Shaun Newman Podcast - #596 - Tobias Miller

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

He served in the Canadian military for 14 years as a radio signaller. He served in 3 tours in Afghanistan and was medically released after suffering shrapnel wounds, traumatic brain injuries, a 50% hearing loss and nerve damage after being hit by an IED strike while on foot patrol. We discuss his thoughts on the Afghanistan war, Russia/Putin and his journey with microdosing.  SNP Presents returns April 27th Tickets Below:https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone/ Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Phone [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Alex Krenner. This is Dave Collum. This is Bruce Party. Hi, this is Jeremy McKenzie, the raging dissonant. Hello, this is Maxim Bernier. This is Danny Beaufort. This is Chuck Prodnick. This is Vance Crow, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast.

Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. How's everybody doing today? Well, I'm doing pretty good. That's me. Someday. How you doing? How you doing, folks?

All right. The world is a mess. Yes, agreed. 2024 is shaping up to be a geopolitical storm. Yep. Now might be the time to diversify some of your hard-earning savings into some of your hard-earned savings. I'm going to say that again. Now might be the perfect time to diversify some of your hard-earned savings into physical money that can't be printed.

I'm talking about gold and silver. Silver gold, both are North America's premier precious metals dealer with state-of-the-art distribution centers in Alberta. that's Calgary and Nevada that's Las Vegas silver gold bowl ensures fast fully insured discrete shipping right to your doorstep they offer a full suite of services to help you buy sell and store your precious metals and if you've never done it yet where it chips directly to your doorstep there's something cool about that like it's slick you know type it in boom boom boom check check it doesn't take mom does it take five minutes I don't even know if it takes five minutes boom and then you just wait and it shows up in your doorstep and I've sat in this studio now

and giving out one ounce silver coins to people. And it's pretty cool to watch. And if you've never experienced that, you should treat yourself. And, well, silver gold bull. They got a special offer specifically for us. For the Sean Newman podcast, this is an offer for us, okay? It's everyone's favorite silver coin. So if you've never had a silver coin, well, it's everyone else's favorite, okay?

The Royal Canadian Mint, Silver Maple Leaf. This offer is only available. It's not available on the site. It's only available here. This is the only place you're hearing about it. And it's only open for us. All you've got to do is call or email Graham for details. So that's what you got to do.

Call them. See what the details are. Report back. Let me know if you bought some, you didn't buy some. You found out information. What did you do? Bhabapabapapha. Silvergoldebol.ca.

Down in the show notes, all the details. Okay? That's what we're talking about. Caleb Taves, Renegade Acres. Well, he does Community Spotlight. Community Spotlight this week, SMP Presents, is back April 27th

in Lloyd Minster, Armstrong virtually, Loongo, Crano, Cranor in person, Chris Sims in person, Curtis Stone in person, Chuck Pradneck in person. We're doing a full day conference. It's called the Cornerstone Forum. And it should be, well, it's going to be, it's going to be a fun day.

I hope to see you there. I think it's going to be a ton of fun. Yeah, like I say, I hope to see you there. Go down in the show notes. That's where you can find all the information. March 14th, Thursday, March 14th, for the kids' sake, is back. We have Shelby Boyd and Tasha Fishman, both of them coming in to talk about homeschooling

and a few other things going on around the schools. So if you're in Lloydminster on March 14th, that'll be 7 p.m. at the Legacy Center. The deer and steer butchery. They got a new lady. cutting up the meat. That's right. A butcheress. A dealer in meat. Man, that sounds cool. She's a mother too, was born and raised in the small town of Wadena. Wadina? Wadina? I don't know why it sounds wrong today. Saskatchewan. So, small town, sass girl, cutting up your meat. What can go wrong? Nothing.

That's right. She's been cutting meat since she was 16. She took her retail meat cutting of Nate, went in prejudice at the Real Deal Meets in Emmington, and has worked in Ontario in the St. Lawrence market, which is one of the biggest fresh produce meat and seafood vendors in Canada. So stop in and see the deer and steer today. Give them a call 780870-8700. If you got an animal, they can get you in and rolling. Erickson Agro Incorporated Irma, Alberta. As Kent and Natasha Erickson, family farm raising four kids growing food for their community

and this great country. Did I mention SMB Presents? I think I did. I think I did. Oh, man. I'm excited. Here we go. Let's get on to that tail of the tape,

shall we? He served in the Canadian military for 14 years as a radio signaler. He served in three tours in Afghanistan and was medically released after suffering chrapnel wounds, traumatic brain injury, and 50% hearing loss and nerve damage after being hit by an IED strike while on foot patrol. Talking about Tobias Miller. So buckle up. Here we go.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today. I'm joined by Tobias Miller. Thank you, sir, for hop on. I'm happy to be here. It's a pleasure. Where abouts are you these days? We're in Porta-Panasko, Mexico,

so about four hours south of Phoenix, right on the ocean, the sea cortex. I got to, honestly, I'm curious. What took you down there? Well, so we sort of left Canada after, I mean, we're both retired military, my wife and I, and we left Canada. We've got a fifth wheel.

We're looking to travel. We can only do 182 days a year in the U.S. We fell in with Texas and Arizona. We'd happily be there full time if we could. But we had to leave after six months, and I didn't want to go back up to Canada and winter, so it was south of the border time. So you're basically an expat living in both the states, splitting time between states and Mexico.

Yeah, that was the general plan. And now we've actually settled into Mexico and we're enjoying it. And we may just sort of stick around here. We're not sure yet. But we just sort of play it fast and loose. That's the beauty of having a fifth wheel and we can move it if we want. Now, has this always been the case? Were you always living out of a fifth wheel?

