James Rosone, a former Air Force interrogator with over 2,100 hours of experience, details the psychological toll of missed intelligence failures in Iraq that created new terrorists. He critiques US foreign policy errors like toppling Gaddafi and highlights NATO's munitions shortages against Russia's industrial capacity. Rosone argues China is the primary existential threat, warning of a 2024-2025 invasion of Taiwan and criticizing AI-driven social engineering and the Belt and Road Initiative. Ultimately, he contends that US hypocrisy in allying with dictators while preaching democratic values undermines global stability and national security. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Interrogation Rules and Duties00:15:18
All right, James, thank you for coming on the show, man.
It's great to be here.
You've written a mountain of books.
Yes, we've written a few books.
Yeah.
How many terrorists have you interrogated in your career?
Probably 110, I'd say.
110.
And is that what led to you sort of discovering this newfound love of writing and reading?
Yes, and no.
I kind of stumbled into the writing, to be honest with you.
It's getting a little bit closer.
I kind of stumbled into the writing.
It wasn't the first, wasn't what I'd gone to school for.
And originally got into it originally as PTSD therapy, to be honest.
And my jobs always had me write a lot in interrogations.
You have to write what went on in the interrogation, any kind of intel reports, you got to write up those and do a lot of research on the person you're talking to and your geographical area you cover.
And so I had a lot of the skills necessary to be a writer.
I just hadn't actually gone that path.
And When I was talking with someone at the VA about how do you make that adjustment from military to civilian, one of them had suggested looking at writing therapy and just writing out some of the areas and things you kind of struggled with.
It's good sometimes to put it on paper.
Even sometimes when you write out that event that happened and just write it down and then throw it away, burn it, just kind of get it off your chest and get rid of it, it can be quite helpful.
But it's kind of a point where it's like, okay, I've done that.
This seems to be helping, but what do I do next?
And that's when this person I was seeing said, Well, why don't you just write a book?
And they're thinking, Hey, I'm just assigning them busy work, you know?
And so I started doing that.
And he said, Well, I'll write what I want to read that I don't see being written.
And it just kind of took off from there.
So it's not typical for Air Force folks to be interrogators, is it?
No, it is not.
It is not our.
Main job at all.
Yeah.
How can you explain to me the beginning of your whole journey into joining the Air Force and eventually going to Iraq and interrogating all these guys?
Sure.
So I originally joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard back in 1996.
I was young, 18 year olds, 18 years, didn't know what I was doing, what I wanted to do in life.
My uncle had been in the Guard for 20 some odd years, but he was active duty, like he worked there full time.
And he encouraged me to just go check out the Guard.
Get my college degree paid for through them.
And then, if I really want to make the military a full time career, I just cross over and do that.
And that made sense to me at the time.
So, that's how I started in the military going that particular path.
I was in a self propelled paladin artillery unit, spent six years doing that.
And then 9 11 happened.
At the time, I was a student doing my fall semester for my senior year in Munich, Germany when 9 11 happened.
And at that point, I decided that I wanted to go full time military.
And went outside, just finished school, and then decided if I'm going to do this full time, I want to go into the Air Force ranks.
And it took a little while to actually cross over because it's not common to change branches.
So it took me about a year and a half to make that switch.
And then I moved in.
And then with the interrogation stuff, this is not a normal job for the Air Force.
It's a special duty assignment for one.
So it's typically you have to volunteer to go into a special duty assignment billet for that.
But what happened is when Abu Ghraib broke all that.
When what unfolded?
The Abu Ghraib scandals at the prison there.
We had the military guards were abusing the prisoners and the photos and all that stuff kind of leaked onto the internet and caused a big problem there.
I think it was in 2004 and 2005 when that kind of really.
Is that when the enhanced interrogation got leaked?
No, it was totally separate.
But you had those images of the prison guards.
Did you find that often?
Abu Ghraib?
Yeah, the prison guards were having the prisoners in different positions they shouldn't have been and just.
They were not doing what they should have been doing.
And it would create a big scandal and a problem for the Army.
And what happened is they lost most of that mission and it got put on the shoulders of the Air Force.
And this is not a normal Air Force job.
So the Air Force put out a request for volunteers to join.
I joined in the second wave.
So I went in the second round of it because we had to provide people for two years to help augment the Army and help assist them in that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Again, this was soldiers being left.
To their own devices and not being properly supervised and doing what they're supposed to be doing.
And where was this prison at?
So Abu Ghraib is, I believe, in the west of Baghdad area.
West Baghdad.
Not too far from the airport.
Okay.
Yeah.
I remember seeing these photos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For some reason, though, I always thought that they were from Guantanamo.
Yeah, it's all in Iraq.
And unfortunately, this really was kind of a spark that really ignited a lot of the insurgency, too, because it just fed the narrative of.
You know, the big bad evil Americans coming here to subjugate them, so to speak.
Yes.
And it just really harmed us a lot, those images.
But this was a big mission, and the Army needed help to manage that.
And so the Air Force was asked to provide, you know, interrogators for a couple of years.
And I saw the call and I read the description, thought, well, that sounds pretty neat.
Let me volunteer and go do that.
And next thing you know, you're signed up for this 556 day.
Deployment, more or less.
And it was quite a long trip.
I think I was, I think I saw my wife maybe 26 to 28 days out of that period.
So it was a long haul.
Now, why wouldn't we want FBI or CIA to be interrogating people like this?
That's typically what they do, right?
Like FBI are like the number one interrogators.
Different.
So the difference between like civilian interrogation versus military, right?
So civilians, they're trying to interrogate people for collecting evidence that can be used by a prosecutor for a case, right?
Military interrogators, that's not our primary goal.
Our primary goal is to acquire information so we can action it.
Whether it's where's a weapon cache, where are they smuggling weapons across the border, who is the leader for this organization or group, and then where are they staying at, where are they building IEDs, things like that.
We're looking for intelligence and locations to go action something.
And our missions are capture kill.
That's what we want.
I prefer the capture part because I need fresh people to talk to to continue working up the chain.
Some of the shooters prefer the other method.
Either way, you're removing the threat from the population.
But again, it's a very different mission set from a law enforcement because they're, again, looking for evidence, confessions, things like that to prosecute.
Whereas on the military side, we don't really care about the prosecution side.
We care about intelligence to go capture, kill bad guys.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Where were we?
Oh, yeah.
So you got deployed?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We deployed out of, so we went to, first you go to Fort Huachuca for your.
Your training with the army.
Um, so us Air Force guys went uh embedded with the army for the training period doing that.
But having spent, you know, I went to basic training with the Army and then spent six years with the Guard and doing different training iterations with that side of the house.
So I was already used to being with the Army and working with the Army.
So for me, it was kind of felt more comfortable because I always felt like an oddball being in the Air Force, having come from a different service because I didn't start in that service.
It was kind of different.
But as soon as we went through the training there, then we all deployed as a group over to Iraq.
We were at Camp Cropper, that's where the main prison facility is.
It's right next to the airport there.
Um, and you're basically broke down into geographical regions.
So you have groups that cover the south, the west, the north, and then inside the north, they'll break it down further into different uh regions.
So the region I covered was the Diala province, which is just north of Baghdad's Bakuba, Al Khalis, Mukhtadiya.
And what year was this?
So we got there in um just middle of October 06, 06, and then we were there through yeah, October 07.
So we were there.
Pre surge, and then we were there for the whole surge, and that was a big difference uh, big op tempo difference.
There was a big change in the work, like I say, we were there when it was the worst of the war, and then kind of got to see a little bit of that transition into where it actually started winning, started to win the peace, so to speak, you know, towards the end.
Um, and then when I got out, we went back home.
Um, I left the air force uh, maybe like six months after our deployment.
Um, time I was interviewing with one of the other agencies.
Um, then that would.
Didn't work out there, which thank God it didn't.
Which agency?
One of the other three layer agency groups.
Because when you do this interrogation type work, you work with some of these groups.
And so they're always looking to try to find people who are good at it and move them into their spot.
I'm glad that didn't work out that particular way because it would put me on a different career trajectory and path than what I ultimately did.
But I still went back to Iraq.
For a couple more years with a couple different contracting companies with Dinecore and with Triple Canopy.
So I can't remember, I can't recall off the top of my head, but 2006, was that after John Keriakou went on ABC and talked about enhanced interrogation?
It might have been.
And was there any sort of talks in your groups, the people that you were there with about that kind of stuff?
Because I know everyone's talking about it.
Well, yeah, that TV series 24 with Jack Bauer, right?
So everyone thinks that that's what interrogation is like.
You're just hooking up electrodes and shocking people and doing all those kinds of.
Physical things to people.
It's really not that.
It's interrogations is much more about conversations.
It's about a lot of wordsmithing.
And on the military side, we were really constrained by the rules and regulations that we had to operate under.
So you guys weren't allowed to waterboard?
No.
Okay.
No.
That would have landed you in a world of trouble and arrest.
Oh, hands down.
Hands down.
Yeah.
No.
Maybe because you guys.
You guys weren't at one of the CIA black sites.
That's why.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and if you were at a CIA black site, God help you if you're still considered active military doing that because you're under different rules and regulations of what they are.
They have a different set of rules that they can play by than we do.
We're under UCMJ.
And so we have to abide by what our box of tools are.
And it's constricting.
I mean, give you an example someone gets captured and we bring them in.
Ideally, you want to put them in separation so that way they can't be.
Coached by the other people in the prison on what to say and how to evade us.
Yes.
But to put him in separation, I got to have a 06 colonel sign off to put him in separation just for, I think it was 72 hours.
And then if I want to put him in separation for up to a month, now I've got to have my task force commander, which is a two star general, sign off on that just to have him in isolation for 30 days.
And if I want to extend that for an additional 30 days, then I would have to have our theater commander.
So now, My case, I'd have to have General Petraeus sign off on that.
And I did.
I had him sign off on two of them because I had two guys that we kept in separation for 60 days.
But that just shows you some of the red tape we had to deal with because that's quite constrained.
You would think that it should be a common sense thing because in the US, we can put people in isolation, people in isolation in prison for years.
But in, or it's considered, you know, inhumane treatment of a prisoner or something like that.
But it's not in America.
Yeah.
I mean, FBI can do this.
Prison system can do this, but you can't do that in a war.
It's quite interesting the rules you had to deal with.
You'd be very careful with perceived threats or direct threats to people.
You can't directly threaten them.
If you don't talk to me, then we're going to harm your family.
That's a direct threat.
That'll land you in a lot of trouble.
You're probably going to get relieved and maybe face some UCMJ charges.
So you had to learn how to be very good with your words and to say, well, look, I can't make you cooperate.
You don't want to talk to me.
That's fine.
I get it.
But if you're of no intelligence value to us, and I'm going to have to work on handing you over to the Ministry of Justice and the Iraqi police.
Well, if he's a Sunni terrorist and he's being handed over to the Ministry of Justice and the police who are predominantly run by Shia, life's not going to go very well for him.
So I didn't threaten him, but I let him connect the dots for himself.
Yeah.
And now he's got to prove why he should stay with me and why he's valuable enough to be kept.
Because if he's not, Well, we'll send them down to Camp Bukka in the South, and that's long term detainment.
And you'll just have to wait your turn as you process through the criminal system.
And maybe you'll be acquitted because they don't have any good evidence.
But that might take you two years or three years for that to happen.
So before you got sent over to Iraq, I'm sure you didn't have any sort of special interest in interrogation or psychology to begin with.
And what sort of training did you have to go through to learn these tactics?
Yeah, so I didn't have any.
I didn't have any previous experience in that or necessarily desire.
I would say it was a job I didn't know about.
And it's a job that most people don't know about or think about.
It's not a very big profession in the military to begin with.
And it tends to be a profession you only really need during a war.
Outside of war, it's kind of challenging to do that.
You end up working on the other side of the schoolhouse, which is the source operations, where you're developing sources, recruiting, and assessing people who can be informants for you, so to speak.
And you would do that outside of military bases overseas.
To make sure you're assessing for threats against the facility or against soldiers operating off the base, things like that.
So, that's what you would tend to do more on the peacetime side.
As far as the training, we all went through the same training that they have out at Fort Wachuka, the 97 Echo course.
I think it's probably changed the MOS at this point, but it's about a four and a half month course.
And then they have a second course, an enhanced interrogation analysis training.
Recruiting High-Value Assets00:15:15
Where you kind of are paired up more as tiger teams, where it's you and an analyst working together as a team.
Enhanced interrogation, what?
Enhanced interrogation analysis.
Analysis.
Yeah.
So in this case, what you now is you have an analyst that's working with you.
And that's what we did.
We had, there was us as the interrogator, then we had an Air Force analyst working with us or a contract analyst, and then our linguist that formed your Tiger team.
And the analyst was really helpful because they could do a lot of the research that you couldn't always do.
I mean, you're going into the booth, you're interrogating the subject, you're talking with them, but the analyst is sometimes vetting what they're telling you, like on the spot in real time.
Yeah.
Or they're doing research of the prisoners that are coming in.
So my analyst, Jeremy Hugh, is phenomenal.
And what would happen is, When a bunch of new prisoners would come in, he looked at the incoming sheet and see who's coming in and where they were captured.
And we only dealt with prisoners that were coming in from the Diallo province.
We knew our area, our province really well.
And if we had new prisoners coming in from a particular village, then he would look and say, okay, what do we know about this village from the previous guys we've interrogated?
And what do we need to know to further our mission in this area to go after these other cells?
And that would help me know specifically what questions to go after or, um, Maybe ask him, do you know this other prisoner?
And get him to tell me a bit more about this prisoner.
And I can kind of vet some of what he's already told me with this other guy.
Maybe it's true, but now I can also let this other guy know that, hey, I know a hell of a lot about your area and I know a lot about you.
You know, you're here because someone narked.
So let's, you know, let's talk.
And that was really, really helpful because, again, it's just another resource to help you track down information, know where to steer you, where to point, so to speak.
And what do they teach you about?
Breaking down the human mind and sort of like getting into the deep, dark secrets.
Yeah.
The best thing I learned was from one of our instructors at the advanced school.
He was a retired special forces warrant officer and been interrogated for a long time and had a couple tours under his belt before he retired, then went to the school I was teaching us.
And one of the things he told me is he says, He's like, All right, it's kind of like knocking at someone's door when you start the interrogation.
You get them to open the door.
What you want to do is you want them to invite you in.
And start talking.
And then once they've invited you in, you want them to kind of give you a tour of the house, tour of the rooms, and see everything in there.
So, to put it in like a conversation, when we start talking, I can either go at you and say, Where are the weapons that your organization is using?
Where are you hiding them?
Where are you storing them?
And how are you acquiring them?
Chances are you're not going to talk to me about that.
But I can spend all day grilling you about this, berating you, trying all kinds of different tactics.
But likely it's not going to work.
Or I could take a different attack and just try to be more of a conversation with you and just try to accept that, you know, we are adversaries, obviously, but you're still a human being.
So you still have human desires and wants and needs and things like that.
So let me play to those.
So kind of talk with them and ask them.
Just like I had one guy, he was a real big, big guy with the Ansar al Sunnah organization.
And one of the things I talked with him was why did you get into this?
Like, what did you do before the war?
So, get him to talk about that.
And he owned a business.
He got his master's in economics.
He actually had a good life before the war.
And when I talked to him about that, I was like, so why are you doing this?
And his basic response is, well, when you guys came here, I lost everything.
I lost my stature and position in the community because I was, you know, SUNY.
I was at the bath party and I have no future employment opportunities and ability here.
So, why would I?
Why would I not fight you?
Right.
You know, and that when I kind of got to that point there and we started talking, right?
I'm not accusing him of anything.
I'm asking him why he feels this way and why he's doing that.
He starts to open up more.
And I say, all right, you're here now.
There's nothing we can do about that.
So let's make the best of the situation.
Who are some of the other organizations in your area where you live that are causing problems?
Because Al Qaeda in Iraq and Anjal Sunna and these other different splinter groups, they're not always working together.
And sometimes they do, sometimes they work against each other.
But it's also ideological.
So there's going to be like Shia organizations.
That are fighting against the Sunni ones because it was kind of almost like a civil war in a way.
And the Sunni guys, the Al Qaeda guys, will get a diary of the mouth about the Shia militias and insurgent groups and tell you everything you want to know about them.
Well, we have a collection of requirements to go after that too.
It's not just the Al Qaeda ones.
We want to know who the other guys are that are causing the problems as well and where they're smuggling their stuff in because a lot of their stuff comes in from Iran.
So if you're not going to talk with me about his organization, at least not right away, then let me get him talking about the other one.
And as we start sharing more and we start developing that bit of rapport, now I can start whittling and getting a little bit more information from him about his.
And in his case, it was more about how have you been able to outsmart us all this time?
And he was kind of, I don't want to say arrogant, but he liked to brag about how smart and effective his group was and how they had outfoxed us for so many years and outsmarted us.
So I played that.
It's like, okay, well, how?
Tell me about this, and then just kind of like, Oh man, that's so clever.
You guys did that, I can't believe we were too stupid to figure this out and just kind of play along with that.
And that led to him telling a lot more than he probably wanted to.
And you just kind of let them talk and let them talk and just poke and prod.
Um, it's conversational, and another really big thing to do, and this it's all cult, it depends on the culture you're dealing with.
Um, in the Middle East and in Arab cultures, uh, it's very common to sit and break bread and have a meal.
And when you have meals with each other like that, you can't really.
You're not really adversaries, so to speak, in their culture.
And so it's not uncommon.
You've seen this with Afghanistan in some of the tribals' relationships and the way they interact.
They can be sit and have dinner together and converse normally.
And then the next day they're fighting each other, right?
Right.
Us in the West, it just doesn't compute.
Like, why would you do that?
But that's their culture.
And so when you kind of understand their culture a little bit, you start, you know, just play along with it.
