Julian Dorey Podcast - #338 - Navy SEAL on China-Funded Meth Soldiers, BlackRock in Ukraine & God | Ephraim Mattos

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) MOOD: Discover your perfect mood and get 20% off your first order at https://mood.com and use code JULAN at check out! 2) RAG & BONE: Upgrade your denim game with Rag & Bone! Get 20% off sitewide with code JULIAN at https://rag-bone.com #ragandbonepod PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Ephraim Mattos is the East Asia Operations Manager for White Mountain Research and is the Founder and CEO of the Fireside Journal. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went on to serve in the armed forces as a US Navy SEAL. EPHRAIM'S LINKS: - WEBSITE: https://strongholdrescue.org/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZ6QnPdHprxpt7njhHMyw2CiAuGfA1NtPcT33J8dLdZ3EvoqMadK6jb0Dw_aem_UGZH-q7yd-nMVmmpBrCdCA - YT: https://www.youtube.com/@Ephraim.Mattos FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Intro 00:54 – Eagles, Fatherhood, Wife Refugee, Stronghold, Jungle, Milwaukee 12:47 – SEAL Training, Alaska, Interrogation 21:40 – SEAL Life, Best Decision, BUDS 29:47 – Surviving BUDS, Stress, Myanmar Firefight 40:10 – Airstrike Myanmar, Firefight 01:01:42 – Presidential Limits, USAID, Power 01:12:26 – Military vs Isolationism, China Aid 01:24:30 – Soft Power, Incentives, Ukraine 01:19:56 – Open-Mindedness, AI on AI 01:42:47 – Truth, AI Warfare, Sniper 01:55:36 – China, Myanmar, Ethnic Cleansing 02:08:29 – Media Neglect, Myanmar 02:17:58 – China Funded M3th Soldiers , Yaba, Evil, Division 02:34:31 – Myanmar Geopolitics, Chinese Advisers, Team, Ambulances 02:49:27 – Stronghold Work, Faith, Haiti 03:01:24 – God CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 338 - Ephraim Mattos Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Has there ever been a point when you're in the middle of this where you've questioned something beautiful that would have created this earth would allow that to happen on it? Literally the worst stuff you can imagine. I've seen it all. The first time I actually came across the Burma Army in a combat. I had been working in the jungle by myself in an area where they said there was fighting happening. I get in Moscow and I look, there was this hail of bullets and gunfire and rockets and mortars. And it was all the Burma Army guys trying to kill the civilians. And so that was the first time I realized, oh man, this is a whole different animal. Dude, this is crazy, too.

The Burma Army has a giant truck with these huge speakers on it. They're blasting death metal music, but then they will give their soldiers this crystal before they're going about. And these guys, they're like zombies. They become like demons. And the level of atrocities of what the Burma Army is doing, it's unthinkable. I saw this other situation where when I see the evil that happens in the world, I believe that God... Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave

a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Affirm, it's good to have you back, man. Dude, good to be back. Yeah. Got to hit another Eagles game this year. Dude, let's do it. We were like the lucky charms last year. We went to, we went to a Browns game. They turned it around after that, and here we are. Super Bowl champs. There we go. Yeah, I think it was us. I think we did. I think that's what I was thinking, too. It was. It's like the magic, the magic of Rob O'Shea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sprinkled fairy dust into Sequin's box there.

And then, you know, the rest of the year was what it was. That was it, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you become a father as well. Yeah, I'm a dad now. How's that been? It's been unbelievable. You know, it was, you know, the funny thing is like I, so I loved my wife when we got married, obviously.

That's good. And then, that's good. And I, you know, the thing is like I started to love for more and more every day since we, got married but watching her go through the pregnancy and give birth like i just i just i don't know i just 10xed uh uh my love for her and it was that was that was something i didn't expect yeah um so it was just so great seeing her uh go through that um and then we actually we actually had a very very easy not easy let me let me rephrase we had a very short delivered the wife had a very short delivery uh she's watching this right now with a bat in her hand she's like boy that was not

easy no it was it was she did it was incredible uh and um yeah so it was like from the from the moment that her water broke to the moment that uh i was holding the baby it was like four hours and 15 minutes isn't amazing like how much you're like oh my god we made that yeah yeah no i i get i do that every day i see a little baby girl and i'm like oh my goodness that's my that's my baby my little waysian baby because my wife's asian and i'm white so my little wazian baby a little mixed baby she's so cute god i love 2025 we can say they should shit. I know we can say it now, man. It's great. Yeah. If I said waging in 2023, they'll be like, can you imagine? Off the internet. He's off the internet. Yeah. Oh, my God, man. That's awesome.

How many months has it been now? Five, five and a half, yeah. Five and a half months. All right. You're working on the next one? Yeah, yeah, you know, hopefully get another one going soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all about it. Yeah. Now, are you going to put them right into labor in the war zone helping you out, like once they're five? Or, yeah, that's, cut off at four yeah the plan is to make them child labor as much as possible you're gonna be karen dad's pack you're gonna make any coffee whatever and they're living over there someone's got to make my nikes exactly yeah yeah yeah that's true that's true no i actually but in reality i uh you know there's some folks they take their you know kids over to those places um i don't intend on doing that um

i want them to i want my kids to see the reality of you know many these different places where i work with stronghold um but yeah i've definitely not willing to risk their lives in any kind of meaningful way but i'd like for them to see the yeah i i want to see i want them to see the the you know the poverty and see but like how how good and amazing these people are in these other places too who live who live in really really rough conditions and so i think it's important for them to for the kids to have that and see that so they can develop some gratitude and understanding of of what they have here in america so your plan is to raise them here in america oh yeah absolutely right yeah yeah so your wife's here now yeah yeah yeah we live in

originally from there yeah so my wife uh so she was a war refugee so she was in a refugee camp in thailand so she's from burma but her uh family lived in a refugee camp in Thailand for 10 years and then when she was 10 she went to uh Canada and uh so she grew up in Canada and um and then yeah met her in the jungle a few years ago and it was uh it was over wait how'd you meet her in the jungle how she how she ended up back there i think you did it was okay you were you were on the podcast last year that was episode 244 I think okay and we we spent a lot of it going through like ISIS and that whole fight because for people who don't know your background you are a former Navy SEAL someone who uses those skills now in your organization stronghold but we got to

the Burma war and genocide you call what it is in the last 30 minutes or so and got like a highlight of it and so quick things and I think one of the things you did mentioned in there was exactly how you met your wife but if you wouldn't mind just telling that story again and today we're going to go through all the work you're doing it stronghold we'll go through some good geopolitical stuff too there's a lot of shit going on in the world i love your perspective on that but i want to give a more give it more room to breathe with what's going on in burma and well it's Myanmar and that's a whole other thing you can explain that as well just so people understand because you know there's certain things the media always focuses on and that's

important but you know there's a lot of other things that happen in the world that are like the same thing sometimes and we don't pay attention to that and you've been at the front lines of this for a long time yeah yeah absolutely so uh yeah just just a quick hum and my wife so obviously i run strong and rescue relief and i've been working there in burma for for years and um so my wife like i said she was a a refugee grew up in canada and so she just randomly went back to burma to to like back to the back to the same area where her parents had you know had to run away from and she wanted to she wanted to come back and help the people there in some way because she speaks the language you know so she's fully western and she's also fully

karen she's from the karen tribe and uh the karen tribe yeah and so uh so she was back there volunteering at a clinic run by another non-profit that was out there that's run by some americans and she was just out there kind of checking it out and seeing what she could do sort of a fact-finding mission sure and uh yeah so we had just gotten off a mission uh the next morning at like i don't know five six in the morning um i saw her and uh within five seconds of her talking, I was like, if everything checks out, I'm going to marry that woman. What was it within five seconds of her talking, you knew you were going to marry her? What was that?

You know, this sounds super corny, but the truth is, I just, when I look back at that, I'm like, how did, how did I know? And it was like, my soul recognized hers. And it was, I was like, that's my, I was like, that's my wife. You know, I was like, you know, everything has to check out first, but so. Yeah, she'd be an expert. Yeah, I'd be like, okay, let's not. I've been like myself blind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that is something about us, guys. Yeah. Talking with a lot of my friends about it, too, there's just a thing sometimes. We're like, you don't know them, but you just kind of know. Yeah, you just know. It's a strange thing. It's happened a few times in my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we got married four months and 16 days after we met, and it was on 4th of July in Canada. So... Fourth of July in Canada? Yeah, so... her that's like what so random but are they even happy about that there they're this they're the descendants all the people are lost well yeah yeah so so that's that's why we got married on the fourth of july because nobody's doing anything on the fourth of july in canada so like that was the day everyone had off so because they're not because they're not celebrating so it was just a total

totally ironic random random thing that that ended up being my my anniversary yeah and there's her family still up there now too oh yeah yeah they'll live up in uh thunder bay there we yeah so and there's a a huge Korean community, all these different folks who've settled in, you know, different parts of Thunder Bay. Where is that? Just north of the, just north of the Minnesota border. Oh, so that's like relative to America and where you're from. That's not like that far. Oh, no, no, no. It's not bad at all. Yeah, it's like we can, we can hop in the car, you know, on a Saturday morning and be the Thunder Bay and by dinner. Where are you living today? Milwaukee. You're living in, yeah. I was just there with Tommy G. Oh, no kidding. I did not know people live there. Yeah. It's, it's awesome.

human beings do live in the i got off the plane they picked me up and like we're driving i'm like there's buildings they were like 15 20 stories too oh yeah we have like a nice downtown area where where would you guys go in milwaukee so we went to an abandoned warehouse and got waterboarded oh you guys filmed that video in milwaukee no kidding yeah so we went to after that was all done andy and i i guess we were friends again at that point we went to the Milwaukee public market okay like right there yeah yeah it's like a mini redding terminal yeah sick place yeah honestly big fan of milwaukee i feel like i wouldn't be a big fan of it in january but it is a beautiful place and like would i would definitely go back for sure yeah yeah yeah yeah

Milwaukee's a great place that's where i grew up and um yeah it's really cool being back there being back there now basing out of there but still bopping around the around the rest of the world doing doing crazy stuff with stronghold yeah now are you living in Milwaukee proper like just on the outskirts on the outskirts a little town called monominy fall Monopoly Falls yeah just right outside Milwaukee how close is that to like Janus oh I have no idea I don't know where he lives I don't remember the town but okay he wasn't that far from Tommy G okay but it was beautiful yeah yeah great great spot seems like a really good spot to raise a family and everything too a lot of good places with yards and you even need picket

fences around there it's great yeah there's there's some there's some really really dark places though to be fair around in Milwaukee but but yeah like where we're at it's it's it's like like yeah it's a beautiful yeah i've seen those documentaries yeah okay yeah i think yeah didn't some guy make a documentary it was like 5302 or something it's like one of the zip codes there in milwaukee and it was like this is like the deadliest zip code or something for like gang shootings or something i would believe somewhere in milwaukee oh i forget what that was that was part of why i didn't see it but when tommy went to have his kid he moved out of milwaukee because you know he covers a lot of stories and he's like you know do i need to be like sitting with a gun out at night yeah yeah yeah

gonna come after me if they don't like it so he's like i feel like we should probably be out in the suburbs he went out into the suburbs yeah here's the documentary you're talking about Milwaukee oh yeah 532206 yeah um interesting i forget yeah forget yeah forget the premise of it but yeah there's a documentary just about about all that i think lots of uh unfortunate a lot of violence in some of the inner city areas i forget i forget are you from the milwaukee area originally yeah yeah yeah i grew up like right by the airport okay yeah yeah decent airport too yeah yeah it's nice nice nice place yeah it's actually wonderful getting like when i when i when i travel and i i land home back in milwaukee um you know it's a very quiet it's yeah like you said it's very quiet

the evening there's not like lots of stuff going on and so it's like it's always this is this nice peaceful arriving home it's not it's not hectic it's just yeah right yeah it's really great no actually it's a good thing to ask you a little sidebar for a second if you don't mind yeah of course like you know we did some bullshit stupid documentary where we went through a little, you know, walkthroughs of how bad things might be able to get at some point and get like a little preview of that. Okay. But when you guys are training for like special forces and things like Sears School happen and all that, I mean, the temperature gets pushed up to 200 degrees and, you know, I've heard some of these will be three to six week programs and all

that, but specifically within the SEALs as a part of your training, you know, at what point Did you guys go through, you know, survival skills in the instance of being captured and how you might handle interrogations and, you know, some rather difficult situations that you had to be simulated in? Like, what was that like in your training? Yeah. So for our survival training, we actually did it up in Alaska. So after you finish Buds, which is the initial six month, you know, selection course, you then begin another six months of what's called SQT, SEAL qualification training. And at the end of that entire year, that's when you become like a seal. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And did you know that they've found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern you can think of?

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Best of all, not only is every mood product backed by a 100-day satisfaction guarantee, but as I mentioned, listeners can get 20% off your first order today by using code Julian at checkout. So head on over to mood.com, link is in my description below, find the functional gumming that matches exactly what you're looking for, and let mood help you discover your perfect mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian when you check out to save 20% off your first order. But one of the first trips that we did, we spent a month in Alaska. And during, there was a point there, I believe it was three or four days where that's where we did our survival simulation thing. So basically, so you're on Codiac Island.

and then they put you in boats and they take you off Codiac Island to this other tiny island and it's snowing, it's freezing cold and they drop you off there. You have you have like you're allowed to have a little survival kit and then you have like warm clothes on and then you basically sit there

for three days. You have to build a shelter find food, find water, all that kind of stuff and yeah so that was freezing cold. I mean so you got to build a fire and just kind of just suck it up for the for the three or four days there. Are you with other guys doing Yeah, you're with like a little squad of guys.

So it's actually really funny. There were, there randomly were cows on this island because back during World War II, the Navy had put, they had put cows on the island just in case the island got cut off. It's like the Russians or the Japanese or whatever, like invaded the U.S. They wanted their, they wanted the guys there to be able to survive because you're going to be cut off from all food sources, right? And so there's still these cows, these wild cows on this tiny little island. And we found one. My squad found one of these cows.

And we were told, like, all right, like, just leave it alone. The seal instructors were like, leave it alone, whatever. We're like, please, we want to kill it and eat it. They're like, no, you can't do that. You know, you're like, you can't do that. Well, so we leave. And then all of a sudden, I don't know, like an hour or two later here, we hear a gunshot. And we're like, the heck, come to find out.

Another, yeah, another squad came across it. And one of the steel instructors was like, sweet. Looks like we're eating boys. So he shot, he shot the cow. And then they used it as like a like as a, like as a, uh, like a training thing so these guys they took the cow butchered it up and so they're they're eating they're eating good you know that's something they can sleep inside it too for warmth oh there you go yeah i don't think they did that but uh but yeah they were eating good man so they were in good food

so we were so we were a nice way of being like yeah no don't go that far now yeah uh but uh yeah so so so so that was like the the the sort of survival uh training aspect of it and you're you know you're you're going down into like the water and you're you know you're pulling like little little like little crustaceans and things off the rocks and like because they taught you which ones you can eat and you're pulling like you know some sea algae and like different things that you can eat so it was it was interesting it was just miserable just kind of a kind of a gut check and at night it was just freezing freezing cold but you know we just kind of we all huddle together and you know take turns trying to rotate you know keeping the fire going yeah how

applicable is some of that like for for food survival if if you're taught like what algae you can eat and stuff like that how much of that is applicable across climate though meaning in this case you were in alaska and then another case you might be off the coast of new zealand or whatever an analogy might look similar but that one might kill you yeah i'll tell you i'll answer it this way one of our one of our instructors uh i don't know if he's still in so i won't say his name uh really really great guy he was a chief and uh so he was like so he his job was to teach us um how to uh basically how to build these traps to catch animals and stuff and so he called it coops trap trail um and it was kind of this funny little thing so we'll walk

along this trail. He shows us all these different, all these different traps and things that are set up. And so I think somebody asked him the same question. They're like, how often are these traps actually, you know, catching anything? And he just kind of giggled and was like, it's like, yeah, honestly, if you have to rely on these kind of traps, you're probably going to die because they don't go over. So you're like, oh, my word, it's too funny. So, so yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't know, like, what the, what the local flora and fauna is going to be. But that's why when you do deploy to one of those regions, you need to, you know, sort of look into that and figure out, okay, like, what can we eat, you know? I don't think anybody actually does. But it would be a wise

thing to do that if you're thinking you might be in a survival situation. For sure. I mean, a cow is straightforward, but you can't count on random cows that were dropped there for survival. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't count on it. Yeah. Now, did you do anything? Did you also get training where you were simulated through, like, you know, enemy combatant interrogations and stuff like that? Yeah, yeah, so we got, so there's different levels of that, of that kind of interrogation training. So I went through like pretty, like a pretty basic level one. There's more, there's more advanced ones where you're going to have like pilots or like CIA guys or, you know, Delta or Dev Groove guys are going to go through these much higher levels of, of those of those courses. I went through the like a pretty basic one.

It's still not fun. You got to, you got, you're, you're, you're, you're escaping and evading. Eventually you get captured, you know, they're, you know, they're, you know, they're, you know, they're. you know they're sleep depriving you putting in putting in small boxes putting in tiny rooms dumping cold water on you taking in you know taking into rooms and interrogating you um and there's there's one point you know where where you get hit where they where the instructors hit you um and the funny thing is so i was getting interrogated and i was getting interrogated by a by this woman and so i was like okay this is this is where i'm going to get hit you know like this

is like i just kind of know um this is that this is the time of the of the training event where this is going to happen so i'm in room alone with this instructor and she's interrogating me and so i was like i really didn't want to get hit um and i was like i just i'm like i don't really want to deal with this you know so i was like you know i'm going to i'm going to like try to reverse siop on this lady if i can and i don't know if what i did actually worked but i will say so basically um she was she was interrogating me and so like i just started getting her like really deep eye contact and just kind of like mellowed out and was like hey look you know um i hear what you're saying look i just want to i just want to take care of my guys like i'm not trying to you know be difficult here

i don't know anything you know but like you know here's what's going on blah blah she's like well here's information i can confirm i'm like yeah i hear you on that um but like but like but the thing was i i i uh i just i just i just made like really really deep eye contact with and she like gets up in my face and i just like just stare like in her eyes um and she never hit me she never hit me And so when CIR training was done, we were doing this, we were doing this big debrief. And there's, I think there's 40 or 50 of us in the class. And so at the, at the end, the instructors are just randomly assigned five or six students to kind of debrief and go through like how the whole training event went. So right before that, though, the lead instructor, he goes, Mattos, where are you at?

