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May 12, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:27
The Dangers of DeepSeek: Medal of Honor Recipient Florent Groberg
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Florent Groberg is a retired U.S. Army captain who fought in Afghanistan and was severely injured attempting to thwart a suicide bomber.
For his actions, he received the Medal of Honor, America's highest award for military valor.
Everything that we have in this nation is because of men and women who put their lives on the line and income home, and their families have to live with the consequences of that.
I spoke with Captain Groberg on a range of topics, from DeepSeek AI and swarming drones, to the war in Ukraine and the Chinese Communist threat.
When I first heard about DeepSeek and its battle with OpenAI, I saw it as an opportunity for the Chinese government to have free access to all of our data as they see fit.
The Chinese have been developing the majority of the world's small drones.
They're cheap, they're effective, so it really has changed the landscape of warfare.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Laurent Roper, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you for having me.
Excited.
You've been recently writing about DeepSeek.
It's available, basically, to any American to be used in whatever way.
Why is this a problem?
That's a very important topic, in my personal opinion, when it comes down to national security.
When I first heard about DeepSeek and its battle with OpenAI, the concept of doing it a lot cheaper, just as well in regards to accuracy, if not better, and that a lot of people here in the U.S. had access to it.
All you had to do was just download it.
It scared me.
Personally, it scared me.
My first thought is...
Why would anyone here in the United States download this application?
Specifically because it's owned by a Chinese company.
And my second thought was, what does it do that's much better than ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, the other applications that would entice you to download this one and put your property, your IP, your personal private...
You know, information at risk.
And then I started to peel the onion back and realize, people don't know.
They just think that this is a new application that's available for them, for cheap, for free, and it's better than the rest because it's a lot cheaper and you can do things faster, whatever the story was sold to them on the media, and they're going to use it.
But they forget, it's a Chinese company.
That has to abide by the 2017 Chinese international law in terms of regulations for companies to have to provide their data to the Chinese government.
So in essence, I saw it as an opportunity for the Chinese government to have free access to all of our data as they see fit, because people are utilizing it to do everything.
From asking normal questions, to planning their day, to financial questions, to doing their taxes, to potentially putting the IP of their own businesses and products that they're developing to get a better understanding or maybe a competitive advantage.
And all this is now being just transferred over at the mercy of whatever the Chinese government wants to make out of it.
The thing that was really astonishing to me was this hype that was created.
Look, they did it so cheap.
It was so good and they did it so cheap without really any evidence provided.
No evidence.
No facts.
We don't even know where the chips come from.
Do they come from NVIDIA or not?
We had no data.
There was actually no proof of their Of what they were claiming they were able to do.
Finally, now we've had the ability to sort of take a deeper look into it.
And, you know, it's nothing special.
It's not better than anything else out there already on the market.
They just can do it at a fifth or an eighth of the cost, supposedly.
I have a question in regards to this.
How much is the Chinese government actually paying?
What's the government's involvement in terms of the financials to make this company go forward?
Does that change the math there?
Maybe, maybe not.
I have no idea.
These are questions we should be asking ourselves.
But instead, I think a lot of us just jump right to the conclusion.
Cheaper, better, faster.
We really need to start pointing our fingers at OpenAI.
What are you doing?
NVIDIA, what are you doing?
And things like that.
What is the full nature then of the China threat?
And when did you first become aware of this?
Well, I've served in the military.
I've served in the intelligence services for a little bit of time.
I am a de facto, not well-versed historian.
I'm also paying attention to, you know, what's going on around the world.
And look, the Chinese have been doing, they made a commitment in 1949, a 100-year commitment, to really become the sole world power when it comes to economics, military, technology.
And they're working really hard at that mission, and that mission requires, you know, passing the United States.
On many different facets.
And so to do so, you need to invest, you need to capture, and you need to lead.
It's a massive threat to our way of life, United States specifically.
The free world, in essence.
And so when I see the opposition taking advantage, potentially, of...
Our own way of life and the way we decide, you know, the freedom of press, freedom of speech, our ability to utilize these type of platforms with no consequences in extent versus the way they operate.
It worries me a little bit because I'm also understanding that they're trying to become, you know, trying to pass us and we're giving them a free pass.