Or did something change that you're like, we're heading out of here? Well, we've actually got a really beautiful house on Vancouver Island. I just, you know, I mean, we're retired for the military. we're both like I'm a wounded combat veteran and we were done we had no sort of obligations we had our house but the weather gets to me the politics get to me a bit the economy certainly gets to me we joking refer to ourselves as economic refugees down here it's much cheaper to live and uh we wanted to see some parts of the world we want us travel around a bit we have two huge dogs so we can't exactly be flying all over the place.

So fifth wheel is the next best option while we have the dogs. Now, Tobias, you've got to tell us a little bit about yourself, you know? Certainly I'm curious about Mexico and living out of a fifth wheel trailer and everything else. But, you know, you get to throw in my way because of your military service and your background. You've alluded to that. I don't know. I don't know where you want to start, but I'm along for the ride today. Tell you know, where did you grow up?

How did you get in the military? And let's talk a little bit about it. Sure. Well, I was born in Winnipeg. I spent probably the first 12 years of my life in Manitoba and then moved to the West Coast. I was a professional diver on the West Coast after high school. I spent a number of years as a diver. Move to Calgary just for work.

You mean like professional diver like dumping off. a diving board and doing the you know and on and on and on and on no i mean gear on 100 feet underwater uh i was uh working aquaculture like commercial salvage uh i was an instructor a dive trainer uh so i spent a i've got i don't know somewhere between a thousand two thousand dives you know so i spent a lot of time underwater and uh and then came a point where uh for work I moved to Alberta and then 9-11 happened. And I felt the call to join the forces. So I joined the armed forces in 2002 as a radio operator, a signaler.

I went to Afghanistan on my first tour in 2003, literally only 10 or 11 months after I joined the army. I was in Afghanistan on my first tour, and that was up north in Kabul. After that, I did a full 15 years in military. I did two more tours in Afghanistan. I did an 11-month tour in 2008, 2009 on the close protection party for the task force commander of all of Kandahar province. And then I went again. Well, after that tour, I joined Canadian Special Operations Regiment. I went from the Green Army to the Special Operations site, and I deployed with them in 2011 to Afghanistan, and I was wounded on that tour.

Okay. So 9-11, I've heard lots about. For you, you watched it. I was in high school at the time. And I remember exactly where I was at during 9-11 and how everything happened then. You were older at that time. I believe you mentioned you were 32, 32 roughly. I was 32 years old when I went to basic training.

It was, you know, I saw what happened. I had friends in the military. I had always wanted to be in the military. I'd sort of put it off for other things, at children and stuff like that, so I didn't join. And then when 9-11 happened, there was just a call to me that, you know, this was something that had to be answered.

This was an attack on, I don't know, North American values on North America itself, and that it was large-scale terrorism of the kind we hadn't seen before, and I wanted to do something. So I went down to the recruiting station and attempted to join as an infanteer. And what I got offered was an opportunity to go in as a radio operator. And I jumped at it.

I took it. And I swore into the military end of April 2002. And I was into Afghanistan, like I said, probably about 11 months later. Forgive me. Radio operator. When you say that, I think of a guy run around with a backpack calling in things and not really, I don't know not hauling around the big

Gatling gunner or what have you. What is a radio operator? It's a broad trade. It can be everything from the guys that are working computers and stuff like that. Most of my career, I was doing exactly what you said. I had a man-pack radio on my back

and I would patrol with infantiers or with a close support unit doing close protection for the task force commander. carrying a rifle, carrying a plate carrier, full gear like everybody else, but then add a big ass radio to it. And were you in the same, like, once again, forgive me, folks, were you in the same like grouping company? I don't know. Or did you bounce from group to group? Now, the reason I ask that is because I feel like in military movies, the radio guy always seems to be like, we need a radio guy.

And then they bring in a radio guy and you go off this way and then you come back and you go off with a different group. Is that factual or is that a complete BS? That can be kind of factual. I mean, the fact of the matter is radio operators generally, like Sigops, they call us signals operators, are one of one. There's only one of you anytime a unit is going out or a patrol is going out, unless there's a big headquarters. If it's just a small unit, there's only one of you. And so they grab whoever they can get their hands on generally. That sort of was different when I got into special operations with special operations with special.

operations they have a guy who is sort of their dedicated signal their dedicated radio operator but when I was with the the Green Army we'll call it the regular army yeah there was a lot of going on on taskings to different units I was lucky in that at some point time I was tasked me the brigade commander's personal radio operator in Petowahua Ontario and I got on with him and I worked directly for him for about a year. And then he took over the position of task force commander Kandahar. So he was command of all of the troops in Kandahar, U.S. Marines, Canadian troops, everybody.

And he asked me to go over and be his radio operator on that tour in Afghanistan. And that's how I went up on my second tour. And that was part of a very small unit. It's his protection party. We would have two light armored vehicles and about a dozen guys. and I was one of those guys. And what do you remember, like, you know, like, what was that experience like? That was an incredible experience because he was, he, it's Brigadier General Thompson.

He's an outstanding guy. He does not like to lead from his office. He leads from the front. So in our lap three armored vehicles, we traveled 17,000 kilometers on those roads in that 10 to 11 months. And that's a lot of mileage through ICE. IED terrain. He was always going out to meet with forward troops and to sort of support them. He actually patrolled himself. He actually was in an IED strike himself, which is kind of crazy for a Brigadier General. But it was a very exciting tour because he was all over Kandahar

province. We went from the Pakistan border all the way towards northern Afghanistan and as far east as we could get, or west as we could get. And it was a great tour. It was very interesting because I saw all of pretty much Kandahar province in that tour. Tell me a little bit about Kandahar Province or Afghanistan in general. Because you're talking to a civilian who's never been there. Right. Well, I mean, Afghanistan's a very interesting place.

