Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Kelsey Sharon, Canadian Forces veteran, artillery
00:00:05 gunner who served in Afghanistan at 18 years old and came home with severe PTSD.
00:00:11 She went on to found Brass in Unity which creates unique jewellery, large part of the
00:00:16 proceeds from which go to help rehabilitate the lives, limbs and mental health of veterans
00:00:23 and first responders.
00:00:25 She has a big personality, big heart and an intense passion for life.
00:00:30 So when our paths happened to cross, I knew we needed to talk.
00:00:35 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, to support it please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:00:40 And now here’s my conversation with Kelsey Sharon.
00:00:45 You mentioned that studying history had a big impact on you and that your grandfather
00:00:49 was a World War II vet.
00:00:52 So people that have gone through World War II, in my family too, they don’t seem to talk
00:00:55 about it much.
00:00:56 Like the worse the tragedy, the less they talk about it.
00:01:00 I mean it’s understandable, I can respect that, but I don’t think people fully understood
00:01:06 the value in human stories over time and sharing that, that certain civilizations don’t have
00:01:13 written language.
00:01:15 The value in that being passed down is extraordinary, but we didn’t really have that with the World
00:01:21 War II vets it seems like.
00:01:23 Well, they kind of want to protect you from the pain.
00:01:27 My grandmother went through Holland and Moore, which is the Ukrainian starvation of millions
00:01:32 of people, and then obviously went through World War II with the Nazi occupation.
00:01:39 And same on the grandfather’s side who, on my dad’s side, grandfather fought in World
00:01:46 War II.
00:01:47 So they seem to not want to talk about those experiences to protect you from the suffering,
00:01:53 to protect you from the evil that they’ve experienced, which is sad because the lessons
00:01:59 from that history are not then propagated through you.
00:02:02 And also there’s something about the strength you carry with you knowing that that’s in
00:02:07 your blood.
00:02:08 Those great heroes are in your blood and that’s suffering, overcoming that suffering is in
00:02:11 your blood.
00:02:12 I would argue that’s exactly correct.
00:02:15 If you have someone you know that comes from your lineage that has done something super
00:02:20 gnarly, that’s just been a badass and in so many different ways, you want to know about
00:02:26 that person.
00:02:27 You have that person’s blood in you.
00:02:28 That’s important to acknowledge and when that isn’t shared, I feel like it’s just a detriment
00:02:32 to that individual.
00:02:33 What do you make of World War II?
00:02:36 In terms of history, do you think about those kinds of wars where two times more civilians
00:02:43 died than the number of military personnel?
00:02:47 So most of the war is basically just the death of civilians and the invasion of homes, the
00:02:54 burning of homes, the bombing of homes, all of that.
00:02:57 World War II for me, I find that was the first experience where I became just obsessed with
00:03:06 history.
00:03:08 World War II really did it for me.
00:03:10 I’m not sure if it’s because of the dramatization of film and TV and the way that our generation
00:03:17 has looked at it, but for me, it was more than that.
00:03:21 I felt a deep connection to it and I still can’t figure out why, like a pull almost.
00:03:28 People joke around about those past lives and those things or those connections and
00:03:32 there’s something deeper within me that feels a pull towards that and I’m not quite sure
00:03:38 if it’s because I had family that escaped Hungary once the Soviets came in, so thanks
00:03:44 for that, or if it was because my grandfather served in it or for whatever reason, I have
00:03:51 this pull to it.
00:03:52 And so when you think about the mass casualty of the civilian population, that’s very difficult
00:03:59 for me to wrap my brain around after being in a war and seeing when you have a small
00:04:05 subset of civilians die, how much of an impact that has on that community right there in
00:04:10 just a tiny area.
00:04:12 So to try to wrap my brain around what happened in Europe and all across and all of that,
00:04:17 I really struggle with that because I don’t know that I can comprehend what that would
00:04:22 truly mean to somebody if I didn’t experience it or see it for what it is.
00:04:28 Does that make sense?
00:04:29 Yeah.
00:04:30 So first of all, you’re right, a lot of people are drawn to World War II for different reasons.
00:04:34 The one is Hitler and Stalin trying to understand how it’s possible to have that scale of evil
00:04:43 in very different flavors of evil.
00:04:46 It’s almost fascinating that human nature can allow for that.
00:04:49 And then also it’s fascinating that so many people can follow leaders like that with a
00:04:54 pride and with a love of country.
00:04:57 And that’s like, it’s almost like this weird experiment, it’s like, wow, I wonder if I’m
00:05:03 made from the same cloth as those people.
00:05:07 Like would I be a good German if I lived in Germany and was, you know, during the time
00:05:14 of Hitler?
00:05:15 Would I believe that Germany has been done wrong, I’m Jewish by the way, which makes
00:05:21 me a little bit more comfortable talking about this, is would I believe in the dream sold
00:05:28 by a charismatic dictator who says that wrongs have been done and we need to correct those
00:05:34 wrongs?
00:05:35 That to me, this is the compelling thing that draws me to World War II, the human nature
00:05:40 question.
00:05:41 I would agree with you on that.
00:05:42 I think there’s a way to look at people like that.
00:05:45 And at that time there was no real, well, there wasn’t a full understanding of the psyche
00:05:50 the way that we’re starting to, I mean, we still don’t understand any of it, but it seems
00:05:56 like the time gap back then, there was no real understanding of sociopaths and narcissists
00:06:03 and psychopaths and really what those traits were.
00:06:07 And I feel like people will follow blindly if they’re given a good enough reason.
00:06:12 Well, if you have an individual who is ranting and screaming at the top of his lungs in the
00:06:18 middle of these town squares and he’s getting this attention, it’s human nature to want
00:06:23 to understand and be a part of a group mentality.
00:06:27 It’s human nature to want to fit in.
00:06:29 And so I don’t know if it’s more of people were at the beginning were just, this is the
00:06:35 cool thing to do.
00:06:36 Or if it was, they were genuinely terrified.
00:06:40 Or if there was an aspect that was like, this guy is saying something that resonates with
00:06:44 me.
00:06:45 There could be a lot of different things.
00:06:47 I think it’s unfortunate that we didn’t get to, or no one got to really examine this individual’s
00:06:54 brain and this person and why they thought the way they thought.
00:06:58 Because that’s always been the biggest thing for me is I’m really curious about why people
00:07:02 do what they do, like deeply, deeply curious about it.
00:07:07 I’m not sure who’s more interesting, the people that follow Hitler or Hitler himself.
00:07:12 So I mean, the question that’s coupled with that is, would history roll out in similar
00:07:17 ways even if there wasn’t a Hitler?
00:07:20 It’s the people that created Hitler or did Hitler create the events of World War II?
00:07:26 I think the people would be more interesting in my opinion.
00:07:29 That seems to be the, that the charismatic leaders are all out there.
00:07:34 The failed artists in the case of Hitler, they’re all out there and it’s just when there’s
00:07:38 this environment of anger and fear, charismatic leaders can take over and it doesn’t matter
00:07:46 if they’re evil or good.
00:07:48 It’s like a roll of the dice in terms of history, how evil, how truly insane they are.
00:07:55 I think Stalin was much more cold in calculating.
00:08:00 He wasn’t as insane as Hitler.
00:08:02 Hitler was legitimately insane, like especially later on in the war where he would do irrational
00:08:08 actions I would say.
00:08:10 But that’s like a weird roll of the dice.
00:08:13 You could have gotten a totally different leader.
00:08:17 Wanting to take over the entirety of Europe and then invading Russia, that’s like insanity.
00:08:23 Yeah, just even, just the first part of that wanting to take over Europe, if you really
00:08:28 think about the scale, if you really sit down and go, this one individual was like, I want
00:08:34 all of this.
00:08:35 If you really sat down and you were to sit down and put him in his traits that we know
00:08:39 of into any sort of document nowadays that deems somebody a psychopath or a narcissist,
00:08:47 this guy would set it on fire.
00:08:50 He himself was so, I think so damaged and he reminds me a lot of people now who struggle
00:08:59 to find their way.
00:09:00 He reminds me a lot of angry individuals who are told no, either by women or by business
00:09:06 or by whatever the sector they’re in.
00:09:10 He reminds me very much of that like, what’s the word I’m looking for?
00:09:15 Just that individual who’s just like, the world is shit and the world owes me everything.
00:09:20 It’s that mentality.
00:09:22 He really came from that it seems like.
00:09:25 And when you foster that too long, you get that.
00:09:28 There’s a book called, what is it, Man From Underground by Dostoevsky, I might be misnaming
00:09:34 the book, but it’s about the bitterness of a man.
00:09:38 It breeds within his mind and it just grows, that bitterness.
00:09:42 I mean, we all have that sort of resenting of the world when you’re younger, when you
00:09:48 have a choice.
00:09:50 When you fail, do you blame the world or do you hold, it’s the Jaco thing, do you carry
00:09:56 the responsibility of that and become a better man or woman because of that?
00:10:02 That’s the decision.
00:10:03 And in some sense, I mean, unfortunately, see that’s because he took responsibility
00:10:09 and leadership.
00:10:10 I know you can’t say he wasn’t a leader.
00:10:15 So it’s not that he’s a failure.
00:10:17 He’s not a failure, but you can’t say he’s powerless, did not take action.
00:10:23 I think he’s just basically a embodiment of the anger and the fear of people at the time.
00:10:29 But the insanity of, obviously, many of my relatives, not just murdering them, but putting
00:10:35 them in camps and torturing them, but many of those people, Jewish people, were also
00:10:40 some of the best scientists.
00:10:42 The insanity of murdering some of the best Germans, it makes no sense.
00:10:49 So that’s why it’s fascinating to kind of look back at that time in history and think,
00:10:55 are these the same humans?
00:10:57 And also, are there echoes of that now?
00:11:02 And is that going to happen again?
00:11:04 Is there going to be a World War III in some other kind of way?
00:11:08 Is there going to be some mass scale injustice in some other kind of way, which we’re not
00:11:13 yet, because of our blindness and maybe not learning the lessons of history, will allow
00:11:21 it to happen again?
00:11:23 And then obviously, it’s a very common thing to whatever political leader you don’t like,
00:11:28 to call them Hitler.
00:11:29 Of course.
00:11:30 Which is, that to me, I got to tell you, when somebody calls somebody Hitler, the weight
00:11:36 behind that has been completely lost in this generation.
00:11:40 This generation does not understand what that truly means to call someone Hitler or a Nazi.
00:11:47 Or Stalin.
00:11:48 To be honest, the starvation, I’ve just been talking to a lot of folks recently, especially
00:11:54 like North Korea, with Wyoming Park, starvation.
00:11:58 And I remember from my grandmother, it wasn’t, time and time again, not having food to eat
00:12:06 is the thing that people say is the worst, everything.
00:12:10 It’s way worse than murder, not having food, and the places that takes your mind and the
00:12:16 actions that forces you to do, that’s terrifying.
00:12:19 And all of that seems very distant in our history.
00:12:22 Yeah, I love her.
00:12:23 I watched that interview with her.
00:12:26 She is, I want to talk to that woman so bad, because when she was on Joe and she sat there
00:12:29 and said, Joe’s like, do you, have you done any therapy?
00:12:33 And she laughed.
00:12:34 I was like, oh, that’s my girl.
00:12:36 It’s such a fascinating, I mean, I would love for you to kind of talk to her and explore
00:12:39 her mind, because we kind of explored her story and that’s, there’s power and importance
00:12:46 to her story, but it’s so difficult to understand, like, how does she become healthier and better?
00:12:56 Even more so than she’s already, she’s, she’s recovered quite a bit, you know, she’s found
00:13:01 herself quite a bit, but I wonder, is she haunted?
00:13:05 You’re saying questions I want to ask.
00:13:07 Like, that’s what I mean, because after being in a war, there are certain things, there
00:13:13 are certain atrocities that you see that, it doesn’t matter the therapy that you do.
00:13:18 And I don’t care what all the special ops guys say, like, I know plenty of them that
00:13:21 have a light switch and they turn it off and they can function, but I also know them when
00:13:24 they’ve been out for 10 years.
00:13:26 There’s things that haunt people differently, but there’s no way, there’s not something
00:13:31 going on there deeply.
00:13:33 Yeah, but there’s also extra levels of complexity in her case because, I mean, this is what,
00:13:43 just looking at history about family, is she spent much of her early life loving the dictator,
00:13:52 right?
00:13:53 Yeah.
00:13:54 We like the water or something.
00:13:55 Yeah.
00:13:56 We like water or we like this because there is no, like, individual, like, when they said
00:13:59 there was no love or anything.
00:14:01 But there is a love for the…
00:14:03 Just that individual.
00:14:04 For that individual.
00:14:05 And so, I mean, it’s like the ultimate abusive relationship.
00:14:09 Oh, yeah.
00:14:12 But it’s still love, like you don’t know the alternative.
00:14:15 So it’s not even, it’s complicated because, like, I wonder if she truly explored it what
00:14:22 you would find because the trauma, much of her trauma, I think comes from when she was
00:14:28 escaping North Korea, treatment by China.
00:14:34 It’s like the…
00:14:35 And her mom and what she had to witness within that and being helpless with that on her own.
00:14:39 So it’s like evil men essentially abusing her, trading her, you know, and doing so nonchalantly,
00:14:45 like it’s part of just the way of life that I wonder if she sees kind of, yeah, it’s so
00:14:52 complicated because childhood…
00:14:54 It would be normal to her because she didn’t know any different.
00:14:57 Exactly.
00:14:58 Like there’s…
00:14:59 Like I grew up poor, but I never sensed that.
00:15:04 Because your parents didn’t make you.
00:15:05 Well, and everyone else around was too.
00:15:08 Right.
00:15:09 And so you don’t notice it.
00:15:10 I mean, it’s a cultural thing.
00:15:11 So the way you grow up, you only start to notice it when you compare yourself to others,
00:15:16 when you learn of the alternative.
00:15:18 That’s the dark reality when you’re abused.
00:15:20 You truly begin to suffer in some kind of way when you understand that you were being
00:15:30 abused.
00:15:32 That’s a dark kind of thought that I wonder if you live your whole life just in that abuse,
00:15:38 if you don’t know better, that that’s a safer…
00:15:41 That’s like, what’s a better life, suffering and then learning that you were suffering
00:15:48 or just suffering until your last days.
00:15:51 There’s two ways to look at this.
00:15:52 I’d argue on one side that suffering and suffering until you die, you know no different.
00:15:58 So you can’t have hope.
00:16:00 You can’t have this idea that there’s better.
00:16:03 And sometimes that’s…
00:16:05 Keep that in its box.
00:16:06 But then if you have kind of what you have with Park where she knows now that there’s
00:16:11 different, she knows that there’s better, then you run into those.
00:16:15 What is the damage that has been done?
00:16:17 What is going to be passed on as intergenerational trauma?
00:16:19 I know she’s a mom.
00:16:21 So it’s like, now you got to look long term a little bit because now she’s an influence
00:16:25 on a child.
00:16:26 And there’s a positive to looking at both, I would say.
00:16:32 And I know that sounds horrible for the living in trauma your whole life and just not knowing
00:16:36 any better.
00:16:37 But there’s…
00:16:38 I don’t know if that saves the brain and the body and just that overall or if it actually
00:16:47 would be better because there’s no way to really find that out.
00:16:50 I don’t think.
00:16:51 Yeah, I think.
00:16:52 But the reality is when you give people hope and you make them realize that they’re suffering,
00:16:57 you’re putting a burden on them.
00:16:58 That’s the first step on a long journey.
00:17:00 And so, and obviously now that she knows that the suffering she wants to make people in
00:17:05 North Korea currently suffer less.
00:17:08 And that’s an admirable goal.
00:17:10 It’s what we do to each other is try to like, when you see suffering in the world, you try
00:17:16 to make it better and unmask that’s probably in a long arc of history going to make for
00:17:23 a better world.
00:17:25 I’m hopeful at that idea for North Korea.
00:17:28 I’m hopeful for that because you never want to leave individuals suffering when you know
00:17:35 that they’re actively suffering while you’re just living your day to day life in the Western
00:17:38 world just out grocery shopping and you see all this food and you know in the back of
00:17:42 your mind…
00:17:43 Like that interview fucked me up a little bit, I won’t lie.
00:17:45 And I had some of the girls in my office listen to it, they’re just bawling.
00:17:48 Because we’re all parents and there’s this idea that not being able to feed our children,
00:17:56 just the idea of that damages the psyche.
00:17:59 It brings up the pain in the chest, just the idea of it.
00:18:03 And so going to the grocery store for about a week after that, I just remember standing
00:18:07 there looking and just going, fuck are we doing?
00:18:11 But then there’s that snap reality that comes into play and goes, so how do we fix that?
00:18:17 You got to take on China, that’s never going to happen.
00:18:21 And the reason that’s not going to happen, it’s happening again.
00:18:24 So Akhani comes down through Afghanistan, Chinese are all through Afghanistan, Iran
00:18:29 makes the deal with China for the roadway to get the oil, well that’s done in the blink
00:18:34 of an eye without anyone knowing.
00:18:36 There’s no way.
00:18:37 There’s just so much at play with China, they control such a large aspect of our world,
00:18:44 unfortunately that to take and free North Korea, a drastic action would have to happen.
00:18:50 And then your people would come in, it would be a mess.
00:18:54 What do you mean your people?
00:18:55 What do you mean your people?
00:18:57 Your Russians.
00:18:58 Did you hear what she said about Russians?
00:19:00 Did you hear what she says?
00:19:01 Russians?
00:19:02 I love Russians.
00:19:03 You know what I didn’t love?
00:19:04 The Russian recruiting video that came out, that shit was terrifying.
00:19:07 Did you watch it?
00:19:08 No.
00:19:09 I told you about it and of course you didn’t watch it.
00:19:10 I didn’t watch it, I’m sorry.
00:19:12 The USA put out a recruiting video and then like a day or two later Russia put one out.
00:19:20 And the recruiting video in the States was an animation of a female soldier with two
00:19:27 moms and she was going to go change the world, right?
00:19:31 Russia came out with one.
00:19:35 It’s like, it’s the character from like Rocky essentially and they’re guys in the mud and
00:19:40 just in the rain just fucking doing pushups, just pushing it out.
00:19:43 They’re just like, they see their boot, they’re just like crushing things and I’m like, and
00:19:47 it’s all like, and the deep Russian voice, I’m like, oh my God.
00:19:51 Which one is better would you say?
00:19:53 Which bothered you more?
00:19:54 What do you mean by bother, specify.
00:19:58 So deception is a funny thing because when you’re young and you’re choosing to go to
00:20:02 the military or not, it’s not like you know, like none of us know what the best trajectory
00:20:07 for a life is.
00:20:08 For many people going to the military is a really, makes them incredible human beings.
00:20:13 Some of the best people in this world I know are soldiers.
00:20:16 So it’s, I’m not, I don’t mean like it’s somehow bad to go to the military.
00:20:20 I think it’s a great choice, but there is something, the honest truth is I just don’t
00:20:25 like marketing people.
00:20:28 And so this is essentially a marketing effort.
00:20:30 Yeah, it is a marketing effort.
00:20:31 So which one do you like as a marketing effort better?
00:20:34 Russia.
00:20:35 Oh, yeah, I do.
00:20:36 There you go.
00:20:37 I do.
00:20:38 Cause Canada doesn’t, you know what our recruiting videos are?
00:20:41 It’s like, I love it.
00:20:44 They’re the best.
00:20:45 Sorry, eh?
00:20:46 Yeah.
00:20:47 Oh, fuck.
00:20:48 Here we go.
00:20:49 It’s starting.
00:20:50 It started.
00:20:51 Awesome.
00:20:52 So Canada does these ones where it’s like, it’ll have a bunch of like soldiers doing
00:20:55 movements and then they’ll like snip it together really quick.
00:20:58 It’ll be like a Navy one and a guy jumping out of a plane and then it’ll be like an artillery
00:21:02 and then like an armored and it’d be like, join the Canadian forces today.
00:21:07 And like, that’s like their, their videos.
00:21:10 So it’s like very marketable, very palatable to Canadians who don’t really want war and
00:21:16 who don’t really acknowledge their military in the first place and do everything they
00:21:20 can to make sure that vets don’t get any support when they come home.
00:21:24 So they, I can see why that one is acceptable.
00:21:27 What Russia did was meant to be more of an intimidation tactic in my opinion.
00:21:33 I like that style better though.
00:21:35 I think we need harder, I think we need people to be harder.
00:21:38 I think it’s acceptable and okay to say that our soldiers need to have a harder mindset,
00:21:43 a stronger mindset, a better mentality and mental health support going into the service
00:21:48 and a harder body because I know when you go to the US, I’ve also encountered plenty
00:21:54 of soldiers that are 600 pounds.
00:21:57 What are you going to do?
00:21:59 So we should say that you, when you joined the military, you were in incredible shape
00:22:03 or not maybe incredible, but very good shape.
00:22:05 No, I was in incredible shape.
00:22:06 It was the best shape of my life.
00:22:07 Yeah.
00:22:08 Yeah.
00:22:09 So.
00:22:10 I’m okay with that.
00:22:11 It’s okay.
00:22:12 I, you know what?
00:22:13 I used to do sit ups.
00:22:14 Like no, I would do sit ups in the morning when I was little until I could see my six.
00:22:18 Like I always had a six pack because all I did was train.
00:22:21 But like if I couldn’t like see it, I would just sit there in morning cartoons and just
00:22:26 do sit ups.
00:22:27 And my mom and dad thought that was like normal acceptable behavior.
00:22:30 So if you had like Instagram back then, you’d be a David Goggins, you would be just like
00:22:33 screaming.
00:22:34 Without the cursing.
00:22:35 That cursing started once the military started.
00:22:37 Okay.
00:22:38 Got it.
00:22:39 So I mean, the people should know, is it probably already know that you also competed in Taekwondo,
00:22:43 like you were an athlete of all kinds.
00:22:45 They even saw rugby in there.
00:22:47 Yeah.
00:22:48 I was, I was, I was good at rugby.
00:22:50 I played that for seven, six years, I guess you could say total.
00:22:55 I think the worst injury I ever ended up having was I tore my right eyelid off.
00:23:00 We were doing an exhibition game.
00:23:02 I don’t do exhibition games well.
00:23:04 I don’t do like for fun well.
00:23:06 I don’t do like.
00:23:07 So you’re very competitive.
00:23:08 No, not me.
00:23:09 So you’re being funny.
00:23:10 Ah, there it is.
00:23:11 He gets it.
00:23:12 You see, he’s not, he’s not a robot.
00:23:15 What I was saying though to you was that we did an exhibition game and the team ahead
00:23:23 was winning.
00:23:24 The team we were playing was winning, which was annoying.
00:23:28 And so there was an opportunity to take out a girl that was going one end of the field
00:23:33 to the other and she just kept hitting tries left, right and center.
00:23:36 She was fast.
00:23:37 So I figured if I just aimed her up, like she’s a target and I just run full force at
00:23:42 her because she was really, she was a tall individual, but I just, if I do that, I’ll
00:23:47 take her out of the knees.
00:23:48 So I did that.
00:23:50 But that, what that resulted in was she put her tooth through her mouth guard and knocked
00:23:53 out and didn’t just, she just stayed there.
00:23:55 But when I stood up, I tore the right eyelid off and it was hanging from the inner corner.
00:24:00 Yeah.
00:24:01 My mom was there cause mom was my mom’s, my biggest fan and she’s supportive of everything
00:24:07 and she didn’t miss a game.
00:24:08 She didn’t miss an anything.
00:24:10 And um, I stood up and I kind of turned around and we already had a girl break her nose that
00:24:14 day.
00:24:15 So she was on the sideline with her nose sideways and just bloody.
00:24:19 My mom was like, I’ll take her to the emergency after once the game’s over.
00:24:22 And so I turned around and looked at her and she just, she almost vomited on the spot and
00:24:26 I was like, what’s wrong?
00:24:27 She’s like, don’t move your eyelids off.
00:24:29 I’m like, but I can see like I was trying to blink, but like it was just down so I could
00:24:34 just constantly see.
00:24:36 She’s like, we’re just, we’re just going to go to the emergency.
00:24:37 We’re just going to go there now.
00:24:39 Was there blood?
00:24:40 Yeah.
00:24:41 There’s lots of it, but I couldn’t really tell.
00:24:43 Okay.
00:24:44 Were you okay with blood at that point?
00:24:46 Yeah.
00:24:47 Yeah.
00:24:48 I mean, I guess you did taekwondo and all that.
00:24:49 Yeah.
00:24:50 I didn’t get knocked out very often.
00:24:51 Like when I was younger in taekwondo, I was really good.
00:24:53 I only lost a handful of times.
00:24:56 So when I did lose, that was bad.
00:24:59 But I never had like a broken nose or a lot of blood on my face, like nothing like that
00:25:04 really.
00:25:05 So nothing freaked me out too much.
00:25:07 Was there aggression there or just purely competition over skill?
00:25:12 A mix of both.
00:25:14 I was, this was right after, not too long after my coach went to prison for statutory
00:25:19 rape and that was like how you talk about Park talking about how that was like she knew
00:25:27 love because of that person.
00:25:31 That person was like a God to me.
00:25:33 And so when that happened, I was just an angry individual from that point on.
00:25:36 So there was competition and aggression mixed in there.
00:25:38 Oh, like it was betrayal that there’s just somebody that is, was a symbol of love for
00:25:44 you, could also be a very bad person.
00:25:46 I used to eat, sleep, and breathe whatever that man said from four years old on.
00:25:52 I lived with my coaches at a point so I could train that much.
00:25:56 I helped look after their daughter.
00:25:58 I was at the club 24 seven.
00:26:00 It just the idea that somebody could do something like that, yeah, that really messed me up.
00:26:05 Where were you on 9 11?
00:26:10 I was 11 and I was in my parents basement.
00:26:15 In where?
00:26:16 Ontario.
00:26:17 Ontario, Canada.
00:26:18 What did you think of 9 11 at that age from Canada that have an impact on you in terms
00:26:26 of changing the level of evil you thought is there in the world today?
00:26:35 Not initially.
00:26:36 I remember it really vividly.
00:26:38 I have a decent memory for certain things.
00:26:41 It seems like stuff like that I stick with really well.
00:26:44 I remember watching it.
00:26:45 I was sitting on the couch and my mom called my dad because my parents are truck drivers.
00:26:51 My dad was on the road, if I’m not mistaken, and he would go in and out of cities all the
00:26:56 time.
00:26:57 I think he was on the East Coast.
00:26:58 My mom was a little panicky.
00:27:00 She tried to get a hold of him.
00:27:01 I think at the time it was beepers and yeah, so he would get a beep, he would go to a payphone
00:27:07 and call us.
00:27:08 He was fine.
00:27:10 I remember my mom being really upset and I couldn’t quite grasp why she was so upset.
00:27:16 I knew something really bad had happened.
00:27:18 It’s when I then saw the second plane go into the tower and I remember her just like the
00:27:24 stereotypical like hand over her mouth and she just felt sick and she just was so confused
00:27:29 and I knew it was bad, but I didn’t fully grasp it.
00:27:33 We went to school that day and they had talked about it briefly.
00:27:36 You could hear the teachers kind of reminiscing about it.
00:27:39 There was a point that week that all of a sudden all of the children who were from a
00:27:47 Middle Eastern family were not at school.
00:27:50 I just remember them saying like a lot of people aren’t coming to school, but it was
00:27:55 in particular.
00:27:56 I think parents were afraid once it got out that it was of a certain group.
00:28:02 They were afraid for their own kids and fair enough, I mean, you never know.
00:28:06 You don’t know and I knew it impacted me enough that I did write.
00:28:11 I remember the school was doing a memorial for it and I remember they asked, I wrote
00:28:16 a poem and a reporter was there and I read it on air.
00:28:21 I remember it was a very short one, but I remember I wanted to do something, but I didn’t
00:28:28 know why or for what reason.
00:28:30 I knew I wanted to do something to honor it, but I couldn’t grasp why.
00:28:34 You eventually went to Afghanistan.
00:28:38 Did that begin to plant the seed of thinking about conflict in the world?
00:28:43 It’s a good question.
00:28:45 I never thought about it that in depth.
00:28:47 I mean, I’ve done 12 years of therapy.
00:28:48 You think that would have come up, Dr. Passi, but apparently not.
00:28:52 We’ll work on it though.
00:28:53 I mean, when did the idea of war start entering your mind?
00:28:58 Late high school, I think it was for me.
00:29:02 I finished high school at 17.
00:29:04 I moved away and went to college, I went to Algonquin College because I wasn’t smart enough
00:29:08 to get into Ottawa U. I was like, well, Algonquin, cheers.
00:29:13 I just wanted to play sports and frankly, I wanted away from my small town that I was
00:29:17 living in.
00:29:18 I went through a bad high school breakup as a kid and you know that where you think that’s
00:29:22 like the love of your life and you just can’t bear to be anywhere near anybody.
00:29:27 I moved away as fast as I possibly could.
00:29:31 I didn’t grasp it still at that point.
00:29:36 Love and heartbreak.
00:29:38 Okay.
00:29:40 Why did you become a soldier?
00:29:42 Why did you want to become a soldier?
00:29:45 My parents told me from an early age, they always figured I would either be a cop.
00:29:48 I would do, they didn’t think military, but they thought it would be like a type A personality,
00:29:54 possibly carry a gun situation and I’d never hunted before.
00:29:59 We never had guns in our house.
00:30:00 I was never exposed to weapons of any kind.
00:30:03 If anything, it was the opposite.
00:30:07 All the hunters on the property, like all the deer would come to our property and all
00:30:10 the hunters would be, no, I’m not, my mom would put salt licks out so that they wouldn’t
00:30:14 get killed.
00:30:15 Your property was the safe space for the deer.
00:30:16 Yeah.
00:30:17 It was 17 acres of forest and they just, we had two turkeys that used to walk up and down
00:30:22 the driveway every day.
00:30:23 We had bears in there and nobody bothered them.
00:30:26 And so there was no aspect of like, I want to go kill shit, that was not like a thing.
00:30:31 I had no idea I wanted to take anybody off the face of the earth or any thing.
00:30:35 I went to school and because I’m a history person, my parents has always made it really
00:30:43 important that Remembrance Day is the thing in our life.
00:30:46 So that’s Veterans Day for you.
00:30:47 So it’s November 11th and it’s, you go, you honor.
00:30:51 I don’t care if you don’t want to go, I don’t care if it’s raining, you go.
00:30:55 And so I went to the Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa that year, which was, it’s our capital,
00:31:01 which is, yeah, it’s our capital and it’s really small.
00:31:04 And so I went, but I took the bus and I was on the bus back to Algonquin.
00:31:10 And I met a lady who was like a World War II vet, really old lady, she had an Air Force
00:31:16 uniform on and just like this row of medals.