So for me, we would sit and have, you know, have a meal.
Dinner with terrorists.
So, you're letting these guys, these guys obviously aren't constrained.
They aren't handcuffed.
I've got an MP outside.
He's sitting out there with a taser and a German Shepherd.
He's ready to go.
So, I mean, if they want to get feisty, I mean, this guy could just grab his fork or his knife and just like leap across the table, couldn't he?
Maybe if he wants to grab it, it's a plastic fork.
Oh, okay.
Gotcha.
It's like it's a real one.
Yeah.
I mean, sure, they can do something too.
The chance of them killing you, pretty slim.
Right.
Maybe you might get punched in the face or get hurt, but.
Yeah.
The guards are going to be on them pretty quick.
I mean, and hopefully you're going to have a little bit of your own wits about you to be able to, you know, defend your own self too a little bit.
But we never had an incident like that.
We didn't have any incidents like that.
In a way, I was kind of surprised.
But when you get there and you kind of see it, I mean, they're in this, they're not getting out of this prison.
And so, you know, they're, I don't want to say they're broken, but they kind of accepted that they're here.
That makes sense.
What sort of hope do they have?
Like by answering your questions and cooperating with you, do you give them any sort of hope of being free or, What do you make them any promises?
Yes, you can do all of those things.
Whether you have a lot of influence in getting them out, that's kind of questionable sometimes.
If the subject you're talking with, if the prisoner you're talking with is a good, high enough asset, like to say they've got really good placement and access in their organization, and there's potential that they could be recruited as a source to work for you, maybe you can have them working, doing collections for you inside the camp and against other prisoners.
They may be able to get recruited by one of the other agencies to go work outside the camp.
That did happen.
It's not very frequent, but there were one off cases where that kind of stuff would happen.
Generally speaking, your objective is to get the intel.
So if you have to lie to these guys, make up, work with the JAG, the military lawyers, to craft up these cleverly worded amnesty things like, hey, confess to all these different things or tell us about all this, your sins will be forgiven, so to speak.
You could come up with a lot of those things and as ruses and use those.
And I mean, you're again, your job is to collect intel.
You're out there, you're not there for them, you're not there to get them out of the prison, you're there to get intel.
So, if it works and gets you intel, great.
And once you've gotten everything you need, sounds callous, but when you've got everything you need, typically they're just transferred down to long term detainment.
That's down south at the other camp.
And I mean, you can write up, you know, a letter and you just explain, look.
I've interrogated this guy now for X number of times, this many hours.
We've talked about these different things here.
Is my belief, and based on the information intelligence we've collected up to this point, he's not involved in this, or this is not true, or he's not involved with these different things.
And the person has provided substantial information to help coalition forces and help the government of Iraq, and you list out the litany of things they've done.
And you can do those kinds of things and put that in their file for them.
And then when their file is reviewed eventually by the Ministry of Justice, you know, the prosecutor is, there's a lot of times where that holds a whole lot of weight.
Usually ends up, you know, absolving them from whatever the charge was because it couldn't be backed up.
You got the interrogator and the antelass saying the same thing.
Those guys usually get to walk.
Okay.
And so, I mean, you can do things like that.
But, you know, again, when I first got there, we had two to 400 new prisoners coming in a week.
They're now we've captured, filtered down to our camp.
And there's only about like 50, 48 to 60 of us.
Not a lot.
That's a lot of new people coming in that have to be screened and interrogated.
And you already got.
5,000 in the camp, too.
So you've got guys you're already talking to.
You got two to 400 new ones coming in.
Now, when the surge happened, we suddenly had 30,000, not 30,000 extra troops.
We had 30,000 extra infantry troops, guys to go kick down doors.
Big difference in like support guys.
They were just capture, kill people left and right.
I mean, it was just heyday.
And that count went from two to 400 a week to six to 800 a week sometimes.
That's a lot of people coming in.
And our interrogation numbers didn't go up.
Like, we didn't get more interrogators to offset that workload.
We just had to work more hours and handle that.
So, there'd be times where you've got 16 cases you're already handling, 16 guys you're handling, and your section chief's going, Sorry, man, but here's five more new ones.
And you're like, So, how do you figure, how do you get through it all?
And I'd have clever different ways of just lined up and have like six guys, eight guys interrogate in one night and just kind of make them really quick assessments, more or less.
For me, it's not a straight up interrogation at that point.
It's going to be an assessment.
Who's going to be reasonably cooperative that I can talk with and has intelligence that's worth my time to exploit?
And who's just, who's not?
Because I don't have time to spend days or weeks trying to break someone down unless they're really high value.
We're just not going to necessarily put that kind of effort into it because, again, I've got 600 new ones showing up every week.
That's insane.
And I still need to get actual intelligence out of the ones I have.
So you really got to balance your time.
Did you speak Arabic?
Can you speak Arabic?
No, I did not.
And you wouldn't have been allowed to interrogate in Arabic even if you did speak it.
Based on the rules and everything that was in place there, we had to work through an interpreter.
So, all of our interpreters were US citizens.
Usually, they had secret or top secret clearances.
But your question had to be asked in English.
The interpreter would interpret it into Arabic and then they would interpret it back and then back to you.
That's how it had to be done because all of our interrogations were video recorded and monitored.
So, other agencies could pop in to just check and make sure you're abiding by the rules and regulations.
And do spot checks, and they have to hear that you are asking the question in English because they may not speak Arabic.
And if you do speak Arabic, and you're you could be asking, you could be asking questions you're not allowed to ask, making threats, making you know, insinuations that you're not allowed to insinuate or do, right?
And languages mean different things in English versus Arabic, and so it's got to be very clear what it is you meant to say, okay?
Yeah, very rule is very quite rule based.
It was after that 2005 Detained Treatment Act that Senator Feingold and Senator McCain. Kind of shackled us with.
They really put the chains on us.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Not fans of those guys.
Now, what did you learn from, say, your first interrogation you ever did over there until like your hundredth interrogation?
Yeah.
So, what did you learn personally about these people?
Yeah.
And what did you learn?
Did you learn anything about yourself and the human mind?
Like, how did you evolve?
So, I'm talking probably about 110 or so, maybe people, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but probably in total about 550 interrogations, I think, over maybe about 2100 hours, give or take, in that year.
So it's a lot of time to spend with these guys.
My first interrogation, what I learned is these guys will lie through their teeth to get out of what they got apprehended for, as they're just going to lie incessantly.
And it's kind of your job to figure out, okay, well, what is it?
What are they lying about?
How can I turn this lie into something I can work with?
And a lot of it goes back to.
Trying to recognize that we are adversaries, but they're still a person.
And if they're a person, they've got needs, wants, and desires.
So, how do you work those needs, wants, and desires to your advantage to get what you need?
Because, again, it's different than a criminal.
I'm not trying to prosecute the guy.
I don't care if he's guilty.
I care if he has intel that leads to the capture, kill of his comrades and to remove these violent extremists from the community.
We can't end the violence in the cities and in the villages if we don't remove these people from the streets.
Understanding Terrorist Needs00:15:36
And that's just the number one goal get them out of there, figure out where the weapons are coming in from, who's financially supporting them.
And it comes with finances.
My God, are they clever?
They are so clever with the finances.
You know, one of the guys I talk about in my book, the book I wrote about my experiences on there.
Which book was that?
That was an interview with the terrorists.
I didn't bring that one here, but that one.
So I had a guy who got apprehended.
He was.
Lived in Germany for about six years.
He's from Bakuba.
And he was coming back to pick up his wife and then smuggle her back out of Iraq back to Germany.
And he got caught on a random checkpoint that special forces threw up.
And his name and information was on a Be On the Lookout list, a Bolo list.
And that's how he got caught, just randomly like that.
But how he acquired this dude's information was wild.
So, what happens is when they need to get money into Iraq to funnel and support these guys, different charitable organizations in Europe and elsewhere, what they'll do is take the money that people are donating for the cause, whatever.
Really expensive vehicles, high end BMWs, Mercedes, it's costing $100 plus thousand vehicles.
They ship them into Kuwait and then someone on the other end receives them.
They take them and drive them up to Baghdad and then they're used for one of two purposes.
Either they're sold and then that money that they make from the sale of the vehicle is now used to pay the salaries of the fighters for the different organizations or used to buy the weapons, things like that.
It's a way of smuggling in money without doing through normal banking systems that follow the network.
Yeah.
And then the other thing they would use it for is car bombs.
So when you see a BMW 7 Series driving up near a convoy or heading towards a gate, one of the military gates to come on the base, you're not really going to think that this BMW 7 Series, brand spanking new, is a car bomb.
You're thinking that beat up jalopy over there that's riding a little low on its suspension is the car bomb.
And you'd be right, that usually is the car bomb.
So, those high end vehicles had much better luck at getting really close to the gates before they would set off their bombs.
And when you set off 1,000, 2,000 pounds in a car, right in a gate like that, you're going to cause some major damage.
So, what happened is when one of those incidents happened, we look at all the evidence that's left behind, right?
The vehicles.
So, you find the VIN numbers for the vehicles, you put it all down there, you keep track of the VINs.
And then, when they did a raid on someone they thought was tied to this whole network, They discovered all the paperwork for the vehicles that were coming in, and they traced one of those vehicles to one of the car bombs to this manifest.
And then from that shipping manifest, they had the end destination in Germany who shipped it.
So we put that guy's name on a bolo.
So when that guy got caught in Bakubo, my prisoner, we had the whole thing.
We had the whole thing linked together.
So now he's in here, and he had no idea how we found out about him.
But that's how we did.
And that's just one method that they use for smuggling in.
Money.
Right.
And they've gotten way more clever now.
I mean, obviously, everyone knows about crypto.
There's other ways where they use SIM cards because you can load money on SIM cards and, you know, for phones and things like that.
So you can do that and move that because it's very easy to take the little SIM cards, dump thousands of dollars on these things, and then move these SIM cards around and then hand them out.
And then they can go change the money and do what they want.
And it's all done under the radar without the banking system knowing about it.
And it's very, very hard to track.
Was there one interrogation that you did that sort of led to?
Some sort of big win for you or like a big victory for your team?
Is there one that sticks out in your mind?
Yeah, I mean, we had a couple of them like that.
So, my guy that we caught in Germany was a really big one because as we unraveled that case, we started to, we had, they had ideas on who else was involved in Europe, in other countries, and in other regions of the world.
And so we started filtering in these names.
Like, I would just say, well, Why would this, you know, why did this person here talk about or mention X, Y, or Z?
And my prisoner would respond back, well, he doesn't know about this, or he's not involved with that.
Well, my guy just inadvertently acknowledged he knows this guy, and this guy is involved in the organization.
So, where we thought we weren't sure if he was involved, now we know he's involved because our guy who is involved confirmed it.
And they don't realize that that's what's happening.
Right.
And so, that was a big win for us because it wasn't like the sexy weapon cache or you captured someone here in Iraq.
What it was, though, was that it was a big win for uncovering a massive web of financing that was happening, of financing the organizations and the money flowing in.
And that was really big because if you can dry that up, it makes it a lot harder for them to pay their fighters and continue to acquire weapons and do things and bribe people.
So it was a big deal to kind of bust that.
But it wasn't directly addressing things inside of Iraq like, I guess, like we would think or want sometimes.
But it had a big.
It had a big impact in the overall mission, though.
Okay.
Because you're drying up the money.
And we're identifying a bunch of things in Europe we didn't previously know about.
Right.
That was a really big deal.
But my focus is kind of on Iraq, not what's going on in Europe.
Right.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
Was there any specific interrogation that fucked with you psychologically that kind of like gave you?
I mean, you mentioned now that you obviously have figured out a way to combat your PTSD with writing and different kinds of therapies.
But is there what part of your job over there?
Was the most disturbing?
So, the most disturbing is just seeing when you get these guys, you have the capture package, got the intel package, what we have on the suspect, right?
What we have on the guy.
It's pretty disturbing stuff.
You know, these are not nice people.
It's not like this is some drug dealer or some gang member.
These are really hardened terrorists.
I had one guy, he got.
His organization had kidnapped a son for a tribal sheikh, one of the local tribal sheikhs, and they were trying to hold him.
They wanted to basically ransom the kid.
And they got the father to pay up the money.
I think it was like $100,000 US dollars or something.
And so they got the money.
And they said, okay, well, your son's in the trunk of this car in this location here.
The drop's been made.
So they got the money.
Here's the location of the vehicle, and your son's in the trunk.
And the son wasn't in the trunk.
Problem was, his son's in the trunk in like a bunch of different pieces.
Oh, wow.
This is how they think and operate like this.
And now I have to, you know, interrogate this guy.
Obviously, you'd like to, you know, be a little physical with someone like that, but you can't.
You got to divorce yourself from that and try to figure out how do I be buddy-buddy friends with this guy to get info information to go kill and capture his buddies.
And that's kind of hard to accept and deal with, but you have lots of situations like that.
You know, there's that one.
There's just other ones.
We had, we had, there was a bunch of some Iraqi cops were.
Working for one of the units that we worked with a lot as sources providing them intel and what was going on in the village and stuff.
Well, they got outed.
Somehow the Al Qaeda guys in that village discovered who was narking on them, who was feeding them information on them to the Americans.
And so when they figured that out, they captured the four guys, but they do their little videos.
They always love their videos.
So here's a video of them getting their heads kind of sawed off with these.
Knives, and then they're just kicking their heads around like soccer balls.
They're animals.
And now we've got the guy that was responsible for it, and we have to interrogate this guy and try to get him to give up the goods on.
Where are they keeping these videos?
A lot of times they would post, at the time, a lot of his stuff was getting posted up to YouTube.
Before YouTube, YouTube's really coming out.
So there's there, there's other kinds of websites that they would post these things on and share these things about.
And it's just, it's a terror weapon because what they're trying to do by doing a horrific act like that is demonstrate to the local population.
That this is the price for cooperating with the Americans.
You cooperate with coalition forces, this is what happens.
And it's a chilling effect because then nobody wants to work with you.
And when you say, well, we can protect you, we will help you, they're just going to say, well, you couldn't help these cops.
Yeah, you couldn't help these cops.
Right, right.
How are you going to help us?
And so nobody starts talking to you until we eliminate those guys.
And that's why they do a lot of those horrific things.
But you have to see a lot of this.
You have to be involved in a lot of this and questioning and talking with these guys.
And if you fail to, Ask the right question, people can get killed.
We had one operation I mentioned in an interview with Combat Stories where we got actual intel on where a very large weapon cache was going to be located at for one cell that we were targeting.
And this new unit had just been in country a couple of weeks, I think it was, up out of Bakuba.
And we told them this particular route has got IEDs and car bombs on it.
They want you to go this route because this is where they're going to hit you.
And you got all these ambushes laid out for you.
This is what this guy was telling you.
Yeah.
That's what our prisoner told us.
He says, look, don't go this route.
You know, he's actually a very cooperative guy.
He's given us good intel on it.
He's past polygraph, you know, polygraph prisoners.
He's past all that stuff.
So we reasonably think he's telling us the truth.
So he tells us, don't, you know, here's where the stuff's going to happen and to take this other path.
So we pass it on to the unit that was going to action it.
And this new unit, like I said, they just got in there.
They're there to, you know, slay bodies and take names.
They just want to fight.
And so they want to get engaged.
So we told them all that, and they're like, Well, hey, if this is where the fight's at, we're going to go to, we're going to advance to contact and engage.
And we're like, We'd rather you not, because we'd rather you go this other route here and not get ambushed and actually get to the weapon site and then, you know, seize the weapons and the explosives, because that's more important than your firefight.
Yeah.
But that's not the path they chose.
So they went the other way, and, you know, they got involved in a couple of fights, and, you know, they got ambushed twice, and we lost six guys that day, you know, and that sucks because it didn't have to happen that way.
And the fight lasted long enough, they moved the damn weapons.
Why didn't they listen to you guys?
They don't believe the prisoner.
They're like, well, we don't believe that he's telling us the truth or whatever it was.
And so they just kind of want to do their own thing.
It's kind of frustrating because, I mean, it is a prisoner.
You're having to trust that this prisoner, who is an al Qaeda operative, is giving you the truth.
And it's kind of hard to accept sometimes.
That kind of like just defeats the purpose of your job, though.
You would think, yeah.
Because in this case, we proved out that, yeah, our guy was actually right.
It helped validate his future stuff because now everyone believed him a whole lot more than they did before.
I mean, he passed a polygraph twice.
That wasn't enough for some people.
But when the car bomb and ID went off in the exact freaking locations he said they would, well, now they kind of believed him a little bit more.
And his subsequent information was treated a lot with a lot more credibility, so to speak.
And other times, you just forget to ask a question, right?
I think I mentioned this in the other interview.
I had a 15 year old kid that we were interrogating.
We don't usually interrogate kids, but this kid got caught, placed an IDA on the side of the road.
One of the units on patrol saw it, so they nabbed him.
How old was he?
15.
And so we can't hold them very long.
We only can hold them for like three days or seven days, something like that.
And we got to let them back out to their family, right?
And so when I have the guy, we're doing different tactics.
We're trying to scare him into cooperating and talking.
And the target was his father and his three brothers.
They ran this big IED cell up in the northern Baghdad area.
And that's what we were trying to go after to get these guys.
How'd you figure that out?
We had a lot of intel on this family in this area.
This feels just.
At the edge of the Diallo province in Baghdad proper.
So that region up there was just a lot of IDs and car bombs going off.
And we kind of knew who was doing it.
And we know that from different signals, intelligence, and intercepts, things like that.
So we kind of had an idea of who they were.
And when we captured the kid and have his ID, we're like, oh, okay, now we know this is their son.
So we want to know where they are at.
And his concern was he didn't want to give us a location because he's concerned that, you know, if we go to where they're at, that we're going to end up killing his father and his brother.
We're like, look, dude.
I can't talk to dead people.
I want to talk to live people.