So, right here. And he goes, it's like, instructor so and so, I forget her name. She wants to, she's going to debrief you. and so I was the only guy in the class who got debriefed by my instructor like personally I was the only one who's selected personally to be debrief and so I go to debrief and then I see her and she's like all dolled up with like makeup and everything and I was like oh my goodness I think she likes me I think that's what's going on here and I was like I think that's why she wants to talk to me and I don't know so we go into the room and we talked down she was very professional to be

very clear she was very professional there was no issue but I was like you know but but she was like no no no yeah I'm sure you weren't looking down yeah no no no so she uh no so she just walked me through the debrief she's like I want you to know like I selected you know you specifically because I wanted to talk to you because you did a really good job blah blah blah blah and I was like okay cool cool cool cool cool thanks and I was just like all right then I got out of there but yeah it was I thought you got out of there I think no no no no no I wasn't interested what I mean you got out of it wasn't interested you weren't interested not in the slightest no no no no no no the slightest so I was it wasn't the slightest so I was like uh it was no it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't good guy i try to be i try to be uh so some demons in them uh but uh yeah so i so i got out of there but it was um definitely definitely funny so i don't know i think uh i think i made my uh instructor get a crush on me or something so she didn't yeah yeah yeah yeah that was great yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah listen i'm sorry i love to help you i'm trying i'm trying i'm trying i'm trying i'm trying i'm trying i'm Tell me how I can help you, help you help me.

Yes, exactly. That's my Sears School experience right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they, but there's some ones like, I'll talk to guys and, you know, they'll have been in the teams or something for Delta or whatever for 10 years. And then they'll be asked like, hey, come do this your school. Like, I don't really even understand how it works because there's guys who have been in there forever. And then they'll have like a special one for them.

And it goes a lot farther. And they'll do crazy shit, bury them in a box or stuff like that. You were never asked to do that while you were in the seals. Yeah. So I want to be like really clear too. So my time of the seals, I was just, you know, a regular seal. I wasn't at DevGrew. I wasn't at Delta.

I wasn't like a like one of those tier one dude. So like when you and so when you are in one of those units, there's this whole different level of, because those guys are on a whole different level. They're operating it in an entirely different pace and entirely different level. Like those are the dudes. Beeper goes off. They're doing the hostage rescue 24 hours later kind of thing, right? I was never in a unit that was, you know, that was like that. So we were just a normal seal platoon, you know, you do your, you do your 18 month workup,

you deploy somewhere for six months. During that six months, you're on call, you know, or you're doing operations or, you know, training with local forces. Yeah, but it's not, let's also not understand. You're being humble. Well, but it's, but, but I understand. Like those guys, yeah, those guys are, you know, they have a whole different level. So yeah, there's these other different levels and, uh, of stuff because those guys are,

you know, I think, I think in protect, in particular, some of the guys who do like playing clothes operations, they're sort of acting, you know, they're, they're in some really squirly stuff. So they got to be, you know, really, really, ready to resist any kind of interrogation because they're really really hanging it out there operating solo or let or just like one or two dudes yeah what was your favorite part about being a seal um this is this is a really dumb answer but it's the first thing that pops in my head uh i really like i really liked flying around in helicopters that's a really silly answer i i really enjoyed the

helicopters um but actually in reality my favorite part of being a seal was um when we got to deploy to afghanistan and like do the job that was like that's i was like yeah this is what I signed up to do. Let's go, let's go crush some bad guy souls. And I love that. I love that aspect of the job when I actually got to do it. But also, you know, we talked about it last time on the podcast too when I had the, you know, I did my, it did my minimum time and then got out and started doing what I'm doing now. Was it like six years or something? Six years and four months. Yeah, six years and four months. That's still, that's a while, bro. Yeah, it was definitely it was interesting. That's, I mean, this podcast has been around for five and a half years or so. And I

feels like a lifetime six years and four months doing that kind of job at that level and like even like we've laid out even the training there's so much that goes into that so much mental fortitude stress that they have to put you under righteously so to be able to get you to pass and get in there and you have to learn every single possible thing so that you can effectively be at the tip of the spirit and then go perform like you did out in afghanistan when bullets are fucking flying i mean And it's something that no one in my seat and nobody listening right now who hasn't lived that can ever fully comprehend. You know, we can understand some of it just based on how you guys explain it and show

us, but like you can't know what that's like until you're forced to, you know, go through that 12 month, 18 months, whatever it is process, and then actually get out there and do it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I always say, too, the best decision I ever made was joining the seal teams and the second best decision i ever made was getting out right so um it was a it was a it was a good experience i'm glad i did it and set me up for what i do now which that's what i'm saying even beyond though the fact that and we're again we're coming back to burma don't worry but like you know even beyond the idea that there are so many literal things that you take into what you do now like don't you think being a seal

could qualify you from like a mental fortitude standpoint to do god damn near anything in the world i mean you put yourself through the hardest situations and you have to have a brain up there too they're not high they're they're not the guys who are making it i'm not saying every single guy there is a 1600 sat guy though you probably are but like you know these are people that can process things very quickly and make decisions which is probably the most critical thing you can have for success in the world yeah absolutely um and and it's it's it's also interesting too because you look at the you look at the selection courses and there's always this question of nature versus nurtured there's always a question of, are you selecting guys who already have this particular skill set

and this aptitude? Or are you developing that aptitude in individuals? And I think it's a little bit of both, honestly. I think it's mostly guys who already have the aptitude. I think that's probably 80% of it. And then I think what it does is it gives guys the opportunity, like the stress, you know, whether it's like, you know, in any of this, in any of the selection courses, Rangers, seals, greenberries, whatever. It's like they're putting everybody under so much stress but it gives you the opportunity to see if you're one of those dudes that can you know that can push through that can that can you know have that mental fortitude and then you continue on past what you thought your what you thought your boundaries were and so now you start to develop an even higher

level ability to to be resilient to think on your feet to you know to suffer suffer in silence as we would say sure in the sure sure yeah outside of the obvious things like new worldviews understanding what the rest of the world looks like when you go to the most dangerous places and seeing battle like the very high level stuff outside of that what would you say about yourself being in the seal teams change the most about you whether that be from a personal perspective or like a personality perspective what was what was the biggest change to happen as a result i would say i would say i had this level of confidence that i didn't have before and so i wasn't i wasn't a person who had a lot of self-doubt. I, you know, I was fairly competent at whatever I did in high

school. I wasn't the smartest kid. I wasn't the dumbest kid. I wasn't the worst athlete. I was just kind of middle of the road. And, you know, so hearing, you know, about the, about the SEAL program or hearing about all the stuff or guys in combat and all this stuff, you always wonder, how would I react if I was under fire? How am I going to react if there's, you know, bullets landing between my legs and, you know, and guys are getting hit and stuff? And or how would I react going through seal training so when i when i showed up to seal training i actually didn't think i was going to make it i didn't think i was going to make it i had no intention of quitting but i just figured they were going to kick me out i just figured like okay this is like so elite there's no way a guy like me just

sort of middle the road dude is going to make it again i had no intention of quitting and i wasn't i wasn't being i wasn't feeling sorry for myself i was just i know i need to i know i need to pursue this or i will never be able to live with myself if i don't and then as i you know as you're going through the um as you're going through uh buds there were this is this is a true story too there were three guys who i really looked up to um and they were guys with great work ethics great attitudes they were in great physical condition and uh really hard working guys and um i really looked up to them and i was like okay those dudes are for sure going to make it i'm just going to try to emulate them as much as possible so we get into buds we're in like the second week so we haven't

even got to hell week yet we're in the second week and so every time somebody quits you have to take off your helmet and you line it up basically you line it up um next to what's called the grinder it's basically a giant parking lot where you have to do a bunch of like push-ups and stuff so you have to line up your helmet next to all the other guys and like your name is on the is on this green helmet that you line up right well uh we were doing we were doing grinder PT one day so it's like you know just doing like hundreds and thousands of push-ups and sit-ups and all this kind of stuff for like hours on end and as we were as we were doing this it's brutal it's like the worst they're spraying with water you're covered in sand you're like bleeding uh you're like back is bleeding because you've

been doing so many sit-ups on on uh you know on um you know like on the concrete right anyway so i look over and i can see the names of all the guys that were there and the most the three most recent quitters were all three of those guys whoa and i couldn't believe it it was just so symbolic it wasn't like they were scattered out between all the different helmets because there's dozens and dozens and dozens of helmets all three of those guys were the three most recent quitters and that gave me the realization that okay now I understand what this whole mental thing is about because there's no reason those dudes couldn't have made it they were much more qualified than me and that's when I start to realize like oh maybe I will survive this thing because I'm like I'm still here and those guys

aren't here now I get it and so to answer your question like what changed when you go through when you go through that training and you and you pass it there's just this level of confidence that now you realize you know who you are and you've proven it to yourself and then you go into combat that and you proved yourself that oh i actually do have the ability and the intestinal fortitude to hold my position when when things are going really bad and um so yeah you just you you learn a lot about yourself and then that hopefully gives you some confidence yeah yeah it's a common pattern i've heard from every navy seal i've talked with it's like when they get there day one whatever dude they point to that they're like oh he's he's flying color is gonna make it that's

like one of the first guys it's cut for whatever reason yeah it's just that thing like the person who on paper looks the best, you know, it turns out to be like the 2011 Eagles as a dream team on paper, a nightmare on the field. You know, it just doesn't work. But it, you know, I had asked you this last time as well, but I asked every Navy SEAL when they come in here to give me, you know, the main mental thing they think people need. And I get a different answer every time. And it's always, it's always something interesting. I'm trying to remember what yours was, but I remember being like, damn, I hadn't thought of it that way. I don't know about you, but I am so particular with jeans. When I go out, I want to look good, but of course I want to be comfortable,

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using code Julian at rag middle dash bone.com. That link is in my description below. That's 20% off at rag dashbone.com using promo code Julian. When they ask you where you heard about them, please support our show and tell them I sent you. At the end of the day, though, outside of like that thing, the most common pattern that every one of you guys talks about is like that ability to just be gritty and just take it.

And just kind of like how much do you have it up here to just be able to be like, I don't need to go be Michael Jordan in this drill, but I better damn well finish the game like he does. You know what I mean? Like I can't go to the bench and take a breather. And there was that old speech. Maybe it was, maybe it was McRaven who gave it. I might be remembering that wrong.

Correct me in the comments if I am, but he's like, don't ever, ever ring that bell. And it talks about the symbolic bell you ring like if you're quitting or whatever. and I don't know that just always stuck with me it seems like it's the Navy SEALs are just a bunch of guys who just don't fucking ring that bell yeah and I think I think there's another so there's two sort of interesting elements here one is you have you have these guys who are hyper who come in hyper confident and so actually this is one of the things that I one of the things that I learned about is an actual psychological phenomena where there's like a direct correlation between how confident somebody is and how competent they are the more competent and better you are. are at something ironically your your level of confidence modulates significantly and so you're you go into something less confident ironically and that's not to me that you that's not to say that you don't believe that you have the ability to do the job like you you're not you're not there's not a lack of confidence because of your own competence it's just you're unsure because you're like okay this is this you know there's i've seen too many things go wrong so when you have somebody who goes

and extremely confident, that is a, there's like a direct correlation between that and them, like having a lower level of competence. So, for example, like at an elite level, you know, you have a, whether it's a sports team or, you know, Delta Force going on a hostage rescue mission, they are going to sit there and go like, yeah, we know we're the best. But this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go wrong. And then they just, and then that's what they focus on is mitigating all those things. And so when they do show up to game there, they do show up for that hostage rescue mission they're ready for all those things and they're ready to adapt and they know they're going to get punched in the mouth you know the uh like the bin laden raid

they went over like what happens if the first helicopter goes down and it did like who would have who would ever thought that the helicopter is going to randomly crash right and they'd already gone through that um and so when you have guys show up to seal training you have these guys that are overly confident a lot of times it's the dudes who are the stud right and they might have a great work ethic they might have but you know whatever but like they are used to being the top dog they're used to be in the the jock in college or at school you know and they're used to be in the top dog and so when they they have no idea what it's like to be at the back of the pack running trying to keep up covered and vomit with their with an injury they don't know what that's like and so then their

confidence just gets destroyed whereas someone like me ironically it ended up being to my benefit that i was just sort of a middle of the road guy because um i knew what it was like to to grind and it was like yeah i'm never i'm never at the front of the pack i'm always like trying to catch the dude in front of me easy and so it totally totally used to it Yeah, no, it makes, like, every time I talk to one of you guys, it makes total sense why you got to where you were. Like, it's just, it's hard to explain. Like, there's all different personalities, there's different personality types and whatever, but that same kind of pattern of just kind of lasting through comes through for sure. But it's like, you know, you were saying this a few minutes ago.

You can't know, it's one thing to beat down your mind in the training to be able to grant. and to grit and bear things and be able to take pain and all that. But you can't know how physiologically you're going to react when you are actually on a real battlefield and real bullets are flying. And every person I ever talked to from any level of the military will tell you some version of you find out who the guys are when the bullets start flying. And I think it's, you know, even at the highest level like you guys, it's still the case because you know the stories you told last time about afghanistan are some of the greatest

told stories in the history of my podcast i mean it was just like we're sitting here like this like holy shit and i'm just trying to imagine myself like damn f from age 20 like you know in the middle of like oh eight or whatever it was oh or two i'm sorry 2011 2012 afghanistan whatever it was in that area right when shit was 2014 right okay so things had gone south even worse things had gone really south at that point and you just got people shooting at you from mountains and trees and you only know where you are you're fighting the geography as much as you're fighting the ghost it's like you can't prepare yourself for that no and there's so you you mentioned you bring up something very interesting the physiological response to stress so when you're when you're healthy and you know

things are good to go you can train your mind for combat itself right but i'm going to give you a really interesting um anecdote so last year when we did this podcast you couldn't tell um but the first i don't know five minutes of the podcast i was like i was having like this really weird nervous reaction my body was physically reacting um because the fact that the cameras are on me and i was having this weird physiological reaction which i didn't understand and so that is where and i'll explain i'll explain what happened and like what i did to get over it um so i guess maybe six months seven no six or seven months before i came on this podcast I was in a battle in Burma, and I don't know if we talked about this or not, but I was in a building that got hit by an Airstrike, and the roof got blown off. I don't know if we talked about this or not.

I think we talked about this, but I think it was off camera. I'm trying to remember. Okay. I feel like we talked about this at the Eagles game. okay gotcha go ahead so anyway airstrike comes in blows the roof off of the building that i'm sitting in myself and a couple other my stronghold guys were in this building and it was a targeted it was a targeted uh assassination they knew we were in this building they cut the cell phone the burma army cut the cell phone towers and they completely changed the attack vectors that all their aircraft were doing trying to hold back the rebels and they came in and so we didn't even hear or see the aircraft until the bombs were already going off so anyway so we're in this building it gets like the roof gets blown off the top of us we run out of the

building we jump into the trenches immediately two more aircraft come in and drop bombs directly on the building that we were just in completely obliterating and all my stuff was blown up all my guy's stuff was blown up I'm barefoot out just having me barefoot at the time because I started I was actually had a mild fever and so we get out of the building we're in the trenches I we have actually have a video of this too of the aircraft dropping bombs on us you can see the you can see the jets flying over us Joe maybe we can try to pull it up on Instagram the strong the stronghold rescue instagram i think we have that on there but anyway so i was in there and uh i remember at

the time i was so calm i was there was almost no fear the only thing that was going through my head was as these aircraft are coming and you hear you hear the jets like screaming in and you know this bomb this 500 pound bomb is going to hit somewhere within like 50 yards of you or maybe right on top of you you don't know and so um as i'm in this trench i'm literally just thinking oh i'm still alive because i'm thinking i'm still alive because i'm thinking and i was like am i dead yet am i dead yet it was just this really weird thing but i was very calm right so we finish we finish that operation and uh you know a few months later um you know we're we're back here in the states or whatever but i started having these really weird sort of uh reactions to um to stress so a normal just a normal

conversation with somebody your stress level goes up a little bit you're like i want this person to like me am i going to am i going to speak well right just normal human being stress that you don't even think about it doesn't even rise above the level of considering it stress right well i started mentally i felt fine but my body started to physiologically react to stuff and so i think i think one of the first times that i recognized something was off was actually um it had been it had been the couple weeks prior to coming on your podcast um because i think i just finished up the um the harvard summer program um that i had just finished up and then i was sitting here and i'm like why am i i started like sweating my hand started getting a little bit just

bit jittery and i was like what the hell is wrong with me and i realized only after i i realized later that it was from it was because this this thing i'd come so close to dying and i and i didn't realize the physiological effect that was happening so there's there was this disconnect between the stress level that my brain felt and like the stress level that of how my body was reacting and so when i was in school too um i'd be sitting in class and i would raise my hand to answer or you know to answer a question or whatever and dude it was nuts it was like you would think I was in you would think I was in a firefight with somebody because again your stress level goes up a little bit there's 50 people in my class you're at Harvard you're like you don't want to look dumb right so there's a little bit

of stress right not much and I don't feel that stressed about it but my my hands would start shaking and my feet would shake a little bit and then my voice would get shaking and I would start talking fast and then when I was done talking it would be like cold sweat on my face I'm like dude all I did was just give my opinion on some geopolitical thing it wasn't even controversial like totally normal there's 50 other people that are raising their hand too And I realized something was wrong. And so one of the things I did was, it took me, it took me like months to try to figure out what to do. It was like, what can I do with this?

And it took me, it took me a while. What I eventually started doing was every morning for about two months, I got up and I went into the shower and I put the water as cold as it would possibly go. And with no, you know, no like, you know, sort of easing into it. I would just jump right into the freezing cold water with freezing cold water on my face. The cold, the coldest I could get. And I would do that every morning and I would just sit there and I would hold for two to three minutes. just sit there and hold with freezing cold water on my face on my back and I was just fighting the like sort of the physiological response to the stress and that actually worked so a couple months later after basically after after a couple months I started realizing when I was going into conversations or things my hand stopped shaking I stopped getting all nervous like I started I stopped having this physiological response to just basic stress you know to basic stress and so yeah ironically was the the the cold water helped me sort of reset that and just train my body That's like the only thing that that was that needed that was the thing that I did because you know for me I you know I have my I have my faith

So and I have a wonderful family and so like my life is really really good and I knew it wasn't necessarily a mental thing I was like it was just a physiological thing and so I was training the physiological stress response and the cold water worked worked amazing I'm glad it did you know what yeah and I want to watch this video in a second to it's just really you know when you were here when you first came in like yeah you did have some nervous energy but that didn't stand out to me like a lot of times when people come to do this especially like you know you had done mike writlins but you know i think at this point it was like you knew you were going to start doing a lot more of these so people started to think like oh is my story going to be good enough which by the way it is but i didn't really think anything of that and then we were talking

afterwards and you were great and like felt like it almost felt like you you had kind of led a little bit of a weight off your shoulders like all right yeah i can do this for a few hours that was easy as fuck you know and which is like a really good feeling for me too so i didn't think anything of that you know where i did think something though what's that at the eagles game okay but i i was wrong i thought it was like a lot of you guys like the tier one guys and some of the intel guys you're so into your schedules and controlling it and everything you know what I mean, just from the world you're in, especially when it comes to flights. And I knew you had a flight that day, getting out of Philly, and you were thinking about the traffic and all

that and whatever, well, at least this is what I thought. But I could see, when we got up into the box and it's more of a constricted space and there's like 35 people in there, 32 of which we don't fucking know, you know, I could see you, like, nervous about stuff, but you kept talking about your flight. So I just figured, oh, right. They get like this. But was that a little, still a little bit of that like probably almost almost certainly yeah and also my wife is pregnant at the time and i was like i was like i'm good like i'm just i kind of want to get home i think it was the other thing too is um i was i was you know so i'm doing a master's program at harvard and then like on a weekend i'm you know doing a doing a trip or whatever right so that's so like i had no rest i had no break at

just soft little he goes to harvard home uh i used to i graduated but uh yeah so then uh so like Yeah, I wanted to get home to my wife. I wanted to get home and rest. And so I was burning myself out. And that was one of the things I didn't realize. So you talk about confidence from the time of the seals or whatever. Well, that's great. But then sometimes you can get overconfident.

