Danny Jones Podcast - #177 - China's New Warships, The Threat of AI Weapons, & World War III | James Rosone

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

James Rosone is an Iraq War veteran who served 3.5 years in a combat zone as a military interrogator and contractor. During his ten years in the military and eight years as a Department of Defense and Department of State contractor, he fought and hunted down bad guys throughout the Middle East, Eurasia, and Europe. Today James is an Amazon top 100 author. EPISODE LINKS  Books - https://amzn.to/3SOMz5S   Twitter - https://twitter.com/jamesrosone Website - https://www.frontlinepublishinginc.com JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon DANNY  https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny  https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE  0:00 - Introduction  3:44 - Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse  6:18 - Air Force Interrogation  17:18 - Breaking down the human mind  30:45 - Psychology of Iraq prisoners  38:12 - Most disturbing aspect of interrogation  56:17 - Pharmaceutical drugs for treating PTSD  1:02:50 - Witnessing war on social media  1:06:28 - Nerve blocking injections with ketamine  1:19:48 - Psychopaths  1:26:13 - Writing therapy  1:34:23 - Predicting the Ukraine Russia conflict  1:49:50 - Saudi Arabia & the military industrial complex  1:56:07 - China’s new war ships  2:03:44 - The CIA & Proxy wars  2:18:40 - Physical damage from burn pits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, James. Thank you for coming on the show, man. It's great to be here. You've written a mountain of books. Yes, we've written a few books, yeah. How many terrorists have you interrogated in your career? Probably 110, I'd say. 110.

And is that what led to you sort of discovering this newfound love of writing and reading? Yes and no. I kind of stumbled into the writing, to be honest with you. It's good having a little bit closer. I kind of stumbled into the writing. It wasn't the first, wasn't what I'd gone to school for. And originally got into it. Originally is PTSD therapy, to be honest.

And my job's always had me write a lot in interrogations. You have to write your, you know, what went on in the interrogation, any kind of intel reports. You got to write up those and do a lot of research on the person you're talking to and your geographical area you cover. And so I had a lot of the skills necessary to be a writer. I just hadn't actually gone that path. And when I was talking with some of the VA about, you know, how do you make that adjustment from military to civilian? One of them had suggested looking at writing therapy

and just writing out the some of the areas and things you've kind of struggle with. It's good sometimes to put it on paper. even sometimes when you write out that event that happened and just write it down and then throw it away or burn it just kind of get it off your chest and get rid of it can be quite helpful but to kind of be a point where it's like okay i've done that just seems to be helping but what do i do next and that's when um this this person i was saying and said well want you just write a book and they're thinking hey i'm just assigning them busy work you know um And so I started doing that and he said, well, I'll write what I want to read that I don't see being written. And it just kind of took off from there. So it's not typical for Air Force folks to be interrogators.

No, it is not. It is not our main job at all. Yeah. How can you explain to me the beginning of your whole journey into joining the Air Force and eventually going to Iraq and interrogating all these guys? Sure. So I originally joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard back in 1996. I was young, 18-year-olds. 18-year-olds, didn't know what I was doing, what I wanted to do in life.

My uncle had been in the Guard for 20-some-odd years, but he was active duty. He worked there full-time. And he encouraged me to just go check out the Guard, get my college degree, paid for it through them. And then if I really want to make the military a full-time career, I just crossed over and do that. And it made sense to me at the time. So that's how I started in the military as going that particular path. It was in a self-propelled a paladin artillery unit. I spent six years doing that.

And then 9-11 happened. At the time, I was a student doing my fall semester for my senior year in Munich, Germany, when 9-11 happened. And at that point, I decided that I wanted to go full-time military. And when I decided I just finished school and then decided if I'm going to do this full-time, I want to go into the Air Force ranks. and it took a little while to actually cross over because it's not common to change branches. So it took me about a year and a half to make that switch. And then I moved in.

And then with the interrogation stuff, this is not a normal job for the Air Force. It's a special duty assignment for one. So it's typically you have to volunteer to go into a special duty assignment, bill it for that. But what happened is when Abu Ghraib, you know, broke, all that unfolded. When what unfolded? The Abba Grabe scandals at the prison there. We had the military guards were abusing the prisoners and the photos and all that stuff kind of leaked down to the internet and caused a big a big problem there. I think it was in 2004 and 5 when that kind of really is that is that when the enhanced interrogation got leaked.

No, it was totally separate. But this was you had those images of the prison guards. You find that awesome Abu Ghrave? Yeah, the prison guards were having the prisons the prisoners in different positions they shouldn't have been. And just they were not doing what they should have been doing. And it would create a big scandal and a problem for the Army. And what happened is they lost most of that mission and it got put on the shoulders of the Air Force. And this is not a normal Air Force job.

So the Air Force put out a request for volunteers to join. I joined in the second wave. So I went in the second round of it because we had to provide people for two years to help augment the Army and help a system in that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Again, this was soldiers being left to their own devices and not being properly supervised and doing what they're supposed to be done. And where was this prison at?

So, Abba Grave is, I believe that's in the west of Baghdad area. West Baghdad. Not too far from the airport. Okay. Yeah. I remember seeing these photos. Yeah. For some reason, though, I always thought that they were from Guantanamo.

Yeah, it's all in Iraq. And unfortunately, this really was kind of a spark that really ignited a lot of the insurgency to because it just fed the narrative of, you know, the big, bad, evil Americans coming here to subjugate them, so to speak. Yes. And it just, it really harmed us a lot, those images. But this was a big mission. And the Army needed help to manage that. And so the Air Force was asked to provide, you know, interrogators for a couple of years. and I saw the call and I read the description, thought, well, that sounds pretty neat.

Let me volunteer and go do that. And next thing you know, you're signed up for this 556-day deployment, more or less. And it was quite a long trip. I think I saw my wife maybe 26 to 28 days out of that period. So it was long haul. Now, why wouldn't we want FBI or CIA to be interrogating people? like this. That's typically what they do, right? Like FBI are like the number one interrogators. Different. So the difference between like civilian interrogation versus military, right? So

civilians, they're trying to interrogate people for collecting evidence that can be used by a prosecutor for a case, right? Military interrogators, that's not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to acquire information so we can action it, whether it's where is a weapon cash, where are they smuggling weapons across the border who is the leader for this organization or group and then where are they staying at where are they building 90s things like that we're looking for um intelligence and locations to go action something okay and it's usually to in our missions are capture kill that's what we want is i well i prefer the capture part because i need fresh people to talk to to continue working up the chain um some of the shooters prefer the other method

either way you're you're removing the threat from the population but again it's a very different mission sets from a law enforcement because they're again looking for um evidence uh confessions things like that to prosecute whereas on the military side we don't really care about the prosecution sign we care about intelligence to go you know capture killback guys okay that makes sense yeah where were we oh yeah so you got deployed yeah yeah we we deployed out of uh so we went to first you go to fort wachuka for your your train with the army um so us air force guys went embedded with the Army for the training period doing that. Having spent, you know, I went to basically training with the Army and spent six

years with the garden, doing different training iterations with that side of the house. So I was already used to being with the Army and working with the Army. So for me, it was kind of felt more comfortable because I always felt like an oddball. Being in the Air Force, having come home a different service, because I didn't start that service. It was kind of different. But as soon as we went through the training there, then we all deployed as a group over to Iraq. And we were at Camp Cropper.

That's where the main prison facility is at. It's right next to the airport there. And you're basically broke down into geographical regions. So you have groups that cover the south, the west, the north. And then inside the north, they'll break it down further into different regions. So the region I covered was the Diyala province, which is just north of Baghdad's Bakugula, Kala, Kala, Kala, Muttedia. And what year was this? So we got there in just middle of October, 06.

Oh, six. And then we were there through, yeah, October 07. So we were there pre-surge and then we were there for the whole search. And that was a big difference, big opt-tempo difference. There was a big change in the war. Like I said, we were there when it was the worst of the war. And then kind of got to see a little bit of that transition into where actually we started to win the piece, so to speak, you know, towards the end.

And then when I got out, we went back home. I left the Air Force, like six months after our deployment. The time I was interviewing with one of the other agencies. Didn't that. Didn't work out there, which, thank God, it didn't. Which agency? One of the other three-lawed agency groups, because, you know, when you do this interrogation-type work, you work with somebody's groups.

And so they're always looking to try to find people who can, we're good at it. and move them into their spot. I'm glad that didn't work out that particular way because it would put me out a different career trajectory and path than what I ultimately did. But I still went back to Iraq for a couple more years with a couple of different contracting companies with DynCorp and with Triple Canopy.

So I can't remember, I can't recall top of my head, but 2006, was that after John Carriacu went on ABC and talked about enhanced interrogation? If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coasts. The studio crew, with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down, makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters, and the personalities keep things lively.

Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. It might have been. And was there any sort of talks in your groups, people that you were there with about that kind of stuff? Because I know that was kind of like. Well, yeah, the TV series 24 with Jack Bauer, right? So everyone thinks that that's what interrogation is like. You just, you know, hooking up, you know, electrodes and shocking people and, you know, and doing all those kinds of physical things to people.

It's really not that. Um, it's interrogations is much more about conversations. It's about, uh, lot of wordsmithing. And on the military side, we were really constrained by the rules and regulations that we had to operate under. So you guys weren't allowed to waterboard? Yeah. Okay.

No, that would have that would, that would have landed you in a world of trouble. Really? And arrest. Oh, hands down. Hands down. Yeah. No, it, maybe because you got, you guys weren't at one of the, uh, CIA black sites, that's why. Yeah, exactly. Well, if you were at a CIA black side, God help you if you're still

considered active military doing that because you're under different rules and regulations and what they are. They have a different set of rules that they can play by them. We're under UCMJ. And so we have, we have to abide by what our box, our box of tools are. And it's constricting. I mean, give you an example, someone gets captured and we bring them in. Ideally, you want to put them in separation so that way they can't be coached by the other people in the prison on what to say and how to evade us. Yes. But to put him in separation, I got to have a, a, 06, the colonel sign off to put him in

separation just for, I think it was 72 hours. And then if I want to put them in separation for up to a month, now I'm going to have my task force commander, which is a two, a two star general sign off on that, just to have an isolation for 30 days. And if I want to extend that for an additional 30 days, then I would have to have to have our theater commander. So my case, I'd have have General Petraeus sign off on that.

And I did. I had them sign off on two of them because I had two guys and we kept in separation for 60 days. But that just shows you some of the red tape we had to deal with because that's quite constraining. You would think that it should be a common sense thing because in the U.S., we can put people in isolation. People in isolation in prison for years.

But in a war, it's considered inhumane treatment or prison. or something like that, but it's not in America. Yeah, I mean, FBI can do this. Prison system can do this, but you can't do that in a war. It's quite interesting in the rules you had to deal with. You'd be very careful with, like, perceived threats or direct threats to people. You know, you can't directly threaten them.

Like, you don't talk to me, then, you know, we're going to harm your family. Well, that's a direct threat. That would lend you in a lot of trouble. You know, you're probably going to get relieved and maybe pay some UCMJ charges. Right. So you had to learn how to be very, good with your words and to say, well, look, I can't make you cooperate. You don't want to talk to me, that's fine.

I get it. But if you're of no intelligence value to us, and I'm going to have to, we're not to work on hand you over to the Ministry of Justice and the Iraqi police. Well, if he's a Sunni terrorist and he's being handed over to the Ministry of Justice and the police who are predominantly run by Shia, well, it's not going to go very well for him. So I didn't threaten him, but I let him make the, connect the dots for himself. Yeah.

Yeah. And now he's got to prove why he should stay with me and why he's valuable enough to be kept. Because if he's not, well, we'll send him down to Camp Buka in the South. And that's long-term detainment. And you'll just have to wait your turns. You process through the criminal system. And maybe you'll be acquitted because they don't have any good evidence. But that might take you two years or three years for that to happen.

So before you got sent over to Iraq, I'm sure you didn't have, did you have any sort of special interest in interrogation or psychology to begin with and what sort of training did you have to go through to learn these tactics yeah so i i didn't have any um i didn't have any previous experience in that or necessarily desire i would say it was a job i didn't know about um and it's a job that most people don't know about or think about it's not a very big um profession in the military to begin with and it tends to be a profession you only really need during a war um outside of war, it's kind of challenging to do that. You end up working on the other side of the schoolhouse, which is the source operations where you're developing sources, recruiting and assessing people

who can be informants for you, so to speak. And you would do that outside of military bases overseas to make sure you're assessing for threats against the facility or against soldiers operating off the base, things like that. So that's what you would tend to do more on the peace time side. As far as the training, we all went through the same training that they have out at Port Wachika, the 97 Echo course. I think it's probably changed the MOS at this point. But, you know, it's about a four and a half months course. And then they have a second course, an enhanced interrogation analysis training. And that's where you kind of are paired up more of a tiger teams, where it's you and an analyst working together as a team.

Enhanced interrogation what? It was an enhanced interrogation analysis. Analysis. Yeah. So in this case, what you know is you have an analyst that's working with you. And that's what we did. We had, there was us as the interrogator.

Then we had an Air Force analyst working with us or a contract analyst. And then our linguist. That formed your tiger team. And the analyst was really helpful because they could do a lot of the research that you, you couldn't always do. I mean, you're going into the booth. You're interrogating the subject.

You're talking with them. But the analyst is sometimes vet. what they're telling you like in the on the spot in real time yeah um or they're doing research of the prisoners that are coming in so my analyst uh jeremy he was phenomenal and what would happen is when um a bunch of new prisoners will come in he look at the incoming sheet and see who's coming in and where they were captured and we only dealt with prisoners that were coming in from the dialla province we knew our area our province really well and if we had new prisoners coming in from a particular village, then he would look and say, okay, what do we know about this village from the previous

guys we've interrogated? And what do we need to know to further our mission in this area to go after these other cells? And that would help me know specifically what questions to go after or maybe ask him, do you know this other prisoner and get him to tell me a bit more about this prisoner and I can kind of vet some of what he's already told me with this other guy. Maybe it's true, but now I can also let this other guy know that. that, hey, I know a hell of a lot about your area. And I know a lot about you.

You know, you're here because someone narked. So let's, you know, let's talk. And that was really, really helpful because, again, it's just another resource to help you track down information, know where to steer you, where to point, so to speak. And what do they teach you about breaking down the human mind and sort of like getting into the deep dark secrets? Yeah, the best thing I learned was from one of our instructors at the advanced school.

He was a retired Special Forces warrant officer and been interrogated for a long time and had a couple tours under his belt before he retired, then went to the school, I was teaching us. And one of the things he told me is he says, he's like, all right, it's kind of like knocking at someone's door when you start the interrogation. You get them to open the door. What you want to do is you want them to invite you in and start talking. And then once they've invited you in, you want them to kind of give you a tour of the house, a tour of the rooms and see. everything in there. So to put it in like a conversation, when I'm, when we start talking, I can either go at you and say, where, where's this, where are the weapons that your organization is using? Where are you hiding them, where you storing them and how are you acquiring them?

Chances are you not going to talk to me about that. But I can spend all day grilling you about this, berating you, trying all kinds of different tactics. But likely is it's not going to work. or I can take a different attack and just try to be more of a conversation with you and just try to accept that we are adversaries obviously but you're still a human being so you still have human desires

and wants and needs and things like that so let me play to those so kind of talk with them and ask him just like I had one guy he was a real big big guy with the Anzhar al-Suna organization and one of the things I talked with him was why did you get into this?

What did you do? before the war. So get him to talk about that. And he owned a business. He got his masters in economics. He actually had a good life before the war. And when I talked to him about that, I was like, so why are you doing this? And his basic response as well, when you guys came here, I lost everything. I lost my statute and position in the community because I was, you know, a Sunni. I was at the bath party. And I have no future employment opportunities and abilities. here. So why would I, why would I not fight you? Right. You know, and that, when I kind of got to that point there and we started talking, right, I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm asking him why

he feels this way and why he's doing that. He starts to open up more. And I say, all right, you're here now. There's nothing we can do about that. So let's make the best of the situation. Who are some of the other organizations in your area where you live that are causing problems? because al-Qaeda in Iraq and then Antio Suna and these other different splinter groups. They're not always working together and sometimes they do. Sometimes they work against each other. But it's also ideological. So there's going to be like Shia organizations that are fighting against the Sunni ones

because it was kind of almost like a civil war in a way. And the Sunni guys, al-Qaeda guys will, they will get diary of the mouth about the Shia militias and insurgent groups and tell you everything you want to know about them. Well, we have a collection requirements to go after that too. just the al-Qaeda ones. We want to know who the other guys are that are causing the problems as well and where they're smuggling their stuff in because a lot of their stuff comes in from Iran. So if you're not going to talk with me about his organization, at least not right away, then let me get him talking about the other one. And as we start sharing more and we start

developing that bit of rapport, now I can start whittling and get a little bit more information from him about his. And in his case, it was more about how have you been able to outsmart? us all this time. And he was kind of, I don't say arrogant, but he liked to brag about how smart and effective his group was and how they had out foxed us for so many years and outsmarted

us. So I played that. It's like, okay, well, how? Tell me about this. And then just kind of like, oh man, that's so clever. You guys did that. I can't believe we were too stupid to figure this out and just kind of play along with that. And that led to him telling a lot more than he probably wanted

to. And you just kind of let them talk and let them talk and just poke and prod. It's conversational. And another really big thing to do, it's all, it depends on the culture you're dealing with. In the Middle East and in Arab cultures, it's very common to sit and break bread and have a meal. When you have meals with you do it like that, you can't really, you're not really adversaries, so to speak, in their culture. And so it's not uncommon. You've seen this with Afghanistan in some of the tribal relationships and the way they interact they can be sit and have dinner together and in conversed normally and then the next day they're fighting each other right right us in the west it

just doesn't compute like why would you do that um but that's their culture and so when you kind understand their culture a little bit you start you know just play along with it so for me we would sit and have you know have a meal dinner with terror so you're letting these guys these guys obviously aren't constrained they aren't handcuffed they're you know i got an mp outside He's sitting out there with a taser and a German shepherd. He's ready to go. So, I mean, if they want to get feisty. I mean, this guy could just grab his fork or his knife and just like leap across the table, couldn't he?