00:31:19 And I mean, I think you can tell by our limited to extreme interactions we’ve had over the
00:31:25 short period of time, I’m curious and I’ll just ask you.
00:31:29 And so I just got up and talked to her and just started talking to her.
00:31:32 And she didn’t say like, I don’t remember exactly her words, but she served, she was
00:31:37 one of the first females to fly and all of these kinds of things that stuck in my head.
00:31:44 And we just kind of kept talking and I missed my stop.
00:31:47 And then I finished talking to her and I got back on the bus and went back to the college
00:31:51 and walked into my small apartment where I had two roommates, these two guys I went to
00:31:58 high school with, one of them I went to high school with, one was from out of town.
00:32:01 And I just didn’t like what I was, I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do.
00:32:08 And I didn’t know what I wanted to do truthfully.
00:32:11 Something just said, why don’t you join the army?
00:32:14 Like in myself, my self talk was like, let’s just join the military, let’s do it.
00:32:19 Are you in general somebody that just follows the gut, like when your heart tells you something,
00:32:24 you go with it?
00:32:25 For the most part, because I figured out, at least now I figured out what parts I could,
00:32:31 like what feeling I can trust and which one I can’t.
00:32:33 Which one’s anxiety versus which one’s my actual intuition talking.
00:32:37 So why did you sign up to be an artillery gunner?
00:32:39 Because they wouldn’t let me be infantry.
00:32:42 I mean, why would you want to be infantry?
00:32:48 I mean, you’re naming a lot of dangerous activities.
00:32:52 Yeah, but that wasn’t a thought in my mind at the time.
00:32:56 My idea was if I was going to do this and I was going to put myself through the bullshit
00:32:59 and the training and all of the hell and the pushups and the screaming dad, I wanted to
00:33:04 do something that I know was actually going to be affecting something.
00:33:07 And what I knew was making change or affecting or on the front lines was infantry, artillery
00:33:11 or armored.
00:33:12 So I was like, one of those.
00:33:14 Can you explain the difference, infantry, artillery and armored?
00:33:16 Do you want like the layman’s term or do you want me to actually explain, explain?
00:33:20 Well, listening to your conversation with Jaco, especially, I love how you get into
00:33:24 details.
00:33:25 Okay, so let’s detail this then.
00:33:26 Okay.
00:33:27 So infantry is your frontline door kicking, you know, blasting the door open, running
00:33:34 and get the fuck on the ground, just that, that, that, that, that.
00:33:36 They’re the guys that, you know, double tap you in the face and they show up in the middle
00:33:39 of the night and put a barrel in your head.
00:33:41 Like those are the guys that are sleeping in the trenches, that are eating MREs, who
00:33:46 are being shot at, who are being blown up, who are doing the dirty work and not sleeping
00:33:51 and carrying the a hundred pound pack and, and are side by side with your buddies in
00:33:55 the trenches.
00:33:56 I wanted that.
00:33:57 That.
00:33:58 They said it was too small for that.
00:34:01 So then…
00:34:02 You were, sorry to interrupt, you were too small under a hundred pounds?
00:34:05 At the time I was about 103 and I’m, I’m five foot, like on a, if you roll my back out,
00:34:10 like I really try, I’m five foot.
00:34:14 At the time though, I think my, my license said 411, so.
00:34:19 So you were too small for infantry.
00:34:23 Yeah.
00:34:24 They just, like, there was no mandate at which they said you can’t be, but they said, you
00:34:28 know, we don’t want to put you through training that you’re going to fail out of and then
00:34:31 have to recourse you and then find a new job for you.
00:34:33 And they want to try to, this is what you’re going in for.
00:34:36 They want to have you follow through that path.
00:34:39 So then there was armored, which are your tanks.
00:34:42 So that’s your movie like Fury where your tank battles and, which we don’t really do
00:34:48 anymore, but you’re rolling around in tanks, you’ve got guys in the back or you’re a driver,
00:34:51 you’re a turret gunner, which I would have enjoyed, but the idea of being in a closed
00:34:57 metal box, something about it made me panic.
00:35:00 So I was like, maybe not for me.
00:35:03 There’s of course power to that kind of a big gun.
00:35:06 Well, that’s why I went for the bigger one.
00:35:08 Okay.
00:35:09 By the way, think of Russia leads the world in number of tanks.
00:35:12 We’re still, it’s very like, what is it, alpha demonstration of like, look, we have largest
00:35:19 number of tanks.
00:35:20 You know what takes tanks out though?
00:35:22 What?
00:35:23 Some gasoline, some old batteries and a wire.
00:35:25 Yeah, but tanks still look badass.
00:35:27 They look great, but they don’t last.
00:35:29 But so much of the military, like we said with the recruiting videos, it’s a display
00:35:33 of power versus the actual implementation of power.
00:35:37 Fair.
00:35:38 Okay.
00:35:39 Artillery.
00:35:40 So I’m doing my best here.
00:35:41 I don’t know what double tap means, which you said earlier, it means two shots to the
00:35:45 face.
00:35:46 Why two?
00:35:47 To be sure.
00:35:48 Okay.
00:35:49 All right.
00:35:50 You guys, taxpayers pay for the ammo.
00:35:51 It’s fine.
00:35:52 So, but you don’t want to do three because that’s wasting the ammo.
00:35:54 Well, that’s now that’s a waste.
00:35:55 Okay.
00:35:56 Double tap to the face.
00:35:57 There’s so much awesome terminology here or gruesome terminology, depending on your
00:36:01 perspective.
00:36:02 Okay.
00:36:03 So artillery.
00:36:04 Yeah.
00:36:05 So that’s the hand of God.
00:36:06 Sorry.
00:36:07 No, that’s intensely a romanticized version, but okay, artillery, the hand of God.
00:36:16 So it will reach out and touch you from wherever we want.
00:36:19 It’s like F18 pilots or bombers.
00:36:24 You won’t know they’re there until they’re there.
00:36:28 And so for artillery, I really honestly didn’t think artillery would be a fit for me.
00:36:33 I didn’t know much about it.
00:36:35 They were just like, these are what you can pick from.
00:36:38 And I was like, I’ll go here.
00:36:40 So in World War II, they used much closer artillery.
00:36:43 So we’re called the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery because the Queen made us Royal Canadian Artillery.
00:36:50 And we shoot these rounds.
00:36:52 When you’re in training, you shoot smaller, smaller ammunition.
00:36:55 They’re about 40 pounds.
00:36:56 They go, I’m going to get this wrong, 20 K, 20 kilometers.
00:37:00 So whatever that is in your mile things.
00:37:04 And they have a casing on them and they’re much easier.
00:37:08 They’re easier to handle.
00:37:10 The guns are smaller.
00:37:11 You need less people for them.
00:37:12 They’re basically what you train on nowadays.
00:37:14 It’s not what we use overseas.
00:37:16 What we use overseas, now those things are beautiful.
00:37:19 Those are just a sheer work of the engineering behind them just makes my heart skip a beat.
00:37:25 Yeah, the engineering on modern guns is amazing.
00:37:27 So are we talking about machine guns here?
00:37:29 So fully automatic?
00:37:30 No, you’re talking about an artillery gun.
00:37:31 So what it is, it’s a 155 millimeter howitzer that shoots up to up to 40 kilometers accurately,
00:37:38 45 unrecorded and it shoots a hundred pound round.
00:37:44 Oh, okay.
00:37:47 So that, but there is still precision.
00:37:50 Accurate as hell.
00:37:51 Accurate.
00:37:52 Okay.
00:37:53 Accurate if the people behind it that are shooting it and aiming it are accurate.
00:37:56 Okay.
00:37:58 So how, at which stage of the warfare do they come in?
00:38:01 Are they saving you?
00:38:03 Like say a bunch of people get raided, a bunch of the sole infantry get raided and then the
00:38:08 artillery saves them or are they the first line of attack or what are they, where does
00:38:13 the artillery go?
00:38:14 Like the hand of God presumes they’re helping.
00:38:17 Yeah.
00:38:18 Yeah.
00:38:19 That’s, well, that’s it.
00:38:20 So depending on the operation or whomever is running it or how they want it done, sometimes
00:38:25 if they just know there’s targets, they’ll use us, you know, high value targets.
00:38:29 So we have this round, it’s called the Excalibur round.
00:38:32 It costs about half a million dollars per round.
00:38:34 It comes in a special tube that is like sealed and locked and you have to get permission
00:38:39 from Ottawa to shoot it and it’s only used for VIP targets.
00:38:43 So like we have VIP for everyone and it will, it’s GPS guided, it’s rocket propelled and
00:38:50 when you fire it, it will, if this is a wall and somebody’s standing on this side of it,
00:38:57 we’ll hit you right there.
00:38:58 We won’t touch that wall, it will hit you pinpoint.
00:39:01 It’ll go right through whatever concrete, whatever and it will destroy.
00:39:06 So it’s basically the same thing as being a sniper, but with a much more damaging weapon.
00:39:12 We don’t use that round often.
00:39:13 I think it’s only been used a handful of times max in Afghanistan that I’m aware of.
00:39:18 Again, I haven’t, I wasn’t there from 2009 until 21, but I, I know people that still
00:39:24 deployed in that, in those units and I don’t know that it was used very often, but the
00:39:28 regular rounds, so there’s HE, there’s loom, so HE is high explosive, there’s loom.
00:39:33 You shoot that, it explodes in the sky, it lights up the sky for the infantry below and
00:39:39 then there’s shrapnel rounds that will explode in the sky and then shrapnel just rains down
00:39:42 hell on you.
00:39:43 HE is what you use normally in my, I’m trying to say this right because I know people squawked
00:39:51 at me about some of the stuff on Jocko, so I’m trying to be very accurate.
00:39:53 In my experience, we used HE rounds to wipe people off the face of the earth when the
00:39:58 infantry needed us.
00:40:00 So we would get a call at any time and there’s always two guns together.
00:40:05 So you never, you never go solo gun ever.
00:40:08 If you are, it’s, there’s, it’s sketchy and there’s bad shits happening.
00:40:12 Can you explain that?
00:40:13 So there’s two gun, two people, two guns?
00:40:15 No, two guns with each gun troop.
00:40:17 So each gun troop has five to seven people running a gun at all times.
00:40:20 Oh wow.
00:40:21 It takes a lot of people to run one of those.
00:40:22 How much electronics is there?
00:40:24 The GPS, like the computer system that’s on it itself, I never ran that much, but it is
00:40:28 completely technologically, it’s GPS guided.
00:40:32 All you have to do is literally type in the coordinates.
00:40:35 Then you’ve got the two big, um, there’s a, there’s a technical word, word for it, but
00:40:40 basically wheels and one does the trajectory, you know, you do your, and you’re just kind
00:40:44 of doing this and you’re watching the watch in it.
00:40:46 And once you hit your target, that’s, you know, it’ll tell you that’s where you need
00:40:50 to hit.
00:40:51 Do you know if there’s any like AI stuff like computer vision, like where there’s cameras
00:40:56 and they help you target using like all different kinds of cameras to see through like the fog,
00:41:03 all those kinds of things.
00:41:04 We use, um, the FOO, which are Forward Observation Officers, which are an artillery individual
00:41:10 that is embedded with an infantry unit.
00:41:14 Oh wow.
00:41:15 Okay.
00:41:16 They call from the front, give us their grid coordinates and basically say like, don’t
00:41:19 drop this on us.
00:41:20 Got it.
00:41:21 So, well, you know what not to shoot, which parts not to shoot.
00:41:24 Correct.
00:41:25 And then.
00:41:26 As long as no one moves.
00:41:27 Don’t move.
00:41:28 Stay still.
00:41:29 But you can hear it coming, but you can’t hear it until it’s too close.
00:41:32 So like when I went, sorry, go ahead, you were going to say something.
00:41:35 No, I was going to say, what’s the experience on the other, like, what does it feel like
00:41:39 to be maybe infantry or underneath it, underneath the artillery?
00:41:44 Well, I, I had the rare opportunity to do that and I have a video I’ll show you after.
00:41:52 It’s terrifying because I know the people that are shooting it and I know them personally
00:41:57 and I know what they’re like as humans and for the most part they’re dialed.
00:42:00 Well, you get the odd duck where you’re like, I’ve seen people have an ND, which is a negligent
00:42:05 discharge.
00:42:06 You basically get charged for it.
00:42:08 You get in a lot of trouble because you can blow people up and it like accidents happen.
00:42:12 And so I know accidents can happen in stressful situations.
00:42:15 And when I was with the Brits, we had to call danger, close artillery.
00:42:19 And when it goes over top of you, it sounds like thunder and lightning.
00:42:23 So you fire it and it’s not the stereotype that you hear in World War II where it kind
00:42:28 of like that, it’s more of like a crackle.
00:42:34 And then you just hear like a whiz and it shit just goes everywhere.
00:42:38 It’s loud.
00:42:39 It shakes the ground.
00:42:41 It shakes you.
00:42:42 It, you feel it.
00:42:44 Okay.
00:42:46 Is there some more words you can put to like the experience of what it’s like to be in
00:42:50 the heat of, of, of battle there?
00:42:53 So what is, is there literally, is it hot?
00:42:57 Is it
00:42:58 like being under it or shooting it?
00:42:59 Under it.
00:43:00 Oh yeah.
00:43:01 It, 55 degree heat.
00:43:02 You’re, you know that you’re waiting for it to be called.
00:43:04 You feel an overwhelming excitement to start because for me, I’d never been under it.
00:43:10 So I was like, okay, I had my camera ready.
00:43:12 Like I was a kid at a candy store and I’m like, I want to watch this happen.
00:43:16 And once you hear the crackle, I got really fearful.
00:43:21 My anxiety kicked up significantly.
00:43:24 I got to the point where I got numb.
00:43:28 Like I was, my nerves were on overdrive so much that like my body would go like numb.
00:43:32 Like I couldn’t move, but like my nerves were numb.
00:43:35 If that makes sense.
00:43:36 What, what were the nerves like and we’re talking about fear or is it just anxious excitement?
00:43:42 Anxious excitement, hopeful that they wouldn’t blow it up on us.
00:43:45 And there was this, there was this excitement that’s hard to describe because you don’t
00:43:52 want to be excited that you’re dropping bombs on people.
00:43:55 But when you just saw their faces and they’re shooting at you, there’s this overwhelming
00:44:00 feeling of got you motherfucker.
00:44:02 Yeah.
00:44:03 Yeah.
00:44:04 Well, we’ll talk about that because that’s such a difficult thing about wars.
00:44:10 You forget that it’s other human beings because those other human beings are doing really
00:44:15 bad things to you.
00:44:16 And so the very basic anger takes over, hate can take over.
00:44:23 And then also just the excitement of almost like video game like, you know, aspect of
00:44:31 war, like sport, it’s like sport that all of those elements are all baked in and it’s
00:44:35 hard to be philosophical in that situation it seems like.
00:44:40 I’ve never played video games so I can’t compare it to that.
00:44:43 But like from, from like a sports perspective, yeah, I could, I could argue that.
00:44:46 Like I felt like we won there for a second and it’s, it’s not just like a heat from outside.
00:44:52 It’s like this radiation within you that is something I’ve never felt since.
00:44:59 You just to take a small step back to the weapons training, what, what kind of guns
00:45:05 did you train on?
00:45:06 Because you also mentioned a rocket launcher.
00:45:08 I love Carl Grossoff’s.
00:45:10 What are those?
00:45:11 What are those?
00:45:12 Carl G.
00:45:13 Carl G’s?
00:45:14 What’s that?
00:45:15 What’s it like, my only experience with the rocket launchers is from the movie Commando
00:45:19 with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
00:45:20 Oh yeah.
00:45:21 And we’ve all discussed.
00:45:22 I haven’t seen that yet.
00:45:23 And I’ve heard about it and people have made me tell.
00:45:24 Yeah, I know.
00:45:25 I feel like you haven’t seen a single movie that’s relevant to war military because every
00:45:30 time anyone brings it up, you say you haven’t seen it.
00:45:33 I don’t have time to watch movies, Lex.
00:45:35 Platoon.
00:45:36 You haven’t seen Platoon, which is, you’re the scientist.
00:45:38 How do you have the time?
00:45:40 I’m not a scientist.
00:45:41 I just play one on TV.
00:45:43 Okay.
00:45:44 Sure.
00:45:45 So what, can you talk about the rocket launcher and maybe any other, for both engineering
00:45:51 actually, to me, those guns are very interesting from an engineering perspective too.
00:45:55 Well, they should be.
00:45:56 They’re fascinating when you take them apart and you see how small the parts get down to
00:46:00 and how necessary every single little piece is to make that thing run.
00:46:03 And even without the tiniest little BB smaller than a piece on there, an artillery gun might
00:46:08 not run.
00:46:10 So we were trained on Carl G’s, I think called M72s, which are disposable rocket launchers.
00:46:17 I’ll back up.
00:46:18 Carl G’s are around, I don’t know the exact millimeter of the round.
00:46:23 It’s been a while since I shot them.
00:46:24 We only did those in training.
00:46:26 But essentially it takes, most people, one person can fire it, effectively hold it and
00:46:31 fire it.
00:46:32 It takes another person to load it.
00:46:34 So you put it onto your shoulder and it weighs, I would, I don’t know, 30 pounds, 40 pounds.
00:46:39 Oh, wow.
00:46:40 Can’t remember.
00:46:41 It’s been a minute.
00:46:42 It’s been a minute.
00:46:43 But one person can carry it.
00:46:44 Oh, yeah.
00:46:45 Okay.
00:46:46 I don’t know.
00:46:47 It just seems like a rocket launcher is a pretty intense kind of device that just.
00:46:53 It for sure is.
00:46:54 I mean, it’s the diameter, I can’t even tell you the diameter, they’re about that big.
00:46:58 I mean.
00:46:59 And it goes on your shoulder.
00:47:00 It goes on your shoulder and then it has a little sight that pops out.
00:47:04 That’s almost like plastic like, which is kind of funny because it reminds me of like
00:47:07 the little green army men.
00:47:11 I just felt so flimsy to me.
00:47:13 I was like, this is hilarious.
00:47:15 And then another person stands behind you and opens the hatch.
00:47:17 And so there’s this, there’s these two levers and you just kind of open it.
00:47:23 And then the back end, which is flared, so it’s just a tube and then it’s flared.
00:47:28 That will open it and drop down and you load a round into that and then you load it back
00:47:32 up.
00:47:33 Got it.
00:47:34 And you’re never supposed to stand behind it because the blast behind it will kill you.
00:47:38 It’s yeah.
00:47:40 But in my case, when I fired it, it was me and another individual, I want to say it wasn’t
00:47:46 Sarah Pellegrin, but it was another girl that was smaller.
00:47:49 And the person is supposed to wrap around your waist and tuck low and hold your stability.
00:47:54 And we were just aiming at tanks that day and they were just concrete heads.
00:47:58 So they would just either, they would hit and bounce off or whatever.
00:48:02 And so when my sergeant saw that, he just kind of looked at both of us and was like,
00:48:07 no, I’m just going to.
00:48:08 And he got real low and just like wrapped both of us and then we’d fire it.
00:48:14 And it feels like you’re getting punched in the side of the head on repeat by Jocko.
00:48:21 You lose all your hearing, like just, snot comes out of your nose and you’re just kind
00:48:27 of discombobulated for a minute.
00:48:29 It’s a real mind fuck.
00:48:32 Is there any other kind of guns that at that time, because you were new to this, you haven’t
00:48:39 shot guns when you were younger that were really impressive to you in the training process?
00:48:44 All of them, because I’ve never fired a weapon.
00:48:46 So we had the C7s, which are like your M16s, I believe, the long barrel.
00:48:52 The cute thing about those is when I have that slung, my barrel drags on the ground.
00:48:57 So that’s fun.
00:48:59 And they shoot your 7.62 or your 5.56 round.
00:49:02 I loved that.
00:49:03 I preferred the C8, which was a short barrel, which is what the SF guys use.
00:49:08 Not because it’s cooler looking, which it obviously is, but because it was functional
00:49:13 for my body height and it didn’t drag on the ground when I ran.
00:49:16 I loved those.
00:49:17 They’re your personal weapon.
00:49:19 Being an artillery gunner, if you’re not an officer, at least in our unit, you didn’t
00:49:22 get a side piece.
00:49:25 I didn’t have a slide piece, Lex.
00:49:27 So I never had a handgun of any type.
00:49:30 I fired those in training.
00:49:32 You can’t get over that side piece comment.
00:49:33 Look at you.
00:49:34 I was going to say, I know what a side piece is.
00:49:36 You don’t have to explain to me.
00:49:37 But you’re single.
00:49:38 So how do you even have a side piece if you don’t have a main piece?
00:49:41 The joke would be the fact that we have a total misunderstanding what side piece is.
00:49:46 Okay, great.
00:49:47 So you didn’t have a side piece as a non officer.
00:49:48 Right.
00:49:49 So I never fired those much.
00:49:51 We did grenades in training.
00:49:52 Oh, cool.
00:49:53 Yeah, grenades are fun.
00:49:54 I love grenades.
00:49:55 I have a massive one tattooed on me.
00:49:56 I have them all over my office.
00:49:58 How does a grenade work?
00:50:00 There’s the spoon and the pin.
00:50:02 So this the pin holds the spoon in place when you pull that pin, the firing mechanism inside
00:50:08 as long as that the spoon is up against it, it won’t fire as soon as that spoon goes.
00:50:13 I believe it causes a reaction on the inside.
00:50:16 And you’ve got about five seconds to check it.
00:50:18 You’d be better to ask that question too.
00:50:20 I don’t mean to get philosophical on this.
00:50:22 No, you’re not.
00:50:23 There’s something about a grenade, because you’re essentially committing suicide.
00:50:30 Unless you get rid of the thing.
00:50:32 There’s something like
00:50:33 or if you’re unlucky, and it just goes off when you pull the pin, which has happened
00:50:36 to tons of people.
00:50:37 So it just feels like a very kind of leap.
00:50:41 It’s a dangerous leap into the abyss every time you use the thing.
00:50:45 Because when you shoot a gun, like the gun is much less likely to malfunction in terms
00:50:50 of like all the possible ways to go wrong.
00:50:52 It just seems like grenade is like
00:50:55 primitive almost.
00:50:56 Yeah, it’s primitive.
00:50:57 It’s also real, like in a way that like a bar fight is like being punched in the face
00:51:01 is real.
00:51:02 It’s like you’re here with a weapon of destruction.
00:51:05 It’s just you and the thing.
00:51:07 Yeah, you have to get rid of it.
00:51:08 I don’t know.
00:51:09 Is that is that terrifying to you?
00:51:11 Like do people still use grenades in warfare?
00:51:13 Oh, yeah.
00:51:14 Okay.
00:51:15 Yeah, those are fantastic.
00:51:16 The Taliban were throwing them over the wall at the airport in Kabul.
00:51:20 People use them all the time because when you’re in Afghanistan, if you’re in a rural
00:51:23 area, you’re going from village to village and they’re, they’re, you know, they’re mud
00:51:26 hot walls, like they’re tall, but you’re walking through corridors and stuff, all you got to
00:51:30 lob one of those is going to take the whole unit out that just walked by like it’s, they’re
00:51:33 accurate if you’re close enough and they’re effective if you’re close enough.
00:51:39 I love them though.
00:51:41 I think they’re fascinating to me because they’re such a tiny little thing with such
00:51:47 devastation.
00:51:48 Yeah, they just can cause such devastation.
00:51:51 But for me, when I had them, the some of the Canadians would make fun of me because when
00:51:55 I did go outside the wire with the British, I had two right here.
00:51:59 And I remember I put a piece of tape over the spoons because in my mind, I could picture
00:52:04 myself searching someone and grabbing me and pulling that and that would be me that that
00:52:10 would have been like, yep, that if anyone that was going to happen to was her for sure.
00:52:15 So you were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009, okay.
00:52:21 And like we said, you were in great, no, perfect physical shape.
00:52:26 Fucking epic shape.
00:52:27 Epic shape, six pack or, I mean, yeah, okay.
00:52:31 So you could do pull up, a lot of pull ups and push ups and yeah, okay.
00:52:37 And well trained, would you say, were you already what like, no, no, no, I’ll argue
00:52:43 that point till I’m blue in the face.
00:52:45 I spoke to recently, I actually spoke to my sergeant.
00:52:47 He’s not a sergeant anymore.
00:52:48 But Sergeant Mark LeBlanc, he’s in Africa right now on a deployment.
00:52:51 He gave me a call the other day.
00:52:52 And I remember talking to him about this.
00:52:54 And it’s frustrating because we were at an active war.
00:52:58 We were sorry, we were involved in an active war where we the units that I were in were
00:53:03 tagged red, which meant they needed people.
00:53:07 So when you need people, things go quick, whether or not that’s right.
00:53:12 I mean, you could argue that’s the similar thing to what’s happening in the world right
00:53:15 now.
00:53:16 We needed a vaccine.
00:53:18 We got a vaccine.
00:53:19 Is it the best it could be?
00:53:21 Could it be better?
00:53:22 Could it do more things?
00:53:23 Sure, probably.
00:53:24 But with the time that we had, we did the best that we could.
00:53:29 That’s my logic on that.
00:53:31 For me, I joined the military in November of 2007.
00:53:35 I was in basic training in January of 2008.
00:53:38 I was graduated basic SQ, which is all your weapons training.
00:53:43 Your DP1, which is your trade specific training.
00:53:47 So whatever trade you’re going to go into, whether it’s infantry, armored, artillery,
00:53:51 medic, whatever, that’s your DP1.
00:53:54 It’s called different things in different units.
00:53:56 And then I got posted to my unit in September.
00:54:00 So January to September, I had done all my training.
00:54:03 And I’m an English speaking individual.
00:54:05 I got posted to a French unit that only speaks French and had to learn all of the weapons
00:54:10 systems, everything, again, that I just learned in that short time frame in French.
00:54:15 This part of your story that you’re telling this to Jaco is one way to say it is very
00:54:21 impressive that you had to learn all of this in French.
00:54:24 So there’s also the camaraderie, the social aspect of it, which is difficult, probably.
00:54:28 I didn’t have any.
00:54:29 Yeah, I didn’t have any.
00:54:32 But it also would make you a more effective soldier to be socially, for that cohesion
00:54:37 to be there, right?
00:54:39 But also just understanding the basic terminology.
00:54:42 Correct.
00:54:43 The right way to say something on the radio, the right way to run a gun, the right way
00:54:48 to, because you got to move with those guns, you got seven people.
00:54:52 It’s really magical.
00:54:54 I’ll send you a video.
00:54:56 When we did some live fire in workup training in Texas before we left, we did a competition
00:55:00 between the other gun to see who could fire 10 rounds faster.
00:55:05 It is truly beautiful to watch an artillery unit fire a gun because it’s like a symphony.
00:55:12 Everyone has their parts and everyone knows and everyone’s yelling, but they know why
00:55:16 they’re yelling and everyone, this guy’s got to do this in order for this guy to load the
00:55:20 round.
00:55:21 It’s just, it’s beautiful.
00:55:22 It really is.
00:55:23 It is gorgeous to watch.
00:55:25 I miss it deeply.
00:55:26 Is there, by the way, for a gun, is there like one person responsible for the, for
00:55:30 the aim and the, or like the specification of the location and somebody else that pulls
00:55:36 it, presses the button?
00:55:37 The lanyard.
00:55:38 Is that the lanyard?
00:55:39 The button.
00:55:40 Is there a button?
00:55:41 It’s better than a button.
00:55:42 You’ll like it.
00:55:43 I’ll tell you in a second.
00:55:44 Okay.
00:55:45 There’s your Sergeant in charge and then they have their two IC and so the comms come in
00:55:51 to the Sergeant and the Sergeant is the, or your Master Bombardier, Bombardier Chef.
00:55:57 Yeah.
00:55:58 Sorry.
00:55:59 What?
00:56:00 Bombardier Chef?
00:56:01 What?
00:56:02 Bombardier Chef.
00:56:03 Bombardier Chef.
00:56:04 Oh, that’s the French.
00:56:05 Master Bombardier.
00:56:06 Yeah.
00:56:07 So it goes like private in the North, like in an infantry or in a regular unit, it’s
00:56:10 like private corporal, Master Corporal Sergeant.
00:56:15 In artillery, it goes Gunner, Bombardier, Master Bombardier, Sergeant and off like that.
00:56:22 So you have two people, but the Sarge is like, you don’t move till he says move.
00:56:27 You don’t fire till he says fire.
00:56:29 Like he’s your guy.
00:56:30 He’ll give you the coordinates.
00:56:31 He’ll feed them to the guy that’s doing the GPS, that portion.
00:56:34 I really never did it much.
00:56:36 I wasn’t tall enough to see it.
00:56:38 Like legitimately the way, how high it is up on the gun.
00:56:40 Like it was, I couldn’t see clearly enough.
00:56:42 It was not good.
00:56:44 So obviously you have a big personality, you’re a strong person.
00:56:48 You don’t say.
00:56:49 And you have a big hat currently.
00:56:51 I always wear a hat, Lex.
00:56:54 It seems like your height and your size was a factor.
00:56:57 Oh, for sure.
00:56:58 How were you able to step up in all those moments and how difficult was it?
00:57:04 I don’t know that I realized it was difficult while I was doing it because that’s just the
00:57:07 way it’s been.
00:57:08 I’ve always been the short person.
00:57:10 That’s life.
00:57:11 Nothing I can do to fix that.
00:57:12 So there was no point.
00:57:13 Am I going to whine about it?
00:57:14 I’m going to break my femurs and insert things to make me grow a little bit.
00:57:18 Maybe, maybe since you’re in robotics, you can figure that out.
00:57:22 That’s your task now.
00:57:24 Make me be five foot three, that’d be great.
00:57:28 For artillery, really what it came down to was the unit when I got there, there was only
00:57:33 a couple of people who spoke any sort of English and my Sergeant was not one of them.
00:57:38 But once he kind of started to get to know me a little bit, the best that he could, he
00:57:43 started to put effort into making sure I could lift the rounds, make sure my capacity to
00:57:49 do my job was there.
00:57:51 And so he took me under his wing in that aspect.
00:57:54 So he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically
00:58:01 help me load the round.
00:58:03 So pick the round up from the ground, pick it up like a trick to put your knee under
00:58:07 it, use your legs instead of just pick it up, use your back, pull your back out.
00:58:12 He would work on that.
00:58:13 And then depending on the position I was running the gun in, if I was running the side that
00:58:18 had the charge bags, I’ll explain that in a second, but if I was running the side that
00:58:23 had the charge bags, I could step up onto the gun and if I leaned inward enough with
00:58:31 my right hand with the charge and I kind of kicked off, I could kind of jump and shove
00:58:39 it up the tube.
00:58:41 Almost enough.
00:58:42 Yeah.
00:58:43 If I was running the lanyard, which is the thing that makes it go boom, it’s really easy.
00:58:47 It’s a long rope.