And so you start to think like, oh, I can do this and this and this and this. But in reality, you can only do two or three things. And I was just doing too much. But yeah, also my body was not handling with stress well. And I was like, what is it wrong with me? Why am I so stressed out? And it was just because, like, I just have. I just had this residual combat stress, which luckily I was able to deal with with cold water for the most part.

All right. I got another question about that, but let's see this video first. And this video, just to be clear for our YouTube reviewers out there, this doesn't include actual bloodshed and violence that's seen, right? Okay. So you guys have that on the record. And scroll down. Let's see if we can find it. I think we have it on here.

Keep going down. Keep going down. By the way, everyone go follow Stronghold Rescue. We'll have that link down in the description. so you can check out what they're doing on instagram can go just a little look can just go a little slower for me thanks no you're good you're good keep going down keep going down okay some dudes in the trenches god some of the and some of the videos i'll see from because you guys really show it too on yeah we yeah keep going keep going you know sorry yeah there's a lot of

a lot of injuries oh i haven't looked at our instagram in a while do you have someone manage this i mentioned yeah yeah yeah okay we'll keep going down here good call having this on camera too joe we'd be getting demonetized every fucking scroll yeah yeah he's got he's got it off camera yeah yeah yeah we're gonna talk about this all right a few minutes obviously to go through this but all people have to do just for i'll talk while we're looking for this okay is go to an instagram like this and see what effron's been posting you know what what stronghold's been posting for years now to be it doesn't take a genius to see we got a problem here joe yeah you're sorry we definitely passed it this is too far back i think we have it on

here my apologies to everybody is it if we don't does it have the i thing on it it i don't think so all right i'll tell you what we'll pause for one sec we're gonna find this video and then we'll be right back all right we're back so long story short you have a video you can now put on social media so people can see it because apparently we must have missed that one i could have swore i would have bet a million dollars that we had already posted no that's all good bro okay yeah we're gonna we'll post it before the episode comes out so people can go to a strong arrest so just just just so i can get the image again one more time this was a few minutes ago it was an airstrike that was coming in you could hear it coming from far away you didn't have any intel that this was

going to be coming a few minutes before so you just heard them coming you're like oh shit that sounds dangerously close well no no so i was in a building um so so the rebels were trying to clear the Burma army out of a out of a you know this the city they were trying to clear them out and so we were providing medical support and frontline you know frontline support for those guys um not quite frontline we were a little bit farther back but medical support and the uh myself and two of my guys we were in a building and we were kind of hunkered down because it was kind of a lull in the fighting this was like a multi-day ended up being like a multi-month operation but um so we're just sitting there it's totally quiet so imagine it's as quiet as sitting here in this room but then all of a

sudden a bomb goes off and blows the roof off at the top of the the room that we're in right now and it blows out all the windows we all just so happen to be laying down taking a rest at the time and I was actually starting to get sick and so this bomb goes off and then we hear the aircraft so the bomb goes off boom and then we hear the aircraft flying over and we're like oh shoot like you know because we'd always been able to hear the aircraft coming beforehand and we always had early warning from from people messaging us well what had happened was the burma army found out from people who were fleeing the city that there were that we were in this particular building we found this out later and so somebody called the burma army was like hey there's white dudes in

this building and so what they did the burma army shut down all of the cell phone towers for the entire region launched three launch three aircraft and they and they did an entirely different vector attack vectors so that way any of the lookouts or whatever wouldn't be able to tell us that there were aircraft coming over radios or anything so everybody's cell phone stop working no radio calls first thing we knew about these aircraft coming it was at the bomb was going off um so we run outside we jump into these trenches it's like maybe 50 meters away from the building and then that's when i i pulled out my phone and just literally i put my head down just put i just put my phone just faced it straight up just faced it straight up and i was like all right let's see what

happens you know uh they'll know how i died and uh content yeah yeah yeah yeah we got to get the content yeah gary v said content we're going to get the content and then i didn't post the content unbelievable unbelievable yeah so like i and it just so happened like the one of the one of the jets comes over you can see it come over you see that you see the jet uh the bomb goes off you can see the blast from it like uh goes right over top of us and yeah it was uh as we got hit yeah three times now here here's the thing and and how long did that last those three hits it's a matter of like five minutes like not even it's like three minutes maybe that's longer than what i thought even yeah it's it's it's but you're just hunkered down like praying that

you know you can like suddenly go like this and be like oh i'm alive yeah yeah yeah kind of deal that's so time is is kind of time is irrelevant right yeah which is very very strange and that's why i was saying i was i was i was thinking okay i know i'm not dead yet because i'm still in this trench and i have the ability to think it was very much i think therefore i am it was literally what i was what i was what i was experienced but i was very calm and i was like oh that didn't affect me i was totally fine um were you doing anything to kill time like counting in your head or something like that no just breathing I was just like no like all right let's just you just got to sit here and take it you know

well this is what's so interesting about this and then how it had you later learned in the coming months that it was having physiological effects on you yeah you it's not like you hadn't been through things like this before you had been with bullets whooshing by your head you had seen bombs go off you had been shot in the fucking leg by iS just and kept moving which that video is insane but you know like for that's what's so fascinating that even someone who is quite literally a hardened warrior like you you can go through all this in your life and then just one random one happens and that's the one it just kind of sets you off and it obviously like luckily you were able to get control of this but it did something it changed something about you and you had to like look in or be like holy

shit this is affecting me so just goes to show you you can't ever it would it would seem get numb to any of it no matter how much of it you may do or may see it could just be that one where you're like well now now the dominoes fell yeah and it's it's a whole different uh it's a whole different animal i think it stacks up over time i think there was this this realization of i don't know just this thing where it's like man that was so close i should be dead right now but i'm not thank god um and and so it took me it took me months to figure out the whole like cold shower thing that would that would really help me sort of reset physiologically um but i had another i had another i had another incident. So during, so during the summer, or sorry, during the, during the winter break,

the Christmas break from school, I did a one month deployment to Burma. This past one. Yeah. Yeah. So just in December. So I was there in Burma again, working with the, working with the guys. And I was, I was maybe, I had like an hour and a half, like an hour and a half, two hours left before I was going to start my journey back home. Right. So I missed Christmas. I was working with the front line these dudes i wasn't at the front line i was a little bit farther back i've got a pregnant wife at that time i've got my wife's pregnant babies baby's doing just a few months and um so i've only got a couple hours left there at the front and i'm going to leave well um as i'm sitting there we hear this wah noise and up of course a bomber shows up a Burma army bomber shows up and it

circles our position for an hour and a half and it just circles all our around us. It's flying right over above us. It's flying all around the area. And it randomly drops these salvos of bombs. That's anywhere from like four to six bombs. So like we'll call it five bombs. It drops five bombs at a time. So it's just for an hour and a half, there's just this sickening sound of waw. Boom bum bum bum bum bum. And then it flies right over. You hear it? And then it's like bum and so anyway. So I'm I'm in this, I'm in this trench myself and my interpreter. There's a very low chance i mean there's no way they're going to see us they can't see us but it's all it's all luck of the draw you just have no idea where they're going to decide to drop those bombs or we're like in

the jungle in the jungle like they're not going to see us so i'm laying in a trench in the jungle and uh with uh with my interpreter and i'm listening to the sound and again my hands started shaking and i was like dude like again i was like there's something wrong here but this one this time it was a little different and as my hands are shaking all i could think about was like i just want to meet my daughter i just want to meet my daughter like i that's that's the only thing i care about in life is meeting my little baby girl that's all i care about um and that was like the all that was what i fixated on and that's not necessarily a uh a good thing right you can't you can't be fixated on that when you're in a when you're in a war zone you need to be focused on the mission you're going to be

focused on the job you got to be cold as ice right uh because you got a job to do and you got to function but yeah i uh that was that was what was going through my head and i thought oh my goodness like I have I have something to lose now you know I'm uh also too I just gotten married during that after that bombing had happened so it's like I think that also affected me it's like oh I've got a wife to take care of I've got you know and then this you know this December it was oh I've got a wife and a baby at home you know I'm going to have a baby here in a few months and um yeah so that that definitely changes everything for sure about about how you see the world and about the risks you're willing to take and uh and all that so but yeah it's very very interesting all the

handshaking us up and that's and that's when I got back to school so it was kind of funny you're uh I'm like literally laying in a trench getting bombed in like the third world country how is your winter break dude exactly exactly so I get back to school everybody's in class I was like oh how was your winter break like oh it was great I went to home and saw my family for Christmas and like oh I went to Costa Rica and went surfing and like oh that's great what about you and I'm like I I just traveled for work you were at least you weren't the dick that's like you kids know nothing yeah I'm way nothing about this world i was laying in a trench yeah i don't think i told anybody i might have told like one or two like close friends or what it like where i'd been but i just was like yeah i was like

i it's it's not even worth trying to explain it's just i was like yeah i had to travel for work and you know and that's sort of what i that's sort of what i said but yeah it was this uh but it's so weird like going from and that's sort of how i see my job in my role in life currently is i'm in the trenches with literally the poorest of the poor people who are who are you know being exterminated who are being hunted literally hunted and you're with them while they're being hunted and so you're being hunted too and you don't have anything to shoot down those airplanes you got nothing and it's my job to connect those guys then the and those people like so the third world connect them with the first world and it's like hey we have security we've got you know we've got financial stability

here and it's my job to basically to connect those two worlds And so it's, it's been, yeah, it's, it's very interesting, though, because these juxtapositions where it's like, yeah, you're laying in a trench next to a guy that, you know, yeah, just is extremely poor, but he's just an awesome dude. And then, you know, three days later, you're back in the United States and, like, nothing just happened. But it's also, you know, you can relate to that from a lot of things you did in the seals, but especially, like, in Afghanistan, where you're going. out there with the teams you're also relying on the people in the villages who are under the thumb

of the taliban you're relying on you know some freedom fighters where people representing the quote unquote new government to fight back against this thing that's still happening there and you know you come from totally different backgrounds and experiences but the end goal at least for the people on the ground i won't talk about the suits and offices in dc but for the people on the ground like you the end goal is the same as it is for those people you know because they're trying to free their land and you're trying to help keep them free yeah you know so it's it's like these basic human things and the worst situations can bring you together and i got to tell you i had in i had in the reaper oh nick irving oh that's great yeah yeah that's my guy he's nice i never one one of the

coolest guys ever you you would love him but humble as could be and like you know his episodes especially we did two while I was here the second one went crazy and and it's it's it's not because he's the most charismatic storyteller like he's a good story he's a really good storyteller he's very matter of fact and very like under underselling of what he does but people can see they're like wait a minute that's just crazy and to him he's like yeah no there were a few guys out there really doing some cool shit I was just helping him out but you know If there were people out there wanted to make like a cross-section documentary of just like the back and forth of you and him telling a story from your perspectives, him being a ranger, you being a seal in Afghanistan, like that would be an amazing juxtaposition from those two episodes because you can see just how fucking crazy it got and how much you guys were, forget like tip of the spear, you guys were kind of in. some ways when you're coming into that era once we get five six years past nine

eleven and everything's focused on a rack where shit went south it's like afghanistan started to become this free-for-all and you guys were like the last line of defense keeping that keeping that thing in check and i i don't know it's just i did that i did that one i did yours and i did daniel corbats all within like two months of each other and you guys each saw afghanistan from a different perspective and i i don't know i just get chills thinking about that because it was so insane and so underreported here at the time. But you lived it. Yeah, yeah.

And that's the thing about war. It's, it's, it's, it's very difficult to understand from, from the outside. It's, sometimes it's, I guess it's also very difficult to understand from the, from the front line as well, you know, being the tip of the spear. And like, and anybody, anybody who's taken, anybody who's taken bullets is as at the tip of the spear in my book. Because it's like, yeah, you're, you're there. You're doing the, you're doing the damn thing. Yeah. And so it's, it's, you know, it's, so I had a cousin of mine, she, she said, she said, I wish,

she's like, I wish I could understand, like, what you go through and like, what you've, what you've done, I wish I could understand. And I just said, it's like, I'm glad, I'm glad that you can't understand. Because if you did understand, that means that we didn't do our job, that means that things have gone horribly wrong here. And so there's this fine balance of, you know, of people supporting the troops, you know, sort of given them the benefit of the doubt, like understand that they're in these rough situations um but at the same point uh you know educating yourself on like what's going on the world geopolitically and making sure you kind of understand so you can so you can you know vote accordingly making sure that you're voting based on um you know based on the best information that

you can find and stuff so like this stuff does matter your voice does matter it's important for you to understand it but it's good that the average american in my opinion isn't sitting there obsessed and knowing all of the the the crazy details of every bad thing that's going on in the world. It's like, you know, just, you know, support the guys who are going to do it. But also don't, don't feel bad. Don't, you know, don't feel bad about the fact that you don't understand or that you haven't seen it. It's like, that's a good thing that you haven't been there, that you haven't seen it. But just, yeah, just listen to the guys who have been there and let them tell their story. And to your point with Afghanistan, you have, you could have 50 different guys on, you know, talking about the worn Afghanistan. You're going to get 50 entirely different experiences because it's, you know, you read a book about Afghanistan. And it's, you know, you read a book about Afghanistan. And It's like, oh, U.S. troops over the course of these few months, you know, occupied these areas. It's like, it's one sentence. But there's like, dude, that's like thousands of guys having these life-changing experiences. There's a book in each of those sentences.

Each word is a, each word is a book. And then there's 50 other, you know, stories to be told. It's fucking crazy, man. And that's, I'm really grateful one of the things we get to do in here. I have on a lot of different people. But I'm very proud of over the years we've gotten a good little subcategory in there across the many categories. where we have guys like you and reaper who have come in here and given like the oral history of what they saw on the ground and i i don't know i i'd take a lot of pride in that because it's like

and there's some other podcasts that do an amazing job with that obviously like sean ryan's done unbelievable content on that because he literally lived it as well so it's a whole not other level but you know when people are looking back on this time you know a hundred years from now 200 years from now it's cool to me that they'll be able to hear these stories on places like this and be able to understand like well i didn't know it was like that there i wonder what was what the bigger picture was and you start to like i sit here and i piece it together when i hear each of you guys because you don't you know unless you listen to all the other podcasts which you know almost no one does like you know you don't know what these guys said or where they were

and then i can make sense of it like wait he was over there and that was happening that year and then he was there and that was happening that year how do we get from there to there it's crazy to me but you start seeing all those patterns do you ever get like a little cynical that and I don't want to put words in your mouth here so feel free to give whatever opinion you have

but do you ever get a little cynical that maybe when it comes to foreign policy and particularly there seems to be a little bit of a uniparty holier than now system where people who have no experience in most cases just decide to make decisions that guys like you were going to have to pay the price for yeah so i think one of that one of the interesting things about our governmental system if you look at it is so if the president let's say

let's just take the president for example so the president if he wants to do anything regarding policy in the united states you got to go through you got to go through the lower house you got to go through the upper house and it also it can also be challenged in the judiciary so there's and you know and then you got to sign off on it and so it's like it has to go through all these checks and balances to do any kind of decision, right? When it comes to foreign policy, there's not nearly as many rules. The president can, for example, just say, like, hey, we're going to leave Afghanistan in five minutes. And you're like, well, we need more than five minutes. And he's like, well, too bad, get it done. You're down to four and a half minutes now. Let's go. And, you know, one individual can make

a decision like that. And I'm not sure what the solution is. If there's, if you necessarily should have Congress has to approve every single foreign policy decision, I'm not really sure what the solution is there but that just goes to show like think about the the absolute disaster that can happen on foreign policy and that's what day-to-day life would be like if we lived under a king or under a monarchy or a dictator or whatever and so that's that's one element of it that there's I think there's I don't want to say there's too much power that the president has to make foreign policy decisions because I'm not sure the solution is to run through Congress I don't know haven't thought about it enough but I will say it there's a there's an American mentality

because of just geography and culture and where we live, where we don't really think too much about the rest of the world. So, for example, if you're a European, you have a very similar culture to American culture, maybe a similar language, similar values, but you're hyper aware of all the other countries because you're so close and you're just surrounded by 50 other countries, right?

And so your history and the way that you think about the world is entirely different, and the relevance of what happens in other countries is so different. And so when you're an American, a lot of us, we don't really think about it. You're like, well, who cares what happens in East Burma? Like, what does it have to do with me having dinner here tonight? And that's a tough question to answer directly how it, you know, how it directly impacts people.