So tell me where they're at.
Tell me how I can capture them.
We'll have a conversation.
And we go through and get the location.
He points out where it's at.
So tell me about the details of it.
And you just forget sometimes to make sure you get everything.
So, like when a door opens, is it open in or out?
And does it have a lock on the top and on the floor and in the center?
You need those kind of details, all those little pieces of information.
Same with windows.
Do the windows have.
Your bars on the outside, on the inside, are they built into the wall?
You got to know all those little nuanced questions and things to ask.
It's a whole litany of things you need to make sure you kind of go through when they start cooperating and start giving you information.
Because if the doors, if you don't get that information right, when the unit goes to action, they may try to bust the doors in because they see that the door's going to go in.
And so they use the RAM, they're thinking, oh, we'll just ram it and go in.
But if there's locks in the tops and the bottoms, they're not going to know to have a shotgun to do what the With the slug to bust it open.
Right.
So, when they start ramming this thing, it's going to take them a couple of hits.
And those couple of hits are going to delay your entry by seconds.
Those few seconds are typically all they need to wake up, grab their weapons, and start engaging.
So, you want to go in with lightning speed and do that.
And, you know, in our case, you know, me and my ass, we just missed it.
You know, missed one of the questions on a lock.
And the unit got in the house.
It took them like an extra three to five seconds to get in.
That was all the time they needed, though.
To grab their guns, grab their guns and start shooting.
And next thing you know, we're there in a firefight.
So one of our guys gets uh, he got his arm shot off, another guy got shot in the chest plate, so he survived.
Um, but after that gunfight was going on, the commander on the ground's like, you know, screw this, I've already got two guys injured.
Um, just you know, we got a gunship overhead, just have them level it.
And so, you know, only you know, hit it with a missile and you flatten the building, you know, problem solved, right?
Speed in Modern Warfare00:14:40
So, uh, an airplane dropped a bomb on him, no, no, a helicopter, one of the helicopters, yeah.
So, um, the suspects we were after, the father and the three sons that were building all these IDs and stuff like that, they're dead.
They're taking off the chessboard.
So good there.
Problem is, we also nailed his grandmother and his mother and his five brothers and sisters in the house, too.
All clown overdamaged.
They're just, they were there at the fight.
And so after that, you got to get the unit takes all the pictures for everyone.
You need to go back to this 15 year old with all these pictures and have him PID his family.
You know, that sucks because I got to go and have him PID his dad and his brother to make sure that they are who, you know, we actually got the right guys.
But here you promised him if he gives you the information on where they're at, you're not going to kill him.
Well, now you broke that promise.
And not only did you break the promise, you also wiped out his entire family.
So, kind of like the burning hatred in that kid's eyes.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, we just made a terrorist right there.
Yeah.
Hands down.
And you don't think about it at that moment, at that time, because as soon as I'm done talking with him and confirm that we got the guys, I'm already on to the next interrogation and then the next one and the next one.
I have like three or four or five of these a day.
And it's just a repetitive cycle over and over and over.
And before you know it, an entire year's gone by.
I can imagine you become numb to this stuff.
You do.
You do.
And you don't really even think about a lot of it.
It's not until you come home and things start to slow down that you start to have some more of these problems.
And for me, I didn't encounter a lot of those kinds of problems until probably like 2014, 2015 is when things really started to get bad.
Because at that point, I've now, I'm out of Iraq.
I'm out of the Intel stuff.
I'm not working in Europe doing that anymore.
I'm back home.
I'm completely out.
And when I'm completely out and have that time to think, that's when it starts to hit you.
That's when you start processing all that stuff and you go, Wow, I can't believe we did all this stuff.
You know, you just explained the hit on that kid's family who was making the IEDs and dropping the bomb on the house and leveling them.
How often would mistakes happen where you would kill a family that was innocent andor bust have some guys bust into somebody's door and you got the wrong guys, you killed the wrong people?
That's hard to know.
I don't know.
I mean, I suspect it happens probably more often than you'd want to admit.
Um, I mean, so when US forces going to do these things.
We're not just like going up to a house and just pulling a pin and throwing it in the room and just letting the grenade go off and clear it.
I'm sure that's probably what a lot of the Russians and Ukrainians are doing in their fight.
But that's not how we fought.
That's not what we were doing.
And by and large, our guys were pretty good about identifying who they are when they're entering and going in at night.
Because you go in at night, they're usually asleep.
You can usually intercept the area pretty quickly and subdue them.
But things happen.
You can't always account for that.
And one of the things that was hard for me to accept was accepting that part there.
And just realizing that at the end of the day, the enemy gets a vote just like you do.
And their vote is almost always going to go against you.
And when that vote's cast, it's cast.
You know, the fight's going to happen.
And sometimes people are going to get caught in the wrong place, wrong time.
You can do everything you can to mitigate that.
You can do everything you can to try and avoid that.
But at the end of the day, the enemy still chose to fight.
His father and his brothers chose to fight.
They chose to participate in this insurgency.
They chose to make these.
IEDs, these car bombs, and make themselves a target and attack us and attack the government of Iraq and try to destabilize the region.
That was their choice.
So, unfortunately, their family was present during the capture and they chose to fight when their kids were in the room and kids were present.
That's out of our control.
And that's hard to accept.
That's hard to accept that that's what happens.
But it took years for me to kind of just get to a point where you just accept that the enemy gets their own vote too.
And it's almost always going to be against you.
And so you can only control your actions.
You can't control theirs.
But it is what it is, unfortunately.
I mean, the war is ugly, it's brutal.
It's not something we want to romanticize or embellish or talk lightly about.
It should always be avoided and be a last resort.
But when it's time to go to war, it's time to put the war face on and go to war and kill the bastards and wipe them out as fast and quickly and efficiently as you can so you can end it.
We shouldn't be training these things out for years and decades like that.
It's just, it's not good.
It doesn't, nobody wins those kind of wars.
What was it like?
Like you just explained, getting home and having time to think and time to reflect on the things that were happening.
And how long did that take for that to sort of kick in and for you to really start to deal with those psychological effects?
So, the first time I came back from Iraq, it was weird because my last night at our camp, we were getting rocketed and bombed that night.
So, I'm sitting there in my bunker and thinking to myself, man, I don't want to get blown up my last few hours in this camp.
And then, you know, four days later, you're walking around the Brandon Mall.
How do you equate that?
You're sitting here where you got, you know, rockets and mortars hitting your base and the alarms going off, you know, the CRAM incoming alarms going off.
And then you're walking around the Brandon Mall and people are sipping on their drinks, you know, and walk around like nothing.
It's like in World War II, you had that shared experience, right?
Everyone had to ration, there was, you know, everyone was making a sacrifice for the war.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, nobody sacrificed anything.
They weren't asked to pay extra money in taxes.
They weren't asked to ration anything.
They weren't being drafted and impacted like that.
So society was very divorced from the reality of what was happening.
And so that was a little hard.
But I didn't have as much time to really reflect and think about that until after I left that whole world behind, so to speak.
And then you kind of start to realize wow, these.
Nobody has a clue what's going on overseas.
They don't realize the threats that we're dealing with, that we're fighting, constantly handling.
They're just ignorant.
They're just not aware of it.
But you are.
And now that you've left it, you see how everyone's like, how can they be so divorced from reality?
It's a little hard to rationalize and kind of deal with.
But you kind of get to a point where it took me years to kind of get there.
I still struggle with some of it now.
But it's just accepting that, again, the enemy gets their vote on it and that there's a time and a season.
To kill in a time and a season to heal, and you kind of have to figure out that because, like, I think we talked about this yesterday is that as a society, we're taught that you live a certain way, you act and be a certain way, and then when you go to war, that goes away like that's all gone now.
It's this kind of savage nature of us versus them.
Um, and that's not how we're taught in society to act and be like, and so when you come home, you have to put that aside and go back to this.
Normal person that you're supposed to fit into society.
Correct.
And that can be a little hard of an adjustment to do.
And some people do it better than others.
And some people just really kind of struggle with that.
I don't know if it's situation training, what really causes some people to struggle with it more than others.
Sometimes it's just like an accumulation of everything you have seen and done.
It just can be so overwhelming.
You know, I mean, I struggle with it a lot.
And I think that as long as you're willing to constantly talk about it and seek, Different help and alternatives that can really help you eventually find some peace with it because you got to have to make peace with it at some point.
You know, if you don't, it's just going to eat you alive or eventually just eat a gun, you know.
And that's unfortunately what a lot of veterans are doing because they can't make that peace, you know.
How long did it take before you started looking into different types of therapies to combat your depression or your PTSD?
So, originally, the VA loves to go the pharmacology route, right?
So, that's their first choice.
Give you some drugs.
But the problem is, a lot of those drugs, all they do is numb the problem.
They just put a band aid over it.
Like, I remember when we were in Iraq, you know, dude, we would get super stressed out with our job.
Just all that crap you're having to see all the time and deal with all the time.
And then on top of it, you still got these freaking rockets and bombs hitting your base and dealing with that.
And then you got issues with home.
You got your, your, your, You know, your superiors, your management, we like to call them.
Maybe they're good, maybe they're not.
It was quite stressful.
But they have these combat stress clinics you can go to.
Over there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I remember going there and one of the psychologists, psychiatrists, he gave me a prescription for LecturePro.
Man, I wish I'd gotten that when I first got to Iraq.
That made me like the coldest, detached interrogator I could possibly be.
What kind of drug is that?
So, Lexapro is an SSRI type drug.
So, um, it's SSRI.
So, but it basically kind of does is suppresses some of your emotions.
Um, your dog could die and you just wouldn't care.
You could stare at you, you just didn't care.
Really kind of deadened you a little bit.
Um, and in our job, that was quite helpful to kind of deaden some of that.
Uh, so that way you could just wade through this mountain of shit and kind of get through it without losing your mind.
Um, you know, but interest, like a pain, kind of like a painkiller type drug.
Can you find that off?
Maybe like a painkiller for the mind.
I don't know, but Lexapro is a pretty common antidepressant type drug that they use.
It was pretty helpful.
Oh, it's an antidepressant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you'd use that, although there's other stuff that I think works better.
Because again, the VA is going to go to the pharmacology route.
I can give you that.
Is there anything else you can do to get out of there?
Like, can you get out and go for a run?
Can you go to the gym?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, so yeah, when we're in, yeah, it's the trolley print, that's it.
Okay.
So, yeah, when you're at the base, I mean, you got the MWRs, you got the gym, you can go for a run around the camp if you want, different things like that.
But at the end of the day, you're kind of trapped in that camp, big, tall walls.
You ain't getting out.
I mean, my job is not to leave the wire.
I'm way too valuable to leave the wire because there's only so many freaking interrogators that are in Iraq, and there is just an endless supply of prisoners.
So, they would love nothing more to keep us strapped to a chair with an IV feed bag if possible.
Jesus.
Just to keep us interrogated, you know?
Click on that.
What does LuxPro do for a person, Austin?
Down.
Oh, yeah.
Little side effects, man.
It's used to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder.
It is an antidepressant that belongs to a group of medicines known as SSRIs.
Huh.
Never heard of it.
I mean, those things don't fuck you up.
They can't.
Yeah.
Well, there's all kinds of side effects to those kinds of drugs, too, from just deadening your cognitive ability, your sharpness a little bit, sexual side effects.
There's lots of different issues and problems that with.
These kinds of drugs, but this is what the VA does because that's what they are allowed to give you and do.
They're not able to say, hey, let's try medical marijuana, let's try ketamine, let's try these stellar ganglion block injections.
What's interesting too, this is what they find that most of the school shooters in this country are the people that shoot up public shootings, mass shootings, they're on these things.
Yes.
Yeah, because they either work very well or they actually will have the opposite effect where they'll almost exacerbate these psychotic.
You know, tendencies.
So that's why you got to be under really good strict care in talking with them and understanding how people respond and develop to these things.
And the problem with kids, kids' minds are constantly growing and developing.
They're not set.
Right.
So when you introduce drugs, SSRI drugs that mess with the chemical balances in their brains, you're kind of jacking up that development a little bit.
Yes.
And it's really dangerous.
That's why they talk about marijuana actually on people who are, I think it was under 25 or 23, actually can have really bad problems in the brain, like actually lead them to develop, you know, schizophrenia or bipolar.
Yes.
There's a lot of problems.
That's been shown.
Yeah.
There's lots of psychedelic drugs that have fucked with kids that have done it.
Too much or abused it at a young age.
Yep.
Yep.
And it damages them because I think it's cool and fun and want to continue to do that.
And we as a society are like, oh, whatever, it's just marijuana.
The doctor gets addicted.
No, it's not about getting addicted.
It's about altering their psychology, their mind as they're developing and getting older.
This is something I talk about all the time, too, because if you look at, I don't know how big the percentage is, but it's got to be more than 80% of kids in America that are like in their teens are prescribed Adderall.
You know why?
Here's the problem we don't let kids be kids.
We want to have.
All right, boys are noisy, they're loud, they're energetic, they're physical.
They like to, that's how they are geared, right?
But we've stopped having kids have recess and play and just be boys and just be kids.
We want them to all be like these neutered little saints that just sit there and look nice and just, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, and do school.
But that's not how their brains are wired.
Right.
That's not how psychologically they're built.
And we're not letting them do that.
And, you know, how do you combat that?
That you pump them full of Adderall and SSRIs.
And then you screw them up mentally because now they don't know how to, they become teenagers and then adults, young adults, and they don't know how to interact with other people and talk normally and say, hey, you and I, we could be politically opposite or totally disagree, but we can still be friends and go have a beer.
Psychological Damage of War00:03:27
Like, that's okay.
Just because we, you're a Dolphins fan and I'm a Bucks fan, doesn't mean we have to kill each other.
I mean, that's.
You know, that's what we have to get back to that kind of mentality.
It's okay to disagree.
Right.
You know, yeah, it's scary to think about what kind of effect that's having on people.
That combined with the, you know, social media and people just communicating through phones and through text messaging and, you know, watching videos.
Like even with war today, like people now just watch what happens.
And I don't know if this is the first war, this Ukraine war is the first one that we've had just a front row seat view.
Oh, it's been brutal.
Absolutely brutal.
Seeing all that stuff going on there.
And I see what's happening and I see that.
So many people are just getting maimed from the artillery, from shrapnel, things like that.
You're talking about a whole society that's just going to have all these people are just maimed and injured.
And you're just watching on the front row, and it's brutal.
I'll see these pictures of a copter drone dropping a hand grenade on a couple of soldiers unsuspectingly in a trench and go off.
And you can read the comments and just see everyone is just cheering it on and whatnot.
It's like.
Those are two people down there.
Okay.
Those guys just got maimed and injured from that hand grenade.
Maybe they are killed.
They may be the enemy, but you know, let's not celebrate their deaths.
You know, right.
And we're desensitizing ourselves to the point where it's we're not seeing our fellow humans as humans.
And it's this like video game mantra.
It's like, okay, well, Ukraine war is just a giant video game, right?
Just video game it.
And it's like, no, it's not a video game.
There's a real people on the other end getting killed.
And they have families.
They have.
You know, they have mothers and wives and kids.
And I don't, you know, it's just strange seeing how our societies evolved using social media to just cheer this kind of stuff on, cheer the killing of other people on.
It's almost like a Roman gladiator time where everyone would cheer people getting, you know, killed in the gladiatorial arena.
And it's kind of like, well, Twitter's our gladiatorial arena.
Let's jump on here and see on the Russian or Ukrainian side and watch these people getting killed like that and cheer it on.
It's, Really quick, detached and strange.
Yeah.
The thing that really gets to me is that none of these people that argue about Ukraine and Russia and all the wars that are going on now, most of them have no experience of war.
You know what I mean?
A lot of it, all of the knowledge they have.
They're not volunteering to go over there either.
Right.
But they can.
They have no experience of anything real, anything like they have no actual firsthand experience of anything.
All they can do is just read.
Articles, watch videos, depending on who they follow or who they listen to.
And it's so, that makes it so bizarre to me that they're willing to fight to the death on this digital platform about something they read or some video they watched.
And they just decide to adopt this idea and they're going to die on that hill because of that video they watched because they trust that person.
Yeah.
I hope that at the end, at the end of the stuff, that, you know, there's some good efforts put forward to try and help.
Rewiring Trauma with Drugs00:15:40
Help these guys mentally and psychologically recover from this stuff, you know, because we did not do a good job of that exiting Iraq and Afghanistan, helping vets just de transition from that into something new, right?
Um, and pumping people full of SSRIs and antidepressants isn't the way to go either because you just don't want them to be productive members of society.
So, how do you help them heal and get better?
You know, um, I was listening to uh, I saw a 60 Minutes episode that Dakota Myers did, um.
He was that Marine Medal of Honor recipient.
He did a 60 minute episode on that stellar ganglion block injections, SGB injections.
It's basically a nerve in the neck here that they do a nerve block on.
And so when someone gets triggered, right, the brain sends that fight or flight signal down to your heart and dumps adrenaline, gets you kind of riled up and going.
Well, when they numb that nerve, when they do that block, when that fight or flight happens, it goes down and hits the block and bounces back.
And it's almost like resets.
You a little bit gives you that it kind of quiets things down, so to speak.
I guess, like, um, way to explain is when you're in that moment, you feel like everything's kind of closing in, like you just have that anxiousness, that jitteriness.
Um, the SGB, when they do that injection, it just kind of like calms things.
And how else to describe it's kind of more of like a calming, allows you to not be as um, jumpy and jittery and just no fuse, right?
You just what is the injection?
What are they injecting?
Oh, so they're just they're injecting you know, lidocaine, it's like a nerve block.
As I do on the neck, there's two nerves on either side.
I do only do them one at a time because usually it'll sometimes leave part of your face like a little numbed or drooped for an hour or two and then it goes away.
And sometimes you only need one injection.
It can last you a year, two years.
