighters were killed.

It's like, okay, let's talk about this for a second. How many of those people that were killed are in that category? Kidnapped early on. Brainwashed. Didn't start out as somebody who was a true believer. Hopped up on fill in the blank. And that's not a new thing when it comes to warfare. Whether be Somalis chewing on cot, you know, for the Black Hawk Down type incident, they gave us uppers and downers.

To stay awake was the justification. But I will tell you right now, it does. It modifies your headspace for sure. You feel like your hair is on fire and I'm like, fuck it. I'm charging it to 50. today. Not that that ever happened, but I think if the situation presented itself, I still don't think I would have done it, but you would have viewed it differently because you're in a modified headspace. Those people, the people you're talking about, like I said, they kidnapped, the brainwash, they're hopped up. If you kill 10,000 of those people and zero of the ones who are the devoutly, just incredibly devout, and it is their entire goal to recruit, we're not actually making an impact. So again, numbers mean something, but it has to be the right numbers.

And I don't know, I don't know if people pay attention to that. You and Jaka talked about the recruitment and the Western women wanting to go and be wives and leaving their families or going with their husbands and then their husband gets killed. And it's like, hey, well, here's your next husband. I mean, it's more complex than people believe, I guess is the point I'm getting to. 100%. And I think to, the issue of religion is a factor, not the factor. Yeah. So for many who are true believers, they will, you know, that's their motivation.

But it's kind of one of five motivations. And we frame it here in a very simplistic term of, well, that is the motivation. And often I will say when we do see loan attacks in the United States or in the West, it usually is a religious motivation. Because those are the individuals that are driven to. radicalized, yep. But when you're actually in that vortex where it is so prevalent, religion is usually not even one of the top three factors of joining. It's usually, again, I strongly stand by this idea of being pissed at your government and wanting to do whatever you can to find back.

Sometimes it's just necessity. So if ISIS comes into your village and you're working in a bakery and they say, well, you know, we can either kill you or you can make $5 a month working in the bakery, you're probably just going to say, okay, I'm going to keep my job. Now I have a new boss. And, you know, so some of it's just pure necessity of survival. Afghanistan is a great example of that. Yeah. You can go back through the history of Afghanistan kind of as far as you want to, and it can be, it can be bluntly described in that country, from my perspective, at least, that they have lived under the rule of the thumb or a stick or an axe or a sword really far back. And first off, you know, you know.

need to survive before you're going to thrive. And you will see a shifting of allegiance throughout the course of that. I completely agree with you. It's a poor man's description to say that this is only religiously ideologically based. I think that, I think it would for most people be farther down the rung. I think it would shock people actually how far down the rung it normally is. Yeah. That most devout fighters, though, that I would, and I say this based off of like probably more of the things that we found on them, whether it be a journal or the videos or fill in the blank, the most committed fighters were the ones that had that ideological route to it

from a religious perspective, but they were so few and far between. Yeah, they were not, they were the exception, not the norm. By a substantial margin. Yeah, like in the book, I talk about interviewing one of the head IED makers for ISIS. He was recruited and was making all the car bombs and things. and suicide vests and I said to him, well, would you go, I mean,

would you strap a vest to yourself? Are you ready? He's like, oh, absolutely not. You know, he's not. But I'll make him for you. What size are you? Yeah, he's like, I don't have that level of faith yet. And I thought, well, here you are, you know,

strapping vests onto people to go to the quote unquote paradise, but you're certainly in no means willing to do that yourself. So I think, yeah, that to me was sort of just the, exemplification of the reason people are joining it. And it was often money and a lot of ISIS, especially in the beginning and why they were so strong in the beginning were Saddam's generals, Saddam's military, who the US debathed, quote unquote. And when you leave a whole bunch of angry men with their weapons on the street and no jobs

and no sort of political allegiance, they're going to get pretty mad too. And then I think we really underestimated just how far the Shia would take their sudden moment in power after being oppressed by Saddam, who was Sunni at the time. And I think the U.S. just completely underestimated the degree to which they were going to toot their own horn. And you ended up with the same problem in reverse. I don't think many understand how the Sunni and Shia even tie into the religion of Islam or where they came from or, you know, the disagreement when it comes all the way back to the days of Muhammad, where that initial. came from, I have a limited understanding of it because I was curious. And so I went and explored it on my own.

That was not something that I was taught when I was in the military. So again, it's there's varying levels of understanding. And if I'm being totally honest, I don't think it was, it was after I got out of the military that I had more interest in that and having an understanding of that. It wasn't even during the time period that I was going over there and being, you know, as a member of the U.S. military deploying to that area. So it's complex. Yeah.

And most of them are Sunni, 90%, I believe. But Iran is the leader of the Shia. So that's sort of where that vortex comes in of the Iran versus Saudi Arabia. Yeah. No, it's very, once you develop a little bit of a better understanding of the Sunni Shia riff in the geography there, it makes a touch more sense. Not saying that it describes everything in perfect detail. But like I was saying, my optic shifted when I was listening to you in Jokotak. and started viewing our own country through perceived corruption or real in the decisions.

It's like, okay, the pieces now are less vague to me. I still can't connect them a lot of the times conceptually, but it's a little bit of a better understanding. You can see where things can start. I mean. At the very least, you can see where, like, oh, maybe this is the inception or origin. Maybe this, I don't know what this would look like in 10 years, but holy shit. Yeah.

Could it look like that? Maybe. Probably depends on how far that perceived corruption goes. or the actual corruption. And another thing that I've thought a lot about, especially in covering Venezuela and other places, but you could almost apply it to the Middle East in a murky way, Syria at least, is when you have an authoritarian government who has deliberately unarmed a population, what degree does, and I sort of try to point this out to my friends who are very pro-gun control,

is you can then pray essentially or you can know that you can oppress an entire group of people because they've been unarmed, whereas sometimes the idea of a population being able to defend themselves is a huge deterrence. You know, and I think a lot of my Venezuelan friends will tell me that in Venezuela, which was a country where you could own arms. And then over the course of Chavez's time, he started to do buyback schemes and other things. And by around 2012, I think, just before he died, it was sort of a blanket. No one is allowed to own a gun and the government's going to protect you. Well, sure enough, Maduro came to power and what happened.

These peaceful protests were completely annihilated. And a lot of Venezuelans, I think, look back at that now with regret and say, you know, not that, I mean, it could have been a complete extra bud bath, you know, had the citizens been able to defend themselves. But you could have also look at it saying the government, you know, they may not have taken the action that they'd take it. Potentially change their decisions. Yeah. If you look back at history, for totalitarian regimes, one of the first things that they generally tried to. do is disarm the populace. Absolutely.

And there's a reason for that. Yeah. It's not accidental that that repeats itself over time. Yeah. And I think that's often missed in the argument that when people are fighting, well, it's a slippery slope when you have this control and that control and this control, you know, where does that slippery slope end? And I seen that play out in, you know, even in Mexico and other places.