It has huge mountains. It also has rolling red sand deserts like you would see on movie sand dunes. It's got some very green parts, but it's also. a lot of desolation. The cities are very, back then, were very desolated. They'd been bombarded through tribal warfare before we got there. There was a lot of displaced people, no homes. The infrastructure was non-existent.

Part of what we were trying to do was build up infrastructure. And Canada Our province itself is the home to the Taliban. That's where they started, and that's where they started. and that's where they sort of headquartered out of. So when we moved from Kabul up in northern Afghanistan down to the southwest to Kandahar province, it was a game changer. We went from being in danger of maybe some mines and IDs to danger of actual gunfights because the Taliban wanted to protect Kandahar province.

They wanted to stand up and protect it, and they were willing to hold their ground. And that made for a whole different war when the Canadian military military, I moved into southern Afghanistan in about 2006. What did you think when everybody pulled out of Afghanistan? It was heartbreaking, you know? I mean, it was very difficult. I've lost a lot of friends in Afghanistan. You know, I've probably lost a half a dozen to suicide post-Afghanistan,

but I've lost six or eight friends in Afghanistan in combat and was wounded myself. I left my blood on that soil. And it was very difficult to watch the waste of blood and treasure, you know, to see that everything we had put in, we dumped in as ISAF as NATO. ISAF is the International Security Assistance Force, which was the NATO body that was in Afghanistan. We had dumped in something ridiculous, trillions and trillions of dollars and thousands of allied lives. and thousands more wounded to replace the Taliban with a better armed Taliban. You know, so, I mean, that was, that was a tough blow to watch. And I know it was that way for most Afghan vets, I know, to watch, to watch the running retreat, you know, out of Kandahar.

I don't know how to phrase this, but we'll try here. Does it make you wish, you know, like, not that you'd never went, but, you know, like, seeing where it ends to where it's, started and how you get pulled in and I don't know how much you've looked into 9-11. I don't know if you believe in any of those thoughts. But do you see how you're pulled in and then to see how they leave and everything else, do you go, man, that was, you know, and to be wounded on top of it? Do you look at that and go, not that you regret it by any stretch. Just what are your thoughts now as you're removed from it?

I don't regret it. I mean, the fact of the matter is I had grandfathers who fought in World War II, which was a big righteous war and it ended, you know, as it should have in victory. And I don't really think that we've seen a military victory since then in sort of North America. It's an unpopular opinion to state amongst other veterans, but the fact of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned with Afghanistan, we lost. I mean, we went in there, we spent all that blood and treasure and the Taliban are still

in power, you know, so while we were not losing battles, and I heard it said by Vietnam veterans while I was growing up, you know, they didn't. We didn't lose battles when they lost the war and we didn't lose battles against the Taliban, but politically it was a loss, you know, the Taliban are still in control. And, you know, do I regret it? No. I was there with my brothers and sisters and I was doing a job I loved doing and I was, you know, I liken this to serving with a football player.

If you practice and practice and practice, you want to play in the big game at some point. If you train and train and train as a soldier at some point in time, you want to be tested. be tested in battle. And I had the opportunity to be tested in battle for about 24 months in total. So I don't regret it. But I do think it was wasteful. And in most ways, you know, I think that I sent somebody the other day, I said, stupid wars have stupid endings.

And watching the way Afghanistan played out at the end. And I suspect Iraq is playing out similarly or witty. eventually, you know, it just makes me question whether or not, you know, if we're not willing to put in the political stick-to-itiveness or wherewithal, if we're not willing to commit, make that full long-term commitment, then should we be there in the first place, you know? And going into Afghanistan, this is a tribal country. These people have been at war for thousands of years, either between themselves or the British or the Russians or then NATO.

These are people who wore. That's what they do. And if you want to change attitudes of people in Afghanistan for women's rights, children's rights, protection and safety of children, et cetera, you're talking about a generational conflict. You know, you're talking about having to be there generations to make those changes. And we weren't, nobody is willing to put in, I don't know, lives for generations. Because while you're in doing the job,

generational warfare and counterinsurgency, you're going to be losing guys. And no country in the Western world is willing to lose guys for generation after generation after generation. And as it was, we had, you know, Afghanistan went on long enough that there were people who served in Afghanistan, whose father served in Afghanistan. You know, we had young troops show up over there at 19 years old whose dad was in Afghanistan in 2001. You know, so it was, it was an interesting situation. But, I mean, if you ask me at the end of the day, wasn't worth it. Not really.

The Taliban's still there. And that's the only metric I have to go off of. What do you think of, you have to, everyone will have to forgive my curiosity. Because anytime I get a military vet on, I just think, you know, we do a military roundtable once a month where we try and, you know, pull out some of, uh, um, the experiences and thoughts of a very small part of the population of Canada, right? It's very, very tiny. And as it sits today, you know, I can pull you in the direction of menstrual products in the men's bathroom and see your thoughts on that.

But I feel like I've probably got a pretty good gauge of where you're going to go. And every other military vet goes on that. How about what's going on? You know, like today, I don't know how much you think about it. But it feels like from time to time, and it depends how much I stare at social. media or the news, the talk of World War III. And they don't really label it World War III. You know, there's just, there's global conflict, I would say, is more the terminology

they use. Do you think about it much? Do you pay attention to it at all? No, no. I do. I mean, it's hard, it's hard not to pay attention to, you know, sort of, I mean, for one thing, it's interesting to watch in the Ukraine that we've gone back in some ways to World War I type fighting with trench warfare, etc.