Maybe if you want to grab it, it's a plastic fork. Oh, okay, gotcha. It's like it's a real one. Yeah. I mean, sure, they can do something to the chance of them killing you pretty slim. Right. Maybe you might get punched in the face or get hurt, but. Yeah.

The guards are going to be on them pretty quick. I mean, and hopefully you're going to have a little bit of your own wits about you to be able to, you know, you know, defend your own self too a little bit. But we never had an incident like that. We didn't have any instance like that. In a way, I was kind of surprised. But when you get there and you kind of see it, I mean, they're in this, they're not getting out of this prison.

And so, you know, they're, I don't want to say they're broken, but they kind of accepted that they're here. That makes sense. What, what sort of hope do they have, like by answering your questions and cooperating with you, do you give them any sort of hope of being free or what, do you make them any promises? Yes, you can do all of those things. Whether you have a lot of influence in getting them out, that's kind of questionable sometimes.

If the subject you're talking with, if the prison you're talking with is a good, a high enough asset, like they say they've got really good placement and access in their organization, and there's potential that they could be recruited as a source to work for you. Maybe you can have them working doing collections for you inside the camp against other prisoners. or they may be able to get recruited by one of the other agencies to go work outside the camp. That did happen. It's not very frequent, but there was one-off cases where that kind of stuff would happen. Generally speaking, your objective is to get the intel.

So if you have to lie to these guys make up, work with the JAG, the military lawyers to craft up these cleverly worded, amnesty things like, hey, confess to all these different things or tell us about all this. Your sins will be forgiven, so to speak. You could come up with a lot of those things and is ruses and use those. And I mean, you're getting your job to collect intel. You're out there. You're out there to get them out of the prism. You're out to get Intel.

So if it works and gets you Intel, great. And once you've gotten everything you need, it sounds callous. But when you've got everything you need, typically they're just transferred down to long term, detainment. That's down south at the other camp. And I mean, you can write up you know,

a letter and you just explain a look. I've interrogated this guy now for X number of times this many hours. We've talked about these different things here. It's my belief and based on the information intelligence we collect up at this point, he's not involved in this or this is not true or this is, he's not involved

with these different things. And the person has provided substantial information to help coalition forces and help the government of Iraq and they list out the litany of things they've done. And you can do those kinds of things and put that in their file for them. And then when they, their files reviewed eventually by the Ministry of Justice, you know, the prosecutor is there was a lot of times where that holds a whole lot of weight and usually ends up, you know, absolving them from whatever the charge was because it couldn't be backed up. You got the interrogator and the anti-lis saying the same thing. Those guys usually get to walk. Okay.

And so, I mean, you can do things like that. But, you know, again, When I first got there, we had two to 400 new prisoners coming in a week. They were captured, filtered down to our camp. And there's only about like 48 to 60 of us, not a lot. That's a lot of new people coming in that have to be screened and interrogated. And you already got 5,000 in the camp too. So you've got guys you're already talking to you. You got 2 to 400 new ones coming in.

Now, when the surge happened, we suddenly had 30,000, not 30,000 extra troops. We had 30,000 extra infantry troops, guys to go kick down doors. Big difference in like support guys. They were just capture, kill people left and right. I mean, it was just heyday. And that count went from two to 400 a week to six to 800 a week sometimes. That's a lot of people coming in. And our interrogation numbers didn't go up, but we didn't get more interrogators to offset.

set that workload. We just had to work more hours and handle that. So there'd be times where you've got 16 cases you're already handling, 16 guys you're handling. And your section chief coming and go like, sorry, man, but here's five more new ones. And you're like, so how do you figure, how do you get through it all? You know, and I'd have clever different ways of just line up and have like six guys, eight guys, and interrogate in one night and just kind of make them really quick assessments more or less for me. It's not a straight-up interrogation at that point. It's giving me an assessment. Okay.

Who's going to be reasonably cooperative that I can talk with and has intelligence that's worth my time to exploit? And who's just, who's not? Because I don't have time to spend days or weeks trying to break someone down unless they're really high value. We're just not going to necessarily put that kind of effort into it. Because, again, I've got 600 new ones showing up every week. That's insane. And I still need to get actual intelligence all the ones I have. So you really got to balance your time.

Did you speak Arabic? Can you speak Arabic? No, I did not. And you wouldn't have been allowed to interrogate in Arabic even if you did speak it. Based on the rules and everything that was in place there, we had to work through a, through an interpreter. So all of our interpreters were U.S. citizens. Usually they had secret or top secret clearances. But your question had to be asked in English. The interpreter would interpret it in Arabic. and then they would interpret it back and then back to you.

That's how it had to be done because all of our interrogations were being recorded and monitored. So other agencies could pop in to just check and make sure you're abiding by the rules and regulations and do spot checks. And they have to hear that you are asking the question in English because they may not speak Arabic. And if you do speak Arabic and you could be asking, you could be asking questions you're not allowed to ask, making threats, making, you know, insinuations that you're not allowed to insinuate or do.

Right. And languages mean different things in English versus Arabic. And so it's got to be very clear what it is you meant to say. Okay. Yeah. Very real. It's very quite real basis. It was after that 2005 detainee treatment act that Senator Feingold and Senator McCain kind of shackled us with.

They really put the chains on us. Interesting. Yeah. Not fans of those guys. Now, what did you learn from, say, your first interrogation you ever did over there until like your hundredth interrogation yeah so what did you learn personally about these people yeah and what did you learn did you learn anything about yourself and the human mind like how did you evolve so i'm talking about 10 or so maybe people maybe a little more maybe a little less

but probably in total about 550 interrogations i think over maybe about 2100 hours give or take in that year so it's it's a lot of time to spend with these guys um my first interrogation what i learned is these guys will lie through their teeth to get out of what they're what they got apprehended for as they're just going to lie you know, incessantly. And it's kind of your job to figure out

okay, well, what is it that? What are they lying about how can I turn this lie into something I can work with? And a lot of it goes back to trying to recognize that we are adversaries, but there's still a person. And if they're a person, they've got needs, wants, and desires. So how do you work those needs and wants and desires to your advantage to get what you need? Because again, it's a different than a criminal. I'm not

trying to prosecute the guy. I don't care if he's guilty. I care if he has intel that we can, that leads to the capture kill of his comrades and to, you know, remove these violent extremists from the community. We can't, we can't end the violence in the cities and in the villages if we don't remove these people from the streets. And that's just the number one. goals. Get them out of there. Figure out where the weapons are coming in from. Who's financially supporting them? And it comes of finances.

My God, are they clever? They are so clever with the finances. You know, one of the guys I talked about in my book, the book I wrote about my experiences on there. Which book was that? That was an interview with the terrace. I didn't bring that one here

with here, but that one, so I had a guy who got apprehend he was, lived in Germany for about six years. He's from Bakuba. And he was coming back to pick up his wife and then smuggle her back out of Iraq back to Germany. And he got caught on a random checkpoint that special forces threw up. And his name and information was on a be on the lookout list, a bullet list. And that's how he got caught, just randomly like that. But how we acquired this dude's information was wild. So what happens is when they need to get

money into Iraq to funnel and support these guys. Different charitable organizations in Europe and elsewhere, what they'll do is take the money that people are donating for the cause, whatever. They buy really expensive vehicles, high-end BMWs, Mercedes, it's caught $100,000-dollar vehicles. They shipped them into Kuwait, and then someone on the other end receives them. They take them and drive them up to Baghdad, and then they use for one and two purposes. Either they're sold, and then that money.

that they make from the sale of the vehicle is now used to pay the salaries of the fighters for the different for the different organizations or used to buy the weapons things like that it's a way of smuggling in money without good doing through normal banking systems that's right now in that work yeah and then the other the other thing they would use it for is car bombs so when you see a BMW 7 series driving up near a convoy or heading towards towards a towards a gate, one of the military gates to come on the base, you're not really going to think that this BMW 7 series, brand spanking new, is a car bomb.

You're thinking that beat up jalopy over there that's riding a little low on its suspension is the car bomb. And you'd be right, that usually is the car bomb. So those high-end vehicles had much better luck at getting really close to the gates before they would set off their bombs. And when you set off 1,000, 2,000, towns, a car, running a gate like that, you're going to cause a major damage.

So what happened is when one of those incidents happened, we look at all the evidence that's left behind, right, the vehicle. So you find the bin numbers for the vehicles. You put it all down there. You keep track of the vins. And then when they did a raid on someone they thought was tied to this whole network, they discovered all the paperwork for the vehicles that were coming in. and they traced one of those vehicles to one of the car bombs to this manifest.

And then from that shipping manifest, they had the destination in Germany who shipped it. So we put that guy's name on a bullo. So when that guy got caught in Bakubo, my prisoner, we had the whole thing. We had the whole thing linked together. So now he's in here. And he had no idea how we found out about him. But that's how we did. And that's just one method that they used for smuggling in money.

Right. And they've got way more clever now. I mean, obviously everyone knows about crypto. There's other ways where they use SIM cards because you can load money on SIM cards and for phones and things like that. So you can do that and move that because it's very easy to take the little SIM cards, dump thousands of dollars on these things and then move these SIM cards around and hand them out and then they can go change the money and do what they want.

And it's all done under the radar without the banking system knowing about it. And it's very, very hard to track. Was there one interrogation that you'd do? did that sort of led to some sort of big win for you or like a big victory for your team. Is there is there one that sticks out in your mind? Yeah. I mean, we had a couple of them like that. So my guy that we caught in, in Germany was a really big one because as we unraveled

that case, we started to, we had, they had ideas on who else was involved in Europe in other countries and in other regions of the world. And so we started filtering in these names. Like I would just say, well, why would this, you know, why did this person here talk about or mentioned X, Y, or Z? And he, my prisoner would respond back, well, he doesn't know about this or he's not involved with that. Well, my guy just inadvertently acknowledged he knows this guy. And this guy is involved in the organization. So where we thought we weren't sure if he was involved, now we know he's involved.

because our guy who is involved confirmed it. And they don't realize that that's what's happening. Right. And so that was a big win for us because it wasn't like the sexy weapon cash or you captured someone here in Iraq. What it was though was a big win for uncovering a massive web of financing that was happening, financing the organizations and the money flowing in. And that was really big because if you can dry that up, it makes it a lot harder for them to pay their to pay their fighters and continue to acquire weapons and do things and bribe people.

So it was a big deal to kind of bust that. But it wasn't directly addressing things inside of Iraq. Like, you know, I guess like we would think or want sometimes. But it had a big, it had a big impact in the overall mission though. Okay. Because you're drying up the money. And we're identified a bunch of things in New York we didn't previously know about. Right.

That was really big deal. But my focus is kind of on Iraq. not what's going on in Europe. Right. If that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Was there any specific interrogation that fucked with you psychologically that kind of

gave you, I mean, you mentioned now that you obviously have figured out a way to combat your PTSD with writing and different kinds of therapies. But is there, what part of your job over there was the most disturbing? So the most disturbing is just, seeing when you get these guys you have the you have the capture package got the intel package

what we have on the suspect right what we have on the guy it's pretty disturbing stuff um you know these are not nice people it's not like this is some drug dealer or some gang member these are really hardened terrorists i had one guy um he got his organization had kidnapped a uh son for a tribal shake, one of the local tribal shakes. And they were trying to hold him. They wanted to basically ransom the kid. And they got the father to pay up the money. I think it was like $100,000 US dollars or something.

And so they got the money. And they said, okay, well, your son's in the trunk of this car in this location here, the drops in me, so they got the money. Here's the location for the vehicle. And your son's in the trunk. And the son was in the trunk. The problem was his son's in the trunk in like a bunch of different pieces. Oh.

And this is how they think and operate like this. And now I have to interrogate this guy. Obviously, you'd like to be a little physical with someone like that, but you can't. You've got to divorce yourself from that and try to figure out how do I be buddy-buddy friends with this guy to get info information to go kill and capture his buddies. That's kind of hard to accept and deal with. But you have lots of situations like that. Um, you know, there's, there's that one. There's just other ones we had, we had, there was a bunch of, uh, some of Iraqi cops were working for one of the units that we, we worked with a lot. Um, as sources providing them intel and what was going on in the village and stuff. Well, they're, they got outed. Somehow the, the al-Qaeda guys in that village discovered who was, who was, who was narking on them, who was feeding them information on information on them to the Americans. And so when they figure that out, you know, they've they captured the four guys but you know they do their little videos they always love

their videos so you know here's a video of them getting their their heads you know kind of you know sawed off with these knives and then they're just kicking their heads around like soccer balls they're animals and you know now we've got the guy that was responsible for and we have to tarry this guy and try to get him to give up the goods on where are they where they keeping these videos a lot of times they would post at the time a lot of his stuff was getting posted up to youtube you know before YouTube. YouTube is really coming out. So there's there's other all kind of websites

that they would post these things on and share these things about. And it's just, it's a terror weapon. Because what they're trying to do by doing a horrific act like that is demonstrate to the local population that this is the price

for cooperating with the Americans. Cooperate with Colise and forces, this is what happens. And it's a chilling effect because then nobody wants to work with you. And when you say, well, we can protect you, we will help you. They're just going to say, well, you couldn't help these cops here.

Yeah, you couldn't help these cops. Right, right. How are you going to help us? And so nobody starts talking to you until we eliminate those guys. And that's why they do a lot of those horrific things. But, you know, you have to see a lot of this. You have to be involved in a lot of this and questioning and talking with these guys. And if you fail to ask the right question, you know, people can get killed.

You know, we had one operation I mentioned in an area of combat stories where we got actual intel on where a very large weapon cache was going to be located at for one cell that we were targeting. And this new unit had just been in country a couple weeks, I think it was, up out of Bakuba. And we told them this particular route has got IEDs and car bombs on it. They want you to go this route because this is where they're going to hit you. And he got all these ambushes laid out for you. This is what this guy was telling you. Yeah. That's what our prisoner told us.

He says, look, don't go this route. He's actually a very cooperative guy. He's getting us good intel on. He's passed polygraph prisoners. He's passed all that stuff. So we reasonably think he's telling us the truth. So he tells us, don't, you know, here's what the stuff's going to happen and to take this other path.

So we pass it on to the unit that was going to action it. And this new unit, like I said, he just got in there. They're there to, you know, slay bodies and take names. They just want to fight. And so they want to get engaged. So we told them all that. And they're like, well, hey, if this is where the fight's at, we're going to go, we're in advance of contact and engage. And we're like, we'd rather you not because I'd rather you go this other route here and not get ambush and actually get to the weapons side and then, you know, seize the weapons and the explosives because that's more important than your firefight.

Yeah. But that's not the path they chose. So they went, they went the other way. And, you know, they got involved in a couple of fights. And, you know, they got ambush twice and we lost six guys that day. You know, and that sucks because it was it didn't have to happen that way and the fight lasted long enough they moved the damn weapons Why didn't they listen to you guys? They don't believe the prisoner And they know, like, well, we don't we don't say believe that he's telling us the truth or whatever it was

And so they just kind of want to do their own thing It's kind of frustrating because it means it is a prisoner you're having to base you're having to trust at this prisoner who's an own kind of operative is giving you the truth And that's kind of hard to accept sometimes that kind of like just defeats the purpose of your job though You would think, yeah. Because in this case, we proved out that, yeah, our guy was actually right. It helped validate his future stuff because now everyone believed him a whole lot more than they did before. I mean, he passed a polygraph twice. That wasn't enough for some people.

But when the car bomb and ID went off in the exact freaking locations, he said they would, well, now they kind of believed him a little bit more. And his subsequent information was treated a lot more credibility, so speak. You know, and other times, just forget to ask a question, right? I think I mentioned this in the other interview, was I had a 15-year-old kid that we were interrogating. We don't usually interrogate kids, but this kid got caught, placed an IDA on the side of the road. One of the units on patrol saw it, so they nabbed him. How old was he?

15. And so we can't hold them very long. We only can hold them for three days or seven days, something like that, and we got to let them back out to their family, right? And so I have the guy, you know, we're doing different tactics, you're trying to, you know, scare him into cooperating and talking. And, you know, the target was his father and his three brothers. They ran this big IED cell up in northern Baghdad area. And that's what we were trying to go after is to get these guys.