And Mexico is one of the three countries in the world that has in their constitution that you are allowed to own guns. Well, they make it so hard for anyone to. legally purchase a gun there. So that sort of enables the cartels and other groups to have free rain over that population. And I just think, you know, I don't know that that works in the least. But again, Afghanistan, Iraq, those places, you aren't legally allowed to go into a gun store and buy a gun. You have to have some sort of military purpose to do that. And yet time and time again, we've seen the own government oppressing its people. Yeah. What was it like sitting across

from an ISIS fighter, somebody who believed in that ideology and having a conversation with them or an interview, however you would want to describe it. I think the first time for me, that was in 2014, so it was still a very relatively new concept. And I wasn't quite sure what to expect.

And there were two young guys that came in. I was... I mean, first of all, he sort of have these impish-looking human beings, and one of them had killed 70 people, and I thought, how does this guy do that? And he only had one hand, because I guess he stole something,

and they topped one of his hands off, so then he had to learn to shoot with the other side. And so it was just sort of a fascinating, it was really sad in some ways, because you thought these young people that kind of got swept up into something, and now they've ruined their lives, they've probably been executed since then.

and in one case the guy that had killed 70 had been forced into a marriage he didn't know the woman and she turned out to have something wrong with her he said and tried to run away couldn't go back to his family because couldn't pay then his family had to pay the dowry which he knew that they couldn't afford sort of poor family went back to land in Mosul and ISIS came in and said well if you're going to stay here you've got a fight for us so that was kind of his foray in and then he he got I guess scared or wanted to get out and tried to do a runner up north and got busted and they took him in and yeah it just it was sad to me that somebody had obviously killed a lot of people but had just made those sort of life decisions i think that were

in a difficult situation and i wanted to go in there and really hate all the you know hate both of them and and i and i remember on that car ride back afterwards feeling angry at myself that i even had any sort of depth of understanding of what they went through because I definitely think they're evil and horrible human beings who did a lot of horrible things. But at the same time, it's not black and white. I can't look at somebody and hear their story and not, to some degree, have something that I can understand about that story. How did he talk about killing those 70 people? Was it matter of fact? Was it even something that hit his radar scope is, I don't know, abnormal? I think him for him yeah he wasn't a hugely empathetic creature I'm not you know

Empathy is a sliding scale yeah people need to understand that some people he was quite matter of fact about it Yeah he was pretty he was pretty uh I wouldn't say he was boastful but he was pretty Matter of fact about what he'd done remorseful at all I wouldn't say particularly remorseful no Was that a theme at all with some of the people that you had sat down how many ISIS fighters or people that have sworn their allegiance to that ideology. Have you sat down and spoken to? I think over a role probably about a dozen, and then I wrote probably about half a dozen in the book.

Similarities between them that you saw? Again, I'd say I don't know that any of them joined for first and foremost, except for the European fighter that I'd interviewed, joined for religious reasons. There was a guy from Belgium who I think was sort of indoctrinated or he grew up in Morocco and I think he was probably the only extremist that had made the effort to go across the world to do that. But the others are, you know, impoverished families, I think limited education, limited financing

and just sort of saw it as a window of opportunity in their lives. So I'd say that's definitely a similarity. I found most of them to be, you had sort of two camps. had ones that were quite sorry for what they'd done and were clearly trying to curry favor and apologize. And then you had the other camp that you could tell, well, maybe rehearsing lines of, I'm sorry, but didn't mean it. And it was usually no one really in the middle that was kind of, there were the ones

that you knew would be back on a battlefield if they'd had the opportunity. And then other ones that were clearly like, I really fucked up and I'm sorry and I would encourage people not to join this group and genuinely mean it. The path for the gentleman who came from Europe, how was he radicalized? What did that journey look like for him? Where did it start? So he, so his Moroccan family, you know, grew up, I think fairly moderate. He was part of a group.

It was called Free Sharia in Belgium or something. And it was funny because they only really just outlawed this group. But this group was extremely radical group that was. very freely, you know, espousing their thoughts in Belgium and radicalizing each other. And someone had told him, go and join al-Qaeda. And I think a lot of it was motivated by what was happening in Syria with the war, with the Bashar al-Assad regime cracking down on protesters there. And a lot of them were extremely incensed by that.

And that was the initial idea for him to go over there. And he found that he could travel, I think, without a passport and just have ID. And so he was up and gone. immediately, and it was a guy who was working at DHL or some, you know, very standard delivery job, ended up in Turkey, going through Turkey, you know, they meet up with these people online who smuggled them into Syria and this was the pre-ISIS day. I think he went in around 2013 when it was still Al-Qaeda. And then when that split kind of happened around that time, he ended up going in the ISIS path that way.

And I think he really saw it as his mission to fight the Assad regime. Did you ever have the opportunity to interview, have conversations with female ISIS fighters? I did. So I had a conversation with a couple of them in Syria. Again, sort of a similar, I mean, the women weren't fighting, so to speak, but the women were kind of the supporters. The enablers, and often something that I think is incredibly horrific is they were the ones really grooming these Yazidi women. So we cannot look at these women and think that they're somehow innocent or caught up in. What do you mean my grooming? So these women, and it's just her, so they would take these EADES, buy them at a market.

Buy them at a market? Yes, so they were, yeah. An ISIS run market? Yeah, so the women were being sold as sex slaves or taken and chosen by the wallies and the leaders and different echelons. And then the wives of the ISIS fighters were the ones that were sort of essentially responsible for putting makeup on them and sort of grooming them to be. be raped. And that to me is just, it's absolute disgusting. So I think that when we look at, there's this sort of idea of wanting to look at these women as being innocent human beings, or they weren't on the front line killing people. So therefore, they should be, you know,

somehow exempt or return to their country or put in some kind of rehabilitation program. And I think in a lot of cases, no, these women were doing just as evil things as killing people. I almost think it's more savage than killing people. Just listening to the description of the grooming and facilitating. Absolutely. Fuck, that is a level of evil that... Yeah. And then one of the women, and the other thing I found was that ISIS would often recruit women

that clearly had mental problems. So a lot of... How would they do that, though? I think you just pray on the vulnerable, really. I remember one of the ISIS women that I talked to, she was schizophrenic and it was quite evident because when I was sitting there, one minute she was laughing and the next minute she was crying and the next minute she'd be, you know, trying to grab me. And then the next minute, you know, she was telling me how much she loved the jail. And so it was just this very bizarre

experience of absolute extremities. But, you know, she, you know, pretended to be this very innocent, oh, I got recruited by the driver and then my husband was going to divorce me and I didn't know what to do. So I joined this group and I wanted some money and she was in Cook. And then she ended up getting caught. But she was one of the, you know, huge enablers. for the Yazidi sex slave. She was one of the ones that were going in the market and grabbing the girls with the fighters and sort of grooming them and abusing them too.