But with the addition of drones dropping mortar rounds directly onto individual troops, right, targeted drone attacks. So it's a very strange situation. I think that the world is unstable, you know, and it's inherently unstable, but that we're reaching a point of less stability every day. And I don't know that that, I don't know how to, where that's coming from. Is it part of its media driven, some of its social media driven? We created the internet and the internet has given us so many incredible things. But one of the things that's given us is the ability to, well, to lie globally, you know, to put forward an agenda and for the agenda to not just be heard by the people within

the year shot, but for everyone in the world to hear it. And so you can get nation states or terrorist groups that can spread a message far and wide. And I think that one of the other things of social media maybe has done is we're no longer as critical thinkers as we used to be. So people take things at face value a little more. You know, we're a clickbait society or a headline society. You read the headline, but I don't have time to read the whole post. I can't be bothered. I got crap to do and more pages to scroll.

Right? So now I base my bias, my opinion, et cetera, off of what that headline said. So then we have people who are getting very good at writing headlines that are not necessarily, if you read a headline and it says what it says, if you're going to read the meat of the story, the meeting of the story really is not actually saying what the headline led you to believe, right? But our society has a tendency to just click the headline and go, yeah, that's good. I got the info now and move on. My wife's a former intelligence, person, military intelligence.

So I'm well-schooled by her all the time on read past the headline, right, and dig a little deeper. And I think that as a society, we sort of failed to do that. And organizations will think advantage of that, you know, organizations that are involved in global terror, nation states that want to destabilize our states and things like. that. It's a, it's a, you know, the, the old Irish toast, may you live in interesting times. And I'm not sure if that's a to toast or a curse, because we're living in interesting times and it's kind of scary some days. What did you think, you know, having a wife that was in military intelligence, what did you two think of the Putin-Tucker interview? I actually have only

watched parts of it. I, you know, I recognize that there's two sides to every story. I'm not a guy who's a believer that Blatterbeer Putin is a good man or ever has been a good man. He's a KGB man. And I think that when you're KGB man, you're a KGB man for life. I don't trust him. Do I think that everything that said about him is, you know, necessarily fact? Do I take all of it at face value? No.

I do know that the organization that he used to be so high up in is not an organization that was built on trust. And I would say this in that I don't trust anybody who was high up in the CIA either. I think that if you inherently come out of an intelligence community, you have biases and you're going to, certainly, if you're now in a position to run a country and you've come up out of the intelligence community, I just don't find that there's all, I have to take everything you say with a grain of salt, you know? I mean, we're talking about an organization that, the KGBB,

that is that help keep its people basically enslaved for years. And while that changed through perestroika and when the wall came down and all the rest of that, they hold a lot of sway now still, the FSB. It's not longer the KGB, it's the FSB, but the FSB, they hold power. And Vladimir Putin heads them in his pocket for sure. So, you know, what do I think of the interview itself? I don't know. I think that it was interesting to watch a lot of journalists be pissed off at Tucker Carlson for going because, well, I mean, Tucker was doing what journalists are supposed to do.

Go ask questions, right? And, you know, you've seen people interview EDMN. You've seen people interview, you know, all kinds of dictators all over the world. And nobody gave them trouble for doing it. And then people, because of, I think, probably Tucker's political viewpoints, whatever. after him for that, you know. But he was doing what a journalist is supposed to do. Go and ask questions of the people who the populace wants to hear the answers from, you know. And I think that it's a shame that we will look at somebody's political viewpoint, whether that's left or right.

And I really, you know, I'm a conservative. I'm a conservative. I'm a dyed-de-the-world, conservative always have been. But I'm a military guy, so that's not a surprise. I'm economically heavily conservative. But I just, to watch people's attitudes based off of somebody's political viewpoint and then to judge their work based off of their political viewpoint, really sort of, I don't, I don't get on with that much. You know, I mean, I don't care who you vote for. Do you go and look for the truth as a journalist, you know?

And do you report that truth, truth without bias? that's the biggest thing. I think we're a world that misses the Walter Winchell's and the, you know, the old, old school journalism. We could stand to have some of the fact where they're not trying to tell you what you should think, but just tell you what happened and you can decide what to think. Well, one of the things I admire about my audience is we let people on, we let them talk, We let them explore their thoughts.

And that's what's lovely about podcasts, right? Because even, you know, you go, any podcast that holds a guest on for longer than 15 minutes, you're going to get to hear their thoughts. And then it's on you to listen to it and think critically. And that's what I loved about the Tucker Putin interview. Is Putin the greatest human being on the planet? No. But he shows how weak our leaders are in the West, right?

Because whether his background and the KGB and everything else makes him the most ruthless leader on the planet, I don't know. But what I can tell you is he, the way he projected himself, the way he answered questions, the way he went back and forth to Tucker Carlson, although given in a different language, put Trudeau beside him, put Biden beside him. And it's no question who the strongest leader is out of those three. It's not even a question. And that's what we're up against. We're up against a foe that has been pushed into a corner by looks of it with NATO. And now has been pushed into war by different agreements that weren't honored, possibly. And you go, when he's getting interviewed by Tucker, and I've seen Tucker in person, Tucker's no slouch.

And he has his way. That shows you all you need to, like, to me, that interview could have went six hours. because the more he talked, the better off it is. And that's what's lovely about podcasts, I think, Tobias. I agree with that. I agree with that. You know, I mean, the fact of the matter is where the man comes from. It's his background is what makes him a strong leader, right?