00:58:49 You hook it on and you put your right hand on your hip and on your left and you hold
00:58:53 it there and you just stare at your Sergeant like this and you just wait for him to yell
00:58:57 fire and he points at you when he does it.
00:58:59 And when you do it, you turn your whole body with it.
00:59:03 And when you do that, it alleviates a misfire essentially because if you just pull it sometimes
00:59:09 that’s not enough.
00:59:10 You got to really give it your whole body into it.
00:59:12 And so he would train me on how to do things differently so that I could do them effectively
00:59:18 and I wasn’t a shit pump.
00:59:20 A what?
00:59:22 So shit pump is a term that we use in Canada to call somebody useless.
00:59:26 A shit pump is a useless soldier who is just, you’re there and that’s the shit pump and
00:59:32 so we all just deal with it.
00:59:33 But somehow they’re still there.
00:59:35 Yeah.
00:59:36 What were we talking about?
00:59:37 The lanyard.
00:59:38 Okay.
00:59:39 Yeah.
00:59:40 We were talking about the artillery guns.
00:59:41 So those things though, what you would find fascinating is just how they break down when
00:59:48 you have to take one of those apart.
00:59:49 I think your mind would really find it fascinating how a breach comes apart all the way down
00:59:55 to like ball bearing size and the only, and there’s a way to just make that gun complete
00:59:59 ineffective and all you have to do when you’re on the charge side, there’s a magazine that’s
01:00:05 a long linear magazine and it holds like 15 little rounds.
01:00:09 If you just take that thing out, that thing’s not firing.
01:00:13 How many people does it take to move that?
01:00:14 Like how easy is it to move that thing?
01:00:16 To move a triple seven?
01:00:17 A triple seven.
01:00:18 I like it.
01:00:19 Well that’s what they’re called.
01:00:20 M triple sevens.
01:00:21 Is a lot of the terminology crossover the same in English and French?
01:00:25 Okay.
01:00:26 I mean, M triple seven does cause it’s an obvious how it’s, or I’m sure it has a separate
01:00:30 word, but like if you’re running it, you’re running it in French.
01:00:33 So like when I’d be running the, when I’m doing the charge bags and I’m doing, I’m doing,
01:00:40 you know, I’m loading everything and I’m getting that ready and that’s my position that day,
01:00:43 I’m also controlling the breach.
01:00:46 So like how it opens, how it closes when it locks.
01:00:50 And so, but you have to yell that as you do it.
01:00:52 So you’re yelling like, like you have to yell all these things.
01:00:57 You have to learn them though.
01:00:59 And so for a long time, it’s, it’s, it’s, it was a little frustrating.
01:01:03 I won’t lie.
01:01:04 It’s really exciting.
01:01:05 I took a lot of French, but I forgot all of it, but I think it’s a beautiful romantic
01:01:09 language.
01:01:10 It’s a good language.
01:01:11 If it’s from Quebec, it’s a, yeah, that’s true.
01:01:14 It’s a good language to fall in love with.
01:01:16 Not as good as Russian, but I mean, English is, all right.
01:01:21 I mean, Russian, are we really, is that like a love language?
01:01:24 It is to me.
01:01:25 I mean, because you’re Russian, but like if somebody walked up to me, it was like, Hey,
01:01:28 Kelsey, I like you, I’d be like, Oh God, he’s going to put me in a camp.
01:01:33 That’s because you don’t understand love, Kelsey.
01:01:35 I don’t.
01:01:36 We’ll talk about that.
01:01:37 Okay.
01:01:38 How many people does it take to move the M777?
01:01:40 It depends.
01:01:41 If you’re moving it by ground, you’re moving it on a truck and when you’re moving it on
01:01:43 a truck, you’re hooking the back of it onto, you’re hooking the front of the barrel onto
01:01:48 one of those big transport looking trucks that has those cargo tents that’s got soldiers
01:01:53 in it.
01:01:54 You don’t want to ever move an M777 by that way, if you don’t have to.
01:01:57 The barrel is worth a million dollars.
01:01:58 Wow.
01:01:59 Okay.
01:02:00 So this is like a serious piece of equipment.
01:02:02 You don’t want to move them.
01:02:03 Okay.
01:02:04 When we got to Kandahar, we were there for a couple of days.
01:02:07 We got flown out to the FOB we were going to be at, forward observation base.
01:02:12 Kandahar is the safe space or was the major base in Afghanistan that we were at.
01:02:16 There’s things like Tim Hortons there.
01:02:19 There’s Canada house.
01:02:20 There’s a British side, an American side, a Canadian side, and that’s where you see
01:02:24 all the different countries in the world kind of come together.
01:02:26 You would see Italians, you would see Germans, you would see French, you would see all these
01:02:30 different uniforms and you never know who to salute because you don’t know what each
01:02:33 thing means.
01:02:34 It doesn’t feel like a war zone.
01:02:36 No.
01:02:37 Oh God, no.
01:02:38 There’s a boardwalk.
01:02:39 There’s hockey there, like floor hockey because Canada had to have that.
01:02:41 There’s a Tim Hortons, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a PX.
01:02:46 I think there’s a restaurant there somewhere, but I didn’t get to go.
01:02:51 Stuff like that.
01:02:52 There’s gyms.
01:02:53 You can run around it.
01:02:54 You feel fairly safe.
01:02:55 You always have a weapon on you, but you can live your life.
01:02:57 When you get out to the FOB, the guns are already there.
01:03:02 Those M777s get lifted by a Chinook.
01:03:04 Normally if they’re going by air, they go by Chinook because they’re heavy as hell.
01:03:07 And Chinooks can hook them under the bottom and they fly them and then they’ll drop them
01:03:12 down.
01:03:13 They have wheels on them, but you don’t need them if you’re going to leave it in place.
01:03:18 Got it.
01:03:19 And you’re getting information about IEDs.
01:03:21 You’re getting a lay of the land as to what’s been going on in the country for the past
01:03:25 six months.
01:03:26 And this, you know nothing, you’re just like, this is your first time you’re getting deployed.
01:03:30 So what was your deployment like?
01:03:31 Can you tell the story of your deployment to Afghanistan?
01:03:36 Like the whole deployment?
01:03:39 Getting like actual deploying, not the deployment itself.
01:03:42 What’s the difference between the two?
01:03:43 Well actually getting ready to deploy is a little different.
01:03:46 So I mean the emotional buildup to it and some of the memorable things that kind of
01:03:54 you remember from that experience, both on the excitement, I get to see battle, I get
01:03:59 to be part of this and the fear and also like being surprised like with the Tim Hortons
01:04:04 and all those kinds of things.
01:04:05 So like the lead up before everything like shit hit the fan, okay cool.
01:04:09 So…
01:04:10 You’re such a fascinating person, but yes, yes.
01:04:13 Something like that.
01:04:14 Yes.
01:04:15 I’ve been called…
01:04:16 Many things.
01:04:17 Yeah, fascinating.
01:04:18 That start with the letter F.
01:04:19 Yeah.
01:04:20 No, I don’t know.
01:04:21 I don’t know many words with F. Okay, so the buildup to the deployment.
01:04:25 So for the buildup for the deployment, I was in Quebec and my unit was deploying from Quebec.
01:04:30 And at that time you kind of get your marching orders, you know you’re deploying.
01:04:34 I knew I was deploying before I even graduated.
01:04:38 That’s how much they needed people.
01:04:39 So once I did all that training, on graduation parade day, a couple men from Quebec in uniforms
01:04:45 came over and said, you, you, you and you are all being posted back here today and you’re
01:04:49 going to deploy with us in April.
01:04:51 So that’s how I found out I was deploying.
01:04:52 Why was there such a need for troops in Afghanistan?
01:04:55 That was a well known thing that there’s a scaling up of troops.
01:04:59 2007 on, Canada really started taking a combat role.
01:05:02 Before it was very much more a UN type deal where doing what we normally do in most wars
01:05:06 where we just, we wear blue and we don’t shoot anyone.
01:05:10 And so we’re there to help.
01:05:13 And so they were really, they were scaling up and there wasn’t a lot of people in those
01:05:18 trades initially, I think when the war kind of started.
01:05:20 So Canada really started to scale.
01:05:22 And so when I got to Quebec, we’ve kind of found, oh yeah, we’re deploying.
01:05:26 And it was a weird situation because I’ve never actually been at a unit on a non deployable
01:05:31 unit.
01:05:32 I don’t know what they do day to day.
01:05:33 That’s different from what I did.
01:05:34 I just know what I did.
01:05:36 So we would do things like in the morning we would get up and we would meet for PT at
01:05:40 5 a.m. and that would include going for a 10k run or playing ball hockey for a few hours
01:05:48 in the gym or lifting weights together or just going on a rock march, a long rock march.
01:05:53 Just stuff like that.
01:05:54 You would have a shower, you would meet and then you would just sit around the regiment.
01:05:59 You would just sit around the regiment and you would, if there was busy work, you’d mop
01:06:04 the floors, you would clean weapons.
01:06:07 There wasn’t a whole lot until there was a whole lot to do.
01:06:10 We did a lot for a while and then we went away on workup training to Texas for a week.
01:06:17 We came down here and we did live fire with our other troop that was gonna be with us.
01:06:23 So Alpha had two guns and two guns has two groups of people and so we all would go down
01:06:30 to Texas and we did live fire here for a week and I ended up getting gastro which was awesome.
01:06:38 So thanks for that.
01:06:39 Oh apparently there was, they were having water problems and sanitary problems so everyone
01:06:43 was getting it on the base.
01:06:45 Okay so it just makes your life way harder.
01:06:48 I didn’t get it towards the end, till towards the end so that was fortunate.
01:06:52 So we would fire live fire, we would go out to the middle of nowhere, the guns would be
01:06:56 there and we would get offloaded truck of rounds and we would do live fire and we would
01:07:02 practice, just constant practice.
01:07:04 What’s that saying?
01:07:05 Perfect practice makes perfect.
01:07:07 Yeah so this is a sensory, like a shooting range for artillery, for long range.
01:07:13 So what does practice look like?
01:07:16 So you roll up in your trucks and you’re, you know, you’ve got each group of people.
01:07:21 You’ve got two trucks and then you’ve got like a medic vehicle and then you’ve got like
01:07:24 an officer vehicle and a comms vehicle and you go to your perspective guns and then you
01:07:30 offload your ammo and then you basically wait for them to send you like a fire mission.
01:07:37 Wow, get that together.
01:07:38 They would call, they would say a mission, so it would be a fire mission.
01:07:41 So we’d wait for that and once we got that then you all run like a bunch of scattered
01:07:45 rats to the gun like it’s like the greatest thing you’ve ever seen and then you just wait,
01:07:50 you wait for the call for the sergeants to say and then you’ll hear it because it’s not
01:07:54 headphones.
01:07:55 You can hear it on a speaker and it’d be like, I’m not going to do it in French, don’t ask.
01:07:59 It’d be like so and so, 10 rounds, fire when ready and then you would get your rounds ready
01:08:09 and everyone would have them ready and would be in their respective positions and then
01:08:13 you would wait and then they would say fire when ready and as soon as they say fire when
01:08:17 ready that means just start going.
01:08:19 Just start and then that’s when the magic starts.
01:08:22 You go like the loop, like you shoot one or whatever, there’s a reloading process.
01:08:26 Yeah, there’s a loop.
01:08:27 So what you would do, you get the fire mission, you would find out the rounds, the 2IC would
01:08:31 be standing by the rounds and it was his job to make sure the amount of rounds that was
01:08:34 told would be the only rounds that would go downrange and so he’d stand there and on each
01:08:39 round depending on the type of round is a fuse which gets screwed onto the top of the round.
01:08:45 So they’re about that big and it’s just a point and then you would have to put it on,
01:08:51 give it a spin and depending if it was a time release, you had a little, what do you call
01:08:57 it?
01:08:58 You get those at IKEA when you have to build everything.
01:08:59 Allen wrench?
01:09:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, Allen wrench.
01:09:01 Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
01:09:02 Yeah.
01:09:03 But like a big one or something?
01:09:04 No, just a little one because it’s a tiny little hole and you just got to click it to
01:09:07 where it’s supposed to go and it depended on what the call was for and it was a timer.
01:09:12 When you said like wheel, you mean like a little thing then?
01:09:15 Is that what we’re talking about?
01:09:16 No, no.
01:09:17 I’m talking about the round itself.
01:09:18 So you would put a fuse on top of the round.
01:09:20 So you would unload the ammo and then you would put fuses on them and the fuses are
01:09:25 on the top and they’re like a little ice cream topper kind of thing and you would spin those
01:09:30 on.
01:09:31 Oh, okay.
01:09:32 And then once they’re on, depending if it’s a time release or not, you would take this
01:09:35 little thing and you would move it the top and that would, it’s almost like a little
01:09:39 timer.
01:09:40 Cool.
01:09:41 That’s what I did.
01:09:42 So you’re assembling a bullet.
01:09:43 Essentially.
01:09:44 A very big one that goes up to my waist.
01:09:47 Cool.
01:09:48 Yes.
01:09:49 This is very cool.
01:09:50 And you’re a fascinating person.
01:09:51 Okay.
01:09:52 So just that you still even years later have all this in your memory.
01:09:55 It’s not all perfectly accurate and that’s what irritates me though is because it bothers
01:10:00 me when I can’t remember things accurately but I have a lot of, I’ve had a lot of memory
01:10:04 issues and problems after like having too many hits to the head and…
01:10:09 This is from earlier in childhood or later?
01:10:10 But both.
01:10:11 Okay.
01:10:12 Both.
01:10:13 The military did not help it.
01:10:14 Where was the hits in the head in the military?
01:10:18 Well when you have a Carl Gustav beside your face like this and it shoots around, it gives
01:10:21 you a concussive blast.
01:10:23 Also there’s new research being done, I’ll find out exactly what it is, but there’s new
01:10:27 research that’s being done that shows that if you’re an artillery gunner and you stand
01:10:31 within a certain range of that gun, you get the same amount of concussive blasts and there’s
01:10:36 a range.
01:10:37 I had no idea but you feel it when it goes off, like it hurt, your whole body feels it.
01:10:43 Your mind is fascinating because it’s like literally the opposite of mine.
01:10:47 One you’re able to speak very quickly, very clearly, very sharply.
01:10:50 Sorry, sorry.
01:10:51 No, what?
01:10:52 I talk too fast and I’m pretty loud.
01:10:53 No that’s perfect.
01:10:54 Because of my hearing.
01:10:55 I admire, I mean I admire that very much.
01:10:56 I can’t do any of that and you listen extremely well and you’re extremely attentive and you
01:11:01 have a good memory.
01:11:02 Anyway, it’s just fun to watch you and I can tell you’re a great soldier in just all different
01:11:09 aspects of it.
01:11:10 Thank you, I appreciate it.
01:11:12 But what the heck we’re talking about?
01:11:13 Oh, build up to the deployment.
01:11:14 How did we get to Texas?
01:11:16 Because that was part of the build up to my deployment.
01:11:18 And live fire you got to, did that feel good?
01:11:20 Oh yeah.
01:11:21 It was so good.
01:11:26 What’s the favorite, what’s the best part about like shooting artillery?
01:11:32 Like what’s the thing that feels good?
01:11:35 Which part?
01:11:36 Power.
01:11:37 Well the feeling of power.
01:11:38 When is the best moment of, the highest moment of the feeling of power?
01:11:43 Is it the whole process that you love or is there like when you actually shoot it?
01:11:48 It’s symbiotic.
01:11:49 It’s a beautiful thing to watch.
01:11:50 To know that a gun can fire and it takes kind of a dance to make it work.
01:11:56 There’s something about that to me that just got my heart racing.
01:11:59 When you actually shoot the round and you see it go and you hear it, it’s unlike, you
01:12:06 can’t describe.
01:12:07 There’s no, I’ve never felt another feeling.
01:12:09 I’ve also never been in like an F18 or an F like 16 or like any, I’ve never been in
01:12:14 anything like that.
01:12:16 And I’ve, you know, I’ve never, trying to think of something else that’d be comparable.
01:12:20 I’ve never been in like a Formula One car.
01:12:22 Those are the only things I can picture being that much for me because to shoot one of those
01:12:29 and to know that you’ve done your job right means that you’ve helped.
01:12:34 And that to me was really what did it for me.
01:12:37 When you hear your sergeant say, mission accomplished, target hit, tired acquired, then you’re like,
01:12:43 that’s a good feeling, that’s the stuff.
01:12:47 Quick pause.
01:12:48 Take a break Lex.
01:12:49 Okay, so live fire in Texas, we’re in Texas by the way.
01:12:54 Fort Worth or Fort Hood, one of them.
01:12:56 Well, okay, so like it’s what, is that close to a big major city?
01:13:00 Do you remember visiting a city?
01:13:02 Oh God, no, we fly right into the tarmac and they’re like, don’t touch the snakes.
01:13:07 And then they send you out to the field.
01:13:09 Got it.
01:13:10 Let’s see the instructions.
01:13:11 No, really, we went into a classroom and they’re like, these are the animals that are in the
01:13:15 wildlife in Texas.
01:13:16 If you see any of them, do not approach.
01:13:18 Do not go pee outside.
01:13:19 Do not squat down.
01:13:20 It is snake season people.
01:13:22 And I was like, I have to pee and squat down.
01:13:25 Why Texas and from like Canada, is it a simulation of Afghanistan?
01:13:31 Yes.
01:13:32 Okay, so that’s, okay, so you’re getting, and that’s the way the live fire was seen
01:13:37 in artilleries, like you’re trying to simulate certain aspects of what you might actually
01:13:41 see in Afghanistan.
01:13:42 I would think so.
01:13:43 I mean, we, it, it looks like it’s hot, like it, you’re out in the middle of nowhere.
01:13:50 Very similar terrain.
01:13:51 That’s the first time we started to get to wear our tan boots and our tan, like our combat
01:13:56 tan stuff before you couldn’t wear that.
01:13:58 So it gave us an opportunity to kind of break in, break in how we were going to be doing
01:14:01 this, what it was going to look like, how the guns were going to work and all of those
01:14:05 lovely things.
01:14:06 How do you go from there to being deployed?
01:14:10 What was the next part of the journey?
01:14:12 So then we go to Wainwright, Alberta, often called or referenced as Waincock because it
01:14:17 sucks so bad.
01:14:19 It is a massive open space in Alberta, which most of Alberta is, and it’s outside of a
01:14:25 small town called Wainwright.
01:14:27 And it is a field X training area for all of the Canadian military.
01:14:32 And it’s where you do live fire, but you also do workup training.
01:14:38 So you go out there for a month or two, I think it is.
01:14:40 I don’t remember the exact time we were there because it was just, you sleep in a tent,
01:14:44 you’re in your cot, you’re in like full mission mode.
01:14:47 And you go outside and we did this operation called Operation Maple Leaf, I think it was.
01:14:53 And you put on these little suits, they have haptic, you can feel when you’re shot.
01:15:01 And then there’s a little camera, sorry, screen in the front of it, and it’s got button options.
01:15:05 And so it’s to mimic if you get shot, it’ll say gunshot wound.
01:15:09 And then you have to choose, okay, do I do this or do I do this?
01:15:12 And depending on your response, person dies or lives.
01:15:15 And they have other people who aren’t on a rotation for deployment come and act as the
01:15:19 Taliban and attack you in the middle of the night.
01:15:25 Is there a good understanding of the tactics that the Taliban used to attack?
01:15:30 I mean, this may be fast forwards to our conversation a little bit, but is there predictable strategies
01:15:38 on the other side that are being used in Afghanistan?
01:15:42 By the Taliban?
01:15:43 By the Taliban.
01:15:44 Oh, 100%.
01:15:45 They had suicide bombers, vehicle born IEDs.
01:15:50 Their standard way to hit people really was IEDs and vehicle born IEDs, suicide bombers.
01:15:57 They’d put like backpacks full of an IED and then put like toys around it and then just
01:16:03 be like.
01:16:04 So they will conceal it certain ways and probably use civilians.
01:16:07 Oh, 100%.
01:16:08 Yeah.
01:16:09 And women were a great way to get close to the soldiers because women seem nonthreatening.
01:16:13 When you see a burqa walk up to you, you’re not expecting an AK 47 to roll out of that
01:16:16 and then, or, you know, but there are great ways to get close.
01:16:21 Okay.
01:16:22 So what is it, Wayne something?
01:16:24 Waynecock?
01:16:25 No, that’s not how, Wayne Wright.
01:16:28 Let’s go to Alberta.
01:16:29 Okay.
01:16:30 Okay.
01:16:31 I mean, we don’t have to go to Alberta.
01:16:32 Nobody wants to.
01:16:33 No, let’s, in our minds, in our imagination.
01:16:37 So okay.
01:16:38 So that’s getting you closer to Afghanistan.
01:16:40 Right.
01:16:41 What was that like?
01:16:42 I mean, are you getting anxious at this point?
01:16:44 Is there a buildup?
01:16:45 What are you thinking?
01:16:46 Or is this just all part of the training?
01:16:47 For me, it was more part of the training.
01:16:49 I was excited to go because I did know that we were going to do some live fire.
01:16:54 I did know that we were going to be doing more of the military type job I thought we
01:17:00 were going to be doing because up until that point, I had just done training.
01:17:03 So I was learning how to march and salute and who to salute and not salute.
01:17:07 Like that was the focus of, that was my experience of the military.
01:17:10 And then the next experience was sitting in a regiment, just working out a lot and going
01:17:14 for breakfast a lot and drinking.
01:17:16 Like that was, I was like, this is the army.
01:17:18 So when I actually got to go to Wainwright, I got my first full taste of, okay, well,
01:17:23 there’s fire picket duty.
01:17:24 So one person gets picked every night to do sentry.
01:17:28 There’s a little less sleep.
01:17:30 You’re eating out of a canteen now.
01:17:32 You’re drinking out of canteen.
01:17:33 You’re in your kit more.
01:17:34 You’re in your deployable kit.
01:17:35 Now you’re in your, you know, you’re wearing your tack vest.
01:17:40 You’re getting ready to practice having plates on.
01:17:42 You’re having ammunition on you.
01:17:44 You’ve got your weapon with you all the time.
01:17:45 When you’re on base in Quebec, you’re, you’re just like an everyday job.
01:17:51 Maybe you can paint a clearer picture to me.
01:17:54 When was there an understanding that you’re actually getting deployed?
01:17:56 Was it just a sense that you’re getting deployed or was this officially told to you?
01:18:00 I was officially told on graduation day, you’re deploying in April with Vac Hits.
01:18:04 Oh, okay.
01:18:05 There’s a date.
01:18:06 Like they, they knew, so what had happened is the reason that Vac Hits unit needed more
01:18:12 people.
01:18:13 So they came to that and they picked five people.
01:18:14 There was five English speaking people that went to Vac Hits.
01:18:16 It wasn’t just myself.
01:18:18 There was a couple other people I knew that were English speaking that got put on other
01:18:21 guns within the regiment.
01:18:23 I wasn’t with any of them.
01:18:24 We all kind of got split up.
01:18:26 And so there was an understanding that we were going to always be deploying.
01:18:33 Next year, it was like 2009, you’re deploying.
01:18:36 Whether you left in May or April, we were deploying because that was the rotation time.
01:18:41 So each Canadian unit did between six and nine months.
01:18:44 And then you knew right around that point, another base of individuals would then deploy.
01:18:49 So you would go on these rotations.
01:18:51 And so even when I was on my deployment then, I was slated to go again the following year,
01:18:56 but towards the end of the year.
01:18:58 So there was always a rotation.
01:19:00 If you were in a combat arms unit and you were in one that was a deployable unit.
01:19:03 So if you were from Edmonton, a PPCLI, which were the Princess Patricia’s, which were their
01:19:09 infantry unit.
01:19:10 If you were RCR out of Petawawa, Ontario, you knew you were deploying.
01:19:16 If you were at Vac Hits, you knew you were deploying.
01:19:19 There’s combat arms bases, and then there’s like naval bases.
01:19:22 I didn’t know their deployment structure.
01:19:23 I didn’t know how they worked.
01:19:25 I’m on the ground.
01:19:26 Don’t worry about the boats.
01:19:27 So I didn’t know how the Air Force deployed.
01:19:29 I knew Vac Hits was deploying in April.
01:19:32 You were going, get ready.
01:19:36 That was that.
01:19:37 So you show up to Afghanistan.
01:19:39 What is a combat arms unit look like?
01:19:43 What’s the situation look like?
01:19:45 How much chaos is there?
01:19:47 How much clarity about mission is there?
01:19:50 What are your feelings about the whole thing?
01:19:52 So when you leave, the day you leave, we left Quebec, we got driven to the airport and then
01:19:57 we walked onto the tarmac and we load our own bags and we got on a plane and it’s just
01:20:01 empty.
01:20:02 It’s just, it’s our plane.
01:20:04 And you don’t go right to Afghanistan.
01:20:06 You go to a stopover point, which I don’t know if I’m allowed to say where that is frankly.
01:20:10 So I just say it’s somewhere overseas.
01:20:12 And you go there and you go there for a couple of days, I think it’s like a day or two.
01:20:16 And that’s where you get like your kit.
01:20:18 That’s where you get your bulletproof plates for the first time and realize how heavy those
01:20:21 fucking things are.
01:20:22 It’s where you get your weapon and your ammunition, your first few mags.
01:20:26 It’s where you get your helmet and your vests and you get everything that you need.
01:20:31 While you’re there, it’s pretty nonchalant.
01:20:34 It’s hot as hell.
01:20:35 It’s your first time being in that kind of heat.
01:20:36 So you just never stop sweating.
01:20:38 The place we were in, it’s just the second you got out of the shower, you were still
01:20:42 wet after you got out.
01:20:43 What the hell is happening?
01:20:44 It’s so humid.
01:20:46 And I’m like, is this going to be like this in Afghanistan?
01:20:47 They’re like, no, it’s not humid there at all.
01:20:49 I’m like, why is it so bad here?
01:20:51 They’re like, it’ll be fine.
01:20:52 Don’t worry about it.
01:20:53 So and where we were there, it was kind of cute.
01:20:58 We were like in a base, within a base and they had like turf and we had like ice cream
01:21:04 and fruit and you could go get on a computer, you could go make calls, you had showers,
01:21:09 you had a real bed.
01:21:10 It was very kind of okay for that point.
01:21:14 And then you got all your stuff and then okay, we’re rolling out, which is about a five hour
01:21:17 flight.
01:21:18 Again, my experience with helicopters is mostly from another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,
01:21:23 The Predator.
01:21:24 I’m not, do you want me to say I’ve never seen it?
01:21:29 I’ve never seen it.
01:21:30 Lex, do you feel better about yourself?
01:21:31 No, you want to tell the audience the, all the excellent shows that you mentioned me
01:21:37 offline that you watch instead, instead of Platoon.
01:21:40 Listen.
01:21:41 Yeah, this, nine is Sex and the City.
01:21:43 Was that more important than Platoon?
01:21:44 Oh no, I’ve never seen that.
01:21:46 Don’t, don’t put me in that category.
01:21:47 Why?
01:21:48 Did you just put me in a box?
01:21:49 I did.
01:21:50 I watch like Homeland.
01:21:51 I watch, no, I watch like, I watch a lot of documentaries.
01:21:55 I watch, I like to watch real, real things more than, than, than just film.
01:22:00 I did a little bit of film stuff when I got back into Canada and I was like, once you’re,
01:22:06 once you’ve seen how it’s made, I’m like, I don’t want to do that.
01:22:09 Yeah.
01:22:10 I mean, I’m the same way as superhero movies.
01:22:11 It doesn’t, I want, I want, I want something closer to reality, but then movies like Platoon
01:22:17 reveal some deep aspect of reality without it.
01:22:21 I did Superman Man of Steel.
01:22:22 Wait, you, sorry, you, you were, what do you mean you did?
01:22:25 I was not a military expert, but I was a stunt expert, even though I didn’t actually have
01:22:31 to do any stunts.
01:22:32 It’s just because I had previous military experience and they were going to have me
01:22:34 as an extra as a military person.
01:22:36 But if you have previous experience, they have to make it as like a stunt role, like
01:22:39 so you get paid more.
01:22:40 Got it.
01:22:41 So I got to sit at a desk and I was in that, I was in that like, you’d see me like, whew,
01:22:45 for like two seconds.
01:22:46 So what you’re saying is you were the mastermind behind that movie.
01:22:50 For the entire thing.
01:22:51 You’re so accurate.
01:22:52 Okay.
01:22:53 Great.
01:22:54 Your representation of me is just fantastic.
01:22:56 The combat arms unit of Afghanistan, the ice cream machine.
01:23:02 What like when you actually get closer and closer to the mission, what, when does that
01:23:07 happen?
01:23:08 When I, you know, got to where we were before we were leaving to get on the plane, I don’t
01:23:12 really, I don’t think I realized what the hell I was doing.
01:23:15 Truthfully, like you’re asking me all these, like, what did you feel, how did you, like
01:23:19 when I really think about it, if I sit there and really think about it, I was deploying.
01:23:24 I was aware.
01:23:25 I knew what I was going to do.
01:23:26 I knew my job, but once we actually stepped onto that Herc to leave, to get into the Afghan
01:23:32 airspace, I think that’s when it hit me.
01:23:35 I think it smacked me in the face so hard.
01:23:38 And that’s when the overwhelming just reality was that, oh fuck, oh, oh, oh.
01:23:48 When they said, make weapons ready, put the barrel to the ground, put your helmets on.
01:23:55 That’s when they start flying tactically, which means they’re going between the mountains.
01:23:58 That means we’re going to land soon.
01:23:59 Which means if you’re flying like this, it’s because RPGs can hit you.
01:24:04 So that was my first moment of, oh, I could like just be shot down right now.
01:24:08 Like I, I couldn’t, I didn’t grasp it.
01:24:11 I was, how old was I?
01:24:13 19.
01:24:14 19.
01:24:15 Yeah.
01:24:16 Wow.
01:24:17 Okay.
01:24:18 So I’m trying to explain to you cause it’s hard because I don’t know that I actually
01:24:21 did grasp it until I was in the air getting ready to land in Kandahar.
01:24:26 When was the first time you heard bullets, enemy, enemy bullets or enemy explosions?
01:24:33 Well, when you’re in Kandahar, when you’re in Kandahar, when you’re at CAF, there’s a,
01:24:37 you’re fairly insulated away from the main walls.
01:24:39 You would hear stuff go off or you would hear the rocket sirens would go off.
01:24:43 So you would hear the, and everyone just kind of got down on the ground and just waited
01:24:48 for the all clear.
01:24:49 And then we got back up.
01:24:50 I didn’t hear any actual live fire until I got to the FOB.
01:24:58 It was more just a lot of noise.
01:25:00 You would hear a lot of helicopters, a lot of planes going in and out of the base.
01:25:04 So there was that sense you could feel the ground shake when they took off, but there
01:25:07 was that sense, you know, things were going around, things were happening.