You know, those huge levels of abuse. Yeah, torture is, I mean, it sounded like in some of the stories, Jock was reading through the sections of the book. And I mean, for some people, it was a daily occurrence. Yeah. Like, you know, let's just be hung from our feet with our hands tied and be beaten or put into a really isolated or small space

so you're contorted. I mean, it's, yeah, it's horrendous. Yeah, totally horrendous. And hard to, I mean, some of the boys as well that were recruited into fighting. I mean, they still just have these permanent, their ribcages are just black because of the level of torture that they had to sustain. It's hard to wrap your head around. It's hard to, for me, it's really something I'm very interested in and exploring a lot more is this idea of how you didn't survive that. you know how you

how you survive just such extreme levels of torture and what is it that mentally what mental headspace can you possibly get into that you can stand there and be beaten and whip senseless and have your fingers cut off you know for hours on end

how do you survive that and I'm just so deeply curious very ordinary people or do you you know And you could argue that sort of on a psychological level, do you? But physically, you know, I've met many people. And this was something interesting that came up for me in the very beginning of covering ISIS when you have these conversations with people, what happens if you get kidnapped?

And I remember being in a room with a couple of other US veterans and myself and a couple of locals. And every single one of them said, well, if I get kidnapped, just shoot me. And I think I was the only one who said, don't shoot me. I'm going to stick it out. Is there another option? Yeah. It's like, do you want to get into a gunfight or a knife fight? Yeah.

Is there an option C that doesn't evolve a gun or a knife? I think so much of our human mind immediately goes to we can't, I could never survive that, so just I want to end it. I don't want to be kidnapped. I don't want that to happen. I'd rather die. And for me, I found that to be, no, I'm, if I can talk to ordinary people that have survived the most extraordinary things and they've lived to at least.

least tell the tale, then I want that opportunity too. So that's something I've always been fairly adamant. That's an interesting headspace. Yeah. Yeah. Was it, how much concern did you have for the probability or realistic nature that you were in a place where they might value kidnapping you? Was it something you were concerned about pretty constantly? I wouldn't say I was pretty constantly concerned about it. I mean, it was certainly something you have in the back of your mind and something you try to avoid. I'll never forget one time coming back from Sinja Mountain and coming back to Abil and this long winding road and I'd end up falling asleep in the back and it was a Yazidi Pasamaker guy driving and a friend of mine in the car and waking up and he'd taken a wrong turn and we were going into Mosul and there was the black flag right there and my heart just dropped because I thought, oh my goodness, like what are we doing? and luckily there was like a kid, ISIS kid at the checkpoint, and our mother guy was able to turn around and we were able to go back.

I think in that moment it was a little bit surreal because I was like, okay, what am I going to do now? I can't call anyone, you know. So I think those things are always to a degree in the back of your mind, but just from a personal perspective and maybe that's just because of the research and work I've done. I've always been a lot more concerned about being taken by a government, like a state actor.

So the Syrian government or the Iranian government, that to me has always been something that has concerned me more than being taken by a terrorist. I'm not sure why. That's just where my head's been in the past. And I thought, you know, once one of those places takes you, it can take 10 years for your government to fight to get you out if you're lucky. And that was something I very much caused anxiety for me

when I was traveling in those particular places. One of the more common themes, Hete even called that, with ISIS seems to be the sex slaves. Yeah. How does that fit into their ideology? So they basically justify that as Yazidis being devil worshippers. Is it just the Yazidis or is it anybody that doesn't fit with their ideology? You could definitely have rogue people that will, you know,

and I have heard stories about Christians and other women that have had that happen. The Turkmen women is another group that have had a lot of missing women by ISIS and that they haven't come out to talk about it. And I have tried and I've gotten a couple of their leadership to admit, okay, well, we have a number of women missing, but they're so deeply conservative that they just, if those girls come back, they probably get stoned to death. And that's the sad reality of it is that the idea of them being taken by any,

sort of male entity, regardless of whatever it may or may not have even happened, they can never come back. And those women usually end up not wanting to come back anyway. So they won't try to escape or they'll kill themselves because they know that there's just no future for them after that. And that, to me, is an incredibly sad situation. So the Yazidis really broke a mold when they came and started to talk about what had happened. Because up until that point, you have these deeply conservative cultures who typically won't talk about it at all. And a lot of Muslim women that have had that happen to them, they won't talk about it because that will cut them out of getting married or their lives will just be over.

Or they do risk being honor killed by their own family. So what the Yazidis did was incredibly brave because they came out very early in the beginning when some of them were being rescued and spoke to the international community about what's happening and it was it was quite incredible to see but ISIS does justify them as these devil worshippers and um you know ISIS is a very organized group they had you know piles and piles of doctrines explaining exactly what they could and couldn't do and so that was sort of all part of it but you had to take them as a wife quote unquote so you had to sort of stand there for two seconds and say you are my wife not that she had any um say in the matter no but that was their justification

of it and um and then they would often sort of sell them and And then they get a new wife or sort of that was their process in that. And these Azeides were really, I mean, there were just thousands of them that were taken. And I interviewed many of the girls that were taken. And they're just extraordinarily brave in telling their stories. And I guess their hope was that something would change. I think if they keep telling their story, something can change, or if people pay attention to what they're saying, the depravity of that situation or the choices involved in that, again,

exceeds my vocabulary when it comes to ability to describe. I can only imagine when they were taken that their life was a life of torture and imprisonment. Absolutely. How long were they, I'm assuming some tried to escape. Some were probably killed, probably more than some, yeah. Some killed themselves. Yeah, I was just going to say that. Some chose to kill themselves.

What percentage do you think survived that? ballpark. Oh, I do have exact figures. I think that I would say there was probably around at least 8,000 that was taken. And then I want to say two and a half have come back. And so there's still a whole chunk of missing. And I really thought, you know, when they announced the Mosul Liberation and I was there and I just thought, oh my gosh, this is going to be a great opportunity for the girls to get out

and they're going to be free. And really very little, very few came out of that. And that was crazy to me because I expected that there was going to be dozens, if not hundreds, that were going to be freed and they just, they weren't. So they were either killed in that fighting. And a lot of them were killed in that fighting too, you know. And I think they were essentially human shields. And so when you're in a house full of ISIS fighters, and I talked to women, I talked to one Yazidi woman who was a sex slave. And I don't know if you remember, there was a, I think it was a Delta Force group that went into Syria and were like,

having hand-to-hand combat with some of the fighters. And it sort of made a big news splash here because of the, I guess, the nature of the fighting and what had happened. And months later, I interviewed her and she'd been able to get out and was at a refugee camp or IDP camp in northern Iraq. And she said, I saw that. She was like, I was in the house. I saw that happening.

And I was trying to get someone's attention, but not that there was anything I'm sure that the Americans really could have done at that point anyway. But it was just fascinating to hear something that I'd seen all over the news. and we'd all read about and then to have her sort of sit there and say, I was just begging for someone to help me and not being able to be helped. And then a lot of the girls were showing me in a shrapnel marks and the thing that they had in the back of their head because the house they were in was bombed.