We don't have presidents and prime ministers who have served their nation in any way other than politics in a lot of cases. you know our current prime minister whatever it is you know i mean i generally don't talk too much about it because i'm not a huge fan uh you know i'm not a fan at all actually but the the fact of the matter is it's a guy who's never really held much of a job and who's never really held a lot of life experience certainly not a lot of you know time in the political arena and then you look at a guy like joe biden who's been in the political arena most of his life Where does their strength lie? Where does that strength come from?

Vladimir Putin's a guy who served in uniform, who served a nation that was very military, and still is to this day, very military, and then served in an organization that was very military and was fighting through a Cold War, which, we like to say, oh, it's just a Cold War, but for those organizations, it was a very real conflict. You know, our armies didn't go to battle against each other, but our military intelligence

communities and our intelligence communities of the whole went to battle against each other in battles of wits and for years, decades. And he came up through that. He's a strong dude. There is no doubt whatsoever. And I think that one of our failings in our current political climates in the Western world is that we, I don't know, are we? We're trying to be all things to everybody all the time.

And that's not leadership. If you water down, you know, I mean, coming up in the military, the leaders that I respected were leaders that when there was time to listen to you and to take your questions, et cetera, et cetera, they would do so. And when there wasn't time to do so, you damn well did what you were told because they're in charge and that's the job. Go, move. You know, I don't have time for this right now. role. That sort of strength and leadership is something that I think that we lack in our in our political arena, right? We, we spread ourselves too thin. We want to be everyone's friend. You want to be a friend to every special interest group out there because they're the voters and you want

their votes. And if you follow along with every special interest group, and in that, I count the military, right? They're a special interest group. Firearms owners, I am one. That's a special interest group. You know, LGBTQ, special interest group, the Muslim Council of Canada, special interest group, the Christian organizations, special interest groups. If you try to cater to all of them all the time,

first off, you're going to have to be lying to somebody. Because their needs are opposite to each other on a regular basis or their desires. So you're going to be lying to somebody if you're catering to all of them. And I think that it weakens your position. And I'm, you know, I've sort of strayed away from politics as I retired from the military and my watch of it. But my sense of it is that we just don't have a lot of strength in places that we should.

We're lacking strength in leadership. You know, you said something there that I guess is sticking with me. And that is, although we didn't go full on, Russia versus the United States or North America. Even now, with NATO essentially fighting, yeah, I mean, it's Ukraine fighting the Russians. But I mean, we're literally, like, is there anybody at this point that's going, we're not fighting the Russians? I mean, honestly, it's being funded by billions and billions and billions of dollars by North America, among other places. And if I look back through history, even the Cold War, although we didn't come to, well, and I don't know, because I wasn't there.

But you just think of all the proxy wars, where it was basically Russia, US going at it. Mono, a mono, over and over and over again. You're a guy who probably has, I don't know, ran into the Russians at times, whether or not I don't mean like armed conflict. I just mean like, is it, maybe my question is, in North America, do we have this sense? Well, we've never really been in conflict. And I'm not putting those words in your mouth. I'm just meaning in general population. Is it like, well, we've never really been in conflict, whereas the Russians have had it on their doorstep or closer to their doorstep where it's like, now, we're at war for the very soul of who we are.

And the North Americans have no idea because they're playing it out on all these proxy states like it's not that big a deal when it is a really big deal. Yeah, you know, there's a difference there when in World War II, I mean, Hawaii was hit one time, a great, grave mistake on the Japanese behalf, I believe, because, you know, if they'd let the American sleeping war machine sleep, you know, we could have had an absolutely different outcome. But North America has never really been targeted. Like nobody is other than 9-11 terrorist attacks and things like that. nobody has attempted to invade here. And the Russians have been invaded within people's memory lifetime, you know. I mean, there are very few World War II vets left, but there are some World War II vets still alive in Russia that remember Stalin drive. You know, these are, and they push that history, and that's somewhere else that I feel like we lacked on occasion.

We don't, we don't recognize our history, we don't remember our history, we don't teach our history well. I mean, we talk about, you know, we were involved in World War II. We were considered, you know, amazing troops in World War II. In World War I, we were stormtroopers. We were demanded for by the British generals because of our fighting power prowess. And those aren't things that we ever teach to our kids in school. And we spent, well, I mean, I've never been in an army at peace. When I joined, we were in Afghanistan.

and when I left, we were in Iraq and Syria with special operations. So I've never been in a peacetime army. But I can guarantee you that my children were never taught about Afghanistan at school, and I very much doubt that my granddaughter will be taught about our country's longest war. You know, 2001, we rolled into Afghanistan, and we pulled our last troops out in 2014, and it didn't fall completely for NATO until two years ago. And I think that, you know, that is something that definitely should be taught and it won't be. And that's a mistake of our part because it is a piece of our history, which we should be justifiably proud, that our troops did stand up and that they did as well as they did and that they accomplished everything they accomplished.

The lack of political will is not their fault. You know, the lack of political power to put behind the war is not their fault. They did an incredible job. And it's something that it should be taught in our history. but it won't be because I really feel like as Canadians, one of the things we do is we like to say, you know, we like to downplay ourselves. We don't like to, we don't hand out medals the way other nations do, you know. The Canadian Victoria Cross has never been handed out ever. And Lord knows, there were numerous occasions in the war in Afghanistan where Canadian troops displayed Ballard that was worthy of the Victoria Cross.