But so there's that. There's sort of this indifference that we have kind of to the rest of the world. We think about, okay, Canada and Mexico. But it's just a cultural thing. It's not a nefarious thing. but then there's there's also this the other side of the coin though is that because we are the most prosperous you know powerful nation in the world

and i believe morally um i would say yeah morally superior in a lot of ways to these other to these other dictatorships and these other systems it's like yeah we're morally superior to china we're morally superior to russia absolutely and certainly like burma and these places um and so there are you know so there's this debate it's like do we do we use our power and our influence to help these other countries do we use it to pressure them into uh you know pressuring them into doing what we want them to do it's like are we being imperialist or are we being realistic here that we have to have you know we have to project us power my personal opinion as it stands today and things can change obviously situation to

situation is like i think in general it's good for the united states to project power not aggressive power but stability type power where we are we're going into places we're not allowing criminal elements to to take hold and let's say it's a country or you know for example i i really believe that we should be involved in in assisting the armed groups that are fighting against the burma army we can get into that a little more as well we will um so i think that the u.s has a moral obligation in my opinion to go help people um who are trying to live free who are trying to be or trying to like live in peace and who are being oppressed who are being attacked and i think we have the i think we have a moral obligation to help them in some way now that doesn't mean that we go in and we

invade and we take over their countries and all this stuff i'm not saying that but i'm saying we use you know we use uh once what like once u s aid is let's say restructured let's say we restructure it properly right uh but like the idea of like using of using a mechanism like that to invest and build up these other places it would have it would you get you can so peace and prosperity in a lot of places you don't need to put u.s troops on the ground um it's good for america because it opens up a lot of um you know economic opportunities for us and it builds friendships and stability all across the world and make no mistake if if you have you okay so you you you might not want to be playing the game where you say like i you know i don't even care i don't care what russia and china are doing like i don't

care like who cares it's like i'm not going to go hunt them i'm not going to go fight them it's like well dude they're hunting you and they're coming for you whether you want to or not like whether you want to realize it or not like china and russia like would love to just would love to see america fail and not necessarily like aggressively just throwing a bomb at you either i mean you're talking about all the other ways that they do this quiet economics we're talking don't road initiative all this stuff and then also comes back to burma as well so um you know the like if you stick your head in the sand and you say like well i don't really care what happens over season. It's like, dude, make no mistake. They're coming for you. Like they, China and Russia

want to destroy us and want to see us. Again, like you said, it's not necessarily that they want to drop nuclear bombs on us. What they want to have happened is for us to become a weak power so they can continue to exert their influence all over the rest of the world, right? And so I think that we as Americans have a moral obligation to hold back those dark forces. And that sometimes means that you got to make friends and allies with people that you might not necessarily get along with or you don't really like hey we're not super you know hot on this or it might you might be now operating in a place that most americans couldn't have you know couldn't point out on a map but it's like this is important because we're trying to prevent a war you know let's say five years

from now or we're trying to prevent these guys from enabling the chinese to come in and build all their infrastructure because now this place you're like now we can't even work here we can't be friends with these people maybe not friends but we like we can't we can't work in these locations because all the infrastructure all the communications infrastructure is built by china right and so there's this there's this long-term geopolitical game that has to be that we have to play so my my personal opinion is i think you know each situation is different each country is different but i think we need to project our power in in an effort to create stability and prevent the next war or delay it as long as possible right there's a lot on the bone here and i do want to see this come back to burma

because that's fascinating that that could be like a like a piece of this puzzle a roadmap that gets to an estuary to the river if you will but you said a lot there so let's let's bite these off first it's refreshing when i get to hear someone like you comment on this because you are you have actually been the guy who you have to back up the actions with words and opinions because you get sent to these places to do this stuff even in retirement now you're literally on the front lines doing stuff you were a navy seal you're not like Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi or whatever who's just like in an office somewhere riding out their fucking paycheck the trade stocks right yeah so there's a huge difference there the second thing

is the USAID stuff and the soft power stuff I'm with you I see why it's so necessary unfortunately human nature across everything that's ever existed this is just the way it works is that anything that starts good eventually slips down the slope and gets bad. And that's what we saw happen with USAID. So instead of using soft power to make sure we buy off the right diplomats in Hungary to avoid a problem with Poland that then would not have, you know, reverberating effects in Russia, we're paying for fucking transgender operations, 10 grand a pop in Uganda, you know, ugats for what, right? So like, obviously it gets out of control. Mike Pence has been in here. He was the guy like blowing the whistle on that, like, talking.

talking all about that. So I get it. You said Mike Pence? Yeah. Former VP. No, no, Mike Benz. Oh, Mike Benz. This is Mike Pence. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. Where the fuck is Mike Pence these days? I haven't heard from you. I don't know. Yeah, I guess he's signed. Okay. So this guy, Mike Benz. Oh, he was on Rogan. Talking about USA. Okay. I listened to his episode on Rogan. Yeah, yeah. He was on Rogan twice. He's been on Ryan twice. He's been on everything. That's great. But he came in here a couple times this summer and was really, really good. And like, he's with me too he's been the one screaming about it but he's like i do think there's a space for something like a us aid we just had to get control of it but you know when when you think about

the reverberating effects what you're getting at here the main point that was standing out to me and what you just went through there is the line between military industrial complex and isolationism and i'm one of these guys where i need the answer right here And what I mean by that is I don't like the military industrial complex. You're saying, war, war, black rock will rebuild. That's bullshit. And it's terrible. It gets us involved in stuff we shouldn't.

People die in the middle of it. I don't even care if they're not from here. Like, these are people around the world, and that's how I view it. I get sick when I look at the numbers, and that's what they are, the numbers on the page. They get reported from Ukraine still, where people are just getting shot over what? You know what I mean? I think that's crazy. On the other hand, I do my best to be a student of history.

I know you do, so you know, you probably knew this long before I did, but, you know, I've read some books last year, and I was very unaware of sentiment in the United States in the late 1930s and particularly. And what I mean by that is prior to December 7th, 1941, we were rapidly isolationist. And I understand this, too, by the way. understand where it comes from we had had world war one it was horrific it's one of really like the overlooked parts of modern history in a lot of ways and then we'd had the great depression and people were like fuck this i get it but it was so bad that franklin roosevelt knew in 39 when hitler you know because you have to remember hitler had the fastest growing gdp in the world he was about to be the biggest gdp in the world so that that does matter right you know

It's not like he had the GDP the size of Italy. You know, he could really do something with what he was building. He knew that we had to get involved, but he had an election on November 5th, 1940. And his opponent was running to the isolationism side, and he had to match him there so much so that while Britain was getting this shit bombed out of them, and Winston Churchill was begging him basically for like a used condom to help out. I mean, he was asking for the lowest stuff. Roosevelt was like, I want to help you, but like, we're going to lose, we're going to get crazy isolationists in here if we don't because we're going to get voted out. So ironically, we have to be isolationist. Good luck, buddy. And then suddenly, boom, Pearl Harbor hits, everyone's like, let's go to war, right? Because it takes that kind of event. And so when you look at this, I see a lot of the same patterns of isolationism now, and I fully understand where they come from. I'm sick to my stomach over how Ukraine Russia has been handled. I'm really sick to my stomach over how Israel Gaza has been handled. The funding and the proxy warfare that goes into that. But people not.

You know, my question for you is, how would you calmly, I don't know if that's the way to say, how would you sell to the average American right now who's very war exhausted, righteously so, that there could be situations where it does require us to do something and know that doesn't mean we're being imperialist military industrial complex? How would you express that in a way that may be the average? person could understand yeah so first and foremost i would say that each situation has to be handled entirely different there's this there's this idea whether you're talking the military industrial complex where the answer is always war war war or the isolationist where it's like oh like who cares

what happens in uganda or whatever right um that doesn't affect me and you know my job i i those those are the two extremes and and in some cases that's true like in some cases that is true like sometimes it's like we got to go to war like to get some stuff knocked out sometimes it's we just got to stay out of this because it doesn't really affect us so but but the reality is in most situations it's a lot more complex so for example when when i look at a just let's just say a general foreign policy this is like my general foreign policy as of as it stands right now would be if we do if we do need to get militarily involved in somewhere and in some place right which i think this okay hear me out i think we should actually get more military involved more militarily involved in more

places in the world but we should do it in small in small ways and what that look what i mean by that is you send in a special operations task force and you build up the capability of the locals over time to stand on their own right and so this is and so you can do that in multiple places let's say in africa we could do that in burma all these different places um this is a way to counter the chinese and the russians and and other nefarious forces destabilizing forces that's a way to with them with guys that really want to go and do this first of all so let me say like the special operations guys they really want to go hunt bad guys to be clear and so um it's it's a small group of people that actually wants to go do this job and you do it in such a way to where we're not going to

go fight your wars for you let's say if you're a foreign country like we're not going to fight your wars for you but we're going to build up your capability now now with that being said we also couple that with proper let's say u.s aid program so we're going to come in we're going to help provide a little bit of stability, mostly your guys, right? It's 10 of your guys and one of our, you know, 10 of your guys for every one of our guy, let's say, right? Militarily, let's some sort of operation fighting a terrorist group in your country. And then we're going to help come in and, let's say, stabilize with some infrastructure,

some schools, some roads, whatever that might be. And again, this is just a general idea. And I think that that would be a good use of military power in specific locations for limited amounts of time in ways where there's a very specific objective. the objective here is to make sure that hopefully let's say within the next seven years this country can completely stand on its own let's build up their capability we do that kind of a little bit already but we just we completely i don't know be like almost like half asset to where the point where it's just not effective it's like no we need to actually go in and do this use use both right now that should be that should be used in just in the extreme cases now in the in most cases i'm a big believer in the projection of soft power uh with u s aid right so go in and make friends with these countries and manage the money and manage the resources that you're putting into these places in ways that where it's not going to be corrupted, it's not going to be siphoned off by the government.

And it requires a lot of attention. It requires a lot of attention in detail. There's going to be situations. There's going to be times when people mess it up, right? But I think that is one of the best ways. I'll actually, I'll give you an example of this perfectly. Because the USAID stuff was cut around around the world. so again i work heavily in burma the uh the local like resistance guys that were fighting against

the the the burma army um and the and like the and their governments like these like these tribal groups um they actually came to me one of the tribes actually came to me and they said it was just having a conversation they were like they're like we might have to talk to china like we do not want to talk to china they're like we do not want to talk to china we do not like america we love america we fought with the americans and the british during world war too but they're like we are dying here and now there's all this aid was cut for these refugee camps and so now like we don't you know we're not sure what to do and now we have no support coming in anywhere and we're like we're really struggling here and so they just were having a conversation they're like we might have to

just go have a conversation with the chinese baby out with the bathwater kind of thing happened yeah yeah and it's like i'm like oh my word this is and i was like don't do that like do not do that you cross that line you're going to have real problems in the future it's like hold you know hold do your best to to hold what you got like don't like don't go down that path because once you go down that path now it's now you're going to have some real problems and you know the u.s is never going to come help you now at that point right and so they feel you know they feel abandoned you know the thing the thing that the guys always say to me every time i leave burma is always the same thing they say don't forget about us don't forget about us and that's what they always say because

that's the last thing on their mind or that that's that that is the that is the main thing on their mind as I'm leaving. Their last thought is, I hope this guy doesn't forget about us because they feel so abandoned, right? So that's a perfect example of a situation where, you know, US aid, soft power, they do not want to deal with the Chinese. They do not want to deal with the Russians. They want nothing to do with them. But they're like, well, if I talk with the Chinese, my wife might not get killed tomorrow. So maybe I need to have that conversation. Yeah. Listen. Yeah. I get it. I get that completely. And this is what, this is an amazing example. Yeah, I guess this is how it ties back, how Berman ties back to, okay, this is what you were getting at. All right, this is good. So

people are always going to do what's in their own best interests. And also, when it's quite literally life and death, I would expect nothing less. And that's what they should do. So if, if one, if they have their mouth open to be fed by one hand and that hand, hand is taken away they're gonna go find another hand that has food and that's essentially what you're saying has happened here and i say baby out with the bathwater because and this is and to mike bents his credit by the way he and i've had this exact conversation that he's had the same concerns to which then people out there will be like oh he must be controlled opposition like no this is exactly what we're talking about like how do you how do you set up a system like this

doesn't have to be called usa right let's say we just fucking make a whole whole new office somewhere else someone else runs it other the whole new team but we're setting it up from square a trying to make it good this time how does something like that get set up and not get taken advantage of by let's just say the underbelly of the bureaucracy which is always going to exist there's always going to whether it be people at cia people at state department people the pentagon what insert blank here there's always going to be some people that their hand gets access to the cookie jar and they take the cookies that they want while you're not looking how do you set it up so that you can minimize that

well so i'll say this the founding fathers they even said that the u.s i'm going to butcher this quote but they said the u.s. constitution was made for a or the u.s. government system whatever was made for a moral and religious people and it is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other men's unbridled passions or whatever uh uh you know will break through our system like a whale through a net or something like that like there's this there's this quote i forget what it is but basically they were saying there is no system that you can build if the individual person is immoral if the individual person is is unethical there's there's nothing there's no system you can do that would build it perfectly so that's one so what do you do well my answer is you deal with you deal in

the world of incentives when people are going to be a little bit immoral you start dealing with the world of incentives and so okay let's let's look at how china does what they do so they have this belt and road initiative they go do all these infrastructure projects all around the world that's how they exert their influence there the china doesn't go around and sponsor refugee camps and water projects to try and get people to like them what do they do they go in and they say hey we're going to do we'll invest in infrastructure with you so we'll help you build these roads it's like it helps you build your you know it helps you build your economy but guess what like we're happy to do that too as china because well we make some money too so you guys are making money we're making

money, traffic's flowing because we got this new road and bridge. And don't be wrong, there's all these different cases where these development projects haven't worked. But so my point is, I think a better way to do it would almost be sort of the Chinese model where you go into a country and we say, hey, you know, we have these U.S. investors and U.S. investors can choose whether or not they want to get involved in a particular project. And we're like, hey, we're going to come in and help you develop these rows. We're going to help you develop these schools. We're going to do that stuff and you you know you make some kind of deal to where now it makes sense for the investors it makes sense for that country you work out some kind of deal where you do like that and then

now you're able to actually project some soft power but you're using you're using the power of money instead of just giving it and then it just goes wherever because like the these a lot of there's a lot of corrupt politicians that will take it no or there's a bunch of bureaucrats that'll that'll that'll shift it over to wherever but if you have an actual business deal going on it's like those evil greedy capitalists will make sure that the dollars go where they're supposed to go because they're like, hey, I'm personally, I personally, you know, John Smith investor from Wall Street, I personally want to see this project happen and I care about it and it makes economic sense. And so because the other thing with the bureaucracy where they start dishing out money is they'll

put it in places where it doesn't make sense to do it because there's no economic incentives. There's none of none of that stuff is in place. And so I think there's a way to sort of basically do, I guess you would call it impact investing. That would make a lot more sense. And so is that going to be perfect? No. Is some guy, is some billionaire in the U.S. going to be able to sponsor a road in the middle of Africa and make some money off of that? Yeah.

And it's like, is that evil? No, unless you're absolutely ripping the people off in the road is crappy. But it's going to be allocated astronomically better than if you just sort of start throwing money, hand over. fist to people who you know their their country doesn't work for a reason and it's usually because corrupt corruption in the culture and corruption in the government so the last thing you want to do is hand them a whole bunch of money right it's like a drug addict the last thing you want it was like who's who's hard up for money what's the last thing you want to do is give him a bunch of money yeah because what he's going to do is go buy a bunch of drugs it's he's not

going to use it well right um and so this is this is a way in my opinion to uh to actually be able to project that power help these people out build friendships but it benefits the united states which is great and it benefits them which is great and deals don't get done unless both sides are you know happy with it and then you still do have the aid stuff you know from time to time as well if we're going to look at this in practice that that includes looking at it in places that are wholly unpopular and at least asking the question to explore it so i mean people are going to freak out when i say this but uh-huh i'll make great content i'll make great content effectively you could make the argument under what you're saying that deploying black rock to ukraine to rebuild all this

shit that we just paid to destroy effectively makes a country that is between asia and europe and on the border with someone that we don't view as a friend a client state economically in a way that's supposed to be friendly because of that while using some form of soft power that got there through hard bodies falling on the ground but that's neither here nor there point being afterwards when it's done an american company comes in to rebuild that it is a little belt and roadie yeah yeah yeah yeah and there's there's an argument to be made where so i don't know if are you talking about an actual deal that was made okay can we pull that up joe just so that i'm not talking out of my ask black rock rebuild ukraine uh deal interesting yeah let's pull this up on the screen

just so that we have it right and then i'll i'll let you do do a riff on it that's an investor document wait wait actually pull that up for one side just the headline selensky black rock announced new investment initiative to rebuild ukraine yeah that'll do okay okay there we go yeah oh i love how they put the picture of larry think in front of a world economic forum image that's so reassuring excellent okay yeah what date was this Joe do we have a

because this was a while ago there's a show right down at the bottom yeah this wasn't like yesterday the epic time okay here we go yep can we get the date

oh yeah Mike Ben's taught us this cool trick so we never have to pay for a page again our card that IS yep it's fucking unbelievable this page was last archive nine months ago here we go okay so this was yeah this was 12 28 2022 was the original was the original date that this was published so point being this you know

that was fucking eight nine months 10 months into the war yeah where they were already talking about hey here's how we're going to rebuild it yeah and i you know the optics aren't great that it's fucking black rock but yeah the thematically i see where it would tie into what you're saying I just wish we weren't funding another at this point, fucking three years of this, for $1,250,000 more people to die in the meantime just to get there. That's where it gets very corrupt.

And it's like, you know, I, from my, I understand the world's not a perfect place, and sometimes you got to squeeze some lemons to make lemonade, which means you got to play ball with people that probably aren't going to heaven. Yeah, right? That's a nice way of putting it. But if the, I guess it's a math,

mathematical thing where if doing that has a percentage greater good than whatever the alternative is that makes you avoid doing that because you feel bad about doing that, then you fucking swallow your pride and you do it. Yeah. And I think there's also a reality here where you're you're dealing with you're dealing with war. Have you ever read um, uh, Machiavelli's the, the, the prince or I have not read all of it, but I have read that book. I've read some of that. Yeah. So there's a, basically the whole premise of the book is just all these different um it's it's it's what they call an a moral book it's not saying what's right or what's wrong morally it's just saying this works if you want to go into a country and take over you got to do this you got to get rid of the leader or maybe

you keep the leader but you got to keep the people happy whatever right so there's um so it's just it's just an amoral book talking about that's just the reality of of this kind of stuff um and so my point is to i'm basically just saying reiterating what you just said which is that um yeah there is a there is a harsh reality to this stuff and how it works and it's it's tough because you know we have our we have our morality we have our values and we have to stick to them um as much as we possibly can right but there comes a point when you're in war um and you're or trying to rebuild from a war or whatever it is and um you know the the the ground gets gray and you had you got to do the the the lines get gray and you're like i don't know if this is this the right thing is it's not the right

thing but the important thing is to try to do your best to try to your best to stick with the ethics and stuff but the the problem is is that you know okay so for example right now that there's the negotiations about like ukraine russia ceasefire stuff morally morally you russia shouldn't have a single you know a single square mile of of russian or of ukrainian territory morally like that doesn't belong to them at all like go home get the hell out of here that's that's ukraine land in reality the Ukrainians do not have the ability to push the Russians off right so are they compromising are like are the Ukrainians compromising are they sellouts are they weak are they corrupt because they're making a but they might potentially make a deal um to to give some land to russia it's like well they

didn't give the land of Russia Russia stole it but at some point you're like well if we can't get it back we can't get it back right and so it's like is there some evil cabal of corruption going on there it's like no dude it's like it's people are trying to deal with these really really complex situation so also and then talking about like the the black rock uh you know rebuilding thing um you know i'm not familiar much with uh with black rock i hear their name pop up all the time but i've never actually like read about them or anything so my my ignorance here is i'll send you to jane's channel okay just send it to me um but my point is the general principle of okay so if it's not black rock that goes in to rebuild an area it's like okay well who else is it going to be it's like

Wang Wu. Okay. It's going to be Zhang Wu, exactly. Or it's going to be some other investor, right? And it's like I don't, I don't think necessarily that there's this, you know, cabal of nefarious people trying to, you know, trying to intentionally start wars just so they can make a bunch of money. I think that has happened in the past. I think that there's cases to be made and you certainly got to pay attention to it. But when I see, when I see, like, what goes on in, like, geopolitics, it's not, it's not that much different, in my opinion, than what I see that happens in interpersonal relationships with people. Like, relationships between, in my opinion, is not that much different than what happens between two different people. It's like, okay, oh, let me guess, there was a miscommunication. Oh, let me guess.