How did you figure that out just because we got it? We had a lot of intel on this family, this area. This, it was just at the edge of the Diala province in Baghdad proper. So that region up there was just a lot of IEDs and car moms going off. and we kind of knew who was doing it. And we know that from different signals, intelligence, and intercepts, things like that. So we kind of, we had an idea of who they were. And when we capture the kid and have his ID, we're like, oh, okay, now we know this is their son.

So we want to know where they are at. And his concern was he didn't want to give us a location because he's concerned that, you know, if we go, you know, we go to where they're at, that we're going to end up killing his father and his brother. I'm like, look, dude, I can't talk to dead people. I want to talk to live people. So tell me where they're at, tell me how I can capture them. What conversation?

And we go through and get the location, he points out where it's at, so tell me about the details of it. And you just forget sometimes to make sure you get everything. So like when a door opens, is it open in or out? And does it have a lock on the top and on the floor and the center?

You need those kind of details, all those little pieces of information. Same with windows. Do the windows have your bars on the outside, on the inside, are they built into the wall? You've got to know all those little nuanced questions and things to ask. You know, it's a whole litany of things you need to make sure you kind of go through when they start cooperating and start giving you information. Because if the doors, if you don't get that information right, when the unit goes to action, they may try to bust the doors in because I see that the door's going to go in until, So then use the ram, they think, oh, we'll just ram it and go in. But if there's locks in the tops and the bottoms, they're not going to know to have a shotgun with the slug to bust it open.

Right. So when they start ramming this thing, it's going to take them a couple of hits. And those couple of hits are going to delay your entry by seconds. Those few seconds are typically all they need to wake up, grab their weapons, and start engaging. So you want to go in with lightning speed and do that. And, you know, in our case, you know, me and my answer, we just missed it. You know, missed one of the questions on a lock. And the unit got in the house, it took kind of like an extra three to five seconds to get in.

That was all the time they needed, though. To grab their guns. To grab the guns and start shooting. And next thing, you know, we're there in a firefight. So one of our guys gets, he got his arm shot off. Another guy got shot in the chest plate. So he survived. But after the gunfight was going on, the, you know, the commander on the ground's like, you know,

screw this. I've already got two guys injured. just, you know, we've got a gun chip overhead, just to have them level it. And so, you know, hit it with a missile and you flatten the building. You know, problem's solved, right? So an airplane dropped a ball on it? No, no, a helicopter, one of the helicopters. A helicopter.

Yeah, so the suspects who were after, you know, the father and the three sons that are building all these IDs and stuff like that, they're dead. They're taking off the chessboard. So good there. The problem is we also, we also nailed his grandmother and his mother and his five brothers and sisters in the house, too. all kind of damage. They're just they were there at the fight. And so

after that the unit takes all of the pictures for everyone. You need to go back to this 15 year old. It's all these pictures and have him PID his family. You know, that sucks. Because I've got to go and have him PID his dad and his brother to make sure that they are who, you know, we actually got the right

guys. But here you promised to him if he gives you the information on where they're at, you're not going to kill him. Why? You broke that promise. And not only you break the promise, you also wiped out his entire family. So kind of like the burning hatred in that kid's eyes. Yeah.

It's like, yeah, we just made a terrorist right there. Yep. Uh, hands down. And you don't, you don't think about it at that moment at that time. Because as soon as I'm done talking with him and confirm that we got the guys, I'm already on to the next interrogation. And then the next one, the next one. I have like three or four or five of these a day.

And it's just a repetitive cycle over and over and over. And before you know, an entire year's gone by. I can imagine you become numb to this stuff. You do. You do. And you don't really even think about a lot of it. It's not until you come home and things start to slow down that you start to have some more of these problems. And for me, I didn't encounter a lot of those kinds of problems until probably like 2014, 2015 is when things really start to get bad because at that point, I've now, I'm out of Iraq. I'm out of the intel stuff. I'm not working in Europe doing that anymore. I'm back home. I'm completely out. And when I'm completely out and have that time to think, that's when it starts to hit you. That's when you start processing all that stuff. And you go, wow, I can't believe we did all this stuff. You know?

You just explained the hit on that kid's family who was making the IEDs and dropping the bomb on the house and leveling them. How often would mistakes happen where you would kill a family that was innocent? Or have some guys bust into somebody's door and you get the wrong guys. You kill the wrong people. That's hard. No. I don't know.

I mean, I suspect it happens probably more often than you'd want. want to admit. I mean, so when U.S. forces go in to do these things, we're not just like going going up to a house and just pulling a pin and throwing it in the room and just letting the grenade go off and clear. I'm sure that's probably what a lot of the Russians and Ukrainians are doing in their fight. But that's not how we fought. That's not what we were doing. And by and large, our guys were pretty good about identifying who they are when they're entering and going in at night. because you go in at night, they're usually sleep. You can usually intercept the area pretty quickly and to do them.

But things happen. You can't always account for that. And one of the things that was hard for me to accept was accepting that part there. And just realizing that at the end of the day, the enemy gets a vote just like you do. And their vote is almost always going to go against you. And when that vote's cast, it's cast. You know, the fight's going to happen. And sometimes people are going to get caught in the wrong.

place, wrong time. You can do everything you can to mitigate that. You can do everything you can to try and avoid that. But at the end of the day, the enemy still chose to fight. His father and his brothers chose to fight. They chose to participate in this insurgency. They chose to make these IEDs, these car bombs and make themselves a target and attack us and attack the government of Iraq and try to destabilize the region. That was their choice. So unfortunately, their family was presence at their you know was present during the capture and they chose to fight when their kids were in the room kids were present that's out of our control um you know and that's hard to accept that's hard to uh accept that that's what happens but it took years for me to kind of just get to

a point where you know you just accept that the enemy gets their own vote too and it's almost always it's going to be against you and so you can't you can only control your actions you can't control theirs but it is what it is unfortunately. I mean, like the war is ugly. It's brutal. It's not something we want to, you know, romanticize or embellish or talk lightly about. It should always be,

it should be avoided and be a last resort. But when it's time to go to war, it's trying to put the war face on and go to war and kill the bastards and wipe them out as fast and as quickly inefficiently as you can so you can end it. We shouldn't be training these things out for years and decades like that. It's just, it's not good. nobody wins this kind of wars what was it like like you just explained getting home and having

time to think yeah and time to reflect on the things that were happening and and how long did that take for that to sort of kick in and for you to really start to deal with those psychological effects so the first time i came back for my rack um it was weird because uh last my last time at our camp you know we were getting rocketed and bombed that that night So I'm sitting there in my bunker and thinking myself, man, I don't want to get blown up my last few hours on this in this camp. And then, you know, four days later, you're walking around the Brandon Mall. How do you equate that? You're sitting here where you got, you know, rockets and mortars hitting your base and the alarms going off, you know, the C-RAM incoming alarms going off.

And then you're walking around the Brandy Mall and people are sipping on their drinks, you know, and walk around. like nothing it's in World War II you had that shared experience right everyone had to ration there was you know everyone was making a sacrifice for the war um in iraq and afghan nobody sacrificed anything they weren't asked to pay extra money in taxes they weren't asked to ration anything they weren't being drafted and impacted like that so society was very divorced from reality of what was happening right and so that was a little hard But I didn't have as much time to really reflect and think about that until after I left that whole world behind, so to speak. And then you kind of start to realize, wow, nobody has a clue what's going on overseas.

They don't realize the threats that we're dealing with, that we're fighting, constantly handling. They're just ignorant. They're just not aware of it. But you are. And now that you've left it, you see how everyone's like, how can they be so divorced from reality? It's a little hard to rationalize and kind of deal with, but you kind of get to a point where it took me years to kind of get there,

and I still struggle with some of it now. But it's just accepting that, you know, again, the enemy gets their vote on it, and that there's a time and a season to kill and a time of a season to heal. And you kind of have to figure out that. Because, like, I think we talked about this yesterday, days that as a society we're taught that you live a certain way you act and be a certain way and then when you go to war that goes away like that's all gone now it's this kind of savage nature

of you know us versus them um and that's not how we're taught the society to act and be like and so when you come home you have to put that aside and go back to this normal person that you're supposed to fit into society correct and that can be a little hard of an adjustment to do And some people do it better than others. And some people just really kind of struggle with that. I don't know if it's situation, training, what really causes some people to struggle with it more than others. Sometimes it's just like an accumulation of everything you have seen and done. It just can be so overwhelming.

You know, I mean, I struggle with it a lot. And I think that I think as long as you're willing to constantly talk about it and seek different help and alternatives, that can really help you eventually find some peace with it. Because you've got to have to make peace with that at some point. If you don't, it's just going to eat you live or eventually just eat a gun. And that's unfortunately what a lot of veterans are doing because they can't make that peace. How long did it take before you started looking into different types of therapies to combat your depression or your PTSD? So originally the VA loves to go to the pharmacology.

route, right? So that's their first choice. Give you some drugs. Excema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four and ten people taking ebbgless achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Hebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per two-millimeter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled

with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to epiglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebbglis. Before starting Epgless, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about Ebglis and visit ebbglis.lis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1,800 545-9709. But the problem is a lot of those drugs, all they do is numb the problem. They just put a band-aid over it.

Like I remember when we were in Iraq, you know, dude, we would get super stressed out with our job. Just all that crap you're having to see all the time and deal with all the time. And then on top of it, you still got these freaking rockets and bombs hitting. your base and dealing with that and then you got issues with home you got your um your your you know your superior you mad your management we like to call them maybe they're good maybe they're not it was quite stressful um but they had these combat stress clinics you can go to um over there yeah yeah um and i remember going there and uh one of the psych psychologists psychologists psychiatrists um he gave me a prescription for uh lecture pro man i was

I wish I'd gotten that when I first got to Iraq. That made me like the coldest detached interrogator I could possibly be. What kind of drug is that? So Alexa Pro is an SSRI type drug. So, um, he's necessary. So, but it basically kind of does is suppresses,

uh, uh, uh, some of your emotions. Um, your dog could die and you just wouldn't care. You could stare at you, you just,

you didn't care. Huh. Really kind of deadened you a little bit. Um, and in our job, that was quite helpful. to kind of deaden some of that. So that way you could just wade through this mountain of shit

and kind of get through it without losing your mind. You know, but. Interesting, like a pain, kind of like a painkiller type drug? You find that often? Maybe like a painkiller for the mind. I don't know, but Lexi Pro is a,

it's a pretty common antidepressant type drug that they use. It was pretty helpful. Oh, it's an antidepressant. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd use that, although there's other stuff that I think works better because again the VA is going to go to the pharmacology route to give you is there

is there anything else you can do to get out of there like can you get out and like go for a run can you can you can you no i mean so yeah when we're in um yeah so yeah when we're in um yeah so yeah when you're at the base i mean you got the mw r's you've got uh you got the gym you can go for a run around the camp if you want different things like that but at the end of day you're kind of trapped in that camp like big tall walls you can get out i mean my job's not to leave the wire. I'm way too valuable to leave the wire because there's only so many freaking interrogators that are in Iraq and there is just an endless supply of prisoners. So they would love nothing more to keep us strapped to a chair when I be feedback if possible just to give us interrogating, you know?

Click on that. What does Lexpro do for a person, Austin? Down. Oh, yeah. That's that effect, man. It's used to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder. It is an antidepressant that, yeah, that belongs to a group of medicines known as SSRIs. Huh. Never heard of it. I mean, it's not. Fuck you up. They can't. Yeah. Well, there's all kinds of side effects to those kinds of drugs, too, you know, from, you know, just deadening your cognitive ability, you know, your sharpness a little bit.

You know, sexual side effects. There's lots of different issues and problems that with these kinds of drugs. But this is what the VA does because that's what they are allowed to give you and do. They're not able to say, hey, let's try medical marijuana. out, let's try ketamine. Let's try these stellar gangling block injections. Well, it's interesting, too. This is what they find that most of the school shooters in this country or the people that shoot up public shootings, mass shootings, they're on these things.

Yes. Yeah, because they either work very well or they actually will have the opposite effect where they'll almost like exacerbate these psychotic, you know, tendencies. So it's why you've got to be under really good strict care in talking with them and understanding how, people respond and develop to these things. And the problem with kids, kids' minds are constantly growing and developing. They're not set. Right.

So when you introduce drugs, SSRI drugs that mess with the chemical balances in their brains, you're kind of jacking up that development a little bit. Yes. And it's really dangerous. That's why they talk about marijuana, actually on people who are, I think it was under 25 or 23,

actually can have really bad problems in the brain. Like actually lead them to develop, you know, schizophrenia or bipolar. Yes. There's, you know, there's, that's been shown, yeah. That's,

there's lots of psychedelic drugs that have fucked with kids that have done it too much or abused it at a young age. Yep. Yep. And it damages them because I think it's cool

and fun and want to continue to do that. And we as a society are like, oh, whatever is just marijuana and that can get addictive. No, it's not about getting addicted. It's about altering their psychology. Right.

Their mind is they're developing and getting older. This is something I talk about all the time too because if you look at, I don't know how big the percentage is, but it's got to be more than 80% of kids in America that are like in their teens are prescribed Adderall. You know why?

Here's the problem. We don't let kids be kids. We want to have, all right, boys are, they're noisy, they're loud, they're energetic,

they're physical. They like to, that's how they are geared, right? But we've stopped having kids have recess and play and just be boys and just be kids. Right. We want them to all be like these neutered little, saints that just sit there and look nice and just yes ma'am no ma'am and do school but that's not how

their brains are wired right that's not how psychologically they're built and we're not letting them do that and you know you combat that that you pump them full of that are all and s their eyes and then you screw them up mentally because now they don't know how to um uh they become teenagers and then adults young adults and they don't know how to interact with other people right normally and and say, hey, you and I, we can be politically opposite or totally disagree, but we can still be friends and go have a beer. Like, that's okay. Just because we, you're a Dolphins fan and I'm a Bucks fan doesn't mean we have to kill each other.

I mean, that's, you know, that's, we have to get back to that kind of mentality. It's okay to disagree. Right. You know. Yeah, it's scary to think about what kind of effect that's having on people. That combined with the, you know, social media and people just communicating through phone. and through text messaging and, you know, watching videos, like, even with war today, like, people now just, you watch what happens.

And I don't know if this is the first war, this Ukraine war, the first one that we've had just a front row seat view. It's been brutal, absolutely brutal, seeing all that stuff going on there. And I see what's happening and I see that so many people are just getting maimed from, you know, from the artillery, Mshapton, things like that. You're talking about a whole society that's just going to have these, all these people are just maimed and injured. and you're just watching on the front row and it's brutal.

Like these, I'll see these pictures of like a copter drone dropping, you know, a hand grenade on a couple of soldiers unsuspectantly in a trench and go off. And, you know, you can read the comments and just see everyone is just cheering it on and whatnot. It's like those are two people down there, okay? Those guys just got maimed and injured from that hand grenade. Maybe they had killed. They may be the enemy, but, you know, let's not celebrate their deaths, you know.

Right. And we're desensitizing ourselves to the point where it's, we're not seeing our fellow humans as humans. And it's this like video game mantra. It's like, okay, well, Ukraine was just a giant video game, right? Just video game. It's like, no, it's not a video game. There's a real people on the other end getting killed. And they have families.

They have, you know, they have mothers. and wives and kids and I don't you know it's just it's just strange seeing how our societies evolved using social media to just cheer this kind of stuff on cheer the killing of other people on like it's almost like a like a Roman gladiator time where everyone would cheer people getting you know killed in the gladiatorial arena and it's kind of like well twitter's our gladiatorial arena let's jump on here and see on the Russian or Ukraine side and watch these people getting killed like that and cheer it on it's really quite detached and strange yeah the the thing that really gets to me is that none of these people that argue about ukraine and russia and all the wars that are

going on now most of them have no experience of war you know what i mean a lot of it all of the knowledge they have not volunteering to go over there either right they can they have no experience It's of anything real, anything, like they have no actual firsthand experience of anything. All they can do is just read articles, watch videos, depending on who they follow or who they listen to. And it's so, that makes it so bizarre to me that they're willing to fight to the death on this digital platform about something they read or some video they watched. And they just decide to adopt this idea and they're going to die on that hill.

because of that video they watched because they trust that person. Yeah. I hope that at the end, at the end of the stuff that, you know, there's some good efforts put forward to try and help help these guys mentally and psychologically recover from this stuff. You know, because we did not do a good job of that exiting in Iraq and Afghanistan, helping, helping vets just detransition from that into something new, right? and pumping people full of SSRIs and antidepressants isn't the way to go either because you just don't want you need them to be productive members of society so how do you help them heal and get better you know I was listening to I saw the 60 Minutes episode that Dakota Myers did it was that marine medal honor recipient he did a 60 minute episode on that uh stelic ganglia block injections SGV injections is basically a nerve in the neck here that they do a nerve blouse. lock on. And so when someone gets triggered, right, the brain sends that fight or flight signal down to your, down to your, your bot, your heart, and your dumps your adrenaline, gets you kind of riled up and going. Well, when they numb that nerve, when they do that, that block,

when that fighter flight happens, it hits, he goes down and hits the block and bounces back. And it's almost like resets you a little bit. It gives you that, it kind of quites things down, so to speak. I guess, like what you explain is when you're, you're in the, you're in the that moment you feel like everything's kind of closing in like you just have that anxiousness that jitteriness um the sgb when they do that injection it just kind of like calms things and how else to describe it's kind of more of like a calming allows you to not be as um jumping jittery and just you know fuse right you just what is the injection what are they injecting uh so they're injecting out lydicane it's like a nerve block um as they do on the act there's two nerves

on either side they do they only do them one at a time because they're just they're injecting out of time because it usually it'll sometimes um it can leave part of your face like a little little nomad drooped for an hour or two and it goes away um and sometimes you can only need one injection it can last you know a year two years sometimes you may need three or four just depends on how your body responds to it and kind of the severity of the trauma too because the brain has has has gone through a lot yeah it has synopsis are very wired for certain things that triggered all the time you have to try to redo that now. So the SGB is really good for helping to block those triggers, like give you an extra fuse, so to speak, and help quiet it down a little bit. But you still have to do the

rewiring in the brain. And that's where you've seen some guys using similar different psychedelic drugs. Yeah. You know, you go to Mexico and do them and whatnot. And that helps a lot of that. Ketamine actually is a really good one. Yeah, ketamine. And I've also heard of, what is it? What is like the Yeah, the mushrooms. They do. Not mushrooms.

