Jocko Podcast - 470: Don't Get Caught In The Crossfire in The Information War. With Jeremy Stern.

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<Jeremy Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and news editor of Tablet magazine. He was previously a senior advisor in the Department of State and an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) officer in the US Army, deploying to five countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and the American Interest, where he was a staff writer. He studied Russian language and literature at Kenyon College and Saint Petersburg State University in Russia.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 470 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The shocking attack in southern Israel this weekend was the most deadly killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The death toll is worse than the worst day of the Yom Kippur war. It is a massacre that will transform Israel and the Middle East. The scenes of horror and bloodshed that resulted, including the murders of entire families, the kidnapping of small children, the rapes of young women were seemingly intended to cause

maximum anger and shock inside Israel. More than 150 people were seized by terrorists and taken back into Gaza where they are being held hostage. They include women, very young children, and the elderly. In the cruel logic of the region where Israel is located and has been located for several thousand years, Hamas's killing spree was not a repulsive example of the depths of human barbarism. Instead, it was considered a huge win and shredded Israel's vaunted military deterrence. And those right there are some excerpts, obviously written after the October 7th attacks in an article written by Alana Newhouse and Jeremy Stern. for Tablet Magazine. Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of that magazine,

and Jeremy Stern serves as the deputy editor. And Jeremy had an interesting path to that position, serving in the Army as an EOD officer, working for the State Department, and eventually becoming a journalist. And it's a privilege to have him here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Jeremy, thanks for joining us, man.

Thanks for having me. I guess we're going to get into a bunch of that, you know, going through your, how you ended up as the deputy editor at Tablet Magazine and some of the things that you've written about there. But let's get to the beginning, the beginning of your life. It's a pretty interesting background. You were born in, where? In San Fernando Valley. That's right. Encino.

Incino, check. And your dad, sounds like that. Dad sounds like he's a pretty wild character. He is, yeah, and he had a pretty wild life. He's 88 now, so he's still around. He had me late in life. But he grew up first in Rochester and then in New York City. His first job out of college was writing on Johnny Carson.

He was a comedy writer. And, you know, this was back in the day when I think it was a bit more cutthroat and brutal back then. Is it not cutthroat and brutal anymore? Well, I think what I had in mind, was did you see the story recently there's a woman I think she might be a cast member but she's definitely a writer on S&L and she didn't see it gave a story to the New York Times about how you know when Elon Musk went on the show he kind of tore apart the bit that she had written for him and you know it was this big sob story about it

was traumatized by the fact that he didn't thought was funny blah blah blah blah it just you know I put that story in front of my dad and he reminded me of how he got fired from Carson which was you remember this woman Sherry Lewis you remember her she had the sock puppet called lamb chop it was a big kind of mainstay of you know late night TV is this in what years what decades the 60s this would be like the early 60s yeah and uh anyway you know my dad had been on the show for a number of years and he wrote a bit for this woman she it was literally just a sock puppet that she would tell jokes with and he got called in the carson's office and he said you know what's the problem did i do something wrong and he and carson and sherry luce are sitting there and

they said well no tony we love your jokes we think they're fantastic it's fantastic but lamb chop has a problem with it. It's literally like a fucking sock puppet. And the sock puppet starts tearing into my dad and fires him. And Carson's like, I'm sorry, the sock puppet spoken. You're done. It was like, that's how he got fired. So what was next to him after that? Oh man. He became like an ad man in New York City. This is kind of the generation now after, you know, Don Draper and Mad Men and all that. So probably more cocaine than alcohol by that point, but still plenty of booze. Anyway, he kind of made his way around. He moved to Mexico for a while, you know, I think got into a bunch of trouble and then eventually he moved to LA. What kind of trouble did he get to in Mexico? And where in Mexico?

So he was in Mexico City, you know, and this is like the 70s by this point. You know, I think it was like, he was a wild time. Was your dad a hippie? Was he just like a rock and roller? Like, what was the deal? I think the sensibility was a little more rock and roll. But, you know, it was like creative advertising in the 1970s, you know, back and forth between America and Mexico. It was... Oh, so he had like a legit job down there in Mexico. He did, yeah. He eventually, so he worked for McCann Erickson, which was a big firm in New York,

and then eventually for Shy at Day in L.A. And anyone who's seen the show, Mad Men, you know, you kind of recognize those two agency names. And then, yeah, he eventually made it here. I have three half siblings. We all have the same dad, different mom. But, you know, eventually he got divorced, and then he married the young secretary, you know, almost 20 years younger than him at his office. And that's my mom.

And then what's your mom do when you were growing up? She was mostly a stay-at-home mom. She worked in some administrative jobs at UCLA and USC up in L.A. Yeah, that was about it. And then you're, what's your mom's background then? Where's she coming from? So she was born and raised in L.A. her, so her parents were from Vienna, my grandparents.

They were Jews in Vienna, left in the late 1930s. My grandmother was part of the kinder transport. You know, if you've heard of that, they got to England, they got out in time. Wait, so this is your mom, sorry, your grandma. This is my grandma. Was part of the kinder transport was taken out of Germany. Correct. She had a sponsor in England, right, who took her in.

She was still, you know, considered at that point in an alien. from an enemy country in wartime England. And then my grandfather, this is actually kind of a crazy story. So he was more of like a street kid. He had his mom, but that was it. He didn't know who his father was. He suspected his father was probably an officer in the Imperial German army, the Vilhont-Mine Germany, who had an affair with his mother during World War I.

But he never knew for sure. But all he had was his mom. He lived in a building in Vienna where, you know, there was only other Jews lived there. And Nazi police came one night. You know, this is 1938, 39, took all the Jews out of the building, sent them to camps. But there was, I think, two Nazi officers who were involved in this raid, and one of them recognized my grandfather as the friend of his little brother. He knew him from around, you know, the streets, a playground, played soccer together, whatever.

And so he spared him and let him go. And my grandfather also got to England. So how old was your grandfather at this point? So he must have been probably about 15, 16. So where did he go? So he made it to Ilkley, north of London, I think, in England, again, where they kind of held all of these. But did he like E&E to get there or how do you get there? That, I'm actually not to sure.

I don't think he was part of the official kinder transport. But I think, you know, he somehow made his way to first to Portugal and then to southern England and then, you know, was processed like all the other aliens were. and then up to Ilkley. And his mother was killed in a, she was executed in a camp outside of Minsk in what's now Belarus. And that's all he knew. And then he later was permitted to join the British Army.

He was in the artillery, stationed in North Africa, and then was part of the invasion of Italy at the boot of Italy. So he was in the Battle of Onzia, which I think included 6,000 allied troops, 4,000 casualties. So it was one of the bloodiest battles of that theater of the war. But he survived. And my grandmother spent the war building tank parts at a factory on the Isle of Man off the coast of England.

And they linked up after the war in these kind of Austrian refugee circles and couldn't get a visa to come to America at the time. So they moved to Sasua in the Dominican Republic, lived on a farm where I think my grandfather would have been happy. You know, he loved raising pigs and chickens and hanging out. in the sun, which you can imagine after everything he just went through. My grandmother was more of a kind of urbanite, Viennese woman. So they eventually got a visa to come to California and move to L.A. And so that's where my mom was born.

And then how'd they make a live in L.A.? My grandfather, it was like odds and ends. He sold rack hair products at malls. He owned a wig store. They were kind of part of this Austrian refugee community in L.A., in the San Fernando Valley. And a lot of them ended up being pretty successful in business. and whatever else.

My grandfather never was that just wasn't who he was. He was just, he was more of a kind of a mensch. He loved hanging at like, he was a chess grandmaster. He played a lot of soccer. He loved soccer. He loved politics. He, I remember when I was a kid, like at any given time, he had the names of every senator, sitting senator

in the US Senate memorized. And he would switch out the information every time that was an election, you know. I don't even know why. I think it was just, it was something it made him proud to, you know, live in a representative democracy. He felt like he should actually know the names of all of his representatives.

And so, yeah. So then is your mom, your mom's now a young lady that marries this older dude. How old, how much older did you say? They're 17 years apart. 17 years apart. And so she's, she's, is she raised like Jewish, active Jewish, practicing Jewish? No, it was kind of typical of their world, which, was these people that had a kind of latent Jewish identity that was important to them and that

they wanted to pay some attention to. But, you know, they completely stopped speaking Yiddish or German in the house with my mom and her kids. They did not observe the Sabbath. They did not believe in God. They did not talk about God. They didn't go to synagogue. They didn't send them to Jewish schools. which, you know, again, I think was typical of a lot of the people who survived what they went through and, you know, their families were killed in the camps and all of that. That's also just, you know, assimilation to Americans, you know, just people come to America. It doesn't matter where you come from. There's a lot of people that I have a friend that was, you know, his dad was, his dad was Mexican. And I always be like, oh, you know, when I first met him, we started hanging out, was like, oh, do you speak Spanish? And he's like, no. And he, and I said, oh, your dad didn't speak Spanish to you. And he goes,

was no, my dad barely spoke to me because his dad didn't want to speak Spanish to his son because he didn't want his son to speak Spanish. Right. He wanted his son to speak English. So he didn't speak Spanish to him. He's trying to like be American. So there's some of that too. That's exactly right.

Yeah. I think that was a big thing and they sent them to, you know, these public schools that are these like assimilation factories, right? It's just like make, make everybody American as quickly as possible. And it worked, right? That's kind of the beauty of the country. you. So now you're born. So your dad's what, 50 something when you're born? He's 52 when I'm born. And then what do you do growing up? So yeah, also in the San Fernando Valley, you know, kind of

middle class, typical, you know, Jewish kid in L.A. played a ton of sports, you know, went to basically the same school my whole life with all the same kids. What school was it? It's called Oakwood. It was, they had different campuses, but they, you know, they're, they're kindergarten the 12th grade. Is it a Jewish school? Is there a, no, but it's just regular private schools?

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Just regular school. And, you know, same kind of growing up. I mean, not, you know, some sort of background awareness and pride in coming from a Jewish family, but with zero tradition or observance or anything like that, right? Which again is like, you know, it's pretty typical.

But it's also typical for, you know, what eventually happened to me for, you know, the grandkids to become more interested in all of this than the parents, right? Because it's kind of like you just said, you know, so my mom was the one who had the direct connection to the grandparents who didn't want to speak the foreign language. They didn't want to talk about the past. They never talked about the past ever, right? So for her, it was just that was her world. as the grandkid, you're like one degree removed and you're like, what the fuck is going on there? Like, why don't, why don't they ever speak about this stuff?

How come when I ask my mom questions, she doesn't know the answers, you know? And so, yeah, that's partly where that came from and I wanted to go visit Vienna, where they came from. I wanted to go to Israel. I got, you know, a little bit interested in it. But most of that actually came later. So when you're in high school,

what are you doing in high school? What are you into? Are you playing sports? I played sports for a while. I was really into it. And then, you know, kind of early high school, I ended up smoking a lot of pot that was into girls. I hated class.

You know, again, very typical story. What kind of music did you listen to? Oh, man, everything. I was really into hip hop. I was really into kind of classic rock. You know, I guess it was all like fairly typical, like Jewish kid from L.A. It was like, you know, Tupac and Biggie and Nas, you know.

but it's yeah it was I would say for a while there it got pretty lost did you did you have any plan for life no zero didn't know what you wanted to do totally zero I it was one of those cases where it was just like I thought that nothing interested in me and that freaked me out right once I got to a certain age then did you say I better figure out something to interest me real quick honestly the way it happened it didn't really come together until uh i went to college so i went to college in ohio in kind of rural ohio did you have a plan going there were you going to study anything in particular no i mean i had no idea i thought maybe i would study english because it sounded easy i mean the one thing i like doing was reading i like reading books i like particularly i like

reading novels and reading history um that was the you know one thing i could kind of you know it's how i like to spend my time but i knew even then there's like there's no future and that there's no money in it there's no you know you can't build a life on that uh but i had to satisfy a language requirement when i was in college um because i didn't get good enough grades in high school spanish so i'm from socal and you didn't roll out with the freaking spanish i know it's fucking embarrassing spanish three or whatever exactly you know you were smoking too much dope exactly so what i what language you pick so i just picked russian just on a whim i was like whatever It sounds weird and cool and, you know, it's super different from Spanish, which now I hate because I did so badly in it.

And that's when it changed. I just, I total luck of the draw, the woman who taught that Russian class. Her name was Natalia Oshanska. She was from Odessa and Ukraine. And she just became like the single biggest person in my life up until that point. Just an incredible woman, brilliant mind, amazing teacher. And she took an interest in me for whatever reason. How long did it take you to figure out that she was awesome?