Sometimes you may need three or four.
It just depends on how your body responds to it and kind of the severity of the trauma too because the brain has gone through a lot.
It has its synopsis, they are very wired for certain things that triggered all the time.
You have to try to redo that now.
So, the SGB is really good for helping to block those triggers, like giving you that extra fuse, so to speak, and help quiet it down a little bit.
But you still have to do the rewiring of the brain.
And that's where you've seen some guys using some of the different psychedelic drugs.
Yeah.
You know, you should go to Mexico and do them and whatnot.
And that helps with a lot of that.
Ketamine actually is a really good one.
Yeah.
Ketamine.
And I've also heard of what is it?
What is it?
Yeah, the mushrooms.
They do.
Not mushrooms.
What's the word?
MDMA.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
I haven't done the mDNA one.
I've done the ketamine one.
I think that works really good, but there's different ways of doing the ketamine.
There's oral and there's IV.
There's a guy here in Tampa who does them.
Yeah, you said that you were one of the first people to try some sort of special therapy in Tampa.
Yeah, the ketamine, doing the ketamine.
That was the ketamine.
Yeah.
The way he does it's really great.
So when you go on a psychedelic trip, right, and you do that, you're out cold.
Okay.
You're out.
But you can.
Like, you're gonna, I mean, you're gonna fall asleep into this thing.
You're not like cognitive.
Like, I couldn't carry a conversation with you when you're down with the ketamine trip like that.
But it can either be good or it can be very bad.
And so, one of the things he does to help ensure that you have that it works out good for you, because I've had the bad ones too.
Right.
When I'm bad, true.
Yeah, when I'll do the oral ones, those never work out well.
But what he does, he puts a benzodiazepine in, a happy drug.
You know, I always used to joke and say with interrogations, that's how we should be.
You're interrogations, pharmaceutical interrogations, because there's no torture, there's no physical harm to them.
You just give them a happy drug and they'll just spill the beans.
Right.
And then give them ecstasy.
And then when the drug wears off, they don't even realize what they did.
There's no harm, no foul, so to speak.
Yeah, they just want to run around and give everyone hugs.
So, yeah, that should be the feature of interrogation, personally.
But so he gives you, he puts a little bit of that in before you do the ketamine.
And then when the IV ketamine, when he would do that, I'm out 15 to 25 minutes usually before I'll kind of wake up from it.
Man, I'll tell you, that is the craziest trip in the world.
It's literally like being in the movie Inception in the Matrix at the same time.
Crazy.
So, when you're falling into a dream and then a dream and a dream.
Right.
And I swear to God, I could be down for 15, 20 minutes and I feel like I've been gone for years sometimes.
Like, whatever.
It's just insane.
What exactly does ketamine do to you?
How does it work?
What is the mechanism of action?
Yeah.
So basically, a lot of this stuff kind of helps to, helps the brain to kind of rewire itself a little bit.
So when you have a trauma, like say, for instance, for me, one of my big triggers is smell because I worked in the camp with 5,500 sweaty, dirty smelling people.
And that's a lot of feces and food and just nasty crap, right?
So a trigger for me was dirty diapers, believe it or not.
As soon as I would smell dirty diapers from one of our kids, it would just, You know, put me right back in the camp.
Or if I'm walking, like when I was working in Chicago and I walk on the sidewalks and walk past an alleyway and I'd smell some of that, some of the trash from there, it just instantly you're back and you feel that trigger right there because that for me, that was my trigger.
It kind of helps rewire some of that.
They say scent is the strongest sense tied to memory.
Yeah.
I believe it.
For me, that was the big one.
For me, it was scent.
It was almost always scent.
I'd smell certain scents and that for me would always kind of transport me there.
And There was this other song, I swear, it's this crazy song.
So, this Gwen Stefani song, Sweet Escape, right?
I would get on the bus to go from, we lived on Camp Stryker and we worked on Camp Cropper about a mile and a half apart.
So we had a little bus that would take you over back and forth to the camp, back and forth there.
So me and my group would get on the bus to go to the camp for our shift.
Every day, for our square, it was like 12 or 13 straight freaking days, we would hear Gwen Stefani's Sweet Escape.
And I'm thinking to myself, wow, I'm listening to this Sweet Scape song as I'm driving into a freaking camp with 5,000 Terrors.
So now, whenever you hear that song, I think about that every time.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's go down.
What is it?
A psychedelic?
What the fuck is it?
Yeah, it's a psychedelic.
It's a psychedelic.
Okay.
Yeah.
And you can do it orally or you can do it.
All right, stop right there.
Go down.
Right there, right there, there.
A K hole is when a high dose of ketamine leads to intense feelings of disassociation.
This can cause feelings of being disconnected.
Or from or unable to control one's own body, also sometimes affecting the ability to speak and move around easily.
One way to think about a K hole is a state between intoxication and a coma.
Interesting.
Some people refer to a K hole as an out of body or near death experience.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So I never had that when I did the IV one with Dr. Klava, but I did, I've done a couple of them where it's oral.
You put the tabs on your tongue, let it dissolve and get into your body that way.
I've had a couple of those with that because it's weird.
A couple of times, I just really thought I was just dead because you go, it's like normal life like this.
And then suddenly it just faded away and it wasn't real.
You're like, holy crap, this isn't real.
This is all fake.
What is real?
What's going on?
And you just kind of like morph from one thing to the next and you don't really know what's going on.
Right.
You just know that nothing's real and that life isn't real and that everything you've imagined has been fake.
And it's kind of scary in a way.
And then the couple of times that happened to me towards the end, I just kind of like found myself eventually in this black, empty space where there's no sound, there's no heat, there's no cold, there's no nothing, just complete and absolute emptiness, black.
And then I would wake up.
And that was kind of, kind of very disassociating.
Kind of scary in a way because it's literally like you died.
Like, oh my God, I'm dead.
And what is this doing to your brain?
That is rewiring it and getting rid of that hypervigilance.
There's probably better ways for a neurologist to explain it than what I can.
I just know that when I have done it, I don't do that nerve switch in order.
You just tell you to switch in order.
Crazy jitterness like I do with the PTSD.
It's like reset for a period of time.
Sometimes it's months, sometimes it's most of a year.
Okay.
It's just a reset.
Interesting.
I don't know how, but it's just like it resets the mind, so to speak.
And do you do the nerve injection paired with the ketamine?
I've done that personally.
I've done that.
And I think that works best because.
It's not enough to just heal.
It's not enough to just block the nerve.
You got to fix the mind.
And it's not enough to fix the mind.
You got to also solve the body part.
That's where the two of them work really well together.
So, is it by injecting the nerve, is that what eliminates the bad trips, like the anxiety?
You know, so what's going to negate the bad trips from the experience is the benzodiazepine.
The benzodiazepine.
The happy drug.
Okay.
And he would do that when he does the IV ketamine, he'll do that first.
And then right after that, he does the ketamine.
Okay.
It's instantaneous once it hits your bloodstream.
You're down.
Okay.
And so explain to me again how that the nerve injection happens.
Yeah.
So, what that does is it kind of like, I think Dakota might probably explain it better than I is like walking through a city street where it's loud and noisy and suddenly it's a quiet forest.
It just kind of slows things down, kind of just.
And it's what it's doing is sort of just inhibiting your fight or flight.
Yes.
Okay.
I mean, it won't completely, it doesn't 100% stop it, but what it does is really, really slow this sucker down.
Okay.
Like really big.
And you're like, hey, that's not so bad.
I don't need to be ducking in a ditch or reaching for a gun right now.
It's okay, right?
It gives you that moment you need to kind of come to that realization, you know.
And I think for the longest time, we don't allow veterans and people to explore that and look at these other homeopathic ways to treat people or these other ways of looking at that because, um, there's no money in it.
Well, no, it's not that there's no money, there's lots, I think there's plenty of money to be made in this stuff.
The problem is, uh, the it comes back to FDA regulations, so in the 70s, they kind of outlawed a lot of drugs, you know.
You had marijuana, it was illegal.
You had LSD and ketamine, different things like that became illegal drugs.
And when they became illegal, there was no further studies.
And so you're missing like 40 years worth of scientific study and research on these drugs to see how they actually do affect the mind and help people.
Right.
Whereas other countries, they continue to evolve and develop that.
And that's why you see veterans and other groups going overseas to get treated for that kind of stuff because they do use it over there.
I just recently read something.
I didn't even, I was completely ignorant to that overseas in countries in Europe, they use testosterone therapy for depression and anxiety and ADHD.
And there's a whole slew of conditions that they can treat with hormone therapy, like testosterone or estrogen for women.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're short, if you're short, some of these things is going to cause you problems.
And that doesn't, that's unheard of in America.
It's unheard of because there's, it's cheap.
It's, testosterone is cheap.
So unbelievably cheap.
Yep.
Yep.
It's like if there's a cure for cancer, we'll never know about it because there's way more money involved in treating it than curing it.
But why not just try to cure it?
That's the deal.
And why not just say, okay, well, the cure for this is half a million bucks.
Did you ever try LSD or mushrooms?
I've not tried the LSD.
I've done the microdosing on the mushrooms.
Okay.
You know, that's a little hard to figure out your dosing levels.
I haven't really spent enough time tinkering with it, to be honest with you.
I mean, you don't need a prescription.
It's legal to do that.
I just haven't really.
Tinker with it.
I tried it once, it was fine.
Turned another time, just kind of left me like I really wasn't able to focus and do what I continue to work and whatnot.
So I just haven't spent a lot of time tinkering with it, to be honest with you.
I'm too incredibly busy, too.
It's always like a couple, like a day to try something.
You tinker with it.
Okay, well, this didn't work.
Let me lose another day while I test this and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.
But nothing worked as good as sitting down and writing.
Well, yeah, the writing is, I think.
Basically, a long term fix for me that helps a lot because at the end of the day, you got to find something that you can still support yourself and your family with, right?
You don't want to become dependent on some, you know, disability pension or handouts, things like that.
You got to make yourself a productive member of society.
And I think for me, writing has been a great therapy.
You know, it's a continued thing.
I mean, sure, I can still do the ketamine, the SGB injections here and there, but I still need to support myself.
I still need daily things to kind of do.
And for me, I found writing as that niche.
Here's an odd question.
Do you think there are people out there, or have you met people out there that can go through countries in Iraq and Afghanistan and be no problems, kill people, slaughter people, do the things you did, interrogate people, and then just come here like nothing happened?
Yeah.
Just completely flip the switch, not have to do any sort of therapy or anything like that.
I think there are definitely people like that.
And sometimes people like that.
Psychotic people, man.
Sometimes you just get some psychopaths out there, or people are just borderline.
And other times, other times, you'll have people like that and they have no problems.
And then all of a sudden, they'll have a problem, you know, down the road.
Say a family member dies and suddenly it hits them, or an incident happens that hits them and it just broke, they just break down.
Or the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was just one too many things and it just snapped.
And that does happen.
I don't think it's kind of hard personally to imagine that people can go through and do all these things and not be somewhat damaged or compromised a little bit.
But a lot of it comes down to how well you can cope with it and deal with it and process it.
And how much you've been involved in all of that, how long you've been kind of doing that kind of stuff.
I think a lot of people who have been involved in, we've got special forces guys and other military guys who've, You know, done five, six, seven deployments.
They've spent five or seven or eight years in war.
I don't know that a lot of those people survive 10, 20, 30 years into the future.
Coping with Military Service00:04:10
I think you see a lot of people suicides taking place somewhere along the path.
Yes.
You know, one of my friends had committed suicide not last year.
It was December of 21.
Yeah, December 2021.
So, you know, he was one of my Oxford classmates.
You know, he's a smart guy.
See, he's got a graduate degree from Oxford.
We're in the same class.
He was an army ranger.
He did one deployment as a ranger and then he went to work for Blackwater and Triple Canopy into the PMC world for seven or eight years.
But he was involved in a handful of shootings and incidents and things like that, too.
Everything seemed fine on the outside.
He's got a nice wife, a nice house, got three kids.
Everything seems fine.
He's got a good job, making two, 300,000 year job.
So it means making good money, all the right connections.
But deep down inside, you know, he struggled with some of those things.
And I didn't personally know that he was struggling with a lot of things.
He never talked about a lot of those things.
And he wouldn't talk about a lot of those things.
But then the year prior to, it was a year or two years before his suicide, him and his wife were, you know, got divorced and separated.
And then things kind of went down a little bit from there.
And then, you know, as he was right before Christmas or right after Christmas, you know, when he did that.
And it just, but you wouldn't have thought that from him.
You know, he just, I mean, he's by all outward appearances, he has it together, right?
You know, I mean, and he's a smart guy, he's got a graduate degree from Oxford.
These aren't idiots, these aren't guys that are just right, judges of society.
They're really smart, intellectual people, yes, who understand suicide, who understand what's going on, but reach a point in their life and then in that moment where they just can't take anymore, they're just done.
I mean, I've kind of gotten, I've hit those points too, but I've just never acted on it.
But I feel and have seen myself get to those levels to those points and just.
You just want to punch out.
You're just kind of done.
You're tired of trying.
You're tired of just going through this grind and not seeing anything improve, anything get better.
You know, I guess what's the difference between me and some of these other guys that experience that is I've at least, when I see that happening, I will usually talk with someone about it or I will, you know, take one of my other medications that kind of helps me counter that.
What kind of medications?
So they have, what's the other ones?
These are other benzodiazepine type drugs like, Kind of like a almost like happy drug, take kind of like Prozac, um, like Alprazozin or Lurazepin, things like that to just kind of help you, you know, help move your mood a little bit.
Yeah, they're going to take you from that I want to just blow my brains out moment to okay, life's not that bad, you know what I mean?
I can get through this, and sometimes that's just what you need.
It's just that.
Are those similar to those drugs you were taking overseas?
No, no, we wouldn't be allowed to take the benzodiazepine over there.
Okay.
Yeah.
And they want, I mean, you're not always going to be able to, you're not, it doesn't, it sometimes affects your ability to think straight and clear.
Which, again, this is what kills me about the VA their pharmacology approach to everything.
And it doesn't let you work.
You know, like, I mean, again, I got a graduate degree from Oxford.
I'd like to think I'm a fairly smart person.
And the problem is when I'm taking those medications that the VA gives, I don't have that sharp mental acuity that I need.
Right.
Right.
I just don't have it.
And that's hard to fight through.
And I either take the drugs, and so then I'm a nice, sociable person to be around.
I'm not an asshole.
And my wife can bear it, she can be around me, and coworkers like being around you.
But then I'm not cognitively as sharp as I have to be for those senior positions at a corporation.
Or I don't take it.
And I'm sharp as a tech.
Writing Battlefield Ukraine00:15:16
I mean, I'm like really mercenary mindset at the job.
I'm sharp.
I know what I'm doing, very, very proficient, good at what I'm doing.
But I'm not the nicest person to be around.
And that kind of can lead to bad experiences that hit your job.
Eventually, you're going to get fired, right?
Right.
When you act like that or do certain things, you just society doesn't tell you that.
They don't take that.
So, when you started writing all these books, incredible collection of books you've written, what sort of approach did you take?
Did you just start kind of writing down your own experiences, thoughts you had, memories you had?
So, the first time, the first book I wrote was Interview with a Terrorist.
That was my experiences working as a Terrier.
For me, that was taking my diary, more or less.
I kept my journal because I needed to have some way to just get all this crap out of my head at the end of my job and the end of work, right?
And I didn't journal every day when I was in Iraq, but just sometimes I just had to do something to just get it out of my head.
And I started just expounding on, just sharing what was going on because the problem is nobody knows what we did.
They all think of you as these evil monsters.
I remember coming back from my year I was gone and being at church, and someone at church, they're like, So, you were gone to Iraq for a year.
Wow, that's great.
What did you do over there?
And you tell them, I tell them, I was an interrogator.
The expression on people's faces says it all.
They have this, Wow, this person's like a monster.
I don't want to talk with these people.
Move away.
Really?
That's because they don't know what we do.
And the image at that time, I said it's 2007.
The image everyone has of interrogators is Abu Ghraib, torturing people, you know, waterboarding, you know, all these other horrible things.
That's not what we did, but that's what they thought we did.
And so for me, I wanted to kind of explain that that's not what we did.
It was a whole different thing.
And our mission was a really important one because how else are you going to find?
You know, we talk with the enemy.
That's our job to talk directly to the enemy every day and find information to try and end this conflict.
And I wanted to try and humanize that.
And from there, I said, all right, well, if I'm going to continue writing, I got to write about something.
So obviously, a book is a great way to do it because it's a very long story.
You can just create out of your head, just, you know, fiction and make it up.
But you got to create something people want to read.
So I looked at and said, well, what do I want to read?
And what is not being produced?
And for me, I liked to read books like Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising.
That was one of my favorite books to read.
The problem is, there's not a lot of books like that where you talk about a battalion or a brigade and division level combat and fights.
It's just not a style of writing a lot of people pursue.
They always like to pursue these small, Unit things, Army Rangers, Navy SEAL, or Green Brains, almost always some rogue this or that.
It's just small stuff like that.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
They're entertaining.
Vince Flynn did really well with his Mitch Rapp characters and creating that and doing that.
But I liked the Tom Clancy style where you have his Red Storm Rising, divisions on divisions, with the Soviets going across and NATO having this big old fight like that.
So I started creating those kinds of books and writing and doing that.
My last government job, I worked over.
Sort of like fictionalized.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I worked at a US European command for almost three and a half years.
Right.
And that's in Stuttgart, Germany.
So I worked in the intelligence group.
I worked as an identity intelligence operations manager.
So more or less like finding people, hunting, tracking, finding foreign extremists that were coming in and out of our AOR, basically.
But that kind of job, on the Intel staff, you're also exposed to our plans, what we're developing to counter.
You know, say Russians invaded across and they're going to attack NATO and invade across.
How would we respond to that?