And they're making massive investments on the technological side.
You've seen our military grow.
They're capturing a lot of territories.
Around the world, in Africa, South America, Europe, they're bailing out Russia.
And so that worries me a little bit for the safety of national security.
Well, and I guess the unspoken thing is that it is a totalitarian dictatorship after all.
You know, I recently, someone was basically commenting that they perceive America as being responsible for the Opium War and treat them...
We're talking about the fentanyl crisis and a lot of the precursors and even actual fentanyl basically being facilitated by the Chinese regime.
My comment and response was, yeah, that's true, but even more important is that they treat their own people worse than they treat the people responsible for the opium.
Yeah, and listen, to me, when it comes down to the opium world, there's a lot of responsible parties.
We need to figure out a way to stop it.
I've lost, unfortunately, friends recently that I served with, unfortunately, who we're using.
And one of them specifically was using a different drug that was laced with fentanyl and passed away.
He was struggling.
He was a medic.
Great, great kid.
But it's a problem that we really need to fix, and there is responsibility.
Here in our own country, obviously, there's a heck of a responsibility over there.
This is one of those situations where I believe this should not be a competition, this should be a partnership.
I think it benefits all parties for it.
Well, Florent, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break and folks will be right back.
And we're back with Medal of Honor recipient, Florent Groberg.
I think the only way that the Chinese regime can be...
Invited to or encouraged to actually stop the flow of fentanyl is if there's some kind of leverage that can be used that will cause them more pain than the, you know, actual military benefit they get out of letting the fentanyl flow and, you know, facilitating the fentanyl flow.
Your thoughts?
You know, in a perfect world, I will say this.
I would love for to be no war.
I've been at war.
I've seen how horrible it is.
The idea and the concept of having to take someone else's life.
And more importantly, it's your friends that don't get to come home.
And the families that have to deal with the consequences on both sides.
War is the worst potential outcome out there.
But I'd love to have a partnership with everybody.
I'd love to be able to have dinner with Chinese counterpart, Russian counterpart, French counterpart, British counterpart.
And all us be peaceful and talking about how can we...
But unfortunately, from my understanding and my personal experience, we face too many individuals who don't think that way.
Well, and I think many would argue that, let's say, some less benevolent forces took advantage of exactly the kind of sentiments and the kind of desires that you just described, which, of course, many Americans share.
Of course, you know, you did serve in the military.
You received the Medal of Honor.
I think we should talk about that and how that happened.
I did.
I served in the Army.
I joined in 2008, infantryman.
I joined at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was stationed in Colorado Springs, Fort Carson.
Two tours to Afghanistan, one in 2009 and 2010, as a platoon leader in the Kunar province.
Led a very specific team of 24. Americans in the remote parts of eastern Afghanistan.
I learned a lot about being a man and a leader, but also a follower.
I learned a lot about myself in those mountains.
I faced some pretty difficult enemies.
But most importantly, I was surrounded by some of the best people I've ever met in my life.
Second tour, 2012, back in Afghanistan, I was running the Specialized Security D-Team for the Brigade Commander, now who is the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.
And we were about six, seven months into the deployment, we were targeted by a suicide bomber in Asadabad, again, eastern Afghanistan again.
My job was to lead that security team.
Luckily, I was close enough to the suicide bomber.
I saw a suicide bomber come out of a structure after they created the version with motorcycles.
I couldn't see a weapon on him.
I saw him as a threat, couldn't confirm him as a threat, so I couldn't engage him with my rifle or my service weapon.
So I did my own made-up escalational force, which was run at him, say a lot of words at him, hopefully he responds, confirm that he's a bad guy, and if he's a bad guy, do your job.
So I ran at him, I hit him, I grabbed him, I hit him, confirmed he was wearing a suicide vest, and the only thing I could think of at that moment was I got to get him away from the team as quickly and as far away as possible.
I was followed by one of my guys, Sal Mahoney, so I threw him, and...
Mahoney was right behind me, just ready to roll, and he landed on the ground, detonated.
I don't know how, call it grace of God, luck, whatever you want to believe, but I lived.
I was thrown 30 feet, my foot was facing me, I had blood everywhere, lost hearing, my head was spinning.