Oh, first day of class. So what'd you do first day of class that made you realize that? I think it was you could tell how seriously she took the subject and that she didn't care. She cared enough about tests and grades and, you know, to kind of help you along in your future. But you could tell she wasn't impressed by kids who could get good grades, but still didn't have any kind of real command of the language or ability to speak or read. She really took it really, really seriously. And that just showed me kind of how much pride she had in her own profession, right? So it wasn't even, at first, it wasn't even just that I like fell in love with the Russian. It was just, she's the first person

I saw where I was like, man, she figured out what she loved and she does it and she takes it seriously every day. And she was the same every day. She was never like tired or pissy or moody or whatever, like every single day, which I'm sure in her, own life she had all that shit right she had good days and bad days but she never showed it and was it like an immersion situation because i well so i i took spanish in college and when i took spanish in college like you'd go in and they wouldn't speak any english to you you know like the whole time and i was by the way i was an old i was 28 years old when i went to college because the navy sent me to college so you know i roll in there

And I was like, dude, please just tell me in English what page to go to and stuff like that. Was it that scenario? Not quite. I mean, I know the kinds of programs you're talking about. I mean, once we kind of learn the alphabet and we learn basic stuff, she would try to do it as much as possible. Her bigger thing was pushing everybody to go to Russia and spend time there and get out of Ohio for their junior year. Go spend one, two, three semesters there. that was her big thing.

She was like, I'm just going to give you the building blocks, but you're going to show up there. And even though you've taken two years of Russian, you're going to get there and you're not going to understand anything that anyone's saying. So even if you get A's in my class, you're not going to understand a fucking thing. But you'll have some sort of framework to build off of.

And that's what she pushed me to do. And that's what I did? I went and lived in Russia for a little over a year. So what were you majoring in at this point? Russian. So you majored in Russian. Yeah, Russian language and literature. I took some other classes too,

but that was the only thing I cared about. So you end up going to where in Russia? St. Petersburg. And how long, how many semesters did you do there? Like two and a half. It was like two semesters plus a summer. So like a full year? Yep.

One full year. Yeah. What was the living scenario? I lived with this little old lady who were, lived in this huge giant Stalinist, 1950s apartment complex at the edge of town on the Finnish sea. I mean, it was like way out in the boonies. And, you know, Russia everywhere is like,

like pretty fucked up and the infrastructure sucks and like you know it's just kind of a slog to get through it but this was like you know a few degrees removed from that and she had a son in the in the Russian Navy who would pop in and out you know every once in a while but yeah it was so this was a real you know language immersion program because she didn't speak a word of English and they just you know I was what 19

and they just threw me in her apartment it was just me and her how long did it take you to start adapting to that lifestyle It, uh, you know, I mean, there are things that are in, in Russia that are cool, you know, for a young American, especially I think if you're a guy. Mm-hmm. That's kind of hard drinking. The people seem kind of rough, you know, but it's got all this incredible history. People are obsessed with, you know, literature and movies and music and whatever else. Wrestling and weightlifting.

Wrestling and weightlifting. Uh, yeah. And so that you can adapt to pretty quick. This was also, you know, is there a party scene? Because you're 19 years old. Huge. And are you like the richest guy in the world because you're an American? No, because I mean, you're a junior in college.

So you got like 14 bucks in your bank account. So I made money teaching English to Russian students. So that was how I got my, you know, my drinking money. But it's, you know, it was a different Russia too. This was 2009, 2010. So this is when Medvedev is the president. Putin's technically the prime minister. I mean, this is all like a facade.

You know, it's all fake. But it was still, you know, Putin had been in power for less than 10 years. People still had a memory of the 1990s and the total chaos and the corruption of the Yeltsin years. You know, Putin comes in in the early 2000s. American and Western petroleum engineers had gone to Russia and, you know, basically turned around the entire oil and gas industry. So they're getting hundreds of billions of dollars of extra. revenue that they hadn't been getting throughout the Soviet Union. And so, you know, I think Putin's probably a smart guy, but anyone would have done well in that scenario. So there's a lot of extra

cash flowing around that had never been there. You know, there's McDonald's and Burger King on every corner for the first time. It was just kind of an optimistic time before, you know, it took a turn later. And then how many, like, what's your schedule? Are you going to class there? What do you do it? Yeah, I'd say for the first semester, you're going to class every day. and then as it wears on, you're kind of like, you know, you develop a close group of Russian friends and you're like, I learn more just shooting the shit with them every day than going to class. So, you know, there's an increasing amount of goofing off. So you had taken two years of Russian role when you got there?

That's right. And could you understand what was happening when you got there? Barely. And then how long did it take before you were? It took a good six months. Conversational. Then how long was it before you're like, yeah, I can speak this? Oh, man.

I mean, probably about a year until I was like. Thinking in Russian. Yeah, maybe dreaming, having dreams where it's unclear in the morning when you wake up which language it was in. You know, I had friends visit me who were, you know, coming in from Ohio and I could fully translate between them and my Russian friends. Totally fluent. I could read the newspapers every day. That took like a full year. Now, as you're, you spend a year there.

Did you have to go back to one more year in Ohio when you got the time? done with that. I did. Yeah, that's right. And then do you start seeing what your future's going to be? Do you have a plan yet? No, still nothing. I was like, okay, so now I've got, I like reading books and I like speaking Russian. That's it. Was it like, what the fuck am I going to do with that? No, I mean, at that point, I was applying to jobs at Whole Foods and I was dating a girl from New Orleans and I followed, she got a job at a magazine in D.C. and I followed her and I was like, I'll work at the market down the street or whatever. But I eventually got a job at a magazine that existed then called the American Interest,

which is a quarterly political magazine. And what was your job? I was like a research assistant. What do you make doing that? $30,000 a year. $30,000 a year. And you're working an eight-hour day. They're saying, hey, I'm going to do a story about blah, blah, blah.

Can you give me the background between this election here that took place in Russia? or whatever. Exactly. And then you sit there, give them a bunch of notes. Giving a bunch of notes. And then, you know, like eventually you can do some of your own writing.

And then if that's good enough, you can impress some older people who take an interest in your future. And that's kind of what happened. But I was living in D.C. And then personally in New York. And it was in D.C. What was going on in New York?

I was kind of commuting back and forth. Okay, got it, got it. But it was in D.C. I met some retired Army officers for the first time, I'd never met anyone in the military, really. I mean, other than my grandfather fighting in World War II, like zero military experience from anywhere in my family. But in D.C., you know, a lot of people come through, as you know.

So I met a lot of people, and I found that really interesting, and I like talking to them, and I was really impressed by them. And I also saw what happens if people who kind of moved to D.C. after college and then never left and get a job at a think tank and work your way in and out of government, and you become a lobbyist and whatever. And that actually, that was the first point, I think, that I got freaked out about what the future could look like

if I didn't do something different. So how, like, what kind of progress did you make in the writing world or in the research world? Like, did you ever, did you publish anything? Did you get any articles or were you just doing research? Thank you. I published a couple. Yeah, right.

I published a couple articles, I think. but the main thing was that I ended up developing a relationship with this guy, Walter Russell Mead. So now he writes the main foreign policy column for the Wall Street Journal. He's an author and historian. He's a really great and brilliant guy. And so, you know, there's kind of a developing theme here of identifying mentors throughout your life. Right. So the first was the Russian teacher.

Walter became the second. And so I had done just enough work to catch his attention or to, you know, allow him to take some sort of interest in me not floundering and having no future. And that ended up being a big, a big help. Now, did you, at what point did these officers encourage you to just join the army and get out of D.C.? It wasn't even that. I mean, no one kind of pushed it on me. I was just, I was impressed.

You know, I think it was that background of having felt like I squandered some of my high school years, smoking dope and being an idiot being an idiot and chasing girls and not paying attention in class and and all of that given the opportunities that I had I think it was the first time that I realized like okay it's not necessarily too late like it's too late to relive all of that but there are ways that you can live your life where you figure this out at you know at this point of what 21 yeah 22 so it's not necessarily too late to like make something of my myself and to go on another adventure and to do that kind of thing. The military really is such a nice place, an opportunity for people to go.

And it's like you get a clean slate. Here's the track. Get on this track. It doesn't matter where you are. You will instantly become a respectable contributor to society. The minute you show up and you enlist, you're going to be, oh, this person's a contributing human. You can be from a degenerate to that next day,

you're a respectable human being, which is kind of freaking awesome, honestly, if you think about it. Did you always know you wanted to go in? Yes. And what were your reasons back then? Like what would you have said when you were 18? See, I would normally throw a question back at you,

like, when you were a little kid, what did you want to do? But it seems like you didn't want to do anything. But most people like, oh, I wanted to be a movie scene. or a rock star or a firefighter or a banker or whatever and most people have that I literally just wanted to be a commando carrying a machine gun so when I figured out that you could get paid money to be a commando and carry machine guns I was like where do I sign up for this shit I'm in

that's really what I always wanted to do you know my my mom is like my mom showed me this piece of paper I filled out like fourth or fifth grade or something And it was like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I was like, soldier, spelled wrong. You know, something like that because I was a little kid. So, yeah, I just always wanted to do it and ran around the woods as a little kid playing Army. And just as soon as I could, you know, I played Army for the next 20 years after that, which was a good time.

But you came across a lot of people, I assume, where it was kind of like they needed a fresh start or they were running away from something. Oh, yeah. It's kind of a common story. Yeah, a very common story. That's why I brought it up, you know. I brought it up because you meet so many people in the military. It's like, oh, what were you doing?

Oh, you know, I just quit college. I just got kicked out of college. I just, you know, graduated high school. I was working into, you know, digging ditches or whatever. Or, you know, I had a DUI charge coming my way. And there's a lot of people like that. There's also people that's like, oh, well, you know, I figured I could learn a trade or whatever. You know, the Navy is, the Navy is a very blue-collar industrial work.

Like, if you join the Navy, you can be a diesel mechanic. You can be an aviation's mechanic. You can be a fuel guy. Like there's all these technical jobs that you can get in the Navy where they just transfer over to the civilian sector. And it doesn't seem, at least when you're probably looking at the brochure for the Navy, you're like,

well, I want to be a diesel mechanic. And that guy looks like he's just in a shop working on a diesel engine. Okay, cool. Whereas in the Army, you might see a guy, you want to be a diesel mechanic in the Army. You're like, wait, why is that guy carrying a machine gun? And he's out in the middle of desert somewhere.

So that might not seem as appealing. For someone that wants like a blue collar industrial job. But you meet a lot of people like that in the Navy. And yeah, you just get that reset button. So I think for me, it was what I always wanted to do. And I'm very, you know, it's weird because I was encouraged. I'm cautious to encourage people to join the military because I know for their first like three weeks of boot camp,

they're going to hate me because you didn't say nothing about this. But I think eventually people that do go. in the military feel like they made a good move. And I will say, here's a question that I've gotten more confident answering over the years is people used to say, well, you know, I'm thinking about doing it, but I'm also thinking about whatever, you know, going, getting my next promotion or finishing college or starting college or getting my doctorate or getting my master's. And I'm always like, you know, you can always do that.

You can always get your master's. You can always get your doctorate. You can always go and work for this finance company. I'm like, the military window is pretty closed. And I would go so far as to say it's a lot easier to go do that when you're 18 years old than when you're 23 years old or 25 years old. Like even you're talking about going to live in St. Petersburg, Russia, in an apartment. I'm thinking about that right now. I would rather go to boot camp than go live with some random woman in St. Petersburg, Russia, in a Stalin flat, you know, like that does not appeal to me at all.

eating Russian food, which I don't even know what that consists of. That's so... It's even worse than whatever your picture. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, none of that appeals to me. If I would have done it when I was 18 or 19, like, cool, you just suck it up. Kind of like you suck up boot camp and you suck up all the, whatever junk things you have to do when you're getting indoctrinated in the military. But I would, that's why I recommend to people now.

Like, yeah, if you're thinking you have that itch, I would. would do it. And the other thing is, I meet people all the time that tell me, I wish I would have joined. I wish I would have joined. I wish I would have joined. I wish I would have joined. I've met very, very few people, very few people that have told me I wish I never would have joined. Even friends of mine that have been like, I wish I never would have joined. No, they're happy they joined. So I lean towards, I've been, I've gotten more confident over the years of answering the question. You know, I'm thinking about during the military. Should I do it?

My answer's pretty much like, yes. Occasionally I'll get someone that's like, hey, I'm 31 years old. I have a wife and three kids and a phenomenal business and I bring in six figures. And I'm, I really want to join the army. I'm like, check the reserves out. So anyways, that's how it ends up. Yes, that's what I wanted it to do. But there was, so you're looking at it.

at the world, you're meeting these officers, and you realize that you've squandered much of your talent with smoking pot and chasing girls, and you decide I'm gonna go and join the army. That's right. And I had some better reasons too. Like, you know, I use authentic feelings of patriotism and where my family came from and the lives they built

for me in America. And, you know, there was a genuine, connection to those kinds of motivations. Where were you in 9-11 happened? I was like a little kid. Seventh grade. Oh, so it's, do you have, do you remember much of it? I remember my, so yeah, I grew up on the West Coast.