Well, we have war plans for everything.
Everything I understand, we got war plans for something.
And you kind of see a lot of those things.
So it's like, well, all right, I've been around that.
Why don't I write a book on Russia invading, you know, in this case, we did Ukraine or whatever countries and just start creating these different series and creating books about big conflicts that nobody's writing or doing that kind of style like Clancy used to do.
And so, well, let's try and do that ourselves.
And so we did.
And, you know, it's like anything, you get better with more practice.
So, my early books and stuff were pretty good.
I think our stuff now is obviously better, but that's because I've written 30 more books since then.
So, you're going to get better.
Yes.
And you start to learn how to craft better characters and how to create more realistic scenarios.
And that's one of the tricks with writing how do I create a character that's so real that it triggers you?
Like you read this, you go, This is this person's like you know, total you know, anti American, whatever.
If they're Russian POV, they need to be a Russian POV, they got to think like a Russian, right?
Otherwise, you're just creating a cardboard character.
Um, if you have a political figure, well, they need to act like the political figure you're trying to portray them to be.
Um, you need to create realistic characters, and so when you have that, and then you have these scenarios that are very realistic to what could actually happen and unfold, you start to get a really good book, and then it's just about you know, continuing to walk through the scenario and say, Okay, well.
What new technology is going to get incorporated?
Let's start writing that stuff in.
How would this scenario play out?
Do the whole what if.
How much research do you have to do?
Research you have to do, like to make this stuff real.
Like, for example, to find a Russian's point of view or a politician's point of view.
Listen to interviews.
Great way to do it.
So, if you want to know about the Russian POV, their perspective, listen to Sergey Lavrov talk.
Like, listen to him speak.
Who is that?
He's a Russian foreign minister.
So, you listen to him talk at different conferences, events, UN, anywhere.
Okay, so you spend some time listening to how he talks, how he phrases things, how he portrays.
XYZ happening.
Listen to how President Putin portrays things, how other elected people in their government and military portray things.
That's going to give you a good insight into that mindset, that thinking.
You can watch Russian TV shows and programs you can watch and kind of see and get some of that insight too.
And that helps you better gauge how they respond and act.
So when you write the scenario, you write the book.
Do you understand Russian?
No, I don't.
I have subtitles and things like that.
Okay.
All that stuff.
But I also have a really big reader network at this point, too.
And so I can throw out different questions and I have different people I can ping for and get answers from.
Wow.
It helps a lot, too.
So you have to go through, you have to understand so many different types of people's perspectives to write these fictional stories and to make it.
If you want to do it good, yes.
If you want to do it good, right.
But you want to make it as realistic as possible.
The technology is actually much harder to get than the people's perspectives and things like that.
The technology can be quite challenging.
What do you mean when you say technology?
What technology?
If you're following the first armor brigade combat team out of the third infantry division, so you know what their equipment is.
So, first, you need to know what the equipment is, kind of rounds, where the range is, effectiveness, different things like that.
So, you have that down and you start getting that for all of the units in the U.S. that you're going to use and operate, whether it's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines.
There's four branches, right?
A lot of equipment.
Well, now who are you fighting?
So, now you need to look at that layer of equipment too.
Now, are you incorporating the allies?
Well, what do they use?
And do the other people have any allies?
And all this.
So, before you know it, you've got quite a lot of different types of equipment you're trying to incorporate and use and figure out well, can this work?
Does it work?
What is the range of these air to air missiles that this Chinese aircraft would use versus what we would use?
So, because you can't have, if you're going to write different engagements, you need to make sure you're writing them with the weapons that can actually do that kind of engagement.
Right.
Otherwise, you're going to have inconsistency problems.
And that's just the part of the detail of getting this technology right.
Has it ever come across to you when you were writing a story or even after you've written a story or a series of stories that, holy shit, my stories are coming true?
Oh, yeah.
There's one here, man.
Battlefield Ukraine.
We wrote that back in 2017, and it's been unfolding an unmitigated nightmare unfolding ever since.
How many books are in that series?
A total of six books in that series.
And what got you started on that series?
What made you want to start that?
Sure.
So I needed to come up with a new series.
And I said, all right, well, Let's look at World War III.
What's going to be the next biggest war?
How would this shake out?
Okay.
I pretty much looked and said, well, it's going to be Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Korea, and Taiwan.
It's going to be one of those three.
Okay.
Or Taiwan.
Yeah.
Okay.
One of those three.
And I said, all right, well, what if we had this secret pact between.
Wait, sorry.
What made you think that?
Oh, based on my experiences working at U.S. European Command, just the stuff I was around and seeing how everything was playing out and knowing what was going on behind the scenes.
I mean, when I saw how things were unfolding in Ukraine when I was there before Maidan, and then just seeing how things unfolded in Iraq and in Libya and in the whole Arab Spring and our reactions to everything, it kind of like, I want to say, opens your eyes up.
You just start seeing our actions from a different perspective, you know, because normal everyday people see the actions taken one way or another.
But when you've kind of worked in those secret scroll realms, you kind of get a better perspective of what's really going on.
Why are we doing X, Y, or Z?
You know, like, why did we suddenly turn on Qaddafi?
You know, I mean, there really was no reason to turn on Qaddafi.
And look what we have in place of it now.
Was this really a good decision?
You know, it's still a failed state.
Right.
Was this really what we wanted?
Okay.
Bad choice right there.
And it also creates another problem for us, too, because Qaddafi gave up his weapons, his WMD program and stuff he had in exchange for normalized relations with the United States and in Europe.
So he did that willingly without having to be invaded.
And then what's his response?
What was our response?
Less than a decade later, we topple his regime on him.
So John Bolton will say, Well, we want to use the Libya model.
Really?
Okay, so we want you to give up your weapons of mass destruction.
Then we're just going to destabilize your regime and replace you once you've done this.
Okay.
What dictator is going to go along with that?
What nation would go along with this?
It's just poor phrasing.
And at the end of the day, I mean, Maybe behind the curtain, Pax Americana is what we really want to pursue.
That's fine.
Don't say that out loud and tell people that.
And then make sure your economy and your country is positioned to support that.
We always say might doesn't make right when we talk about Russia and China interacting with their neighbors.
That rule applies to them, it does not apply to us.
Might always makes right when it comes to the United States.
We're going to do what we want to do.
If we want the resource, or you're threatening access to our resource or our allies, we're going to fix the problem.
So, when you came up with this idea to write this book, I mean, were you looking at NATO and seeing what was going on between NATO and Russia?
Yeah, just looked at that and said, all right, well, I see NATO is incredibly weak.
It just doesn't have the capability to deploy forces in a Reasonable amount of time.
We're now discovering NATO is weak in that way.
They can't rapidly deploy anything.
They don't have forces that are operationally ready to react.
So in the US, we have the 82nd Airborne, you can have most of the division deployed really quickly.
They don't have quick reaction forces like that.
A lot of their stuff relies on the US being able to move them and get them to point A to point B.
They don't have large stockpiles of munitions to support a sustained.
You know, sustained combat.
Okay.
You know, the British Ministry of Defense was recently saying that if they got in a fight right now with Russia, they have weeks' worth of munitions and that's it.
They're out.
And a lot of those supplies probably won't even last weeks now because they've given so much of it to Ukraine.
You know, the Secretary General for NATO was saying that, you know, almost begging countries to start mass producing munitions because Ukraine is expending.
Multiple times what we can generate in, you know, just really rapidly.
You know, the US produces just under 100,000 or 155 millimeter artillery shells a year.
I think it's like 86,000 a year.
So the Defense Department's in the process of scaling it up by five times that number.
Problem is, you have Ukraine burning through like 3,000 to 7,000 rounds a day.
So they're cooking through our entire year's production in about 14 to 21 days.
Whole year production is being blown in 21 days.
So the way that's being supplied and supported right now to continue what they're doing is eating out of our war stocks.
So if we started five to six million rounds in the inventory, Well, we've already burned a million in the first nine months of the war, and we've now located another million more.
So we're already dipping really bad into our own stocks.
So bad now that we are pulling our reserve inventories we keep in South Korea in case that war was to kick off.
We're pulling our munitions out of our stockpile out of there.
And now we're pulling our stockpile out of Israel to send to Ukraine.
Well, the problem is now, should things kick off in those other regions, we don't have those inventories there anymore.
To supply our forces and keep things going.
That's a big problem.
And the Pentagon is scaling up the production, war production right now, but you're looking at like 12 to 18 months or more just to get up from 86,000 a year upwards to what?
To almost half a million.
But half a million isn't even enough.
That's only enough for maybe four or five months worth of fighting.
What about the rest of it?
Trading Space for Time00:15:24
So, when you started writing Battlefield Ukraine, you said you chose those countries.
And what was the premise?
What was the premise of Battlefield Ukraine?
Yeah.
So, the premise was basically that the Russians and the Chinese have decided, you know what, this is the time to dethrone the West, to knock America off its pedestal and take charge.
And by collaborating and working together, they will move to do that.
So, the first stage was moving forward in Ukraine.
It's getting the Russian government to essentially do what they did annex and recognize these regions and then say, of Ukraine.
Yeah, of Ukraine, say, and basically tell them, all right, These are now recognized.
We're going to request that NATO move its forces out of Eastern Ukraine.
And if they're not moved out of Eastern Ukraine on this set time, then we're implementing a no fly zone and we will forcibly evict them.
And the whole book, the war starts when we just kind of laugh it off like, whatever, there's a bunch of Russians not going to do this.
And we hit that timeline and we hit the no fly zone, it goes into effect.
Like, whatever.
So, we have some F 16s fly right through the no fly zone and they get shot down.
And then the Russians are like, okay, it's game on.
And then they just unload and they go on it.
And the first part of the book is just really reacting to it.
It's just trading space for time, you know, to basically buy time for the rest of NATO to react, U.S. forces to get moved over to Europe so you can get them into place and then try to stop them at the Dnieper, basically.
And so the fight kind of evolves right there.
And that's where it starts, but that's not where it ends.
So that one kicks off there.
If China really wants to grab Taiwan in Southeast Asia, it needs another conflict.
So that's when you get the North Koreans to kick up.
And now you get that war to really happen.
Well, now the US has got to respond there in Korea, and we're responding with NATO.
Now we're really bogged down.
Now you're free for China to go in and grab Taiwan and anything else they want.
Because there's nothing that we have that can stop them.
And so the book really follows this whole, the first couple of books, the first three books in the series is really just a rolling crescendo of just body blows against the West and just having to react.
And then the second half of the series is we finally reacted.
We've now caught our breath.
We're now rallying the West to unite together, to combat and push back.
And so that's the second half of the series the pushback and eventual defeat of them because they just overstretched.
Wow.
But the first part of the year, it's like there's going to be fights.
You're going to lose a lot of land in the first part of the year.
It's just like World War II.
First year was really bad.
Second year was a little worse.
And third year was much better.
Right, right.
And when you started to see what's going on right now, when you started in February of last year, when this whole thing kicked off, what were you thinking?
How, I mean, obviously it was a little bit different because it was kind of like we sort of instigated that.
We started just building up tons of weapons, putting a ton of money on the border there of Russia.
Well, we didn't have a clear mission and purpose.
Like, what was.
What was the mission?
What's the purpose?
And if this happens, what are we going to do?
So Joe Biden was telling them, disclosing all the information of saying, hey, if, you know, we know you're going to attack.
If you attack, we're going to do these sanctions.
And then, you know, his phrase when he said, well, it depends how much land they take or what they do.
Like, no, it should never have been how much.
If you really wanted to deter them, obviously the sanctions didn't work because sanctions haven't worked since 2014 when you've been doing them.
So if you really wanted to deter them, You should have just told them, say, look, you're not going to invade Ukraine.
There's this memorandum that said, and the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons, that the United States and you would protect their territorial integrity.
My predecessors didn't honor that.
I will.
So if you invade Ukraine, then we are going to war with you, and we are going to send U.S. forces in there, and we are going to engage you.
Well, that would have been the shot across the bow to let the Russians know okay, this is what's going to happen if we cross the border and engage.
Now, that might have worked.
But if it didn't work, then you've got to be willing to back up the threats.
And that's the problem we don't want to make a threat because we don't actually have to follow through on it.
That's what happened with Syria.
Obama issued the red line in Syria and then famously didn't follow through.
Well, that told the Russians and it told everyone else hey, they're not going to follow through on this.
And then again, it didn't happen.
And so in the lead up to Afghanistan, when that was all falling apart, The Taliban had to abide by a series of agreements in order for US forces to leave.
Otherwise, we were going to be in another 10 years.
We would have been there another 10 years if Trump was in there, probably would have stayed a lot longer, or we would have bombed the hell out of them.
But when we walked back those agreements that we were supposed to hold them to and just kind of walked away, they ran over the whole system.
And when that happened, everyone looked at that in Europe and said, wow, okay, America literally just pulled up stakes in 10 days and was gone.
Just gone.
It's like, wow, 19 freaking years?
We've been in 65 million, 65 billion dollars worth of weapons and equipment there.
Imagine if we had that right now for Ukraine.
What the difference that would make?
But we abandoned that.
And that said, again, we've sent multiple messages through multiple generations that we're just not going to honor these red lines.
We're not going to defend these things.
And so Putin saw that and said, well, whatever.
They're not going to defend us.
They're not going to attack us.
They're not going to stop.
And he rolled across.
And what have we been doing since then?
We've been doing piecemeal supports.
You know, we're giving the Ukrainians weapons, but not enough to win, not enough to lose.
Just slaughter, it's just a stalemate.
And, you know, they've said the quiet part out loud.
You know, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and a bunch of other people have also said the quiet part out loud.
We're not in this to win and help the Ukrainians win.
We are in this to bleed the Russians dry and just bleed their military dry.
You know, that's what we're doing.
That's the strategy.
That's what, you know, what the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was saying is, you know, we're spending a fraction of our GDP on bleeding the Russians.
So we're just going to keep doing it.
Right.
But, and from a, you know, a Pax Americana strategic, you know, perspective, that makes a whole lot of sense.
You know, I listened to Dan Crenshaw talk about that, and he's like, well, look at what we're spending and what we're getting.
It's like, I get that from that perspective.
But you're also talking about the human beings, okay?
You're using the Ukrainians as a proxy meat shield to implement your desired outcome on Russia.
Well, what about them?
I mean, don't they have a say in this?
I mean, you're right.
You're pushing these guys to continue to fight, and sure, the politicians are going to go along with it.
I mean, they scan to make financially a fortune.
I mean, you can't divorce the fact that Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe.
Just because the Russians invade doesn't mean that went away, right?
It did not go away.
There's a great number of people who have already been fired because of that.
Like the current defense secretary, he's still there, but he's like at the epicenter of a lot of the corruption, where you know, hey, I need to buy these water bottles for my soldiers, so I'm going to buy them from you for ten dollars a bottle, right?
And then, you know, there's obviously the kick.
Backs across the board for everyone.
Right.
I mean, that's just running rampant across that country.
And you see, recently, Saudi Arabia put like $400, $500 million into Ukraine.
That just happened.
The Saudi Arabian diplomat was just there meeting with Zelensky.
And now that has an effect on the rest of the world because China's already basically stated their stance with Russia because they're already doing business with them with oil and whatsoever.
And now Saudi Arabia has lined with the US.
But I think China depends on Saudi Arabia.
Saudi's just playing both sides, man.
They're just trying to play both sides.
I saw this video.
I got to pull up this video.
I got to send this video to you, Austin, and you got to play this.
This thing is the way this guy on, I think this was Instagram.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
There you go.
There's the.
Now is it humanitarian aid?
Okay.
Yeah.
So the difference between humanitarian and military aid and reconstruction stuff that they're doing.
Oh, it's humanitarian aid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because they're not going to give up weapons.
They're getting weapons from Austin.
And a lot of people don't realize they talk about Ukraine getting these Patriot missiles, right?
PageA missiles cost a lot of money too, like $3 million a pop.
It's not exactly a good return on investment to be using a $3 million missile against some of these drones that are a fraction of that price.
But the other thing is Saudi Arabia has these missiles too.
So Saudi has spent the last, what, three or four years dealing with Houthi rebels being backed by Iran who are using drones too to hit the Saudis.
Yeah.
So they're launching these drones from Yemen across Saudi Arabia and then hitting their refineries and oil fields.
With these drones.
Well, they're using Patriots to counter a lot of this stuff too.
So we have a problem where a lot of people use Patriots, and that's great, but we don't have the industrial capability in place to mass produce the missiles to keep those things supplied and going.
Right.
That's the problem.
And so we have a lot of users of it.
Well, they're also using it right now.
Like Saudi is using Patriot missiles quite frequently.
And now you're going to have Ukraine who's going to use Patriot missiles at an astronomical rate.
We're not going to be able to keep up with that.
Right.
It's just the same problem with artillery rounds, you know, anti tank, you know, missiles, javelins, and in laws, and stingers.
We don't have the industrial capability to keep waging that kind of a fight.
You know, we, and that's, I mean, that's one thing we do write about in the books a lot is we really kind of reinforce some of that.
We talk about that, we integrate that into the struggle.
You know, like there's a couple spots you talk about, and I think it was in the Monroe Doctrine series.
Did you get the video?
You know, like in this series, and then in the other one where, The president's getting a brief, and one of the generals is telling the president, like, Sir, you don't understand the gravity of the situation.
That artillery round is being, or the tank round, in this case, is being made in this factory here.
It is then being loaded onto a plane and flown to this airport here, put on a truck and driven 200 miles towards the front, and being shot out the tube of a tank four days later.
That's how grave the situation is.
It's going from factory to being shot out the tube in a week.
Wow.
That's not a good system.
That's not a lot of inventory.
Right.
It's called just in time shooting.
And that's not, that's great for building manufacturing.
That's not good for war.
And, you know, I tried to build that into the different series and things we write because that's realistic.