Microdosing. MDMA. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't done the MDNA one.

I've done the, I've done the ketamine one. I think that works really good, but you know, there's different ways of doing the ketamine. There's oral and there's IV. Those guy here in Tampa who does them. Yeah,

you said that you were one of the first people to try some sort of special therapy in Tampa. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, doing the ketamine. That was the ketamine. Yeah.

The way he does it, it's really great. So when you go on a psychedelic trip, right? And you do that. You're one, you're out cold. Okay, you're out. But you can, like, you're going to, I mean, you're, you're going to fall asleep into this thing. You're not, like, cognitive. Like, I couldn't hear a car, carry a conversation with you when you're down with a ketamine trip like that.

But it can either be good or it can be very bad. And so one of the things he does to help ensure that you have that it worked out good for you. because I've had the bad ones too. Right. Like a bad trip. Yeah, when I'll do the oral ones, those never work out well. But what he does, he puts a benzodiazepine in a happy drug. You know, I always used to joke and say with interrogations, that's how we should be hearing interrogations,

pharmaceutical interrogations, because there's no torture, there's no physical harm to him. You just give them a happy drug and they'll just spill the beans. Right. And then when the drug wears off, they don't even realize what they did and they're saying, there's no harm, no foul, so to speak. Yeah, they just want to run around and give everyone hugs. So, yeah, that should be the future. of interrogation personally. But, so he gets you, he puts a little bit of that and before you do the ketamine.

And then when, uh, the Ivy ketamine, when he would do that, I'm out 15 to 25 minutes usually before I'll kind of wake up from it. Um, man, I'll tell you, that is the craziest trip in the world. It's literally like being in the movie Inception in the Matrix at the same time. Crazy. So when you're, um, what kind of a drug is, you're, it's like falling into, you, you're, like you're falling into like a dream and then a dream and a dream. Right.

And I swear to God, I could be down for 15, 20 minutes and I feel like I've been gone for years sometimes. Like, whatever. It's just, it's insane. What exactly does ketamine do to you? How does it work? What is the mechanism of action? Yeah.

So basically a lot of this stuff kind of helps to, uh, helps, helps the brain to kind of rewire itself a little bit. So when you're, how about trauma, like say, for instance, for me, one of my big triggers is smell because I worked in the camp. Yeah. 5,500 sweaty, dirty, smelling people. And that's a lot of feces and food and just nasty crap, right? So a trigger for me was dirty diapers, believe it or not.

As soon as I would smell dirty diapers from one of our kids, it would just, you know, put me right back in the camp. Or if I'm walking, like when I was working in Chicago and I walk on the sidewalks, I walked past an alleyway and I'd smell some of that, some of the trash from there, It's just instantly you're back in, you feel that trigger right there because that, for me, that was my trigger. Yeah, well, they say scent is the strongest sense tied to memory. Yeah, I believe it. For me, that was the big one for me.

It was scent. It was almost always scent. I'd smell certain scents. And that, for me, would always kind of transport me there. And there was this other song, I swear, this is this crazy song. So this Gwen Stefani song, Sweet Escape, right? I would get on the bus to go from, we lived on Camp Stryker and we worked on Camp Cropper about a mile and a half apart. So we had a little bus that would take you over back and forth to the king back and forth there.

So me and my group would get on the bus to go to the camp for our shift. Every day, Ferrari Square was like 12 or 13 straight freaking days. We would hear Gwen Stefani's sweet escape. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, I'm listening to this sweet scape song as I'm driving into a freaking camp with 5,000 terrorists. So now whenever you hear that song. I think about that every time. Yeah.

Okay. So it's go down. What is it a psychedelic? What the fuck is it? Yeah, it's a psychedelic. It's a psychedelic. Okay. Yeah.

And you can do it orally or you can do it. All right there. Go down. Right there, right there. A K-hole is when a high dose of ketamine leads to intense feelings of disassociation. This can cause feelings of being disconnected or from or unable to control one's own body. Also, sometimes affecting the ability to speak and move around easily. One way to think about a K-hole is a state between intoxication and a coma.

Interesting. Some people refer to a K-hole as an out-of-body or near-death experience. Absolutely. So I never had that when I did the IV one with Dr. Klova. But I did, I've done a couple more, it's oral. You put the tabs on your tongue let dissolve and get into your body. that way. I've had a couple of those with that because it's weird. A couple of times it just really thought I was just dead because you go, it's like normal life like this. And then suddenly

it just faded away and it wasn't real. You're like, holy crap, this isn't real. This is all fake. What is real? What's going on? And you just kind of like more from one thing to the next and you don't really know what's going on. Right. You just know that nothing's real and that life isn't real. everything you've imagined has been fake. And it's kind of scary in a way. And then the couple of times that happened to me towards the end, I just kind of like found myself eventually in this black, empty space where there's no sound. There's no heat.

There's no cold. There's no nothing. Just complete and absolute emptiness is black. And then I would wake up. And that was kind of kind of very disassociating. It's kind of scary in a way because it's literally like you died. Like, oh my God, I'm dead. And what is this doing?

What is this doing to your brain that is rewiring it and getting rid of that hypervigilance? There's probably better ways for a neurologist to explain it, but I can. I just know that when I have done it, I don't feel that nervous, crazy jitterness like I do with the PTSD. It's like reset for a period of time. Sometimes it's months, sometimes it's most of a year. Okay. It's just, it's a reset. Interesting.

I don't know how, but it's just like it resets the mind, so to speak. And do you do the nerve injection paired with the ketamine? I've done that. Personally, I've done that. And I think that works best because it's not enough to just heal. It's not enough to just block the nerve. You've got to fix the mind. And it's not enough to fix the mind.

You've got to also solve the body part. That's where the two have worked really well together. So is it by injecting the nerve? Is that what eliminates the bad trips? like the anxiety. You know, so what's going to negate the bad trips from the experience is the benzodiazepine. The benzodiazepine. Okay.

And he would do that. You know, when he does the IV ketamine, he'll do that first. And then right after that, he does the ketamine. Okay. It's instantaneous once they hit your bloodstream. You're down. Okay. So explain to me again how that the nerve injection helps.

Yeah. So what that does is it kind of like, I think, Dakota might probably explain it better than I is like walking through a city street where it's loud, noisy, and suddenly it's a quiet forest. It just kind of slows things down, kind of just. And it's what is doing is sort of just inhibiting your fighter flight. Yes. Okay. I mean, it won't completely, it doesn't 100% stop it. But what it does is really, really slow this sucker down. Okay. Like really big. And you're like, hey, that's not so bad. I don't need to be ducking in a ditch or reaching for a gun right. now it's okay right it gives you that moment you need to kind of come to that realization you know and i think for the longest time we don't um allow veterans and people to explore that and and look at these other homeopathic ways to treat people or these other ways of looking at that because um there's no money in it well no it's not that there's no money there's lots i think there's plenty of money to be made in this stuff the problem is uh the it comes back to FDA regulation

So in the 70s, they kind of outlawed a lot of drugs. You know, you had marijuana was illegal. You had LSD and ketamine and different things like that became illegal drugs. And when they became illegal, there was no further studies. And so you're missing like 40 years worth of scientific study and research on these drugs to see how they actually do affect the mind and help people. Right. Whereas other countries, they continue to evolve and develop that.

And that's why you see veterans and other groups going overseas to get treated for that kind of stuff. Yes. They do use it over there. I just, recently I heard, I read something I didn't even, I was completely ignorant to was that overseas in countries in Europe, they use testosterone therapy for depression and anxiety and ADHD. And there's a whole slew of conditions that they can treat with with hormone therapy like testosterone or estrogen for women. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you're short, if you're short to mean things, it's going to cause your problems. And that isn't, yeah, that's unheard of in America.

It's unheard of because there's, it's, it's, it's cheap. It's, testosterone is is cheap. So unbelievably cheap. Yep. Yep. It's like if there's a cure for cancer, we'll never know about it because it's way more money involved in treating it than curing it. Mm-hmm.

But why don't you just try to cure? If that's the deal and why don't you say, okay, well, the cure for this is half a million blocks. Mm-hmm. Did you ever, did you try LSD or mushrooms? I've not tried the LSD. I've done the microdosing on the mushrooms. You know, that's a little hard to figure out your dosing levels. I haven't really spent enough time tinkering with it, to be honest with you.

I mean, you don't need a prescription. It's legal to do that. I just haven't really tinker with it. I tried it once. It was fine, trying to their time. Just kind of left me like I really wasn't able to focus and do what I and continue to work and whatnot. So I just haven't spent a lot of time tinkering with it, to be honest with you. Okay.

I'm too incredibly busy too. Right. To lose like a couple, like a day to try something you'd think you're with it. Yeah, well, this didn't work. Let me lose another day while I test this. And maybe it'll work maybe alone. You know. But nothing worked as good as sitting down in writing.

Well, yeah, the writing is, I think, basically a long-term fix for me. That helps a lot because at the end of the day, you got to find something that you can still support yourself and your family with, right? You don't want to become dependent on some, you know, disability pension or handouts, things like that, you've got to make yourself a productive member of society. And I think for me, writing has been a great therapy.

You know, it's a continued thing. I mean, sure, I can still do the ketamine and the SGB injections here and there, but I still need to support myself. I still need daily things to kind of do. And for me, I found writing as that niche. Here's an odd question. Do you think there are people out there

or have you met people out there that can go through countries in Iraq and Afghanistan and kill people, slaughter people, do the things you did, interrogate people, and then just come here, like nothing happened. Yeah. Just completely flip the switch, not have to do any sort of therapy or anything like that. I think there's definitely people like that. What makes sense? People like that. Psychotic people, man.

Sometimes you just get some psychopaths out there where people are just borderline. And other times, other times you'll have people like that and they have no problems. And then all of a sudden, they'll have a problem, you know, down the road. Say a family member dies and suddenly it hits them or an incident happens that hits them and it just broke, they just break down. Or the straw that broke the camel's back, so speak, where it just won too many things and it just snapped. and that does happen I don't I think it's kind of hard personally

for to imagine that people can go through and do all these things and not be somewhat damaged or compromised a little bit but a lot of it comes down to how well you can cope with it and deal with it and process it and how much you've been involved in all that how long you've been kind of doing that kind of stuff

I think a lot of people who have been involved in we've got special forces guys and other military guys who've done five, six, seven deployments. They've spent five or seven or eight years in war. I don't know that a lot of those people survive 10, 20, 30 years into the future. I think you see a lot of people suicides taking place somewhere along the path. Yes. You know, one of my friends had committed suicide not last year.

He was December of 21, yeah, December 2021. So, you know, he was one of my Oxford classmates. You know, he's a smart guy. He's got a graduate degree from Oxford. We were in the same class. He was an Army Ranger. He did one deployment as a Ranger, and then he went to work for Blackwater and Triple Canopy into the PMC world for, you know, seven or eight years.

But he was involved in a handful of shootings and incidents and things like that, too. everything seemed fine on the outside he's got a nice wife in his house, he's got three kids, everything seems fine he's got a good job, making a two, three hundred thousand year jobs

so he means making good money all the right connections but deep down inside you know he struggled with some of those things and I didn't personally know that he was starting with a lot of those things. He never talked about a lot of those things and he wouldn't talk about a lot of those things

but then the year prior to his year or two years before his suicide him and his wife got divorced and separated and then

things kind of went down a little bit from there and then you know as he was right before Christmas or after Christmas you know

when he did that and it just but you wouldn't have thought that from him you know he just I mean by all outward appearances he has it together

right you know and he's a smart guy got a graduate degree from oxford he's aren't idiots these aren't guys that are just right judges in society they're really smart intellectual people yes you know who understand who understand what going on but reach a point in their life and then in that moment where they just can't take anymore they're just done i mean i've kind of got i've i've hit those points too but i just never acted on it but i i feel and have seen myself get to those levels to those points

and just you just want to punch out you're just kind of done you're tired of trying you're tired of just going through this grind and not seeing anything improve anything get better you know i guess what's the difference between between me and some of these other guys that experience that is i've at least i when i see that happening i will usually talk with someone about it or i will um you know take one of one of my uh other medications that kind of helps me counter that what kind of medications uh so they have uh What's the other ones? These are other benzodiazepine-type drugs, like kind of like a almost like happy drug.

You take kind of like Prozac, like Al-Prosolzin or lorazepan, things like that to just kind of help you, you know, help improve your mood a little bit. Yeah. They're going to take you from that. I want to just blow my brains out moment to, okay, life's not that bad.

You know what I mean? I can get through this. And sometimes that's just what you need. It's just that. Are those similar to those drugs you were taking overseas? No. Not at all. We wouldn't be allowed to take the benzodiazepine over there.

Okay. And they want, I mean, you're not always going to be able to, you're not, you're not, it doesn't, it sometimes affects your ability to think straight and clear. Which again, this is what kills me about the VA is their pharmacology approach to everything. And it doesn't let you work, you know, like, I mean, again, I got a graduate degree from Oxford. I'd like to think I'm a fairly smart person. And the problem is when I'm taking those medications that the VA gives, I don't have that sharp mental acuity that I need. Right. Right.

I just don't have it. And that's hard to fight through. And I either take the drugs and so that I'm a nice, sociable person to be around. I'm not an asshole. And my wife can bear, she can be around me and coworkers like being around you. But then I'm not cognitively as sharp as I have to be for those. you know, senior positions at a corporation. Or I don't take it.

And I'm sharp as a tack. I mean, I'm like really, you know, mercenary mindset at the job. I'm sharp. I know what I'm doing. Very, very proficient and good at what I'm doing. But I'm not the nice person to be around. And that kind of can lead to bad experiences that hit your job. Eventually you're going to get fired, right?

Right. When you act like that or do certain things. You're just society doesn't talk. They don't take that. So when you started writing all these books, incredible collection of books you've written, what sort of approach did you take? Did you just start kind of writing down your own experiences, thoughts you had, memories you had? So the first time, the first book I wrote was interview with the terrorist. That was my experiences working as a terrier.

For me, I was taking my diary more or less. I kept my journal because I needed to have some way to get all this crap out of my head at the end of my job. and the end of work, right? I didn't journal every day when I was in Iraq, but just sometimes I just had to do something to just get it out of my head. And I started just expounding on, just sharing what was going on.

Because the problem is nobody knows what we did. They don't think of you as these evil monsters. I remember coming back from my year, I was gone, and being at church, and someone at church said, so you were going to Iraq for a year. Wow, that's great. What did you do over there? And you tell them, I tell them, well, I was an interrogator.

It's like you, like the expression on people's faces says it all. Like, you have, they have this like, wow, this person is like a monster. I don't want to talk with these people, you know, move away. Really? You know, that's because they don't know what we do. And the image at that time, I said it was 2007, the image everyone has of interrogators is Abu Ghraib, torturing people, you know, waterboarding, you know, all these other horrible things. That's not what we did, but that's what they thought we did.

And so for me, I wanted to kind of explain that that's not what we did. It was a whole different thing. And our mission was a really important one because how else you could have find, you know, we talk with the enemy. That's our job to talk directly to the enemy every day and find information to try and end this conflict. And I wanted to try and humanize that. And from there, I said, all right, well, if I'm going to continue writing, I got to write about something. So obviously, it books a great way to do it because it's a very long story. You can just create out of your head, just, you know, fiction.

and make it up. But you got to create something people want to read. So I looked at and said, well, what do I want to read? And what is not being produced? And for me, I liked to read books like Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. That was one of my favorite books to read. The problem is there's not a lot of books like that, where you talk about a battalion or a brigade and division level combat and fights.

It's just not a style of writing. A lot of people pursue. I always like to pursue these small unit things. Army Rangers, the Navy SEAL or Green Brain. It's almost always some rogue this or that. You know, it's just small stuff like that. And there's nothing wrong with that. They're entertaining.