But because we are the people we are, Canadians, no applause, please, we're Canadian. you know, that we also won't teach these things. And so we run risk of losing our history if we don't do that. You know, if we don't push our stories forward into the future with our future generations, then they don't get to learn from it either. And that's a shame. And that's, you know, if you fail to remember your history, you're doomed to repeat it, right? That's the saying.

And I think that we have an obligation to be. teaching those our history and and all of our history not not not not just the pretty stuff you know we need to be teaching everything we need to teach about the the great things we've done and the bad things we've done i i said that about you know the removing of statues uh in some places that you know there are a piece of history i think that if you hide it away that's a shame instead what should be done maybe is there should be some truth told about on that statue you know this person did this and they did this great thing for the country and this great thing, but they also did this, this, and this.

And let people make a decision, let people be critical thinkers and make a decision about that piece of history. Well, the thing that comes to mind is George Orwell. Who controls the past, controls the future? Who controls the present controls the past? And that book terrifies me on so many different levels. It's not even funny. but they're like and probably the reason why it terrifies me is things like that that just

maps so perfectly on to where we're at these days um you know we i could sit and and i could sit and talk all this for for for hours you know in your email you mentioned and you've mentioned briefly and i haven't given it its due course which is you know you're you're injured on on you're hit by an iED um and you've had a journey with that uh I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about that and hear the story and some of the things that it's led to and see where it goes. Sure. Well, so on my third tour and a half guess, I was a member of the Canadian Special Operations Regiment, which is a unit in KANSOCOM, Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. It has four or five units in, one of them being CSO, which I was in, JTF2, which is our Tier 1,

of special forces unit, a nuclear biological chemical warfare unit, an aviation helicopter unit, and a school. So I was in C-Sore. I was on a foot patrol near a village called Zangabat down in Pangewe, which is the Horn of Pangeway in southern Afghanistan and Kandahar. And it's in about 2010 to 2012, it was about the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan. And on my 41st birthday, we were going out on a quick patrol, about a 10 or 12-man patrol. We were going out to do a presence patrol, it's called, which is to just let the locals know you're there and let the enemy know that you're there and you're looking for them.

On that patrol, we found two IEDs that morning, and we cleared them both. We blew them in place. So we find them. We get as much intelligence about them as we can. put a charge on top of them and then we we draw back we blow them up and then move forward through the gap that we've created and we did that twice that morning and then we went to we finished the patrol we were headed back to camp and I got some information that there were possibly a couple of guys on a hill behind us and they could have a heavy weapon and you never want anybody to have

the high ground behind you particularly if they're you know so we were moving to engage them, moving to contact to a gunfight. And our dog handler, who was an American contractor, triggered an IED. He stepped on a pressure plate about six feet off my left shoulder. He lost both his legs. I don't remember much of the blast. I remember smoke and fire coming up my left side, and then it sort of went, and this horrifically loud noise, and then it went black. I came to a couple of minutes later, and I was bleeding. I had to the trap. holes badly concussed as it turns out later there's three dead spots on the left side of my brain from the blast I lost 50% of my hearing I had some nerve

damage and PTSD at the end of the day I went into I was medically evacuated we were three of us and the dog were medically evacuated to the Rule 3 hospital at Ken Har Airfield we went through medical procedures Bobby who stepped on the ID lived, he lost both his legs. A couple of us, including myself, went through debridement where they're removing shrapnel and stuff from me and another buddy. It was, for me, it was mostly what they call biological shrapnel, which means it was pieces of Bobby's leg bones and rocks. It wasn't actually like metal shrapnel. It was, a lot of it was pieces of leg bones.

So I had taken that in the face and up the arm. A couple of days of recovery, I went back out to start patrolling again and was really not acting right. And it was noticed that I wasn't acting right. So we went in for back into Canada airfield. We flew back in. What do you mean acting right? Well, I guess I was zoning out.

I was not speaking well. I had aphasia. I would drop words all the time. And that's not good for a guy as a communicator. You know, when you hear the communication sergeant, it's not good when you can't speak correctly. So we went back into the Canter Har Airfield, which is a huge, fairly secure base in Canter Har City.

Like, I don't know, 10, 15,000 troops in it at the time. And I had some MRIs on my head, and they said that, you know, they didn't, that I had traumatic brain injuries. I had a psyche vowel and the shrink there For the first time ever I told the shrink The truth what I thought The question I think was

So what do you think of Afghanistan at this point in time And I was My answer was I don't care I'd burn this place to the ground I don't give a damn about this place Man women, children, I didn't care I was so pissed off from being wounded And having lost friends and stuff

And from Bobby being so maimed And they just said you know you can't you can't be here you were gonna have to medically repatriate you if certainly from my my psych situation but also for the brain injuries so i was sent home uh to canada and uh i proceeded to go through some rehabilitation um i had really bad aphasia i would uh i like i knew the word dog but i couldn't say the word dog but i could say aphasia it was like really strange i would uh i say things like i got my I asked my wife, you know, about supper one night and I said, well, we'll have sea fish.

Not seafood and not fish, but sea fish. And there were just strange things coming up. And I was filled with rage, just violent rage. I was punching holes in every wall in my house. I was numbing with booze, a lot of vodka. And at one point in time, I was on 26 pills a day. Psych meds, pain meds, anti-convulsives to try to stop night. nightmares because I was waking up screaming four, five nights a week, well, three to four nights a week.

My wife has been attacked and hitting her sleep, choked. And so a lot of, I mean, my life was going downhill fast. It was a spiral. So the Army did what the Army does, which is trying to get you help. We had one psychiatrist on the base in Petalawa, a single psychiatrist, 5,000 troops on a brigade. to take care of an entire brigade of 5,000 troops, one psychiatrist, and that brigade is at war. And there were weeks where the flag never went past half staff in federal wall, because we just kept losing guys every couple days.