01:25:10 You just weren’t far enough.
01:25:12 You were not close enough to the edges of CAF to see it.
01:25:17 So what’s the FOB?
01:25:19 FOB is a Forward Observation Base, which is a small little base out in the middle of wherever.
01:25:25 And that’s, that’s specific to artillery?
01:25:28 No.
01:25:29 That’s in general, just an observation base from which combat.
01:25:32 For infantry to go in and out of, for armor to go in and out of, special ops go in and
01:25:36 out of them.
01:25:37 They fly, they’ll stop there.
01:25:38 They’ll pick people up or do whatever, then they’ll go out.
01:25:41 So it’s, a Forward Observation Base is used essentially to have eyes in that area without
01:25:45 having to be doing patrols every five seconds.
01:25:48 But there’s not, is it like, is there like medics there?
01:25:50 Oh yeah.
01:25:51 Yeah.
01:25:52 Yeah.
01:25:53 So it was.
01:25:54 Actual base?
01:25:55 Yeah.
01:25:56 I was, it’s a, I don’t call it an actual base.
01:25:57 You sleep in tents and cots.
01:25:58 And it is, the walls are this mesh material that are filled with gravel.
01:26:03 And that’s the walls.
01:26:05 And then you have towers.
01:26:06 You had five, I think we had five towers because the Americans ran four and we ran one.
01:26:10 And so it was an American FOB.
01:26:12 It’s called FOB Ramrod.
01:26:14 And there was a, were there Marines?
01:26:17 No, I think they were the 101st.
01:26:20 They were out of there.
01:26:22 This is where I get dicey because I was moved a lot.
01:26:24 So when people are like, who are you with?
01:26:25 I’m like, I know what their patches looked like.
01:26:28 I don’t know the full ins and outs.
01:26:30 So I’m working on getting that back so that I can tell it accurately because I believe
01:26:34 it deserves that type of respect.
01:26:35 But that being said, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around all of this.
01:26:40 Yeah.
01:26:41 You almost have to go back and do like research to understand the full details of all the
01:26:46 things you were experiencing.
01:26:47 And so I reached out to actually a bunch of people even before I wrote the book and I
01:26:50 didn’t get a lot of answers.
01:26:51 Well, once I did Jocko, all the people have reached out to me and were like, hey, and
01:26:55 I’m like, called you.
01:26:56 So now I’m working, that’s why I’m doing the rewrite is I’m working on making sure that
01:27:00 things are exact.
01:27:02 And so there was infantry units going in at that FOB and it was a really tiny FOB.
01:27:08 It was run by the Americans and then there was a tiny little corner that was the Canadian
01:27:14 artillery unit.
01:27:15 And the Americans, normally it’s Americans shooting for Americans, Canadians shooting
01:27:20 for Canadians.
01:27:21 The rest of the regiment that deployed, so Bravo and Charlie, they were at Canadian FOBs,
01:27:26 Massom Guard and another one and these were huge FOBs.
01:27:29 Ours was this tiny like three kilometer around place and we had this tiny little subsection
01:27:35 of it and the rest was so it was like this and then all American here.
01:27:40 And when we got there, we landed, the guns were already there.
01:27:44 So you ripped out the unit before you.
01:27:46 So those guys were just leaving and we were just replacing them.
01:27:49 So that we knew the guns, they were Canadian guns, we understood, you know, how to run
01:27:53 those.
01:27:54 That was fine.
01:27:55 When we got there, though, we had come in on Chinook and Chinooks are super loud and
01:28:01 they’re like, we’re hearing protection.
01:28:03 They don’t, you’re not, no, this is not reality.
01:28:07 Like this is why I’m partially deaf now.
01:28:08 Like it’s not reality.
01:28:09 So sorry to take a tangent, but do you usually wear ear protection in any aspects of warfare
01:28:15 of this whole process?
01:28:17 You wear comms, like you have a comm on like in a radio if you’re outside the wire.
01:28:23 So comms, is that like a Bluetooth headset?
01:28:24 Yes, it’s a Bluetooth headset.
01:28:26 Okay.
01:28:27 No.
01:28:28 Like from Nike or like?
01:28:29 I was gonna say Adidas.
01:28:30 Okay.
01:28:31 I don’t know if anyone was involved at some point.
01:28:33 I don’t know.
01:28:34 This equipment looked like it was from World War II.
01:28:35 So it’s comms, but is that having ear protection?
01:28:39 Like.
01:28:40 No.
01:28:41 No.
01:28:42 And I didn’t wear them.
01:28:43 That’s just what some people wore.
01:28:44 People when you were as low as me, like we weren’t privy to conversate.
01:28:46 Like we were just told what to do and you do it.
01:28:48 So when you’re doing like on the OP tower, you have a radio, you pick up and you call
01:28:53 in and then you put the radio down.
01:28:54 But for hearing protection, I mean, I would put in earplugs, but those things are so violently
01:28:59 loud that earplugs, they don’t do it justice.
01:29:02 I feel like when you go shooting, there’s a certain kinds of earplugs that you, it blocks
01:29:09 out the gut, like certain kinds of sounds associated with guns and you can still hear
01:29:14 other types of stuff.
01:29:16 So the ones they issued us were these big things that had like a headpiece like here,
01:29:20 but you have to wear your helmet when you’re firing.
01:29:22 Right.
01:29:23 So you can’t have both on.
01:29:25 Okay.
01:29:26 So how much are you aware of the logistics of the whole thing?
01:29:29 That’s always fascinating with warfare.
01:29:31 Like in terms of setting up, you mentioned gravel and the fobs, like setting all those
01:29:36 bases out.
01:29:37 Were you seeing any of this or again, it’s a 19 year old kind of just.
01:29:41 Well, it’s not that I was oblivious.
01:29:43 That’s the one thing I would say I wasn’t.
01:29:44 I was, I’m very aware of my surroundings.
01:29:47 That’s something that’s always been taught to me from a very early age because I travel
01:29:50 a lot with my dad in the truck.
01:29:52 And so my dad would be like, you’re going to go into that bathroom and I’m going to
01:29:54 watch you come out and you’re going to watch everyone around you because people get kidnapped.
01:29:58 Like that’s just the reality.
01:30:00 I was always very paranoid.
01:30:03 So you were paying attention to surroundings.
01:30:07 But the fob was already built up when we got there.
01:30:09 This is already like well established bases already.
01:30:12 Like there’s.
01:30:13 Established enough.
01:30:14 All right.
01:30:15 And that is one of the first times you’ve heard actual fire.
01:30:19 Yeah.
01:30:20 That was like the, I mean, I’d heard it on the, when we, when we shoot and when we zero
01:30:24 in weapons and we do all that stuff.
01:30:26 But I had never heard it, heard it like that before.
01:30:29 And then you would see the, the, the guys, the Americans would roll out every day and
01:30:33 go on patrol and come back, back, back.
01:30:36 And so you would see them, you would hear them, they would tell the stories, those types
01:30:40 of things.
01:30:41 But I never experienced it because we never, we never got attacked.
01:30:45 Like our base never got hit.
01:30:46 We were really lucky that way.
01:30:48 There were other ones around us that were getting hit, but we weren’t, we weren’t getting
01:30:51 hit.
01:30:52 We were very fortunate.
01:30:54 At least we didn’t get hit when I was there.
01:30:56 I believe the entry got, there was an attempt.
01:31:00 There was an attempt at some point in a past, but I wasn’t privy to that.
01:31:04 But we were in the OP tower, so we had to do our own security.
01:31:08 But because we were such a small subset of Canadians and we always had to have people
01:31:12 running the guns and ready to run the guns at all times.
01:31:14 We only had to man one tower.
01:31:16 So you would do four hour shifts with a fire team partner in the tower, depending on whatever,
01:31:20 but you would do it every day.
01:31:22 So I would look out into the rest of Afghanistan at that opportunity.
01:31:26 Otherwise it was just like your walls.
01:31:28 What did it look like?
01:31:29 Is it beautiful?
01:31:31 Just the full landscape?
01:31:33 Or is it?
01:31:34 Where I was, there was mountains in the distance.
01:31:36 It was just very sandy, very flat.
01:31:39 And there was a couple of small compounds on the outside.
01:31:41 It wasn’t a lot to look at.
01:31:43 There was a long road that you knew that got hit all the time.
01:31:47 There wasn’t a lot to look at.
01:31:49 Such a strange place to be the center of superpowers over the decades.
01:31:56 It really is.
01:31:58 And the fact that the populace, the civilians are almost completely clueless to the full
01:32:03 history of things in terms of globally, the geopolitics of it all.
01:32:07 Yeah.
01:32:08 Well, if you look at the location of it, right, on a map, it makes more sense.
01:32:12 Right.
01:32:13 You can wrap your brain around it.
01:32:15 But I met plenty of people who had never even seen a picture of themselves when I was in
01:32:18 that country.
01:32:19 I mean, how much more are they going to understand if they don’t know what even exists outside?
01:32:24 You tell a small story of taking a picture of a girl and showing it to her, an Afghani
01:32:31 girl.
01:32:32 Yeah.
01:32:33 We were, I was with the British at that time, and we were on that operation that gets highlighted
01:32:38 quite a bit.
01:32:39 And we had stopped and the ICOM radios were pinging.
01:32:42 And ICOM radios are a radio that we have an interpreter on that the Taliban, basically
01:32:49 we can hear what they’re saying.
01:32:51 It’s their comms.
01:32:52 It’s us tapped in.
01:32:53 When it’s really clear, they’re close.
01:32:56 When it’s scatty and they’re far enough away, normally they’re not planning an attack, although
01:33:02 you never know, really.
01:33:04 And we were going door to door, kind of like what they’re doing now.
01:33:09 And we were pulling people out of their houses.
01:33:11 And we knew there were, there was people in there that were active Taliban and we knew
01:33:14 the ICOMs were pinging.
01:33:15 When we got in there, they had hidden all the women and kids and locked them inside
01:33:18 the house because often nowadays women, the women, they would hide things on them that
01:33:24 they shouldn’t have because no one would be ever there to search them because there isn’t
01:33:28 a lot of women on the front lines.
01:33:30 But I got borrowed to go specifically search women and children.
01:33:33 So they had me and one of the little girls kind of snuck out and was kind of sitting
01:33:38 near me and I was eating something and I had these little candies, I think they’re called
01:33:43 little sweeties.
01:33:44 The British have them in the ration packs.
01:33:46 I don’t know.
01:33:47 They’re good though.
01:33:48 And she saw me eating them and so I gave them to her and then her brother came over and
01:33:51 slapped her upside the head and took them from her.
01:33:53 So then I just went over and slapped him upside the head and just pointed my gun at her while
01:33:56 she ate them all because I was like, no, you can have these.
01:34:01 I’m going to stand here and make sure you do.
01:34:03 And I remember asking, can I take a picture with her?
01:34:06 I asked the trip, can you ask her, can I take a picture with her?
01:34:10 And she was very confused and when you look at the photo, you see her face, she’s very
01:34:14 stunned.
01:34:15 She’s very stunned.
01:34:16 And it wasn’t my camera.
01:34:17 It was my officer’s camera.
01:34:18 It was a hot pink, like fluorescent pink camera.
01:34:22 So I pulled this like a huge pink thing and I’m like, let’s take a picture.
01:34:27 And so she stood there and took a picture, but then she grabbed the camera because I
01:34:30 flipped it and showed it to her and her eyes got huge and she grabbed it and she ran inside
01:34:36 and they’re like, oh, that’s gone forever.
01:34:37 Like that’s, it’s over for you.
01:34:40 And then she came out and she kind of snuck out and I went in and grabbed it and the mom
01:34:44 lifted up her burqa and was showing me that she like shaved her legs to be more Western.
01:34:50 And I was just, at that moment, I don’t know that I could have realized how much that moment
01:35:00 affected me, how much that moment would affect me later on in my life until it’s been later
01:35:08 on in my life.
01:35:09 Yeah.
01:35:10 There’s little like glimmers like that in parts of the world that are basically you’re
01:35:16 taking away everything from the populace, like freedoms and so on.
01:35:21 And when they, when you see that glimmer of humanity, like yeah, shaved legs or like using
01:35:29 technology for the first time, it’s magic or like food being presented with certain
01:35:34 kinds of foods that you’ve never tried.
01:35:36 I mean, you want to see true, like joy of discovery is you bring basically the American
01:35:45 supermarket, anything from it to most parts of the world.
01:35:49 And they, I just, I mean, I remember even, I mean, we weren’t like in poverty in Russia,
01:35:55 just poor, but just the supermarket was full of joy.
01:35:58 I thought I could just die happy in an American supermarket when I first saw it.
01:36:02 And how old were you when you came here?
01:36:04 13.
01:36:05 Did you speak English?
01:36:06 Yeah.
01:36:07 Not well, I thought I was, I never was good at languages.
01:36:11 So I, it was very much like why would I need to learn another language?
01:36:16 Okay.
01:36:17 It was that attitude is very like, doesn’t, I don’t, well, no, I think culturally in,
01:36:24 not only in America, but everywhere else in the world, it’s constantly kind of seen, it’s
01:36:30 a good thing to do to learn other languages, especially English, because it’s like, that’s
01:36:35 the language of the world.
01:36:37 And I just thought like, I don’t need English to discover the beauty of the world.
01:36:43 Like this doesn’t like, I enjoy life.
01:36:45 I enjoy soccer.
01:36:46 I enjoy, I don’t remember what else I enjoyed in life, but math, like why do I need English
01:36:52 for this?
01:36:53 So that kind of attitude got me in a lot of trouble when I came here because I couldn’t.
01:36:57 You were reluctant?
01:36:59 Yeah.
01:37:00 But also just couldn’t speak well.
01:37:01 And when you move 13 years old, it’s middle school, you get made fun of a lot.
01:37:05 You get bullied and all those kinds of things, which in retrospect is a very positive thing
01:37:10 because it makes you harder.
01:37:13 I thought being Russian would be like hard enough.
01:37:16 No, well, me, everyone is different.
01:37:18 I mean, the part of the Russian thing is kind of, I’m joking because if you know me, I admire
01:37:26 being hard.
01:37:27 I admire fighting and these kinds of things, these, what would you call them?
01:37:33 Struggle in all of its forms, martial arts, wrestling, all those kinds of things.
01:37:37 But I’m ultimately like, I’m so much about love.
01:37:39 Like I’m clearly sensitive to the world in some weird genetic way that it was important
01:37:46 for me to harden up when I came here and I was in love with people and everybody’s being
01:37:52 mean to me.
01:37:53 And it’s like, what, that, it’s a little like slap, like, oh, okay, life is not often fair.
01:38:03 And then that’s when for me personally, everybody has different journeys of hardship that are
01:38:07 much, much more difficult, like your story is much more difficult.
01:38:12 I started to read a lot.
01:38:15 Something happens, some kind of challenge where you start to think about the world,
01:38:18 start to think about yourself, that can ultimately create really interesting minds.
01:38:24 It can break some people.
01:38:25 It can create interesting minds.
01:38:27 And it’s ultimately your choice.
01:38:28 But those people are weak and then they just need to be weeded out.
01:38:30 I thought we talked about this, you know, the strong will survive, the weak will die
01:38:34 off.
01:38:35 Yeah.
01:38:36 Now you’re talking Russian to me.
01:38:38 I’m not speaking Russian.
01:38:39 I’m just giving solid life advice.
01:38:43 Just be harder and then everyone will be fine.
01:38:46 Yeah.
01:38:47 That’s your inner David Goggins coming out real quick here.
01:38:50 Okay.
01:38:51 The fob.
01:38:52 Yeah.
01:38:53 And then I was just explaining to you that the way it is run, you’re going to love this.
01:38:57 When we walked up to those tents for the first time, the people that were there before us
01:39:01 left us a noose.
01:39:05 I have a photo of it, like hanging from the tent, like at the front of the tent, like
01:39:10 welcome.
01:39:11 So you were also mentioning like the dark humor of it is a basically a funny joke.
01:39:17 Correct.
01:39:18 Yeah.
01:39:19 It was funny at first.
01:39:20 That’s pretty funny.
01:39:21 It was funny during the time.
01:39:22 Now when I look back at it, I was like, come on.
01:39:26 I mean, I get it because they had already been there.
01:39:29 And like, so afterwards I can see how it’s funny.
01:39:34 Now with like the suicide epidemic in the veteran community, now I’m like, oh, I don’t
01:39:38 post that photo.
01:39:39 Really?
01:39:40 Yeah.
01:39:41 Doesn’t that dark humor still somehow help even when you’re considering suicide?
01:39:45 Doesn’t it?
01:39:46 Some of it.
01:39:47 Somehow.
01:39:48 It makes it copable.
01:39:49 Somehow.
01:39:50 Yeah.
01:39:51 It’s like you’re not hiding it.
01:39:52 It’s like humor is one of the ways to reveal the reality of abuse, of suffering.
01:39:59 If you look at, there’s this photo that generates right around suicide prevention month, which
01:40:04 is September.
01:40:05 And it’s always like a photo of like Robin Williams and Bourdain and all of these other
01:40:10 individuals who were comedians who all took their lives and they’re all smiling.
01:40:15 And they’re like, this is the face of depression.
01:40:19 There’s a way our brains work where humor is a necessary part of survival, whether it’s
01:40:26 used for joyous things or it’s used for ways to cope through life.
01:40:31 For me in the military, humor was one of the things that helped get me through.
01:40:35 And it still does to this day, frankly, because humor, humor makes some of the horrific things
01:40:43 I say not seem so horrific.
01:40:47 And people can digest it rather than being like, you need to be locked up somewhere.
01:40:53 Yeah.
01:40:54 That’s why, I mean, one of the aspects of Russian humor, there’s a darkness to it because
01:41:01 through it reverberates all the millions of people who died.
01:41:06 And it seems like the only way to make sense of it is to joke about it.
01:41:10 I still love it.
01:41:11 Because if you don’t, it’ll break you.
01:41:13 Something like that.
01:41:14 Or also humor just seems to be the highest form of us humans and the human experience.
01:41:22 It just seems, it seems to somehow accumulate the full thing, the absurdity of it, the unfairness
01:41:28 of it, because like ultimately all the suffering is like, it’s all just apes fighting for power
01:41:35 and love and somehow torturing each other in the process.
01:41:40 Hello podcast listener, Lex here.
01:41:42 Quick intermission to say that some of the names in the following story have been silenced
01:41:46 out to protect their privacy.
01:41:49 The story of, and witnessing, I think your first, somebody you met, somebody you saw,
01:42:01 somebody you began to be close with, his life, him dying, can you tell the story of him dying?
01:42:12 Sure.
01:42:13 That’s no problem.
01:42:14 I will tell you that I am going to leave some of the names out of the people because they
01:42:20 have reached out and asked that I do such.
01:42:24 I’ve also been informed of other things I forgot that happened during the thing that
01:42:28 were way worse than I thought.
01:42:30 So I’ll try to add those in because that’s new information to me because my brain has
01:42:34 blocked it out.
01:42:35 But I’ve been told, which is good because it’s better detail.
01:42:39 So we were doing a movement that morning and we were going from compound to compound.
01:42:47 I was never told what we were doing.
01:42:49 I knew what my job was.
01:42:51 I didn’t know the operational overview.
01:42:53 I didn’t know who we were looking for.
01:42:56 I wasn’t there for that.
01:42:58 My job was specifically to look after the women and children and to provide support
01:43:03 if need be.
01:43:05 And when you have certain people, so i.e. the bomb dog handler and the bomb dog, and
01:43:11 then you have the medics and then you have a female searcher, there’s only one of those
01:43:16 in each unit or if there’s even one in each unit.
01:43:20 I got passed between units so that they could have access to me for both.
01:43:26 And we were kind of sitting and we were waiting for the all clear to move.
01:43:30 And at that time, the compound wall I was leaning up against, I had my back up against.
01:43:37 I wasn’t facing the direct direction where it actually blew up.
01:43:42 I had my back to it and I had happened to turn and look to the left.
01:43:46 And on the right hand side across the road of where we were leaned up against was another
01:43:52 compound two stories high, people inside, a sniper on the roof and a spotter.
01:43:59 There was a handful of us on this wall and in front of me, there was a road.
01:44:07 The road went straight.
01:44:09 That compounds here.
01:44:10 There’s another road here on the right hand side in front of it.
01:44:13 And then this road went along here and this was a wide open space.
01:44:17 Just a huge.
01:44:20 We hate those.
01:44:21 You hate those because it’s too much space.
01:44:23 It’s too easy.
01:44:24 It’s like fish in a barrel.
01:44:26 You don’t want to be in that field.
01:44:29 Because there’s too much line of sight line of sight.
01:44:32 Could be IEDs.
01:44:33 It could be.
01:44:34 It could be.
01:44:35 It could be anything.
01:44:36 And so when I was leaning up against the wall, we had sent a couple of people ahead to go
01:44:45 and clear the road so that we could all go along it and then clear the gray pup off to
01:44:50 the left hand side.
01:44:52 We are doing that because they use those locations to put IEDs so that when you’re going to search
01:44:57 it, it’s just it’s a better chance of you blowing into a million pieces, essentially
01:45:03 why they love that.
01:45:04 Put bombs in small places, send people into small places.
01:45:07 Small places go boom, they paint the walls.
01:45:10 So we were just kind of sitting and waiting.
01:45:13 And then I turned, I happened to turn, I was looking in that direction and I heard the
01:45:17 ground shake before I even realized what I was seeing with my own eyes.
01:45:22 The ground shook and I saw a big piece of a body, I think it was the torso, just kind
01:45:33 of fly through the air and land into the field.
01:45:37 And as soon as that happened, all hell broke loose.
01:45:40 It was like the, they were sitting and watching and waiting and they do that.
01:45:44 And I say they, I mean the Taliban, they do that.
01:45:47 They love that because then they can record it for propaganda and they can use it against
01:45:51 us and they just love being able to take our people out.
01:45:55 And we had the interpreter sitting beside me and he had the ICOM radio on.
01:45:59 And as soon as the blast went off, I heard just the scream of, I heard it.
01:46:06 And I knew what that meant, but I couldn’t, I didn’t understand what was about to happen.
01:46:13 I couldn’t, I couldn’t wrap my brain around what was about to happen because I had never
01:46:20 been outside the wire.
01:46:23 And people are like, people say to me now, they’re like, no, no, there’s no way that
01:46:29 shit’s true.
01:46:30 There’s no way that she was involved in that and then that, and then in that, and then
01:46:33 in that.
01:46:34 Well, let me explain.
01:46:35 I was one person.
01:46:37 I was being passed around to units.
01:46:42 I was with a ton of different people.
01:46:46 I had no comms and I was just being told where to go.
01:46:52 And I just happened to be like a shit hit the fan magnet, it felt like.
01:46:57 And then I found out later it was not just me, it was all of us were getting it.
01:47:02 So that made me feel better because then I was like, well, I have a lot of survivor’s
01:47:05 guilt.
01:47:06 That’s like a thing that’s still stuck with me.
01:47:08 I’ve worked through a lot of shit, but survivor’s guilt, that’s a big one for me.
01:47:13 And food is a big one for me and my food skin on food.
01:47:21 So like chicken with skin on it, just because of the biology of death, just when you hold
01:47:28 people’s bodies in your hands with no gloves on, you know what that feels like when you
01:47:33 touch raw meat again, it’s the same thing.
01:47:37 That’s what that feels like when, when it’s a dying or dead body.
01:47:40 Well, my friend was blown into a million pieces, so I just had pieces of him.
01:47:45 So there was no, there was no differentiator of like, this was his thigh, or this was his
01:47:54 torso, or there was like, there was none of that.
01:47:58 There’s only one instance with the boot, but at that point we had been in some firefights,
01:48:07 and we had been taking some rounds, but it was more like take around, you know, get hit
01:48:13 and then we duck into a compound and we would set up and then we’d be firing.
01:48:17 I wasn’t, I wasn’t really involved in a lot of the firefights until after this.
01:48:21 After that, the rest of the week, I was like, I was angry and I wanted them all to go.
01:48:25 And I wanted to be in every position to take them out myself.
01:48:28 So I put myself in every position.
01:48:30 So I made sure I was on the roof.
01:48:31 I made sure I was there.
01:48:33 I made sure, Hey, you need something, I’ll fucking run it.
01:48:35 I don’t care if I die anymore, because as soon as that happened, my light switch went
01:48:38 off.
01:48:39 It didn’t matter anymore to me.
01:48:40 Can you go through what happens?
01:48:42 Yeah.
01:48:43 So are you hearing the, these screams?
01:48:46 Yeah.
01:48:47 So the ID went off and what had happened was they put an ID inside of a grape hut and the
01:48:54 grape hut has rectangular wall, rectangular holes in the wall.
01:48:58 And there’s just like one door and it’s this tall mud hut with just all these like holes
01:49:03 in it.
01:49:05 And they had put an ID underneath a pile of sticks and had a metal detector, the Brits
01:49:11 carry them.
01:49:12 I’ve never seen, I think other countries have them, but I’ve only ever seen them use it.
01:49:15 And that’s how we were kind of detecting if there was an ID, we must’ve hit it, the sticks
01:49:20 or something and it set it off.
01:49:22 And it just, it was over.
01:49:24 There’s no way he felt anything.
01:49:25 And then there was another guy at the door bent down on one knee and he was facing and
01:49:30 kind of watching for, and then a blast hit him on this side.
01:49:35 And so it took him out and pulled his kid off, pulled his helmet off, pulled everything
01:49:38 off, fucked him all up.
01:49:40 Big time.
01:49:41 This is one ID.
01:49:43 Yeah.
01:49:44 But it was in a contained area and he was in the doorway, up and out.
01:49:50 Can you explain what an ID is and how does it work?
01:49:54 I can do my best.
01:49:55 They’re improvised explosive devices.
01:49:57 They can be used pretty much out of anything to make anything.
01:50:00 So garbage, when we got to Afghanistan, they did the ID meeting with us.
01:50:05 They’re like, these are what we’re finding that they would show us diffused IDs.
01:50:09 So they would see those big blue drums filled with gasoline buried in the ground.
01:50:14 You would see a wire, it would go to a pressure plate.
01:50:16 You hit the pressure plate, that would hit that and it would go.
01:50:20 You would see IDs.
01:50:21 Some of them were ridiculous.
01:50:24 The engineering that went into some of these was hilarious because they were thinking,
01:50:29 they were thinking to use everything they could.
01:50:31 There was a cigarette pack they had used.
01:50:34 They lined the inside with tinfoil and when you stepped on the tinfoil, it had a piece
01:50:38 of wire and it was enough of a spark to set off a line of batteries that we had thrown
01:50:42 out that were all dead.
01:50:43 When you fuse them all together, there was enough juice to make it go.
01:50:47 Then they would attach that to like, like phosphorus or gasoline or whatever they could
01:50:51 that would make a big boom.
01:50:53 They would use, yeah, that’s why you never kick garbage on the ground.
01:50:57 You’ll never see me kick something on the ground.
01:50:59 You’ll see me walk around it always.
01:51:01 If I ever see a pile of rocks or something that looks like it shouldn’t be there, I won’t
01:51:05 walk near it.
01:51:07 Even now, because they use that pile of rocks to remind people there’s something there.
01:51:12 We don’t know what that means, but we know that something’s there.
01:51:14 And very often they would use anything, garbage, wires.
01:51:20 We were very, we had to burn everything for a reason.
01:51:24 It’s so terrifying to not, for the source of death to be like little parts of the environment
01:51:32 and then people that don’t look like that.
01:51:36 They’re not dressed as soldiers, like civilians and like regular, because then you, when you
01:51:42 have to come back or even there is you’re just surrounded by danger and then you distrust
01:51:48 everything essentially.
01:51:49 That’s the problem and that’s why you have such PTSD issues with the soldiers we have
01:51:54 now because you’re in the environment in which it’s very similar.
01:52:02 So there’s this one IED.
01:52:03 So this one IED, I still don’t know what it was, went off, body flew, the guy at the door,
01:52:12 he kicked out.
01:52:13 He was all broken and bleeding and a mess.
01:52:19 At that point, the radio started going crazy.
01:52:21 I could hear the guys yelling and screaming, trying to figure it out and then you could
01:52:25 hear the numbers being called.
01:52:27 KIA number, number, number, number.
01:52:29 I don’t know anybody’s service number.
01:52:31 I don’t know what’s going on.
01:52:33 Next thing you know, mortar rounds start coming down and live fire starts happening and I’m
01:52:39 like, holy fuck, things are popping off.
01:52:42 And I remember just looking at and being like, we need to go, we need to go now.
01:52:46 And I just got this like, I was like, we’re going and they’re like, hold on Burns and
01:52:52 I’m like, we’re fucking going.
01:52:53 I wasn’t dealing with it well and they’re like, all right, all right, go, go, go, go.
01:52:58 So we went and I helped out with that other individual, kind of held him down, started
01:53:08 doing medic work on him and he just kept saying, where’s, where’s, where’s, he was in such
01:53:13 a state of shock.
01:53:14 I’ve seen somebody’s eyeballs so big in my life.
01:53:16 She’s like, where’s, where’s, where’s, he’s good buddy, he’s good, he’s good.
01:53:21 Picture like a super thick Scottish accent though, because these guys were just, and
01:53:26 when they talk fast, it’s even worse.
01:53:29 And then so I ran over and we jumped down into the ditch along the side of the road
01:53:33 because the road hadn’t been cleared and we’re running through these tall, they look like
01:53:39 cannabis plants, but they’re not, but it just very thick bush and I felt like I was running
01:53:46 in slow motion.
01:53:47 So if you picture one of your video games where like the tunnel vision and you’re just,
01:53:50 you can hear your breathing is like that and you’re running and you can’t move fast enough
01:53:56 and you’re like trying to get there and we hit the road and the rounds are coming down
01:54:03 and mortars are coming down and they’re like, okay, on three run.
01:54:06 So we run on three and we run into the compound, I mean, into the great putt.
01:54:11 And I remember looking around and very seriously going, where is he?
01:54:17 Just genuinely asking, I think it was been messaging me and he’s been incredible.
01:54:23 He’s one of the best soldiers I’ve ever served with.
01:54:26 He was a higher up, so he was running part of this.
01:54:29 He’s messaged me and he was giving me some information and he’s like, I was in there
01:54:33 with you and he goes, I remember cause you handed me the boot and cause I walked over
01:54:38 and I, all the rounds were like, we were being shot at, mortars were coming down, but it
01:54:42 was this slow motion and I remember walking over to the hole in the ground and seeing
01:54:50 his boot in the ground, but it was, his leg was still hanging, like just below his knee
01:54:57 was still in it, but the boot was perfectly laced up, like the boot was fine.
01:55:03 And I just, I held it and I turned and I looked at the guys and I was like, we could reuse
01:55:09 the boot.
01:55:13 Now that wasn’t even, what is, what is that?