And I don't know by who. It could have been Syrians. It could have been Iraqis, Americans. I don't know. But they were sort of in the middle of it. And I thought, well, that's going to be really difficult to avoid. Well, it may be impossible to avoid because. we're not the only people who understand our rules of engagement.

Yeah. Or the boundaries that we tried to put on war. You and Jock talked about, absolute war. The U.S., I actually agree with Jock a little bit, the dropping of the atomic bombs. That was about as close to like, hey, hold my beer. Everything is on the menu that I think the U.S. has gone to. In Iraq and Afghanistan, I had very precise Rwees. Mosques, almost always off limits.

Hospitals treated as exactly that. Hospitals, ambulances, Red Cross, all of those things. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the seams in your enemy or opponent's strategy or limitations. So we started, you know, yeah, they'd get in cars with kids and women. And we could even way back in the day. We'd track a handset, but are you willing to send a hellfire missile into a car of women and kids to kill one individual. I've never been at a level where that value

mathematical decision needs to be made or I don't even know what the threshold necessarily is. But it's impossible, I would imagine, for these women. Especially for urban fighting. They're going to drag you in, they're going to put you in front of the windows, they're going to have you sleeping in the same rooms as them. And it can get much more complex than that,

and I'm not even going to add the other things that I've seen because I don't want to give anybody ideas, but it could become impossible for them Because the people that we're trying to find and eradicate, they understand the rules that we have to operate in. One of the most fascinating things I saw was sitting on Sinjar Mountain when it was not long after the Mosul liberation had kind of started and just watching back to back traffic of ISIS vehicles, families, moving from Mosul into Raqa into Syria along this sort of one road. And I just remember sitting there and we're just watching it. And I'm sure, you know, the guys were all sort of sitting there watching it as well. And there was just nothing they could do because they were all families.

And I just thought, you know, here's your absolute, you know, probably the leadership that's sitting right there in plain sight in front of me driving along this road. And there's just nothing anyone can do. No one's going to drop a bomb because they're all full of kids. I'm glad that we didn't drop a bomb there, though. Of course. There has to be a difference. Yeah. Because, again, there's a question I will get asked.

Well, what's the difference between you? you and, you know, the people that you were fighting. And you've interviewed U.S. servicemen and women, I'm assuming. Yeah, 100%. Similarities and differences that you found between U.S. servicemen and women and ISIS fighters, male and female. Did you find any similarities between the two? Or was it more defined by their differences?

I would say it was more defined by differences. But if you're going to talk similarities, you have to believe what you're doing is right to a degree. You know, and I think that's where ISIS differs. I mean, not that the U.S. soldiers definitely believed they believed in their fight and they believe what they're fighting for, but I think there's been a lot of disillusionment over the last two decades. It's a sliding scale for sure.

Whereas I think ISIS, to whatever degree, they believe in their mission and their fight. And I think that that has been an issue, I think, a little bit with the U.S. soldiers. However, I would caveat that by saying, I think one of the big reasons that ISIS was eliminated, not eliminated in a physical sense, but at least by territory in 2017, was because Trump did come in and say, this is the mandate, get rid of ISIS militarily. It wasn't, let's fight Iran. It wasn't, let's fight Bashar. It wasn't, you know, let's build a nation. Let's, you know, it wasn't that. clear mission. And all the generals on the ground that I'd interviewed at the time were like,

that's what we needed. We needed a clear mission and basically the free hand to go and do that. And I think, you know, in their perspective, when I interviewed them, that was what they felt they've gotten and that was what enabled them to fairly quickly see that ISIS was run out of Mosul and Racker and at least taken in a territorial sense. Yeah, from a geographic perspective, we took back their territory. So I think when you do have those clear mandates, I think that definitely helped. But yeah, I think, you know, I hate to equate any sort of U.S. with what ISIS was doing. Well, and it wasn't an attempt to do that. People who fight for a living, whether they enlist

and they want to be issued a uniform or they become radicalized or they find a purpose that they want to fight for, I wouldn't be surprised if there were similarities. You know, depth of belief does not necessarily equate to legitimacy of belief in my mind. Because, again, when I asked you about evil, the praying upon those. And then the belief, I would say, for most U.S. service members, is they want to go and prevent that from happening. They can equally believe that that depth equally. I don't have an issue with that.

I feel that there are two very different values that are placed on those beliefs. One to protect and ensure that, you know, what the other individual, male or female was trying to do, trying to do doesn't happen. Right. I wouldn't have been surprised if you said that the U.S. soldiers, at least from a depth of belief perspective, it probably is actually very similar. Depending.

Right, depending. And what I found, too, in my, when I'm able to have those very one-on-one conversations, you know, maybe outside sort of the military environment, is really the level of compassion that, you know, a lot of the U.S. soldiers and sailors and things, have for the people on the ground and the situation and the frustrations of wanting to do the right thing and wanting to help people that are oppressed and really challenging situations in

life and sort of hopefully seeing some of what they do as part of that mission, even though it does involve combat and killing and other things, there's this sense of wanting to do what's right. And I found that that's been a very constant theme too. And even talking about, it's funny, I bring up, I spent a little bit of time going and touring Sada City with the Mahadi Army. And even though they're kind of the enemy of, you know, the U.S. and the cost of lives in Sada City in Baghdad was horrific. But every person I know who served in Sada City just stays with them and they talk about the smell and, you know, and things. But there's a sort of uncanny, and you can probably speak to this, an uncanny love for this place because even the

they hated it, it defined so much of their lives and they're fighting. Yeah, and it left this sort of incredible mark. So I think there's this duality of loving and hating a place at the same time. Jaka would call that a dichotomy, which is his favorite word. And I feel like he should get a tattooed, not on his forehead, but somewhere. He uses it well and he uses it often because they're everywhere. Yeah. And that is war itself, I think.

it's the best and the worst of humanity. It brings out the best and the worst of what we as humans can do for each other. Do you think, and this is more speaking from using, not speaking from, but using the example of somebody who has been radicalized versus, well, they could have been recruited, kidnapped and then brainwashed. So a radicalized ISIS believer, do you think it's possible through education, or means other than taking their life to reorient their opinion on their beliefs? I do.

I do. And that's to say for everyone, not sort of that rehabilitation process isn't going to be for everyone. There are going to be people that are way too far down that line to be brought back to Earth. But there are many who I think sort of with their right program, it just depends. Do you want to invest in that? And I'd say with the Iraqis, they were so damn pissed off. about what had happened with ISIS and they were not, there was no mercy there. They were having, you know, very short, very quick trials and basically sending guys out to the gamos.