That's what they're facing right now, where you have these massive shortages of ammo.
You run out of bullets.
It's not like Hollywood where you just have an endless supply of bullets to keep shooting.
You can only carry so much ammo on you.
And when you run out, you got to have more.
Well, someone's got to bring it and get it over there.
And that means someone's got to be able to drive that ammo.
Down some road that's hopefully not getting shot up and hit with drones to get you there.
Right.
And when you have five, 6,000 guys in a city like in Bakhmut, they're chewing through ammo, you need a lot of supply runs.
And meanwhile, you got drones hitting them, artillery hitting them.
I mean, it's kind of a mess.
And then ammo's going to get blown up.
Are you familiar with the War Dogs movie?
The two guys out of Miami who basically got that $200 million arms deal to supply.
I haven't seen it, but I know which one you're talking about.
Yeah.
Supply the Afghan army with munitions.
And they basically got it, they sourced it all from Albania, a factory that ended up all being Chinese ammunition.
So they repackaged it.
There was some sort of law that was put in place through Obama where they couldn't buy any sort of, there was an embargo on Chinese munitions, but they just repackaged it and got rid of all the Chinese markings and they sold it.
And all the ammunition was great, by the way.
It worked perfectly.
Even the army guys that basically were there using it and stuff like that, they basically said there was nothing wrong with it.
There was no misfires, nothing at all.
And, uh, The main guy, anyways, I had that guy in the podcast.
Fascinating story.
This is the video.
This is the video that I was just talking about.
Okay.
Play that, Austin.
This is Prince Faisal bin Farhan, one of the top Saudi diplomats, meeting Zelensky in Ukraine yesterday, right after announcing $400 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
The reason that this is such a big deal isn't the size of it.
After all, Ukraine has gotten almost $100 billion in total aid since the invasion.
The reason it's such a big deal is because it has put China in a very tricky position.
You see, up until now, Saudi Arabia has been mostly neutral so far regarding its stance on the invasion.
But with this new $400 million package, it's becoming clear that they're siding with the West.
This is very concerning for China, who just last week were debating sending suicide drones to Russia as part of an arms deal.
Now China is faced with two options, and neither are good.
Option 1, China sends weapons to Russia, but alienate themselves from Saudi Arabia, a country essential to their energy and economic goals.
China would also likely be facing even more economic sanctions from Western countries and become further isolated, hurting Chinese companies.
Or option 2, they don't send weapons to Russia and end up burning the bridge with one of their oldest allies, which would put even more pressure on Russia and push Putin closer to the talking table.
I'll be keeping a close eye on China to see what they do in the coming weeks, so follow for updates and thanks for watching.
This guy makes great videos.
What's the name of his channel or his page?
Quiver something.
It's too small.
I can't read it.
Make sure we shout this guy out.
Quiver quantitative.
Okay.
On Instagram.
So it's interesting.
So I see that.
I think it's slightly different taking what he's doing with that.
So there's an incentive to keep this war going.
Okay.
So we thought that we could bleed the Russians dry and kind of implode their economy and collapse them over the course of this first year.
That was what we really thought, but it didn't happen.
And now we're figuring out that it's actually us who are starting to have a problem because they didn't implode like we thought Russia would.
So, from the Chinese perspective, if they can keep the war going, the longer they keep the war going, the weaker we become because we're just going to expend more and more munitions that we can't readily replace.
And as long as we're doing that, We won't have those munitions available, at least as a credible threat, should they make a move on Taiwan at some point.
Right.
You know, I think one of your other guests a while back had said something about how his idea, his belief was that the Chinese, if they're going to make a move on Taiwan, they probably would look to do it towards really close to the run to the 2024 election cycle.
Yeah, it was Andrew Bustamante who said that.
Yeah, I listened to him last night on that.
So, probably right.
Chinese Assault Ships00:15:26
But, What's really going to, when you'll really see the indication of when they're kind of ready to make that move, is when a series of these large landing helicopter assault ships are done.
So we have these.
That we are making?
No, no.
The Chinese are building these things.
Correct.
So they've been working very feverishly on building kind of like a blue water navy so they can go beyond their coastal areas.
Okay.
But we have these.
So you can look up the USS America, the USS Wasp.
These are large helicopter assault ships that US Marines use.
For moving, whether it's helicopters or landing assault vehicles, things like that, it's to take a force and move them to do an amphibious invasion.
That's really what the Chinese have lacked for a while.
So they have a new type of warship that they've been building for quite some time.
They're building a whole string of them.
I want to say they have three or four of these landing helicopter assault ships done.
And they have, I think, five or six more under construction right now.
And then there's a couple other versions of it that are larger as well that they're building.
When those ships are done, That's when you're going to, there'll be, that's when I think you're going to start to see some serious movement because that's kind of what they need to go over.
Okay.
To get there.
Because otherwise, they have a whole lot of smaller boats that can move across.
And I'm not saying they couldn't do it.
Probably the way they're going to invade is have a lot of people fly in normally, like as civilians into China first.
A lot of special forces will go in clandestinely, like that.
They'll wait until the appointed time.
Then they'll coalesce together.
Pick up their weapon caches and go to execute their operations.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with a handful of these roll on, roll off car carriers and other cargo ships already kind of like have been maneuvered into port where they'll just roll vehicles right off into the ports and instantly snag the ports.
And then you'll have a lot of helicopters that'll come across the straits, you know, right on the water to land and try to grab and secure certain positions, coastal areas before you'll actually have an invasion force hit.
But what would really help cinch that and make that a lot more likely to succeed is if you had more of those helicopter assault ships completed.
Okay.
And you get a few more of those done, and then there's a few other vessels they need, and they'll be able to kind of ring Taiwan pretty tight.
And so there was another Air Force general recently talking.
He was saying he believed that this would probably kick off sometimes more in like 2025.
There's others that believe it's like 2027.
I think it's probably going to be probably between September, October of 2024, and probably before the end of 2025 ish.
If I was guessing a window, that's what I would say.
That's going to happen.
Yeah.
And what are we going to do?
What is our reaction going to be?
Depends.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi's already there.
Yeah.
It depends, like, well, it depends when.
Is it happens under Biden or does it happen in either his second term or someone else's term?
That's going to be interesting to see.
And it also depends on how things play out in Ukraine between now and that time, too.
Because if we're still getting bled dry, we're not going to be able to intervene.
In too much, we can say we are, but unless we want to go toe to toe with the Chinese and use our navy, really the best weapon we would have would be our subs and our navy and trying to close the straits and keep them from supplying the Chinese.
But there's so many of the weapon systems that are needed to do that that are not that the Taiwanese have bought them, they're not being given to them yet because we are either diverting weapons that are completed, supposed to go to Taiwan, being diverted to Ukraine.
Or they're getting put to the back of the queue to be built because we're needing to build stuff for Ukraine.
And all that's doing is weakening them.
You know, like there was talk about giving Ukraine F 16s, F 16 Vipers, the latest model that they have.
They're really great aircraft.
But these were bought and slated for Taiwan.
And there was a lot of effort to try and actually take the Taiwanese F 16s and give them to Ukraine.
It's like, hey, the way you're going to deter Taiwan from getting invaded is to make Taiwan a porcupine.
A really big, mean, savage porcupine.
And if you can make it so costly that they're not, that, you know, for them to invade, they won't.
But you can only do that if you're willing to give them the anti ship missiles they need, the aircraft they need, the air defense they need, the artillery systems like the M109 Paladins, the self propelled artillery guns that I, you know, used to work on when I was in the army side.
They need those and those are being diverted to Ukraine.
And so much of the munition stockpiles are going there that we don't, we're not placing them in Taiwan like we need to be.
And so it comes back to priorities.
And if this is what we want to do as a country, right or wrong, I mean, I'm not an elected person, that's just not my choice.
But if the choice is to intervene and do all of this, then we need to scale our industry to meet the requirement.
And that's not happening.
We need to go to General Motors and Ford and Tesla and say, hey, that's great, all these cool cars, but we need you to shut down half your line and convert to manufacturing artillery shells.
Missiles, armored vehicles, and equipment because we need these things.
You got to start scaling up.
And we're not retooling the economy to be a wartime economy to support and sustain that.
Neither is the rest of our allies.
I mean, this is my biggest gripe with what's happening in Europe you don't see NATO stepping up to the plate.
They give, like, the British are great for this.
Love my British friends.
But they're great for giving these wonderful, tough sounding speeches and then going to have afternoon tea afterwards and feeling they did something.
Well, where's the action to follow through on that?
Like, where's the scaling up of your industry to meet the demand for this conflict?
Right.
I mean, you like the British actually had to shrink the size of their army because they couldn't meet the recruitment goal.
That's not a good situation.
You're a year into this war in Ukraine and you're shrinking your army when you should actually be like doubling it.
Right.
You should be scaling up production of munitions and aircraft and weapons, but you're not doing any of that.
And you're not even spending more money on defense.
Like in Germany, all the NATO countries are doing this.
This is the problem.
It's like we're a year into this, into supporting this war in Ukraine, and you guys haven't even.
Transition to wartime economy.
Well, guess who did transition to wartime economy?
The Russians a year ago.
And they have factories running, mass producing this stuff 24 7.
And they're just continuing to scale and get more and more of their production going that way.
And we don't really have a good read on how effective our sanctions are and things going on inside there either.
My friend Jack Murphy was on here a couple of weeks ago.
I don't know if you saw that one.
He did a report basically on.
The CIA conducting sabotage inside of Russia and not inside of Ukraine, but all inside of Russia.
Yeah.
Going after those specific factories.
Going after factories.
There's been all these fires, all these railroad trains getting derailed, all kinds of crazy things going wrong.
Russia's been sort of like brushing them off because they don't want to acknowledge that it's some sort of foreign adversary doing it because they don't want to lose morale for their people and their troops.
But Jack confirmed through a number of Vetted CIA sources that it is a NATO country working through the CIA working through a NATO country to do this stuff.
So they have some sort of plausible deniability.
Yeah.
Which is wild, wild story.
That's what we do, though.
That's why our country is very good at doing that kind of stuff.
You know, we're very good at waging proxy wars.
Yes.
I mean, the concern I have with all the proxy wars is when we were in Iraq, right?
So we had Iran, the IRGC was supplying weapons to fight us.
And a lot of our guys got killed with those explosively foreign penetrators, those EFPs.
And that was when they were interfering, right?
During that war, we did not have Russia or China actively interfering in that war against us.
We didn't have Russia providing Al Qaeda to the tune of $100 billion of weapons and munitions in intelligence support and all that kind of stuff.
We just didn't.
And my concern is when you're waging a proxy war, Particularly against another superpower, and everyone, I mean, they know we're doing this.
What's going to happen in the next time we go to war?
So, say there's another conflict or war in Africa or in the Middle East or somewhere else, right?
And the U.S. is involved in that conflict.
Well, what's to say that Russia is not going to take their own revenge on us for that?
Because when we were in Vietnam, the Russians messed with us for years in that war and cost us a lot of people and supplying the North Vietnamese weapons and aircraft equipment, technical expertise, and we lost a lot of Americans from that.
And when Russia went into Afghanistan, we returned the favor and hit them hard like that.
And that's kind of stopped.
But now we have restarted that with that proxy type actions in Ukraine.
So you got to expect that they're going to retaliate and hit us with the same kind of thing in another future conflict.
Or we say, oh, we'll just do sanctions.
Things just didn't stop them from invading Ukraine.
That didn't work.
So the only thing that's going to stop them is military force.
And we got to step back at some point and just say, This is a nice, beautiful planet.
We all don't need to like destroy each other and blow each other up over some of these conflicts.
There's a way for us to negotiate and figure out how we can solve this without trying to kill each other.
Well, it's the people, it's you got to want to actually solve it, though.
There's such a gap in humanity between the people that are doing the fighting and the psychopaths that are running the country, the diplomats and the people that make all these decisions and that are making all this money and trying to advance their political careers by doing X, Y, and Z.
And yeah, I mean, the neoconservatives like Victoria Newland and her husband and those people.
Newland's like her husband runs the Institute for the Cellular War, you know.
That John Jack Keene is like one of the chairmen on, and always talking about on Fox News.
And they always cite the Institute for Study War.
Well, her husband's one of the founders of this thing.
And they're kind of the architects for this whole surge in Iraq and just the perpetuation of the whole invasion there in doing that.
And it's frustrating because it's the same cluster of people who are pushing and doing all these things.
And it's like your policy was tested and failed.
So let's not continue to use the same failed policy.
Let's try something different.
Let's try a different approach, right?
It's like when I'm interrogating a really tough individual, I can beat my head against a wall trying the same approach.
Or I can say, you know what, this isn't working.
Let's try something different.
We can still meet our objective, but just try a different approach.
You know, with Russia, why?
We didn't have to pursue this complete adversarial relationship with Russia.
You know, we keep saying, well, Russia is invading all these foreign, you know, invading their neighbors and doing all this stuff like that.
The borders of NATO have not.
Russia didn't expand its border with NATO.
NATO expanded its border forward.
Right, correct.
I mean, that's happened.
Yes.
But it's all defensive, right?
That's what I keep saying it's all defensive.
Well, here's my question.
Why can't Russia be part of NATO?
Why not?
That's a good question.
Why not?
Why not?
Because if, I mean, and people say, well, they'll roast me for this.
I know.
Well, NATO is designed to defend Russia, right?
By definition, that's what it is.
Oh, NATO is.
Okay, so when we say, well, why can't Russia be part of NATO?
Well, you have Greece and Turkey.
Those two nations have hated each other for thousands and thousands of years.
They have fought.
Just countless wars against each other.
They're also both put into NATO, jammed in there together, and they can't fight anymore.
They can't fight.
They're not able to fight each other in open conflict because they are part of NATO.
They're members now.
There's a process for them to have dialogue and disputes and handle these problems and go through things like that.
And so when we have this issue with Russia, NATO is around to deal with Russia.
And Russia has always had, Russia is becoming aggressive and adversarial against the US since 2000, I think it was 2008 when they first intervened in Georgia.
And it's been aggressive like that ever since.
But it was aggressive like that because that was leading up to that point, we were continuing to encroach and advance on their border.
And they said, well, if you're going to advance on our border, we need a buffer.
If we're not going to be part of this community, we're going to be the boogeyman.
And you're going to continue to advance forward, we need a buffer.
When they invaded Georgia.
Yeah.
Who do you remember who wasn't?
I'm gonna fuck this up, but wasn't the leader of Georgia somebody that we were paying like some incredible salary?
I don't remember.
I mean, I was in Iraq at the time when that happened.
It was kind of funny because the FOB I was working at had a whole ton of Georgians stationed at that FOB because they were in Iraq with us, like 3,000 of them, I think.
And when the war happened, all 3,000 of the Georgians within like a day were.
Flown in and brought into Baghdad, and we put them all on C 130s and C 17s and flew right back to Georgia.
And so they were in Iraq, and then a few days later, they were back in their own country, off to fight the Russians.
And we provide intelligence and tell them, say, hey, those anti aircraft guns you have, yeah, why don't you move those to this valley over here and move this one to here and just wait and see what happens?
Right.
And the next thing you know, Russian planes are flying through and getting zapped.
Mm hmm.
You know, I told them where to go because they didn't have that capability.
But they also got steamrolled.
The Russians just steamrolled right through them and they had to make a, they got to cease fire stuff.
Right.
I believe on the outskirts of Tbilisi at that point.
I don't know if I'm remembering this right.
I don't remember if it was Georgia or was a governor of some sort of state.
In like southern Ukraine, but they found out this guy actually posted on his Facebook page his salary or what he was paid.
And America was paying him like $250,000 a year.
And he basically was being paid more than the governor of Massachusetts.
It's crazy.
They're crazy.
What the fuck?
You know, no wonder there's such a, there's such a, Bad taste in the Russians' mouth when we are so balls deep in these places that are surrounding Russia.
Yeah.
Abrams Tanks and Oil00:06:42
I look at it this way the existential threat to the United States for like the next 50 years is not Russia.
It is actually China.
And that's where the focus needs to be is on the Chinese section, focusing there.
So, why couldn't there have been a way for us to find a way to work with Russia, to bring them into our sphere of influence, our fold?
Instead of having them as an adversary, bring them in with us and get Russia to align with us against China.
Because we can't be friends with a dictator like Putin.
But we're friends with other dictators.
And that's what kills me.
We have other dictators that we're friends with.
Who are we friends with this world in the Middle East?
All across the Middle East, man.
What about, what's his name?
BB Netanyahu.
Netanyahu.
He's elected.
They elect him whether we like him or not.
He's an elected official.
His country has a democratic election.
His political party.
Nominates him to be the prime minister and he puts together a coalition and they win.
And so that's not a dictatorship.
We may not like him or maybe some people do, but he's elected by his people though.
You can look at MBS in Saudi Arabia.
I mean, top kingdoms.
Yeah, all over the Middle East, they're all dictators.
I mean, we have Maduro down in South America, in Venezuela, and we're wanting to reduce sanctions and move all that stuff away.
Why?
So we can use their oil.
But this is a horrible dictator, and we've isolated them and crippled their economy with sanctions and kind of gotten them down and weakened them in hopes that he would eventually lose.
But now we're going to remove all that so we can pump up his oil industry so we can, you know, produce more oil for us.
But why don't we just produce oil here?
Why do we need to do that for those guys?
It makes sense.
What you're saying makes perfect sense to why there's no reporting on that proxy war in Yemen with Saudi Arabia and Iran.
It's been going on.
For almost a decade now.
And maybe you can explain this to me.
This was something I was talking to a friend about last night.
Why is there a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia happening in Yemen, which is the other way?
Because they can't fight each other.
And that directly, at least.
The U.S. is actually kind of a shield between them.
We have naval and air bases blocking some of those areas in the Red Sea there, in the Persian Gulf there.