01:55:17 Was that, was that actually an intelligent attempt at humor or was it some kind of deeply
01:55:25 lost?
01:55:26 Like you were completely just lost.
01:55:27 I think my brain broke.
01:55:29 I think my, that’s the moment I call my light switch went off.
01:55:35 Did you understand that he was dead at that point?
01:55:37 Like intellectually, you were just something, it just broke.
01:55:45 No emotion.
01:55:46 Like it just broke.
01:55:47 It just shattered.
01:55:48 It shattered.
01:55:49 I felt it happen.
01:55:50 Felt.
01:55:51 I didn’t feel, I didn’t feel anything.
01:56:06 It just broke.
01:56:08 And at that moment, because later there’s some anger almost at that moment, none of
01:56:15 that.
01:56:16 I couldn’t comprehend what happened.
01:56:17 I knew he wasn’t there anymore because they looked at me and said, what’s here is here.
01:56:23 Start grabbing pieces.
01:56:24 We need to fucking move.
01:56:26 And so I handed the boot over, they took it and then I started just grabbing anything
01:56:32 out of the walls because those little rectangular just had flesh hanging from it.
01:56:38 And I didn’t have my gloves on because I only used them to search.
01:56:42 So you want to bring everything back.
01:56:48 This is what, even if they’re dead, do you want to save, save those you served with?
01:56:55 Yeah.
01:56:56 Because they deserve that.
01:56:57 They don’t deserve to have a piece of them drug behind a truck for propaganda.
01:57:00 It’s not, it’s not fair.
01:57:02 What are the others?
01:57:03 I mean, was there just a focus on mission or was there a panic?
01:57:07 No panic with these guys.
01:57:08 These guys were the most switched on motherfuckers I’ve ever seen in my life.
01:57:12 They, we started grabbing and remind me, he said, you know, you, uh, that’s not, he goes,
01:57:19 when people say that’s the worst part of your day, that wasn’t even the worst part of your
01:57:21 day.
01:57:22 Do you remember when you handed me the bag of intestines?
01:57:27 No.
01:57:29 No, I do though.
01:57:34 Thank you for that.
01:57:36 So there’s parts you don’t even, they’re just not.
01:57:39 They don’t register.
01:57:42 Because I had some people contact me and be like, you didn’t tell it right.
01:57:45 And war is subjective and war is from your perspective and war is messy and horrific
01:57:51 and war is graphic and violent and painful.
01:58:03 Your brain remembers what it wants to remember and your brain allows you to remember what
01:58:07 it allows you to remember and there’s reasons that you don’t remember everything.
01:58:12 And so we were getting, we were really getting hit.
01:58:17 We were getting, it was bad.
01:58:19 And some of the guys, machine gunners had come up to do cover fire and I know, uh, we
01:58:25 were calling in for air support to come pick up the guys, uh, because they had to go.
01:58:32 And we, we just collected everything we could, but I did remember screaming like, we didn’t
01:58:39 get them all.
01:58:40 We didn’t get them all.
01:58:41 There’s no way we got them all.
01:58:42 We did not fucking get them all.
01:58:43 And I remember one of the guys looking at me being like, we got them, we got them.
01:58:45 I’m like, we didn’t fucking get them.
01:58:46 We didn’t get them.
01:58:47 Like, no, we got them.
01:58:48 And I couldn’t say it enough.
01:58:50 And so I grabbed as much as I could.
01:58:54 I, I, I, um, I slung one of their weapons and it was just a twisted heap and I had his
01:59:00 helmet and someone else’s helmet in my arm.
01:59:03 And then I had, um, my weapon in front of me and I was carrying it.
01:59:10 And then we, we piled everything we had onto a stretcher.
01:59:13 Those things are super fucking flimsy anyway.
01:59:16 And there was a couple of guys in front of us and there were a couple behind me and I
01:59:20 was kind of in the middle and we, we said, okay, we’re just gonna have to run.
01:59:24 We’re gonna have to fucking run the road.
01:59:25 We’re gonna have to have to run it.
01:59:26 It was a chance.
01:59:27 We ran it and that was the closest, well, that was I guess not the closest, but it felt
01:59:32 like it was the closest I could hear the, the whiz of the rounds going by me.
01:59:38 It’s a weird noise when they’re coming at you than when you’re, they’re leaving you.
01:59:43 And so they, that slowed everything down for me.
01:59:47 And then one of the guys accidentally dropped the edge of the stretcher and everything fell
01:59:51 off into the ditch and then we had to go back down and get it back up.
01:59:56 And then so we kept running and we finally got back into the compound that that sniper
02:00:00 was sitting off on the right hand side and we got all in there.
02:00:05 And I know the, I think said there was two flights.
02:00:09 I only thought there was one, but apparently there was two flights.
02:00:12 So went on one, his body went on one.
02:00:15 And then I think, I think he said went on the other and and then they took off.
02:00:21 And then when they leave though, they rain hell down on anything they can see on the
02:00:25 ground.
02:00:26 And that is a beautiful sight because they had mortar rounds coming down and it just,
02:00:30 it was getting really, really bad.
02:00:33 And then as soon as the black ox took off, all of a sudden it just stopped and went quiet,
02:00:41 like deafening quiet.
02:00:44 And we were sitting inside the compound and I, one of the medics looked at me and you
02:00:48 could see, and I still do it now and I, I’m working on not doing it, but I do it when
02:00:52 I get really overwhelmed.
02:00:55 Because I didn’t have any gloves on, I had blood all over my hands and just like body
02:01:00 and stuff.
02:01:01 So he came over and he just gave me like sanitizer and I started rubbing.
02:01:05 And so I rub, I do this when I’m stressed, I’ll rub my hands.
02:01:11 And I still can’t, I still can’t do, I still can’t eat food with skin on it.
02:01:17 And I can’t like, like salmon and stuff, like I can’t, anything with skin, I can’t touch
02:01:22 it.
02:01:23 And I’m making meat at home, like for my husband and my son, like I have like meat gloves and
02:01:28 then I have like a fork and a knife and I’m like cutting it.
02:01:31 Like I never touch it, I can’t touch it.
02:01:34 So there’s something almost like the texture of the biology of a human flesh that just,
02:01:43 that’s at the level of, that’s the level of your trauma.
02:01:47 Yeah.
02:01:48 And it’s been, I mean, it’s 2021, this was in 09.
02:01:51 And I’ve worked on this, like, and I mean, I’ve been in like treatment religiously,
02:01:57 just to be able to keep me alive for this decade.
02:02:00 And so it’s not like, it’s like, oh, I’ve never, you never even tried to get better.
02:02:04 It’s like, I never really used to leave my house.
02:02:06 I used to call people that looked like that horrific names in public.
02:02:10 I used to want to kill people on a regular basis.
02:02:13 I’m a fairly happy individual now.
02:02:16 What about, so you’re, you’re talking about sort of skin and parts and, but there’s also
02:02:24 just the fact that we’re mortal and there’s somebody close to you who dies.
02:02:31 So you watch, walk up and then never come back out again?
02:02:34 Yeah.
02:02:35 It’s like you’re facing mortality in a very real way.
02:02:38 And if, in a, in a way that’s not the same as somebody dying from cancer in a hospital,
02:02:44 so it has echoes of that because that’s also absurd.
02:02:48 And like, it doesn’t feel like there’s justice to it in any kind of way, but it’s so sudden.
02:02:55 Like, have you been able to make sense of that, of your feelings about it?
02:03:03 Like how do you feel about it or, or is everything just shrouded in this like trauma that you’re
02:03:11 not able to just feel for the loss of a human being, like mourn the loss of a human being?
02:03:19 I think I had, when he, when I realized he wasn’t there, when I realized that he, um,
02:03:28 that was the, I, that was what was left of him, I found out afterwards there was other
02:03:33 parts that were outside and went back.
02:03:37 I think, I think he said went back and they got, they ended up getting the rest of him.
02:03:43 So that made me happy because I just found this out this week.
02:03:47 Uh, so that, that means, so that means you have a feeling like you still feel like parts
02:03:54 of them were left behind.
02:03:56 Yeah.
02:03:57 On the ramp ceremony, when I lost my mind, literally I, I lost my mind and I was screaming
02:04:07 that he wasn’t all in there.
02:04:10 I’m happy now knowing that he was, but I held onto that for 10 years.
02:04:18 Yeah.
02:04:19 This, um, yeah, the sandbags, like, like it’s the bulk of the weight is, is not from human
02:04:28 flesh.
02:04:29 Yeah.
02:04:30 He was a young kid too.
02:04:32 It was, I think it was his first deployment as well.
02:04:35 Like he was, he was a young kid and he was just, just going to clear the road for the
02:04:42 rest of us.
02:04:43 Right.
02:04:44 Like not like, you know, you’re in war and you know that you’re outside the wire and
02:04:48 you know, things could happen.
02:04:50 You understand that to the extent you can understand that when it’s happening, it’s
02:04:57 something very different.
02:04:59 Also maybe you can correct me, but, um, there’s something much more like brutal about an IED.
02:05:07 It’s proficuous.
02:05:09 Versus like a bullet, cause a bullet, you still watching somebody close to you die from
02:05:15 a bullet, you still get to the basic humanity.
02:05:20 Like so IED basically converted a human being into sort of parts by biological parts.
02:05:26 A cheeseburger.
02:05:28 Versus, yeah, I mean, I don’t, that’s, that’s tough.
02:05:35 That’s tough because that’s like, um, because it’s hard for you to remember them as a human.
02:05:43 You remember them as parts.
02:05:45 For me, that’s how I remember him.
02:05:48 I would like to, I have a picture that I post every year about him.
02:05:52 I see that, but I don’t put two and two together.
02:06:00 Does that make sense?
02:06:01 Yeah, no, it does.
02:06:03 So I, even I listening to your story and, you know, um, thank you for sharing it first
02:06:08 of all, but, um, it’s not my, it’s, well, I’m just the one to tell it.
02:06:12 I was just involved one, one set of eyes on this particular human being.
02:06:19 But even I get angry.
02:06:20 I can’t tell if it’s exhaustion or anger.
02:06:24 I’m sorry.
02:06:25 I look always exhausted.
02:06:26 Oh, that’s okay.
02:06:27 You’re, you’re into robotics.
02:06:28 Isn’t that like your guys’s thing?
02:06:29 You guys are just always working on, I think because I feel so much for the world.
02:06:35 I just don’t do, we were talking about resting bitch face earlier.
02:06:39 I just don’t feel the need to maintain, um, all the effort of the musculature for presenting
02:06:45 myself to you visually.
02:06:46 It’s exhausting.
02:06:47 It’s exhausting.
02:06:48 So I just focus on the feeling.
02:06:49 No way.
02:06:50 Face show, whatever the hell it shows.
02:06:52 Fair enough.
02:06:53 Okay.
02:06:54 Was there anger?
02:06:56 Was there hate?
02:06:57 Yeah.
02:06:58 Can you just talk to your feelings of what you remember?
02:07:02 Yeah.
02:07:03 So after that operation with the British, I went back to the Canadians and I didn’t
02:07:11 go back as even remotely close to who I was when I left.
02:07:16 And that was really troublesome for a lot of people around me because the level of anger
02:07:22 and hate that came out of me was palpable when I just walked by, um, I got shockingly
02:07:29 quiet and you understand how you’re learning how to be terrified if you are quiet.
02:07:36 And I don’t know if hate and anger do that justice.
02:07:41 I don’t know another word, but I don’t think those two words do it justice to the extent
02:07:47 that I was feeling like I got to a point when I got attacked by a woman, um, with some scissors,
02:07:54 like the idea crossed my mind, like I could boot stomp her to death and not feel anything
02:07:59 about it in front of her, all of her family and her kids.
02:08:01 Was it more like just not recognizing the basic humanity or was it legit hatred?
02:08:06 No, it was legit hatred, but also I no longer saw those people as humans.
02:08:13 It took one event.
02:08:14 And when that happened, the rest of the operation that was echoed in my, in the way I was to
02:08:20 those people.
02:08:21 But to what level can you see those people as human?
02:08:26 So this is where, well, like this is where Jaco shut down, um, I still think I’m right.
02:08:36 Um, there’s a dire straight song called, uh, brothers in arms and, um, actually anyway,
02:08:45 we’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms.
02:08:48 And I brought that up to Jaco because it’s humans on both sides, but he said, not in
02:08:58 Iraq like to him, he’s like, no, that’s the enemy.
02:09:04 These are people who use the civilians.
02:09:07 They rape, they torture, they they’ll do anything.
02:09:12 And they put evil onto the world.
02:09:14 And then it’s like, so they’re, they’re stood on at that moment.
02:09:18 Like the, these two were humans and it’s politicians waging war and it’s, it’s kids on both sides.
02:09:26 But then Jaco was like, no, he’s not wrong.
02:09:31 So which can you carry both things with you as a soldier?
02:09:36 I think when I was a soldier, I could only carry one thing with me.
02:09:40 I think my perspective has changed drastically, but not because I’ve lost the reality that
02:09:48 they are the enemy, but I’ve, I’ve gained my humanity back again.
02:09:54 And that’s what I lost when I was there.
02:09:55 I lost all humanity.
02:09:57 I lost all hope for humanity.
02:09:59 He’s not wrong when he says the Taliban or like when he was in Iraq, but for me, the
02:10:07 Taliban are evil.
02:10:08 I still hold a spot of hatred for them that could set this building on fire.
02:10:15 You don’t, I don’t know that anybody can fully understand that when you watch what they do
02:10:20 to women and do kids and they do it in the name of God, they are the enemy.
02:10:28 They are less than, they don’t exist.
02:10:32 They’re barely worth the bullets we put into them.
02:10:36 But then because they use civilians, so like then everybody becomes the enemy.
02:10:45 And how are you supposed to make sense of that?
02:10:47 Like what you get, but here, Lex, you can’t make sense of it.
02:10:50 This is why they’ve done a really good job of blending into the civilian population.
02:10:54 They’ve done it intentionally.
02:10:55 They’ve done it on purpose.
02:10:57 So they’re brilliant.
02:10:59 This is why you guys couldn’t beat them.
02:11:01 This is why we couldn’t fucking beat them.
02:11:03 They use their people so effectively.
02:11:07 They have no shame in that.
02:11:08 They have no issue with that.
02:11:10 They take no qualms with wiping a kid off the face of the earth.
02:11:14 If it means they can get close enough to a soldier to throw a fucking bomb into their
02:11:18 tank.
02:11:20 This is why they’re affected.
02:11:22 How do you beat them then?
02:11:23 There’s this, there’s no winning that you just basically do policeman type work or you
02:11:30 do your best.
02:11:31 I mean, that’s one way.
02:11:33 So the other is you come from an artillery background.
02:11:38 A fucking hellfire missile hit the whole place off the face of the earth.
02:11:42 You can’t beat radicalism like that right now.
02:11:45 The problem is, is we’ve, we’ve let it go unchecked.
02:11:48 We had it kind of in check for 20 years.
02:11:52 We just shot ourselves in the foot, the chest and the face.
02:11:56 So the problem with force is it creates longterm hate because young kids and propaganda and
02:12:07 like propaganda works.
02:12:09 So you, you see your father, your brother die because of a bomb.
02:12:14 It’s very easy to convince that person that they died because of evil Americans and tell
02:12:19 whatever story you want about America or Canada, Russia.
02:12:22 That’s the biggest problem.
02:12:23 So it seems like there gotta be better solutions because I mean, I talk about love, but it’s,
02:12:30 it’s honestly basically figuring out sneaky ways of empowering women, of educating people
02:12:36 of like, and like, and not in a cheesy way, but like in the same level of like mass warfare,
02:12:48 but with love.
02:12:49 You’re talking about DARPA budgets, DOD budgets, but like do that where you educate and empower
02:12:56 women by force.
02:12:58 And it, you know, they want to learn, right?
02:13:01 I mean, you’re not like forcing anybody, you’re setting them free.
02:13:05 That’s exactly it.
02:13:06 Like combat flip flops does this.
02:13:07 They do this.
02:13:08 They give literacy.
02:13:10 They teach girls to read nothing else to read because as soon as you can read, you know
02:13:15 what that happens.
02:13:16 You know what happens then.
02:13:18 What’s combat flip flops?
02:13:19 That’s the scarf right there.
02:13:20 That’s made in Afghanistan.
02:13:23 So when you buy something from them, the proceeds go to literacy in Afghanistan for girls.
02:13:28 They’ve given literacy to 800 girls over there.
02:13:30 Yeah.
02:13:31 They’re really cool.
02:13:32 Uh, Griff owns the one, he was an army ranger and his buddy, but Lee, I think is his name.
02:13:37 They were on Shark Tank a long time ago, but they, um, they do shoes and I think they’re
02:13:41 called Schmongs.
02:13:42 I don’t know how to say it properly.
02:13:44 Built in Afghanistan.
02:13:45 Yes.
02:13:46 And then the proceeds go back there.
02:13:48 They do great work for literacy and you know, as well as anyone, if you can teach someone
02:13:54 to read good color, dark, like your soul lacks matches on the inside, just on the inside.
02:14:01 All right.
02:14:02 The outside is just the, it’s just the suit.
02:14:06 I feel like you think that’s your suit of armor, but I feel like it’s, it’s there.
02:14:10 See what were you saying?
02:14:11 Sorry, what were you saying?
02:14:12 I was saying go on.
02:14:13 I will allow this.
02:14:14 All right, I think there is room if you teach education.
02:14:20 The problem is we’ve taken a massive step backwards.
02:14:24 I know that the Taliban have just instituted, uh, this week honor killings will be back.
02:14:30 Stonings are back and, um, uh, dismemberment as well.
02:14:35 Holly McKay is the reporter that’s been reporting that from the ground.
02:14:37 She’s still there.
02:14:39 The way to pull people, in my opinion, out of something like that is through education.
02:14:45 Well we just took all of that away, which is pretty horrific in my opinion because you’ve
02:14:51 taught over 20 years.
02:14:54 You’re perfectly right, Lex.
02:14:55 When you say that hate and violence won’t work, it won’t because you see dad get killed
02:15:01 on the battlefield.
02:15:02 Well that 14 year old little boy is going to pick up an AK 47 and go avenge dad’s death.
02:15:06 That’s just the way it’s going to be.
02:15:07 Well, we think about it, you were there for 20 years.
02:15:10 There’s a couple of generations in there.
02:15:11 There’s another generation that’s either grown up in this or has seen enough of this.
02:15:16 So there are always going to be a subset that think that we’re the enemy and fair.
02:15:22 We haven’t done always the greatest things, but the one thing that we have done that I
02:15:25 did participate in was giving literacy, giving girls an opportunity, letting them know that
02:15:31 you aren’t second class citizens.
02:15:33 You can do things too.
02:15:35 And that’s why we have to look at war differently.
02:15:40 There’s times for violence.
02:15:42 Oh, there is time for violence and there is time for missiles and there is time for detainees
02:15:50 and there’s times for bagging tags and double tops of the fucking face.
02:15:54 There’s times for all of that, but there needs to be more time to educate.
02:15:59 The problem is you can’t educate if you’re in a country where their culture doesn’t believe
02:16:04 in that.
02:16:05 There’s so many different things that you, it’s an almost an impossible situation.
02:16:12 When you look at the 20 years in Afghanistan and we just pulled out, there’s a sudden pull
02:16:17 out of troops.
02:16:18 What do you think about those 20 years?
02:16:21 Let me ask hard question, which is, was it worth it going into Afghanistan?
02:16:31 And you’re sort of, you’re one person.
02:16:33 My limited capacity.
02:16:35 You have experienced specific set of extremely difficult things.
02:16:41 You’ve met a lot of humans.
02:16:44 You understand certain aspects of the way this war is carried out.
02:16:47 But if you zoomed out at the big story, like you’re, you like history too.
02:16:52 When you think of the history, a hundred years from now, we look at the invasion of Afghanistan.
02:16:59 I don’t even think you need to go far that back to know that it was, we went in on false
02:17:04 pretenses.
02:17:06 We did.
02:17:07 That’s not, that’s not a good start.
02:17:10 What’s that saying?
02:17:11 Future behavior is a good, was it past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior.
02:17:18 So I struggle with that because when I first found out that the pullout was going to happen,
02:17:24 I got really angry because my government skated the whole situation because he’s having a
02:17:33 snap.
02:17:34 He’s having a snap election.
02:17:35 It’s happening on the 20th.
02:17:38 So that was beautifully planned by my government to hold no accountability, zero accountability.
02:17:46 And the media won’t talk about it.
02:17:49 They reached out to me to do an interview about Afghanistan.
02:17:51 And then I told them what was going on after I talked to my people that were on the ground
02:17:54 and then they canceled the interview.
02:17:56 When you say my government, is America any better at this, like it feels like there’s
02:18:01 no accountability.
02:18:02 No, no.
02:18:03 The government, no, no, the American government is a dumpster fire.
02:18:08 I’m not saying, I’m not saying that, but what I am saying is at least they sent people to
02:18:16 pull people or pull some people.
02:18:20 We sent no one to pull anyone.
02:18:24 And I know for a fact, because I helped move a family, I was fortunate enough to be given
02:18:28 an opportunity to help move a high value nine person family out of that country that worked
02:18:33 in the government, that worked in prosecuting the Taliban, that were on the top of the list.
02:18:38 I learned really quickly the ins and outs of things and I’m really disgusted by it.
02:18:42 I learned that Canada had the one email address that all Canadian Afghani visa holders were
02:18:48 supposed to email, Ottawa put two people on that email address.
02:18:54 That’s confirmed.
02:18:56 Canada put no more than 70 people on the ground for that pullout and they were not allowed
02:18:59 to leave the airport and they left well before the pullout date.
02:19:02 They left on the Thursday before the Tuesday that was the 31st.
02:19:07 There were high value Canadian visa holders that are still in that country that are on
02:19:11 the top of the kill list.
02:19:12 Canada’s not doing anything about it.
02:19:17 I’m disgusted in the way my government has acted because number one, there’s an active
02:19:21 lawsuit with veterans against the Supreme Court of Canada right now.
02:19:27 We are leaving our vets and our Canadians stranded over there and we are leaving the
02:19:33 vets that have been maimed by this war in Canada.
02:19:38 They’re turned down for everything.
02:19:39 I’ve been turned down for hearing loss.
02:19:40 They’re saying it’s not military related.
02:19:42 They have PIs follow me.
02:19:45 This is normal behavior.
02:19:47 There’s a veteran named Brock who was told by Trudeau in a meeting that after he lost
02:19:52 his leg, he was just trying to get a new prosthetic because it was just killing him.
02:19:57 Trudeau stood up in a meeting and said, you’re just asking for too much.
02:20:00 Less than six months later, he gave $10.4 million to an Afghan terrorist that was in
02:20:05 the Canadian prison system.
02:20:07 He won and got 10.4 of our million taxpayer dollars.
02:20:11 I don’t know that American government’s any better, but what I do know is that the absolute
02:20:16 fucking machines of human beings that stepped outside of the chain of command to pull my
02:20:21 family out for me, I know they were there.
02:20:25 The British that stayed on the ground that I contacted to literally confirm my biometric
02:20:30 data and passports to get that family moved, they weren’t there.
02:20:33 That family would still be there.
02:20:35 That three year old that got the shit kicked out of him by the Taliban that I was trying
02:20:38 to exfil, Canada left him.
02:20:44 What is it about politicians and governments not willing to do their job?
02:20:52 Well, not willing to do a big part of the job, which is you send people to war, these
02:21:03 are heroes, and then you should spend most of the time repaying the debts to those, right?
02:21:12 What is it about, why can’t we?
02:21:15 Because we’re disposable numbers, and we hire them out of high school when they’re stupid
02:21:20 enough to not understand what they’re going to get themselves into, and then we blame
02:21:25 it on themselves for making that decision by volunteering.
02:21:27 Yeah, but I mean, this still doesn’t make sense to me.
02:21:32 No, it’s a cop out.
02:21:33 I mean, Trudeau, I feel like he is a good human being that wants to do good for, I mean,
02:21:39 I tend to, I want to believe that leaders want to do good by the heroes of this world,
02:21:45 and it doesn’t, like, I don’t understand the system of delusion you have to live in to
02:21:53 not understand who the heroes are.
02:21:55 Like, I refuse to believe Trudeau is somehow a bad person.
02:21:58 You haven’t met him though, have you?
02:21:59 I don’t, actually.
02:22:00 I’m speaking about Trudeau without knowing, but I mean, in general, think that way about
02:22:06 leaders.
02:22:07 Like, they surround themselves by people who delude them, who like, they’re yes people,
02:22:12 yes people that lead them into a kind of reality that becomes detached from actual reality.
02:22:18 And so they misunderstand the priorities of this world.
02:22:21 They think maybe some kind of special interest, they focus on that versus like the humans.
02:22:28 If you look back, was there a way we could have done something better in Afghanistan,
02:22:34 assuming we do the invasion?
02:22:36 Also, is it ultimately about taking care of the veterans, like, investing more money in
02:22:44 the education of women and liberating people who are suffering injustice in those parts
02:22:53 of the world?
02:22:54 Like, what’s a better way to do it?
02:22:56 And one other aspect is, on the US side, paid over $6 trillion for the wars in the Middle
02:23:02 East since 9 11, so the financial side as well.
02:23:06 Is there something you can comment on things we could have done better?
02:23:11 That’s a loaded question because you’re talking to someone who had no hand in what happened
02:23:16 other than do this and do that.
02:23:18 So I can go from my perspective, which is there was probably plenty of things that we
02:23:22 could have been doing better.
02:23:24 I think there was a lack of leadership from the get go.
02:23:27 I think the preparation that the Canadian military gave me was nowhere sufficient for
02:23:34 a deployment of that level.
02:23:37 Mind you, things happen.
02:23:38 They didn’t realize things would happen, but yet they happen.
02:23:43 With little to absolutely no cultural idea was that I was walking into.
02:23:50 Like when the one male in the family grabbed the back of my vest because my hair was tucked
02:23:55 and he thought it was a man going into a room with a bunch of women, I couldn’t understand
02:23:57 why he was attacking me.
02:24:00 There was no real breakdown of this is what you’re going into, this is the culture, this
02:24:05 is why they do what they do, this is how they do it, this is how you should handle a situation
02:24:10 like that.
02:24:11 There was none of that.
02:24:13 Something I speak about frequently and I think it’s important to acknowledge is when you’re
02:24:17 doing any of that training, we are giving none of our soldiers proper mental health
02:24:21 training, tools in that fucking toolbox or ways or things to look for on their buddy
02:24:28 because we’ve created a system and a problem where if you say that you’re ill or that you’re
02:24:34 struggling with PTSD, you’re done.
02:24:36 No one’s going to say that, they’re going to keep struggling with it and that’s when
02:24:40 you get loose cannons, when you get problems happen, so you get fractures start to happen
02:24:45 in leadership and that’s being seen and has been seen now for a while.
02:24:51 In terms of what we could have done, say for a better way to go into the country, a better
02:24:59 way to help the country, I can’t speak to that as much as I wish I could because I don’t
02:25:07 know that I would have all the answers.
02:25:09 What about withdrawal?
02:25:11 Oh my God.
02:25:14 That’s a cold.
02:25:15 Do you think more gradual, you think it’s better to maintain presence there for indefinitely?
02:25:24 I don’t know about that, but I do know we have bases, I say weeks, I serve with them,
02:25:30 Americans have bases in Japan, Americans have bases in Korea, Americans have bases in Germany.
02:25:36 There’s reasons there’s bases everywhere.
02:25:38 There’s a smart, there’s an intellectual way to look at this.
02:25:42 You want to be able to have eyes and ears, can’t have eyes and ears when you do things
02:25:47 like you just did.
02:25:49 The way that we pulled out of that country, that’s right, the way that, I hate saying
02:25:53 American British because it puts like a blame on them.
02:25:54 I say we because I’m a soldier, I’m a NATO soldier.
02:25:58 The way we pulled out of that country, my five year old could have done it better.
02:26:03 He could have said, mommy, why are we not keeping that Bagram base?
02:26:07 Mommy, why are we not keeping that base just until we get everyone else that we need?
02:26:12 Why are we going to a civilian airport that we don’t control, that we don’t understand?
02:26:16 Mommy, why are we doing this when there’s only one road to it?
02:26:20 My five year old would have that conversation with me.
02:26:24 It was so poorly done.
02:26:27 It was so poorly executed and no fault of the soldiers on the ground on their own.
02:26:31 My God, I can tell you there’s operators, I just call them A, I don’t say who he is
02:26:36 because he’s told me not to.
02:26:38 There’s a guy named A and there’s another guy named R and there’s a few other named
02:26:42 D and these guys, they gave everything to try to pull my family when no one else would
02:26:52 pull my family for me.
02:26:54 They just got me on the phone and said, I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking to.
02:26:56 I don’t know how many people you’re trying to get ahold of here, but you’ve got everyone
02:26:59 looking for your family.
02:27:00 Six, I’ve gone to everyone I know.
02:27:02 I’ve done stuff on Instagram.
02:27:04 I’ve got a contact.
02:27:05 The contact called me.
02:27:06 I called them.
02:27:07 I was handling this family and when they call you and say, we can’t go back to the gate,
02:27:12 my three year old just got beat up by the Taliban and they say, what do we do now?
02:27:17 I’m in Vancouver.
02:27:20 Why am I being left to deal with this?
02:27:23 Why is the civilian and ex military population being left to deal with this?
02:27:27 Why was this not thought out?
02:27:29 We knew this was coming.
02:27:31 We knew the timeframe.
02:27:33 Yeah, I ultimately blame, it almost starts at the top always at the leadership, sorry,
02:27:38 this is the civilian leadership.
02:27:41 I think probably the generals know the right thing to do here.
02:27:46 Even if they’re sometimes overzealous in terms of being, wanting to increase, I think the
02:27:51 great generals understand what’s needed.
02:27:53 And then it takes great leadership on the civilian side to listen to the generals and
02:27:57 understand that war is not just about like.
02:28:00 It’s not binary.
02:28:02 Yeah, and it’s not about the invasion and saying mission accomplished.
02:28:07 It’s not about the PR.
02:28:08 It’s about the full complexity of geopolitics.
02:28:13 Can I ask you this?
02:28:14 You can ask me whatever you want.
02:28:16 I’m looking at a book that you gave me, Do the Fucking Work.
02:28:18 It’s very motivating.
02:28:19 Good Fucking Design Advice.
02:28:21 That’s their company called Good Fucking Design Advice.
02:28:24 That’s great.
02:28:25 I know, they’re great.
02:28:26 What’s the website?
02:28:27 GFDA.
02:28:28 Okay, so the F is for friendship.
02:28:32 Something like that.
02:28:33 They are a design company.
02:28:35 They’ve worked with Apple and Nike, and this is their book.
02:28:37 It’s been published by HarperCollins.
02:28:39 And it is really just, it’s an incredible, they’re an incredible company.