Do we need to use air quotes for the trial? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like perhaps the verdict might have been preordained before it began. Totally. And there was just no, there was, they were done. There was going to be no sense of compassion. Based off of what ISIS did when they, I mean, at a very deep level, I can understand that. And really how many Iraqi soldiers had sacrificed their lives in that fight? And I think we overlooked that a little bit or a lot is just, I mean, there's thousands upon thousands of, and they actually, I think, had to hide the numbers because they were so high because it would destroy morale of how many of these Iraqi soldiers that were killed in the fight, and that rightfully so, they were pretty pissed off about anything to do with ISIS, and there was going to be no mercy

at all there. And they certainly had no. interest and and that's one thing that a lot of them have brought up with me in the past is well why you why americans trying to do these rehab programs for these people we don't understand this just you know this is silly why would you spend money on that and to them it's you know it's weighing up what the what they see is the importance of a human life and and I guess how we see it in a slightly different frame there there is a difference at least in my own experience and into the conversations and the things that I've physically seen express, the beliefs physically expressed, there is a difference, and even actually honestly, how they fight. I've watched them shoot.

Well, again, I can't say I ever encountered somebody who was ISIS. Al-Qaeda, probably a different story. I've watched them shoot through their own fighters to attempt to injure Americans. There's just a different value in life and the way that they conduct themselves on the battlefield. field. I don't know. I prefer our particular approach to that as opposed to theirs, but I'm not trying to make a value judgment on it. But I think they've grown a lot, and that's something that I, I think that's been sort of nice to see from the beginning toward the end is how, I mean, obviously with the amount of experience they had, but in the beginning, I think a lot of the Iraqi fighters

I talked to really didn't know what they were fighting for, who they were fighting, or, you know, it was a kind of a paycheck. Whereas by the end, of it, I saw a much more cohesive sense of we're fighting for Iraq. And to me, that was finally a nice thing to see because, you know, if you, if you aren't fighting for something, you're fighting for nothing. So to sort of see that evolution, I think by the end of it was quite profound. Well, without that evolution, they would never be able to do it on their own. Absolutely. You have to have that deeper level of belief and understanding and purpose and mission. Otherwise, war will fucking grind you up and spit you out because there is a

cost to it that is huge. Yeah. And that's one thing I really observed in Yemen and I think why we're seeing that conflict continue to go on and why the Houthis are so strong is because they're fighting and they're a roundbacked and they're fighting for their militia and they're fighting for their purpose. And whereas the sort of Yemenis are this kind of rag tag. We don't really know. We just want our court. We want to wake up at 11 and then, you know, stay up all night and two and then maybe you fire a few things and leave. And I always got the sense working. there that they never knew what they were fighting for. And so it really doesn't surprise me six years on that they're still not really anywhere with that war. And because I think Yemen

doesn't know what Yemen is fighting for. Yeah. How many trips have you done as a journalist to war zones? Do you have a ballpark? I've never counted. Spitball here. What do you think? I mean, it depends because a lot of it's not war zone either. A lot of it might be, you know, Venezuela or other places, I guess, you know, 20 or so, 20, 25? I had to calculate it all. Out of all those 20 to 25, or not out of all of those, but in all of those trips and the experiences that you have had, can you point to something that has robbed you of a little bit of faith in humanity, something that sticks with you?

Like, oh, shit, maybe we're not so well off as a species. I think there are many, unfortunately. I think for me, there was a moment that just absolutely broke me. And that was in Sinjar City after it had been liberated. And I was sort of living there. No one was able to live there because it was still, you know, it was full of trip wires everywhere, full of ideas. And I was just with a small Yazidi Peshmerger group sleeping on a roof. and I remember kind of going through the town and then seeing this man one time.

It was just living in this bombed out house. And there were two little kids. And I just said, you know, stop the vehicle. I want to talk to this guy. And I went out and I sat with him on this totally broken down porch. And he started to explain to me that he was a poor farmer. His wife had been taken as a sex slave. And so he had the two kids.

And he couldn't afford to stay at the refugee camp anymore. because there was trouble and they needed some, you know, he just wanted to be back in his home. And his home had nothing. Had no electricity, no water, and it was mostly rubble, but enough structure had survived to stay there. And so he'd come back and he was just so broken. And he said that the ISIS captor, which they often do, would call and say, well, I have your wife here. And if you pay me $15,000, I will send her back to you. So this guy had just gone around his village and was raising money and was selling his she,

and whatever he had to get his wife, the mother of his children back. And it took him months. And finally, he was able to call the fighter back and say, okay, I have the money. And the fighter says, oh, well, it's doubled now. And he knew that he, there's just no way he would be able to do that and raise that money again. And who knows what would happen or how long that would take. And it broke me because I knew I couldn't help him because, and I couldn't ask anyone to help him.

I couldn't start a go fund me. I couldn't ask an NGO. There was nothing I could do because that would be supporting terrorism if I'd, you know, tried to do that. Indirectly funded it. So I just, I remember that was a part of me that I felt absolutely broken because. The helplessness? The helplessness. And I just felt completely wasted by the helplessness.

And these two little children who would grow up without a mom or any type of resource and they were living in this awful place. And I just thought, how sad is that? This guy just, he'd done everything he's good. He'd given up everything he could to try to get his. his wife back and and it just became a hopeless mission and that nobody could really assist him on and that was just heartbreaking to me and I find that for me moments like that so weigh on me so much more than you know digging yeah the bang bang bang or even digging up a mass grave or something that that is horrific but but death is death and I think when the living are like the dead there's something

that's just incredibly haunting about that. And it's stories like that. And I often wonder about these people and what lives they're living now and those things stay with me a lot more. I wonder if his wife was even alive to begin with. Right. And yeah, there's really,

and the rescues are just such intricate, challenging things for all people involved in those. But yeah, that was just, it was heartbreaking for me. And I thought of just the sheer helplessness. What about the other side of the coin? and all of your experiences, what has stood out to you that restored your faith in humanity? I think we can look at the same story to a degree and say, the people that were rallying around him to give him money and to support him,

it's that kind of community. Again, that has given me faith and what people are willing to do for each other without anything in return. And I think that has always been extraordinary as well. and seeing that play out in many different ways. I know in another situation I was at a refugee camp and there was a woman who was pregnant and I guess the baby had gone really, really overdue

and they didn't have access to medical resources. And again, you saw this sort of same rallying of people, selling whatever they had in their tents, going down, you know, onto the corner and selling whatever little trinkets or whatever until they could raise enough money for the woman to be able to go to hospital and have her baby.