You know, Vince Flynn did really well with his Mitzrap characters in creating that and doing that. But I like the Tom Clancy style where you have this Red Storm rise and these divisions on divisions, you know, with the Soviets going across and NATO having this big open. fight like that. So I started creating those kinds of books and writing and doing that. And my last government job, I worked over.

Sort of like fictionalized. Yeah. Yeah. So I worked at U.S. European Command for almost three and a half years. Right. And that's in Stuttgart, Germany. So I worked in the intelligence group.

I worked as identity intelligence operations manager. So more less like finding people, you know, hunting, tracking, finding, foreign extreme is coming in out of our AOR, basically. But that kind of job, you know, on the Intel staff, you're also exposed to our, you know, plans and what we're developing to counter, you know, say a Russians invaded across and they're going to attack NATO and invaded across. How would we respond to that? We have war plans for everything.

Everything I understand we've got war plans or something. And you kind of see a lot of those things. So I said, well, all right, I've been around that. Why don't I write a book on Russia invading, you know, in this case, we don't. Ukraine or whatever countries and just start creating these different series and creating books about big conflicts that nobody's writing or doing that kind of style

like Clancy used to do. And so, well, let's try and do that ourselves. And so we did. And, you know, it's like anything, you get better with more practice. So my early, early books and stuff were pretty good. I think our stuff now is obviously better,

but that's because I've written 30 more books since then. So you're going to get better. Yes. And you start to learn how to craft better characters and how to create more realistic scenarios and that's one of the that's the trick with writing is how do i create a character that's so real that it triggers you like you read this you go this is this person's like you know total you know anti-american whatever if they're russian pov they need to be a russian pov they got to think like a russian right otherwise you just create a

a comic character. If you have a political figure, well, they need to act like the political figure you're trying to portray them to be. You need to create realistic characters. And so when you have that and then you have these scenarios that are very realistic to what could actually happen and evolve, you start to get a really good book. And then it's just about, you know, continue to walk through the scenario and say, okay, well, what new technology is going to get incorporated?

Let's start writing that stuff in. How would this scenario play out? Do the whole what if. How much research do you have to do, research you have to do, like, to make this stuff real? A lot. Like, for example, to find a Russian's point of view or a politician's point of view. Listen to interviews. Great way to do it.

So if you want to, you want to know about the Russian POV, their perspective, listen to Seria Lavrov talk. Like, listen to him. Who is that? So he's a Russian foreign minister. So you listen to him, talk at different conferences, events, UN, anywhere. I was like, okay, so you spend some time listening to how he talks, how he phrases things, how he portrays X, Y, Z happening. Listen to how President Putin portrays things, how as they're elected people in their government and military, portray things. That's going to give you a good insight into that mindset, that thinking.

You can watch Russian, there's Russian TV shows and programs you can watch and kind of see and get some of that insight, too. And that helps you better gauge how they respond and act. So when you write the scenario, you write the book. Do you understand Russian? No, I don't. I have subtitles and things like that. I work on that stuff. But I also have a really big reader network at this point too.

And so I can throw out different questions that I have different people that I can ping for and get answers from. Wow. It helps a lot too. So you have to go through, you have to understand so many different types of people's perspectives to write these fictional stories and to make this. They want to do a good, yes. If you want to do it good, right, but you want to make it as realistic as possible. The technology is actually much harder to get than the people's perspectives and things like that. The technology can be quite challenging.

What do you mean when you say technology? What technology? Okay, so if you're following, you know, first Armour Brigade combat team out of the third infantry division. So you know what their equipment is. So first you know what the equipment is, kind of rounds where the ranges, effectiveness, different things like that. So you have that down. And you start getting that for all of the units. in the U.S. that you're going to use and operate, whether it's Army, Air Force, Navy Marines.

There's four branches, right? A lot of equipment. Well, now who are you fighting? So now you need to look at that layer of equipment too. Now are you incorporating the allies? Well, what do they use? And do the other people have any allies and all this? So before you know, you've got quite a lot of different types of equipment you're trying to incorporate and use and figure out, well, can this work? Does it work?

What is the range of these air-to-air missiles that, you know, those Chinese air-eer? aircraft would use versus what we would use. So, because you can't have, if you're going to write different engagements, you need to make sure you're writing them with the weapons that it can actually do that kind of engagement. Right. Otherwise, you're going to have inconsistency problems. And that's just the part of the detail of getting this technology right. Has it ever come across to you when you were, when you were writing a story or even after

you've written a story or a series of stories that, holy shit, my stories are coming true? Yeah, this one here, man. Battle of Ukraine. We wrote that back in 2017, and it's been unfolding an unimidated nightmare unfolding ever since. How many books are in that series? A total six books in that series. And what got you started on that series? What made you want to start that?

Sure. So I needed to come up with a new series. And I said, all right, well, let's look at World War III. What's going to be the next biggest war? How would this shake out? And I pretty much looked and said, well, it's going to be Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Korea, and Taiwan is going to be. One of those three. Okay.

Or Taiwan. Yeah. One of those three. And I said, all right, well, what if we had this secret pact between... Wait, sorry. What made you think that? Based on my experience is working at U.S. European Command, just the stuff I was around and seeing how everything was playing out and knowing what was going on behind the scenes. I mean, when I saw how things were unfolding in Ukraine when I was there before, my done.

and then just seeing how things unfolded in Iraq and in Libya and in the whole Arab Spring and our reactions to everything, it kind of like, I don't want to say open your eyes up. You just start seeing our actions from a different perspective. You know, because normal everyday people see the actions taking one way or another. But when you've kind of worked in those secret scroll realms, you kind of get a better perspective of what's really going on. Why are we doing X, Y, or Z? You know, like, why did we suddenly turn on Qaddafi? You know, I mean, there was no reason to turn on Qaddafi and look what we have in place of it now.

Was this really a good decision? You know, it's still a failed state. Right. Was this really what we wanted? Okay. Bad choice right there. And it also puts a, it also creates another problem for us, too, because Qaddafi gave up his weapons, his WMD program and stuff he had in exchange for. normalized relations with the United States and in Europe. So he did that willingly without having to

be invaded. And then what's his response? What was our response? You know, less than a decade later, we topple's regime on him. You know, so, you know, so John Bolton will say, well, we want to use the Libya model. Really? Okay. So we want you to give up your weapons of mass destruction. Then we're just going to destabilize your regime and replace you once you've done this. Okay. What, what dictator is going to go along with that? Right. And what, nation would go along with this. It's just poor phrasing. And at the end of the day, I mean, maybe behind the curtain, Pax Americana is what we really

want to pursue. That's fine. Don't say that out loud and tell people that. And then make sure your economy and your country is positioned to support that. You know, if we always say might, you know, might doesn't make right when we talk about Russia and China interacting with their neighbors. that's that rule applies to them it does not apply to us might always makes right when it comes to the united states we you know we're going to do what we want to do right if we want the resource or

you're threatening it access to our resource or our allies we're going to fix the problem so when you came up with this idea to write this book i mean were you looking at nato and seeing what was going on between nato and russia and yeah just looked at that and said all right well i see you NATO is incredibly weak. It just doesn't have the capability to deploy forces in a reasonable amount of time. We're now discovering...

NATO's weak in that way? They can't rapidly deploy anything. They don't have forces that are operationally ready to react. So in the U.S., we have the 80-second Airborne and you can have most of the division deployed really quickly. They don't have quick reaction forces like that. A lot of their stuff, relies on the U.S. being able to move them and, you know, get them to point A to point B.

Okay. They don't have large stockpiles of munitions to support a sustained, you know, sustained combat. Okay. You know, the British Ministry of Defense was recently saying that if they got in a fight right now with Russia, they have weeks' worth of munitions and that's it. They're out. And a lot of those supplies probably won't even last weeks now because they've given been so much of it to Ukraine.

Yeah, the Secretary of Jennifer NATO was saying that, you know, almost begging countries to start mass producing munitions because Ukraine is expending multiple times what we can generate in, you know, just really rapidly. You know, the U.S. produces just under 100,000 or 155-millimeter artillery shells a year. It is like 86,000 a year. So the Defense Department is in the process of scaling. it up by five times that number. Problem is, you have Ukraine burning through like three to seven thousand rounds a day.

So they're cooking through our entire year's production in about 14 to 21 days. Whole year production is being blown in 21 days. So the way that's being supplied and supported right now to continue what they're doing is eating out of our war stocks. So if we started five to six million rounds in the inventory, Well, we've already burned a million in the first nine months of the war, and we've now located another million more. So we're already dipping really bad into our own stocks, so bad now that we're pulling our reserve inventories we keep in South Korea in case that war was kick off. We're pulling our munitions out of our stockpile out of there. And now we're pulling our stockpile out of Israel to send to Ukraine.

Well, the problem is now, should things kick off in those other regions, we don't have those inventories there anymore to supply our forces and keep things going. That's a big problem. And the Pentagon is scaling up the production, war production right now, but you're looking at like 12 to 18 months or more just to get up, you know, up from, you know, 86,000 a year upwards to what, to almost half a million. but half a million isn't even enough that's enough for

that's only enough for maybe four or five months worth of fighting what about the rest of it so when you started writing Battlefield Ukraine you said you chose those countries and what was the premise what was the premise of Battlefield Ukraine

yeah so the premise was basically is that the Russians and the Chinese have decided you know what this is the time to dethrone the west to knock America off its pedestal and take charge and by collaboration working together, they will move to do that. So the first stage was moving forward in Ukraine. It's getting the Russian government to essentially do what they did. Annex to recognize these regions

and then say of Ukraine. Yeah, of Ukraine. Say and basically tell them, all right, these are now recognized. We're going to, we request that NATO move its forces out of eastern Ukraine. And if they're not moved out of eastern Ukraine on this set time, then we're implementing a no-fly zone and we will forcibly a victim. And the whole book, the war starts when we just kind of laugh

it off. Like, whatever, there's a bunch of Russians not going to do this. And we hit that timeline and we hit the no-fly zone goes into effect and like, whatever. So we have some F-16s fly right through the no-fly zone and they get shot down. And then the Russians are like,

okay, it's game on. And then they just They just unload and they go on it. And the first part of the book is just really reacting to it. It's just trading space for time, you know, to basically buy time for the rest of NATO to react. U.S. forces to get moved over to Europe so you can get them into place and try to stop them at the NEPRO, basically. And so the fight kind of evolves right there. And that's where it starts, but that's not where it ends. So that one kicks off there.

if China really wants to grab Taiwan in Southeast Asia, it needs another conflict. So that's when you get the North Koreans to kick up. And now you get that war to really happen. Well, now the U.S. has got to respond there in Korea and we're responding with NATO. Now we're really bogged down. Now you're free for China to go in and grab Taiwan and anything else they want because there's nothing that we have that can stop them. And so the book really follows this whole, the first couple of books, the first three books in the series is really just a rolling crescendo of just body blows against the West and just having to react.

And then the second half of the series is we finally reacted. We've now caught our breath. We're now rallying the West to unite together to combat and go in pushback. And so that's the second half of the series is the pushback and eventually defeat of them. because they just overstretched. Wow. But the first part of the year, it's like, there's going to be fights. You're going to lose a lot of land in the first part of the year.

It's just like World War II. First year was really bad. Second year was a little worse and third year was much better. Right, right. And when you started to see what's going on right now, when you started in whatever February of last year when this whole thing kicked off, what were you thinking? How, I mean, obviously it was a little bit different because it was,

it was kind of like we sort of instigated that. We started just building up tons of weapons, putting a ton of money on the board. there, Russia. Well, we didn't have a clear mission and purpose. Like, what was, what was the mission? What's the purpose? And if this happens, what are we going to do?

So Joe Biden was telling them disclosing all the information of saying, hey, if, you know, we know, you're going to attack. If you attack, we're going to do these sanctions. And then, you know, his phrase when he said, well, it depends how much they, how much land they take or what they do. Like, no, it should never have been how much. if you really wanted to deter them, obviously the sanctions didn't work because sanctions haven't worked from this 2014 when you've been doing them. So if you really wanted to deter them, you should have just told them, say, look, you're not going to invade Ukraine.

There's this memorandum that said when the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons that the United States and you would protect their territorial integrity. My predecessors didn't honor that. I will. So if you invade Ukraine, then we are going to war with you and we are going to send U.S. forces in there. are going to engage you. Well, that would have been the shot across the bow to let the Russians know, okay, this is what's going to happen if we cross the border and engage. Now, that might have worked. But if it didn't work, then you've got to be willing to back up the threats. Right. And that's the problem is we don't want to make a threat because we don't want to, we don't actually have to follow through on it. It's what happened with Syria. You know, in Obama issued the red line

in Syria and then famously didn't follow through. Right. Well, that told the Russian. and it told everyone else, hey, they're not going to follow through all this. And then again, it didn't happen. And, you know, so in the lead up to Afghanistan, when that was all falling apart, the Taliban had to abide by a series of agreements in order for U.S. forces to leave. Otherwise, we were going to be under 10 years. We would have been there another 10 years. If Trump was in there, probably would have stayed a lot longer, probably would have bombed

the hell out of them. but when we walked back those agreements that we were supposed to hold them to and just kind of walked away they ran over the whole they ran over the whole system and when that happened everyone looked at that in europe and said wow okay america literally just pulled up stakes in 10 days was gone just gone but wow 19 freaking years we've been in 65 million 65 billion dollars where the weapons and equipment there. Imagine we had that right now for Ukraine. What's the difference that would make? But we abandoned that. And that said, again, we've sent multiple messages through multiple generations that we're just not going to honor these red lines. We're not going to defend these

things. And so Putin saw that and said, well, whatever, they're not going to defendants. They're not going to attack us. They're not going to stop. And he rolled across. And what have we been doing in citizen? We've been doing piecemeal supports. And we're giving Ukraine's weapons, but not enough to win, not enough to lose. It's just a stalemate. And, you know, they've said the quiet part out loud. You know, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and a bunch of the other people have also said the quiet part out loud. We're not in this to win and help the Koreans win.

We are in this to bleed the Russians dry and just bleed their military dry. You know, that's what we're doing. That's the strategy. That's what, you know, what the Senate majority of Chuck Schumer was saying is, you know, You know, we're spending a fraction of our GDP on bleeding in the Russians, so we're just going to keep doing it. Right. But in from a, you know, a Pax Americana, a strategic, you know, perspective, that makes a whole lot of sense. You know, I listen to Dan Krenshaw talk about that and he's like, well, look at what we're spending and what we're getting.

It's like, I get that from that perspective. But you're also talking about these human beings, okay? You're using the Ukrainians as a proxy meat shield to implement your desired outcome on, Russia. Well, what about them? I mean, don't they have a say in this? I mean, you're pushing these guys to continue to fight and ensure the politicians are going to go along with it. I mean, they stand to make financially a fortune. I mean, you can't divorce the fact that Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe. Just because the Russians invade doesn't mean that went away. Right. I did not go away. There's a lot of people who have already been fired because of that. And like the current defense secretary, he's still there, but he's like at the epicenter, a lot of the corruption, where, you know, hey, I need to buy these water bottles for my soldiers. So I'm going to buy them from you for $10 a bottle, right? And then, you know, there's obviously the kickbacks across the board for everyone. Right.

I mean, that's just running rampant across that country. And you see recently the Saudi Arabia put like $400,500 million into Ukraine. That just happened. The Saudi Arabian diplomat was just there, meeting with Zelensky. And now that has an effect. effect on the rest of the world because China's already basically stated their stance with Russia because they're already doing business with them with oil and whatsoever. And now Saudi Arabia has lined with the U.S. But I think China depends on Saudi Arabia.

And he's just playing both sides, man. They're just trying to play the little sides. I saw this video. I got to pull up this video. I got to send this video to you, Austin, and you got to play this. This thing is the way this guy on, I think this was Instagram. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there you go. There's the, um, now is it humanitarian aid. Okay. Yeah, so the difference between humanitarian and military aid and in reconstruction stuff that there's. Oh, it's humanitarian aid. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're not going to give weapons. They're getting, they're getting weapons for us. And like, like, people don't realize they're talking about, Ukraine getting these Patriot missiles, right? Patriot missiles cost a lot of money, too, like $3 million bucks a pop. Right. It's not exactly a good return on investment to be used in a $3 million missile against some of these drones that are, you know, fraction of that price. But the other thing is Saudi Arabia has these missiles too. So Saudi has spent the last about three or four years dealing with Houthi rebels being backed by Iran who are using drones too to hit the Saudi. Yemen. Yeah.

So they're launching these drones from Yemen across Saudi Arabia and then hitting their refineries and oil fields with these drones. Well, they're using patriots to counter a lot of the stuff too. So we have a problem where a lot of people use patriots and that's great. But we don't have the industrial capability in place to mass produce the missiles to keep those things supplied and going. Right. That's the problem. And so we have a lot of users of it. Well, they're also using it right now.

Saudi is using Patriot missiles quite frequently. And now you're going to have Ukraine who's going to use Patriot missiles at an astronomical rate. We're not going to be able to keep up with that. Right. It's the same problem with artillery rounds, you know, anti-tank, you know, vessels, javelins or in-laws and stingers, we don't have the industrial capability to keep waging that kind of a fight. You know, and that's, I mean, that's one thing we do write about in, in the books a lot,

is we really kind of reinforce some of that. We talk about that. We integrate that into the struggle. You know, like, there's a couple spots you talk about in, I guess in the Monroe Doctrine series. Do you get the video? You know, like in this series. Yeah.