02:28:44 They’re artistically, like they’re a design company, so you can see that.
02:28:49 You can see it’s a design company.
02:28:50 Oh yeah, they signed it for you.
02:28:52 And the pages are beautiful, but they have a saying and then a paragraph about each saying.
02:28:58 Get fucking started, obstacles are fucking opportunities, fail, fail, and fucking fail
02:29:04 again.
02:29:05 Ask for fucking help, show some fucking passion, finish the fucking job.
02:29:11 That’s right.
02:29:12 So we should send that to Biden.
02:29:13 So I…
02:29:15 She said it, I didn’t say it.
02:29:16 Lex said it.
02:29:17 I didn’t say it.
02:29:18 Lex said it.
02:29:19 It’s fine.
02:29:20 I’ll say it.
02:29:21 I should also send it to Trudeau as well.
02:29:22 So, but I mean, he probably won’t know how to read it.
02:29:23 He just taught drama instead.
02:29:25 So I’ll send it to the previous four presidents.
02:29:29 How about that?
02:29:30 That’s fine.
02:29:31 We can also send it to them too.
02:29:32 Cause they’re all just as much at fault.
02:29:33 So, and they, most of them have all the same last names, but okay.
02:29:38 Let me tell you about them quickly.
02:29:39 Cause we did a mug with them and I was really excited about it.
02:29:42 Not because it was a mug.
02:29:43 I’m a mug person, but you are, that’s your mug obsessive.
02:29:47 I’m obsessive about my mugs.
02:29:48 What’s your favorite mug?
02:29:50 Currently it’s mine right now.
02:29:51 The one that I have with them.
02:29:52 Okay.
02:29:53 The GMT mug.
02:29:54 What does it say on it?
02:29:55 Can I, do you want me to read what it says on it?
02:29:57 Yeah, please.
02:29:58 Okay.
02:29:59 Cause I’m really happy about it because we created this with them, with GFDA.
02:30:04 I found out about them because my husband’s office, Atlas Neck Brace, he had his very
02:30:09 first office, he had one of their prints done and it was their original, like do the fucking
02:30:14 work.
02:30:15 And I was really excited about them once I found out because I’m like, well, fuck is
02:30:20 my middle name.
02:30:22 And I want to make sure that I am going to, whoever I work with, I want to make sure that
02:30:28 I’m working with people that I believe in, that I believe what they stand for and I just
02:30:35 think they’re brilliant.
02:30:36 So I got on the phone with them and I said, hi, I would like you to sponsor my podcast.
02:30:42 And they said, cool.
02:30:43 What’s your podcast?
02:30:44 And I was like, it’s called Brass in Unity podcast and I want to work with you guys somewhere.
02:30:49 And they’re like, okay, so like, what are you thinking?
02:30:52 And I said, you know, I’m looking to do, I would love one day to do something with you.
02:30:56 I don’t know what it would be, but I would like it to be something.
02:31:00 And they said, you know, we do like, we have this book, but we also have like shirts and
02:31:03 mugs with our sayings on them and prints.
02:31:06 And so I was thinking to myself, I was like, well, if I just did like a mug with them,
02:31:11 well then I could, you know, that could work for what my company does, which is it’s a
02:31:15 jewelry company and sunglass company, but it could be like an add on kind of deal.
02:31:20 These guys are really good designers.
02:31:21 I can already tell.
02:31:22 Yeah.
02:31:23 I knew you would like this.
02:31:24 That’s why I brought it.
02:31:25 So I’m like, certain people would appreciate this.
02:31:27 And so my whole thing, my, my like hashtag is work hard, help harder.
02:31:33 And that’s the whole concept of what I do now.
02:31:35 And so we did a mug and it’s called fucking help somebody.
02:31:38 That’s their like first tag.
02:31:40 And then the rest is kindness is a wealth that increases as it is given away.
02:31:47 What you get in return isn’t passed between hands, but felt between hearts.
02:31:51 It’s precisely because you’ve been at the bottom that you can raise others up.
02:31:55 It’s because you’ve, sorry, I’m reading a photo here.
02:31:58 You’ve been lost in the dark.
02:32:00 You can lead others to the light.
02:32:02 It’s because you fought with yourself that you can bring peace to someone else.
02:32:07 You now have the strength because you’ve once struggled the best you have to come, the best
02:32:13 you have to come from the fucking worst you’ve had to take.
02:32:16 So it’s, this is the mug there and we’re sold out of them.
02:32:20 We just got a bunch of.
02:32:21 What does it say?
02:32:22 Fucking help.
02:32:23 Fucking help somebody.
02:32:24 Fucking help somebody.
02:32:25 And so we did, they were so gracious enough to sit with me and be like, what do you want
02:32:29 the copy to be like?
02:32:30 And I said, what do you think I want it to be like?
02:32:33 What would you, if you could write one for me, what it’d be?
02:32:35 And they’re like, it’s going to be around lifting people up.
02:32:37 And I was like, okay, cool.
02:32:39 And they’re like, do you want fuck in the title?
02:32:40 And I was like, every other word, if we can have it.
02:32:43 And they said, we’ll just do once.
02:32:44 And I was like, okay, I compromise.
02:32:46 And so we came up with that copy and we put it on a mug and we’re going to be doing a
02:32:49 shirt with them.
02:32:50 But the, the whole thing to me was that, that embodied what I stand for now and the healing
02:32:58 I’ve gotten to now and the point I’ve gotten to now in my life, because that fucking sand
02:33:04 pit almost broke me, like off the face of the earth broke me.
02:33:10 First of all, can we go through the full journey of that in terms of your psychological development?
02:33:17 Who were you before?
02:33:19 Who were you after?
02:33:20 Can you think about that?
02:33:22 Like what was your, if you had to put a brain on the table before and after and try to analyze
02:33:29 it?
02:33:30 Well, they both have CTE.
02:33:31 So we know that they’re both bruised and gray matter is a little dicey on them.
02:33:38 And it may sound the same and it’s, it’s not, so I’ll try to explain it to you.
02:33:42 Before that, don’t you laugh because I can, I know it’s coming.
02:33:47 I was even louder, even more obnoxious, even more outgoing.
02:33:52 I know it’s hard to believe.
02:33:54 This is you humble and quiet right now.
02:33:57 This is normal me now.
02:34:01 This is who I am now.
02:34:02 And I love that.
02:34:03 But who I was before I was, you know, motocross, taekwondo, tomboy.
02:34:12 I didn’t know how to dress.
02:34:14 I thought that if you just wore like the same jeans and t shirt all the time, that was like
02:34:17 acceptable behavior as a woman.
02:34:20 I wore skate shoes.
02:34:21 I went to a Catholic school that I refused to wear skirt at.
02:34:25 I wore pants.
02:34:26 I played hacky sack.
02:34:27 I was so into sports, I cut and split wood with my dad on weekends.
02:34:32 We heated our house that way.
02:34:34 I would go on the transport.
02:34:35 I stayed out of trouble for the most part.
02:34:42 I think I was a fairly good kid.
02:34:43 I was pretty angry though for most of my teenage life after my coach.
02:34:46 I lost my way a little bit there.
02:34:49 I was just crazier.
02:34:52 But happy?
02:34:54 I don’t know if I was happy.
02:34:55 I’m realizing that now.
02:34:56 I think I was, I think anger overtook who I was, and I think that’s why I was such an
02:35:01 angry individual towards my parents when I was in high school.
02:35:04 So parents, was it a little rough relationship with parents?
02:35:08 I mean, yeah.
02:35:09 I mean, my dad was gone a couple of weeks at a time.
02:35:12 So my mom, stay at home mom, had to handle me and my brother, who were both competitive
02:35:16 athletes at the time, by herself.
02:35:19 And when you come home and you have a daughter that just calls you like a bitch to your face
02:35:23 because she can’t, she’s being bullied so bad that she can’t understand why, but also
02:35:29 doesn’t know how to fix it, but has no other outlet anymore to kind of get rid of it.
02:35:34 I was not nice.
02:35:36 I was a really mean person.
02:35:37 I broke my mom.
02:35:38 I remember the day she stopped yelling.
02:35:40 That’s the day I know I broke her.
02:35:41 I broke her.
02:35:42 Did you have a source of discipline in your life?
02:35:44 Like, what, like maybe like your dad, somebody who says you’re being a bitch.
02:35:50 Oh, like who would call me like that?
02:35:52 Oh no, no, no, no.
02:35:53 My parents were incredible.
02:35:54 And my dad came from like a family of like a bajillion kids who lived in a farm with
02:35:58 no running water with like super, my dad was brash and abrupt.
02:36:03 So like I’ve caught myself doing that once in a while.
02:36:05 So like if I did one thing wrong, if he was just in a mood, I would know it.
02:36:11 So you weren’t, okay.
02:36:13 So that anger just took different forms.
02:36:15 It took different forms, but it mostly would be directed at my mom because I know she would
02:36:19 take it and that was who I had.
02:36:22 And I feel bad about it to the day.
02:36:24 Like I still, she listened to the Jocko podcast and so did my dad.
02:36:28 And my mom promised me she would never read my book because there’s certain parts.
02:36:30 I just, my dad on my deployment, when I called him and told him some of the stuff, he started
02:36:35 crying.
02:36:36 My dad doesn’t cry.
02:36:37 And he just said, please never tell your mother this.
02:36:40 Don’t do that to your mom.
02:36:41 My mom, like my grandfather came from Hungary.
02:36:44 He escaped when the Nazis left, when the Soviets came in.
02:36:49 He wasn’t great as a dad.
02:36:53 My mom went through a lot as a kid and that was because her dad was in the war.
02:36:59 That was because her dad didn’t know any better and she knew she couldn’t be like that.
02:37:06 So her way would be yelling.
02:37:10 And then I hit about 16 and I wore her down and I broke her, shattered her ability to
02:37:16 think that she could have any sort of relationship with me.
02:37:20 You wouldn’t want to have had a relationship with me.
02:37:22 But the funny thing is you’ve rediscovered that now.
02:37:26 So she, is she, are you guys close now?
02:37:29 Yeah.
02:37:30 She’s, she’s so funny.
02:37:31 She’s coming out to help out again.
02:37:33 She comes out to help out with Jack all the time and my dad, they’re still, they’re still
02:37:39 truck drivers.
02:37:40 They’re still on the road.
02:37:41 They team drive.
02:37:42 They have their little dogs and they go and they do their thing.
02:37:44 And I’ve had that relationship now it’s, it’s, it’s still strenuous.
02:37:48 Like I still, when I’m having a hard time, she’ll be the person I’ll take it out on because
02:37:52 I know she can take it.
02:37:53 Even though I know I shouldn’t, it’s like, she’s my safe space to be like, blah, about
02:37:59 everything.
02:38:00 And she’ll just be like, well, that’s not nice.
02:38:01 I’m like, well, you’re not, fuck it.
02:38:03 Like I, and I’ll take it out on her.
02:38:04 She knows I don’t mean it and I try, um, but for whatever reason, she just, she takes it
02:38:11 and um,
02:38:12 And it brings it out of you.
02:38:13 Yeah.
02:38:14 Can you describe sort of the various characteristics, the, the shape of your PTSD, the trauma, how
02:38:20 the anger and hate took shape in you in the, in the seconds, minutes, hours, months, years
02:38:28 after and after the, the full trauma of all the things you’ve experienced in Afghanistan.
02:38:33 So it’s funny because Jocko asked me something and it made me, it’s made me, I’ve really
02:38:37 been thinking a lot about it and he’s like, do you think if somebody of the leadership
02:38:42 would have just sat you down and said, Hey, Burns, what you’re feeling is okay, what you’re
02:38:50 feeling is normal, what you’re feeling is what happens when you’re in something like
02:38:56 this.
02:38:57 Do you think you would be where you are?
02:38:58 And I said, well, I thought about it and I’m like, you know, I don’t think I would
02:39:02 be because I wouldn’t have been medicated out of my mind.
02:39:05 I wasn’t able to process anything because I was just given medication right from the
02:39:10 get.
02:39:11 And for me, what happened was once that light switch was off, um, I was sent back to Kandahar
02:39:17 to what I, once the operation was over, we, we flew back to Kandahar, like with the Brits.
02:39:22 And then because there was deaths and we lost people on that operation, I had to go to the
02:39:26 British side for the next, I think three or four days and recant word for word why, what
02:39:33 happened to a British MP who hand wrote statements, but we had to do that on repeat to make sure
02:39:37 we all had the same story and so nobody shot anybody in the back.
02:39:42 And so that I don’t think is a great way to do that after an after action, after action
02:39:47 reports happen, but I don’t think beating a dead horse and having somebody repeat, repeat,
02:39:52 repeat, and then just imprint more and more and more.
02:39:55 I don’t, I don’t know that that is a great way of doing that.
02:39:58 Um,
02:39:59 And especially from a perspective of what are they, uh, liability almost like legal,
02:40:04 that kind of that perspective as opposed to the full perspective.
02:40:08 I mean, so, so for people who don’t know, uh, one is the, the, the overmedication and
02:40:15 that you had to undergo.
02:40:18 And then the other is the social isolation in terms of, I mean, more than what Jaco,
02:40:24 what you just mentioned, you also kind of, uh, mentioned that just being with, um, with
02:40:31 other soldiers you’re close with, just sitting there in silence and, um, just sitting in
02:40:37 that shared understanding, even that in itself communicates like these feelings are normal.
02:40:45 Like you don’t have to talk and you were robbed of that as well, essentially.
02:40:51 Yeah.
02:40:52 Because I was, because I was borrowed, I think Jaco had a name for us when we get borrowed.
02:40:56 It was like, there was like a, I don’t know what they call us, but it’s like when you
02:40:59 take a person and you put them in another unit, there’s a name for it.
02:41:01 I don’t remember what it was.
02:41:03 You never see those people again.
02:41:05 But because I was in Kanderhart, the doctors gave me the medication because I, I think
02:41:10 I was the one who said, I don’t, this isn’t right.
02:41:12 I don’t feel right.
02:41:13 This is wrong.
02:41:14 Cause when I got back that night, there was supposed to be somebody there to pick me up,
02:41:17 to take me to the other side of the base and no one showed.
02:41:20 So I, I humped on my kit back to the Canada house and I remember getting in the shower
02:41:26 and the rule was quick fucking showers, no water.
02:41:32 I must’ve sat on that floor, that shower for half an hour, 45 minutes.
02:41:37 I just held myself and cried and didn’t even know why I was crying.
02:41:41 I just knew I needed to cry and I still this day, I, and when they sent me back to the
02:41:50 FOB, they sent me back with all this medication after spending that time with the Brits and
02:41:58 they put me back on the guns, medicated out of my fucking tree.
02:42:01 I almost shot someone, but they didn’t tell my staff that I was on meds.
02:42:07 So when the artillery gun was going off and I didn’t run to the gun and I was still asleep
02:42:11 inside the tent with the gun beside my head, they didn’t know I was just drugged.
02:42:16 They just thought I was fucking off somewhere, hanging out with some Americans.
02:42:20 They just thought I wasn’t doing any of what I should be doing.
02:42:24 And then I remember the moment my Sergeant, we did a night shoot and he, he’s so funny
02:42:28 because he called me and goes, ah, fuck, Burns, I remember this, yes, you were standing there
02:42:33 with me and I look at you and go, hey, Burns, are you okay?
02:42:37 Because your eyes are all fucked.
02:42:42 And I, I looked at Sergeant LeBlanc and I just remember going, yeah, I’m good.
02:42:46 Like just huh.
02:42:47 He’s like, I still remember that.
02:42:51 And I’m like, I know.
02:42:52 And he goes, they never tell me anything, fuck, Burns, I did not know the drugs you
02:42:56 were on.
02:42:57 And as I was on all of them, he goes, I know I walk in, you show me the bottles, ah, fuck,
02:43:01 Burns, you shouldn’t have been there.
02:43:05 I guarantee he sounds just like that.
02:43:06 You’ll find out.
02:43:07 He’s brilliant.
02:43:08 He’s brilliant.
02:43:09 Yeah, so what, I mean, I suppose this is a lazy way of dealing with trauma and it’s for
02:43:19 the military in some sense.
02:43:21 If you don’t have a good program in place, this makes sense, but you should have a good
02:43:25 program in place.
02:43:26 Just like you said, on the prep, on the mental prep side, like just any prep, like training
02:43:32 people, training people on the, I suppose to, I guess train the fact that you’re going
02:43:38 to have somebody close to you blow up, like you have to probably visualize that.
02:43:45 You have to think through that.
02:43:46 You have to have a process of how to deal with something like that, with that kind of
02:43:50 trauma.
02:43:51 And then that’s it.
02:43:52 Tools in the toolbox is what the doctors call it.
02:43:54 Exactly.
02:43:55 I mean, and it’s not like weakness, it’s actually strength.
02:43:58 It’s like you have to be mentally strong enough to process that.
02:44:04 That probably takes a lot of training, but it’s a great training, right?
02:44:09 Well worth it to protect your investment training.
02:44:13 Right.
02:44:14 That’s a very cold, but correct way to put it.
02:44:16 I mean, it’s cold.
02:44:17 I thought you would appreciate the coldness of the way I articulated that.
02:44:22 Well, yeah.
02:44:23 I mean, I’m of two minds in this.
02:44:25 I don’t, I sometimes wonder like what I would be like as a soldier, actually.
02:44:32 I don’t know, because I love country and I love all the things you’re mentioning.
02:44:36 Like I could see myself probably dying for my country and also enjoying the skill of
02:44:42 it.
02:44:43 The very like OCD, like very proficient.
02:44:48 Yeah.
02:44:49 But then also the human side, I fall in love with people.
02:44:53 I fall in love with everything.
02:44:54 So I don’t know, I suppose you have to shut off the part of your brain when you’re executing
02:45:00 a mission that cares about other humans outside your close knit group.
02:45:09 Like there’s no time for philosophical thinking.
02:45:11 I don’t know.
02:45:12 I suppose that’s why it’s better to be young.
02:45:15 Young and dumb.
02:45:17 You’re not necessarily dumb.
02:45:19 It’s just like you were over that energy of excitement of proficiency and excellence is
02:45:27 just higher than it is later in life.
02:45:30 You’re not dumb.
02:45:32 I was not dumb, but I was naive, uneducated, not well trained and had an arrogance because
02:45:46 we were told we were the fucking shit.
02:45:49 Yeah.
02:45:50 You’re amazing.
02:45:51 Okay.
02:45:52 I’m amazing.
02:45:53 So I wonder, do they think if we do mental training?
02:45:56 That makes you weak.
02:45:57 Do you think the military thinks that makes you weak?
02:46:00 Well, yes.
02:46:01 And the reason I can say that is because it’s obvious in the way that they handle it now.
02:46:05 So like if a soldier says, hey, I’m really struggling with that last op we were on, man,
02:46:09 it’s just really, it’s getting to me, I’m having a hard time sleeping.
02:46:13 They’re going to go, okay, well, how, how hard of a time sleeping are you having?
02:46:19 And then you get that re and you go, oh no, I’m not, it’s not that bad.
02:46:22 I’m not, I don’t need anything for it.
02:46:24 Like I’m just like once in a while I’m losing some sleep.
02:46:26 They’re like, okay.
02:46:27 Because you know that pen moves, it’s all getting written down and then you’re dead
02:46:31 red, you’re dead red, which means you’re not deploying again.
02:46:33 Yeah.
02:46:34 And then you’re not able to do the thing you love the most with the people you love the
02:46:36 most.
02:46:37 Right.
02:46:38 I mean, but also this is really difficult and I’d love to talk to you about PTSD, but
02:46:44 like.
02:46:45 Sorry.
02:46:46 Yes.
02:46:47 I keep going off.
02:46:48 No, please.
02:46:49 So I’m, I’m hoping to, um, like launch a company, you know, in the engineering space and the,
02:47:01 and I currently lead, I’ve led a few people and it’s always this kind of, um, like how
02:47:08 much are you supposed to push people because people are, everyone is weak and lazy.
02:47:14 Are you quoting her text messages from earlier?
02:47:17 Yeah, exactly.
02:47:18 I’m quoting, all I have is just quotes from you.
02:47:21 That’s okay.
02:47:22 Uh, tells me how much we’ve spoken in the past week, poor soul.
02:47:26 I just, I don’t know what to do because sometimes people are really struggling, like really
02:47:31 struggling in a way with their being there.
02:47:34 Like it’s the, it’s the Goggins thing is like, where’s the line to where you’re actually
02:47:39 breaking the human being versus where you’re breaking them at the places where they will
02:47:45 grow back stronger.
02:47:47 Like in that line is tricky, uh, to, to truly understand.
02:47:52 I think the military eras on the side of like, they, you know, like push them beyond all
02:47:58 limits, physical, physical, but mental, they don’t, they need to respect the mental more.
02:48:03 Uh, they fuck with the brain a little bit.
02:48:06 I mean, in basic training, they like scream in your face and to see who’s going to crack
02:48:09 and they, they put you on sleep deprivation to see who’s weak enough that they can’t handle
02:48:13 sleep depth.
02:48:14 They’ll, they do stuff to you.
02:48:16 Like I know if you’re a downed pilot, you have to go and you have to do this training
02:48:20 and like it’s, you’ll get captured.
02:48:22 It’s like this whole thing and they fuck with your brain, but there’s a line.
02:48:27 There’s a line.
02:48:29 My issue is go to the line, cross the line, give them the tools to come back from the
02:48:37 line.
02:48:38 Right.
02:48:39 Yeah.
02:48:40 We don’t do that.
02:48:41 We don’t, we, we know there’s PTSD.
02:48:43 We know there’s a, such a thing.
02:48:44 We understand there’s anxiety and depression.
02:48:46 We understand there’s major depressive disorder.
02:48:48 We understand that there are precursors.
02:48:51 There are signs and symptoms.
02:48:52 We understand that.
02:48:54 So why are we not building enough of a toolkit, whether that be, I’m not talking medication.
02:49:00 I’m talking, it sounds woo woo, but fucking trust me, it works.
02:49:06 I’m talking meditation.
02:49:08 I’m talking yoga.
02:49:09 I’m talking about peer group support.
02:49:11 I’m talking about if you go to your doctor and report this, there’s, you’re not automatically
02:49:16 going to be losing your job.
02:49:18 Why aren’t we giving the proper tools and the education needed?
02:49:22 These things are not difficult to teach.
02:49:24 They don’t take a lot of time.
02:49:26 They don’t take a lot of money.
02:49:27 The only time it takes a lot of money is when you want to medicate.
02:49:30 We don’t need to medicate you yet.
02:49:32 You only need to be medicated if you’re a danger to someone else or yourself.
02:49:35 And most of the time, because of the way the system is set, you’ll lie about it through
02:49:39 your fucking teeth, just so that no one touches you.
02:49:42 So from the perspective of the military, do you think you can still be a bad motherfucker
02:49:47 and do all the mental work?
02:49:50 Yes.
02:49:51 Some of the baddest dudes I’ve ever known are like, I gotta go to yoga.
02:49:55 I gotta go meditate.
02:49:57 I go do ayah with those guys.
02:49:59 Why?
02:50:00 Because they know that that’s not okay to be like that in your life.
02:50:04 Can you answer the ridiculously big question of what is PTSD?
02:50:10 Do you understand the basic characteristics of it?
02:50:13 Is there universal characteristics from your own unique experience, from what you’ve understood
02:50:20 about it?
02:50:21 Yeah, of course there are.
02:50:22 So there’s the basic things that a doctor looks for when they’re diagnosing PTSD.
02:50:27 I’m not a doctor.
02:50:28 Let me make that fucking clear.
02:50:30 But there are things that you look for.
02:50:32 You look for insomnia.
02:50:34 You look for anger and aggression.
02:50:36 You look for people to fly off the handle.
02:50:38 You look for avoidance.
02:50:40 You can tell in somebody’s body.
02:50:42 People who can’t sleep.
02:50:43 If you can’t sleep, you know that after a certain amount of time, they’re just going
02:50:47 to deteriorate.
02:50:49 You know, sleeplessness, triggers.
02:50:51 When you say avoidance, do you mean…
02:50:54 Avoidance.
02:50:55 So like, when I first got back to Canada, I avoided everybody that was Middle Eastern
02:50:58 at all costs, no matter how much of a difference it made in my day.
02:51:03 If I had to not go somewhere for one of the greatest events of my life, I wouldn’t have
02:51:07 went.
02:51:08 But isn’t there some aspect that are combined with the triggers?
02:51:11 Maybe it’s wise to avoid triggers even like for your own personal health, well being.
02:51:16 Well that’s it.
02:51:17 For me, that was one of my triggers.
02:51:19 So you have triggers.
02:51:20 And then you also deal with things like sounds and smells.
02:51:24 You can tell.
02:51:25 You can tell when someone’s triggered.
02:51:26 A lot of vets don’t like fireworks.
02:51:28 It’s like, okay, well remove yourself from the situation.
02:51:31 So there’s other things within PTSD that kind of rear its head that with PTSD kind of attach
02:51:39 other things.
02:51:40 So like when I was diagnosed with PTSD, I think it was like four years later, I was
02:51:43 diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
02:51:46 And that was kind of a compilation of things that was just like a shit show there.
02:51:50 What is major depressive disorder?
02:51:52 Good question.
02:51:53 Is there an answer?
02:51:56 I don’t have one.
02:51:57 I was told I had it.
02:51:58 Okay, so I mean, what does your mind go through?
02:52:05 Where are the places that my mind goes, your mind goes like the dark places when I get
02:52:10 triggered and when it was like really bad?
02:52:12 Yeah.
02:52:13 Okay.
02:52:14 Yeah.
02:52:15 So you thought about suicide every minute of every day.
02:52:20 What are the pros of suicide in your mind at that time?
02:52:23 At that time, the pros were no one has to deal with this anymore, I don’t have to feel
02:52:29 this way anymore, I’m a burden to my family, I’m a burden to the military system, I’m weak,
02:52:37 I’m a bad soldier, I didn’t do my job, I don’t deserve to be alive, I don’t deserve veterans
02:52:44 affairs support, my parents don’t deserve to watch me go through this, the guy I was
02:52:49 dating didn’t deserve to put up with the bullshit I put him through, the people who drive with
02:52:56 me in cars didn’t deserve to almost hit medians because I swerved because of a piece of garbage,
02:53:02 people didn’t deserve my racist outburst, people didn’t deserve, people didn’t, I did
02:53:08 not deserve to be breathing anymore.
02:53:10 I should have died there and I wished I died there.
02:53:15 So self hate there too.
02:53:17 So that’s at the core of it, that’s like this, so how do you escape from that place?
02:53:30 How do you overcome that depression essentially at the core of the desire to kill yourself?
02:53:39 What basic principles, I mean, we could talk about ayahuasca, but basic principles of literally
02:53:46 how do you escape that moment?
02:53:48 Yeah, previous to any of that, I did from 2009, I got out, so I was medically, I was
02:53:53 3B medical honorable discharge in 2011, May 23rd, 2011, so I left the military then.
02:54:00 And so it’s been 10 years, just over 10 years, oh my God, it’s 10 and a half years, I just
02:54:04 realized that right now.
02:54:05 Oh my God.
02:54:06 Happy anniversary.
02:54:07 Thanks, man.
02:54:08 Awesome.
02:54:09 So I’ve been out for 10 years and I would say the reason I didn’t kill myself for the
02:54:14 longest time was the individual I was dating.
02:54:18 That was straight across the board, that was it.
02:54:22 For me, there was no relief for about six years of the thought of just kill yourself,
02:54:31 kill yourself, kill yourself.
02:54:32 It’s easier if you just do it.
02:54:33 That voice was so strong for that long, there was really no relief.
02:54:36 What there was though was implementation of different medications, realizing they weren’t
02:54:44 working, trying different things, getting myself to a point where I could leave my house
02:54:49 comfortably ish again, and I wasn’t triggered, which then allowed me to travel, which then
02:54:54 allowed me to slowly try to go back to school, which by the way, it was a very bad idea.
02:54:59 That was a bad idea, that was bad.
02:55:02 I went too early, they started practicing active shooter drills in our school.
02:55:08 It was bad, my professors understood.
02:55:11 School was full of triggers, it turns out.
02:55:14 It is when you live in Vancouver.
02:55:16 There’s a theme to this conversation about your love for Canada.
02:55:20 Look at me, I love my fucking country, I am one of the most patriotic people you will
02:55:25 meet in it.
02:55:26 I think Canada is one of the greatest fucking places on the earth.
02:55:31 I think in the past two years or three years, I have seen what I loved so deeply, so proudly
02:55:38 preached about so…
02:55:50 I’m so proud of what I did there.
02:55:55 And I’m so proud of the country I got to represent, because I was good at my job.
02:56:04 Being great at your job for a country you love, you just don’t like some of the politicians
02:56:08 some of the time.
02:56:09 It’s not even the politicians anymore, it’s the state of the country.
02:56:14 I’m a second class citizen in my own country right now.
02:56:17 I can’t travel to see my parents within my own country.
02:56:21 I’m not allowed to step foot in my son’s school.
02:56:24 I am not allowed to go to a restaurant with my family.
02:56:29 I’m not allowed to leave Canada without, I told you all the stuff I have to do to get
02:56:34 here.
02:56:35 To even get home, I have to do the same.
02:56:38 I’m watched by the RCMP, neighbors rat you out.
02:56:44 So for somebody who fought for their country.
02:56:47 I hate it, it makes me so sad.
02:56:50 To go through this process of what many consider to be power overreach by government in the
02:56:56 face of this particular pandemic.
02:57:00 I always knew I had a hard time, I loved Canada, the day I got spit on when I got home was
02:57:05 not ideal.
02:57:06 But the thing was, I knew long enough that if I just put one foot in front of the other
02:57:17 and kept going to treatment, and kept doing what my doctor told me to do, that I could
02:57:23 pull out of this if I tried.
02:57:26 I was told that I could do anything in my life.
02:57:29 It didn’t matter.
02:57:31 As long as I tried.
02:57:32 Was trying really hard?
02:57:36 Trying was harder than breathing.
02:57:41 It was exhausting.
02:57:42 It was, I would be awake for like half a day and every minute of that day, I’d just stare
02:57:50 at the wall and just want to kill myself.
02:57:53 That’s what I’ve had people close to me who suffer from depression and it was like, it’s
02:58:00 unclear how to escape, but it’s clear that you need to try something.
02:58:06 And they didn’t want to even try.
02:58:07 Because you have no try in you.
02:58:10 I’m watching a person who has no energy essentially to like do any of it and it’s like so hopeless.
02:58:18 But you have to try and I think some of that has to do with all the different physical
02:58:23 feeds you have to do.
02:58:24 Like when you have nothing left, you still keep going.
02:58:27 That same like weird drive when you’re empty, you still keep going.
02:58:33 I wanted to give up.
02:58:34 I tried.
02:58:35 It’s, I did.