And I just thought it's little things like that that are just bringing the community together. And that's also what's restored my faith in humanity is the resilience and meeting people who, maybe this isn't the first time that they've run away from their, had to run away from their home. Maybe it's the third or the fourth. Maybe they left in the Iran-Iraq War

and then left again during the U.S. invasion. And now again with ISIS. And yet the willingness to go back and rebuild, the willingness to go back and start, lives again with nothing and to be able to accept that it couldn't happen again. To me, that's just remarkable. I think that will and that resilience is just something that I've learned a lot personally. When was the last time you went on a trip to a war zone? How long ago? I've, I mean, I guess I've covered a lot of cartel stuff over the last year, so I've sort

of been doing different Mexico trips. Different type of war zone. Different times. But, you know, extremely, I would say, I would say in case, I'll say case in point, cartels and a lot of what I've seen in Africa make the brutality of ISIS pale a little bit. Really? Yes. Yes. Well, you're going to have to unpack that for me a touch. Yes. The level of, I mean, ISIS is a high-scale brutality and then stuff I've seen, both in cartels and Africa I always point to is if you look at some of the places in Congo and things, I remember. meeting people that had triplets and they have to run because otherwise if people find out that you've had triples they will sacrifice them they will you know do some kind of ritual that

is beyond me because they because of the fact they were triplets yeah just this is a lot of uh like witch doctor type stuff that happens and it's it's really you know that's what people with alopecia you know they have to to run too so you see that all the time the women and what they endure um there is is is crazy in terms of, I think it's the Congo where they literally rape babies. I mean, it's horrific. You have one week old, and there's some incredible doctors, the Dr. McQuagie who won the Nobel Prize, who's there, and they will get one week babies brought into their clinic that have just,

I mean, I can't even put it into words. How can a human being do that to another human being? I don't even know, you know. It's just, it's earth-shattering to me. And then the women, you know, they'll have these children out of rape, and then the children that are being born out of this rape are then subject to crazy sort of stigma. And then their lives are upended as well.

And even at a refugee camp, these different militia groups will come after them. And some of these women are just the strongest human beings I've ever met that I'm in awe of what they are willing to enjoy. Yeah, and it's horrific. And then similarly with the cartels, just the sort of the constant or the lack of concern in chopping up a body and sending it to someone's loved one is just dropping a body in a bath of acid or things like that that a lot of those small villages and places that have messed with the wrong person or subject to are also pretty unfathomable to me. Am I mistaken in the belief that cartels are nearly always tied to the drug trade in some way, shape, or form? In some way shape or form, obviously I think their business enterprises expands it a lot beyond that.

But the nuts and bolts of it is... At a root cash level? Yeah, it started with drugs. And one thing I've been exploring a lot is the relationships between these labs in China that bring all the fentanyl precursors into Mexico and the sort of the relationship between these Chinese groups and the Mexican cartels, which is... killing Americans and it's something that's right on our doorstep with fentanyl and other things that are coming through and how that's coming through and how that relationship has really grown a lot over the past eight or nine years and it's it's something that hugely affects affects all of us i think we all know someone who's died of a a counterfeit pill or or an overdose

or yeah just had their life just inexplicably changed due to an addiction of some kind or you know, just a catastrophic event involved by it. Yeah. Are you going to write a book about what you're researching or reporting on? I've done a few different articles. I would like to, I'd like to include it in something in the future. I'm not sure what shape that's going to take yet, but I think one thing, as I mentioned earlier, that I'm really exploring is this idea of survival.

So what are the, what is it that people are, what gets them through the, the, these unfathomable situations? Is it faith? Is it family? Is it hope? Is it how do you pull through? You know, I have a good friend of mine and she was held by Joseph Coney for eight or nine years. And she had several children out of rape and I, you know, I talked to her often. She just went back to Uganda. And I just think, you know, how did you survive that? And not even just the own, you know, that particular militia, but just the threat of other militias. the threat, the constant environment. And you were taken out of a boarding school at the age of 14 into this.

And, you know, how did you get through that? How did you escape? Like what, you know, and she went on and got a master's at Georgetown. And just she's brilliant. And I just think, how do you live your life after that? And she's a real example of that to me. And someone else who I talked to and fairly often and recently wrote, who I know that you know is Jessica Lynch.

And she's someone I talk to. And Jessica and I talked a couple of weeks ago about her life now. And she's just this incredibly vivacious, beautiful. She's a student teacher in West Virginia, and she has her daughter, and just how she's able to pick up the pieces of her life. And every day she's putting on the leg brace. And every day she's reminded of, you know, what happened to her? And I just think, you know, what is it that pulled you through?

You know, how do you survive that and just become this beautiful human? and that you are today. And she's just such an incredibly compassionate, zero bitterness, zero resentment, just fully accepting of everything that happened to her. And I just think that is something we can all learn from people like her and people in Iraq and all parts of the world. What is it that they get to get them through? And I think when we tend to feel like, or, you know, if I tend to feel like my world is falling

apart because something very minor happened in comparison. Wi-Fi slow? Yeah. And I'm, I'm, totally, you know, and I find myself falling into that trap. We all do. It's like, God damn it. I only have 5G. Yeah, this sucks, and I can't download this damn photo right now, and I need to send it to someone.

I'll have those moments. I'm like, I'll go find a mirror and just look at myself, like, you're a piece of shit. You need to go. You need to recalibrate yourself. Totally. And so I wanted to do a book in that realm, and not because I want it to be dark and depressing, but because I actually want it to be a little bit, you know, give us all a little bit of hope of what is it that we can draw upon

in situations that is that human instinct for survival. And I see many great survival books that are out there, but they're all often by very trained people or people that are kind of doing massacistic things. And so I just really want it to be something from a very ground level. So that's sort of a project I'm working on. Do you think you'll ever return to a war zone? I'm putting the cartel in a slightly different category, but, you know, similar to the areas that you visited to write your book.

Yes, I definitely am not done with that part of my life yet. Maybe not to the same level that I've covered in the past of really, it's a lifestyle. It's certainly not a life. It's a lifestyle. And everything that you do has to be somehow consumed by that. and I don't know, I guess I tend to look at life a little bit in chapters, and I don't know that that chapter is ever going to be in, it was sort of a repeat, but I definitely think my life covering war zones is not done yet.

I'm very interested, and I'm talking to an Australian dwarf photographer, friend of mine in the moment, about collaborating on some products, possibly in Afghanistan around the time that the US sort of officially departs because we'd like to see what happens there. So I think that will be also on my radar as well. And I'm curious about that part of the world, definitely. And then I think the sort of the nature of war is changing a little bit too. Again, I think the big focus is in China, Iran,

and I don't necessarily know that they're going to be hot wars, but they're going to be sort of cold-simmering wars. And that is very intriguing to me as well. I think Myanmar, Burma, is. also an interesting place that I've covered a little bit, but I would like to explore that a little bit more as well in Asia and see what, where that develops. Do you ever worry about how much time you spend in the shadows and the dark? If you talk about good and evil, you know, as a metaphor, light and dark, you ever worry about how much time you spend in the dark? The impact it

might have on you, the weight. I do. It has tangible weight. It does. It does. It does. It does. And I guess I made a decision. You know, nobody forced me to be in that situation. Nobody's forced me to go back there or to cover assignments there. They've all been decisions that I've made. So I take responsibility in that I've made those decisions. But I do think I look back.