We'd lose more guys. So everybody back on base is watching their friends come home and boxes, and they've all been there, too. Those guys have done two, three, four tours in Afghanistan, and they had one psychiatrist, and this poor bugger was run ragged. They did what he could, but, I mean, what? psychiatrists generally do is pharmaceuticals right and so I was on 26 bills a day I tried a few different psychology things I did cognitive behavior therapy I did EMDR which is where they have a

light flashing your front of your face while you relive things I tried a bunch of stuff and none of it worked we then sort of move forward to 2016 I get released from the military medically they're like you know you you you're obviously not going to be able to come back so we're going to release you I'm releasing. I'm a sergeant with 15 years in and I'm going to get a medical release. That leads to another new host of problems. Because your identity for a lot of people and soldiers is to have built up an identity as I am a soldier. That is what I do. I'm in this tribe and now I'm out of the tribe. You know, the gate closes behind you, probably the hardest day of my life. It was the day that the gate closed behind me at C-Soror, the Special Operations Regiment,

and I would no longer a member. That was heartbreaking for me because those are my tribesmen in there. And now I'm not one of them, right? It's like you've been shunned and put out to pasture. So that now that I've released, that's a new thing that's coming up, a new dynamic. And I struggled with it and struggled with it for years. And so the journey you were living to started about a year and a half ago. We were in Texas, and I was in a rough place.

And I reached out to a friend of mine, Sebel Lavois. who's a former RCMP emergency response team Sergeant Major. And I reached out to him and I said, I don't know what else to do so. I'm at my wits end. I've been reading about psychedelic therapies and stuff and I just don't know what to do. And he linked me in with a couple of people

who live in Tulum and Mexico and they write an organization called Becoming Home, OM. And they do microdosing, psilocybin microdosing Mindfulness Program. I was still on some medications at the time, and I was like, well, okay, let's try this. And I got on board with it. And it's a really interesting program. So when I talk about microdosing, it is microdosing.

It is subperceptual amounts of psilocybin, magic mushroom. You don't even feel it. It's not like a party. It's not like even, like I tell you, when I used to have to take an avidavan, I felt that more than I ever felt a microdose. but it sort of lowers some walls between you and your your psyche and your your inner voices and stuff so I went through the program the program includes journaling uh physical fitness meditation and mindfulness so it's not just you don't just take a micro dose and this is like a new um antidepressant and wow this works you know you're you're putting it work through a program while you're

while you're taking this. By the end of the program, I was on zero medications. I came off all my pharmaceuticals. I was starting to sleep properly. I had gotten rid of a bunch of rage. And I was still having issues. And that's where the next step came, which was a trip to Peru to sit with ayahuasca, which is a heavy psychedelic, it's DMT.

and it's administered by, they call them Maestro's, but they're shaman from the Shepiebo tribe in Peru. I did five ceremonies with them. Saw a bunch of crazy stuff, you know, psychedelics. You saw all kinds of crazy lights and things like that. But somewhere in that experience, I walked out of there and I have at this point in time, and I'm a year down the road from Peru now, no. No rage, no suicidal ideation. I used to have a voice in my head would come into my head unbidden about 40 times a day to tell me to just finish this.

Just get it over with, end it. This is stupid. Why are you even bothering? That's gone. I haven't heard it in a year. I sleep. I don't, if I don't sleep, it's because I'm, you know, approaching 54 and I don't need so much sleep anymore. But I don't have nightmares.

That's not a problem anymore. I don't have anxiety. My depression is pretty much. gone I'm not cured of PTSD I don't think that there is a cure for PTSD but I think that this treatment did more for me in five

ceremonies five nights than 11 years of any other modality ever did so that was that was the next step was trying this psychedelic therapy and and now I as I'm retired and I live in Mexico

I volunteer as a a mentor to anyone who's interested, but specifically focusing on first responders and veterans and veterans' families for mindful microdosing of psilocybin. I've done a lot of podcasts about it. There's some discussion to me talking to, possibly the Senate subcommittee on Veterans Affairs in Canada about it. I know they have pushed forward a letter to Veterans Affairs sort of demanding that Veterans Affairs speed up. research into psychedelic therapy for injured and ill veterans and I think that it really is a future in in treatment of trauma I think that I think that there's a lot of now not all of it is scientifically studied yet but there is a whole lot of anecdotal evidence I know US Special Forces guys who are four years post doing psychedelic therapy and they are living the best lives that they could be living considering some of them are missing legs. Some of them are, you know, like, like serious traumas.

And, and this is what worked for them. I think if I look at the last, you know, four years, I think it's become pretty evident how much society is influenced by pharmaceuticals. And, you know, my wife's from the States. And when we cross the border and we're in the hotel room, one night with the kids. We, you know, I'm so unplugged from like regular television, heck, the radio, et cetera, that you just don't hear that.

And then you go to the United States and you see the paid for advertisements and it's Pfizer this and it's Pfizer that and it's this drug and it's that drug. And you're like, holy crap. I can't imagine 26 pills in the day. You know, I just, I just cannot fathom that. How did you stumble into the world of, I don't know, alternative treatment? I'm going to label it, I think is probably safe to say. Like, how did you stumble into it?