Your values weren't aligned. Oh, let me guess you both want this same thing. Okay. All right. Well, yeah, like, that sounds like, that sounds like an argument with your, you know, with your friend or a regular person. And so my point is, is think about how difficult it is to sometimes get along with somebody that you don't want to get along with. Maybe you work a job and you're like, you're stuck with somebody that you absolutely hate, right? But you got to like, you got to work through it.

You got to make it happen. Well, the same thing is happening on the international stage. So that's one. The other part is never attribute to this statement I've heard is like never attribute to mouse, which you can attribute to stupidity, right? And it's like, in a lot of cases, like, that's what's going on. People are just, they're just really dumb. and or they or it's ignorance like they just don't know what the right decision is and it's really easy in hindsight to go like oh well these guys shouldn't have done this and they shouldn't have done that and you know in 1940 churchill should have done that and you know whatever blah blah right it's really easy to do that in hindsight but it's very very difficult in the moment to make quick strategic you know to make quick strategic decisions the reason people get really uptight and upset about that line never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity is, in my opinion, not because it's necessarily wrong, it's because it's overused.

And this is an argument I have with Andy Bustamante all the time who will, you know, take the government line on a lot of these things and shoot down any conspiracy or anything. Okay. Not all of them. Okay. You know, there's some that he's, that he'll talk about that I feel like people probably don't give him enough credit for that. But there's a bunch where it's like, all right, dude, I get it. Like, you're still working for him.

But what I always say to him is I say, Andy, a line like that basically gets to use percentages. And that means you can say, yeah, 99% of the time, it's just stupidity and not malice. And because that number is so large, that means that every time something comes up, you can be like, yeah, this is a part of the 99. And never give that 1%, never explain. Because, I mean, if you look on the internet now, fucking everything is a conspiracy. And I know that's not the case. And sifting through that sometimes it's like, guys, all right, touch some grass. You know what I mean?

But does that mean that like something like Epstein, which is so clearly a conspiracy, is not? Of course it doesn't. That's absolutely a conspiracy. It's being covered up by fucking everyone, including the current president of the United States. It's like, you know, you can explain something like that away by saying nothing to see here. This is just stupidity, not malice. And I think that's where people out there, and you'll hear it in the comment sections, I'm sure. And I understand it. They'll be like, fuck that. Like, that's just what, that's what the status are going to say. And that's not the lane you come at it from all, like, at all. You're working on your own out there. And it's not like you came from the intel world or something like that. You were a Navy SEAL. It's very different. But a lot of these other guys who do come from those worlds or come from Washington, D.C. and working these think tanks and stuff like that when they use the lines like that. I mean, can you understand why people are like, wait a minute. Yeah. No, I totally get that. That's fair. And again, I'm not really in this.

online world online space uh with that good for you so but the so to your point that one percent of time and this is where this is where you um you can't write off what people are saying right so like you're going to send me some stuff about black rock right i'm honestly going to go into it with the attitude of i don't know i have no idea you might be a hundred percent right you might be a hundred percent wrong yeah i have no idea because i've i've heard the name i've heard the name black rock and larry think usually in a negative way but i i've never looked into it right and so this is where it's important to have an open mind and look at the different facts like so um it's so funny it was i don't know five six years ago my uh my uncle uh he was he was like yeah man they got

this island they got kids out there you know these underage kids and like these these these uh you know these politicians that going out to this island this guy called epstein and i'm like dude i'm like all right okay uncle like like what like what are you talking about like that's insane uncle charlie yeah yeah we lost him we lost him dude and then like all this stuff started coming out. And so then I actually went and went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it and I was like, oh my goodness. He was 100% correct. So I learned very early on anytime one of these conspiracies pops up, if there's even an, if there's even like the slightest amount of like, okay, there's there could be something legit here. It's like you got it. You got to immediately go instead

of having an opinion right off the bat, you have to immediately go, I don't know. I'm not going to, I'm not going to jump in and go like, yeah, 100% agree with you. But I'm not going to be like, no, no, no, no. that doesn't make any sense no way until i've actually looked into it and um because because the the repercussions of getting it wrong even that one percent of time are so disastrous and are so horrible um that you can't you can't ignore it right and that's the thing it takes a lifetime to build up a reputation to trust it takes one second to rip it all down just to rip it all down yeah absolutely you can do a lot of things right and then if you do something so provably wrong it's just human nature that's what people hone in on and focus on and sometimes very righteously so and i think

that you know like probably pretty much everyone out there there's a part of me that views the world as pre-covid and post-covid right yeah and we saw all the things that happened there and so i get it when people are like okay just any of it these days i try to play middle ground on some things and say like again like don't throw a baby out with the bathwater all right so yes all these people here lied let's let's be very wary of anything those people ever say again it but like all these people over here who maybe knew less about that or weren't really a part of it that have a lot of other great ideas let's not just throw out all their great ideas because of their title you know like there has to be some reasonable nature there but i get it you know like even even look in pop culture like you see the attacks joe rogan was subjected to right about stuff that he was largely right about. I'm not saying he was 100% right to play warmer. Bro, he was a lot more right than wrong and the people that attacked him were very wrong on almost everything. And then they would lie to attack him and he's putting out shows every day and it's coming up in different ways and

whatever. And so when I see him after, I thought he handled it with the utmost class by the way and was like such a good example of not freaking the fuck out at people and yelling. But he's still a human being. So when I see him have some stronger opinions now on other things that he wouldn't have had four years ago, sometimes I'm like, man, I wish I wish you would just look at it like a little more balance. But as a human being, I'm like, the fuck am I to say how I would think of that because I'd probably be doing the same thing. Like all these people were saying that fuck them. They must be wrong about this too. Yeah. It's going to happen to all of us. So, you know, we're living more and more in a world now post-COVID where that is a trap you can fall into so how do we not and that's why we're having this

discussion how do we do something like a USA or something like that where we actually keep a lot of the decent things and like whoever these actors are who get in there through the back door we kick them the fuck out yeah I think one of the most important skills in life is is they come hand in hand one is being willing to say I don't know and also being willing to say i was wrong so for example we earlier we were talking about confidence and overconfidence and um this is a perfect example of of that sort of overconfidence versus confidence stuff in in in play so the wiser somebody is the more experienced they have they're going to go you want to know what yeah sometimes these conspiracies are a hundred percent correct oh my gosh like i had no idea and you know maybe whatever eight times or nine times out of 10 it was total baloney right but they they go into it with a this is where i was talking about

where like your confidence level goes down in your opinion because you're more competent does that make sense so you go in and you're like i don't have strong confident opinions about black rock and larry think because i've never looked into it i've never looked into it so i can go into it and i'm like like let's let's see what's up i have no idea what you guys they're talking about um and so but that comes from the experience of oh my uncle told me about epstein island and i thought he was a nut job um and so i'm like oh yeah but then and then there's also like you know the all the covid stuff that happened and like the line that happened and you're like yeah you got you got to at least look at it um without getting you know too dogmatic about it

because then there's all the you know there was a bunch of like uh i don't what was like qanon was like a thing for a while people were saying i don't fully understand what that that whole thing was about either there was like some like cabal of generals who were gonna choose the president and i was just like what is like what is this about like no this is silly you know so it's like some stuff is true some stuff's not true and so it's it's a it's a it's a it's a mark of a a mature mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it i forget who who came up with that quote but there there's somebody who said that i think it was one of the ancient philosophers or something but yeah you have to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it um if you're

going to ever find the truth and um i think that that's such a that's such an important just life skill because there's so much especially in the we live in the age of information and especially with AI and everything now you know you look at I think this is another interesting thing too so AI is going to AI right now everybody's using AI to create content for the internet right and then AI uses content from the internet to create its own opinions so we're about to look at this giant over the course the next few years we're going to like the all of the world is just going to be the AI commenting on AI written articles. That's literally what's going to start happening. And so all these things like, I don't know what, I don't know what that's going to cause.

Certain ideas are just going to get doubled down. I was like, no, we have 57 sources that say such and such. Well, it's because 57 sources went to chat GPT and wrote an article about whatever, you know what I mean? And so like, I think that's going to really change it that way. Dude, that's going to change. It's going to change the nature of truth and it's going to, or not the nature of truth. It's going to change the nature of how people can see truth and where you're, going to trust it. Like AI is going to use AI to come up with its own opinions in the future. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more

with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash the iPorter to learn more. It reminds me, Joe, tell me if I'm getting this right, the old Bo Burnham video about reacting to the reaction and then the reacting to the reaction of the reaction and then where he keeps making these videos where it's just like, sorry, I have your mic off, that's it?

Yeah, yeah, that's it. All right, so it's like just a reaction loop. Okay. But now it's AI's. Yes, that's exactly what it is. That's actually kind of scary, though. Yeah. And it's like, what are the implications for that? Now truth is going to be, I think there's going to be a much higher premium on truth and reality. And it's going to be a lot harder and harder to find it. Because it's just going to, it's going to feed itself. One of my favorite things that I've been able to come across and doing this podcast for hundreds and hundreds episodes now is when I have in people, obviously we're here for three hours. Sometimes people are here for six hours if they keep going and we do two episodes. And it's like, I'm,

I'm oftentimes bringing in people who are an expert on something. It could be an expert on their own story because that's why they're here, or it could be a, you know, a journalist who's an expert on this topic here, whatever it might be. And one of the things I respect the most and I've stated publicly to certain people on camera and certainly a lot off camera is when I ask them a difficult question that's in their lane and they say things like, you know, I don't know. Or they're humble enough to say,

I used to think this and here's why I got better evidence and I think I'm wrong about that and unfortunately the internet often and this existed long before I was on it making content the internet has created this world where we like to incentivize

people saying fuck you you change your opinion or fuck you know you didn't know you need to know about this you're supposed to know everything but I think that we over Delta or whatever you would say the effect of comment sections versus the average person listening And I think a lot of what I've learned over the years, especially when things like this come up, is that a lot of the people listening have also shared my respect for people who, you know, in the course of a three-hour conversation, have the balls to be like, you know, I'm not sure about that.

Now, if someone's saying, I don't know to every fucking question, then maybe they shouldn't be sitting there, and that's my fault for putting them there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you're talking about a million subject matters and intricate questions and things like that, the idea that someone just off the top of their head is going to have the answer to everything is kind of ridiculous. And so I like to, I appreciate that, you know, someone else was actually pointing that out on my podcast, like that idea. And, you know, it's not just me doing it because I always like to reassure those people on that when that's happening. I'm sure listeners out there have heard me do that because it's like we need more of that. We need a little bit more, you know, humble like, hey, things can change or information can change or information may be beyond what I've looked at on the internet because, you know, people now have to make 60 second vertical videos where they tell you every fucking thing that's happening and what they think about it and why they're right because that's what they need to feed the algorithm today. And I don't think that's healthy.

Mm-hmm. It's not healthy. And that's why I was saying, too, there's going to be, there's going to come a point online or wherever. Maybe we're sort of there already is where there's going to be a premium on truth. There's going to be a premium on real non-AI generated ideas and thoughts because people are going to get lazy. They're going to continue to just use AI to come up with all their thoughts and opinions and everything. And I think there's something deeply human about being willing to admit that you're wrong and head your bets a little bit. it too and that's why i said too we were talking about like my sort of my kind of my might my take on foreign policy a little bit and i was like as it stands right now this is my idea and i say that intentionally as it stands right now because you want to know what in five years i'm probably going to have a slightly different a view of foreign policy if not wildly different right and so it's it's important to uh i think one of the most important things is too is you have to be willing to admit that you're wrong but it's also it's not even just about being willing to admit that you're wrong it's not even just about you as an individual

It's the only way that you can find truth. It's the only way that you can find truth. A scientist will never discover, we'll never make a scientific discovery if every single time they do an experiment, it doesn't work and they won't admit that they were wrong. Like, it's never going to work, right? Like, you look at these, you look at like the scientific method

and they'll do 50, 100, a thousand, whatever, iterations of some kind of thing, putting two different kinds of chemicals together to try to finally get something to work. And so it's obvious, it's like well that didn't work right but we as human beings instead of going through a thousand iterations or additional information or looking for additional information we go well yeah this is what i think this is this is my first hypothesis therefore the scientific method says this

must be the truth and it's like no dude that's probably not the truth yeah and it takes time um and then this brings up another thing too it's um in life trial and error is the rule not the exception trial and error trial and error is the rule not the exception in every single thing that you do whether you're you're trying to find a spouse you're going to date multiple people till you find your spouse whether you're starting a business like one of the things that uh you look at entrepreneurs um i forget the number i think it's like six or seven but most entrepreneurs start six or seven businesses before they have an actual business that works um and it's so over and over and over again you're going to develop opinions and ideas and things and you have to be willing to

shift and change because the only thing that's certain is that nothing is certain and that you have to that you have to keep being being willing to evolve over time and so that's why trial and error is is the most important thing and it's okay to hold opinions and say like I truly believe this but you got to also if you're if you're a competent thinker you also have to sit there and go maybe there's that one percent maybe I'm wrong right and that's why you got to go like hey maybe I'm wrong and there's nothing wrong with that I think I think it's refreshing to your point when people say yeah I was actually wrong about this this was my opinion Here's why I thought this.

Like when was the last time you heard a politician go, hey, you want to know what? 18 months ago, I said this on a podcast, right? I said this on a podcast. I was promoting this idea and I was wrong. And the reason I was wrong was because I was thinking A, B, and C. I realized, you know, X, Y, and Z was the reality. So I shifted over to here.

And here's why I truly believe this. Think about how much you would respect a politician or a president or a senator who came out and did that. You would go, okay, now I can actually trust what you're saying. I because all the other stuff that you're saying you actually truly believe you're not going to double down and go like yeah because every time there's a scandal with the politicians like oh we meant to do that yeah yeah we meant to do that and it was uh you know it was uh this was yeah this is the this is the thing and like oh no that didn't happen that didn't you know or somebody else made a mistake they always come up with some way to instead of just going like yeah we messed up somebody hacked our twitter or or yeah i tweeted this and it was stupid but instead of saying that they're like oh we got hacked on twitter the chinese hacked our twitter and it's like no he didn't uh you know so that that that sort of thing but just be willing to admit that you're wrong yeah that's the only way to grow that's the only way to live absolutely man well you mentioned you mentioned in there the idea it's very interesting to me of like AI in this age now building on top of AI to create a circle of loop on information based on

AI which creates a potential in infinity loop of untruth where you know one thing that's wrong grows into a whole tree of wrong and people don't even realize it because they don't know where it came from in the first place it's very scary to me but also So from a, from your perspective, still being on the front lines of things, how much do you know about or have you looked into how much AI is threatening to change warfare? So I haven't personally dealt with anything where AI was changing warfare in the, in real time personally. I know that it is. There's a lot of stuff that's being deployed in in Ukraine, for example. Like lots of new technology is being developed because of the war in Ukraine. right everybody and so we're talking about military industrial complex here there's actually a slight

benefit there to to to to the uh maybe very clear here the war is not good right but we're bad war bad war bad developing technology to stop the next war good um so like we're getting the chance to like try out all these new things and iterate really really quick so we're preparing for the for the next war right and effort works for palanteer by the yeah yeah yeah palatier i do i do this podcast is sponsored by palatier yeah and and Pfizer um so so crap what were we talking about before that i told you just lost my train of thought i'm an idiot i'm sorry i shouldn't know that too it was a joke but you were talking about how it's going to change it war is bad but it's going to change yeah so i haven't personally seen it um using

it all but i've heard of multiple uh use cases so um you feed all the information of a battlefield the map terrain um your troop numbers your ammunition amount the amount of fuel that you have, you feed all this information in there. And then you could, you could have these AI programs. I know they're developing them where, okay, what is the, like building a timeline of how quickly I can deploy my troops and how far they can go before, like, let me know when I need to do resupplies, how far can my, you know, my aircraft go, all this kind of stuff. And it can factor all these things in.

And so you can build a much more, so that way you have a much better idea of what your, of what your military is capable of, right? So it's sort of like Sun Tzu's, know yourself, know your enemy, you'll never lose in a thousand battles. It really helps you know yourself because you can feed information into it, right? And then you can also use it to sort of predict maybe what the enemy is going to do. The information that you currently have, you can ask questions about, you know, like, what am I missing here? What am I not thinking? What pattern am I looking at here?

What pattern are I missing here? So that's as far as like battlefield analyzing, that's one thing. now going into the technology itself so obviously drones are now like the thing and they're even like all over burma now it's crazy so like jungle warfare with drones and stuff is going on it's insane and so now you can have autonomous drones that are going to much more accurately be able to identify targets and figure out where you know where things are and they they might be able to listen to sounds of gunfire this that the other thing it might be able to analyze like oh that's a that's an m16 our guys don't use m16s our guys are using this all right so fly over here so

There's a million different things are. I think a Ukrainian sniper just set the new world record for the farthest kill shot. I think it was, I saw this somewhere. I think it was like four kilometers or something, something insane. Four kilometers? I think so. I think so. Yeah. And I, I saw the headlines that I saw said he used AI. I don't know if this is true or not.

I didn't look into it, but that's another thing, too. You can use AI. You can put it, you can use that to build into the ballistics of, these weapons. Ukrainian sniper claims to have killed two Russian soldiers with longest shot, longest ever shot of 2.5 miles. The sniper was part of the Privid sniper unit defending the key Ukrainian town of Pukvrooks. I'd definitely say that wrong.

From advances by Putin's forces. Yeah, does it say anything about AI? Can you do at Command F and see if the AI is in there? Yeah, artificial intelligence. The second, sorry, the second line there said artificial. intelligence uh right where is the seconds the record shot was uh was fired on august 14th with the assistance of AI using a 14.5 millimeter alligator rifle yeah so that's that's pretty gnarly so yeah you can just you can more accurately predict uh information and and and make better decisions

it's going to help the commanders it's going to help vehicle drivers it's going to help fighter pilots it's going to help everybody because it just processes information so much faster Imagine if the Raper had AI in Afghanistan, we might have won that war. That's all you need. That's all you need. Like four miles away, got them. Yeah. The frustrating, well, not the frustrating thing, but the reality, though, is the enemy is going to use it too.