So this was, you know, seven o'clock in the morning or so, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. So I was like that. I think I remember getting in the car with this, you know, this girl who was in 12th grade who drove, you know, a bunch of little kids to school for carpool. And we hadn't turned on the TV. in my house before I'd left

when I was eating breakfast or whatever. So by the time we got in her car, the first tower was already hit. And then we were in the car listening to the radio when the second tower was it. And at that point, you know, there's kind of no cell phones

at this point still. So at that point, she took us back to her house so we could just basically flip on the TV and our parents were calling her parents and they were like bring everybody home. So then she, you know, she rounded all the kids up

and then she dropped us off one after another. And then I think I just spent the rest of the day watching it on TV with my parents. Where were you? So you were in the Navy. Yeah, it was actually, I was going to college and I was driving to college and they were like, oh, an airplane hit one of the World Trade Centers. And I was like, oh, you know, I literally didn't think much of it.

A figure of Cessna, you know, guy confused, foggy, whatever. And then I went to a couple classes. I went to a class and they were like, oh, no, it was a big airplane. And I was like, oh, that's freaking crazy. And then, you know, the second tower got hit and two and two. And I knew we were going to war at some very close juncture. And now it's now when you're thinking about going to the army, it's what, 2013, 2014? That's right.

So it's about 2013 when I'm thinking about it. Seriously signed my contract in 2014. So this is in the kind of sequestration days in the kind of middle of the second Obama term. So it was actually, you know, I expected to sign the contract in two weeks later I'd ship out, but it was like eight months. until I got a slot for Basic, right? Because there was just no money and there was no slots and they were trying to get rid of people, right?

People were getting pink slips. And did you enlist to be an officer? Yeah, so I went to... Did you get that kind of contract or whatever? That's right. So it was in my contract that after Basic, assuming I made it through, that I would go to OCS at Fort Benning

and I went to Basic at Fort Benning as well. Oddly enough, I never realized that they did that until very recently that if you... Because in the Navy, you don't go to Navy. Navy boot camp. You go straight to OCS. And in the Army, if you're going to be an officer, you go to boot camp first and then you go to OCS. That's right. And that's actually pretty cool. And if you get injured or you wash out or something happens at basic, then you're

enlisted for those three and a half years. What if you're just a turd? If you're just a turd, you become an 88 mic and you drive a truck as a private and it doesn't matter if you have a, you know, if you have a college degree or whatever. So if you're caught, are you getting judged while you're in basic training? I mean, I guess you are, you have to be a real turd to wash out that bad. OCS is really kind of the bigger filter

and some serious turds make it through there as well. But it's, yeah, I mean, basic, I mean, this is 2014. By that point, it's like, I mean, everybody's getting through. Yeah. Are you, when you're going through there, are you identified as an OCS?

Oh, yeah. And the drill sergeants don't like that. They don't like it. No, they give you a lot of shit. How many people are in your, What are you in a company with like 150 guys in your boot camp company? So it was more than that. So you're in a platoon with, you know, I think 39.

Okay. So it's, you know, how many guys in there are going to OCS? Very few. So in my platoon of about 40 guys, probably five or six. Do they put you in charge of things? They, yeah, they mostly do. And they try to get you to kind of compete against each other.

And they pit you against each other to vie for the loyalty of the lower enlisted guys. Dang. mind games so that's what happens you end up you enlist you go and did you do a contract to get EOD no they didn't have anything like that

the way that worked was so you get a basic training you get OCS towards the ends of OCS they have you ranked I can't remember how many I think there was about 80 people in our class they have you literally ranked one through 80 there's a guy with his name next to the number 80 and you know there's a guy with his name next to number one and they get the available slots

from, you know, Army personnel headquarters in Fort Knox or whatever. And they say we have 17 infantry slots. We have 100 logistic slots. We have whatever. And then you get up on a stage and you go one through 80 and you pick what you got. And there's like a, there's a board up behind you showing what's getting taken, right? So, yeah, a lot of the, a lot of people wanted intelligence for whatever, you know, military intelligence for whatever reason. That was like a really popular one.

There was only like one or two slots. You know, most of the guys towards the top of the class, I would say wanted infantry. But one thing you could do is get a seat for EOD school. So it was not guaranteed even by that point. So that's what I selected. I wanted to go to EOD school. How did your Russian language? How did you not get put into a slot?

They'd go, hey, we've got a fluent Russian linguist here. He was like typical army. Just didn't care. Whatever. It was like, oh, you speak Russian. We can teach you Korean. like, oh, you speak Korean, we can teach you Arabic. Like, it's, you know, that kind of thing.

Especially at that level, your second lieutenant. They're trying to teach you basically how to spend a career in the Army. How did you do an OCS? I did okay. Yeah, I was in the top, I think, 12 or 13 of the class. Right on. Yeah. Any thing that shocked you, do you have any challenges with anything?

I got like a pretty serious ankle injury. And that was just kind of, I, I, the reason I think of that, is because you know, you got to basically take a pause while you heal up or else you're not going to pass any of the physical fitness requirements, land navigation, anything like that. And they basically just put you like in a cell with some other injured dudes waiting.

And that's like you have a lot of time. Are you rolled back? Are you, it's your class moving on and now you're... That's right. Your class moves on and then when you're all healed, you pick right back up. And that's where you just have a lot of time to think about like, what am I doing?

Like, I'm sitting here. my girlfriend is back home. I'm just sitting around doing nothing. I'm not progressing in class. I'm not getting to de-school quickly enough. So that was like a good time to just kind of take stock of everything. How did you like it when you got in the Army coming from your freaking dope-smoking slacks dazical attitude?

It was great, man. I mean, the most fun part about it was, I mean, other than the obvious, right? I think anyone who's seen a movie about the military has a sense of like there is a fun element to basic training. But the best part was like, you know, I came from this super hippie, liberal, progressive, died in the wool, blue Los Angeles upbringing. And I didn't like know my own country at all.

Was that how I felt. And I was in a room with 39, 38 other dudes from all over the country, mostly from pretty poor rural backgrounds, not all by any means, but a lot of them. You know, different races and religions. you know, it's kind of the cliche is accurate. And it was just so much fun, right? It's like you get to know everybody. Everyone, like, I mean, for the most part,

everyone finds ways to get along, at least as, you know, as much as you need to get through the course. And like, I just love that. It was like, it felt like, you know, it was like an education in my own country that I, you know, I'd never had before. So you were, you were into it.

I loved it, yeah. Dang. I kind of hit my stride. It was, you know, I got really into fitness for the first time in my life. I got, you know, I loved working out like several hours a day with other friends. And I got really into, like, studying all the infantry doctrine. And I, EOD was this thing that I heard about. The Hurt Locker came out at the time.

I was like, that seems fucking cool. So, yeah. Was the Hurt Locker supposed to be Army? Was that Army? It was, yeah. Okay. Check. And so you saw that and you're like, yo.

Yeah. I mean, it's a ridiculous movie. but at the time I was like that seems cool. Yeah. And you mentioned your girlfriend, but this is actually before you left for boot camp. You had met up or linked up with one of your old high school friends or something like that. This is now my wife.

Yeah. We'd known each other in high school, but she just, you know, before I went to a basic, I guess that's the point at which I really started taking fitness seriously. And I, you know,

I didn't know at the time. They'd get you into shape of basic training. But, you know, I spent, because, you know, there was eight months between when I sent,

sign the contract when I got to go to Fort Benning. I had all this time on my hands. And so I just spent a while working out. And my wife heard, I think, from a mutual high school friend like, oh, Jeremy got jacked. So she just like hit me up on Facebook or whatever it was back then. And we linked up. And now we have in two weeks, we'll have three kids.

Nice. Nice. So you get done with basic. You get done with OCS. And now you go into EOD school. That's right. And how long is EOD school? Cool.

So, well, I guess, so after OCS, you go to Fort Lee in Virginia because EOD is technically part of the ordinance directorate, which is part of logistics. But anyway, so you go there. So even at that point, it's not guaranteed. And this was pretty fucking scary because you have to go to an EOD board. So what I selected at OCS was the right to go see the EOD board, which still reserve the right to say no. And if they said no, I would have been part of ordinance logistics, which I probably would have

crush my soul. But I was fortunate enough to make it through the board. And then after that, yeah, they send you to EOD school, which all the services go to the same EOD school in Niceville, Florida, about 45 minutes away from Pensacola. It's a Navy school, right? It's run by the Navy. It's closest to Eglon Air Force Base.

But yeah, the Navy runs the school. And how long was that school? Seven months. It's a long long long. And it's mostly academic, right? there's a there's a very large academic component to it in the sense that towards the beginning you spend a lot of time learning the history of explosives and the science behind the explosives and the development of them you know eOD kind of starts in in world war two the british

invented it right because they had all these time delay german bombs falling in london they had to figure out how to diffuse them and dispose of them before they blew up um so it's the beginning of the seal teams as well because it was an American guy, Draper that was over there that was volunteering to do that because he couldn't get into the American Navy because of his eyesight being too bad. And so he had volunteered and that's why he was over there doing that. And he did that job and he eventually came back to America. They led him in the Navy. He did that in Hawaii disarmed a bomb.

It's an amazing story, but it did start with that EOD right there. Insane. Yep, solving those bombs. Those guys are nuts. I mean, they were literally like tying ropes to fuses in. you know, 500 pound fragmentation bombs and tying the rope around their waist and like running to try to get it to pop out. Nuts.

And then how was that school for you? Any issues at that school? Any challenges? I mean, it was pretty challenging. I didn't have any kind of like formal engineering background. I didn't know anything about electrical engineering or chemical engineering or anything like that, you know, let alone a lot of this hands-on explosive work. But again, it was awesome.

I loved it. And that one's cool because all of the classes are not. separated by by branch. You're sailors and airmen and Marines and soldiers and enlisted and officers altogether? Correct. How is what's the physical part like? It's not nothing crazy. No, you just have to keep meeting the minimum demands of your,

of your whatever branch you're in except if you want to there's certain, at least in the army, there were certain elite level like EOD is a bit different in the Navy. Like I think it's part of all of EOD is part of special operations. in the Army, that's where their funding comes from, but there's plenty of just conventional vanilla EOD teams that attach to these brigade combat teams, these giant infantry formations.

If you wanted to make it into special forces or do kind of like Aob support, there was different physical fitness requirements for that. So you get done with that, and then what's your first real job? So I'm at Fort Hood in Colleen, Texas. and I was an XO, company XO first, and I was a platoon leader second,

and then November 2017 is when we deployed. So you show up there, your company XO, and then you get put in charge of a platoon. Right, it's a little backwards. Yeah, that was a little backwards. And now you go on your first deployment. And it's 2017, you said? Would you guys deploy to?

So it was a kind of rotation. So at this point, you know, this is towards, this end of 2017. There's, so EOD teams. So, like, Missoule's going on and stuff like that. There's, I mean, most of the people I knew out there was they were just like sitting around. There wasn't a ton. But, yeah, so in Syria, there was at Altamph Garrison, you know, a couple hours from the Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

There were EOD teams running soft support out there. And, you know, they were supporting these ODAs who at that point were doing mostly like capture kill missions and counter ISIS. and all of that, demining, you know, getting rid of IEDs from residential areas, all that kind of stuff. So that was the only kinetic environment that was live at the time. Everything else was running EOD support in Saudi Arabia. So there was only two EOD teams, Army EOD teams running EOD support for the U.S. military and all of Saudi Arabia, which is like over 2 million square kilometers.

So it's not enough people. And there was these humanitarian demining mission. in Tajikistan, there was, there was some, this was actually kind of weird. We showed up in Salala in Oman, which is near the Yemeni border. And the war in Yemen was active at the time. And the Houthis in Yemen were firing these chemical rounds

over the border. It was like, where the fuck are they getting these chemical rounds? So they called in EOD teams to clean up all that. So that was kind of, and then there was, you know, the command was sitting around in Kuwait. And so we deployed as a company, but EOD teams technically, you know, they deploy as like detachments to either as special forces units

or to larger infantry units. And we just all kind of rotate it throughout. So what was your first gig? Which one did you do first? Saudi Arabia. So you're in Saudi Arabia. What's your opt-tempo in Saudi Arabia? I mean, is it like...

The only... That sounds like there's not much going on. There was not much going on. I mean, the only thing was the Houthis were firing these Birken II ballistic missiles at the airfields. So King Khaled, you know, some of the times they would dud fire, EOD would go and clean them up, or you'd do the kind of post-blast analysis,

but there was no mystery, right? We knew where they're coming from Yemen. And yeah, we do kind of like bomb support stuff for the U.S. embassies. Sometimes the seals who were based, I think, at Bahrain. They'd be training up in northern Saudi Arabia, and we'd go up and do some training with them, but that was basically it. And then what about Syria? Did you get to go to Syria?