Because, I mean, 26 medications. Was there a breaking point? Was there somebody who said, you know, you got to try this? How did you find your way to that? And probably the second question is, like, how sad is it that, you know, the things that work get buried while 26 medications get jammed down your throat? And you're still having suicidal thoughts on top of a whole list. of other problems. So I had, I mean, I followed a lot of groups on Instagram,

ex-US Special Forces guys, because that was sort of my community, special operations at the end of my career. And so I stumbled across a number of guys who were engaging in psychedelic therapy where I had engaged in psychedelic therapy. And so I started to get interested in it. And I started to read their stories and listen to their stories

and listen to them on podcasts talking about what it had done for them. And I thought, that's better than 26 films a day. better than this cereal bowl full of pharmaceuticals every day. I mean, like 26 pills a day, I was numb. Numb. I felt so okay, now I'm not depressed, but I don't feel anything. And that's no way to live a life, right? Like, that is, that is, that is, that is, was unacceptable to me.

So it just came to a point that it was a unacceptable to me and B, wasn't working as well anymore. And I had seen all these other guys, Navy SEALs, U.S. Green Berets, even Delta Force guys. the states who had sort of gone through these programs and there was a program out there called Horoat Parts that's run by ex-US service guys and they catered to special operations guys ex-special ops guys so I just sort of started to do some research and that was when I mentioned to the sub lab law and he said I actually know some people

who might be able to help you and he linked in with them and you know the idea that that we try to shun or ban this stuff I mean our parents from the 70s, my parents from the 70s, did us no favors when they treated all this stuff as party drugs, right? Like, you know, like let's just let's just let loose and party with all this stuff. Because what happens then is that scares the powers that be, the government, the whoever. And what do they do with it? They start to put things on schedule two, or they ban it, or they make it criminalized. And when we criminalize it, we take away the ability to have learned from it.

you know we had an opportunity and we lost years of learning that we could have we could have been picking up you know but I think that's changing that we understand that this people

these ancient peoples in Peru and elsewhere have been using these these substances for thousands of years and they work well there's definitely you know so you know

I mean we're now sitting in a world where we're starting to recognize there's some value to psychedelic therapy. My concern here is that exactly what we're talking about, pharmaceutical companies, right? Because if psychedelic therapy starts to get studied, who's going to do the study?

Is it going to be pharmaceutical companies? One of the reasons some of these things work is because there's a spirit to the medicine. As you're engaging in the medicine, you're engaging in it with a sort of a spiritual component, engaging with the spirit of the medicine and the spirit of healing and stuff like that. And I think that when a pharmaceutical company or even a lab, even a university lab, decides it wants to study this stuff properly, all it's going to do is try to break down that molecule and give you that molecule.

These aren't miracle molecules. They require work. You have to work in conjunction with them. So my big concern when we're coming up to things like the Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs saying, we're going to study this for helping veterans. we already know it helps veterans. We have hundreds of veterans who has helped. We already know how. Why do we need to study the hell out of this?

Because if we're studying the hell out of this, are we in danger of it no longer working the way it works now? Why are we going to try to reinvent a wheel? And that would be my big concern. I think that if people are suffering from trauma, if people have got post-traumatic stress issues, whether you're a first responder or a veteran, no matter what, I think that you and you're not finding the modalities that you're currently using are helping,

then maybe you should open your mind up and have a look at, you know, alternative therapies such as psychedelic therapy. And I'd like to see them get a broader sort of more widespread acceptance. But I think that we run the peril of removing some of their efficacy if we try to Western medicineize them. And that's, you know, I'm not a big pharma fan. And I think that if we put their hands in it, if we let them get their hands in it, they're going to mess it up. And I don't want to see that because I know that's for me, just anecdotally, it has worked so well. And I know so many others I've worked with who it has worked for them now.

I'm, you know, probably worked with 50 other veterans and some of whom have had massive breakthroughs through psychedelic therapy. And I really am concerned that if Purdue Pharma wanted to get you on a microdosing thing, that it would not be as effective as if you were actually giving the medicine, the plant, as it's grown in nature, and working with people who understand the plant and understand the therapy aspect of it, rather than trying to just monetize it. And that's what pharmaceutical companies do. They monetize things, right? There's no reason people in the United States should be paying $10,000 a month for drugs for diabetes,

but, you know, a drug that costs next to nothing to make. But the money, follow the money. And I worry that the money's going to draw the psychedelic therapy in. So my hope is that that we can be smart about it and that people like me will continue to stand up and speak for it and say there's absolute healing available here. and that it'll get some more mainstream acceptance without us diluting it or letting it be monetized and changed by by firm shoe companies.

So, you know, I appreciate you giving me an opportunity to talk and tell sort of my story. It's, you know, it's a story that is common amongst veterans and the Canadian forces, certainly common amongst veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. Traumatic brain injuries and PTSD are the signature injuries of those two wars. And I picked up both of them,

and I know a lot of guys who have them. And I think that it's something that, you know, PTSD has stigmas behind it, and we talk a lot about releasing that stigma, getting rid of it, but the way to really get the stigma out of it and allow people to ask for helping to move towards help, whether that's psychedelic or not,

is for shows like this, for people to be able to have a voice, guys like me, they will have a voice and say, you know what, it's, it's okay to admit that you were ill or that you were wounded

or that you weren't okay after 24 months in, in Afghanistan. It's okay to say, hey, I'm not all right. I need to take a knee. I need, I need some help.

And for people to be able to reach out. And I appreciate you to give me an opportunity to use my voice. Well, folks that's going to do it uh we we had some audio visual uh problems with uh toby's uh connection and so i wanted to finish off the chat but uh at least we got to have some final thoughts from uh from toby and i appreciate you all hopping in today and we'll catch up to you on the next one until then