The enemy always gets a vote. So that's why there's these wars of, like, arms races, right, where you're trying to, like, outdo the other person. I've seen it over the last, you know, three, four, five years in Burma, where the rebels started using like very basic drones and then the burma army started using drones and they started come up the jammers and so the so then the so then the rebel started using drones that could go up higher above the jammers and they started getting even better jammers and then now and it's just this crazy arms race where there's just like these giant drones flying around like dropping bombs and there's jammers and stuff everywhere and it's uh it's just by point with that is just technology totally changes

absolutely yeah all right we've been talking about burma a bunch today given a bunch of previews but let's get let's get deep in the weeds just very quickly in episode 244 you went through the whole story with fighting isis and and and and iraq and even when you were with the navy seals but then right after when you immediately went back over there so i don't want to retell all that people can go watch that episode but just very quickly what made you want us for people that aren't familiar what made you want to start stronghold and what was the mission from the beginning and then how did you end up in burma okay perfect so um i started an organization called stronghold rescue and relief it's It's a nonprofit organization, and I started it right after I left the military, but within like a year of leaving the military.

And the goal was to create some kind of organization where I could hire veterans to go back in the conflict zones and help families who were caught in the middle. Originally, the intention was always humanitarian aid, that kind of thing, but then also helping the locals build up their defensive capabilities using what they already have. So it's like mentorship for what they already have there. and so that was the original goal and so um after the iraq incident which we talked about last episode um i was in thailand doing um doing a moitai camp recovering from the gunshot wound and um some of the some of the guys who worked in burma heard that i was there and so they said can we can you know through mutual friends are like can we want to talk to him because we think that there's the ceasefire is about to break that tribe currently had a ceasefire with the burma army and so they said we think

the ceasefire is going to fall and we need to start preparing now because within the next 12 to 18 months we're going to be in total war with the Burma army and we're not prepared and so I met these guys agreed to go in sort of as an advisor to show how to better use what they already have and that's sort of how the Burma stuff started working but that's kind of how I got started into it but then I realized eventually that there's a much bigger geopolitical game being played in Burma so if you look at a map when you look at where Burma is it's right on the, you know, southern portion of Asia itself and has access to the Andaman Sea. And we got it up here on the screen. Joe's got it Bengal, Andaman Sea. You see right down there. Okay, cool. So, Joe, can you actually, can you zoom out a little bit? I want to, this will help make my point. Keep zooming out a little bit. So we can, to where we can see Russia and China. A little more. There's good. Okay, cool. So if you look at where China has access to the ocean, right? We have the South China.

to see all this stuff you look at where russia has access to the ocean it's all really far north and so um if you look at what happened during world war two and this is important to understand like what's happening today so during world war two the japanese were trying to conquer china and so in order to conquer china they sent hundreds of thousands of troops to burma and you think why the hell would you go to burma if you're trying to conquer china well it's because if you look at the map there, Burma is a backdoor directly into China. And so you can get resupplied by the sea, you can get resupplied by the air, you can get resupplied. If China has control and influence over Burma, then any kind of blockade on China's eastern

coast is going to be relatively moot. And it sort of opens up an entire new corridor for them, a corridor. So that's why the Japanese sent hundreds of thousands of troops into Burma, Myanmar. Kind of like taking Sicily to go into Europe and take Germany. yeah yeah yeah yeah so you got to go for the underbelly so now what's going on is um china is heavily backing the mianmar military the burma army and the burma army is in charge of the country so they don't have a president or a prime minister they have a general general meow lie is the general in charge of the country general what meow lie it's like meow lie or meongleang or something

yeah exactly meow uh yeah he's definitely not meow uh he's an evil he's an evil guy um so what's what's going on right now is the chinese and the russians are building up uh they're they're supporting the burma army because the chinese and russians get this are building deep water ports in the south of burma damn it yeah they're building those ports right now and not only does burma have a lot of natural resources and things like that um but they want access to those deep water ports so china um and russian are building there now china also has oil pipelines um that go through burma and right now they're not very secure because the rebels of course you know try to choke that off and a lot of the air power

that the that the burma military has actually comes from russia i just got a message um like a week and a half ago my guys in burma were like hey three russian warships just showed up and dropped off four uh russian fighter jets and a bunch of russian troops got off uh there to help sort of set up these these fighter jets and during my trip when I was there in in December this last December I was woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of a like a thousand pound bomb going off maybe half a mile away from me because this fighter jet had come through the middle of the night and dropped a bomb in this nearby village we were not in the village but it was a Russian it was a Russian built jet that could fight at night and so we didn't hear it coming

nobody heard it coming it just really popped up over the mountain put a precision bomb right in uh right actually ironically it hit the huts hit the two huts that myself and my other guys had been sleeping in three nights earlier and somebody had seen us there so i don't know if that was a targeted attack on us i don't know it's probably 80 percent it was going for us uh but my point is like that's they're bringing in these russian these advanced russian aircraft piloted by burma army pilots the burma army also sends a lot of their officers to Russia to learn how how the Russians fight and basically and so when you're when you're dealing with the Burma army they fight extremely aggressively and do not care about the casualties that they take for example because they they think like the Russians do they think like the Russian military

and it's very different so the U.S. is not used to fighting Russian troops and so like when I was there and I started to see and was advising and showing these guys what to do talk about needing to admit that you were wrong there were times where i made a decision or i was i made it i i advised them to do something because i was thinking um like an american and then i realized oh my word no these guys fight like russians and so i had to you know it changed the change the change the way that i like advise them would advise them on what they should do so geopolitically china and russia are backing up the burma military because they want access to the south china or to the to the and to the c now let's think about this let's play this out a few years let's say

China decides to go for Taiwan, right? Let's say they just do a blockade of Taiwan. This is just one scenario. There's a thousand different scenarios, right? China decides to blockade Taiwan to go for Taiwan. Well, what's something that we could do that's non-kinetic where we're not firing, we're not shooting at them? It's like, well, we could potentially do a counterblockade.

We could do a counterblockade of mainland China. Well, now that no longer is an option if these deep water ports get built because now China can last for as long as they want to and they can just bring everything in through Burma so what so then what do we have to do well now we have to take half of our navy and go over there well guess what now our blockade isn't as effective right so there's a there's a much deeper um sort of strategic move that Russia and China are making right now that nobody's paying attention to and the level of atrocities of what the Burma army is doing to the civilians is just uh it's it's unthinkable it's so beyond evil

um can you be before you get into the details of that because I I do want the details so that people can understand this can you you did a little bit in that answer there but that was more focused on russian china which is great but can you give like a full outline of the history of what the origins of the struggle were and like how it got to where it is today before we even get to you know who's built imports and who's funding or not funding yeah yeah gotcha so the the the conflict that's in burma is primarily an ethnic one so it's not necessarily religious as primarily an ethnic conflict um so the british made uh made burma a a colony um a few hundred years ago i forget the timeline on that uh it ended during world war two those when the british

left but even before that the ethnic uh burmese people who control who are the they are the ethnic majority in the country and they control the center of the country for hundreds of years possibly thousands of years they had been trying to subjugate all of the ethnic minority groups that are in Burma so if so so in Burma all along the border regions there are they're like a they're like a dozen different major tribes with entirely different languages entirely different cultures it's so it's not like they're all speaking the same language and everything like that it's it's entirely different entirely different languages and so the ethnic Burmese population has

been trying to subjugate all the other all the other groups and so of course naturally all the other groups fight back but the problem is none of the groups by themselves are strong enough to defeat the the the Burmese right and so this has led to just non-stop conflict because the Burma the Burma army isn't strong enough to control all the areas that it wants to control but the other guys aren't quite as united because they don't have the same language and you know there's geographical issues and so during World War II the ethnic Burmese the Burma army they actually sided with the Japanese so they sided with the japanese because they wanted to get rid of the british uh they want to get rid of the their what they

saw as british oppressors right whereas all the um all the ethnic minority groups not all of them but the vast majority of them they wanted the british to stay um because they were like this is great the british are protecting us from this large ethnic majority group that like wants to you know control us and so the japanese come in the ethnic uh Burmese fought alongside the Japanese. Well, then when the Burmese realized that Japan was losing the war, they switched sides and started fighting alongside the British to get rid of the Japanese because they wanted to maintain control of the country. And so at the end of the war, the British left and who got all the weapons and ammunition and everything, the Burma Army got a lot of that stuff. And so

then that's the beginning of this. And at the time that some of the other ethnic minority groups were strong enough to resist properly, but for the last 75 years or whatever it's been, the ethnic minority groups have been continuing to just slowly but surely lose ground. The Burma Army will go into areas. They'll control the area. And then they'll start to sort of do like re-education stuff. So you're no longer allowed to speak. So they'll control the schools and they'll say the kids are not allowed to speak the language of their own tribe.

They can only speak Burmese. and they're not allowed to have the religious customs of maybe the tribe where they were from in some in some instances as well and if you resist well we're just either the Burma army will just come in and rape and murder and destroy whatever they want to if they want your village gone they want your village gone and that's what they're going to do so it's not necessarily an ethnic cleansing to the point where it's like if they see you well it's not to the point where if they see you they're just going to kill you yeah it's but it's yeah it's but it's yeah it's It's like, no, if they see you, your village better bow to them and do as they say, then we'll let you live. But you're going to start speaking our language. It's a, to me, the way I'm interpreting it, it's a passive cultural ethnic cleansing. Yes, that's a good way. Because they want to make sure that whatever ideology exists within this generation is gone for the next one. And that is, in a lot of ways, as sinister to me.

And what, of course, goes without saying is as sinister as anything is the fact that when they don't, they are killing them. so there's a genocide yeah yeah absolutely absolutely so it's it's all of that um and there's also that sort of dehumanization factor that goes on because like uh where the the burma army looks at the other ethnic minorities as like inferiors you know it's typical typical racist crap and so then they justify all the evil that they do so that's the way the war's been going for the last like 75 plus years what happened a couple years ago so the burma army set up like basically a fake governmental system it it's not really a democracy Um, and so, but they, but they, they, they sort of set one up. They went through the motions to sort of say like, oh, we're, we're, you know, we're trying to make steps for democracy. They're about to do the same thing again here in a few months, by the way. Um, and so what happened was they, they, they set that up. And then I think it was, I believe it was 2021. Um, so many wars kicked off around 20, 21, 22. I'll be it was 2021. Um, um, the Burma military basically did away with their, their, uh, um, um,

sort of their fake democracy and so that's why everybody if you look online it's like well there was a coup in 2021 you know there's this big coup it's like really wasn't a coup because they were the the democracy was sort of fake anyway but anyway they got rid of all pretences of that and the military came in and was like no we're not even going to have these discussions anymore we're not going to play this game anymore we're done and so that was a huge mistake the population of ethnic burmese people who had sort of been indifferent were necessarily they didn't necessarily hate the ethnic minority groups they were just sort of like they didn't like the birma army they don't really care about the ethnic minority groups they're just trying to live their lives um when that happened uh the people saw

any chance of democracy go away and so then the entire country rose up against the burma army and that's been this new phase of the war for the last few years where the burma army's been losing a lot of ground and been getting their butts kicked because now everybody on all sides is and including the cities where they used to be totally peaceful and fine um where they were safe the burm army was safe well now it's not like that anymore. Now the people in the cities are rising up and throwing Molotov cocktails at them and, you know, fighting, like actively fighting.

Why do you think? Because actually, before I asked this question, can we Google this? Death toll in Myanmar, 24. Let's see last year. Yeah. What it was. Okay?

And let's put, let's be callous and just put math on it first. second. Civil War report conflict that killed over 52,000 people since January 20, 21, a figure higher than any armed conflict globally during this time. Okay. That says what I need to say next, or it gives me the juice I need here. Why does the media choose not to cover something like this when even to be cynical for a second if we're going to look at the media as having you know dark alliances with intelligence and things like that this seems like this is something intelligence would want covered heavily because it has massive geopolitical implications against some of their

largest enemies in the world including their number one enemy by a GDP perspective which is china to be able to get access to a country like this why is this not being pounded through not that i agree with that system that they have in place by the way but seeing as that is the system where you know intel feeds the media all this shit why are they not pounding this into the into the front pages because i mean it's unfortunately like you know the quote if it leads it leads like uh it's horrible but yeah this has all the makings of that kind of story and yet no one fucking talks about it um so two angles on that one is again i don't think there's any malice here i think there are so many things going on everyone's focused on israel they're focused on ukraine

And they're focused on, you know, the, whatever the administration's doing. And so it becomes very difficult to track every single thing that's going on. So for me, Burma is like a heavy, it's like a major part of my life. Like my wife's from there. Like it's a, it's a, it's very personal. So for me, this is, this is my thing, right? But you could also ask the question, why aren't we talking about there's, there's like seven or eight like major wars going on in Africa right now? Right.

No one's talking about it. The media's not talking about it. So part of it is because I, this is my honest opinion. i think that there's too many things going on and so they just sort of focus on the main so that people care about but this is the this is the second part about it of the answer is i don't think people fully understand the geopolitical ramifications of what's going on in burma right i understand maybe why people are like okay so some wars going on in angola like what does that have to do with us or like d rc it's like okay maybe we want some you know some rare earth minerals deals in d rc like

okay i can kind of see that but like this is major this is the russians and the chinese are making their next moves, making their five and ten year plans right now. I don't think, I just think they don't know about it. And so this is one, like, well, okay, let me, let me rephrase. People know about it, but they don't pay attention to it because they don't understand the geopolitical aspect of it. And this is something

I'm trying to change. This is why I come on and talk about this stuff. And I will be also be making some, some intentional pushes toward media to try to explain some of the stuff and try to get them to start talking about. That's one of the reasons why I'm in town as well, is to try to get, get this

story into into their sort of lexicon where they understand it i was just talking with the journalist last night and i was explaining a bunch of this and he was like i have never heard about this he's like how come i've never heard about this and i was like well that's why i'm talking to you like we need this is this is this there's and he was like i never heard about the geopolitical aspect of this like i had no idea russia and china were so interested in this little country and we look at it on map you're like oh yeah this makes sense and so i'm like yeah well this is why i'm trying to get you this information so i think there i think a year from now it could be different i think a year from now people might know where Burma's out on the map maybe and i'm trying to make that push

um so people understand because it's not it's not even just an issue of you know uh you know because like oh i care about the situation it's not even it it's like i care about my country i love the united states and i want us to be successful encountering these evil empires that are expanding and backing you know and they're doing these um terrible atrocities that i see firsthand and i know the people friends and I watch them get killed and I watch them lose their legs and I see their villages get bombed and I go to their houses and I meet their family like I like this is very personal to me because I see it but I'm trying to and I care but it's like this is about helping the United States this is also about helping to prevent the next war sure and making it less likely the

weaker that they are the less likely Russia and China are to to do something squirrely and so I think a big piece of that puzzle is Burma and so I'm trying to trying to educate people on that yeah yeah and where i can help with that we're we're going to do that that's that's why i like having you in as well because you're out there doing things i i like having people back who are constantly coming across new stuff that they can bring to this table which is just like a bullshit podcast studio but you can you can say like i'm doing this thing at this crazy place in the world and you guys don't know about it so let's get a full conversation so that you can understand it's like the coolest part about what i do yeah but

when you first got there and you know you've been told what's going on on the ground it's one thing to be told it's another thing to go see it what what was the first moment that you had personally where it became far more than a number on a page and it was up close and personal and you're like whoa this is worse than i thought the the first time okay i'll tell you about the first time like i came across like the Burma army like in a in a combat situation so I'd been working in the this was like 2018 I had been working in the jungle by myself literally just me solo operator for five or six months with the with the local defense guys going from territory to territory just you know advising and at one point they decided to go do an operation now keep in mind

this is during the ceasefire this air quotes a ceasefire that's going on and so So I didn't think I was going to see anything. I didn't think anything was going to happen. I was like, you know, there's a ceasefire going on. Well, so anyway, they wanted us to go do this reconnaissance mission in an area where they said there was fighting happening. And I said, well, what do you mean there's fighting happening? They're like, well, there's a, there's a, you know, there's fighting going on here. So I was like, all right, well, let's go take a look.

So we hike up to this area. We walk for several days through the jungle to get up to this remote area. We get up on top of this mountain. And I was actually sitting behind a, I was actually sitting behind a, sniper rifle and very, very far. And I'm, I get, I get in the scope and I look and I see this this entire Burma Army camp and this long road of just hundreds of Burma Army guys, like ants crawling all over this hill. And they're in the process of building a road deeper into the Keran territory, deeper into the tribal territory. So what was going on was even though

there's an air quotes ceasefire, the Burma Army was using the opportunity. to build infrastructure in a place where we don't want you to have infrastructure basically they were using it to build a road and so they were building a road and so the local guerrilla guys were fighting the Burma army and they were trying to stop them they're setting up Claymore's they're trying to set up ambushes but they don't really you know what to do and they're they're they're doing their best to stop these guys and so then I realized so we basically they reported back to the to the general and he was like yeah we I told you he's like they're like this because he was at the politicians, the leader of this, of this rebel group was like, mad at the politicians because he's like, they say there's a ceasefire, but I know there's not a ceasefire. I'm glad you see it, right? And I was like, yeah, there's definitely fighting happening here. Anyway, so the, the rebels kind of went up into a position. I wasn't there. I just kind of, I was watching from like two hills over and was kind of watching what they were doing. One of the, one of the rebels snuck in, and he fired one shot and he uh i believe he probably he probably killed the berm army guy um who was trying to

you know build this road and when he fired that one shot there was this hail of bullets and gunfire that i had never like heard before it was the sound of like 150 dudes all opening up with automatic weapons and rockets and mortars and it was all the berm army guys trying to kill whoever it is that just had just fired that one shot and it was this you would never heard anything like that before well i and training i had heard stuff but this was a whole different level this is like hundreds of people shooting so when you're on a seal operation are you doing training i've heard i've heard like thousands of rounds a minute going but this was like a sustained battle or a sustained volley of fire from like 150 guys like in the seals it's you're dealing with you know maybe 30 40 50

guys max shooting but like this was an actual combat scenario where there's a hundred yeah like i said like 100 maybe you know 150 guys all firing at the same time rockets you know everything so i've i've heard this sound But this was, but it was, there was this juxtaposition that I realized one bullet and then thousands of bullets. And it was, and listening to the sound of this, of this battle that happened, I realized, oh, this is, this is a, this is a perfect example of how strong and powerful this army is versus these little guys in the jungle just trying to stop these guys from trying to stop the Burma army from building a road close to the villages where their, where their families live. um and so that was the first time when i realized like that was my first time when i when i got to the war and there and realized oh man this is a whole different animal this is something i didn't i don't you know fully understand crazy that a dude comes from mosell and then is able to say something like that that puts it in perspective because mosell i mean all you got to do is look at imagery of that

and it yeah before we even get to some of the videos you literally have it's just like you can't believe that exists in the 21st century but it does yeah yeah it absolutely does and this was jungle warfare and i'd never been in like actual combat in the jungle and so i was just seeing this and just the sound of it um like a bad like a scary one but like like this is this isn't real this i'm in a jungle and this is happening you know yeah i guess there is some of that there's a bit of uh sometimes it's a little bit surreal yeah even now honestly i still go back there i'm like what the hell am i doing here like how did how did uh a kid from milwaukee end up here in the middle of the jungle with some, like, rebel group, you know, try to, like, you know, shoot down, like, fighter jets and, you know, defend villages.