So you have a lot of oil traffic moving in and out there with all the trend.
No, no.
Through the Strait of Hormuz going into the.
Can you pull up a map of that whole area, Austin?
Yeah, you'll see it.
There's a whole string of military bases, U.S. bases on there.
And so, if the Iranians try to go across there and do that, they're going to run into problems with us.
Whereas, if they go through the Horn of Africa, down in Yemen, the lower portion of Saudi Arabia, there, there's no issues down there.
The government toppled that we were backing, and now it's just kind of a free for all.
The Houthis kind of control it.
Okay.
So they're like coming in the back door.
Correct.
Correct.
Because if you look at Abu Dhabi and Qatar, we have bases there.
We have a whole naval task force.
Where's Qatar on this map?
It should be a small little place right about Dubai.
You see it there?
That's where the World Cup was.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
I see it.
I see it.
Yeah.
Tiny little speck.
Yeah.
But that whole area is just very militarized.
Whereas if you go in from Yemen, there's not a lot of defenses out there.
You can do things out there and go through there.
But what's interesting so we sold Abrams battle tanks to Saudi Arabia, and the Germans have sold Leopard tanks to Turkey.
So we have actual experience seeing these tanks being used in combat.
By non US, non German forces, right?
So, this, if you can YouTube some of the videos of like Saudis using our Abrams battle tanks in the war in Yemen against the Houthis there, those are not the same kind of tanks that we use.
I mean, okay, shell is sure, right?
But it doesn't have the same armor mix.
So, what makes an American Abrams so deadly and formidable is the type of it's a classified material used in making the armor.
And we don't give that to anyone.
Like, no ally has that.
Australia doesn't have it.
They're buying Abrams from us.
They're not getting that.
No one gets that.
That's a special US only thing.
And it means it helps our tanks always have a competitive edge should we ever have to fight our own tanks.
So, when we're giving tanks to Ukraine, we're not giving them the same equivalent that we have.
We're going to be giving them this partner nation version, which doesn't have that same quality armor, doesn't have some of the same weapon technology.
Integrated firing systems that our stuff's going to have because that's what makes our tank special.
That's classified material.
We're not going to do that because it's going to get destroyed at some point.
These things do happen.
You're going to lose equipment in a war.
We don't want that to fall in Russian hands because they will take that and they will bring that back and they will analyze what it is.
And before you know it, them and the Chinese have it.
Right.
You know, just like when we lost a self fighter over Serbia and during the coastal Serbia war in 99.
Well, parts of that was brought, you know, To the Chinese embassy.
And coincidentally, we had an errant bomb destroy the Chinese embassy.
We didn't want that stuff falling into other people's hands.
The technology, because it's the shell of it, the coating, how they coat the exterior of it, the paints, the different types of materials, things like that.
We didn't want them to reverse engineer that kind of tech.
So it's the same thing with the tank technology.
And it's just not going to be the savior everyone is thinking.
And then you're going to have this logistical nightmare.
Of trying to get parts for these tanks, and you're not talking a lot of tanks either, it's not enough to make a difference, which is what kills me about it.
And then the same with the Germans, they're not sending in like the top of the line Leopards.
Um, and the British are sending theirs in, they're sending their tanks in, but again, they're sending 14 like, seriously, 14.
I mean, it's not even a battalion of tanks.
What are you going to do with 14 tanks, right?
And you combine however it's like under 30 USA rooms, I mean, it's like, guys.
You're not serious about winning this conflict.
If we're going to, I mean, it kills me with our interventions.
If we're going to go to war, then go to war to win.
Don't go to war to lose.
We haven't won, if you look at it, we haven't won a war since World War II.
We'll win a lot, we win most battles that we fight, but we still lose.
Losing Wars Since WWII00:04:25
And that just sucks.
I mean, I spent, like I say, I spent most of my late 20s and early 30s in Iraq.
You know, three and a half years of time in that country on that mission trying to win this thing and make this thing work.
And then to find out years later, everything was a lie to get us there.
And then you guys didn't give us the tools and allow us to win it.
Well, it's just walked away.
It's like, what did we just do?
Why did I sacrifice all those years of my life?
You know, like I am, you heard about the burn pit issues that a lot of us vets are having to deal with from that stuff.
So when we capture Intel, right?
So we capture people with these nifty little cell phones, right?
And laptops and computers, different things like that, right?
That stuff has to get destroyed.
So how do we destroy this stuff?
We burn this crap.
So, when you're burning lithium ion batteries, that causes a problem.
It creates fluoride gas and other kinds of toxic materials.
And they didn't tell us about this kind of stuff.
They didn't give us proper protective materials when you're having to do this.
So, you have to burn these materials.
We've got to burn classified materials every shift.
You're breathing in this kind of stuff all the time, and it causes long term health effects.
For instance, I was 30.
31 years old, and I had to have double hip replacements at age 31 because shortly after I got back from my last time in Iraq, a few months later, I developed vascular necrosis out of nowhere.
What is that?
It's where the blood flow to the bone just stops.
It just stops.
The bones become brittle and break.
And so both my hip bones just became brittle and broke.
And I've had to have them replaced.
And the really bad part is when they did the left hip, They didn't do that one correctly, so I had to have a revision surgery.
They have to go do it again.
So it was like three years later, I had to have that thing replaced again.
Except when they did the revision, they broke a part of the bone off and it healed in the wrong spot.
And then now it's pushing into a cluster of nerves.
And then they did something they didn't put the proper joint head on there, ball head on the rod.
And it's too small, so now it kind of like vibrates on the bone.
It's just, oh, that's freaking painful.
And the only way I can get this thing fixed is to have it done a third time.
Hip replacements are pretty painful surgeries to have, and they leave you, you know, it's a week in hospital, three weeks in rehab.
It leaves you down for a little while.
Are you doing this in the VA?
I will the next time.
I didn't do that the first time.
The first surgery I had to have was actually done in Germany.
I was working in Germany at the time.
And then I had the revision done once in Chicago.
But I'm going to have to have this leg done a third freaking time.
And it sucks because we're stuck dealing with these physical problems and issues now from this war.
And this is crap that's going to plague us for decades.
And I'm not the only one.
There's lots of other guys.
Biden's son died from brain cancer.
That is completely tied to the burn pit stuff.
Really?
Yes.
His son died from a type of cancer that a lot of other vets have died from, all attributed to the burn pits.
What is the background of his son?
He was a JAG, he was a lawyer.
So he was deployed over there doing.
We use lawyers a lot.
I mean, I use him as an interrogator.
We had four lawyers assigned to our unit on different shifts.
And so we worked with them all the time in our job.
And they're always there advising commanders what you can and can't do for laws of armed conflict, things like that.
Right.
Is you allowed to do this strike or not?
Well, what does a lawyer say?
Sucks you got to fight a war.
Yeah, a lawyer next to you, but that's where we're at these days.
But his son was a lawyer over there.
So he was exposed to the same materials I've been exposed to and everyone else.
Wow.
And so he got that cancer and died.
There's other people we know that have had that cancer.
I knew one of our friends from our church.
He'd retired from the military, worked a lot of different secret squirrel crap.
But he was over there in Iraq and Afghanistan for a number of years before he retired.
And then he ended up getting that same type of cancer that Biden's son got brain cancer.
And he hung on for a while.
He hung on for like four or five years before he died.
He died a couple years ago from it.
Cancer Clusters in Veterans00:06:54
You know, but it's just.
And this shit's off from the burn pits.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good.
Materials just don't know what you're breathing in.
A lot of stuff.
Just like in Vietnam, guys, they had that Agent Orange that they kept defoliated, that they were just rained out on them as they're out there doing patrols.
Well, they're just doing patrols.
They don't know what's going on.
They got exposed to it.
What is this, Austin?
It's just a list of all the things.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, all the different types of cancers.
Oh, my God.
Kidney cancer, lymphatic cancer.
Yeah.
They just passed this new burn pit legislation for vets, which was really good because the VA was notorious for like denying everything.
Wow, man.
Yes.
It's just, it's just, you know, so we have that to look for.
It's like the medical time bomb is in our body's way to explode.
You know, but it frustrates me because if we are going to go to war, then give us a clear cut objective, what we're to accomplish, and then give us an exit strategy and define what winning is.
We know what.
The objective is what we can work towards.
Yeah, but it's like, let's win.
Like, is it take the shackles off, let's win?
Is it the case with proxy wars like the one in Yemen?
Is it the like, is it true that the dynamic is basically we want to be helpful to our allies, Saudi Arabia, because we need them and they need us?
We want to maintain the relationship.
So we want to basically look like we're doing everything we can to help them, but we don't really give a fuck about helping them.
We just want to make it seem like kind of so it's more sinister than that, even.
So Okay.
That's why you don't give them the best tanks.
We give them, we, well, look, we're giving you this.
It's even worse than that.
Okay.
So with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, right?
Do we really want them to win?
Not necessarily.
Because if this, as long as this fight is happening and Saudi Arabia is having, is losing tanks, losing equipment like MRAPs and armored vehicles and, and having to expend missiles like Patriot missiles and all kinds of things like that, that is a continuous, that's a continuous source of supply, like a demand.
It's kind of like a drug dealer, right?
He doesn't want to kill you by giving you too much drugs.
He wants you addicted and coming back for more.
So, if Saudi Arabia is fighting the Houthis, the more they owe us, the more we give them, the more they owe us.
Well, the more they owe us, but they need replacements.
They're losing equipment.
They need to buy more from us.
They lose that equipment.
They got to keep buying more from us.
Well, if they're having to buy equipment from us to make sure they don't lose to the Houthis, when Saudi does something we don't like, We now have a little more leverage on them.
Well, okay, maybe we are going to put these weapon sales on hold.
And that devastates them because they built their army around our equipment.
And suddenly you choked off the supply for parts and servicing and everything else.
That means they're going to comply.
So there's that piece to it.
So if we can, and it's like with Ukraine, we're getting the Europeans to just expend everything they have.
And Uncle Sam's going to come around and be the sugar daddy to supply them with everything to replace it.
And because they don't have any of their own indigenous equipment, they're dependent on us.
We can now control your ability to defend your nation by turning the supply spigots on and off if you don't comply.
That's why you want to make sure you own your own defense systems and stuff like that.
That's why you see, like, Poland, they're buying a lot of American weapons and artillery and munitions, things like that.
But they're also partnering with South Korea to buy a lot of their armored vehicles and equipment, and they're building their own indigenous systems and their own industry to be able to supply and do it themselves because they want to be independent.
Right.
Poland has a horrible history of being screwed by its allies.
And, you know, they want to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future.
So, have you ever watched Oliver Stone's Putin interviews?
Yes.
Really interesting.
What did you think about that?
It was really interesting.
I mean, I, I think Olive Stone has his own bent and angle to things.
But again, I'm not trying to side with Putin or with Russia or anything like that.
I just like studying people and I like learning what makes them tick and why countries and places happen.
I'm glad things happen.
Yeah, I think it's brilliant.
And because as a writer, someone trying to create these books, when I want to create book two or book three for this series, I use those resources to help me better understand the conflict, better understand the scenario.
In this particular one, so in Monroe Doctrine, one of the things we really expose and look at is the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.
And this is where they have a Chinese big manufacturing company, country.
What they want to do is link their factories with markets around the world.
So you have a constant supply of customers and that keeps them going.
So Belt and Road is basically a global infrastructure plan where they will come into, say, a country, a poor country.
You know, somewhere along Central America.
And they will say, All right, we will build, we will help build and finance a deep water port, which will massively improve your country and economy.
But we're going to own 51% of the port, and you get the benefit of it all.
And then we will help build from the port these rail and highway networks connecting your major cities.
All this isn't being done out of the altruistic nature of their hearts.
This is being done to ensure they have a consumer to buy the products that they're.
Building.
Oh, and because, yeah, so they're doing that makes sense.
That's why they're spending all this money in Africa.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's what they're doing with that.
But more importantly, they're also at the same time putting you into a debt trap where the interest rates on these things are really low, cheap, but they're lots.
It's big.
And they own 51% of the port, or maybe they own 49%, but there's a closet.
If you fail to make your payments, it reverts to their ownership.
There's all kinds of little things they do.
Now, these nations are poor.
They want to develop and grow and move forward.
And the Chinese are coming in with essentially endless cash to do all of that.
And that's what they're kind of moving forward and accepting and doing that.
And the Chinese are all over the place with this.
But because they have control of these facilities and the infrastructure, they can manipulate and change the foreign policy of those nations to be how they want it.
So in our scenario, we look at that as one aspect of it.
But now we also look at artificial intelligence and machine learning, saying, well, where is that going?
Because we can use AI to help us understand how, say, the naval commander for a ship is going to react in certain circumstances and situations.
And how do we do that?
Social Assessments and AI00:03:48
Well, we look at what is this guy's social profile, his online profile.
So, what I mean by that is we look and say, okay, well, what does he spend his money on?
What does he do on social media?
What kind of interactions does he do?
What does he watch on YouTube?
What kind of books does he read from Amazon?
What's his purchasing behaviors?
We look at all the different types of materials that he does.
And then we look at not just him, but his immediate orbit and his friends.
What do they all do?
So that helps to shape like the person's opinion, who they are, personalities, all those different social profiles of that.
And then they have these awesome games on Facebook that everyone just loves to play.
What character are you in Lord of Rings or in what's a Game of Thrones?
Who cares?
But people click on this shit.
And when they do, they go through and they answer all these different questions.
Questions, right?
And those questions give a certain type of social assessment.
It's like a social assessment.
These are like assessing individuals and people.
And then when you're also doing that, there's also a clause that actually grants them access to then see everything you do on the site and from there into even more.
So they're really able to track a bunch of things.
But they're getting you to play this game where you're helping them build a social profile of you willingly and you're giving them access to all of your social media.
So, when you have machines that can take all this stuff in, synthesize it, create profiles, you can start doing predictive behavioral analysis.
So, now I can start conditioning a society to accept something by engineering everything to fit into a certain mold or poke and prod and push people.
Or I can understand how they will respond when an action happens.
So, like a way to condition people, really good of social engineering study, case study.
Look at last year when Florida passed its parental rights bill, right?
So, the parental rights bill, different organizations and whatnot labeled this thing, don't say gay.
And that's what they tried to call it.
They called this thing as that.
Who labeled it that?
A whole slew of these left wing groups started labeling this thing, the don't say gay bill.
Well, it has nothing in the bill that says you can't use the word gay.
There's nothing in about homosexuality at all.
Okay.
All it is simply saying is that kids between the ages of, well, kindergarten through third grade, so basically, Five year olds through eight year olds should not be taught sexual content or sexual related materials.
Okay.
What was the name of that act?
It was the Parental Rights Act.
Parental Rights Act.
Okay.
And this was a massive thing that they took a bill that had nothing to do with being gay and made it into something it wasn't and got and renamed the whole thing and then whipped up everyone into this frenzy over something that was never even mentioned or a part of the bill.
I mean, I have yet to find an adult who can explain to me why we need to teach five year olds, you know, sex ed.
Right.
They're five.
Right.
Why are we telling them they need to start understanding gender pronouns and using gender pronouns?
Dude, they don't understand what a noun or a verb is.
They can't even write their names yet.
You're making them do this.
Why are you doing this to them?
You know, let them be kids.
Why was that?
Do you know why that act was put in place?
Because they were doing that.
Because schools in Florida were actually doing that?
It's so permeated through there.
They were actually putting this stuff in there.
I mean, you can.
Student Loan Problems00:08:32
What schools were doing it?
I don't have the list of them off the top of my head.
That's fucking insane.
There's so few of them, though.
That's crazy.
And like, there's this one gal on.
I don't use TikTok, social media.
That's a Chinese spy app.
I'm not on that thing.
But there's this group called Libs of TikTok.
Familiar with it?
Yeah.
So this woman who runs this thing.
She doesn't do anything with it.
She's literally taking whatever it is you made on your TikTok thing and just sharing it.
Right.
So, you made it.
Reposting it.
You admitted to this.
You said, I'm doing X, Y, and Z, and I'm proud of it.
All she did was just repost it.
Right.
You put it out there.
She didn't create anything, just put it out there.
And that's how everyone found out about this because you have these teachers talking about this, getting their gratification and self, and like just feeling like importance.
When I got my group of kindergartners to understand why I go by my pronoun or these different things, like, Dude, your job is to educate kids.
Don't just why is this important?
Right.
Why is this part of it?
And it comes back to our schools are failing the basics of just making sure that our kids can read, write, and arithmetic, right?
They're just not doing this.
So if we're not getting those things right, then why are we going to expand into other areas, social areas like this, when we're not even getting the basics right?
Our emphasis needs to be on why are our kids not.
Being able to meet and exceed their grade levels in their education.
We spend more money on education than almost any other developing nation.
We do?
We spend huge sums of money on education, and we have the worst results from this stuff.
How come an elementary school teacher makes the same amount of money as a Burger King manager?
Well, it's not because we don't spend money on the education, the money is there.
It's a matter of how the money is allocated, though.
How many school administrators?
And support personnel do you have per teacher?
You know, the teachers should be getting paid a lot more money.
But if you have a slew of school administrators and other non teaching jobs that are taking up salaries and oftentimes quite high salaries, that's money you don't have for teachers.
It's like when, like the university systems, well, universities have become very expensive because you have a whole plethora of non teaching jobs and positions.
That are not contributing to like teaching students, teaching people.
It's like on a contract, having a billable, being able to bill a client or not bill a client, you know?
Right.
Also, everyone gets loans to go to college.
So they don't have to pay anything out of pocket and they have deals with these financial institutions where they just have these ridiculous student loan programs.
Think about this proc.
I mean, this is a horrible debt trap we put ourselves in, right?
I mean, I got $62,000 in student loans myself from Oxford, okay?
I mean, I'm in the boat too.
I've paid off a good chunk of mine.
What happens is you have the federal government's going to guarantee X amount of money for tuition, right?