And I guess, you know, having gone to boarding school and having left Australia, very young and all this thing. So I've always been a very independent person. And I never put weight on support systems to the degree that I think now that I'm in my mid-30s that I wish that I'd done when I was younger. So I guess, you know, when you're in your 20s, you're somewhat invincible. And you don't think you need help and you don't think you need, you know, to talk about it to friends. And quite frankly, it's hard to talk about those things that people that are not in that environment and I think that I just thought I was a little bit maybe invincible in that way and I didn't put those support structures in place when I should have and so now I'm looking back on it and

kind of trying to work backwards a little bit but I think I didn't you know I tended to go into a hole a little bit more than I should have and I'm I'm definitely very aware of that and now for me it's more just being able to how can I restore some of the support systems or what is it what does a support system look like to me now that I think I didn't need as much when I was younger that I definitely recognize that I need now. I know that writing is cathartic. It helps me. Have you ever, or do you now, do you talk with a professional to unload some of that weight?

I have in time to time. I'm not particularly great about doing that on a frequent basis as I should. But I do have a couple of really good friends that I tend to unload a lot of that on to. where I'll talk about it a lot or I'll call. But, yeah, I write a lot. It's hard, and I guess this is when my stubbornness comes into a degree. It is hard always to explain a lot. And also, I guess you don't want people who really love you to worry about you too much either.

Good luck with that. Yeah, yeah. So that's why I've never really discussed it with my family, so to speak. you know, they often didn't even really know when I was in places until I came back and then I would tell them or, you know, I'd say I was in a, you know, I was in Turkey when I was really in Syria or whatever it is. So I tended to shield them from that too, I think, to a degree. Yeah. So it definitely is a work in progress in recognizing that you do need those outlets. And at the same time, I also think that I, what helps me is having knowing that I make a conscious decision to do those things. No one's holding a gun to my head to go to Iraq and report on that. They're things that I feel that are part of my purpose as a journalist in this particular echelon of my life. What do you do for hobbies in your downtime in between these journeys that you're going on?

I still do my ballet. I still love my ballet. I'm a big runner. I have a Harley, which is, I haven't been able to ride as much as I like because it's been stuck in New York and I've been traveling. But that will be, you know, a downtime thing for me is to go on a ride. Usually I'm not really much of a group rider, but I'll go with a friend or often, you know, will enjoy going by myself. You know, do a little bit of a day trope or something somewhere. So that's been a really nice thing to have gotten into in the past. I don't know if I'll do it forever. But it's something, you know, it's been nice to get into in the past four or five years.

What kind of bike do you have? I have an 8.83, but I really like the 48. So I'm kind of contemplating selling so I can get a 48. But then I'm like, oh, this is an expensive hobby. Maybe I need to give it up all together. No, it's fun. Well, I mean, let's not do that. Mikes maintain their value. You could swap them around a little bit. I think there's a marketplace for these type of things. Yeah. So, no, that's been fun. And that's sort of, you know, that's actually was a really fun thing I got to do in Iraq too and a lot of other places that I've gone is like still one of those really shitty, you know. 180 whatever they are bikes I've logged a few miles on those bikes yeah and then take him for a ride which is kind of being fun

and journey into places that you may not otherwise be able to get into so you have been on one hell of a ride your experience is quite fascinating I would say you probably based on the trips that you have done you have probably more peripheral experience to combat in the cost than most people

in the United States military, even in the peak kinetic years. It's good to see that you have, that you've handled it the way that you have, and you haven't become defined by it or been smashed under the weight of it on the shoulders. It's a real thing for sure. It's very, very hard to describe the cost. You asked in the book, and I don't know if it was you asking this, because Jocka was reading it, what is war? Was that something that you ask people?

That's a running theme sort of throughout the book. I guess it's a string that ties a lot of the memos together. But no, they're my perceptions. Okay. So taken from different situations. Yeah. So in each sort of situation, I think you can never define war as one thing or the other. And so often I would ask this question to myself, really.

What is it in this particular situation? What is it in this particular situation? What are the little different facets that we may not fully understand? And they can be as small as war being something that so is distrust between people. So suddenly you can't trust your neighbors. You can't trust people who are your friends. And right through from that to the much more macro picture, which war is a suicide bombing.

War is babies being killed. War is, you know, and they're the big picture. But I guess with that question, what I wanted to do was bring out the micro in the subtle aspect of what war does to humans. Now that you've had some distance from it, what does it mean to you now in your current headspace? Somebody was to ask you, Holly, I've never been around it. I don't want to be around it, but you have been around it. What's it like?

What's war? War is horrific, and I'm someone who really, I guess, over time, has come to see that it often does very little good. You know, I think there's a lot more, it should always be the extremity of an absolute last resort and never a first resort. I think I rarely see a purpose in going to war. I rarely see a point of US in any sort of full-scale capacity. And that's not to say that, you know, we can't be involved in some of these conflict and supporting local groups or supporting humanitarian concerns, but I rarely see the point of full-scale war. Having said that, war, again, I go back to war,

will show you the best and worst of human beings. It will show you absolutely incredible things, and it will show you the absolute darkness and the light as well. It's a pretty damn good description. Probably better than I could do. What's your definition? Of war. That's tough because I had my personal experience,

and then the grander, what is war as a country? War was one of the most beautiful things that I've ever been around. The clarity of decision-making, and I think the ability to have an impact is hard to match. You and I could have a conversation for six hours, and we could maybe change somebody's mind or set in motion for them a new routine or habit that could have a long-term impact maybe if they can see the course.

But my experience in war is that you can take what you perceive to be evil at a level that it harmonizes in your bones and you can take it off the board. The ability to have impact, the ability to make a difference, the selflessness that I saw from other people, the sacrifice that I saw for other people. I watched U.S. service members on countless occasions risk their life to run into the middle of a road to grab a kid, to shield women with their own body with incoming rounds or mortar. And they don't know these people. And they don't know necessarily what they believe in, but they know that those people are trapped in the situation that they can do something about it. And on the other side of that, you know, the depths of what humans are capable of, abuse.

and the abuse that rubbed me the wrongest, that's not correct way to say that, the abuse that still has an impact on me, oftentimes it didn't come from the soldiers. It was from the way that the people treated themselves and their neighbors. In addition to having either al-Qaeda or the Taliban around there, just the savagery of neighbor against neighbor and holding on to grudges generationally and seeing how that would have an impact. But I look back on it and to me war is a beautiful, beautiful thing

from the perspective of how I was able to find myself, how I was able to grow in that process and I would never wish it on anybody and I wish it was an option that wasn't even on the table. Very complex for sure. It also taught me really the value of a beautiful thing about America is the value that we do put on human life, that we don't see in much of the world. And in so many of the countries I've worked in, a soldier dies in the battlefield, they're dead on the battlefield, whereas the U.S. will risk the lives of 20 more soldiers to go in and find the remains of that soldier, which to a lot of foreign entities just look at that and think that's. insane but to me you're an idiot why would you do that why would you do that and to me that's you know

that's a beautiful thing about america is the value that we put on human lives and there are still people out there trying to to find remains of of pilots who went down in world war two and just you know that is what makes america an incredibly special place i agree yeah it's uh i didn't think we'd be having this conversation today. Very deep. Where can people find your book? You can go to Amazon and also from the DiAngelo Publications website. It's also an Audible and Kindle as well. If you're going to listen to it on the Audible, please don't do so in your car with your kids in the back unless they're age appropriate. Yes. Late teens, I would say at best. Yeah, there are some heavy moments in there, definitely.