My number two came out of nowhere, grabbed me by the hand of my plate carrier, dragged me into a ditch.
My 22-year-old medic at the time, who had a torn MCL, PCL, saved my life because he applied a tourniquet.
My translator helped him and helped save my life.
And so it was probably one of the most difficult moments of my life, personally, on a physical sense.
But what made it worse is that when I came to my senses, A couple minutes into it, my number two came to me and said, "Hey, I just want to give you a sit-rep." I asked him, "What's the status of Mount Warrior VI?" which was the colonel.
He said, "Mount Warrior VI is okay." "What's the status of Mount Warrior VII?" which is the command center major.
He said, "We lost command center, Mr. Griffin." And we lost three others.
And I said, "Get me out of this hole." They picked me up and I'm hopping on one leg.
I saw Major Griffin, Major Gray, Major Kennedy, and then USAID at the time, Reggie Abdel-Fatah, were all killed by the same bomber that didn't kill me.
A few minutes later, I was put into a vehicle on top of ammo cans, and I was casavacked to the nearest military hospital where my war ended.
So I received the Medal of Honor on November 12, 2015, from President Obama for actions on.
And I tell people...
There was no heroic act that day.
Literally, my entire team did their job, and unfortunately, we still lost Americans.
The fact that I was recognized as a hero for that was a really tough pill to swallow.
It was a really tough one for me to swallow to this day.
But I've also understood that this is an opportunity for me to have a platform, to continue serving, to say the names of my friends who didn't come home.
The true heroes of my personal story.
And also just to remind people that everything that we have in this nation is because of men and women who put their lives on the line and then come home.
And their families have to live with the consequences of that.
Yeah, we are the greatest nation in the world, hands down without a doubt.
That's because we bleed for it.
And that's because we have individuals who put on that uniform and are willing to deploy thousands of miles away, years at a time, to make sure that we get to keep this way of life.
And I don't take that for granted.
In reading about your case, I understand there was a second suicide bomber who was basically also going to detonate, but because of your action, they were kind of prevented from that detonation actually having any impact on the two.
Correct.
So I did not know this, but there was a second one.
He was still in the building.
What we understand, based upon forensics and the storyline, is that...
Because we got there so quick on the first one, it prevented the second one from actually exiting.
So their goal was boom, boom.
He gets in the middle of it, detonates, second one finishes the job.
But because we got there so quick, and because I got to throw him so quick, the first one detonated, and the second was still in the building.
And so the first bomb caused him to detonate, probably shocked him.
And so he detonated inside the building.
But I thought, for a long time, that the second bomber was the bomber that killed Commander Sergeant Griffin, Major Graham, Major Kennedy, and Regev del Fatal.
It wasn't until I actually read the report, maybe a year later, actually it was after Sergeant Mahoney received a Silver Star, my teammate, that I realized, hold on, you're telling me that the guy that blew up on my feet...
Is the one that killed my friends?
30 feet away?
And then that really threw me for a twist.
Because you start replaying the scenario over and over again.
You start thinking, how?
Like, how?
Why am I here?
How did I live?
And then one day you start to realize, stop asking those questions.
One day you'll figure it out.
You'll meet the maker, and you'll get your answers, hopefully.
In the meantime, do something about it.
Be a better person.
Serve your community.
Honor those guys that didn't come home.
Do your job as a father.
Do your job as a husband.
And that mindset sort of gets you back on track, if that makes sense.
It makes a ton of sense.
Was there a moment when you realized that this could be the end and you still chose to act?
I guess that's what I'm curious about.
I get this question all the time.
Weren't you scared?
How do you react this way?
Don't you know you're going to die?
You don't think that way.
And not in combat.
I call it the power of love.
You love your brothers and sisters so much that you're willing to do the impossible for them.
And you're willing to die day in, day out, night in, night out for them.
That this whole concept of dying, even though it is always in the back of your head, it is shelved.
Because the concept of protecting them becomes The priority.
So for me, I didn't go into this situation doing a calculation of like, okay, here we go.
Eh, probably going to die right now.
I went in with, he's going to kill my friends.
And my job is to protect them.
Literally my job that tour was to protect Command Sergeant Richard Griffin and at the time Colonel Mingus.