02:58:37 I’m really lucky because it really was the one person that I’d wake up to next every
02:58:42 day and he’d be like, hey, so that new drug you’re on?
02:58:47 Fun fact, if you don’t go to sleep right away, you talk and when you talk, you just don’t
02:58:51 fucking stop and you go off about everything that’s horrible and I’m like, what are you
02:58:56 talking about?
02:58:57 No, last night.
02:58:58 Yeah.
02:58:59 You took that pill.
02:59:00 Guess what?
02:59:01 You just, you just, you didn’t stop.
02:59:02 I’m like, I have no recollection.
02:59:03 I’d get up in the middle of the night.
02:59:04 I would cook food like on a stove and it would be, hopefully we don’t die because I would
02:59:11 have no recollection because of the drugs.
02:59:14 The idea that when people say, well, just put yourself out of depression, I’m a highly
02:59:21 motivated individual.
02:59:25 The idea of lifting my head up to turnover was daunting.
02:59:32 It’s terrifying.
02:59:33 It’s like for somebody so as driven as you to completely lose all of that for moments
02:59:39 of time, for stretches of time.
02:59:43 Fuck the mind is a motherfucker.
02:59:45 It is.
02:59:46 I can’t, for somebody like, I can’t, I can’t, I’m so, I’m so grateful for people like you
02:59:54 to be able to pull out of that.
02:59:56 I’ve been always the opposite.
02:59:58 Like I’ve been very fortunate to just always find joy, meaning in everything, even the
03:00:06 stupidest shit.
03:00:07 Can I ask you something?
03:00:08 Yeah.
03:00:09 Do you think that’s because of how you were raised, where you came from?
03:00:16 No, no, it was my own person.
03:00:19 I honestly think it’s the biology, the, this, cause I had my parents, I’m very cognizant
03:00:27 of had nothing to do with that.
03:00:30 They, they never understood this little engine I had.
03:00:33 I just, I always liked just sitting, looking at people and just enjoying how amazing they
03:00:37 are and just like looking at, like it’s, I think it’s straight up just biology, whatever
03:00:42 the neurochemistry is.
03:00:44 Like I’m just getting like a good drug from, yeah, I’m getting hits all the time from stupid
03:00:50 shit.
03:00:51 And it doesn’t, and yeah, so that’s why I can be, sometimes I’ll talk like very self
03:00:58 critically about myself because that’s almost makes me, it makes life more fun and challenges
03:01:03 stuff and it makes you more productive.
03:01:05 But ultimately it’s because I’m getting that like good, I’m getting the good stuff all
03:01:09 the time.
03:01:10 I wondered about that.
03:01:11 I was thinking about that when I listened to you for the first time on, I think when
03:01:14 you’re on Rogan for the first time, water shouldn’t do that.
03:01:17 Oh, it’s not water.
03:01:19 You shouldn’t trust.
03:01:20 See, this is the thing with the Russians.
03:01:21 It’s Dessani.
03:01:22 It’s owned by Coca Cola.
03:01:23 Well, no, I had it resealed.
03:01:26 I mean, I didn’t go that far, but now I’m really certain to question what’s in this,
03:01:30 but that’s okay.
03:01:31 If I offered you tea, you should really be worried.
03:01:34 Yeah.
03:01:35 Why?
03:01:36 I mean, that’s the, no, that’s the, like the more famous way that Russians usually assassinate
03:01:41 it.
03:01:42 They put poison in the tea.
03:01:43 Cause a lot of Russians drink tea and you know, all right, well, I mean there is a blade
03:01:49 right there.
03:01:50 So I thought was somebody, um, Andrew Huberman gave that to me.
03:01:54 He’s also good.
03:01:55 I don’t know if you know him, but he’s a cool, I don’t know all the people, you know, I’m
03:01:58 new.
03:01:59 Okay.
03:02:00 I’m new here, Lex.
03:02:01 You’re going to have to send instructions.
03:02:02 Yeah.
03:02:03 I’m going to have to let my friends say, he says, uh, he’s an ex operator and he’ll message
03:02:06 me once in a while and ask me something and I’ll answer back.
03:02:08 If I answer in the correct way, he’ll go candidate meets expectations.
03:02:14 I’m like, fuck you.
03:02:15 I’m not a candidate of anything.
03:02:16 Yeah.
03:02:17 Yeah.
03:02:18 But yeah, it’s essentially.
03:02:19 Well, Andrew Huberman is kind of a celebrity.
03:02:21 Andrew, you should check her out.
03:02:23 Uh, you’re, you’re an interesting person.
03:02:25 You guys should connect.
03:02:26 He’s a Stanford neuroscientist was a, I think the number one podcast in the world in health.
03:02:32 Uh, he’s a, does he have like a, a beard thing going?
03:02:37 Uh, yeah.
03:02:38 I mean, I’m knocking him down to like, does he have a beard?
03:02:42 I don’t, I don’t look, I don’t look at people’s visual appearance, man.
03:02:45 No, I don’t.
03:02:46 Uh, does he have a beard?
03:02:47 I think he has a beard.
03:02:48 Yeah.
03:02:49 He’s a very handsome gentleman.
03:02:54 I think I know you’re talking about, cause I think I was looking at his stuff this morning.
03:02:56 Yeah, exactly.
03:02:57 No, seriously on Instagram.
03:02:58 No, no, no.
03:02:59 Okay.
03:03:00 Yeah.
03:03:01 I know him.
03:03:02 But it’s very, very humble, very intelligent.
03:03:04 Yeah.
03:03:05 Probably you would understand, like I’m very kind of poetic and so on.
03:03:09 He’s, he’s probably the most like rigorous, um, reference machine of science.
03:03:16 Like he’s a legit scientist.
03:03:18 Like he knows every paper and everything has to do with the mind and neuroscience.
03:03:22 Like performance.
03:03:23 Yeah.
03:03:24 Yeah.
03:03:25 He’s much more, he’s, he’s, he’s much more actually, and the focus is always on, um,
03:03:31 how to help, how that helps people.
03:03:34 So like protocols, like, like here’s what you need to do to get better sleep.
03:03:38 Yes.
03:03:39 Yes, I know who it is.
03:03:40 Here’s like a thousand papers.
03:03:41 Yeah.
03:03:42 And he just goes like hammers nonstop.
03:03:44 I mean, he, um, he spent a week in Austin, he’s coming back and spending, uh, a couple
03:03:51 of weeks in Austin.
03:03:52 We just hang out.
03:03:53 And it’s like, you think that was like a teleprompter or something, like the way he does his podcast.
03:03:58 Yeah.
03:03:59 Like in person, he’s the same, like, all right, this is, this is intense, but I like it.
03:04:05 Anyway.
03:04:06 Anyway.
03:04:07 Uh, why did we bring him up?
03:04:08 I don’t know.
03:04:09 Brought up knives.
03:04:10 We were talking about.
03:04:11 He gave it to me.
03:04:12 That’s right.
03:04:13 PTSD.
03:04:14 Yeah.
03:04:15 And then you talk about poison and how you were poisoning me.
03:04:16 And I said, knives.
03:04:17 We’re talking about Russians.
03:04:18 And then we were kind of talking about the brain and PTSD.
03:04:21 Yeah.
03:04:22 I think for, for most people though, the biggest thing when they see somebody who’s struggling
03:04:27 with PTSD there, their first, you know, reaction is how do I help them?
03:04:32 Well, often just saying, Hey, I’m here when you’re ready to talk and you’re going through
03:04:36 something, whether you want to talk about it right now or not, I’m here.
03:04:39 And then keeping a close eye on behaviors.
03:04:42 When you start to see somebody having, you know, four, five, six beers at night, let’s
03:04:49 ask why.
03:04:50 When you see somebody, you can tell they’re not sleeping.
03:04:52 Hey buddy, you sleeping?
03:04:53 I just am not sleeping.
03:04:54 Instead of just going, Oh, that sucks.
03:04:58 Hey, why aren’t you sleeping?
03:05:00 You having nightmares?
03:05:01 Are you, you just have an insomnia?
03:05:03 Are you just eating sugar before bed?
03:05:05 Like care enough about your people to just ask one followup question.
03:05:10 Cause often that’s really all it takes.
03:05:12 Cause then somebody goes, somebody cares enough to ask and then they’ll just, yeah.
03:05:18 Just showing that you care.
03:05:20 Honestly, grocery store lineup.
03:05:22 I’ll say, Oh, I like your dress.
03:05:24 Oh, thank you.
03:05:25 And then I’ll go, how’s your day going?
03:05:27 They’re like, actually it’s going all right.
03:05:30 It’s not as great as I thought it would be today, but I’m doing okay.
03:05:33 But like they’ll give you a, instead of good you, instead of just giving you this fake,
03:05:36 false reaction.
03:05:37 If you just show any effort in somebody that you care at all about someone’s wellbeing,
03:05:44 you’d be amazed.
03:05:45 Amazed.
03:05:46 And some of that is just energy.
03:05:49 The reason honestly I moved to Austin is some lady at a Walmart said, honey, you look handsome
03:05:54 in that suit.
03:05:55 But the care that she put in that, she just looked at me and it wasn’t like hitting at
03:06:01 me or something.
03:06:02 She was like, the love.
03:06:03 Just love.
03:06:04 Yeah.
03:06:05 And I was like, Oh, okay.
03:06:06 I’m moving here.
03:06:07 I guess.
03:06:08 There was a, that’s so funny you said that.
03:06:09 Cause I told my, I told my husband this happened and it was, it threw me off.
03:06:13 There was an older lady at a store and this was right after we, we got a brief period
03:06:18 of no masks in Canada.
03:06:20 Just like a brief.
03:06:21 It’s like five minutes.
03:06:22 Oh yeah.
03:06:23 It was not even that.
03:06:24 And I, I had come from like an interview or something.
03:06:26 So I had actually had makeup on that day and I had my hat and I was, you know, just at
03:06:30 the grocery store.
03:06:31 She walked up to me and she got real close and I didn’t know what was happening.
03:06:34 And then she got closer and then she just grabbed my arm like this.
03:06:37 She goes, I love that hat on you.
03:06:40 And I looked at her and I was like, she touched me during a pandemic and she’s old.
03:06:43 Oh my God, I love you too.
03:06:45 Thank you so much.
03:06:46 I said, you’re so amazing.
03:06:47 And I just, and I just sparked a conversation.
03:06:49 Yeah.
03:06:50 Yeah.
03:06:51 That’s amazing.
03:06:52 Doesn’t take much.
03:06:53 Yeah.
03:06:54 That little moment of genuine care.
03:06:55 Maybe you can tell me actually the, um, the journey you took with ayahuasca, like what
03:07:01 that’s such a fascinating journey.
03:07:03 So like, uh, letting your mind go to different places in order to rediscover itself, like,
03:07:08 like, what is it like a rocket ship to somewhere else so you can land in a better place?
03:07:13 Here, how about I show you something that’ll help your brain.
03:07:16 Yes.
03:07:17 This is not for you to lift up either and show on the camera because there’s leaves
03:07:21 in it.
03:07:22 Like there’s leaves in some pages.
03:07:23 So just don’t dump it out cause it’ll go all fucking everywhere.
03:07:25 Got it.
03:07:26 Got it.
03:07:27 Instructions.
03:07:28 I like this.
03:07:29 Yeah.
03:07:30 Well, you feel like you need them.
03:07:31 Um, ayahuasca is a beautiful psychedelic that we have been so blessed to have on this earth
03:07:39 that we have so underutilized and could be, I don’t want to say saving humanity, but just
03:07:45 you ever hear that saying, if you could just give everyone mushrooms one time, the world
03:07:48 would be a better place.
03:07:50 Okay.
03:07:51 So psilocybin is I use for microdosing, uh, for depression.
03:07:57 I did ayahuasca in January of this year.
03:08:00 Um, and I’ve at that point, that was the last time I was on a pharmaceutical drug.
03:08:06 I’ve been off everything ever since 10 different ones.
03:08:09 So if you backtrack a little bit, just to, so you’ll understand my doctor gave me the
03:08:14 opportunity, Dr. Greg Passi.
03:08:17 He is a veteran himself, served in Bosnia and Rwanda.
03:08:20 He’s a medic.
03:08:21 He’s a Colonel.
03:08:22 I think Colonel Lieutenant, he’s going to fucking punch me right in the face for that.
03:08:25 He’s high up officer.
03:08:26 Um, he is one of my saviors.
03:08:29 He’s like my old, I call him my old man.
03:08:31 He’s my favorite and, um, rides a Harley, like that kind of guy.
03:08:35 Nice.
03:08:36 Yeah.
03:08:37 And, um, he said, you know, Kels, this is, I just don’t, I was hitting a wall.
03:08:41 I wasn’t getting any better.
03:08:42 And he goes, what, how do you feel about cannabis?
03:08:45 And I was like, I don’t feel good about it because family histories or my parents always
03:08:51 told me if I smoked weed, you know, it’s just this, this perception because I just want
03:08:55 you to try it.
03:08:56 Just would it, would you be willing to try it?
03:08:58 So I was like, okay, so I was willing to try it.
03:09:01 Then I started going to these groups called Women Grow and, um, learning about it.
03:09:06 And then I realized, oh, I’m starting to sleep a little bit.
03:09:12 I don’t feel groggy in the morning.
03:09:14 I don’t feel like a bag of shit.
03:09:16 And I also want to have a baby one day and I can’t have all this stuff in my system.
03:09:21 So I started using cannabis and then I started using it as a main medication and I’d been
03:09:27 using it now since 2014, got married, 2015, 2015, 2015 I started using it.
03:09:38 And then I’ve been using it ever since.
03:09:41 And that was the way I got off of all the pharmaceutical drugs was keeping cannabis
03:09:46 the constant, finding the right strains for me, and then slowly with the doctor’s advice
03:09:51 and under supervision going off of those medications.
03:09:56 Back to January of 2021, I had hit a really bad spell last year.
03:10:01 Um, and the year before it was a really big struggle.
03:10:04 Uh, I almost lost my company last year due to COVID just like many, many millions of
03:10:09 people did.
03:10:10 Um, and instead of me just laying down and taking it, I pivoted really quickly and called
03:10:17 the factory and said, do you guys make masks?
03:10:19 They’re like, yeah, we’re making masks.
03:10:21 I was like, I’m going to call the Canadian government.
03:10:23 I’m going to get my medical license and I’m going to try to sell the masks and see if
03:10:27 we can do that.
03:10:28 And so we did that.
03:10:29 And so we did 200,000 masks for Ontario hospitals, um, which ironically went to my entire community
03:10:37 I was born and raised in.
03:10:39 So it was really weird.
03:10:41 And that kept us afloat long enough.
03:10:43 Um, we lost 200 retail locations that I all single handedly spent five years going like
03:10:49 door to door getting myself.
03:10:50 Um,
03:10:51 and we should say this is brass and unity, jewelry,
03:10:54 the jewelry and sunglass company.
03:10:57 And um, I started,
03:10:58 speaking of which,
03:10:59 looks like a cereal.
03:11:02 I mean, you do look good in them.
03:11:05 I won’t lie to you.
03:11:06 Thank you.
03:11:07 Well, okay.
03:11:08 We’ll call them the Lex.
03:11:09 That’s those are now called the Lex.
03:11:10 Fuck the gunner.
03:11:11 They’re the Lex.
03:11:12 I like it.
03:11:13 The Lex.
03:11:14 I’m jumping around here, but just bear with me.
03:11:15 I, I started, my doctor suggested art therapy.
03:11:16 Dr. Patsy did.
03:11:17 And that’s really how the company started.
03:11:19 I bought beads and a pipe cutter and a hammer and a drill and I fucked up our kitchen table
03:11:23 and I taught myself how to put jewelry cause my husband was like, you can do it.
03:11:26 Go for it.
03:11:27 So I was like, okay, he says I can believes in me, so I guess I can do it.
03:11:31 No idea what I’m doing.
03:11:32 And then got to this point, um, you know, where COVID hit and people lost companies
03:11:38 and we pivoted and we did what we could.
03:11:40 And then I really started to go downhill psychologically.
03:11:45 I’ve found purpose again with this company.
03:11:49 I found a way to help again.
03:11:51 I found myself again.
03:11:54 And then that was in danger of being gone again.
03:11:58 So the company is 2015.
03:12:01 We started, I started building jewelry in 2015 under like a just, it was called her
03:12:06 wearables and it was really small and it was just, I was just trying to make stuff.
03:12:11 It wasn’t supposed to be a company.
03:12:13 And you were on a ton of medication throughout this whole process.
03:12:17 And my mom being the tenacious truck driver she is, she was driving for Kevin Hart’s what
03:12:23 now tour.
03:12:25 And so she got, she just harassed them was like, you need to meet my daughter.
03:12:29 Yeah.
03:12:30 I saw the picture of you and Kevin Hart, that’s cool.
03:12:32 But he just gave me a good piece of advice.
03:12:33 Hey, if you’re going to make this something, you can’t really, if you want it to be for
03:12:36 everyone, you can’t call it her wearables.
03:12:38 I was like, cool.
03:12:39 And then we drove home that night and then he tweeted it out to people to 24 million
03:12:44 people.
03:12:45 And he was like, who is now?
03:12:47 And that was a giant deal.
03:12:49 And then my husband kind of looked at me and being, he’s so fucking brilliant.
03:12:52 He looked at me and goes, all right, yeah, we got to come up with a rename.
03:12:55 Let me start thinking.
03:12:56 Let me start brainstorming.
03:12:57 Like, let’s make, you want to make this real?
03:12:58 Let’s make this real.
03:12:59 And so we did.
03:13:01 And he was like, what do you think about like, we were doing like brass collective co, brass
03:13:04 this, but I just knew I wanted brass in the name.
03:13:07 And then he’s like, what about brass and unity?
03:13:08 You’re trying to like unify people.
03:13:09 Like why wouldn’t you do that?
03:13:10 I’m like, fucking million horses came up with it.
03:13:13 Like everything else.
03:13:14 That’s a great name.
03:13:15 Well, he’s a brilliant person.
03:13:16 It’s annoying.
03:13:17 Yeah.
03:13:18 So the idea of losing this thing that we had just built and just got me kind of functioning
03:13:22 with was devastating.
03:13:24 So I got this opportunity given to me by Griff, Combat Flip Flops.
03:13:29 Um, again, Brady, my husband was like, Hey, you should get sponsors for your podcast.
03:13:34 Hey, have you heard of this company, Combat Flip Flops?
03:13:37 Remember we watched them on Shark Tank.
03:13:38 And then I reached out, he emailed me back.
03:13:40 He’s like, yeah, we go to together like peanut butter and jelly are companies.
03:13:43 That sounds great.
03:13:45 And then I was like, Hey, also, like, do you think one of your owners would want to come
03:13:49 on the podcast?
03:13:50 Just like tossing it out there kind of like I did with you.
03:13:54 And he was like, yeah, I’d love to come on.
03:13:56 And I was like, oh my God.
03:13:59 And he came on the podcast and it went great.
03:14:01 And then at the end of it, we stopped recording and he just kind of did this thing.
03:14:04 He does this.
03:14:05 Just like leans in real close, looks into your soul and goes, how you doing?
03:14:11 And they’re like, great.
03:14:12 And he’s like, how you really doing?
03:14:14 And I’m like, I’m horrible.
03:14:16 I’ve done everything.
03:14:18 And just this whole, just like waterworks happen and he goes, listen, have you ever
03:14:22 heard of Ayahuasca?
03:14:23 And I was like, yeah, like in movies and like psychedelics in the seventies, you know, and
03:14:29 he’s like, no, no, no, no, no.
03:14:30 Let’s like have a talk.
03:14:31 And he goes, I’ve got an opportunity for a spot.
03:14:34 I’m going with this charity called Heroic Hearts.
03:14:37 They have spaces in UK, Canada and the United States.
03:14:41 They’re owned by an army ranger named Jesse Gould.
03:14:44 You know, they’re really trying to help vets.
03:14:47 And this has worked.
03:14:48 Would you want to come?
03:14:49 And before he even said, like, would you, before I even got like an invite, I was like,
03:14:53 can I come?
03:14:54 When can I, when, when, when do we, when do we go?
03:14:57 And he’s like, oh, it’s in like three weeks.
03:14:59 You can’t be on any SSRIs.
03:15:02 If you’re on any, you’re going to have to wean off.
03:15:04 And at the time I was on my last one.
03:15:06 And so I was like, I called my doctor and I was like, listen.
03:15:10 And he was like, what?
03:15:11 And I was like, guess what I’m about to do?
03:15:13 And he’s like, I’m like going to go do ayahuasca.
03:15:16 And he goes, you’re going to, he does this thing where he just goes, all right.
03:15:23 Because he knows he’s not going to win.
03:15:24 He knows I’ll just fight him on it.
03:15:26 That’s just called that, like the, the Jocko reset because he does a.
03:15:30 Pretty much.
03:15:31 Yeah, exactly.
03:15:32 And he goes, I said, but here’s the kicker.
03:15:35 I have to go off of this medication.
03:15:36 And he goes, well, you know, we’re supposed to do that in the summer months when the depression’s
03:15:40 not like bringing, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
03:15:42 Listen, I hear you, but I’m doing it.
03:15:46 Whether you want me to or not.
03:15:47 So I’m letting you know, Hey, this is going to happen.
03:15:50 And he’s like, okay, just try to do it properly.
03:15:51 I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:15:52 I know the drill.
03:15:53 I know the drill, whatever, whatever.
03:15:54 I went to school to be a paramedic.
03:15:55 I know the drill.
03:15:56 I’ll go off of it properly.
03:15:57 So I can like drop that within a week that stuff was, I was done taking it.
03:16:02 And I was going through like the world’s worst just withdrawals.
03:16:06 It was like you were at a rock concert and your head was banging up and down, but you
03:16:10 were sitting perfectly still.
03:16:13 It was horrible.
03:16:14 But you had like a thing to look forward to with the sidewall.
03:16:17 I had a light at the end of the tunnel and I knew if I got to the light was the worst
03:16:22 that’s going to happen.
03:16:23 Just get to the light.
03:16:24 But at that point, like I, again, I had a son, I had a husband, I had a great company,
03:16:29 I have a great house, I have a nice car, I have everything.
03:16:33 Why did I want to die every minute of the day?
03:16:36 I was at that point again.
03:16:38 And I’m like, this has got it, something’s got to give.
03:16:41 And so I went and I got there and she is the most intense, beautiful, divine deity or entity
03:17:02 or visualization, whatever you want to deem ayahuasca as, mama ayahuasca is real.
03:17:11 And she takes no prisoners.
03:17:15 She shows you exactly what you need to see to help yourself, but she does not discriminate
03:17:23 against whether you’re ready or not.
03:17:26 If you’ve ingested it, she’s coming for you.
03:17:30 She’s going to be either gentle or she’s going to beat your ass.
03:17:34 And sometimes that’s what you need, but she does it in a way that is profound.
03:17:43 So what were some memorable, profound moments for you?
03:17:46 What what are the places it took you, these people had you meet?
03:17:52 For the first time, I got to be in a group of people who didn’t judge me or question
03:17:58 my service.
03:17:59 They just respect me.
03:18:01 That was number one.
03:18:03 So that group I lost, I just found again.
03:18:09 Big shocker, I was the only woman there again.
03:18:12 Seems to be the thing for me.
03:18:16 And so I was surrounded by all these special operators.
03:18:18 These aren’t like normal soldiers.
03:18:20 These guys that I’m with are like, Bronze Star, fucking Purple Heart, just the coolest
03:18:28 people.
03:18:29 People I’ve always wanted to be like, that’s my buddy.
03:18:32 Now I can be like, those are my buddies, like those motherfuckers will go to bat for me.
03:18:36 They will bend over backwards.
03:18:38 They will exfil me out of anywhere.
03:18:40 They will take a bullet for me.
03:18:42 And these guys welcomed me in in a way I didn’t I didn’t expect.
03:18:45 So that hit me weird right off the get.
03:18:48 I was nervous.
03:18:49 And now I was just felt that home for a minute.
03:18:52 And then when I stepped into ceremony, the first night because you do you do three nights
03:18:59 over like over like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the first night, I was so nervous and so anxious
03:19:06 because you go up in ceremony and you’re the shamans come in and they cleanse themselves
03:19:12 and then you get served the ayah individually, you go up, they give it to you, you can take
03:19:18 your time and pray, you can do whatever you want, then you drink it.
03:19:21 I was so just like, I got back to my mat and I sat there and I was like trying to keep
03:19:29 it in.
03:19:30 But I could feel that like heat come from my toes all the way up and you’re like your
03:19:34 mouth starts to water.
03:19:35 I’m gonna throw up, I’m gonna throw up, I’m gonna throw up.
03:19:37 And I looked over to Griff and I looked at Bishop and I was like, okay, and you can’t
03:19:45 talk or anything.
03:19:47 So I like my buddy, we call him the Viking, a soul Viking.
03:19:52 He looks like a Viking, his head’s tattooed, he’s been on the show.
03:19:57 He’s so cool.
03:19:58 He’s sitting directly across like you and I and he can see me, he’s looking at me and
03:20:01 I’m throwing up and I do it about three times and then the last time he just saw me and
03:20:08 I couldn’t do it, I threw it up.
03:20:12 And so I like to think that was her way of easing me in so I didn’t get like a full punch
03:20:17 to the face.
03:20:18 But I gotta, let me take your hand and show you what I’m gonna show you.
03:20:22 We’re gonna make you better, we’re gonna take the pain away.
03:20:25 Aren’t you supposed to eventually throw up no matter what?
03:20:27 It’s not supposed to, some people don’t.
03:20:29 You purge.
03:20:30 Yeah, if something’s happening, you’re going through something, yeah, you purge.
03:20:33 But it doesn’t have to happen.
03:20:34 But this, I mean, within like the first 20 minutes, no.
03:20:37 It just takes like, you gotta sit and meditate for, or sit still basically and meditate
03:20:42 in the pitch black for about 45 minutes before the effects even, before you even feel her.
03:20:48 So it’s very.
03:20:50 So here she figured out the right dose you need, maybe.
03:20:52 Well because I did the same dose as everyone else.
03:20:55 I think it was 20 mils, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you’ve never done hiatus.
03:21:01 Oh my god.
03:21:03 So I felt like such a bitch.
03:21:06 God, I felt like such a bitch.
03:21:09 Okay, that was the thought going through your mind.
03:21:11 Oh, you just fucked it all up.
03:21:13 You ruined it.
03:21:14 You ruined this again.
03:21:15 You couldn’t do this right?
03:21:16 Yeah.
03:21:17 And so at that point, we went through the meditation part and the shamans were, they
03:21:24 literally sing for like six hours straight.
03:21:26 So you sit there, you take it and then there’s just what you’re quietly listening to them.
03:21:31 Meditate and you wait and you wait and you’re in pitch black, like can’t see this far in
03:21:35 front of your face.
03:21:37 And you have a little puke bucket and then you have a little light that has a red filter
03:21:41 on it.
03:21:42 You have to get up to go to the bathroom to get out of the yurt and you use that so you
03:21:44 don’t turn lights on.
03:21:47 And me, I brought like what?
03:21:49 No, it’s just a cool visual of just a puke bucket and a little light for the, like I
03:21:55 can imagine these like little lights going every once in a while and then the rest is
03:21:58 just in darkness meditating with this singing.
03:22:03 It’s so beautiful.
03:22:04 It’s cool.
03:22:05 I would love to do that sometime.
03:22:06 Because trust me, you would, I wouldn’t offer if it wasn’t the group I would trust.
03:22:12 Yeah that’s in, you had a very interesting group.
03:22:14 So it’s the Heroic Hearts people.
03:22:16 Yeah, Heroic Hearts.
03:22:17 So they, yeah, this is my, Jesse gave us all these journals.
03:22:20 They’re like, you’re going to want these.
03:22:22 So he gave us all these journals and now this is like my Bible, like my work, my everything
03:22:26 goes in this with me everywhere.
03:22:28 It’s just this like silent reminder for me.
03:22:31 And so Heroic Hearts does fantastic work.
03:22:34 I’ll get into them after.
03:22:37 The thing with this group is there’s such care.
03:22:44 It’s not like go do AYA and like you’re done.
03:22:46 There’s like integration coaches and there’s like doctors and there’s like people to make
03:22:50 sure that you’re doing the work because AYA is just the, is just the gate.
03:22:55 Now you have to take it and you have to implement it into your life.
03:22:59 People don’t do that though.
03:23:00 Did you do like integration?
03:23:02 Did you do conversations with somebody?
03:23:04 Did you talk to, like, is there a process to, because similar with psilocybin you mentioned,
03:23:11 as I understand, it’s exceptionally beneficial for when you also do like talk therapy.
03:23:16 Like you couple that with the integration in some form where you talk through your experience
03:23:21 and you talk through different things.
03:23:23 Like that seems to be a really, you know, I need to do that more with basically every
03:23:27 substance I take.
03:23:28 Like if I get, which I have been every once in a while known to do, a bit of vodka or
03:23:33 whiskey or whatever, like do integration the next day.
03:23:37 What did you learn?
03:23:38 What did you get from that?
03:23:39 What did you get?
03:23:40 Because you learn a lot, but you sometimes kind of just move on and you celebrate that
03:23:43 that happened, but like really kind of think through it.
03:23:46 Write it down.
03:23:47 Yeah.
03:23:48 It’s important because that’s what this was.
03:23:50 So the first night, I’ll give like a very, because trust me, we could spend a whole podcast
03:23:55 on both of the, all three of those nights, but the first night, the biggest thing that
03:23:58 happened for me is I got to see my daughter, which was my first baby.
03:24:04 And so people say, well, you know, blah, blah, blah.
03:24:07 Fuck you.
03:24:08 That was my daughter.
03:24:09 And I’m very aware it was, I’m very conscious that it was.
03:24:12 And at that point, she just eased me in enough to let me know and showed me enough that this
03:24:19 wasn’t it.
03:24:20 This wasn’t the end all be all.
03:24:23 Where you are right now on this plane, on this dimension, in this life, this is, this
03:24:28 is a blip and it is, it is so minuscule to the big picture.
03:24:34 And so she really did that by, she showed me just a black and then like a crack.
03:24:40 And then these vibrant colors that I can’t describe because there aren’t words, Alex
03:24:44 Gray does really great art.
03:24:48 And that is like been the closest thing I’ve been able to find colors.
03:24:51 He’s a famous guy who does ayahuasca and he’s an artist.
03:24:56 I think he’s got stuff in New York as well.
03:24:59 But she just, she eased me in and gave me some relief and showed me enough that I could
03:25:07 go, I could wake up the next day and not want to die the next day.
03:25:12 And so what Heroic Heart said, because they gave us all these journals, they’re like,
03:25:16 you know, the next day you kind of wake up and you, you do a meet, like a meeting.
03:25:23 You do like a circle.
03:25:24 You just sit in a room and talk about what just happened the night before.