And then, in the other one where the president is getting a brief. and one of the generals is telling the president, sir, you don't understand the gravity situation. That artillery around is being, or that the tank round, this case is being made in this factory here. It is then being loaded onto a plane and flown to this airport here, put on a truck and driven 200 miles towards the front, and being shot out the tube of a tank four days later.

That's how grave the situation is. It's going from a factory to being shot out the tube in a week. Wow. That's not a good system. That's not a lot of inventory. Right. It's called just in time shooting. Yeah.

That's great for building manufacturing. That's not good for war. And, you know, I try to build that into the, into the different series and things you write because that's realistic. That's what they're facing right now where you have these massive shortages of ammo. You run out a bullet. It's not like Hollywood where you just have an endless supply of bulls to keep shooting. You can only carry so much ammo on you. And when you run out, you've got to have more.

Well, someone's got to bring it and get it over there. And that means someone's got to be able to drive that ammo down some road that's hopefully not getting shot up and hit with drones to get you there. And when you have five, six thousand guys in a city like in Bachmut, they're chewing through ammo. You need a lot of supply runs. And meanwhile, you got drones hitting them, artillery hitting them. I mean, it's kind of a mess. And then the ammo's going to get blown up. Are you familiar with the War Dogs movie, the two guys out of Miami who basically got that $200 million dollar.

arms deal to supply. I haven't seen it. I know which one you're talking about. Yeah. Supply the Afghan army with munitions. And they basically got it. They sourced it all from Albania, a factory that ended up all being Chinese ammunition. So they repackaged it.

There was some sort of law that was put in place through Obama where they couldn't buy any sort of, there was an embargo on Chinese munitions. But they just repackaged it and got rid of all the Chinese markings. And they sold it. And all the, all the ammunition was great, by the way. It worked perfectly. Even the, um, the army guys that. Yeah.

Basically were there using it and stuff like that. They basically said there was nothing wrong with it. There was no misfires, nothing at all. And the main guy, anyways, I had that guy in the podcast. Fascinating story. This is the video. This is the video that I was just talking about. Okay.

Play that, Austin. This is Prince Faisal bin Farran, one of the top Saudi diplomats meeting Zelensky in Ukraine yesterday, right after announcing $400 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The reason that this is such a big deal isn't the size of it. After all, Ukraine has gotten almost $100 billion in total aid since the invasion. The reason it's such a big deal is because it has put China in a very tricky position. You see, up until now, Saudi Arabia has been mostly neutral so far regarding its stance on the invasion. But with this new $400 million package, it's becoming clear that they're siding with the West.

This is very concerning for China, who just last week were debating sending suicide drones to Russia as part of an arms deal. Now China is faced with two options and neither are good. Option one, China sends weapons to Russia, but alienate themselves from Saudi Arabia, a country is central to their energy and economic goal. China would also likely be facing even more economic sanctions from Western countries and become further isolated, hurting Chinese companies. Or option two, they don't send weapons to Russia and end up burning the bridge with one of their oldest allies, which would put even more pressure on Russia and push Putin closer to the talking table. I'll be keeping a close eye in China to see what they do in the coming week, so follow for updates, and thanks for watching. This guy makes great videos.

What's the name of his channel or his page? Quiver or something? It's too small. I can't read it. Make sure we shot this guy out. quiver quantitative on Instagram So it's interesting

I see that I think it's I have a slightly different taking what he's doing with that So there's an incentive to keep this war going

Okay So we thought that We could bleed The Russians dry And kind of implode their economy And collapse them Over the course of this first year

That was what we really thought But it didn't happen And now We're figuring out that it's actually us who are starting to have a problem because they didn't implode like we thought Russia would. So from the Chinese perspective, if they can keep the war going, the longer they keep the war going, the weaker we become.

Because we're just going to expend more and more munitions that we can't readily replace. And as long as we're doing that, we won't have those munitions available. this is a credible threat, should they make a move on Taiwan at some point? Right. You know, I think one of your other guests a while back had said something about how his idea, his belief was that the Chinese, if they're going to make a move on Taiwan, they probably would look to do it towards really close to the around to the 2024 election cycle. Yeah, it was Andrew Bustamante who said that.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I listened to him last night on that. So probably right. But what's really going to, when you really see the indication of when they're really see the indication when they're kind of ready to make that move is when a series of these these large landing helicopter assault ships are done.

So we have these... That we are making? No, no. The Chinese are building these things. Correct. So they've been working very few years. I'm building kind of like a blue water Navy so I can go beyond their coastal areas.

Okay. But like we have these like you look up like the USS America or the USS WASP. These are a large helicopter assault ships that U.S. Marines use for moving, whether it's helicopters or landing assault vehicles, things like that, it's to take a force and move them to do an amphibious invasion. That's really what the Chinese have lacked

for a while. So they have a new type of warship that they've been building for quite some time. They're building a whole string of them. I want to say, have I had three or four of these landing helicopter assault ships done. And they have, I think it's five or six more under construction right now. And then there's a couple other versions of it that are larger, well that they're building. When those ships are done, that's when you're going to, they'll be, that's what I think you're going to start to see some serious movement because that's kind of what they need to go over to get there.

Because otherwise, they have a whole lot of smaller boats that can move across. And I'm not saying they couldn't do it. Probably the way they're going to invade is have a lot of people fly in normally, like civilians into China first, a lot of special forces. forces will go in clandestinely like that. They'll wait until the appointed time. Then they'll coalesce together, pick up their weapon caches, and go to execute their operations.

Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a handful of these roll-on, roll-off car carriers and other cargo ships already kind of have been maneuvered into port, where they'll just roll vehicles right off into the ports, instantly snagged the ports. And then you'll have a lot of helicopters that will come across the straits, you know, right on the water to land and try to grab and secure certain position cultural areas before you'll actually have an invasion force hit. But what would really help cinch that and make that a lot more likely to succeed is if you had more of those helicopter assault ships completed. Okay. And you get a few more of those done. And then there's a few other vessels they need.

They'll be able to kind of ring Taiwan pretty tight. And so there was another Air Force general recently he was talking. He was saying he believed that this would probably kick off sometimes more like 2025. There's others that believe it's like 2027. I think it's probably going to be probably between the September October of 2024 and probably before the end of 2025ish. If I was guessing a window, that's what I would say. That's going to happen.

Yeah. And what are we going to do? What is our reaction going to be? depends. I mean, Nancy Pelosi's already there. Yeah, it depends like, well, it depends when. It happens under Biden or does it happen in either his second term or someone else's term? That's going to be interesting to see. And it also depends on how things play out in Ukraine between now and that time too.

Because if we're still getting bled dry, we're not going to be able to intervene in too much. We can say we are, but unless we want to go toe to toe to the Chinese, and use our Navy. Really, the best weapon we would have would be our subs and our Navy and trying to close the straits and keep them from supplying the Chinese. But there's so many of the weapon systems that are needed to do that that are not, that the Taiwanese have bought them. They're not being given to them yet because we are either diverting weapons that are completed, supposed to go to Taiwan, being diverted to Ukraine, Or they're getting put to the back of the queue to be built because we're needing to build stuff for Ukraine. And all that's doing is weakening them.

You know, like there was a talk about giving Ukraine F-16s, the F-16 Vipers, the latest model that they have. They're really great aircraft. But these were bought insulated for Taiwan. And there was a lot of effort to try and actually take the Taiwanese F-16s and give them to Ukraine. It's like, hey, we, the way you're going to deter Taiwan. Taiwan from getting an invaded is to make Taiwan a porcupine, a really big, mean, savage porcupine. And if you can make it so costly that for them to invade, they won't.

But you can only do that if you're willing to give them the anti-ship missiles they need, the aircraft they need, the air defense they need, the artillery systems like the M1 and 9 paladins, the self-propelled turrogens that I used to work on when I was in the army side. They need those. and those are being diverted to Ukraine. And so much of the munition stockpiles are going there, we're not placing them in in Taiwan like we need to be. And so it comes back to priorities.

And if this is what we want to do as a country, right or wrong, I'm not an elected person. That's not my choice. But if the choice is to intervene and do all this, then we need to scale our industry to meet the requirement. And that's not happening. We need to go to General Motors and Ford and Tesla and say, hey, that's great, all these cool cars. But we need you to shut down half your line and convert to manufacturing artillery shells, missiles, armored vehicles, and equipment.

Because we need these things. You got to start scaling up. And we're not retooling the economy to be a wartime economy to support and sustain that. And there is the rest of our allies. I mean, this is my biggest gripe with what's happening in Europe is you don't see NATO stepping up to the plate. They give, like, the British are great for this. Love my British friends. But they're great for giving these wonderful, tough sounding speeches and then going to have afternoon tea afterwards and feeling they did something.

Well, where's the action to follow through on that? Like, where is the scaling up of your industry to meet the demand for this conflict? Right. I mean, you, like, the British actually had to shrink the size of their army because they couldn't meet the recruitment goal. That's not a good situation. You're a year into this war in Ukraine and you're shrinking. in your army when you should actually be like doubling it right you should be scaling up production of munitions and aircraft and weapons but you're not doing any of that and you're not even spending

more money on defense in germany all the canada countries are doing this and this is the problem it's like we're a year into this into into supporting this war in ukraine and you guys haven't even transition to wartime economy well guess who did transition to wartime economy the russians a year ago And they have factories running mass producing this stuff 24-7. And they're just continuing to scale and get more and more of their production going that way. And we don't really have a good read on like how effective our sanctions are and things going on inside there either. My friend Jack Murphy was on here a couple weeks ago. He did a report basically on the CIA conducting sabotage inside of Russia.

and you're not inside of ukraine but all inside of russia yeah going after those specific factories going after factories there's been all these fires all these railroad these trains getting derailed all kinds of crazy things going wrong russia's been sort of like brushing them off because they don't want to acknowledge that it's some sort of foreign adversary doing it because they don't want to lose morale for their people and their troops but it jack confirmed through a number of vetted CIA sources that it is a NATO country working through the CIA working through a NATO country to do this stuff. So they have some sort of plausible deniability, which is wild, wild story. That's what we do, though.

That's what our country is very good at doing that kind of stuff. You know, we're very good at very adept at waging proxy wars. Yes. I mean, the concern I have with all the proxy wars is when we were in Iraq, right? So we had Iran, the IRGC, was supplying weapons to fight us. And a lot of our guys got killed with those explicitly foreign penetrators, those EFPs. And that was when they were interfering, right? During that war, we did not have Russia or China actively interfering in that war against us.

We didn't have Russia providing al-Qaeda to the tune of $100 billion. of weapons and munitions, in intelligence, support, and all that kind of stuff, we just didn't. And my concern is when you're waging a proxy war, particularly against another superpower, and everyone, I mean, they know we're doing this. What's going to happen in the next time we go to war? So say there's another conflict or war in Africa or in Middle East or somewhere else, right? And the U.S. is involved in that conflict. Well, what's to say that Russia is not going to take their own revenge on us right for that because when we were in vietnam the russians mess with us for years in that war and cost us a lot of people and supplying the arduinemese weapons and aircraft

equipment technical expertise and we lost a lot of americans from that and when you when the russia went into afghanistan we returned the favor right and hit them hard like that right and that's kind of stopped but now we have restarted that with that proxy type actions in ukraine So you got to expect that they're going to retaliate and hit us with the same kind of thing in another future conflict. Or we say, oh, well, just do sanctions. They just didn't stop them from invading Ukraine. Right. Right.

Okay. That didn't work. So the only thing's going to stop them is military force. And we got to step back at some point and just say, this is a nice, beautiful planets. We all don't need to, like, destroy each other and blow each other up, blow each other up over some of these conflicts. There's easy way for us to negotiate and figure out how we can solve this without trying to kill together. Well, it's the people. You've got to want to actually solve it, though.

There's such a gap in humanity between the people that are doing the fighting and the psychopaths that are running the country, the diplomats and the people that make all these decisions and that are making all this money and trying to advance their political careers by doing X, Y, and Z. Yeah. I mean, the neo-conservatives like Victoria Newland and her husband and those people. Newland, so her husband runs the Institute for the Study of War, you know, that John, Jack Keene is like one of the chairman on and all he's talking about on Fox News. And they always cite the Institute for Study War. Well, our husband is one of the founders of this thing. And they were kind of the architects for this whole, for the surge in Iraq. And just the perpetuation of the whole invasion there in doing that.

And it's, it's frustrating because it's the same cluster of people who are pushing and doing all these things. And it's like your policy was tested and failed. So let's not continue to use the same failed policy. Let's try something different. Let's try a different approach. right it's like when um i'm interrogating a really tough individual i can beat my head against a wall trying the same approach or i can say you know what this isn't working let's try something different we can still meet our objective but just just try a different approach you know with with russia why we didn't have to pursue this

complete adversary relationship with russia you know we keep saying well russia is invading all these foreign you know invading their neighbors and you're all this stuff with that the borders of nato have not didn't expand its border with NATO. NATO expanded its border forward. Right. Correct. I mean, that's happened. Yes. But it's all defensive, right? It's all... Definitely keeps saying. It's all defensive. Well, here's my question. Why can't Russia be part of NATO? Why not?

That's a good question. Why not? Why not? Because if... I mean, and people say, well, they'll roast me for this. I know. NATO is designed to counter Russia. To defend Russia, right? By definition, that's what NATO is. Okay, so when we say, why can't Russia be part of NATO? Well, you have Greece and Turkey. those two nations have hated each other for thousands, thousands of years. They had fought just countless wars against each other. They are also both put into NATO, jammed in there together, and they can't fight anymore. They can't fight.

They're not able to fight each other in open conflict because they are part of NATO. They're members now. There's a process for them to have dialogue and disputes and handle these problems and go through things like that. And so when we have this issue with Russia, NATO is around to deal with Russia. And Russia has always had, Russia has become an aggressive and adversarial against, against the U.S. since 2008, when they first intervened in Georgia. And it's been that aggressive like that ever since. But it was aggressive like that because that was leading up to that point,

we were continuing to encroach and advance on their. border. And they said, well, if you're going to advance on our border, we need a buffer. If we're not going to be part of this community, we're going to be the bookey man. And you're going to continue to advance forward. We need a buffer. When they invaded Georgia. Yeah. Do you remember who wasn't, I'm going to fuck this up, but wasn't the leader of Georgia somebody that we were paying like some incredible salary? I don't remember. I mean, I was in Iraq at the time when that happened. It was kind of funny because the, the, the fob I was working I had a whole ton of Georgians stationed at that farm because they were in Iraq with us, like 3,000 or my thing.

And when the war happened, all 3,000 of the Georgians within like a day were flown in and brought it into Baghdad. And we put them all on the C-130s and C-17s and flew right back to Georgia. And so they were in Iraq. And then a few days later, they were back in their own country, you know, off to fight the Russians. Yeah. You know, and we provide intelligence and tell them, say, hey, those any aircraft guns you have, Yeah, why don't you move those to this valley over here and move this one to here and just wait and see what happens. Right.

And the next thing, you know, Russian planes are flying through and getting zapped. Mm-hmm. You know, I told them where to go. They didn't have that capability. Yeah. But they also got steamrolled. The Russians just steamrolled right through them and they had to make a, they got to ceasefire and stuff. Right.

Believe on the outskirts of Tbilisi at that time. I don't know if I'm remembering this right. I don't remember if it was Georgia or was a governor of some sort of state in like, southern Ukraine, but they found out this guy actually posted on his Facebook page, his salary, or what he was paid. And America was paying him like $250,000 a year. And he basically, he was being paid more than the governor of Massachusetts. It's crazy. What the fuck? You know, no wonder there's such a bad taste.

in the russian's mouth when we when we are so balls deep in these places over that are surrounding russia yeah i i look at this way that's the the existential threat to the united states like the next 50 years is not russia it is actually china and that's where the focus needs to be is on the chinese section is focusing there so why couldn't there have been a way for us to find a way to work with russian to bring them into our sphere of influence our fold instead of having them as an adversary bring them in with us and get russia to align with us against china because we can't deal with we can't we can't we can't be friends with the dictator like putin but we're friends with other dictators that's what kills me you know is we have other dictators that we're friends with

and who who are we friends with us all across the middle east man what about what's his name bbby net yu he's elected you elected you know he's elected you know They elect him, whether we like him or not, he's an elected official. His country has a Democratic election. His political party nominates him to be as a prime minister and he puts together coalition and they win. And so that's not a dictatorship. We may not like him or maybe some people do, but he's elected by his people, though. You can look at NBS in Saudi Arabia, I mean,

South kingdoms. Yeah, all over the Middle East, they're all dictators. I mean, we have Maduro down in South Arabia. America in Venezuela and we're wanting to reduce sanctions and move all that stuff away. Why? So we can use their oil. But this is a horrible dictator. And we've isolated them and cripple their economy with sanctions and kind of gotten them down and weakened them in hopes that he would eventually lose.