Like, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, so it can be a little surreal at times, but, but yeah, that was, like, my first time there in the jungle seeing this juxtaposition of, like, this incredibly, like, weak force up against this just Goliath, this Goliath army. Do we know how big the army is? Can we Google that? That's a great question. Just to get let's I like giving numbers to people on some of the stuff just to see mathematically what you're up against because you can picture the weapons and the advantages 150,000 to 400,000 personnel who have access to insane weapons that the regular people and rebels do not as you correctly point out Correct and then how big is the population in the M.R approximately and again, it's not like the whole population's fighting them. You know, there's rebel forces that are fighting them and then men women and children

So there's roughly around 55 million people as of last year that live in the country. And I would imagine a lot of them obviously don't support the military. But the military has a concentrated hold on power. They may only be, you know, 250,000 of them if I split the difference there, roughly. You know, but they have access to the most weapons and the biggest, bad, as scary as people, and they have access to the outside sources that can get them things. So you've explained outside, you know, there's. some nefarious relationships with other countries and stuff like that where there's weapon

trades what are the other ways that they are funding their existence perhaps nefariously it is it just they're you know taking tax dollars from people or are they dealing coke to other countries like what how how do they get their get the income to be able to to get all the backup that they have they they steal and sell a lot of um natural resources sources. So there's lots of rare earth minerals. There's lots of gold, jade, emerald, all kinds of stuff in the hills there. The other thing, though, is they sell what's called Yaba, which is Yaba. They call it Yaba. It's crystal meth. So there's a huge amount of drugs and stuff that comes out of Burma and goes into all of Southeast Asia. So there's a huge, there's a huge drug trade. There we go. And that funds a lot of this stuff. Is that Y, A, B, B, B, A, B, B. Oh, Joe's already got it. Look at that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, you see the little pills there. Dude, and this is crazy, too. So they will give their soldiers this, this crystal meth. Of course they do. Before they go to battle. That's right. And I've seen it.

I've seen it. And these guys, they're like zombies. They just, no fear. They don't care. It was a couple years ago. The rebels had taken this town. And so the Burma Army was sending reinforcements come in to take back this town and the Burma army had to come up this long road and the

the rebels knew exactly the direction they had to come from so they had a bunch of ambushes and stuff set and so what the Burma army did is they brought in and I watched all this happen they brought in a bunch of fighter jets and bombers and bombed the crap out of everything alongside the road of course where the rebel guys were but then um I started hearing this noise it was like this boom boom boom and I was like is that music like is there a concert going on over there. And so the, the rebels that were up closer to the front, they radioed back and they said the, uh, the Burma army has a giant truck with these huge speakers on it. They're blasting like this like death metal, um, like Burmese military music. And they're all shooting guns into

the air and they're all on Yaba. They're all, they're all on crystal mess. So literally what they did in prep, so what the, what the Burma army did in preparation to do this counterattack. where they had all these guys on drugs and were blaring this music so that way these guys would just rush the rebel positions after the rebel positions had just been hit with all these airstrikes and stuff of course our guys couldn't hold we took a bunch of casualties and so that's and so the Burma army came in like a bunch of like Nazis zombies like the sound of like thunder to the sound of yeah whatever this music was yeah and so like I personally I personally witnessed and saw that saw that happen yeah look at this in Thailand it went by Ya Kiyan. I definitely said that wrong. Sorry to my Thai friends. Hard work, which means hardworking pill. Then as Yamah, which means horse medicine.

And then Jabba, which means crazy pill. These fucking translations are nuts. In 1996, according to an episode of the Televote Vision series Drugs Inc., it is commonly referred to in North Thailand as Chokhali. It's dangerously close to chocolate. Due to its alleged sweet taste, there it is, and chocolate you smell. In Myanmar, formerly Burma, it is also called Kiethi, which means literally button, athi, and palarkar.

In Malaysia, it is no... How do you keep track of all this? Like, we just call it meth. Like, you know what I mean? Like, let's keep it simple. In China, it's called Mr. Magoo. Magoo, look at that, yeah. Like, what is this even...

And I feel like you get executed in China if they catch you with this. Yeah, yeah, probably. Yeah, unless you're the ones selling it and they... Right. And they're taking it to the other countries. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, yeah. So it's, it's, uh, really bizarre. I actually, I saw this other situation where, um, there was a sniper. One of the, one of the, uh, rebel snipers was taking a shot at this, uh, Burma army gun. I was watching it through. I was watching it through a scope. And so there's this Burma army soldier and he's standing out there kind of by himself on the side of this hill. And so it's a very far shot. So the sniper fires and the bullet lands, um, like five or six feet away from this Burma army soldier. And as I'm watching this, the Burma Army soldier turns, looks directly in the way that, in the direction that the gunfire came from, put up his arms like this and started yelling, ah, and like laughing.

And so the sniper took another shot, went in pretty close. And he just started taunting. He was like, it's like beating his chest. Fucking Tropic Thunder. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But he's, yes, imagine that. Imagine that, but he's not getting hit. And so he's just like, he's, so he's like taunting the sniper.

And I'm like, what is wrong with this guy? Like he's on Yaba. He doesn't care. And then I think the third round hit like right at the guy's ankles or something. And then he jumped into a trench. But up until that point, he was, I mean, so stupid. So unbelievably stupid. But it also enables them to, it's sort of like it's the same stuff the Nazis were using that allowed them to do blitzkriegs, right?

It's the same stuff. And so like they march really fast. They show up in places where you wouldn't expect them to show up. And then also while they're on this stuff, they become like, they become like demons, right? And so when they go into a village, just this is why they do, this is one of the reasons why they do the evil things that they do with the villagers is because they're all hopped up on, hopped up on this stuff. To your knowledge, not to get too graphic here, but I mean, these are realities on the ground. To your knowledge, when they take over villages and stuff by force or, you know, people aren't complying. are the soldiers ordered to do things like you know are the the women there or is that just

it's just a natural side effect of what they're doing um it's going to be it's going to be actually be both so the the the officers will force their guys to do stuff um but they're not getting much resistance from the from the guys themselves because they've been indoctrinated this idea that these people are ethnic minorities they're inferior it's just you know your textbook case of racism and then And there's just this weird, you know, power dynamic, I guess, that happens in those situations where guys that are on the bad side. And this is also, so when you look at something like sexual assault and war, for me, one of the first things I do when I look at a war and I don't know who the different, who the two sides are or like who I should have an opinion on, which side is doing all the sexual assault for the most part? like those are i mean every single time i can't think of a single case where the side that's doing the sexual assault is the side that is on is that is on the side of the right um on on

of right and good they're they're always always always always the bad guy and then you have cases where both sides are doing that to each other and then in those cases like you have wars where like both sides are the bad guys um it's it's and it's it's such a textbook cut and dry thing it's it's it's an almost perfect system for looking at like who you should side with in a particular war which side is going in and uh and committing sexual assault and it shows you which side is full of hatred and racism and anger and uh and are just like demonic barbarians and which sides are actually you know fighting for what they might believe is a good cause you know i'm really glad i can't comprehend how you could ever think that way that that

and and it's just it's something that's happened throughout human history and the fact that it still happens today is just insane to me but how common it is in armed conflicts around the world everywhere it's extremely for this to be a side effect of whatever you want to call it of what conquerors do to me it's it's the most not masculine thing you could possibly do it's so beta it's yeah it's it's it's a disgusting it's like i can't you understand what i'm saying i i know exactly i can't i can't even process what like how what does that even be a thing yeah why is this why is this even turning you on to do that you're just you're striking the worst fear in someone who has utter disgust for you how is that and and you're you're doing like the lowest thing you can do outside of murdering someone maybe maybe as low because i mean you basically murder their soul when you do that like i don't this is so this is something i think about often uh not this particular question but just the

evil of just the nature of evil itself yeah and the reality is one is that everybody thinks that they're the good guy no matter what so you have to keep that in mind but but number two the more important thing is that ideas have consequences ideas and ideology have consequences you cannot fathom this this evil atrocious thing because you were raised right you were raised in western civilization we respect women we protect women that's the most mass the most it's interesting you said like that's so that's so non-masculine it's so beta to do something like that because you've been taught that a meant because the idea that you have in your head is an ideal man protects and cares for women and and earns their trust earns their trust and takes care of them and

you know and that's that's what you do you're you're there to protect and provide and defend them so that's the idea that you have in your head these other guys in these other cultures they are not raised with the idea that women are to be defect defended and protected and stuff maybe in certain instances maybe their mom maybe their wife maybe their sister but other than that um their their ideology is not that um women as a whole deserve respect because they've not been taught and they are taught that as a man it is masculine to take what you want right so the idea is it is masculine so the idea that they have in their head is that it's it's masculine to to you know to take what you want whereas the the western idea of

masculinity is ultimately an act of service it's an active sacrifice it's an active provision it's an act of defense it's an act of you you know putting yourself uh between the bullets and the and the and the women and children right and so this is why ideas absolutely have consequences this is why ideology is so important and this is why you know it's like tying it into the united states and our cultural the cultural questions that we have um it is so it is so vital that the right ideas and that the good ideas uh proliferate in society because when people start to um When people start to accept certain bad ideas, there's these unintended but completely foreseeable consequences, right? Because you can say, like, what's the harm in saying that, like, a man takes what he wants, right?

What's the harm in saying that? At first glance, you think, like, oh, that's not a bad idea. It's like, yeah, a man's going to go out there, you know, whatever, he's going to do his thing. But it's like, no, that's selfishness. And that ultimately, that guy who's thinking in those terms, he's going to go out to war and he's going to start taking what he wants because that's what it means to be a man. whereas American soldiers are going to show up and they're going to, you know, be covering people with their bodies as air strikes or whatever are coming in. And it's an entirely different thing. And so when I look at, to tie this back into American society, when I look at the divisions that we have in our country, it's because we have two entirely different sets of values, which is basically just another way of saying two entirely different ideas about how the world works and about how it should work and about how humans should behave. And this is where morality comes into it.

This is where, you know, religion comes into it because as a, I think, so my, so I just had a daughter, I heard somebody funny, I heard somebody, I heard somebody say something funny. And they said, uh, children are little barbarians when they're born. They're just little barbarians coming into the world and it is your job to civilize them, right? And there's something true to that because it's like, I mean, my daughter's only five months old. So she's just like a little angel that just wants to eat and cuddle. but as she gets older she's going to want to say no she's going to want to start hitting people she's going to want to scream when she doesn't get what she wants so well how do i how do i correct that behavior take her to burn as she gets all yeah well so what i'm going to do is i'm going to put ideas

into her head and i'm going to tell her like oh no this is how humans are supposed to behave this is how a young lady behaves this is how a good person behaves and so behavior is dictated by the ideas that you have in your head it's like a computer program the computer the hardware is all the same it's what code did you put in there what is the language that you put in there because that's how people are going to actually think and then that's what's going to end up having the results and so this is why i can't stress it enough having the right um having the right ideas and going back to what we were talking about earlier where you have to be willing to find truth um is so important because then if we don't have truth if people don't have the right ideas in their head if they're not willing to find

truth well then civilization just decays back to our natural barbarian tendency right all great points man it's uh you know we we can only know be fortunate enough in some cases to know the environments that that we've come up in and in this country we are even in places that aren't as well off we are so much better off than the rest of the world in so many ways and there's things that luckily don't a lot of us are fortunate to not have come to our front door that then when we hear about it, coming to someone else's front door, it's like, how does that even become a thing? But now that we have a layout of what's happening over there and everything, I want to get to exactly what your guy's mission is on the ground right now

in a second, but you were going through the Russia and China funding to build ports and creating dark alliances is the standing right now. I want to focus in on China for a minute because obviously Russia has a lot going on in Ukraine and that's a whole rabbit hole that we'd be here for hours on but with china who's been very successful through the belt and road initiative at building economic influence which includes funding situations where there's a war footing going on in some of these countries it would appear obviously that's what they're doing now so there's funding going from them to the to the to the Burmese military they're giving them weaponry and stuff in exchange for port space what what is the full nature of the I don't know, financial or, you know, a mutual beneficiary society relationship that that decides have at this time. So when the, when the coup happened, there was a there was a period where China actually kind of backed off a little bit and they were not helping the Burma army because they were, China was sitting there and looking at the rebel groups and it looked like the rebel groups were going to take out the Burm army. Now that it's been several years, the Chinese a few months

ago, one of the leaders of the Burma Army went to China, and basically there was this big conversation that they had these meetings. And then from that point forward, China's policy went back to shift, it was shifted back toward helping the Burma Army. So what does that tell us about China's intentions? China doesn't care who's in charge. They just want to make sure that they have access to the rare earth minerals. They want to make sure that they have access to the ports. They want to make sure that their pipeline is secure. And they'll help anybody. They like the winner. They just want to back the winner. Right. And I'm sure there's some discussions with the Russians as well to make sure all that's all that's there the nature of the

actual deals themselves i don't know because that stuff's not public they i don't know how much money the burma army or so that china might be giving to a burma army general uh you know whatever i don't know but i do know the that they are bringing in a ton of weapons so i'm getting all these photos as well uh it's not just weapons like like bullets and bombs and stuff they're the china is now over the last few months has started bringing in a lot of drugs own technology, specifically in the places where they are planning to build their ports. And there's also discussions around a nuclear power facility, which I believe is something that the Russians are wanting to, but I could be wrong with that.

It's either Russia or China, but there's discussions about building a nuclear power facility. So the Chinese, their entire goal is just to be able to de facto have access to that entire country as a logistics hub. and they'll back anybody they'll uh you know whoever's basically whoever's winning so there's no there's no sort of moral code there they're sort of doing uh china first policy uh at the expense of uh at the expense of anybody in burma and they and again they don't care they know exactly how the burm army is using the drones they know exactly how those uh how the how they're using the jets some of the jets of the burm army has are actually from china so the the jets that bombed us

those were chinese those were chinese jets that's awesome yeah it's always a good time Yeah. Even if you can't see the, just real quick, even if you can't see the money trail, like you were saying, the fact that you already know the weaponry trail, that is money. Well, and I'll tell you as well, too. So my guys reported to me as well, they said there's a, there's a particular village. I don't know if I should say this. I'm not going to say it. It just, it just an intel thing. Our guys are, I'll just say this. Our guys, our, our, our. Our guys. Our. Our. observing, when I say our guys, I'm just like my friends in Burma, they are observing movements of actual Chinese nationals moving from certain locations to other certain locations to provide technical and military advisory and support stuff. So our guys have reported they see the Chinese guys on the ground and they see where they go and how they're helping the Burma Army. So my point is

it's not just, oh, here's a box, you know, here's a truck full of bullets. It's we're going to send and advisors were sending actual Chinese nationals on the ground we already knew the Russians were doing that um that's been going on for a long time but these are uh cases of our guys actually spotting actual Chinese operatives on the ground like as as as advisors whoa yeah yeah so corn kerosene on the fire exactly because they are preparing for something uh bigger i think it's i don't know if they're necessarily that's i don't know if that's a correct characterization they might not be be preparing for something bigger like they have some specific plan in mind, but they are definitely building, building up their infrastructure and everything

in Burma as a way to sort of support them China and Russia in the future logistically. How worried do you get about dealing with locals who are in highly impoverished, war-torn situations and, you know, are looking to survive. How worried do you get about them not necessarily even being just sources for the Burmese military, but, you know, potentially being sources for like China or some sort of foreign power like that, that where, you know, information that you give could be used not just against you, but against the interests of the United States. With the information I give could be used against the United States.

That you might share with people that you view as friendly who are, you know, trying to fight against this, but... Oh, I see what you're saying. So to be really clear, anything, any work that I do on the ground in Burma, I'm literally just showing them how to use what they already have. There's no greater, like, there's no, like, greater geopolitical thing going on. I'm just like, okay, we're in this area. You got how many guys?

What kind of guns do you got? All right, the Burma Army is trying to do this. All right, maybe here's your best way to kind of stop them, you know, from doing what they're doing. So there's nothing that could be used against the United States at all in anything, unless I was maybe captured and they tried to use me as a pawn or something like that, which that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. I'm saying back.