Yeah, I mean, briefly, you know, it's, there was, The first unit that it went in, everyone was TDIY at that point. So people would do, there was one unit that did, or one detachment that did like 180-day rotation, and then everyone else was like 30 days. And that was, you know, they had this A-OB where the-B were the- So you're saying your rotation was going to be 30 days. That's right. And, you know, by that time, it was like they had captured a bunch of, like, Dishka machine guns from, you know, the Russian-supported whatever forces they were fighting. They'd bring them back. We'd set up Dishka positions.

and, uh, so were you on like a little fob somewhere? Yeah. So this is like, where were you? This is like near Altaunf Garrison. So at this fob, I was only there for like a couple weeks. Uh-huh. And then. Were you freaking hyped to be there?

Yeah. I mean, the only other, I mean, the, the best part of the deployment was, uh, this demining mission in Tajikistan. They had this. Well, let's finish Syria first. So you're in Syria. Does it feel like you're in the Wild West? Because I never went to Syria.

And what was the, like how much infrastructure did the U.S. have there? Very little. I mean, the funny thing about this is like at the time, Trump is president, and he's trying to pull U.S. forces out of Syria. So you get notifications like, we're going to blow up this Aob, and we're going to get out of here. We're going to blow up the fob and get rid of everything because Trump's pulling out. And then, like, he'd somehow get, like, vetoed by the national security bureaucracy.

is like, all right, take it all down, we're staying. They slow-rolled him. Yeah. Insanely. Yeah. It's crazy that that happened. It was crazy. And I mean, the other crazy thing is, you know, it was all these counter-IS missions. I mean, ISIS was kind of the, you know, the opponent of the Assad regime, which just fell, right? And so a lot of what the Americans were doing there were deconfliction with the Iranians and the Russian Air Force, right, trying to stay out of each other's

way. So, you know, again, I don't want to oversell my participation in a lot of these larger events because I served with guys who did, you know, some some serious work. But there was kind of a feeling there that it was like, you know, no one feels conflicted about, you know, getting rid of ISIS. But it felt like it was kind of in the service of keeping the other bad guys, you know, in position there. So, yeah, there was a lot of that. But I mean, as a platoon leader, it was a lot of like. I just saw some meme about. like who's winning in Syria right now the people that are supported by the pentagon or the people that are supported by the CIA it's like it's freaking ridiculous have you seen that that meme it's like uh the iron dome missiles and the and the rockets coming in from Gaza it's like my tax dollars somehow also my tax dollars yeah yeah it's freaking crazy kind of like that that's exactly what's happening right but so when you're there so the amount of infrastructure was it like how many people are on this little fob that you're on uh less than 30

So less than 30 Americans. There's some basic workout equipment. There's these, you know, little kind of like plywood. And the ODAT? This is a special forces team that's there? Yeah, they're the ones running the show. And they've been there for months. Yes.

Okay. And they would also rotate it in and out pretty frequently. But you're coming in there just to support them. Correct. And hang out. I was there to support my EOD techs who were supporting the soft team. Got it. So you show up and these guys are running stuff and you're just there happy, like a little

war war tourist basically that's very accurate is it did you get to do anything cool at all besides manadishka

on the on the freaking on the wall or anything you know it was like there was a lot of post blast analysis you know when they would ever they would get into

I mean I think in the whole time we were there there was one big firefight where there was you know they eliminated like 11 ISIS guys captured 13 they were all wearing s-fess you know so we'd kind of disable those

bring them back do some post blast analysis did you disable them with robots did you how did you disable those guys no I mean most of those are like really rudimentary it's like there's so you know somewhere in the circuit there's some deck cord and it's like bright and red and it's sticking out and you know what it is right and like in the OD school they teach you all there could possibly be a wire running through the deck like no one does that shit you know it's it's too it's too hard it's too complicated those guys would blow themselves up trying to make them. So, no, it's just like you come up with some...

Yeah, ceramic scissors and cut the deck cord. And that's that. Yeah. And then they had a bunch of, you know, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines buried around in the desert, but, you know, that kind of stuff, too. It's like you've got an EOT team who goes and clears it first. Yeah. How hyped are you when you first, like, defused something?

Because you went through... I'm just thinking you go through all this school. I mean, I'm just thinking about myself, like, the first time I kicked in a door. Yeah. I was like, oh, thankfully. got to kick in a door. You know what I mean? Like I've been training my whole life to kick in a door and finally got to kick in a door.

So the first time you get to defuse something, you must have been hyped. For sure. I mean, you know, it's, again, I don't want to overstate my. Yeah, yeah, no, you're doing a good job of downplaying and, and, um, it's mostly, I mean, I'll explain why. Yeah. It's mostly because, you know, so I'm a platoon leader at the time. Yeah.

My platoon sergeant, who to this day is one of my best friends, I'm going to his wedding. And he's running everything. He has been at this point. on six deployments. He's lost a ton of friends, you know, other people maimed in his life. The way we, we did a great job together.

I think we made a really good team. And he cared, you know, he taught me a lot about just caring for the soldiers and taking care of their, you know, promotion throughout the ranks and all of that. And so when it came to the actual hands-on EOD work, I was like making sure everyone was set up for training, Everyone had, you know, everything they needed.

But I followed his lead on that part of it. So when they brought me an S-S-S, it was like a cat bringing a mouse to its owner. It was like, hey, L-T, we got this S-E. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Can you please defuse us? Right, exactly.

Perfect. Freaking awesome. But it's, you know, I wasn't cutting it off of a dead guy's body. Right on, right on. So then the other thing you mentioned was going to Tajikistan. What was going on there that you said was interesting? The reason that was cool, it was, so Tajikistan in the 90s, like a lot of these other countries

after the Soviet Union had collapsed, had a big civil war, and they were surrounded by other countries that had a lot of civil wars. So their borders with Uzbekistan and with Afghanistan are both kind of still covered in mines. So there was a big partner force from Afghanistan and from some other countries in the region, both military and civilian, who came out to basically get trained on humanitarian demining. So we went out there and, you know, these are mines that have been there for, you know, close to 20 years at that point. But that was like, you know, that was something like you could feel completely unconflicted about, right? It was like there's a bunch of things in the ground that want to explode and kill kids, right?

And so we're going to go and get rid of as many of them as possible. And this is like, it takes decades to do this shit, right? I mean, like in Europe, they still have, you know, bombs in the forest in France and that they're never going to get rid of. So you're never going to get rid of everything. But that was like a cool one. it was it was the OSCE was kind of somehow part of it I don't know I never saw them um but that was an interesting one because Tajikistan's like a freaky weird country it's like this tiny little central Asian country that's sort of Russian sort of Chinese sort of Persian sort of Afghan

and that was cool and I got to you know work with a bunch of guys from Afghanistan that you know I never ended up going there so that was fun do you uh like is there is there enough language crossover and or are you one of the guys that like when you show up into a new country you're like I'm going to learn this language no but a bunch of people in Tajikistan speak Russian okay so this was my it was like oh finally it's useful so that was actually cool so I taught you know one part of a demining class to a bunch of Tajik's in in Russian seals are we don't we're not good with languages you know it's kind of our notoriously bad at languages whereas compared to the special forces you know they go to language school they all

to language school and we don't go to language school. For a little while, there was a while where they were sending seals to like a three month school, whatever, and it was just worthless. And I got, I was, this was before the war in the year 2000, I was over in the Persian Gulf and we were doing counter smuggling operations against people that were smuggling stuff out of the Persian Gulf.

So we ended up tracking this Russian ship and we ended up taking down this Russian ship. But what was crazy was... Wait, why? It was smuggling oil out of Iraq. Ah, God. And so... So it was sanction.

Yeah, it was breaking the sanctions. And so... But the reason I'm telling you this, because it was a Russian flag vessel. And in my platoon, which we had... My friend Drago, who was a Polish guy that was forced to speak Russian growing up,

so he spoke Russian. We had a hippie guy who went to Berkeley and studied Russian and spoke Russian and, like, I think he lived in Russia. So he was fluent Russian. and my platoon commander who went to the naval academy and when he started at the naval academy

it was like yeah you know we're Russia's the enemy so he studied Russian so in this one seal platoon of 16 dudes we had three like fairly fluent Russian speakers and there's just a miracle so yeah it was one of those one of those odd moments in time um so you're when you're in Tajikistan or do what are you a guy that goes out and gets on that local food too? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I got food poisoning. I was like a little too adventurous. It's pretty good there. It's not bad. It's better than Russia somehow. I'm one of those guys like, I don't want any of the local food.

I don't try and learn the language. I'm not the best at that type of thing. Like I wouldn't have been like when I look at the special forces mission compared to the seal mission, and I didn't know this at the time. I was too stupid. But I ended up in the right. spot because I'm more of a like seal type mentality than the,

then the green beret foreign internal defense. We're going to learn the language. We're going to embed with these people. I was just like not, not that into it. And luckily for me, I, when I flipped that coin and really it was just because the water, I heard the seals were in the water, obviously. And I wanted to be like a maritime type commando. So that's how I ended up doing what I was doing.

Is this also because when you were coming up, this was pre kind of counterinsurgency strategy, right? So there wasn't really this idea yet that these teams were going to be going out and living among the population. Yeah. And it was just me, dude, you got to remember I was 18. Well, you know what I mean? Like I was an idiot. And there was so much less information at the time. There was no information.

So they're just, we didn't even understand that. And even if, I mean, I didn't. Really start thinking about the two separate missions probably until I was a few years into actually being a seal before someone explained to me. Oh, well, the Green Berets all speak a language. I was like, oh, well, that's cool and weird. Why would they do that? It's like, oh, well, they in bed and they live with them. And I was like, oh. And then, you know, you also start hearing that the seals in Vietnam worked with Vietnamese seals. So you're like, oh, so then it would make sense to learn that language a little bit. But still, there was also whole seal platoons that were just in Vietnam that were just working, you know, just unilaterally as seals. Whereas Green Berets, man, they were out doing awesome stuff. I mean, you know, training with the, with the, not only the South Vietnamese, but with the mongs and the, who else? There's one other. The mountain yards, but there's one other group.

But they were out there training and embedded with these people. Again, awesome mission. And I look at it now and I'm like, yeah, that's freaking killer. And then not to mention the green berets that were in SOG, which were going out with Vietnamese, with South, with two Americans, maybe three Americans with three or four South Vietnamese guys. I mean, that's epic. So, yeah, just a different mentality. And, you know, I also don't like blend in well. So, you know, I've never been, you know, oh, I'll grow my hair out.

Now people think I'm from, you know, Afghanistan or Iraq. It's like, no, I look like a big white dude. I look like a big American special operations dude is what I look like. And I got told that quite a few times. Anytime I kind of brushed up against that other type of work, guys would be like, dude, stick with what you got. Dude, you're a good assater. Stick with that.

And then once I became an officer, it's like, yeah, you go ahead be an assault force commander, not a, not a low-vis guy sneaking in the back door. It's just like not my jam. And, you know, I had a guy once tell me, you know, he's talking to a group of us. Like, it takes, you know, it takes like a year, maybe even a year and a half, 18 months to get the, to get the special operations stink off of you, meaning in order to be like in a clandestine role. And then he looked at me and he goes, not you. He was just like, yeah, you don't, you ain't doing this job. And I was like, cool, fair enough.

So, so you, so now when you're in Tajikistan, you're on this first deployment. I mean, this is cool stuff you're doing. It was great. And you're having a good time. You still loving the Army. Yes, very much.

And so is your plan now thinking you found your gig? You found your jam in life? At that point, it was, you know, my wife, her career was taken off. She was hidden her stride and we were just, we never saw each other. We were married by the time I deployed. And I sense that she was kind of done with me being gone.

that much. And there was no point in promising her that I wasn't going to leave again, right, because you always do. So then after those deployments in 2017 and 2018, I got out of the army. Basically what happened was this guy, Richard Grinnell, he was the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, U.S. ambassador to Germany during the Trump administration. He'd actually called me when I was deployed, we'd come across each other when I was in D.C. and he was hooked up with this other guy I mentioned earlier. He was looking for a kind of policy advisor or chief of staff type role at the embassy who was not a career foreign service officer in the state department. And I somehow got recommended to him or he decided he wanted to ask me to do it. But at that point I was deployed,

I was like, that sounds awesome, but I can't. So when I came back and my wife and I kind of agreed, I was ready to get out of the army, I called him back. and happily at that point he had not yet filled the position. He was already in Berlin. He made it through his confirmation hearing. And so he gave me that job. And so I, you know,

the Army had to kind of like finesse this lateral transfer for me to the defense attache's office at the embassy in Berlin. But technically, you know, the day I got my discharge paperwork from the Army, I onboarded with the stage department and put me on a one-way play to Berlin and my wife and I moved,

there. Also, your wife got to go with you. She did for a while. I mean, she would come back and forth because she worked in L.A. But, yeah, we got to spend a lot of time there. And had you done much work with the State Department prior to? No. I mean, I did EOD support for the embassies, but, you know, that was pretty irrelevant. I mean, I got to know the way they operated a little bit, but that was mostly the kind of the way the Marines ran the security situation. Yeah. It's weird. I just thought of this because you and I were talking earlier about just being in the 90s and in the military in the 90s.

we were mentioning that I was kind of a split career between pre-war and post-war, but pre-war, we would interact with the embassies quite a bit and we'd understand like the ambassador and the Chargerie de Affairs and like we, you know, kind of got to know that world. But once the war started, I didn't think about that stuff ever again.