And so if I died and they lived, then that's my job.
Yeah, it's not a great way of putting it.
But that was a reality.
And so, I'm already designed that way.
And as a warrior, you then have to trust your instincts, your training, and then your love of brotherhood and sisterhood.
And then you just allow it to just develop.
And so, I'm blessed that I've been in combat before.
I'm blessed that I was serving alongside some fine people.
I'm also blessed that I had really good training.
And that allowed me to make a decision.
And then the last piece is the piece that we all wonder.
Who am I?
In that moment.
I don't know.
If you would have asked me, would you bum rush a suicide bomber before that, I'd probably say, I don't know about that one.
That sounds a little stupid.
When a situation happened and you have to do your job, I just did my job.
And Mahoney followed me right into it.
It just tells me I'm not the only one.
And I tell people, you guys don't understand.
When you're into moments in combat, I've seen so many heroic acts.
We're all ordinary individuals.
But we become something special to each other in those moments because you'll see people running to burning buildings or vehicles, middle of an open ground to go pick up their friends and put them on their shoulders and run them while being hit.
The story of Sal Junta, when he was in a Korengal, seeing his buddy dragged, running across enemy line, taking out the enemy, picking up his buddy, putting him on his shoulders and running back through enemy lines.
Things like that that you think, wow!
How would you ever do this?
That's simple to us.
It's our job.
And we love each other enough that if we're going to die trying, that's our duty.
And I think that's what makes the professionals so different and special.
The only way I can think of that comes as close to it, and still different, is firefighters.
I have so much respect.
The idea of just running into a burning building day in, day out, night in, night out, to go save complete strangers or your friends.
It's unbelievable.
You know, as I listen to you speak about this, I can't help but wonder if, at least at some maybe lesser level, you're seeing or hoping the same exists in America writ large among Americans, despite this increased polarization that we absolutely see, and in some cases is being fueled by nefarious parties.
I believe that if we spend a little bit more time willing to actually have our conversation with people who defer in ideas from us, that we will go a lot further than we possibly could ever imagine in terms of bridging that gap.
I ask questions to my family and my friends.
I didn't live in the 60s and 70s.
I've watched a lot of reports.
I've seen movies.
You read books.
You learn about it in history.
It sounds like those days were pretty tough, too.
We had a very unpopular war.
We had a hippie movement.
We had a lot of racism in this country.
We had an impeachment and a president.
We had the Cold War.
We had a lot of issues, a lot of changes in our society.
We're technologically growing.
I wonder, and I ask these questions, I said, did you guys think it was the end of the world that moment?
The way we think about it today.
So I look at those moments and I look at the concept of this nation.
And one of the beauties to me is the idea of freedom of speech.
Because freedom of speech doesn't mean that we're all going to have great conversations with each other and listen to each other.
Freedom of speech means that we're going to very much disagree.
And at times it's going to be very notorious.
Nefarious as well.
And that's going to create this concept or this idea specifically to our enemies.
That we don't like each other very much.
That we are a country that is on the brink of civil war.
No.
We are a country that is utilizing our God-given rights and our constitutional rights to disagree.
Sometimes we take it too far.
We are taking it too far right now.
100%.
But to me, that's human nature.
It's a cycle.
I hope that we find a way over the next couple years to say, okay, this is a little bit too much.
I really want to better understand why you're thinking that way.
And maybe we find a little bit of common ground.
So this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
I'm an optimist, right?
I'm not looking to go pick fights with anybody around the world.
I'm looking to...
You know, bridge gaps and heal.
That's what I want.
I've done enough fighting.
Too much in my life.
And so, but, you know, in this country right now, I'm excited to be a part of this, what I see as bridging that gap.
And I want to make a commitment for as long as it takes to be that individual that's in the middle, trying to listen to everybody and bring everybody together.
Because that, to me, is too important.
There's no way you're going to sell me on picking one side because it doesn't make sense.
And I think we're going to be just fine.
This is not the end, folks.
Sometimes it's good to take a step back and appreciate what we have to remind ourselves of how hard it is, how hard we've worked to be where we are and who we are, and that we've got to continue earning every day.
It's not free.
Well, Florent Groberg, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Florent Groberg and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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