But then otherwise, yeah, I have my link on my social media, which is Holly S-M-K-K-H-L-L-I-E, S-M-C-K-A-Y. What's your next trip you're going on? Possibly Africa next month, kind of working on a few things there to see what pans out there. If not, I was supposed to be in India next week,

but I decided to postpone that one because of the situation there. There's COVID-Hoddhast I was in the COVID hotspot and I just didn't think that it was going to be worth getting the material that I needed to get. So definitely when that situation settles down, I'd like to get back there. And also I'd like to get back to Pakistan too. There's some stuff I'm working on there.

I'm very passionate about the Dr. Afridi case that's still ongoing there and talking to his lawyer and he is obviously... I'm not familiar with that at all. What's going on there? So he's the doctor that went to the bin Laden. compound and got swabs that the CA then used to find bin or to verify bin Laden's location and pre-operation so he was thrown in what basically in a nutshell you know Panetta and a bunch of people came out after that operation and were very quick to relay the details publicly before the doctor you know he was offered to be able to leave my understanding is that he was offered to be

able to leave but decided you know no one's going to know or he didn't really know who he is for it was just taking money. And so, of course, the Pakistanis were very upset about what had happened. They nabbed him. They didn't charge him, you know, with treason or terrorism, but they charge him with a bullshit part of being part of a terrorist group, which he wasn't. And so he has been spent the last decade wasting away in a jail being abused every day. He's been on hunger strikes.

His family has to move to a different location every other week because the radicals want to get them because they're so angry about it. And I just think it's a real shame and it's a real stain on the United States that we had this doctor that, you know, did a great service to us. And he is, you know, sitting in a jail somewhere and he's been forgotten. And that's something I've tried to bring up as much as I can. I've brought it up in different interviews that I've done with the foreign minister and people over there and just, it's like budding your head against a wall. I bring it up with the State Department. You know, whatever opportunity I can.

And I just, it's one thing I don't want to forget about because this guy is just, he's, you know, he's on his death row and he's a 23 year sentence or something. Like I said, I think near the beginning, the United States, specifically the DOD or the military is great at a few things. Tying up all the loose ends, probably not one of the ones that they're the best at, for sure. And they admit they fucked up on this. They admit it openly. and we bring this up in high-level discussions, we'll keep going, do more. There's aid, there's other things we can do to push for this,

and it's very politically charged. Yeah, I can imagine that it definitely would be. Wow. So you have no intention of slowing down at all. I can respect that immensely, actually. Yeah. People tell me that I should, well, they used to tell me, I've changed my hobbies, much more safe hobbies now,

but they say, well, you're crazy, why do you do that stuff? I don't know, it's what I'm called to do. So I can totally understand that from that perspective. Yeah. And I'm all about a good story. And to me, a good story and good writing isn't necessarily always about being in a war zone or a crazy place. I'm very, you know, deeply curious about things that, you know, everyday things here as well. And I think there are a lot of great stories to be told, you know, pretty much on your back door.

So I think, you know, for people that are wanting to do that work, I would suggest, you know, firstly stop and just learn how to tell a great story. and that doesn't have to be running to the other side of the world where there's bombs falling. It can be going to talk to your 99-year-old neighbor and asking them what life was like in 1945. Or, you know, there are just ways of, we gravitate to great stories. And I think that's something, you know, that's an art that we've lost a little bit of. And I think everybody wants to sort of think that they can tell a story and da-da-da. But I think we've lost that art of just what it is just to tell a story. And I think I took a lot of weight off my own shoulders when I used to get very frustrated.

You know, you go and you report these things and nothing changes. And then once you take that sort of hubris away and say, that's not what my job is. My job is not to go in and of course you want to have an impact, but that's not my job. Whether I have an impact or not, my job is to tell the story as best I can. And I think once I removed myself from that situation, I was able to be much more free. with the pen and just tell it without expectation. I think change will come from the stories. I mean that in a grander perspective because it has to be,

it has to see the light of day for the change to occur. It's probably on the timeline most often that people don't have the tolerance for. But I think you have to have one to have the other. I think it's very important work. Thank you. Closing thoughts by Holly. I'll get you guys out of here so you can enjoy what apparently is Gail Force Wins in Montana. All right.

Yeah. Here's the thing about Montana, and I'm not a native people, calm down. They say if you don't like the weather in Montana, wait five minutes. That's actually the first time I've said that, but I have heard other people say it a lot. I think Montana is one of the most stunning states in the country. I think you mean Wyoming. That's what I've been told to say. Well, that's a John Steinbeck quote where he says something to the degree of, you know,

Wyoming is beautiful, but Montana is heavenly or something to that degree. I think you mean Idaho. Yeah. Oh, Idaho. Or Colorado, perhaps. It's hard to say. Colorado, perhaps. Perhaps we could, but no, Montana is pretty stunning. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to come up here. Thank you for putting yourself out there and going to these places and taking the time to invest in what other people around the world are going through.

Like I said, I think the stories have to be told for there to be change. And far too many people have their head buried in the sand. So maybe they'll listen to you more than they'll listen to me. me. I hope so. And I hope that, you know, the memos are pretty diverse, so I hope that, you know, if something gets a little heavy, it's okay, you can sort of turn the page and find a latter one. And I hope there's... Don't do that. Go right through that. Yeah. It needs to be heavy sometimes. I know, it does. It does. And that's the thing about, I guess, war writing for me is there's no exaggeration needed. It can be raw as, raw as possible. And I hope that in doing

that, it gives people a deeper sense. I didn't, I didn't want to sound a sense. I didn't, I didn't want to sanitize anything. I think that's the only way you can do justice. Awesome. Thank you, Holly. Thanks, Andy. Thank you again to Kalo for supporting this episode of the podcast. Kalo's silicone rings are great. No matter how active you are, get 20% off at Kalo.com slash cleared hot. Check them out. That's Kalo, Quebec Alpha Lima Oscar.com slash cleared hot. And also thank you to Babel for supporting the podcast. Right now, when you purchase a three-month Babel subscription, you'll get an additional three months for free. That is six months for the price of three. Just go to babble.com and use the promo code cleared hot. That's bababble.com code cleared hot for an extra three months for free.

Babel Language for Life. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Thanks for taking the time to tune in, whether you're listening on an audio-only platform or you're watching on YouTube. I appreciate that you take the time every week to tune in. People ask me a lot, what can they do to help me spread the word? And the answer is actually embedded in the question. The biggest thing you guys can do to help me if you enjoy the podcast and you think it would be helpful to others is subscribe and share it with other people. And if you have the time, go on to Apple Podcasts and leave me a rating and a review.

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