It was just off my radar. So I'm assuming, yeah, like you said, you had a little security, but it's a whole new world when you start doing Department of State stuff. Completely new world. And, you know, all the policy issues were totally different.

You know, it was, so at this time, so this is now 2019. You know, the big American priorities are, or Trump's big priorities out there, were killing Nord Stream 2, this gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. It was getting our NATO allies to spend 2% of their GDP on defense. It was improving NATO infrastructure, you know, these highways that cross from western to eastern Europe. it was getting them to kind of update their technology. So these were all the kind of big, I mean, really like 50,000 feet policy issues that I had barely any familiarity with.

But I think the reason he identified me and the reason it ended up working out was, you know, as you can imagine, Donald Trump's political appointee to be his representative in Berlin is not always see eye to eye with the career State Department bureaucracy who's out there, right? and I think I was seen, because I had just gotten out of the army, I was seen as kind of plausibly neutral, right, in that way. I was just out there serving my country. So to have me in the front office interfacing directly with the career bureaucracy, it I think was helpful to kind of, you know, lubricate that relationship. And I think it ended up working out pretty well, actually. You know, it's got this building full of 1,200, you know,

people who are not exactly supporters of Donald Trump to. 1,200 people, Department of State and the embassy in Germany? Including the, including some of the German civilians who do support work. Yeah. I mean, they have Berlin Station there. It's huge. I think it must be the biggest one. Yeah, I was going to say, it must be the only the biggest ones in the world.

Yep. So what's your day-to-day like when you're doing that job? It was, you know, you'd roll up pretty early. The U.S. Embassy in Berlin is this awesome location, right? It's right next to the Brandenburg Gate, right? where Ronald Reagan gives the big tear down this wall speech. You're right there. So you roll up.

The ambassador would come in pretty early. We would do a kind of press roundup in the morning. We'd take a look at all the German headlines. Then we kind of, you know, you have a representative from all the different sections in the embassy, the political section, economic section. You'd have a representative from Berlin Station. You'd have, you know, some of the kind of law enforcement guys. Everyone would go around in this kind of group sync.

And then from there, it was like, every day was pretty different. I mean, a lot of crazy shit happened while we were there. There was a, you know, our big push at the beginning was to basically get the Germans to comply with U.S. sanctions on Iran. So this is the time of like maximum sanctions against Iran. So the two things that we did that were successful, we got the Germans to block landing of any flights from Mahan air, this Iranian airline.

And then the other one was to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization because the Europeans typically split. They introduced this like artificial difference between the political, in the military wing of Hezbollah, which allows them to conduct banking transactions with members of Hezbollah. So, you know, by the end, we convinced them to basically get rid of that fake distinction. But there was also, I mean, I don't know if you remember, but there was these Russian security services executed this ex-Chetchley in general in broad daylight in the Tiergarden. So that was something that happened that, you know, I mean, that was the responsibility mostly of Berlin Station to follow up on it. So what does follow up on that look like?

It's a mix of I'm probably getting trouble if I talked about it and there was a ton of shit I didn't even know about. But, you know, so this was like, I mean, for all the like crazy shit about Trump being, you know, this is at the end of Russia gate. Right. So all the stuff in the media about Trump is a Russian agent. He's friendly to Vladimir Putin.

We were kind of on the backside of all of that. It had kind of wound its way through Congress. That must have been insane. It was during, like, prior to the end of it, if you were in the embassy in Germany and you got all this press saying that Donald Trump is a freaking Russian agent. Right. And people in Germany, it's a disaster. It's a total disaster.

And people in Europe, like, they don't watch Fox, right? They read the New York Times or they watch MSNBC. So, like, to them, I mean, here, I had a lot of crazy people in my life who bought this. A to Z, but at least there was like some back and forth debate is like, is this bullshit? Is it not? In Germany, it was like, you couldn't find anybody who didn't believe the entire thing. And I mean, the funny thing is like, we were doing some pretty like intense anti-Russian shit while we were there, right? Oh, yeah.

And it was the administration's policy. Nord Stream 2 was kind of the biggest part of it. Obviously, you know, trying to get NATO allies to spend more money on defense. There's only one country that's aimed at, right? And so when they executed this guy who I think was, you know, trying to immigrate to the U.S. or something, you know, that was like an intense like, oh shit. The Russians think correctly they can do anything in Germany. They can execute this guy in broad daylight knowing there's going to be zero repercussions. So that was wild.

So what does it look like when you have those people, those permanent kind of state department people, that are, you know, who knows when they were appointed or who knows when they got hired, how many years ago, decade ago? Is that a realistic? Is that an average time, would you say someone's been over there working at the State Department for 10 years in Berlin? Yeah, I mean, they rotate through,

they have these three year rotations like the Army or like the military, but once you become a subject matter expert, if you're an expert in Germany and you speak fluent German, you know, the State Department is probably correct to be like, let's just keep sending this person back to Germany, why send them to Afghanistan at this point, you know? Yeah. But you, you know, the problem there is you have a lot of people going native, right?

It's like they start feeling like their job is to explain Germany to Americans, especially to the Trump administration, right? Rather than represent American interests in a foreign country. What was the level of hostility? So when you showed up there, it been, what, two years that Trump had been, since Trump had been elected? That's right. It was a little over two years.

And what was the level, like could you still feel the hostility from some of the, some of the troops there? The Americans? Yeah. Yeah. I shouldn't say troops. From some of the State Department personnel. Yes.

And, you know, I don't want to overgeneralize. There's a lot of people who are doing a great job serving their country in the Foreign Service and all that. But, yeah, there was a lot of people who, you know, would, I think, encourage their German counterparts to wait out the term, right? He's going to get voted out. He's going to get put in prison. He's going to get shot.

Like, whatever. He's just, he's going to go away at some point. So don't trip over yourselves to meet any of these various demands that are coming out of the embassy, right? Because he's going to be gone in a like a traditional Democrat or maybe even a traditional Republican will take his place. What's that going to look like this time around? Yeah.

They can't, they can't act fooled. a surprise this time. It also seems, you know, like, for Trump to realize and recognize, like, how long does it take before you go, gosh, wait a second, I put out this word a little while ago. The front line, the front line is not doing what I said. Wait, what's going on? Why don't they understand? Like, just the amount of time it takes to go, oh, these people are actively not carrying out the policies that I'm putting forward. It takes a little, it takes a little I mean, you've got a lot of stuff going on. You're the President of the United States.

You've got however many embassies that are out there, how many countries, you got all this stuff going on. And of course, you know, even the best leader, when fully supported by the folks on the front lines, it still takes time to go, oh, yeah, now I'm seeing these policies coming to effect. Oh, yeah, it's been three months. Oh, yeah, we're starting to see. We're starting to get feedback.

Well, those three months, you go, wait, where's the feedback? Oh, there's no feedback. Oh, because nothing changed. Oh, because they aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. So you can imagine that the feedback loop took a while that first time around and you know again his first time being president He's looking around going oh well You know what's the feedback loop here? Like wait a second nothing's changed since I asked that to happen. Okay, what's going on? Why is it taking so long? You can just see it's it's going to be a

It was much slower last time and this time I think there's going to be a lot The feedback loop is going to be a lot quicker. He's going to recognize what's going on if that kind of thing is going on and even what we talked about earlier with, you know, getting orders, hey, we're going to leave this fob in Syria. The president has ordered us to leave the fob. Okay, we're going to blow everything up. Okay, cool. Let's plan for it. And then it's like, well, actually, we're not going.

And those kind of things, I think, are going to be a lot more difficult for people to get away with this time around. Because I think Trump is just going to have such a much clearer understanding. I think he's putting people in place that are going to be on board out of the case. gate and not be a bunch of people that are going to try and slow roll his policies. I think that's right. And, you know, with this Doge Elon's initiative, you know, it's, I think the basic idea is that he or, you know, his team are going to try to do to the U.S. government, the federal government, what they did at Twitter, which is show up, first day, fire 80% of the workforce. Everyone falls into a panic that, you know, the servers are going to crash and nothing's

going to work. And it turns out everything works just like it did before. which means that 80% of the workforce was completely redundant, right? I think they figure it must be at least that bad in the U.S. government. And I think the State Department is probably pretty freaked out because the Foreign Service is a prime target for like, how many people do we have chilling in Paris hanging out? Well, apparently we have 1,200 in Berlin. Right.

Living in awesome apartments, hanging out, you know, like, how much work are they doing? How necessary is all of this? How much did their language training costs? Like I think it's, you know, it could be a bloodbath. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So how long you do that job for?

That was about a year and a half. So you're in Berlin, which is like Cold War, you know, battleground for intelligence, for counterintelligence, for espionage, for spies. Like when you're there, people are trying to collect on you. What did you have to be heads up on with people trying to collect on you? I'm just like just for example when I was in the SEAL teams in the 90s and we'd be going to a country and they'd give us sort of the basic like hey if you if you're in a bar and this incredibly gorgeous woman comes up and starts talking to you it's probably not your charm or good luck setters doing that so be careful what you're saying like what kind of stuff would they give you a heads up on yeah I mean first of all exactly that these guys getting honey trapped right so it's it was actually a guy that we knew who you know he he He got this foreign girlfriend who, and he didn't report his contact with a foreign national. He was dating her, he was sleeping with her.

She ended up, you know, reporting either accurate or fabricated charges of sexual assault and rape to the services and, or sorry, I think she threatened to do that. If this guy did not cooperate with whatever, the embassy somehow found out and they got rid of him, right? So that was one. So that, it's just, just so people know,

like, as much as you watch like Jason Bourne. Hey, Coach Charles. Yeah, Born identity. Sure. As much as you watch Jason Bourne and all of us that are in the military go, yeah, dude,

whatever, such. But these things, like these things are really happening. Like these kind of intelligence, counterintelligence, that stuff is going on. And there's a classic example right there.

Right. And there was some other stuff that I heard about. There was the way the Russian security services would fuck with people who worked at the embassy. This guy who was certain he'd left a bunch of dirty dishes in his sink. came home at the end of the workday. All the dishes were clean that didn't think anything of it. The next day he came home.

He left his dog in the kennel. He came home. The dog was locked out on the balcony. The Russians presumably at this point were trying to get rid of this guy. They didn't want him in the country anymore. So he freaked out, reported this, and the State Department got rid of him. So, you know, there's all these ways that, you know, I think they have of letting you know that you're being watched or getting rid of you if they don't want you in the country anymore.

It's also just important to recognize, you know, that the, well, what you mentioned earlier, the information warfare that's happening on all fronts at all times, we really, we as Americans, need to really pay attention to the various propaganda that's coming from various sources

and how simply outstanding it is and how impactful it is and how it really truly dictates the way people think. And what you mentioned earlier about, the the the the the the russia gate type stuff and where we in america you know look you could be in america and there's still you can probably find what you definitely could find people that would 100% well no actually of course you know this uh uh donald trump was colluding with the russians

of course he was we saw it in the news we saw it for three years you know they didn't follow the story it's just accepted as fact and that's in america where there is the counter the counter propaganda of saying what actually happened and explaining everything and that's been done over and over and over and over again. And you still hear about Russian collusion. And you still hear about the 2016 election being swayed by the Russians.

Total fabrication. It's crazy that we have to say that. But that's true. But then you point out in a very important fact, which is overseas, they're not getting all that counter propaganda. They're just hearing the propaganda that's being put out. And so you had the entire country of Germany,

and most of Europe. Oh, of course, obviously Donald Trump is colluding with the Russians. Look at the reporting it over there. And the craziest thing is that Donald Trump was harder on the Russians than any other president has been. Yeah, I mean, just the, you know, the oil and gas policy, right? Like really, really ramping up American petroleum production. Yeah. What's the, you know, the primary consequence of that other than, you know, Americans, you know,

being energy secure is that the price of petroleum goes down, which means less. for the Kremlin, right? All right. So keep that in mind, everybody. So how much longer do you do? How long did you do that job for? That was about a year and a half. And then after the pandemic started is when I got back to L.A.

What was, did the pandemic start while you were in Germany? I was there at the end of February. Okay. So you got home just before it kicked off for real. It had kind of already started because this was when like Northern Italy had completely blown up. Right. And I think that was like at the beginning of February or maybe mid-February. Yeah.