But now we're going to remove all that so we can pump up his oil industry so we can, you know, produce more oil for us. But why don't we just produce oil here? Why do we need to do that for those guys? It makes sense. What you're saying makes perfect sense to why there's no reporting on that proxy war in Yemen with Saudi Arabia and Iran. It's been going on for almost a decade now. And maybe you can explain this to me. This was something I was talking to a friend about last night.

Why is there a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia happening in Yemen, which is the other way? Because they can't fight each other. And not directly at least. The U.S. is actually kind of a shield between them. We have naval air bases blocking some of those areas in the Red Sea there and the Pershing Golf there. So you have a lot of oil traffic moving in and out there with all the... In Yemen? No, no, through the straight of Hormuz going into the...

Can you pull up a map of that whole area there? Pull up a map of like, with that whole area, Austin. Yeah, you'll see this whole string of military bases, U.S. bases on there. And so if the Iranians try to go across there and do that, they're going to run into problems with us. Whereas if they go through, you go through Horn of Africa, there down in Yemen, the lower portion of Saudi Arabia there, there's no issues down there. The government toppled that we were backing, and now it's just kind of a free-for-all, the Houthis kind of control it. Okay. So they're like coming in the back door.

Correct. Correct. Because if you look at Abu Dhabi and Qatar, we have bases there. We have a whole naval task force out there. Where's Qatar on this map? should be a small little place right above Dubai, you see it there? That's where the World Cup was.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, I see it. I see it. Yeah, tiny little speck. But that whole area is just very militarized. Whereas if you go in from Yemen, there's not a lot of defenses out there. You can do things out there and go through there.

But what's interesting, so we sold Abrams battle tanks to Saudi Arabia. And the Germans have sold leopard tanks to Turkey. So we have actual experience seeing these tanks being used. used in combat by non-U.S. non-German forces, right? So if you can YouTube some of the videos of like Saudis using our Abrams battle tanks in the war in Yemen against the Houthis there, those are not the same kind of tanks that we use. I mean, Michelle is sure, right, but doesn't the same armor mix. So what makes an American Abrams so deadly and formidable is the type of, It's a classified material used in making the armor.

And we don't give that to anyone. Like, no ally has that. Australia doesn't have it. They're buying Abrams from us. They're not getting that. No one gets that. That's a special US-only thing. And it means it helps our tanks always have a competitive edge,

should we ever have to fight our own tanks. So when we're giving tanks to Ukraine, we're not giving them the same equivalent that we have. We're going to be giving them this partner nation version. which doesn't have that same quality armor, doesn't have some of the same weapon technology and integrated firing systems that our stuff is going to have, because that's what makes our tank special.

That's classified material. We're not going to do that because it's going to get destroyed. At some point, these things do happen. You're going to lose equipment in a war. We don't want that fall in Russian hands, because they will take that and they will bring that back and they will analyze what it is. And before you know what, them and the Chinese have it.

Right. You know, just like when we lost a stealth fighter over, over Serbia and during the Coastal Serbia War in 99. Well, parts of that was brought, you know, to the Chinese embassy. And coincidentally, we had an errant bomb destroy the Chinese embassy. We didn't want that stuff falling into other people's hands, the technology that, because it's the, it's the shell of it, the coating, how do they coat the exterior of it, the paints, the different types of materials, things like that.

We don't want them to reverse engineer that kind of tech. So it's the same thing with the tank. technology. And it's just not going to be the savior everyone is thinking. And then you're going to have this logistical nightmare of trying to get parts for these tanks. And you're not talking a lot of tanks either, not enough to make a difference, which is what kills me about it. And then the same with the Germans. They're not sending in like the top of the line leopards. And the British are sending their tanks in. But again, they're sending 14. Like, seriously 14 I mean it's not even a battalion of tanks what are you going to do with 14 tanks

and you combine however it's like under 30 u.s. a rome's like guys you're not serious about winning this conflict if we're going to I mean it really kills me with our interventions if we're going to go to war then go to war to win don't go to war to lose we haven't won if you look at it we haven't won a war since World War two we'll win a lot we win most battles that we fight, but we still lose. But that just sucks. I mean, I spent, like you say, I spent most of my late 20s and early 30s in Iraq, three and a half years of time in that country on that mission, trying to win this thing

and make this thing work. And then to find out years later, everything was a lie to get us there. And then you guys didn't give us the tools and allow us to win it. It's just. away. It's like what did we just do? Why did I sacrifice all those years of my life? You know, like I am you heard about the burn pit issues that a lot of us vets are having to deal with with it from from that stuff. So when we capture Intel, right? So we capture people with these nifty little cell phones, right? And laptops and computers, different things like that, right? That stuff has to get destroyed.

So how do we destroy this stuff? You burn this crap. So when you're burning lithium ion best, batteries, that causes a problem. You know, it creates fluoride gas and other kinds of toxic materials. And they didn't, they didn't, like, tell us about this kind of stuff. They didn't give us proper protective materials to when you're having to do this. Right. So, you know, you have to burn these materials. We've got to burn classified materials every shift.

You're breathing in this kind of stuff all the time. And it causes long-term health effects. You know, like for instance, I was, I was like 30, 31 years old and I had to have double hip replacements at age 31 because shortly after I got back from my last time in Iraq, a few months later, developed vascular necrosis out of nowhere. What is that? My hips. It's where the blood flow to the bone just stops. It just stops. Your bones become brittle and break. And so both my hip bones just became brittle and broke.

and I've had to have them replaced. And the really bad part is the, when they did the left hip, they didn't do that one correctly. So I had to have a revision surgery way to have to go do it again. So it was like three years later, I had to have that thing replaced again. Except when they did the revision, they broke a part of the bone off and it healed in the wrong spot. And then now it's pushing into a cluster of nerves. And then they did something, they didn't put the proper joint head on their, ball head on the rod. And it's too small.

So now it kind of like vibrates on the bone. It's just, oh, that's freaking painful. And the only way I can get this thing fix is to have it done a third time. PIP replacements are pretty painful surgeries to have. And they leave you, you know, it's a week in hospital, three weeks in rehab. It leaves you down for a little while. Are you doing this to the VA? I will do the next time.

I didn't do that the first time. The first surgery I had to have was actually done in Germany. I was working in Germany at the time. Okay. And then I had the revision done once in Chicago. But, you know, I'm going to have to have this like done a third freaking time. and I it sucks because you

we're stuck dealing with these physical problems and issues now from this war and this is a crap that's going to plague us for decades you know I just and I'm not the only one there's lots about the guys right like Biden's son died from

a brain cancer that is completely tied to the burn pit stuff really yes this son died from the from the very from a type of cancer that a lot of other vets have died from all attributed from the burn pits What is the background of his son? He was a, he was a JAG.

He was a lawyer. So he was deployed over there doing, we use lawyers a lot. I mean, I use him as an interrogator. We had four lawyers assigned to our unit on different shifts. And so we worked with them all the time in our job. And they're always there advising command of what you can and can't do for the laws of armed conflict and things like that. Right. You know, are you allowed to do this strike or not?

Well, what was a lawyer saying? Sucks, you got to fight a war. Yeah. A lawyer next to you, but that's where we're at these days. Right. But his son was a lawyer. over there in something. So he was exposed to to the same materials

I've been exposed to everyone else. Wow. And so he's, you know, he got that cancer and died. There's other people we know that have had that cancer. I knew another one of our friends from our church he retired from the military, worked a lot of different

a lot of different secret squirrel crop. But he was over there in Iraq and Afghanistan for a number of years before he retired. And then he ended up getting that same type cancer that Biden's son got that brain cancer. And he hung on for a while. He hung up for like four or five years where he died. He died a couple years ago from it.

You know, but it's just. And this shit's off from the burn pits. Yeah. Yeah. Materials just don't know what you're, we know what you're breathing in. It's just like in Vietnam guys,

they had that ancient orange that they kept defoliage that they were just rained out on them as they're out there doing patrols. We're just doing patrols. They don't know what's going on. They got exposed to it. And that's what we have. Austin. It's just a list of all the things.

Oh, yeah. Oh, all the different types of cancers. Oh, my God. Kidney cancer, lymphatic cancer. Yeah. They just passed this new burn pit legislation for vets, which was really good because the VA was notorious for, like, denying everything. Wow, man.

Yes. It's just, it's just, you know, so we have that to look for us. It's like the medical time bond. Right. It's an hour to explode. You know, but it frustrates me because if we are, if we're going to go to ward, then give us a clear-cut objective, what work to accomplish. and then give us an exit strategy and define what winning is.

We know what the objective is, what we can work towards. Let's win. Like is it... Take the shackles off and let's win. Is it the case with proxy wars like the one in Yemen? Is it the, like,

is it true that the dynamic is basically we want to be helpful to our allies, Saudi Arabia, because we need them and they need us. We want to maintain the relationship. So we want to basically look like we're doing everything we can to help them,

but we don't really have fuck about helping them. We just want to make it seem like kind of, so it's more sinister than that even. So that's why you don't give them the best tanks. We give it. Look, we're giving you this. It's even worse than that. Okay. So with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, right? Do we really want them to win? Not necessarily. Because if this, long as this fight is happening

and Saudi Arabia is losing tanks, losing equipment like MRAPs and armory vehicles and having to expend missiles like patriot missiles and all kinds of things like that that is a continuous that that's a continuous source of a supply like a demand it's kind of like a drug dealer right he doesn't want to kill you by giving you too much drugs he wants you addicted and coming back for more so if Saudi Arabia is fighting the hooties the more they owe us the more we give them the more they owe us well the more they owe us but they're they need they need uh replacements they're losing equipment they need to buy more from us

They lose that equipment. They got to keep buying more from us. Well, if they're having to buy equipment from us to make sure they don't lose to the Houthis, when Saudi does something we don't like, we now have a little more leverage on them. Well, okay, maybe we are going to put these weapon sales on hold. And that devastates them because they built their army around our equipment. It's only you choked off the supply for parts and servicing and everything else. that means they're going to comply.

So there's that piece to it. So if we can, it's like with Ukraine, you know, we're getting the Europeans to just expend everything they have. And Uncle Sam's going to come around and be the sugar daddy to supply them with everything to replace it. And because they don't have any of their own indigenous equipment or dependent on us, we can now control your ability to defend your nation by turning the supply spickets on and off if you don't comply. That's why you want to make sure you own your own defense systems and stuff. That's why you see, like, Poland.

They're buying a lot of American weapons and artillery and munitions, things like that. But they're also partnering with South Korea to buy a lot of their armor vehicles and equipment. And they're building your own indigenous systems and their own industry to be able to supply and do it themselves because they want to be independent. Right. Poland has a horrible history of being screwed by its allies. And, you know, they want to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future. So have you ever watched Oliver Stone's Putin interviews? Yes, really interesting.

What did you think about that? I was really interesting. I mean, I think Olive Stone has his own best. and angle to things. But again, I'm not trying to side with Putin or with Russia or anything like that.

I just like studying people. And I like learning what makes them tick and why countries and I'm glad to get it. Yeah,

I think it's brilliant. And because as a writer, someone trying to create these books. When I want to, you know, create, you know, book two or book three for this series,

I, I use those resources to help me better understand the conflict, better understand this scenario you know um in this particular one so in monroe doctrine one of the things we really expose and look at is the chinese belt and road initiative and this is where they have uh chinese big uh manufacturing company country what they want to do is link their factories with markets around the world so you have a constant supply of customers and that keeps them gone so

Belt and Road is basically a global infrastructure plan where they will come in to say a country, a port country, you know, somewhere along Central America. And they will say, all right, we will build, we will help build and finance a deep water port, which will massively improve your country and economy. But we're going to own 51% of the port and you get the benefit of it all. and then we will help build from the port, these rail and highway networks connecting your major cities. All this isn't being done

all the altruistic nature of their hearts. This is being done to ensure they have a consumer to buy the products that they're building. Oh, shit. Yeah, that makes sense. That's why they're spending all this money in Africa. All of the place. Yeah, yeah.

So that's what they're doing with that. But more importantly, they're also at the same time putting you into a debt trap where the interest rates on these things are really low, cheap, but they're lots. It's big. And they own 51% of the port. Or maybe they own 49%, but there's a closet. If you fail to make your payments, it reverts to their ownership.

There's all kinds of little things they do. Now, these nations are poor. They want to develop and grow and move forward. And the Chinese are coming in with essentially endless cash to do all of that. and that's what they're kind of moving forward and accepting and doing that. And the Chinese are all over the place with us. But because they have control of these facilities and the infrastructure, they can manipulate and change the foreign policy of those nations to be how they want it.

So in our scenario, we look at that as one aspect of it. But now we also look at artificial intelligence and machine learning and saying, well, where is that going? because we can use AI to help us understand how, say, the naval commander for a ship is going to react in certain circumstances and situations. And how do we do that? Well, we look at what is this guy, what's this guy's social profiles, online profile? So what I mean by that is we look and say, okay, well, what does he spend his money on?

What does he do on social media? what kind of interactions does he do? What does he watch on YouTube? What is he, what kind of books does he read from Amazon? Like what's his purchasing behaviors? We look at all the different types of materials that he does. And then we look at not just him, but his immediate orbit and his friends. What do they all do?

So that helps to shape like the person's opinion, who they are, personalities, all those different social profiles of that. And then they have these awesome games on Facebook that everyone just loves to play. what character are you in Lord of Rings or in what's a Game of Thrones? Who cares? But people click on this shit. And when they do, they go through and they answer all these different questions, right? And those questions give a certain type of social, it's like a social assessment.

These are like assessing individuals and people. And then when you're also doing that, there's also a clause that actually grants them access to then see everything you do on the site and from there and do even more. So they're really able to track a bunch of things. But they're getting you to play this game where you're helping them build a social profile of you willingly. And you're giving them access to all of your social media. So when you have machines that can take all this stuff in, synthesize it, create profiles, you can start doing predictive behavioral analysis.

So now I can start conditioning a society to accept something by, engineering everything to fit into a certain mold or poke and prod push people, or I can understand how they will respond when an action happens. So like a way to condition people really good of social engineering study, case study. Look at last year when Florida passed as parental rights bill, right? So the parental rights bill, different organizations would not label this thing, don't say gay. and that's what they tried to call it. They call this thing as that.

Who labeled it that? A whole slew of these left wing groups started labeling this thing, the don't say gay bill. Well, it has nothing in the bill says you can't use the word gay. There's nothing about homosexuality at all. Okay. All it is simply saying is that kids between the ages of, well, kindergarten through third grade,

so basically five-year-olds through eight-year-olds, should not be taught sexual content or sexual-related materials. Okay. What was the name of that act? It was a parental rights. Parental rights. Yeah. Parental rights.

Okay. And this was a massive thing that they took in a bill that had nothing to do with, you know, being gay and made it into something it wasn't and got and renamed the whole thing and then whipped up everyone into this frenzy over something that was never even mentioned or a part of the bill. I mean, I have yet to find an adult. who can explain to me why we need to teach five-year-olds, you know, sex ed. Right. They're five. Right. Why are we telling them they need to start understanding gender pronouns and using gender pronoun?

Dude, they don't understand what a noun or a verb is. They can't even write their names yet. You're making them do this. Why are you doing this to them? You know, let them be kids. Why was that, do you know why that act was put in place? Because they were doing that. Because schools in Florida were.

older than we're actually doing that. It's so permeated through there. They were actually putting this stuff in there. You, I mean, you can, what schools were doing it? I don't have the list of them off the top of my head.

That's fucking insane. There's a full slew of them, though. That's crazy. And like there's this, there's this one gal and I don't use TikTok social media app. That's a Chinese spy app.

I'm not on that thing. But there's this group called loops of TikTok. I'm familiar with it. Yeah. So this woman, who runs this thing, she doesn't do anything with it. She's literally taking whatever it is you made on your TikTok thing and just sharing it. Right.

So you made it. Reposting it. You admitted to this. You said, I'm doing X, Y, and Z, and I'm proud of it. All she did was just repost it. Right. You put it out there. She didn't create anything.

You just put it out there. And that's how everyone found out about this. Because you have these teachers talking about this, their gratification and self-aware and like just feeling like importance when I got my group of kindergartners to understand why I go by my pronoun or these different things like dude your jobs educate kids don't just why is this important right why is this part of it and and it comes back to our schools are failing to the basics of just making sure that our kids can read right in arithmetic, right? They're just not doing this. So if we're not getting those things right,

then why are we going to expand into other areas, social, social areas like this, when we're not even getting the basics right? Our emphasis needs to be on why are our kids not being able to meet and exceed their grade levels in their education? We spend more money on education than almost any other developing nation. We do? We spend huge sums of money on education. We spend huge sums of money on education. And we have the worst results from this stop. How come a elementary school teacher makes the same amount of money as a Burger King manager? Well, it's not because we don't spend money on the education. The money is there. It's a matter of how the money is allocated, though. How many school administrators and support personnel do you have per teacher? You know, the teachers

should be getting paid a lot more money. But if you have a slew of school administrators and other non-teaching jobs that are taking up salaries and oftentimes quite high salaries, that's money you don't have for teachers. It's like the university systems. Well, universities have become very expensive because you have a whole plethora of non-teaching jobs positions that are not contributing to teaching students, teaching people. It's like a contract having to billable, being able to build a client. or not build a client, you know?