So, what will happen is the school will be like, okay, well, if we increase tuition by an extra 3% each year, the government's just going to increase the amount of loans available by that same amount.
So, as long as the government's going to guarantee a certain increase for the students, then we'll just continue to increase it.
And the student doesn't know any better.
They just want to go to college.
So, they sign up for these things and get it.
And then, next thing you know, They've got all of the student loan.
They've got all these debts.
And this is the worst kind of debt because it's not even, they wrote the laws for the student loans in such a manner that you can't even discharge it.
Right, right.
That's what's really bad.
How much interest is on student loans?
It depends.
If you have a federal loan, it's usually not that bad.
I mean, my federal loans, I think, are like three and a quarter.
I mean, it's not too bad.
But personally, I think if the government's going to do something like that, then maybe you should set the interest rate at maybe like half a percent or 1%.
It should be just enough to service the loan.
Not to make a profit.
Because actually, the government actually makes a solid profit on student loan interest.
Right.
Because it's just, it's over a trillion dollars.
Yeah.
They make money on student loans.
And like right now with the budget deficits we're facing, part of the deficit we're actually facing is because we're not collecting the interest payments.
We're not collecting payments on student loans, you know, and whatnot.
Now, you know, it's kind of a problem.
But, you know, that's the issue.
The school's allowed to keep raising rates without justifying why they're doing that because the education isn't improving, not teaching anything new and cool that's worth that jump.
But we're going to charge all this extra money.
I mean, we're not producing hordes of doctors and people in the STEM fields.
We're producing tons and tons of people getting degrees in, you know, English, literature, gender studies, and history.
It's like, well, that's cool knowledge to know.
That's why you call them humanities.
That shouldn't be your major, though.
If we have a shortage in engineers and scientists and doctors and whatnot, then shouldn't the student loans be made available for people who want to go into those fields?
Yes.
And not for.
There shouldn't even be loans.
We should just be able to give that.
We should be able to.
The government should pay for that.
If we could buy all those tanks and rockets for the other countries, we should be able to buy the fucking education for doctors and lawyers and engineers and physicists.
So, when I was in Germany, a lot of people say, well, look at Germany and Europe, how they have like free healthcare and they have free education.
And technically, that's true.
But there's catches to all of that, okay?
So, in the education system, it's free.
And once you're in, you could stay and get your PhD.
There's nothing pushing you out the door to go to work.
That's why Germany has so many PhDs.
So many people with PhDs because they'll just stay as a permanent student for 12 years because the government pays them to do, gives them money to live on, and it's free.
Sounds like a lot of the rich kids I grew up around.
But here's the catch here's the catch for it, okay?
You have to take a national standardized test.
And if you don't get in a certain percentile, you don't go to college.
You're just done.
Right.
Now you can go to private college and pay for that on your own.
Your family can't get student loans for it.
That seems like a great, a great system to it.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, it is and it isn't.
So, you have a lot of people who just maybe they don't test well.
They suck at taking tests.
They're just not a good person to sit there and regurgitate test questions, right?
Does that mean that person is not super smart though and probably would be great in college and great afterwards?
No, just means they're not good at taking a test.
There are a lot of people who are really good at taking tests and they are stupid.
Like they're really good at regurgitating test questions and scoring on there, but they're dumb as a box of rocks.
They just don't have a common sense.
But those are the ones who are going to be allowed to get the education then because they don't want to contest well.
And so it really blocks people from having that full access.
And what happens in their schools is usually in their high school, what they call their version of high school, you either get identified to either you're going to go academic route, like college, or you're going to go trade route.
And you kind of diverge and you split.
Okay.
In high schools, usually it usually happens like in middle school, and you find like three or four years of high school, you split.
Right.
And then you're going down one.
Track of the other.
And you're kind of like stuck.
Like, what if you decided, I don't want to be a plumber?
I really want to go to college and go into engineering.
Well, that's not an option anymore.
I mean, you can try to take those standardized tests and hope to get the right score you need, but all of your high school education until you finished high school didn't prepare you for that.
So you're at a huge disadvantage to do that.
And so if we had that kind of a system, it may be free, but just understand very few are actually going to get to benefit from it.
It would be another caste system, so to speak, that we just create.
On the medical side, so when I was there as a contractor, I had private health insurance, which meant I got seen by a doctor like that.
I went to the doctor on Monday.
He said, Oh, your hip broke.
That's why it hurts so much.
That's what you showed me MRI.
Medical Caste Systems00:15:08
We're gonna do surgery on Friday.
Like, okay, you know, it hurts like hell.
So, yeah, they're gonna do surgery right away.
Well, my roommate, um, you had his hip replaced too.
So, he was a cop, German, you know, politicized.
He's a local cop, and I was talking with him about this.
He told me that his hip, when his hip broke, he waited six weeks for his slot to get his surgery.
I mean, it's free, he doesn't pay anything for it, but he has to wait in a queue, right?
And your queue.
As long as there's no one like super severe that gets bumped in front of you, it's like there's not like a line of acute cases in front of you, you'll eventually get seen relatively quickly.
But there are other times where you can end up waiting a very long time.
And I don't know if you've had anyone who's had a broken hip will attest to this.
When that happens, you don't want to wait six weeks to get this thing fixed.
It's broke for a reason and it hurts.
Right.
You can still move around sometimes, but you're grinding on broken bone.
It's quite painful.
But it's free.
Yeah.
I mean, there's trade offs.
It's not as green as everyone thinks.
Yeah.
I've heard a lot of stories about the VA being really slow and not efficient and poor quality service.
Then my dad has been dealing with the VA.
He is an Air Force veteran.
And he's just been recently dealing with some stuff, having to go there for some checkups and some physicals.
He had to get hearing aids.
He's losing his hearing.
And he's had a really positive experience with the VA.
He says it can be.
It depends where you're at.
I've had really great experiences with the VA here.
I did not have a good experience with a VA in DC or in Chicago.
Right.
Just terrible VAs up there.
Yeah.
I had Kristen Beck.
Are you familiar with Kristen Beck on here?
Navy SEAL.
I've heard the name.
His name was Chris Beck.
He transitioned to being Kristen Beck.
Ah.
Does he manufacture the firearms, right?
There's another person that's kind of like that.
Navy SEAL.
He has a firearms manufacturer here.
There's a book and a documentary made about her, and it's called Lady Valor.
It was like a, I think it was either CNN or.
HBO documentary made about his story or her story.
It was pretty incredible.
I forgot where I was going with this.
Oh, just don't challenge with the VA.
A lot of problems with the VA.
A lot of problems with the VA because she dealt with a lot of psychological issues being a SEAL in Iraq.
It's tough.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you're in combat for very intense periods of time and then you go home and you're back in intense combat.
And that's kind of a difference between like a Uh, the special warfare guys versus like line units, regular grunts, you know, just they're there for a year.
Sometimes they see action, sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they, you know, they go through the whole time without having any issues or problems.
Whereas the special warfare guys, they go in and they're there for whether it's uh, you know, three months or five months, but that period they're there, it is high intensity for that period, and then they go home and high intensity and go home.
Um, it's tough on those guys, man.
Yeah, it's tough, really tough.
But it's like future warfare stuff, man.
That's scary as hell because, yeah.
Oh, the technology, where it's going with the drones and the AI and everything else.
Like, there was Textron, they have a really interesting remote controlled ground vehicle.
Like, you can look it up.
The Army's got these really unique, the future Army combat systems, part of it are making these autonomous ground vehicles.
So, what you'll be able to do is you'll have.
Different size, like armored fighting vehicles and tanks, will have different kinds of weapons on them, different sizes.
But these vehicles will be able to kind of like a UAV, they will be remotely controlled so they can go into the combat zone area from, well, the guy who's actually operating may be hundreds of miles away or even the other side of the world.
And the vehicle will go in and be able to conduct its operations, its missions.
It's kind of scary to think about because there's going to come a point where, like, you have, like, take for instance with Tesla, right?
They've got their self driving AI software.
Mm hmm.
And that is getting better every single year because you have hundreds of thousands of people using it, recording more data.
Well, it's not going to be long before you're going to have that same kind of technology and capability that can operate this armored vehicle that will be able to autonomously go into a combat zone where you just say, okay, everyone in this area here is classified as an enemy combatant.
So just go in and as it identifies people, just start engaging them.
And you have that, then you'll have aircraft, helicopters, soon underwater.
Well, we already have this stuff, though.
Crazy, but they're all man in the loop right now.
You know, they're being physically operated by someone.
We're not far away though, where this is going to be a semi autonomous to fully autonomous weapons.
And then you're going to have these things just moving across.
That's going to be scary.
Yeah.
I see.
What was the story a couple months ago that San Francisco was going to start?
They were going to have robots kill people.
Yeah.
It's like crazy.
Like, what do you mean robot police with basically the authority to.
Murder people.
I guess they rolled it back once it started getting a lot of publicity.
It's nuts.
It's nuts where we're going with some of the technology like that.
But then on the other hand, you know, you think about technology and AI and where we're going.
It's spooky where it's going, but then you see this goofy ass balloon, spy balloon floating across America.
Like, are you kidding me?
Yep.
Are we really still using balloons in 2022, 2023?
I don't know.
I think, I don't know.
They say it's a weather balloon.
Gathering.
Is that a smoke screen?
Who knows though?
I think it was a matter.
Maybe it was just like a middle finger that floated across the country.
And I'm saying, huh, look what we can do.
We just floated right across your country and you didn't do anything about it.
And, you know, kind of a black eye from there.
But as a writer, okay, here's a scenario.
Imagine this balloon and you place a nuclear device on top, on this balloon, right?
And it explodes at those high altitudes.
What's it going to create?
Electromagnetic pulse system that would blanket a big chunk of the United States.
Fry all our circuitry and take us out.
Right.
So, you know, the writer in me looks at that and says, Wow, that's a cool scenario.
How could that work?
You know, and what if they did something like that?
What if they wanted to test it and say, Hey, can we float a balloon across the United States without getting seen or anything?
And the scary part is, had this rancher out there, was it Wyoming or whatever, not seen it and reported it, we probably never would have known about it.
And it sounds from the reports from the Pentagon, they wouldn't have known about it.
Because apparently they're trying to say that this has happened in the past and we didn't know about it.
I'm like, really?
You had balloons the size of 200 foot tall, 200 foot long balloons floating across the country and you didn't know about it?
What if someone did put a bomb, like an EMP bomb on there and did that?
I mean, I also think too, like, how many are there really, was there really only one or how many of these are really floating across the skies that we know about?
And we just wanted to say, You know, create some sort of psyop to point the American public, make them look at China.
Hey, look at China.
Look what they're doing to us.
And guess what?
Somebody sitting at the CIA right now just laughing their ass off.
Oh, you remember what happened like right before this, right?
So, right before the balloon thing, that's when Project Veritas had this big sting operation that they had done with one of the Pfizer employees who kind of talked about how they had, um, how the vaccines just didn't work and went through that whole process and exposed all of that.
And then a couple of days later, oh, we have a balloon up here, shiny object over here.
I never, I don't remember even seeing what you're talking about.
Yeah, look up Project Veritas with that whole thing they had about the Pfizer stuff, it was a big deal.
Magically, Austin, can you find that?
Magically, like less than a week or two later, Pfizer's board ends up ousting James O'Keefe, who is the founder and the president for the company who does this.
Like, that's his gig.
And they get rid of him.
And now, you know, he's out in the left flap in the way he'll probably restart his own brand new version of Project Veritas and restart the whole thing.
But it's like coincidental timing from them breaking this big story.
It's one of the biggest stories of the decade to the balloon to then his ouster.
Like always in weeks, like coincidence.
I mean, yeah, that is scary.
That's crazy.
The vaccine stuff is really, really scary.
You should try and talk to James Keith.
The reason that stuff scares me is just the level of control that has been put on social media and the internet and communication just based on that.
Yeah, that is what scares me.
Elon Musk exposed all of that and just was like, wow.
I mean, from an Intel perspective, I understand, know that stuff happens.
It's just, I guess, I was surprised at how.
Eager the media was to just be lapdogs for all of this and just compliant to it.
Yes.
What happened to investigative journalism?
Not investigative journalism, journalism, period.
That goes back to what Jack Murphy was talking about.
When he was putting out his story for the CIA, he was working with one of the top two publications in the country.
And when it came down to like the clock is ticking to hit the publish button on that article, they had to run it by the CIA's deputy director.
They had a conference call, a three way call with his editor at the publication and the CIA's deputy director on the phone, off the record.
He didn't have an on the record agreement with this guy.
He said, completely, vehemently denied everything about those cells being in Russia, doing those sabotage campaigns, conducting those sabotage campaigns.
In fact, he said that it was rogue Ukrainians conducting those campaigns.
So after the call, he has another one on one with his editor saying, okay, what are we going to do?
And the editor says, we have to scrub every single mention of the CIA out of the story.
Yeah.
Rogue Ukrainians that are on CIA payroll.
He wanted to completely make it line up with the deputy director's narrative.
But they couldn't just take the story and say, Deputy director of the CIA says this at the bottom or something like that.
Say they denied it.
No, they had to make it jive with his story.
That is fucking scary because now you're not doing journalism.
Now you're just a mouthpiece for the state.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, that is completely.
Like, I understand that the CIA's job is to keep.
You know, clandestine missions off the front page of the newspaper.
I completely understand that.
But when you are absolutely tied into the biggest journalistic publications in the country, it is completely undermining what it means to do journalism and to be a journalist.
Yeah, it is.
It's sad.
And that's why I question so much about this Russia thing when we say that Russia is completely blinded by propaganda.
Everything there is propaganda.
Are we not blinded by propaganda?
Yeah, that's what's made me see that more than anything.
What is this?
Oh, did Pfizer's boss cast doubt on his own vaccine?
Is this the Veritas thing?
Yeah, probably some of it, but they are.
Yeah.
It's the whole story was just really interesting.
January 20th.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, James, I've learned a lot from this conversation, man.
We just did three hours.
Oh, my God.
I appreciate you coming by, man.
This has been a really fun conversation.
We covered everything.
Hopefully, you know, people are kind of like, this is how we come up with all our material for our books, right?
Yeah.
You ask questions, okay?
Lots and lots of questions.
It's not that you take a position on one thing or another.
It's just about absorbing the information so you can then create these scenarios.
Because I want to have these scenarios out there so people can look at that and go, Man, what if this happened?
What if that happened?
Wow.
Well, there's a book about it.
There's a whole series on that stuff.
And walk the dog, see what happens, what could happen.
And maybe we go, Damn, that is not something we should pursue because here's a somewhat realistic scenario.
How could possibly play out?
And that's kind of that's it's.
It's almost like, I don't want to say like warnings and stuff like that, but just trying to put ideas out there of how things could shake out.
And I think that's kind of important for people to see and have out there because we sure as hell know the media is not going to do that.
Reporters aren't doing that.
Right.
So it's a very, very unique tool and sort of endeavor that you can go down.
It's really fascinating how you can predict things that happen in real life when you're just writing fiction and you're trying to cook up scenarios.
Yeah.
You just look and say, well, it's an exercise that not a lot of people do, or maybe they do, and I'm just not.
Well, you have to think nefariously, right?
And you gotta take on the nefarious mode of, well, how would I do this?
If I want to jack up a country's electoral system, how would I do that?
Walk through the whole thing and say, okay, now I've got that.
Could I do this to the United States?
Or how would I do this to the United States?
How would I manipulate it to gain control?
It's all about control and money, control and money.
Right.
Most of the world revolves around that.
And so you just figure that out and then say, all right, well, let's create a series on that.
Let's create a book series on that and walk the dog.
It's incredible.
You know, next thing you know, you start seeing it actually unfold.
You're like, damn, probably shouldn't have made that.
Hopefully, I'm not making a blueprint for someone.
Right.
And it's really cool, too, to see someone like yourself go from what you did overseas to actually finding some sort of meaning in life and create a career for yourself and develop some sort of purpose for yourself.
Other vets find this, too.
Yeah.
You know, I've got two other veterans that I've mentored through this whole process who are now writing and creating their own books and doing their own things.
And they're making money at this.
You know, they're making $3,000, $4,000 a month and growing with their book sales and building that out.
And it's creating, Alternative works, alternative jobs, and careers that help them overcome their, you know, whether it's a physical disability or just the psychological trauma of PTSD and things like that.
You don't have to be a permanently damaged or injured person.
There's ways to overcome this and still be productive.
And that's important.
Powerful stuff, man.
Tell people where they're listening and watching where they can buy your books.
Look at your website, your social media, all of it.
Yeah.
So you find all of our books on Amazon.com.
We're available in Kindle Unlimited.
Print and audiobooks.
Oh, you do audio too?
All of them?
All of them?
Audio.
Yeah.
Do you read them?
No, I don't.
I have professionals who do that because I'm way better at doing story creating.
Yeah.
I already work like 80 hours a week on this stuff.
So I need to find somebody with a good voice.
Marketing Self-Published Books00:00:58
Yeah.
And that's why, you know, we create that stuff.
And it's odd because I've got the thrillers that we really dominate on.
Then we also have, you know, sci fi took us a break because there's something that's not real.
You know, and you kind of push and do that.
But it's been fun.
It's been neat to learn and learn like the digital marketing side of it all.
And, um, We found out last year with Amazon, we hit the top 100 most read writers.
I think it was like seven out of the 12 months through their Kindle Unlimited program.
We had, gosh, was it almost 74 million pages read through their Kindle Unlimited program?
Of the books.
It's just, that's insane because we're self published.
We do this on our own.
We don't have a publisher that works with us.
We don't have an agent, you know, nothing like that.
It's 100% on our own.
So it's our own ability to create the stories, edit them, get them up there, and then figure out how to market them.
I do that.
So yeah, just apply all the skills you learn from the government and apply it into marketing and creating books.