People were like dying a lot. Yeah. But, you know, like public events and conferences and stuff weren't being canceled yet. So at the end of, I think it was like February 20th or so, 2020. I was staying in the Beyrshire office, this really old kind of 18th or 19th century hotel in Munich. And it's for the Munich Security Conference, which is, you know, people from all over the world are coming in for this big security conference. There was a delegation of like 200 people from China, right? It was like, oh man, like we're watching all.

I mean, even back then, you know, for if you were like paying any attention, He was like, there was no mystery about like where this was coming from. It was like, oh shit. So anyway, after I got home after that, my wife and I got, it was the sick as we'd ever been there. Were you, were you already planning to leave the State Department? Yep. And what made you just that do that? You just like, I gotta get back to America.

It was one of the other things I did while I was there is so the ambassador at the time got tasked by Trump to do some work for the National Security Council where he was basically negotiating some political and economic normalization agreements between Serbia and Kosovo in the Balkans. So it's totally separate from the Germany portfolio, but, you know, he was stationed in Berlin, not that far away. And so I was the kind of working level negotiator on all of those. And they were at the time, the economic normalization agreements were successful.

We signed them at the conference. And I was like, you know, put a dot on it. And that's it. And that's because you were done being separate from your wife. You wanted to move back to it. And was her career going on? What was she doing at this time? She's a TV writer.

And so her career was taken off. She was writing on a bunch of shows. Got that sugar mama. He was like, yo, I'm going home. That's right. That's right.

I was done with the, yeah, the government salaries. And was she living out in L.A.? She was living out in L.A. And I also, you know, my dad,

like I said, is much older. I saw, you know, this pandemic was coming. It was killing a lot of older people. I was like, okay,

it's probably a good time to get home. So then what did you start doing when you got home? I did some consulting work for a little while. And then I eventually fell in with, with Tablet, who you mentioned at the beginning. So that was, you know, Tablet was a magazine that I loved as a reader. I had been reading it for a number of years.

I had no interest in a career in journalism, like at all. But I just loved Tablet and I wanted to be a part of it. And at that point, I think when I was in the Army, I wrote some op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. I did like a thing for the New York Times. They just, you know, when they were looking for some kind of commentary from a someone who was active in the service or a recent veteran. So I kind of grew that muscle a little bit and I liked it and I love tablet and a mutual friend

introduced me to the editor-in-chief there and they were looking for a news editor. So I came in and I became the news editor and then eventually the deputy editor. Well, is it hard to get hired for that job with like no experience? Were they just desperate? How did you pull that off? I think, you know, I was like literate enough and I had a good enough sensibility. And, you know, I think most people in journalism, they go into it from the beginning

and they never get out, right? And I guess that gives you like a good resume for getting other jobs in journalism, but it teaches you nothing about the shit you're writing about, right? You have no real experience of the world. I mean, some people do, but most don't. You have no experience of the kinds of jobs that are being done by the people you're writing about.

And I think that explains a lot of the poor quality of the journalism you see out there. So I think to their credit, that they thought the experiences I'd had living in Russia, being in the Army, being in the State Department, being able to write a bit. You know, that was maybe a better qualification than,

like, having to gone to journalism school. What's the business model at tablet? There's no physical copy, is there? So there's, I shouldn't announce it too soon, but there's going to be probably at some point soon. There'll be a monthly print version. But, no, But yeah, it's primarily an online magazine.

And is it make money through online advertising? How about it's a bit different? So like the, you know, the two basic business models you have in journalism are, on the one hand, the like ex-wife of a dead billionaire buys the Atlantic. Right. Or Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post. And there's your business model. Right. There is no other business model.

You lose $100 million a year. It doesn't matter. And then the other is nonprofits. So that's what tablet is. So it has a board. Tablet itself is a nonprofit. It can spin off various for-profit, you know, enterprises, but it's basically a nonprofit.

So that's what's kept it kind of ad-free, which is like a much better reading experience. It's a much better reading experience. Right. Yeah. But the print edition will be a kind of way for, you know, there to be some kind of economic relationship with readers, people who want to pay extra for something special.

I think that'll be cool. So what, tell us a little bit more about tablet. Like what is the, what is the driving force behind tablet? Tablet's a, it's a Jewish magazine that's about everything. So it started off as a little bit more of a niche product, you know, Jewish magazine in New York writing primarily about Jewish issues. But it attracted a lot of just amazing talent that was fleeing more traditional journalism as the business model was breaking down

as it was getting politicized and whatnot. So it was actually, you know, it was attracting a lot of some of the most talented people who had been, you know, the New Yorker and New York Times and stuff like that. And then as time went on, its remit kind of expanded to just cover all of American life

from kind of a Jewish sensibility, I'd say. So at this point, it's just kind of a national American magazine that has a kind of core Jewish identity, which is what, you know, I really liked about it and a lot of people I think appreciate about Talbot. And I'd say probably over half the readership at this point is not Jewish. But just the fact that it has some kind of identifiable core there is attractive to people. It's not, you know, I think something like the Atlantic, the New Yorker. It's like this kind of free-floating elite center-left, left-wing social game, right?

whereas Sablet, I think, has some kind of identity grounding it that, you know, even if you're not Jewish and you don't know anything about Jews and you don't care, it's kind of interesting, right? It's like the subculture in America that somehow feels authentically American. Now, we talked about you're growing up, right? And as you're growing up, Judaism wasn't front and center in your life. Now, as, now you mentioned that when you were in Russia, you start thinking more about your Jewish heritage. And where did it go from there? Like bring us along kind of your Jewish journey from, you know, you're in college.

You don't really, you're not really thinking and practicing Judaism actively. Like what did you, did that curiosity start to grow? Did you start to get more grounded to it? What happened? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, my, my grandma. parents passing away, that's one thing, right? It kind of just makes you think and it's like, well, you don't want, you know, if they were Jewish and my parents are Jewish and I'm Jewish,

that means this somehow endured for thousands and thousands of years, right? Most Jews are not Jewish because they like recently converted. My family certainly not. So it was, you know, it kind of puts it in perspective and makes you feel small, I think, in a good way. And you kind of, you know, come away with this feeling of like it endured for all this time. Am I going to be the one who, like brings it to a halt, that would be shitty, right? So that's one. I mean, yeah, living in Russia was kind of another. So, you know, my family is mostly German Jews, but before that, like, you know, everybody from that part of the world had come from the Russian Empire. And Russia's one of those places where it's just like you can see this kind of rise and fall of various

incarnations of the society and the total destruction of things that, you know, used to be around in recent history. And that kind of put it on my radar too. I visited distant family. I had an Israel for the first time. That was an eye-opening experience. It was, you know, seeing Israel in the flesh and how different it was from the way I'd been educated about it or the way it's portrayed in media.

What were the differences? I mean, I think the most striking one is that, you know, people have this sense that Israel was built by people who escaped the Holocaust. So therefore it's people who are kind of central and eastern European people who are therefore white, right? That's the kind of image you get of Israel. You get there. It's like a fucking Middle Eastern country, right? Like over half the people are Jews from Iraq, from Morocco, from Libya, from Syria, places like that.

So that's about half the population. 20% of the population are people who fled the Soviet Union or descended from people who fled the Soviet Union. And like, I guess you call those people white. I don't know what that means, right? And then the other part are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. So the first thing that strikes you when you get there is like, Israel's not like a weird, disappointing Denmark, right? It's like a super overperforming Lebanon.

So that was another. And then, you know, I just kind of, as I grew up, I think I just got more interested in the tradition and the history. I never, to this day, developed, you know, particularly strong personal faith or belief, but, you know, there's just a lot of kind of very interesting history and tradition there that I kind of vived with a lot more as time went on. So how are you raising your kids? We're raising them Jewish.

My wife was a Presbyterian minister's granddaughter. She's not Jewish at all, but she's converting in the process of converting. And we send her a three-year-old to a Jewish preschool and all the kids are going to be raised Jewish. but, you know, we're not going to pretend to be people we're not, right? Like, we're not going to turn around and make it like an extremely observant Orthodox household. We're going to do our own version of it. But it's interesting, you know, it's like things that are theoretical until they become a part of your life, which is basically, you know, we send our three-year-olds of the Jewish school.

And you always hear about, you know, these weird anti-Semitic threats that these schools get. there's an active, you know, this guy walking around with a gun, there's a bomb threat called in, like, whatever. You hear it about it all the time. And it's like, when it's your kid in the school, it's like, oh, man, this is a choice. Well, speaking about threats, let's talk about October 7th. What were you doing when you heard about what was happening there? I was in Belgrade, Serbia, actually, reporting a different story. But that was one of those.

you could kind of see it unfolding on Twitter and in WhatsApp groups, with people, friends I have in the area. And it's just, you know, like all these things. It's like we were talking about at 9-11. It's like the first things that happen, you're like, what? I'm like, okay, I guess there was, you know, some attack. And then it's like, oh, this seems worse than I thought.

It was probably like just over the course that the first 24 hours that you're like, this is actually, the country is never going to be the same after this. This is, this is, they just live through maybe the most momentous thing that's happened since 1948. Um, and it was obviously horrifying to see. And, you know, first thing was the check that my, you know, cousins and aunts and uncles and some distant family had there were okay. Uh, they were. The one cousin who ended up going into Gaza after the, the war began and lost his leg. Actually, he'd only been there for 48 hours, I think.

Um, but at that point, it was just like, okay, there's like no more fucking around a tablet. Right. This is like, this is our core mission is to serve readers who are interested in the truth of what's going on and why it happened. So as you, well, as I watched it unfold and then it was one of the most shocking things. things to me about watching to unfold from a media perspective was how quickly you got to see the anti-Israel rhetoric start to go. I mean, it was almost simultaneous. It wasn't even like, oh, it's been five days. And it was prior to any actual military reaction from Israel. Like, they were they didn't even have things under control yet.

And there was rhetoric going back against Israel. What is, what does that look like from your perspective? Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, you're right that it was basically simultaneous. So October 7th happens. Hezbollah declares we're on October 8th, right? The international criminal court that just issued these arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and the foreign, former defense minister.

They date their charges of war crimes to October 8th, right, before the war began, before Israel even went into Gaza. So those are charges of genocide, intentional famine, you know, all these kind of things. They date it to October 8th. So it was like, it really was instantaneous. And then it went through several different forms over the last year, right? So you had the initial reaction of, you know, it didn't happen the way the Israeli said it did. You know, those women weren't really raped. Those people didn't really have their heads

cut off. And then, okay, you get this, you know, the IDF basically collects all of this documentary evidence, makes it available to the international media. So then it moves on to, these people had it coming, right? They were living right on the border of Gaza. They live in a country that doesn't even belong to them anyway, right? This is, Israel is a white European colonial project, right? This is legitimate, this is legitimate violence visited upon them by people who are trying to take land back that is rightfully theirs. And then it spread, you know, to Columbia University, I think is where it began. And then basically college campuses all over America.

And then you had kind of European incantations of all of this. And it's been a wild year to see, you know, there's been right wing and left wing versions of the kind of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, whatever you want to call it, you know, at its more extreme versions, kind of Jew hatred. I mean, we were talking earlier about my experience in the Army and how it was kind of an education in my own country. So I had joined in 2014, and that was right at the beginning of something that has kind of escalated since then, which is people warning.

I see this mostly in the media among certain people in Congress. saying that there's an increasing radicalization within the ranks, right? White supremacists and Christian nationalists in the American military. And I didn't know what to believe, you know, back in 2014, but everyone in my life seemed to think that was definitely true. And it was definitely going on. So I at least had my eyes peeled for it. Like in almost six years in the Army, which is not, you know, it's not 20 years,

but it's a big enough sample set, right? I came across hundreds of people, you know, deployed in five different countries as a part of a few different units. In almost six years, I never encountered anything you could even remotely call anti-Semitism. Nothing. Like zero. And one of the things that taught me was that that version of bigotry,

there's something, I don't want to say un-American, because that's a term that politicians, I think, use too much and abused, but it's like non-American. There's nothing native. or natural about it to the way Americans think. And in order to participate in it and to start believing in it, you almost have to be educated into it, right?

It's not something that strikes anybody who lives just off their own common sense and their own personal experience in America as being anything other than like deranged and demented. But I think that's why you see it kind of most prevalent on the left, on college campuses, among academics, among, you know, people in media.

And then on the right, mostly these kind of maybe social media influencers or, you know, kind of at the elite levels of being kind of, you know, very visible online personalities. I just, after everything we've seen the last year, it just seems even more clear to me that this is not a development that's spreading among ordinary Americans. This is really a kind of elite level fight on left and right. And so are they are the elite level left and right unified? This is, you know, something that Echo and I will sometimes talk about. You know, I'll kind of start, I'll start doing the one degree of separation and how you can go from being like a, let's say you're a liberal leaning left Democrat.