Right. Also, everyone gets loans to go to college. So they don't have to pay anything out of pocket, and they have deals with these financial institutions where they just have these ridiculous student loan programs. Think about this project. I mean, this is a horrible debt trap. We put our own cells in, right?

I mean, I got $62,000 to steal loans myself from Oxford, okay? I mean, I'm in the boat, too. I feed off a good chunk of mine. But what happens is you have the federal government is going to guarantee X amount of money for tuition, right? So what will happen is a school bank, okay, well, if we increase tuition by an extra 3% each year, the government's just going to increase the amount of loans available by that same amount. So as long as the government's going to guarantee a certain increase for the students, then we'll just continue to increase it. And the student doesn't know any better.

They just want to go to college. So they sign up for these things and get it. And then next thing you know, they've got all of those. of the student loan. I've got all these debts. And this is the worst kind of debt because it's not even, they wrote the laws for the student loans in such a manner that you can't even discharge it.

Right, right. That's what's really bad. How much interest is on student loans? It depends. If you have a federal loan, it's usually not that bad. I mean, most, my federal loans, I think are at like three and a quarter. I mean, it's not too bad. But personally, I think what, if the government's going to do something like that,

then maybe you should set the interest rate at maybe like half a percent or one percent. it should be just enough to service the loan, not to make a profit. Because actually, the government actually makes a solid profit on student loan interest. Right. Because it's just, it's over a trillion dollars. Yeah. They make money on student loans. And like right now with the budget deficits we're facing, part of the deficit we're actually facing is because we're not collecting the interest payments.

We're not collecting payments on student loans. You know, and now, you know, it's kind of a problem. But, you know, that's the issue. issue. The school is allowed to keep raising rates without justifying why they're doing that because the education isn't improving, not teaching anything new and cool. That's worth that job. But we're going to charge all this extra money. I mean, we're not producing hordes of doctors and people in the STEM fields. We're producing tons and tons of people getting degrees in, you know, English literature, gender studies and history. It's like, well, that's cool knowledge to know. That's why you call them humanity. That shouldn't be your major, though. If we have a shortage in engineers and scientists and doctors and whatnot, then shouldn't the student loans be made available for people who want to go into those fields? Yes. And not for...

There shouldn't even be loans. We should just be able to give that. We should be able to... The government should pay for that. If we could buy all those tanks and rockets for other countries, we should be able to buy the fucking education for doctors and lawyers and engineers and physicists. So when I was in Germany, a lot of people say, well, look at Germany and you're probably have, like, free health care. and they have free education. And technically that's true.

But there's catches to all of that, okay? So in the education system, it's free. And once you're in, you could stay and get your PhD. There's no, nothing pushing out the door to go to work. That's why Germany has so many PhDs, so many people with PhDs, because they'll just stay as a permanent student for 12 years. Because the government pays them to do, gives them money to live on and it's free. Sounds like a lot of the rich kids I grew up around.

But here's the catch. Here's the catch for it. you have to take a national standardized test. And if you don't get any certain percentile, you don't go to college. You're just done. Right. Now you go to private college and pay for that on your own.

Right. Right. Right. And you can't do it. That seems like a great system. It doesn't. It doesn't. Well, yes and no.

I mean, it isn't. So you have a lot of people who just maybe they don't test well. They suck it, taking tests. They're just not a good person to sit there and regurgitate test questions. right does that mean that person's not super smart though and probably would be grade in college and in great afterwards no just means it's not going to take a test there are a lot of people who are really going to take a test and they are stupid like they're really good to re-urgitating test questions and scoring on there right but they're dumb as a box rocks they just don't have a common sense um

but those are the ones who are going to be allowed to get the education then because that once he can test well and so it really it it blocks people from how having that full access. And what happens in their schools is usually in their high school, what they call, their version of high school, you either get identified to either you're going to go academic route, like college, or you're going to go trade route. And you kind of diverge and you split in high school. It usually happens like in middle school and you find like three or four years of high school, you split. And then you're going down one track of the other. And you're kind of like stuck.

like what if you decided I don't want to be a plumber I really wanted to go to go to college and go to engineering well that's not an option anymore I mean you can try to take those standardized tests and hope to get the right score you need but your all of your all of your high school education until you finished high school didn't prepare you for that so you're at a huge disadvantage to do that and so if we had that kind of a system it may be free but just understand very few are actually going to get to benefit from it it will be another cast system, so to speak, that we just create. On the medical side, so when I was there as contractor, I had private health insurance, which meant I got seen by a doctor like that. I went to the doctor on Monday, he said, oh, your hip broke. That's why it hurts so much. And you showed me the MRI. We're going to do surgery on Friday.

Okay. You know, it hurts like hell. So, you know, they're going to do surgery right away. Well, my roommate, you know, had his hip replaced, too. So he was a cop, German, you know, the pullet side. He's a local cop. And I was talking with him about this. And he told me that when his hip broke, he waited six weeks for his slot to get his surgery.

I mean, it's free. He doesn't pay anything for it, but he has to wait in a queue. Right. And your cue, as long as there's no one like super severe that gets bumped in front of you, it's like there's not like a line of acute cases in front of you. You'll eventually get seen relatively quickly. But there are other times where you can end up waiting a very long time. And I don't know if you've had a, anyone who's had a broken hip will attest to this.

When that happens, you don't want to wait six weeks to get this thing fixed. It's broke for a reason and it hurts. Right. You can you still move around sometimes, but you're grinding on broken bone. You're quite painful. But it's free. Yeah. I mean, there's tradeoffs.

It's not as green as everyone thinks. Yeah, I always, I've heard a lot of stories about the VA being really slow and not efficient and, you know, poor quality service. Then my dad has been dealing with the VA. He's an Air Force veteran. And, you know, he's just been recently dealing with some stuff having to go there for some checkups and some physicals. He had to get hearing aids. He's losing his hearing. And he's had a really positive experience with the VA.

He says that- It depends on where you're at. I've had really great experiences with the VA here. I did not have a good experience with the VA in D.C. or in Chicago. Right. Just terrible VAs up there. Yeah. I had a.

Kristen Beck. Are you afraid of Kristen Beck on here? Navy Seal. Her name. His name was Chris Beck. He transitioned to being Kristen Beck. Ah, does he manufacture the firearms, right? There's another person that's kind of like there. Navy SEAL. He has a firearms manufacturer here. There's a book and a documentary made about her, and it's called Lady Valor. It was like a, I think it was either CNN or HBO documentary made about his story or her

story. It was pretty incredible. I forgot where I was going with this. Oh, she's talking about... She's a lot of problems with the VA. A lot of problems of the VA. Because she, you know, dealt with a lot of psychological issues being a seal in Iraq. It's tough. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're in combat for very intense periods of time.

And then you go home and you're back in intense combat. And that's kind of a difference between like the special warfare guys versus like line units, regular grunts, you know, just they're there for a year. Sometimes they see the action. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they, you know, they go through the whole time without having any, any issue of problems. Whereas the special warfare guys, they go in and they're there for whether it's, you know,

three months or five months, but that period of there, it is high intensity for that period. And then they go home and high intensity and go home. It's tough on those guys, man. Yeah. It's tough, really tough. But it's like future warfare stuff, man. that's scary as hell

because the technology where it's going with the drones and the AI and everything else like there was a Textron has they have a really interesting remote controlled ground vehicle

like you can look up the Army's got these really unique the future Army combat systems part of it are making these autonomous ground vehicles. So what you'll be able to do is you'll have different size, like armored fighting vehicles and tanks will have different kinds of weapons on them, different sizes.

But these vehicles will be able to kind of like a UAV. They'll be remotely controlled so they can go into combat zone area from while the guy who's actually operating maybe hundreds of miles away or even the other side of the world. and the vehicle go in and be able to conduct its operations, its missions. It's kind of scary to think about because there's going to come a point where, like, you have, take for instance with Tesla, right, they've got their self-driving AI software, and that is getting better every single year because you have hundreds of thousands of people using it,

recording more data. Well, it's not going to be long before you're going to have that same kind of technology capability that can operate this armored vehicle that will be able to, to autonomously go into a combat zone where you just say, okay, everyone in like this area here is classified as an enemy combatant.

So just go in and as it identifies, people just start engaging them. And you have that, you'll have, you know, aircraft, helicopters, yeah,

underwater. Well, we have, we already have this stuff, though. I mean, crazy, but they're all in the loop right now.

You know, they're being physically operated by someone. We're not far away, though, where this is going to be a, like, semi-autonomist to fully autonomous weapons.

And then you're going to have these things just moving across. That's going to be scary. Yeah. What was the story a couple months ago that San Francisco was going to start? Yeah, police, right? They were going to have robots kill people. Yeah. It's like crazy.

Like, what do you mean? Robots killing people. With basically the authority to murder people. I guess they rolled it back once it started getting a lot of publicity. It's nuts. It's nuts where we're going with some of the technology like that. But then on the other hand, And, you know, you think about technology and AI and where we're going.

It's spooky where it's going. But then you see this goofy-ass balloon, spy balloon floating across America. Like, are you kidding me? Yep. Are we really like, are we really still using balloons in 2022, 2022, 2023? I don't know. I think, I don't know. They say it's a weather balloon gathering.

Is that a smokescreen or? Who knows? I think it was a matter. Maybe it was just like a middle finger that floated across the country. Right. I'm saying, huh, look what you can do. We just float right across your country and you didn't do anything about it. And, you know, kind of a black eye from there.

But as a writer, okay, here's a scenario. Imagine this balloon and you place a nuclear device on top, on this balloon, right? And it explodes at those high altitudes. What's it going to create electromagnetic pulse system that would blanket a big chunk of the United States? Fry all our circuitry and take us out. Right. So, you know, the writer in me looks at that and says, wow, that's a cool scenario. how could that work?

And what if they did something like that? What if they wanted to test it and say, hey, can we float a balloon across the United States without getting seen or anything? And the scary part is, had this rancher out there, and what was it, or whatever,

not seen it and reported it. We probably never would have known about it. And it sounds from the reports on the Pentagon, they wouldn't have known about it. Because apparently they're trying to say that this has happened in the past and we didn't know about it. I'm like,

really? Really? you had balloons the size of you know 200 foot tall or 200 foot long balloons yeah floating across the country you know about it what if someone did put a bomb like an EMP bomb on there and did that I mean I also think too like how many are there really is was there really only one or how many of these are really floating across the skies that we know about and we just wanted to say you know create some sort of sigh up to point the American public make them look at

Yeah, look at China. Look what they're doing to us. And guess what? Somebody sitting at CIA right now just laughing their ass off. Oh, you remember what happened like right before this, right? So right before the balloon thing, as when Project Veritas had this big sting operation that they had done with one of the Pfizer employees who kind of talked about how they had, how the vaccines just didn't work. And went through that whole process and exposed all of that. And then a couple of days later, oh, we have a balloon up here.

Shiny object over here. I don't remember even seeing what you're talking about. Yeah, look up Project Veritas. With that whole thing they had about the Pfizer stuff. It was a big deal. And then magically. Austin, can you find that? Magically, like less than a week or two later, Pfizer's board ends up Alston, James O'Keefe,

who is the founder and the president for the company who does this. Like, that's his gig. And they get rid of him. And now, you know, he's out in the left flat. happened the way he'll probably restart his own brand new version of Project Veritas and restart the whole thing um but it's like coincidental timing from them breaking this big story as one of the biggest stories of the decade to the balloon to then his ouster all over the weeks it's like coincidence i mean yeah that shit is scary that's crazy the vaccine stuff is really really that's dude you

should try and talk to james lekeith the reason that stuff scares me is just the the level of control that has been put on social media and the internet and communication just based on that that is what scares me elin musk exposed all of that and just i was like wow i mean from an intel perspective i i understand know that stuff happens it just i guess i was surprised at how eager the media was to just be lap dogs for all of this and just compliant to it yes you know what happened to investigative journalism not investigative journalism period that that that That goes back to what Jack Murphy was talking about. When he was putting out his story for the CIA, he was working with one of the top two publications in the country.

And when it came down to like the clock is ticking to hit the publish button on that article, they had to run it by the CIA's deputy director. They had a conference call, a three-way call with his editor at the publication and the CIA's deputy director on the phone off the record. He didn't have an on-the-record agreement with this guy. He said completely vehemently denied everything about those cells being in Russia, doing those sabotage campaigns, conducting those sabotage campaigns. In fact, he said that it was rogue Ukrainians conducting those campaigns. So after the call, he has another one-on-one with his editor saying, okay, what are we going to do? And the editor says, we have to scrub every single mention of the CIA out of the story. Yeah.

Rogue Ukrainians that are on CIA payroll. He wanted to completely make it line up with. the deputy director's narrative. But they couldn't, they couldn't just take the story and say, deputy director, the CIA says this at the bottom or something like that. Say they denied it. No, they had to make it jive with his story. That is, is fucking scary. Because now, now you're not doing journalism. Now you're just a, you're just a mouthpiece for the state. Yeah. You know, I mean, that's what, that that is completely, like, I understand that the CIA's job is to keep, you know,

clandestine missions off the front page of the newspaper. I completely understand that. But when you are absolutely tied in to the biggest journalistic publications in the country, it is completely undermining what it means to do journalism and to be a journalist. Yeah, it is. It is. And that's why I question so much about this Russia thing. When we say that Russia is completely, they're completely blinded by propaganda.

everything there is propaganda. That's what's made me see that more than anything. What is this? Oh, did Pfizer's boss cast doubt on his own vaccine? Is this the Beritas thing? Yeah, probably some of it, but they are, yeah. It's interesting. When did this come out?

Okay. Yeah. Well, James, I've learned a lot from this conversation, man. We just did three hours. Oh, my God. I appreciate you coming by, man. Yeah. This was been a really fun conversation.

We covered everything. Often, you know, people are kind of like, this is how we come up for our material for our books, right? Yeah. You ask questions, okay? Lots and lots of questions. It's not that you take a position on one thing or another. It's just about absorbing the information so you can then create these scenarios because I want to have these scenarios out there so people can look at that and go, man, what if this happened? What if that happened?

Wow. Well, there's a book about it. There's a whole series on that stuff. And walk the dog, see what happens, what could happen. And maybe we go, damn, that is not something we should pursue because here's a somewhat realistic scenario how it could possibly play out. And that's kind of, it's almost like, I don't say like warnings and stuff like that, but just trying to put ideas out there of how things could shake out.

And I think that's kind of important for people to see and have out there because we sure as hell know the media is not going to do that. Right. The reporters aren't doing that. Right. So it's a very, very. It's a very, very. It's a very, very unique tool and sort of endeavor that you can go down.

That it's really fascinating how you can predict things that happen in real life when you're just writing fiction and you're trying to cook up scenarios. Yeah. He's looking and say, well, it's an exercise that not a lot of people do. Or maybe they do and I'm just not in that world. Well, you have to think nefariously. Right. And you got to take on the nefarious mode of, well, how would I do this? If I want to jack up a country's electoral system, how would I do that?

Walk to the whole thing and say, okay, now I've got that. Could I do this United States? Or how would I do this United States? How would I manipulate it to gain control? It's all about control and mine. Most of the world revolves around that. And so you just figure that out. And then say, all right, well, let's create a series on that.

It's great a book series on that and walk the dog. It's incredible. You know, next thing you start seeing it actually unfold. You're like, damn, probably shouldn't have made that. Hopefully I'm not making a blueprint for someone. Right. Right. And it's really cool, too, to see someone like yourself go from what you did overseas to actually finding some sort of meaning in life and create a career for yourself and develop some sort of purpose for yourself. Well, how other vets find this too.

You know, I've got two other veterans that I've mentored to this whole process who are now writing and creating their own books and doing their own things. And they're making money at this. You know, they're making three, four thousand a month and growing with their book sales and building that out. And it's creating alternative works, alternative jobs and careers that helped them. overcome their you know whether it's a physical disability or just the psychological trauma PTSD and things like that you don't have to be a permanently damaged or injured

person there's ways to overcome this and still be productive and that's important powerful stuff man tell people where they're listening and watching where they can buy your books look at your website your social media all of it yeah so you find all of our books on amazon.com we're available in kindle limited print and audiobooks Oh, you do audio too, all of them? All of them.

Wow. Yeah. Do you read them? No, I don't. I have professionals to do that because I'm way better doing the story creating. Yeah. I already work like 80 hours a week on this stuff. I need to let me do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why, you know, we create that stuff. And it's odd because I've got the thrillers that we really dominate on. And then we also have, you've been sci-fi, took us a break because it's not real. You know, and kind of push and do that. But it's been fun.

It's been neat to learn and learn, like, the digital marketing side of it all. And we found out last. year with uh on amazon we hit the um top 100 most read all writers i think it was like seven out of the 12 months um to their kind of limited program we had gosh was it almost 74 million pages read through their kindle limited program um of the books it's just that's insane because we're self-published we just on our own we don't have a publisher that works with us we have an agent you know nothing like that it's 100% on our own so it's our own ability to create the stories edit them get them up there and then figure out how to market them.

That's amazing. So yeah, just apply all the skills all the skills I learned from the government and apply it into marketing and creating books. And so it works. Incredible work, man. Well, thanks again for doing this. I really, really appreciate it. Yep.

Good talking to you guys.