Well, I will kill myself before they take me. it's like it's not going to happen so so so that's so that's that's that's one aspect of it um as far as being able to trust the locals um one of the one of the or one of the one of the main things is that we focus and working in areas where we have total and complete trust with the locals and there are places where it's like yo there are straight up like there are bad guys here watching you um that are civilian informants and things like that so there are certain levels of of risk of where are we going to so when we're in the green area we have total trust with these guys because they they know their territory and they know their people so well any outsider any stranger

comes up you know the one road that's there you know it's like everyone's going to know that like oh there's some weird guy here who the heck is that so everybody knows everybody there's no like strangers walking around that's like that's like in the green zone like good area and then you have your gray zone which is where it's mixed and there are some people who are you know like loyal to the burma army maybe and some people who are uh like the the majority of people maybe are you know pro democracy and so in those areas uh we can operate pretty well like because like because the locals have a pretty good sense they're like hey we're just we're just not going to go to this village but like we're going to be fine when you drive through here just make

sure you put a face mask on just just just you know uh initial the initial scrutiny you pass initial scrutiny so they're not like looking back like oh that was a white guy you know on the back of a motorcycle or something um and then there's like red zone areas where it's like everybody in this area is supportive of the burma army uh we still have you know maybe the rebels have like a little bit of control of that area so the berm army's not there currently but they're like so anytime we travel through an area like that we have to move very quickly usually at night just get through here don't let them see you and then and then we move on yeah how did you i mean you mentioned you were talking about first being there in the jungle alone and

just working with some locals but how did you go about setting up operations here as a white guy from a foreign country who has a particular set of skills for sure but you know i mean you've told stories today about them doing targeted bombs at you because you attract that kind of attention because of your skills how do you even go up about setting up an organization in a country like this that's so worn torn as an outsider like that well again it starts with you going in alone building up just relationships with the guys you feel them out and they start to like and they start to understand you you start to understand them and um you know when i when i first went in i thought i was just going to go in for a few weeks maybe a month and help them out a little bit that was my

original thought and then now i've been there you know going been going back for eight years so like when you go in it's a matter of going directly to whoever's in charge and you explain who you are you explain why you're there and then um one of the uh that that or the the tribe that we work with um they have this thing culturally where they don't care what you say it's sort of like show me until until until you until until you show me it's like okay cool you can talk all you want to they do not care show me and so um this is why i've also you know gone on a bunch of operations with them because they're like all right you're telling us we should operate this way and you know you do this particular tactic to defend our villages and families great cool but show me and so that's

I've done this with the guys a lot as well. And so you just build up trust over time. And so again, right now we're focusing heavily on the sort of kinetic action, action stuff as well. That's like our main focus at the moment. But when I set up the nonprofit stronghold rescue and relief, our primary focus is still, you know, embedding directly with those local rebels and stuff. But we're bringing in, we're basically teaching them how to do a. emergency medicine, evacuations, all that kind of stuff. So we have the, we have, we have, we're at the point now where we have a bunch of, um, we set up a network of ambulances,

which are in the back of, uh, supped up, uh, Hyluxes that are moving patients, which is, you know, this and create this crazy logistical operation. We've got to the point where one of our ambulances, one of our crews can actually go in and do blood transfusions in the field. So they can, yeah, so you got a critically injured patient. You can take blood from one person and put it into another person if you have to. So these really advanced, uh, trauma, based skill sets and so we've spent you know years and years um just sort of slowly building up that capability and it started at the front line um with me going in alone and then it and then it became all right let's uh let's start you know helping with medical evacuation and then like well now let's

put in uh you know ambulances it's like well now we need roads to get the ambulances to where we need to go and we need bridges now so um the vast majority of what we do now is that emergency medical evacuation and then while we're there we also do the the the mentorship aspect as well approximately how big is is your team now I have we have five full-time guys who are who are veterans who work for us and then we have two people who are administrative oh my word Jesus Christ my bad man that guy's still going I know and like he's going to do something I'm sorry oh my word oh my goodness that's unbelievable If you guys couldn't hear, that was a guy holding down his horn for like a solid 30 seconds.

That's unbelievable. Yeah. So we have like five or six veterans who work full-time doing this and a few administrative people as well. But on the ground in Burma, we have 25 full-time employees who are local Karen people, and they are the ones that run and manage all of the ambulances. So kind of going back earlier to what I was talking about with, you know, the USA 2.0 right this is the exact model that we use with them we are we we set up teams of locals and we organize them and we train them and we bring in the supplies that they need

and then they're able to run their own ambulance evacuations I call it charity with dignity it's it's the ability to stand on your own when you're not there like the way that we measure success is the the lives that they save when we're not even there on the ground And I also have a rule where I don't send in any more than four Westerners at a time into one place because if you bring in, yeah, you bring in a, I could, you know, I could put out an email tomorrow and get 57 people who want to go volunteer in Burma. But if I do that, we all show up, first of all, it's very expensive. We can't maneuver easily at all. It's very conspicuous. And then now we're doing all this, now we're doing all the treatment and all of the work.

and then you leave and then the locals don't know how to do it on their own anymore. Yeah. So that's why I keep the team very small. It's enough

so we can work with each other and support each other in the field. But yeah, it's small enough to where the locals, it has to be a partnership. They greatly,

greatly outnumber us. A lot of this, and we can't show it on the screen because a lot of it is highly graphic, but people can follow using the link below, follow Stronghold Rescue

on Instagram. so you can see from the ground because I think it is important you see but a lot of the images and videos that you show these are people correct me if I'm wrong usually not always but you're going in and rescuing them from where they were caught in the crossfire or where they were actually rebels battling against the army and are injured on the field and you're trying to save them and get them back to a hospital or somewhere that can treat them yeah that's correct so all these patients that you'll see on there and again if you go check it out that the Instagram account it's uh again it's very graphic so fair warning um but you're seeing people

who are stepping on landmines people who are getting hit by mortars um and when you go on there you're going to see a bunch of uh you know local folks who are doing the evacuations and it's you know it's pregnant women who are having complications i don't know if we talked about this on the last podcast but we the reason we started the ambulance service because at the time i was pretty much we were just doing like human like basic humanitarian relief and then like front line men The reason we started the ambulances, which is now like our main, main thing, is because we were driving along a road one day in this part of Burma where there were only two trucks. One truck was owned by the governor of the area, and it was broken, and then Stronghold had one truck. These were the only two trucks for this very large, for this very large area.

And so as we were driving along this road, the villagers came out and they stopped us, and they said there's a lady, can you, there's a lady. can you there's a lady in this hut can you take her to the hospital now the hospital is uh is literally just a um it's bamboo huts in the middle of the jungle five and a half hour drive away from where we currently are god and so we're like yeah absolutely like get her in like let's do this so uh they're they're they're bringing they bring the lady out and so i asked i was like what it's like what's what's her issue and they said well it's a pregnant lady she's she's seven months pregnant obviously due in two months but for the last 12 hours she's been bleeding in her hut and you know there's been like this steady flow of bleeding for 12 hours and they had her hooked up to an IV and they were

so they said we've been trying to find a vehicle that could take her they can't throw her on the back of a motorcycle or anything obviously and so we were the only option and so luckily we were just so happened to be driving by so we brought the lady with us and drove five and a half hours five and a half hours yeah while she's in the back of a pickup truck just literally in the of a picture of and there's no it wasn't set up to where it was comfortable or where the medics could work easily or anything like that and there there's plenty of like local medics and people who were able to help them out um and so that was it was actually during that five and a half hour drive where i looked over at my interpreter and we both kind of looked at each other and we were

like yeah we need to set up ambulances and which is crazy because that's now sort of our our main our main mission there yeah but that's i mean again something you take for granted like crazy this is all over the place at the highest level in this country, even though our health care system has so many problems. It's like comparatively speaking, you know, somehow this might be a piece of shit, but it is the best piece of shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A pile of steaming shit. Yeah, and so, like, for context, the places where we're running these ambulances, there are no other ambulances. That's the thing. So people who, you know, again, we're a nonprofit, so we work completely off the donations of people who help support us.

um when if you're helping us put in one of these ambulances and helping us sustain these ambulances like you're you are actually investing in a place where if we were not there nobody else is going to be there it's not one of those things we're like oh like we're going to we're going to set up an ambulance to like help out because uh you know it's like we want to help out the other ambulances it's like no no no it doesn't exist it's not a thing we have to explain to them the concept of an ambulance and like what so you just have a truck sitting here with and and to be clear too we bring in like oh two bottles, we bring them in from other countries and have them like deep in the middle of the jungle so you can actually have oxygen support while you're getting transported. And then we have all

these different, you know, advanced medical equipment in there as well. So it's, yeah, it's a really good program. And it was put together by one of our head of field operations. He was like the dude who's spirit headed it a couple years ago and we started former Ranger and somehow was able to make it happen because it's extremely complex logistically to make this happen. But But it's amazing what can be accomplished when you have a small squad of highly dedicated, highly skilled individuals who, you know, are dead set on making sure you're going to bring ambulances into a place that's never even had them. And so far, none of the guys you've brought in to do this, you haven't lost any of them? No, none of us, none of us have been wounded. Yeah, obviously, have some close calls.

Yeah, we've had, we've unfortunately had some close calls. You worry about that, though, I would imagine. Well, yeah, absolutely. Of course I worry about the guys. We were very selective about what we do and where we do it and how we do it. Again, we're not looking for a fight. We're not looking to go, you know, do gunsling. We'll do what we have to do to help the locals when needed. And sometimes we'll take risks that are above and beyond the call of duty. But that's for strategic reasons. And it's because we know there's going to be an outsized, an outsized return on that. But yeah, it truly is, you know, these guys take. these guys take huge risks the guys on the team but but you also have to have this you're able to have this you know huge impact on the world and yeah so i just so much respect for for my guys so actually so we were talking about those airstrikes coming in um most likely in the video that we're gonna that we will post after this podcast to our instagram of these uh of this airstrike coming in you'll see in there one of our guys um he's wearing his stronghold t-shirt and he's in

the trench with his body covering a wounded soldier who was hit in the first one or two airstrikes that came in and he's in the trench on top of him you know treating him as these airstrikes are coming in and you can say whatever you want to you can be your keyboard warrior I would do whatever if I was in such a situation or or or like oh I care I care so much about people I'm just like you know whatever you can say wherever you want to yeah I promise you your real personality what you really believe is going to come to the forefront when you're laying in a trench and bombs are dropping right on top of you and uh uh yeah shout out to adam um this little video clip he's he's he's in there like covering this patient with his body while he's while he's

treating him oh that's amazing and that's the caliber of dudes that we have on the team that makes that's really fucking cool man yeah yeah are you are you able to talk at all about i don't even know if i would imagine this is a thing but are you able to talk about any relationship without going into detail you may have with i don't know intel sources to provide information about what's going on on the ground um that's a great question and uh i can talk about it because there's nothing to talk about um and of course all the conspiracy theorists can be like yeah right hey listen you said that really that was a good performance i almost bought you almost bought it so um he looked up though that was where i knew it was

bullshit he's like he's such a lot right um so we we do pass whatever information that we get um on things and we do we do pass it to you know to the u.s um none of it is is like super secretive anything it's it's a lot of the same stuff that we're talking about right now but it's just like more timely i'm like hey we just got some information that such and such we pass it off to you know whoever and they do whoever and they do whatever they want with it the flow of information unfortunately only goes one way we are getting zero support um coming the other direction which would be uh wonderful if we could but i honestly you know it's it's it's it's hard to know like what they what they even know or like if they have you know i don't even know but yeah i can honestly say we we send the

information to them we get nothing in return but it's all good america you're you're a guy and you mentioned this a few times in this conversation i've talked with you in the past about this and you know we we got into some of your background more on on the last podcast we did as well but you know you're a guy of faith and and have been consistent on that your whole life has there ever been a point when you're in the middle of this stuff seeing these things up close where you know innocent people are being slaughtered maimed essayed all these different demonstrably evil things have there ever has have there ever been points where you've questioned your faith and and question whether or not you know something beautiful that would have

created this earth would allow that to happen on it so my my history with with faith was there was there was a period in my life for a few years mostly when i was in the military when um my attitude was no longer i my attitude is sort of like i respectfully disagree i'm not i wasn't super into i i was believe that there was a god but i wasn't uh i didn't consider myself a christian or religious there was a few years there um when i was in the military and even a couple years afterwards that is completely changed um i i am a christian i would consider myself to be a christian now my faith has gotten deeper so to answer your question when i when i see the evil um that's that happens in the world and again i'm seen it at all the the

literally the worst stuff you can imagine. I've seen it all many times. And when I see that, I believe that God gave us free will. And so when I see a terrible tragedy that happened, I don't think, why did God do this? I think why did this evil human being do what they just did? I don't blame God for what happens in these cases. Now, it's very easy to kind of go down the rabbit hole of like, well, why would God allow this to happen, right?

And because like God knows everything, why doesn't he stop this? Why doesn't he stop all this stuff? And that's a very, very tough question to answer. But at the end of the day, that's what free will means. You are free to do good. You are free to do evil. And I'm a believer that the good you do in this world is God doing good in this world. So you would say, like, well, you know, why doesn't God stop the massacres happening in these villages?

Why doesn't God stop these things? And it's because it's people haven't stopped doing that and people haven't gone in to stop things. So I personally, as I as I get older and I get deeper in my faith, I see my mission to help the world in some ways. I see it as as more of me sort of doing God's work in a way. It's like you want you want good things to happen. You want God to do good things. It's like, well, well, you need to go do good things. everybody wants to sit around and and uh you know hope that god will bend the bullets away or uh make a

miracle happen or make a million dollars show up in your bank account it's like no it doesn't work that way you got to go you got to go work for it and you have to go do the right thing and so this is what i'm saying ideas have consequences and so all the evil in the world um i just it's just a it's an outgrowth of free will and there's a lot of deeper questions in there about you know like well i would got to make world that you know we could knowing that it was going to go down this this you know this this this dark path there's a lot of questions like that but for me that doesn't make me doubt god or doubt the goodness of god it just makes me think like there's a lot that i don't understand here um and that's that's more my more of my take on it what you don't know

humble and what i don't know and i'll also say this too so um one of the one of the reasons why i actually came back to christianity was because of all the evil that i saw in the world and And what I realized when I looked around the world, I saw all these evil things going on. And I realized, I was like, you know, in particular, I was in Haiti where I started having these thoughts. Because I was looking at Haiti and I was like, man, this is such a beautiful place. It has such great potential. And I was like, you know, if like the top 20 people who controlled the country would just get their act together and would just stop lying and stealing and cheating and stop being so corrupt, just like the top, just few people would just, I was like, why don't they just like? follow the Bible. You know, that was like, that was like my thought process. Or just get killed.

Yeah, I was like, why don't you just, why don't you just stop, you know, acting like this? And then I realized I was like, you know what, you know, you look at places where people actually do follow biblical principles. And the Bible says where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. And you think about that. And you're like, well, like, what does that mean? It's like, well, because when you see yourself as, when you see us and all people as like children of God, like we're all God's creation, we're all God's children. there's this instant level of equality that you have with each other right and you go like oh like i'm no better than you because i'm not king god is king right like you're not king and so what that also does is that then causes hopefully it results in some humility and some love for one another but it also is foundational for creating like a democratic society because no no no you're trying to be king

you're not king god is king but also i'm not going to be king god is king right so what do you do it's like well Why don't we vote? Because we're all equal here. Why don't we all take one vote and see who's going to lead us for a short amount of time until the next thing, right? So built within this ideology is a pathway toward peace and stability. Is our human beings going to be able to perfectly implement the biblical principles and like everything Jesus taught? Of course not. But the attempt to do so, I think heals a lot and creates a lot of good and stability in civilization. in society. And so when I saw that, that just made me realize there must be some truth here.

It's like a cheat code that fixes a lot of problems, if actually implemented. Some great perspective. And it's something I think about a lot, not even just from a, you know, whether it's faith or wonder what happens in the afterlife or what religion is right or all that. Beyond that, it's like the great catch-22 of life is that for the light you need the darkness, you know, for the good, you need to know the evil. For the up, you need to feel the down. And for the success, you need to understand the failures. And so to live in a world where everything were all good and heavenly, if you will, would defeat the purpose of the great chase that this, short life we have on earth is and the downside of that is that we do have to see

those things and some people lose more than others do through no fault of their own and some people you know no one chooses where they're born no one chooses who they're born to no one chooses the environment that raises them and molds them but you do choose how you react to it some people have more difficult circumstances to try to overcome and maybe it gets the best of them and others are able to through it's a it's a strange thing about what what we have here but your point about free will dictating both directions and the fact that you know if there is a creator above here who has allowed this system to happen it would then

reflect that that creator has not decided who's gonna do what instead he's giving us the opportunity to make our own way and look at it from the perspective of there will be winners and losers and the winners to that creator will be the people who do more good than bad and leave the world a better place than how they found it. But you know, you've lived it on front lines and seen these things, seen the lowest of the downs, but also seen the spirit of the ups where people overcome massive odds to help other people or save lives or do things that are objectively good.

Yeah, and I think there's also, we as humans, we try so hard to understand God, whatever God is. It's a spirit, it's like, I don't know. I don't know what God is. I just God is God, right? Whatever that means. And so the way that I try to explain the concept of God to people is something like this. imagine you're playing a video game you've played one of those games like the sims city simulators or whatever or whatever

so somebody sat down and developed this game and there's all these little people and they're pre-programmed to do things and you know there's a little bit of chance thrown in there and there's all these different scenarios so but these but these little these little characters might have a tiny little bit of like algorithmic autonomy but for the most part they're just kind of running around doing so right Because my point, though, is like, they're very non-complex little digital beings, right? So if you were the creator of that game, of this world, and you wanted to be friends with these little things that are so beneath you, well, how would you communicate with them? It's like, well, one of the things that you could do is you could give them a document, a digital document, a bit of code, written in a language that they would understand, right? And imagine you try to do that for these little for these little digital characters. And you try to explain to them the concept of love. You try to explain them the concept of, hell, three-dimensionality. You try to explain the concept to them that you

like to eat food. They would have no way to fully comprehend that because you are the creator of this game. You are so complex above them. It is impossible for them to fully grasp, like, who you you are and what you want, right? So you would use very simple terminology, right? You might use stories, you might use parables. You might use examples that kind of demonstrate certain ways on how they should live and how they should play the game, right? Now, what's another way that you could interact with them? Well, you might create a character that is all powerful, that you are personally directly controlling that is interacting with all the different characters. And you would do miracles, right? What they would, what these little digital characters would consider to be

miracles. I see what I'm saying? You see what I'm saying? And so, in my personal belief is that that is what sort of i guess like what jesus was that was jesus was god come to earth and it was god's way it was was was god and it was god walking around saying like no i am god um look at look at me heal people look at me uh make things happen that just shouldn't not be able to happen and i'm also going to teach you these totally counterintuitive ideas about love your enemy um and things like that and so that's god communicating with us and so the whole point of this analogy is simply that God, I look at God as being so complex that it's impossible for us to fully, fully understand everything about him. And so when people get dogmatic or they start

arguing about this or that, the other thing, I'm like, I don't engage with it because it's like it's so complex, dude. I don't know. Like, however it is that I picture God in my head, there is a 150% chance that I am off majorly. And so that's kind of, you know, so that's kind of how I look at it and so i try not to get too dogmatic about any of that kind of stuff because like dude i don't know it's like that's great wisdom yeah it's like do good with what you have and the time you're given and i think if you do that over the course of a life whatever happens after that you'll be in good shape and that's i don't even know that's i mean someone i know but like maybe you're 100% right that's just my piece with it yeah like i don't know what i don't know and whatever gets people

through the day to try to imagine what's on the other side. I think that's great. If you're using it for good, I don't care what you believe. I think that's awesome. But, Ephraim, I love talking with you, man. I love the work you're doing. It's amazing stuff. I mean, you know, you gave your life to defend in the country, and now you're voluntarily giving it to defend people who are in horrible situations around the world, not just in Burma, by the way, your organization does more than that. but we're going to have the link to stronghold down below so people can donate there and and help fund this i would really at the very least love to see people follow these guys on instagram and on other social so give me all those links and i'll put those down there as well but as you guys continue to do stuff over the years i'll continue to bring you in here to talk about it and it's it's always great getting your perspective you're a really really smart guy and a really good guy too awesome much appreciate it's been fun all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace

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