And if you go one degree at a time, you can go all the way to you're at the dinner table with one of your friends. who's a Nazi from the conservative side, you know, like, and your friends because you both hate the Jews or you both, you know, it's like, you can just get, you can get there. You can, if you go one degree at a time, you can get there. What does that look like, you know, when you talk about the left and the right, and they both end up with this or the, what you just call them, the elite extremist left and right, and you end up with these attitudes, at some point, do they unify? Yeah, it's a good question.

I think, so it's kind of complicated. So maybe to take the left-wing version first, because it's probably a bit newer and more novel. I mean, it's as old as Soviet communism, but it's not ancient, right? But it's kind of internally coherent. So I think it's kind of easy to understand, which is whatever you want to call, you know,

kind of progressive ideology of the last 10 years, right? Wokism is how most people refer to it. It's based on this idea that, you know, basically the sins of the past are so egregious that they have to be rectified at nearly any cost in the present, right? And that the only way to do that is to punish the descendants of the people who conceivably committed those crimes in the past, right? Broadly referred to as like white people, right, or whatever. And that those people are the villains of history

and the people who punish them are like the heroes of history. Jews like are a special problem for this ideology. The idea of like a racial hierarchy, which kind of, you know, wokeism is like almost like a theological version of this, right? I reference Soviet communism because it's basically class struggle except replaced with identity and racial politics. Jews are a problem for the internal coherence of this ideology because Jews are clearly among the victims of history, right? Gettos are invented for Jews. Concentration camps are invented for Jews.

Gas chambers are invented for Jews. It would be ridiculous to try to claim that they're not among. not saying more than anyone else, but just like Native Americans, like black people in various societies, Jews are among the victims of history. At least in the American context, most Jews look like white people, right? So that technically means it's possible to be white and to be a victim. And if that's true for Jews, maybe it's true for other kinds of white people. Maybe that means that referring to people as quote unquote white doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe not all black people are always and primarily black. Maybe the whole

woke racial hierarchy is a bunch of bullshit and people are just people and they're not defined by their race. Right. So that's why I think Jews for the left wing version of this, they have to be identified as in America, they're white, they're oppressors and they're supporting a foreign country that is oppressing the victims in that region, right? Otherwise, the whole thing doesn't hold together. And I think that's kind of the explanation for, or it's an explanation for what you've seen with the explosion of hostility to Israel and also to just American Jews on the political left.

That's the left-wing version of it. The right-wing version of it, which maybe has a bit more uncommon with the, ancient, European, old, the madness of old Europe, those versions of anti-Semitism has a bit more in common, but it's still kind of, you know, uniquely American and of this moment, which is, you know, I think what you see with a lot of people on the right who are, you know, predominantly, these are people online, very, very online. These are people who talk about Jews controlling American foreign policy, Jews controlling the banking system, Jews assigning minders to every individual

member of Congress to make sure that they vote the right way, right? This is stuff that's like kind of old czarist Russian propaganda, right? I think what makes it a bit new and a bit unique to our country is that you also often find this kind of stuff grouped together with a resurgence of like national inquirer level stupid conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with Jews, right? Did the aliens build the pyramids? Does the deep state control your mind? Is Goldman Sachs funneling fentanyl across the border in order to get people to vote a certain way, right? It's all of this kind of demonstrably nonsense conspiracy theorizing rather than, you know, the kind of more elevated version of asking good questions about things.

that are genuinely uncertain, right? And I think what unites both the Jew hatred and the nonsense about aliens, building the pyramids, is what they both do is they serve to undermine our collective attachment to reality, right? Another big kind of, you know, theory on this end has been really questioning the legacy of World War II. were the allies actually the bad guys?

Did Hitler actually want peace? Did the Jews force Roosevelt and Churchill into fighting a genocidal war? Again, the details of that, I think, are uninteresting, right? World War II is probably actually the most covered subject in world history, right? Anyone who wants to learn about it can access any number of books or documentaries or whatever. The thing that's interesting about it is that it's part of this process of undermining our attachment to our own collective past as Americans, right? It's severing a lot of our connections to our ancestors and to our sense that what they did was good,

right? And so what does this have to do with theories about Jews controlling the world and your mind and being responsible for why your life sucks, right? What is that having common with the other nonsense theories? I think it all serves to demoralize. otherwise ripe people, right, who would have otherwise felt like it's within their power to do something about their life. I would actually say it's the opposite of what this podcast, of what your podcast does, Jocko, right? As I understand that a lot of it is about is instilling a sense of

agency into, you know, maybe primarily young men, not only, there's millions of people who listen, but to take one core audience, right? It's given. young men a sense that there's actually something they can do about the quality of their life, right? And maybe also about the circumstances of their community or the future of their country, right? It's within their power to do something about that. Both theories about Jews controlling the world and your life and the government and all of that and these things about like, you know, did the aliens write the constitution or whatever other nonsense? All it does, what all of those do is take any agency away from you, right?

There's nothing you can do. It's the deep state. It's aliens. It's Jews, right? And so I think this is kind of the right wing version of the explosion of anti-Semitism, right? It's an explanation for a sense of collective failure, which is why I think the right-wing version actually kind of has more in common with the versions of anti-Semitism you see, like in the, in like Pakistan, right?

It's like, oh, it's like, it's the Jews. who did this, right? The left-wing version is maybe a little more specific to contemporary left-wing politics in America. So what, when you look at Israel right now and the situation that they're in, and from a, from a media perspective, what, you know, for lack of a better words, I know I put out and talked about very early on that the way that they handled, the media and the propaganda and the information war after the attacks on October 7th was going to be so critical. And I'll tell you one example.

One of them was like the, I think it was, it's a Twitter channel, but it was either IDF, it was IDF something, you know, whether it was the IDF error or the IDF ground. I forget what it was. But they were just throwing up like, oh, we're hitting this building, hitting this building, hitting this building. And I said, I said on a podcast, like, that's not the call. That is not the call. And I know that that's the call.

If you're an Israeli person or you're a Jewish person that's looking at what's happening in Israel, what I want to see as an Israeli or as a Jew sitting in wherever I am, whether I'm in another part of the world, I want to watch that all day long. But that wasn't the call. The call was, how can you put out? you know, what they're trying to do from a humanitarian perspective, what they're trying to do from preventing civilian casualties perspective. That's what they needed to focus on. And quite honestly, they did shift that. They did shift that pretty quickly from like a what looked like vengeance,

Twitter into, okay, we're trying to do some humanitarian things here. But I think that was a critical piece. You know, and right out of the gate, you know, one of the first things that I said after October 7th was there's nothing more that Hamas wants than for, for Palestinian people to get killed. They want as many Palestinian people to get killed as they possibly, as can possibly get killed. And the younger and the more innocent people get killed, the more happy Hamas is going to be. And so there's, there was a part of me that, you know, thought the best move for Israel would have been like, okay, we've secured our border, all stop. We're going to see. sit here and we're going to let the world absorb before we do anything we're going to let the

world absorb what happened we're going to show the world what happened and I also realize and I said this as well if I'm an Israeli and that happened to my family we're not sitting we're we're going to go we're going to go take action we're going to find the people that did this and that was almost a foregone conclusion you know you can't go in and murder and rape 1300 people and have those families annihilated like that and expect expect those relatives and those countrymen, fellow countrymen, to sit back and not do anything. So it was almost like a foregone conclusion. I had the thought that, you know, in a perfect world, the maximum restraint would have,

it probably would have been better in the long run to be, I still think that right now. I think it would have been better in the long run. But I also knew it was not going to. happen. So from a information operations perspective, what are your, what are your thoughts as you look at the situation that's going on as it continues to unfold? Yeah, I mean, Israel's never been good at PR. I would say Jews as a people are terrible at public relations, if you haven't noticed. I think there was maybe two forces undermining whatever incipient hope there would have been, for the kind of information response that you just described.

One is what we talked about earlier, which is on October 8th, they were being blamed. They felt that they were being blamed by the world for what had just happened to them. And that doesn't rob them of the agency to have been able to take the high road and be above that, but it did serve to undermine any forces in Israeli politics that would have pushed for more restraint.

right because the people who were for a kind of maximum punishment in Gaza could point to the response, the international response to October 7 and say, this is the response when we haven't fired a single shot yet. What do you think all of that restraint is going to accomplish, right? So that was one. I think the other was that, you know, Israel's relationship with America is, and with Washington, D.C., in particular, is, you know, obviously a very important one. And I think what they saw was that they had tolerated Hamas in, in, in, in, in, in, on their, on their border and Hezbo and southern Lebanon on their northern border for, for, for a very long time. And they saw the ways that the Americans handled Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I think in their opinion, I'm, I'm referring. referring to them as if Israel is a unitary country, right? It's an extremely politically fractured country. There's people with every opinion under the sun. But just, you know, to try to steal man that argument. The most, like, liberal people lived right on the border with Gaza. Is that a, I've heard that stereotype? There were these kibbutzis that were among the ones that were slaughtered on October 7th,

which were populated by Israeli. who were, it was a kind of a statement they were making about their optimism, about their ability to live just on the other side of offense with Palestinians, right? It was an expression of hope for the future as opposed to retreating to Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean Sea, far away from any border, right? That's right. So I think they saw the various American and coalition failures, as they saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think the way a lot of them would describe it would be an aversion to achieving clear military victory, right?

The phrase I've heard them use is like American managed the war. I think they saw a lot of this the year before, by the way, in Ukraine, right? In the year and a half before, this way of like providing the Ukrainians with enough weapons and enough capabilities to survive, but not enough to actually win a battlefield victory. they saw this as kind of, this was the maximum kind of support that Israel was going to get from the United States and thus from the world, right? And given the way that October 7th changed the country, I don't think that they were, they were, they felt they even had the political support from a country that, by the way, you know, the day before on October 6th, there were these massive anti-government protests trying to get the Netanyahu cabinet to fall. were protesting these judicial reforms. So there was a big, very active liberal movement in the country that was totally swatted down

by the events of October 7th. October 7 guaranteed that those people had lost all political cachet, right? And the country became unified around the goal of no longer living with Hamas and Hezbollah, but actually achieving a decisive military victory, right? which they knew at that point no one was going to support them in doing but it was something they felt like they had to do. So I think maybe that was another factor

contributing to the marginalization of any voices in Israel that would have otherwise called for more restraint. There was just enormous popular support for we don't want to go back to October 6th, right? We need to live in a totally new security situation. Yeah. And even if you're not going to show more restraint,

you should propagate that you are showing more restraint. That's my point. Like the propaganda was not as good as it could have been. The information operation is not even propaganda. Like the information operations could have been better. They're exceptionally bad at that. Yeah. So where do you see it?

So where do you see it right now? It seems that at this point it would be very, very difficult for Hamas and Hezbollah both to reconstruct themselves into a serious. security threat anytime soon. They're not decisively defeated in either Gaza or Lebanon, but it would take quite a lot, right? Especially, I think, with the Trump administration coming in, you know, the basic source of financial and military support for both Hamas and Hezbollah has been Iran for years, right? And I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of unpredictable things about the second Trump term, but I think one thing you can kind of guarantee is the policy of maximum pressure on Iran is

going to come back. So the Iranians are going to have less money for their forces, right? I think another thing we saw unfold in Syria this week is, you know, people had been referring to Hezbollah as Iran's kind of strategic depth in the region, right? I think what happened this week is we saw it was actually their only capable, really, really capable fighting force. The IRGC, whose, you know, expeditionary forces have been in Syria for a while, just completely fell apart, right? So I think they've been exposed as pretty hollow. So I think, you know, Israel has achieved a real security, they've reached the real security goal that they've had for a very long time, which was to eliminate these various threats on the borders. Will they be able to

actually shape that into a better political outcome than they've seen in the last several decades? That's definitely to be seen, but they don't have a very good history of being able to influence anything remotely like that. What are they going to do with Gaza? First of all, I have no idea. But when you talk to people in Israel, I think there's a feeling that they very much like some of the Arab countries

that they've been improving relations with and cooperating with in the last several years after the Abraham Accords to come in and pay for the reconstruction and take some maybe political ownership of what goes on there. I doubt that will happen, right? I don't think the Saudis are, you know,

jonesing to get into Gaza and be responsible for everything that happens. So that, I really don't know. I mean, I think they just, at this point, there are probably limited objectives or to create like, you know, multi-kilometer buffer zones where just no people live, right? No buildings are built, no tunnels are built,

no weapons can be smuggled in without their surveillance networks being aware of it. and to just push those people further back. That's not a pretty picture, right? But I'm not aware of any better solution that they've come up with so far. Syria, interesting to watch that thing fall apart so quickly.

Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things, right, is from, you know, like, why were the Iranians and the Russians in Syria in the, first place, right? I mean, I'm curious for your take on this, like, the story back when this happened, right, was the Americans were negotiating the JCPOA, what became the Iran deal, back in, like, 2014. And they depended obviously both on the Iranian government and also the Russian government for the success of those negotiations. And, you know, I've heard people explain that that's the reason the American response to the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine

and annexation of Crimea in 2014 was so weak and also why the Americans were happy to let the Russians back into the eastern Mediterranean where they hadn't been since midway through the Cold War and also to cooperate a bit with the Iranians there. Not cooperate, but de-conflict, get it out of each other's way. We're all trying to get rid of ISIS here, right? So, I mean, part of the collapse in Syria

has been like the collapse of that understanding. Right. And so what's interesting, I think it's kind of propitious for for Trump, is he's coming into office with, I think, more leverage again on the Russians and the Iranians than he would have had two weeks ago, right? Because now he can actually force some pretty tough terms on the Russians, for example, by not allowing them to return to their bases in Syria if they come to terms with him in Ukraine. But it's really interesting. I mean, I'm not, Syria is so complicated. Yeah.

No, I agree. I think it's actually very good for Trump right now going in. It's going to be able to use that as a negotiation tactic for sure. And it's going to hopefully help give him some leverage in Ukraine. I guess we'll, I guess time will tell. Hey, also at a tablet, you guys talk about some, like you said, it's about the world. and one of the articles that you wrote that really seemed to get a lot of traction

didn't have anything to do with, well, it had very little to do, I should say. I guess it had a little to do with war. But this guy, Palmer Lucky, how'd you stumble onto that guy? I think I started hearing about Enderol when I was deployed. So this is like 2017, 2018.

You first started hearing about this new defense technology company in Southern California. that was using this new AI powered software system to power all of its autonomous weapon systems. And, you know, this is a full six to seven years before the introduction of ChatGBT. So at this point, AI wasn't like a silly buzzword

that everyone was using. It was kind of like, oh, is this real? You know? And the cool thing about them, I remember kind of tracking at the time was, you know, traditional defense contractors like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or whatever. They work on these cost plus

contracting model. So basically the government decides what they want them to build. They come up with all the specifications and then they pay them the costs of their time and their materials plus a fixed percentage fee on top, right? This is why these companies tend to make a lot of money the longer they take. Androl was kind of taking an opposite more kind of traditional business approach, which was they were developing all of these weapon systems themselves. And then once they were ready, they would sell them off the shelf to the government. I was like, that's kind of cool. I mean, that's interesting, right? Because they wouldn't talk about any of their new capabilities

until they'd already proven it. Anyway, that's how it first got on my radar. But then the more I learned about them, it was, you know, the founder was this guy, Palmer Lucky. He was the same guy who invented the Oculus. That guy? Like, you know, and he kind of... In a trailer in his parents' driveway or something like that.

Yeah, he was 19 years old. He's living in a trailer in his parents' driveway, and he's just this kind of authentic engineering genius, right? and he's kind of got like a uniform, right? He wears like Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts and flip flops and he's got a goate and he's got a mullet. And it's like, he's just like a really wacky figure. But I was like, I can't believe that guy is the one who's building these drones that are being deployed in Ukraine and everywhere else. So yeah, I just got, I got interested in him and I reached out to his team at Anderl and ended up getting to spend some time with him and wrote an article about kind of his life so far.

only about 30 years old. Yeah, 30 years old. He sold his first company there to Facebook for $2 billion, which is, I could parlay that into a good time right there. I go Charles, let me tell you. And are you going to expand on that? Anything else going to come with that?

With that story? The piece went, you know, kind of unusually gangbusters. I mean, which I was glad to see, right? It was like to realize that your own interest in something super specific and relatively unknown, totally catches fire in other people's imagination too. So that was cool to see. And yeah, so, I mean, people have reached out about a film adaptation and a book adaptation.

And so we'll see. The book, I think, is the one that's more likely to happen and kind of more of like a history of the development and the kind of the decline in fall and then the revival of the defense industry in California. Yeah. And you'll tie him and that company into it? He's such an interesting character that I think it's, you know, it's more interesting to follow him than it is to follow, you know,

something amorphous like the defense industry. I hope he'll figure prominently. It is, it is, I mean, he is a movie. I mean, he really is a movie. Just everything about him lives, or he doesn't live in, but he's got the, well, he's got the largest collection of video games in the world or something. something like that. He does and he keeps it buried 200 feet underground in a decommission

Titan or Atlas Air Force nuclear abyssal base. I mean, he's yeah, he's kind of endlessly weird. The dude's 30, echo Charles. Yeah, he's really into anime. Like, he's a character, dude. And I think it was, I don't think it was before it was published, but at least since the piece has been published, his, now his second company. So he sold the Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion and now Anderol, the defense technology company, is now valued at about $14 billion. It's impressive. So what else you got going on? You could do a podcast with Walter Russell Mead, who you mentioned earlier.

The podcast is called What Really Matters. You guys do a little kind of review of the weekly news. You kind of hit him with the things and he gives you his feedback on it. That's right. It's a 30 minutes short, quick hit podcast news and history. basically, you know, the, if it's providing a public service, it's basically, you know, kind of helping you understand what news actually matters in the long run historical sense and what you can basically ignore because it's empty calories and nonsense.

And then what else? Anything else to get us up to speed? Got a piece coming out pretty soon. Maybe by the time this episode comes out about, it's a long profile of Amos Hoxstein. He's the senior White House diplomat in Lebanon. He's the guy who brokered the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. two weeks ago. What's his background? What's going to make it interesting? Super interesting. This guy, he's American, American parents, American grandparents, but grew up in Jerusalem, served in the IDF, moved to the U.S., became a congressional staffer in the 1990s, kind of traditional democratic foreign policy circles. He then becomes a lobbyist for some

extremely unsavory African dictators, including Gaddafi. and Equatorial Guinea. He then joins the Obama administration and eventually becomes the kind of senior energy diplomat in the Obama administration and gets kind of stuck in the middle of the story of the Biden family's involvement in the Ukrainian national gas sector.

Then he comes out of government, joins the board of NAFTA gas, so he's kind of directly involved in Ukrainian gas, and then he gets hired again by the Biden administration, and he's supposed to be just be like the energy guy, and he somehow parlays this all into this gig where he's the chief diplomat in Lebanon, and his kind of novel contribution or invention is he figures out a way to interact directly with Hezbollah. And so it's like he kind of circumvents American laws about having direct contact with him.

So obviously the interesting thing being the guy who figured out how to negotiate directly with Hezbollah is a Jewish IDF veteran. in from Jerusalem. Right? So how did the story of how did they come to trust him so much? Interesting stuff. Right on. Does that get us up to speed?

I think so. Check out Tablet Mag. Yeah. You're on Twitter, Twitter X. Jeremy Stern, L.A. You're the editor at Tabletmag. Tabletmag.com. Special thanks to Maggie Phillips.

She's a freelance writer. She's a former tablet journalism fellow. She happens to be the daughter of, a guy by the name of General Sean McFarland, who was my leader, and I admire him greatly and a friend of mine from the Battle of Romadi, and she connected us.

One of the best people you ever meet. Yeah. So thanks to Maggie. Appreciate it. Echo, you got any questions? How's your Russian now? It's not as good as it was the day I left, but it's not bad.

I'm instilling a big. bit of it in my son. I'm teaching him some words. There you go. That's all they got. Right on, Jeremy. Any final thoughts? That's it.

Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. Right. Oh, man. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for your service in the Army, obviously protecting our nation. Thank you.

Thanks for your service in the State Department. I think you're the first State Department person we've had on here, working on the diplomatic front. And thanks for what you continue to do today to get good information out to the world. Much appreciated. Thank you. And with that, Jeremy Stern has left the building. obviously some turmoil in the world right now

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That's true. Also, Jocko Store called Jocco Store. This is where you can buy your shirts, hats, hoodies, apparel, merch, if you will, and represent discipline equals freedom. Good. You know, these types of standby to get some. It's a good one. You're going to represent that.

Also on Jocco Store. There's a shirt locker subscription shirts every month, new design every month, a little bit outside of the box as far as designs go, but still representation across the board. Do you're going to make one about that video that you just put up? What the, what about the, you just show up? Yeah, the abuse that I just took, you know, no. Hey, one never know. Okay. We're going to find out about that one.

Yeah, but yeah, if you like, go to jocco store.com, you can, you know, kind of browse there. Check out something. Like something. Get something. Also known as defecore.com, by the way. I'm saying that's the that's the OG like if you know you know scenario but it's also knows jeffcourt.com anyway yeah you like something gets it out uh subscribe to the podcast subscribe to jaco underground.com check out our YouTube channels there's the jaco podcast official there's jaco podcast clips because echo Charles made a clip amen need a place to put it jaco fuel has one put one up with it with Chris Pratt did you watch that one yeah wait the realistic how realistic yeah yeah that That one actually, I liked that one more than I thought I would like it. It was very well done.

What did you like about it? Just the interaction was good. The, it was relevant because that's stuff like where I kind of wondered to like, oh, how good was he really looking? Because he looks good. To me, they all look, you know, for the most part. I could tell, you could tell it was very nice because when we went to film Warrior Kid and there's combat scenes in Warrior Kid.

And like Chris didn't need to get trained. He's, you know what's up. So that was, that made. That made things a lot easier. Yeah. And, you know, so, yeah, so check that out. Jocco Fuel, YouTube channel and also Origin USA, YouTube channel. Check those out.

Psychological Warfare, Flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. A bunch of books. I've written a bunch of books. Wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. A lot of people keep that one on their desk, by the way, because it's just a reference. Oh, like, I'm having this issue. Boom.

Open it up, problem solved. I'm having another issue. Boom. Open it up, problem solved. Leadership strategy and tactics. I wrote an expanded edition. That's available. Written a bunch of other books.

Written a bunch of kids' books. Some of those kid books are getting turned into a movie. I hear a good thing. You don't have to wait for the movie, even though the movie's going to be worth waiting for. To weigh the warrior kid, one, two, three, four, and five. Don't forget about Mikey and the Dragons. Don't forget about extreme ownership dichotomy of leadership,

about Face by Hackworth. A bunch of cool books. Check them out. Achelon front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details there. Also, we have live events. We have the Dallas muster, which is already taking place, and it's sold out.

And all the musters that we do sell out. So if you want to go, San Diego, February 23rd through 25th, San Antonio, April 29th through May 1st. Sign up, register early. They'll sell. Women's Assembly be coming up at some point. Check those out. Extreme ownership. is another website that we have

where you can learn the leadership principles that we teach in an online academy. It's amazing what you can learn online. You're pretty good at music, or not music, but video editing. Pretty good at that. Did you go to college for that?

No. Did you learn it online? Learned it online. So you watch, go watch, what's your most profound and impactful video that you have made as far as, let's say, which shows off your,

editing and CGI skills. Oh, well, that's a, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Put it this way. For the time, it was like warpath, I think, maybe. First it was like good, that good video was like kind of fun. Yeah, not it, not in depth.

No, but, but if we want to see like now, you do CGI, you do all this other stuff now. Or CGI if you went to Instagram and looked at the third measure stuff, that's like more CGI. But it's a very specific kind of CGI. Actually, you know what? I have that third measure video, the one about the robots taking over the world that has never been published yet. The one, like, you're in it. Wait, I think you're in it. I forget.

But yeah, but it's mixed with real live footage and stuff. It's actually pretty good. Does Rana shoot somebody with a movie? Yes. Yes. You didn't never post that one? Never posted it. How come?

Because I wanted to do like a final scene where it's like either part of a dream or part of a something or maybe some campaign or something. But let's just get it out. All right. Well, check that out. You can learn through online sources. And if you check out Extreme Ownership.com, you can learn the leadership lessons that we learned on the battlefield. And you can apply them to every aspect of your life.

So go to Extreme Ownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee. She started an amazing charity organization. It's called America's Mighty Warriors.

And if you go to America's Mighty Warriors. You can donate or you can get involved. Also, Heroes and Horses.org, Micah Fink, up there in Montana, and then Jimmy May's organization Beyond the Brotherhood.org. Check all those out. Great organizations. If you want to connect with us for Jeremy Stern, he's got his podcast, which is called What Really Matters.

He's on TwitterX at Jeremy Stern, LA. And he can also be found at tabletmag.com. and for us you can find my stuff at jocco.com on social media at jocco willink and echoes also on social media at echo charles just be careful when you get on there just be careful watch your back because if you don't watch your back next thing you know 20 minutes went by 27 minutes went by you could have learned a new guitar chord you could have you could have done what probably 250 piece in 20 men yeah maybe even 300 yeah sure so do that don't let the social media get you thanks once again to jeremy stern for joining us sharing your lessons thanks for your service in the

army and the state department and thanks for what you continue to do to inform the masses and thanks to all our men and women out there in uniform with a special salute to the eOD techs from every service thanks for what you do to keep us safe and also thanks to our police law firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for your sacrifice to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there,

the world's a chaotic place. It's a chaotic place. And you should look at it, you should study it, you should do your best to understand it. You should be careful, though, that you don't get caught up in it. You don't get caught up in the propaganda. You don't get caught in the crossfire of the information wars.

Stay detached. Stay objective. And keep getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.