03:25:27 People are crying and people are quiet and you just listen and that’s what you do.
03:25:32 And then you write on your free time.
03:25:35 So after that, it’s like up to you what you want to do.
03:25:37 Do you want to just go walk in the woods?
03:25:38 Well, I chose to go find a fence post and lie on it for an hour.
03:25:43 I’m not kidding.
03:25:44 I lied there and stared up at these two eagles that were just in like the, I’ll tell you
03:25:48 where we were after and you’ll be like, oh, okay, I get it.
03:25:50 And then I found a forest and I just walked up with my book and I just lied there for
03:25:59 hours.
03:26:01 And then she all of a sudden started giving me what you call your downloads.
03:26:05 So the stuff you learn, the stuff that you were all of a sudden you’re remembering and
03:26:09 these messages that come through.
03:26:11 And that’s what this is.
03:26:13 What kind of things are we talking about?
03:26:17 So my biggest thing that she tried to reiterate to me at the beginning of that first night
03:26:21 was that I don’t breathe.
03:26:24 I just, I don’t, I don’t breathe.
03:26:30 I don’t fucking breathe at all.
03:26:32 I just, one thing to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing just
03:26:35 to survive.
03:26:36 I don’t take a minute and breathe.
03:26:39 And so she made, when I say she and I say it because it’s hard for people to understand,
03:26:43 but I showed this to my husband, I showed it to my doctors and they’re like, bitch, that’s
03:26:47 not you.
03:26:48 You don’t write like that.
03:26:49 You don’t talk like that.
03:26:50 So like you can flip through it, but it was like, I’ll just give, I’ll just let Lex read
03:26:57 for a second and just, I’ll just do here.
03:26:59 Let me do, I’ll do an ad for heroic hearts.
03:27:01 Heroic hearts.
03:27:02 Here, I’ll get my papers while you read.
03:27:04 Connect to her, listen to her, open to her.
03:27:07 Do you mind if I read some of these?
03:27:08 You can read some of it.
03:27:09 Yep.
03:27:10 Go right ahead.
03:27:11 The dark has lifted.
03:27:13 Judge my spelling and I’ll punch you right in the face.
03:27:16 So there’s like, it’s very sporadic, sporadically written.
03:27:22 It’s okay to be still.
03:27:24 It’s okay to be quiet.
03:27:26 This is good.
03:27:28 Like what, and these are over a stretch of, that was the first, the first couple of pages
03:27:34 were from the first night.
03:27:36 This was just that weekend.
03:27:37 And you’re just there laying looking at the Eagles.
03:27:40 Yeah.
03:27:41 With a pen, just frantic as well, Lex, not like writing where you’re like, Oh, I’m just
03:27:46 writing.
03:27:47 It’s like, I had to get it down or I was going to lose it.
03:27:52 You are warrior.
03:27:54 You are power.
03:27:56 You can choose now, breathe now, be now, be present, be warrior, be strength, breathe,
03:28:11 be the strength.
03:28:12 You are the strength.
03:28:15 There’s some soul searching going on here.
03:28:17 This is incredible.
03:28:18 Yeah.
03:28:19 We wait till you get through.
03:28:20 You get in there.
03:28:21 She gets deep, real aggressive, like.
03:28:25 Crack the door for I am the light, the giver, the taker.
03:28:33 I am warrior.
03:28:34 I am life.
03:28:35 I am air.
03:28:36 I am water.
03:28:37 I am fire.
03:28:39 I am light.
03:28:44 This will, this can.
03:28:46 This will, this can.
03:28:49 For I am warrior.
03:28:53 For I am light.
03:28:54 And there’s a leaf here.
03:28:56 What’s the story with the leaf?
03:28:57 I don’t know.
03:28:58 I was walking and every single time over the, over those three days, anytime I like went
03:29:02 for a walk by myself, I would just hear like, take this, like just almost like as if a voice
03:29:09 was standing there and be like, you need this, take it, take it with you and keep it in your
03:29:12 book.
03:29:13 Ground you.
03:29:16 And it just goes off.
03:29:17 So this is from there.
03:29:18 Yeah.
03:29:19 It’s cool to have sort of, it’s almost like time travel.
03:29:23 I have poppies from France too when I did a, I did a 75th anniversary D Day ride in France
03:29:28 where we rode 600 kilometers on our road bikes for charity.
03:29:32 And we landed on the beaches of Juneau on the 75th and we got to go by the poppy fields
03:29:37 and I’m like covered in poppies and I have some in a book.
03:29:42 I don’t know why I do that.
03:29:44 I just, I do that.
03:29:47 That’s cool because like, these are your thoughts and those are the physical items as it really
03:29:51 helps transport to that place somehow.
03:29:55 Let the light in, let her in.
03:29:56 And she would show me these visuals.
03:30:02 So my drawings are just like, yeah, there’s drawings here and you’re seeing this stuff.
03:30:12 Oh yeah.
03:30:14 I can’t draw either.
03:30:15 So that’s why they’re so, I wish I could draw because if only I could translate what I could
03:30:20 see visually onto paper.
03:30:24 And you’re talking to her.
03:30:26 Yeah.
03:30:27 It’s time.
03:30:28 I’m here to listen.
03:30:32 Is this Mama Aya?
03:30:34 Yeah.
03:30:35 We call her Mama Aya.
03:30:36 Mama Aya.
03:30:37 Mama Aya.
03:30:38 So what, who, who are you seeing?
03:30:41 Is this a woman?
03:30:42 So for me at first, it was just eyes floating in the sky.
03:30:46 These unbelievably gorgeous, beautiful eyes that I, and I was like literally looking up
03:30:50 at the top of the yurt and I kept going to myself, is anyone else seeing this?
03:30:55 There’s eyes in the sky.
03:30:59 And so there’s these eyes floating and they just kept looking at me.
03:31:04 And I remember when I kept telling myself like, oh, don’t worry about it, there’s nothing
03:31:07 there.
03:31:08 She would get angry.
03:31:09 I’m right here.
03:31:11 Pay attention to me.
03:31:12 And I’d be like, okay, like forceful, like very forceful.
03:31:17 So at first it was just the eyes.
03:31:20 The second night, is I’m crazy when I say this, great, that’s going to be my clip, easy
03:31:32 on crazy.
03:31:33 It’s what I do when I get uncomfortable.
03:31:35 I do weird hand gestures and movements.
03:31:37 Voices, I like it.
03:31:40 Yeah, I do.
03:31:41 Yeah.
03:31:42 You would hate to be in my office because most of the day it’s just this weird lunges
03:31:48 and uncomfortable moments.
03:31:50 She turned me into a wolf.
03:31:54 I know I said it out loud.
03:31:55 I said, I hear it, I said it, head to toe.
03:32:01 And her takeaway for me was, I’m trying to be this pack leader, I’m trying to be this
03:32:07 leader in my life.
03:32:08 I’m trying to do these things, but I’m going about them the whole wrong way.
03:32:13 So like when the shamans call you up to do their special prayer over you, you go up,
03:32:18 you don’t touch them.
03:32:19 They flash their little light.
03:32:20 You see the little light spot, you walk to the light, you sit down on the light.
03:32:24 And then my shaman, he’s so funny because he’s got this great tone in his voice.
03:32:27 He goes, how are you doing Kelsey?
03:32:31 And I’m like, so hi, yeah, I have a problem.
03:32:37 I’m a wolf and I need it to stop.
03:32:39 And he’d be like, don’t you worry girl, I got you, you ready?
03:32:42 And I was like, uh huh, uh huh.
03:32:44 So I’m sitting there cross legged, I’ve got my palms out like this.
03:32:48 And I had a really traumatic shoulder injury.
03:32:50 So I don’t just sit slanted like this.
03:32:51 My shoulders actually permanently detached and no one in the world will touch it or fix
03:32:55 it.
03:32:56 My collarbone comes out my back here and I don’t have any collarbone here.
03:33:00 So nobody will fix it.
03:33:02 No one will touch it.
03:33:03 Even I’ve had specialists, I’ve had surgeries, no one will do anything with it.
03:33:06 So I’m permanently down and forward.
03:33:09 So I slouch, it’s horrible.
03:33:14 So before I.
03:33:15 Functionally too.
03:33:16 Oh, there’s nothing.
03:33:17 I can’t do a pull up anymore.
03:33:18 Oh, so weak.
03:33:19 Oh, wow.
03:33:20 Oh, you should, I’ll show you how to do a pushup after you’ll fucking throw up in embarrassment.
03:33:26 Yeah, it’s bad.
03:33:27 So before I though, chronic pain, like had to drink a bottle of CBD every day just to
03:33:32 the pain is so bad because the trauma and it was so bad, the surgery went wrong.
03:33:38 The collarbone dissipated and no longer exists.
03:33:40 Like there’s just, and they’re not sure how I lift things with it and do stuff with it.
03:33:44 It’s like overcompensation everywhere.
03:33:46 Like my, the, my back, like, um, my trap, my scapula, like flares outward.
03:33:53 It’s I’m all messed up from it.
03:33:54 And so I was in chronic pain.
03:33:56 So he’s praying over me and all of a sudden all I feel is this arm just start just fucking
03:34:03 vibrating and my hair’s really long and I feel somebody grabbed the back of my ponytail
03:34:08 and snap my head back like this.
03:34:12 And it felt like something was coming out of my throat, like being pulled out of me
03:34:18 in the takeaway that I ended up in the whole, the rest of the night, there was a million
03:34:22 other things.
03:34:23 And the takeaway was you no longer need to bite.
03:34:30 You may only show your teeth.
03:34:32 You can be the leader that you want to be.
03:34:35 You do not always have to be the traditional type of leader.
03:34:39 You can be in the back of the pack.
03:34:41 You have to watch the rest around you be, be mindful of those around you instead of
03:34:46 just being upfront, be, be behind as well.
03:34:50 Make sure that every thing that you’re doing is all being looked after.
03:34:54 Because my thing was I will rip your fucking head off if you just say the wrong thing to
03:34:58 me before.
03:34:59 The whole thing was you can just show your teeth and that is more than enough.
03:35:03 Stop trying to be, stop trying to overcompensate.
03:35:07 You don’t need to do that any longer.
03:35:09 And then I had this weird astral projection thing happen like where I was in my house
03:35:15 and there were these flyers all over my husband and my son and like I went ham on them.
03:35:22 I like shredded them to pieces.
03:35:24 Like I was this protector.
03:35:28 And it’s crazy because the guys told me after like someone would be like, there were flyers
03:35:33 all over you the whole night.
03:35:35 They were just all over you.
03:35:36 And I’m like, I was snarling when I was sitting there.
03:35:38 Like the shaman had to be like, I need you to try to calm your breathing after I could.
03:35:43 But before like I was like attacking things beside me that people could see and I could
03:35:50 see but couldn’t wrap my brain around that they were real.
03:35:53 Like it was weird.
03:35:54 This is a crazy man.
03:35:58 That’s day two.
03:35:59 That’s day two.
03:36:00 And so what’s the big takeaway there?
03:36:03 My takeaway was I needed to be, I needed to stop trying to, stop trying to push everything
03:36:11 too hard.
03:36:12 Stop trying to force everything.
03:36:14 It’s all going to come.
03:36:15 It’s all going to happen.
03:36:17 But you are, you are too aggressive.
03:36:20 You are too, you’re trying so hard that you’re missing, you’re missing everything else.
03:36:26 Got it.
03:36:27 That’s just how to be a better human kind of thing.
03:36:31 Right.
03:36:32 This is getting intense.
03:36:33 Yeah, it gets aggressive.
03:36:34 Yeah, it gets aggressive.
03:36:35 I mean there’s love and light still.
03:36:42 It gets better.
03:36:43 Love and light.
03:36:44 Love and light the warrior within is calm.
03:36:48 She will test you daily.
03:36:50 Show her respect.
03:36:52 So that’s what I mean.
03:36:53 You’ve read my book.
03:36:54 You know I don’t write like that.
03:36:55 Yeah.
03:36:56 This is strange.
03:36:57 See?
03:36:58 Good.
03:36:59 You get it.
03:37:00 Because people don’t understand when I say I didn’t, I don’t feel like I wrote that.
03:37:04 I feel like she gave me, like I reread this all of the time.
03:37:10 So I wonder, I mean, well not obviously, but this is somehow part of you.
03:37:16 I think it’s a part of me obviously.
03:37:18 Reconnecting you somehow to that part.
03:37:20 It kind of is incredible to think of what are the things that are part of us that we
03:37:24 haven’t really explored, you know.
03:37:26 And there’s so many.
03:37:28 We just get to talk.
03:37:29 Nature.
03:37:30 To connect to her.
03:37:31 Feel her flow through them.
03:37:34 Use them for the strength for each day a new challenge will present itself.
03:37:39 Love.
03:37:40 Light.
03:37:41 Breathe.
03:37:42 Sorry I have too much hair.
03:37:45 Never enough.
03:37:46 I used to have long hair.
03:37:47 What about day three?
03:37:48 So day three is the, the stuff I talked about on Jocko.
03:37:52 When I got taken over to the other side.
03:37:55 I almost missed that night too.
03:37:57 I almost missed that ceremony.
03:37:59 I got a false positive on my COVID test and I got a call from the medical clinic that
03:38:04 night being like, you need to come in.
03:38:07 You got a false positive on your COVID test.
03:38:10 And if you’re going to travel, you have to, we got to figure this out.
03:38:14 You got to come do blood work.
03:38:15 You got to come do, you know, whatever it is you need to do if you want to get home,
03:38:19 but you got to come do something.
03:38:21 And so I didn’t think I was going to be in ceremony.
03:38:24 I had to leave.
03:38:25 So I left and you know, they waited, they waited for me.
03:38:35 And so I think the biggest takeaway from all of this for me was this isn’t it.
03:38:43 This isn’t everything.
03:38:45 This isn’t the end all be all.
03:38:49 You can fight through this.
03:38:50 This is possible.
03:38:52 It’s going to take work.
03:38:53 It’s going to be fucking hard.
03:38:55 It’s worth it though.
03:38:56 And if you just keep going in the right direction, everything that I wrote down, everything,
03:39:01 every goal, it’ll happen.
03:39:05 What about love?
03:39:07 What about love?
03:39:09 Tell me about your husband.
03:39:10 Okay.
03:39:11 He’s the best.
03:39:12 What role did he play in your life?
03:39:15 The most pivotal role.
03:39:17 He kept me alive and made me feel worthy enough to, until I knew that I was worthy enough
03:39:22 to be alive.
03:39:25 Can you dissect that a little bit?
03:39:26 Like what, I mean, what role does love play in the human condition?
03:39:31 I think love is the only reason that we haven’t destroyed ourselves.
03:39:36 I mean, we humans in general.
03:39:39 Yes.
03:39:40 I think there is a subset of people where love will always be, you know, love conquers
03:39:46 all, you know, but that’s not always the reality.
03:39:49 The reality is life is messy and humans are messy and the way we choose to deal with things
03:39:56 are messy and complicated and difficult, but at the root of all good is love, I think.
03:40:02 And for me, I was fortunate enough to meet my husband through a friend, which you listened
03:40:11 to that podcast.
03:40:12 So I don’t know that we need to, unless you really want to go into that story again, how
03:40:16 I met my husband.
03:40:18 Well, the only part of that story I like, people should just go listen to the Jackal
03:40:21 podcast is how you made him uncomfortable.
03:40:23 I love it.
03:40:24 I, well, okay.
03:40:25 So how it works, let me explain.
03:40:26 In the supercross and motocross industry, it’s really small.
03:40:29 The people who are professional, there’s, it’s a small subset of people.
03:40:32 It’s kind of like formula one, 21 cars.
03:40:35 That’s what there is.
03:40:36 That’s the amount of riders.
03:40:37 And we should say your husband is a motocross guy.
03:40:40 My husband was a professional supercross and motocross racer for his whole life.
03:40:44 And he raced for Kawasaki and Suzuki.
03:40:48 He lived in California and raced all down there.
03:40:51 And when I met him, I met him at the tail end of his career.
03:40:54 And so I went to Montreal with a friend of mine to see somebody that I was currently
03:41:00 sleeping with, who was a friend of mine and end up meeting Brady instead.
03:41:08 Yeah.
03:41:09 And the funny moment in Jackal’s podcast was saying that I was fucking him instead
03:41:13 of just sleeping with him.
03:41:14 And then Jackal’s face exploded and Jackal was like, oh, sleeping.
03:41:18 So like he was, he was trying to get details of the sleeping quarters that you’re just
03:41:23 trying to get you to define as a good interviewer would, oh, sleeping, okay.
03:41:26 And then you were like, it’s fucking Jackal or something like that.
03:41:32 It was great.
03:41:33 It was great.
03:41:34 But that’s true because in that industry, it’s like, we, it’s small.
03:41:37 We all share, trust me, is what it is.
03:41:41 And it was, so I met him there and he had broken his wrist really, really bad.
03:41:45 And I was, this was before I deployed.
03:41:48 So I met him and I, we stayed in touch and just became friends and just texted.
03:41:54 That was it.
03:41:55 Nothing weird.
03:41:56 And I was deploying though.
03:41:57 So we just agreed, you know, we’d be friends.
03:42:00 We weren’t actually talking about anything romantically at all.
03:42:04 And then I deployed and we got talking and to know each other a little more, a little
03:42:09 more.
03:42:10 And then we decided that we liked each other and we wanted to try to give it at least a
03:42:14 semi shot.
03:42:15 And so when I got home from Afghanistan, I went and watched him race his last, one of
03:42:21 his last two races that he did professionally before he retired, excuse me.
03:42:27 And it was in Montreal and one was in Vegas and I hadn’t seen him and he didn’t really
03:42:34 know me.
03:42:35 We didn’t really know each other.
03:42:36 We met, I slept in the bed beside him because my girlfriend didn’t want to get in trouble
03:42:41 from her boyfriend from sleeping beside a random dude.
03:42:45 And then, yeah, we just, we started dating and he really slowly became my rock and he
03:42:54 understands trauma.
03:42:55 He had some stuff happen in his life and his family that he went through a lot of therapy.
03:43:00 He went through a lot of shit.
03:43:01 He went, he saw what traumatic situations can do to a family and to people and those
03:43:07 that are suffering with it.
03:43:09 And so he was well equipped to handle me, thankfully.
03:43:15 And it got to a point where we were doing the long distance back and forth, back and
03:43:18 forth and back and forth.
03:43:19 And I finally got the call that I was going to be released from the military and I wanted
03:43:23 to live near him, but I couldn’t afford to live in British Columbia because I was from
03:43:26 Ontario and BC is like, it means bring cash for a reason.
03:43:31 I’m like, there’s no way I can live there.
03:43:32 And then his family was like, come live with us.
03:43:35 They had a big enough house.
03:43:37 They had a big enough house.
03:43:39 Trust me, it was fine.
03:43:40 So I was like, okay.
03:43:42 And so I went from dating this guy long distance to over from 2009 to 2011, just back and forth,
03:43:49 back and forth, back and forth.
03:43:50 And then finally his parents were like, should her get off the pot here with her?
03:43:53 Come on.
03:43:54 It’s obvious she loves you and I would never say it.
03:43:58 That word just as a love.
03:44:00 Like it was just, I couldn’t say for a long time, for a long time because I was dead inside.
03:44:07 I didn’t know what that meant because I couldn’t feel, I didn’t feel anything.
03:44:11 He loved it because he like, we go, we go do something.
03:44:15 You would never complain about anything.
03:44:17 You wouldn’t say a fucking word.
03:44:19 You would just sit there.
03:44:20 And now you got all your feelings back and your emotions back and now you’re too hot
03:44:26 and you’re too cold.
03:44:27 And anyways, so yeah, he loved it.
03:44:29 I was numb and dead inside.
03:44:30 Seriously, when I call him back.
03:44:32 Were you still able to have fun together?
03:44:34 That kind of thing?
03:44:35 Like when you say there’s no emotion, there’s more emotion around the basics of like everyday
03:44:39 life, but you’re still able to just like enjoy shit together?
03:44:43 I was enjoying stuff, but I wasn’t feeling.
03:44:49 I was like, this is fun.
03:44:50 Yeah.
03:44:51 Right.
03:44:52 That was it.
03:44:53 That was surface level like Lex, this is fun.
03:44:54 It wasn’t.
03:44:55 There’s nothing there.
03:44:56 Yeah, no, there’s nothing that, Hey, yeah, nothing.
03:45:02 And so we went through that for a long time and then I lived with his parents and we,
03:45:06 we lived there and that was, you know, God damn it.
03:45:09 His family was so good to me because I was a nightmare.
03:45:12 I was a nightmare.
03:45:14 Couldn’t cook certain food around me anymore.
03:45:16 Couldn’t, couldn’t go certain places anymore.
03:45:18 Couldn’t, you know, crowds were in hard no, we didn’t do Canada today.
03:45:22 And like, I just changed, I moved in and was like, shit’s got to change.
03:45:26 If you guys don’t want me to kill everyone, like, and they were willing and they were
03:45:31 accepting and they were amazing about it.
03:45:34 And then we finally said, okay, well like, does this, is this, we’re good.
03:45:37 We’re like, I said, I used to say like, I L you like, I couldn’t say love.
03:45:44 It freaked me out for a long time.
03:45:46 And then I finally said it and then that shit had said it like a month later and I was like,
03:45:50 that’s not fair.
03:45:51 That’s not the same exact time.
03:45:52 I wanted the response.
03:45:53 Yeah.
03:45:54 And he goes to treatment with me, he, whatever I need, he knows that like, hey, it’s more
03:46:00 for like him and like, how do I handle her?
03:46:04 And then we moved out and we bought a house and then he took a sweet ass time.
03:46:07 We were dating for four years before we were engaged because just to be sure the crazy
03:46:12 wasn’t too crazy, he waited four years on that.
03:46:15 Smart man.
03:46:16 Right?
03:46:17 Yeah.
03:46:18 Or you can, you could say he’s just terrified of commitment, but both.
03:46:20 A little bit of both.
03:46:21 Hey, when you were the guy on the posters that all the girls sign up to, that sent all
03:46:26 the dirty pictures, fucking why are you giving that up?
03:46:28 It’s easy.
03:46:29 Yeah.
03:46:30 Commitment is a real commitment then.
03:46:31 Yeah.
03:46:32 Okay.
03:46:33 This is the Jaco reset.
03:46:37 We talked about Brass in Unity a little bit.
03:46:40 What’s the longterm mission goal and dream of your company and the podcast of the same
03:46:46 name?
03:46:47 So for me, what I’ve been trying to do with this company is create a community that can
03:46:54 really work together to not only help vets, first responders, but to really bridge the
03:46:59 gap with the civilian population and letting them know what we kind of go through and why
03:47:03 it is such a epidemic and why there is over 22 suicides a day and we are losing people
03:47:09 like it’s going out of style, like the amount of vets that are questioning the last 20 years
03:47:13 of their life right now is terrifying.
03:47:18 I work with organizations that are doing this outreach and they’re overloaded right now
03:47:22 like they have never seen before because this whole thing is just, it’s hit ahead here.
03:47:28 And so what Brass in Unity tries to do is it is really just a vehicle to get the money
03:47:33 in the hands of the people that are doing the work with it.
03:47:35 I couldn’t start a nonprofit because I’m not good at fundraising.
03:47:38 I’m not good at being like, give me your money, I’m going to do this with it.
03:47:42 The least I could do is come up with a product that I know I could give to people or people
03:47:47 could purchase and if I gave pretty much all of the actual profit from it to those organizations
03:47:56 and I give them something to wear that is a touch piece or if they’re out and somebody
03:48:02 sees a bullet on the wrist they go, hey, what is that?
03:48:04 It’s a conversation starter and that’s exactly what it’s been and it’s done its job as that.
03:48:10 And so we, like I said, we are a way to get the vehicle, we’re the vehicle, we’re the
03:48:14 money in the hands of the people.
03:48:15 People don’t always want to just get a tax receipt.
03:48:18 It’s great to donate to something, great on you to do that but most people have a selfish
03:48:22 aspect and that’s okay but if you can tap into that you can then fund these charities
03:48:28 properly and give them the tools to do their jobs effectively.
03:48:32 Up until this point they just count on people’s goodness of their hearts.
03:48:36 Hate to break it to you, humanity is rough right now.
03:48:38 We need to look at something a little differently.
03:48:40 So these things spark, like a jewelry sparks conversations and then do you work with charities?
03:48:46 Yes, oh God, yeah, that’s what I do.
03:48:49 So my whole mission every day is I get up, I push jewelry and sunglasses on people and
03:48:54 say but now that you’re gonna wear that, now you’re a part of the B&U Army, now you’re
03:48:59 a part of this community.
03:49:00 Speaking of which, let me put it right back on, branded.
03:49:05 This is organic product placement.
03:49:07 Yeah, this isn’t like marketing at all, nothing weird about this at all and so we work with
03:49:13 a lot of organizations and I’m very particular about where we send our money because there
03:49:17 are, it feels like thousands of vet organizations right now and if we were able to consolidate,
03:49:24 it would be more ideal.
03:49:25 I spoke about that on another show but that’s not currently happening.
03:49:28 So I try to work with the nonprofits I know, number one, are not paying six figure salaries
03:49:32 which trust me, there’s lots, a lot.
03:49:36 Number two, I look at the actual resources that they’re providing and if they’re going
03:49:39 to be something that are gonna be useful, in my opinion, whether or not they’re actually
03:49:43 useful and I just don’t think they are, that’s up for debate.
03:49:46 I know it’s worked for me so I try to fund the things that I know have been helpful for
03:49:50 me and the people I associate with.
03:49:52 So that’s why I brought all the paper because I didn’t wanna be an idiot and forget anybody
03:49:57 that’s really important because I get caught up in things and I think it’s important to
03:50:01 acknowledge.
03:50:02 So number one, Heroic Hearts, we just started working to talk about them and really make
03:50:09 them known but we’re gonna be donating to them as well.
03:50:12 Are they doing more stuff than the ayahuasca thing?
03:50:15 Yeah, so their points are, I got Jesse to actually, I’m like what are your talking points
03:50:19 because I need people to know exactly what you do.
03:50:21 So veterans have had to take their mental and general health into their own hands due
03:50:25 to the failure of the government system so that is why they were created but Heroic
03:50:29 Hearts is a peer supported mental health network involving full preparation, integration, coaching
03:50:34 and connection to vetted psychedelic treatments.
03:50:36 So they don’t just do ayahuasca, they deal with psilocybin, ketamine, ibogaine but they’ve
03:50:42 got protocols in place, they’ve got locations you go to that are safely vetted and they
03:50:47 work.
03:50:48 They’ve got over right now, Jesse said they have 800 veterans on a waiting list for treatment.
03:50:53 That’s just before the spike of the end of this war.
03:50:57 They have over a hundred, they’ve helped over a hundred veterans including dozens of special
03:51:02 operation vets find effective care.
03:51:04 They’ve now got branches in the US, UK and Canada and the biggest thing about them and
03:51:09 why we talk about them is because the problem of psychedelics and the stigma around it is
03:51:14 so significant but because of great universities that are now stepping up and doing the research
03:51:19 behind it, it is being legitimized.
03:51:21 So like they’re doing that, in Canada there’s a group called Theracil, they are currently
03:51:26 fighting the government to get the rights for Canadians under section 56 of our laws
03:51:31 to get compassionate care for psilocybin use.
03:51:34 I’ve done a panel with them on that really great base out of Victoria, really smart people.
03:51:40 One of the other bigger charities that we work with and they’re honestly, they were
03:51:44 my first and foremost charity that I ever worked with and they’re a big component in
03:51:48 the veteran community in Canada.
03:51:51 They’re called Honour House and Honour House was started by honorary Colonel Aldi Genova.
03:51:57 It was started because of a guy named Trevor Green.
03:52:00 He was a Canadian soldier who deployed and he was, so Captain Trevor Green, sorry Trevor,
03:52:06 Captain Trevor Green, he got an ax in the middle of his head, a Taliban member came
03:52:11 up and put an ax directly into his head when his helmet was off and he survived.
03:52:16 He’s done work with Invictus Games and Prince Harry.
03:52:19 He has an exoskeleton he uses on the island.
03:52:22 He’s so cool.
03:52:23 He hasn’t changed one bit from like the infantry captain you expect him to be.
03:52:29 And Al saw there was a need for vets and first responders to get treatment because there’s
03:52:34 no real home away from home for people.
03:52:37 Picture Ronald McDonald for cancer and families, this is vets and first responders.
03:52:42 And so their whole thing, and I’ll read it so I say it exactly right because I used to
03:52:46 be on the board of their charity, but I ran out of time, so now I just consult.
03:52:50 But they are a home away from home for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, veterans and
03:52:55 first responders and their families to stay completely free of charge while they’re receiving
03:53:00 medical care and treatment in the Vancouver area.
03:53:03 But since then, they’ve expanded since I’ve come on board and they’ve opened Honour Ranch,
03:53:08 which is up in Ashcroft, BC and it’s 140 acres, 10 cabins and a main cabin.
03:53:14 They do equine therapy and they’re more focused on operational stress injury clinic.
03:53:18 So sorry, operational stress injury within the veteran community.
03:53:22 And they have specialists that do that.
03:53:25 They have their own bracelet with us.
03:53:27 So every time you buy an Honour House bracelet, all the proceeds go to them.
03:53:30 And it’s actually the green one.
03:53:33 So that one.
03:53:34 So when you buy one of those Honour House bracelets, they have those.
03:53:37 They go directly to them, which is really amazing.
03:53:41 They’ve been near and dear to my heart for a long time.
03:53:44 You’ve got the All Secure Foundation, which is these guys are these guys are super dope.
03:53:49 I’m going to read exactly because Jen text me.
03:53:50 So Jen and Tom Satterly, I’ve had them both on the podcast.
03:53:54 Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down.
03:53:58 Tom is a Delta.
03:53:59 Have you heard of them?
03:54:00 No.
03:54:01 No.
03:54:02 No.
03:54:03 So, okay.
03:54:04 So Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down.
03:54:05 It was one of his first operations.
03:54:06 He’s a Delta operator.
03:54:08 And I asked her, I said, listen, I’m going to be doing these shows and I think it’s great
03:54:11 that we talk about you more.
03:54:12 So I said, give me your three points of importance.
03:54:15 So the All Secure Foundation serves special operations combat families in healing from
03:54:20 post traumatic stress injury and secondary post traumatic stress.
03:54:23 So that’s often what the wife or the other husband or the other spouse suffers from.
03:54:27 And we’re starting to see that be more and more of an issue now.
03:54:31 So they also are devoted to rebuilding the couple’s relationships on the home front after
03:54:35 the separations of war.
03:54:36 And 80% of their warriors want their families to be more involved in the healing.
03:54:45 The problem is, is very often vets don’t realize that they can have, or just because the system
03:54:51 doesn’t pay for it, actually have their spouse as a part of things.
03:54:54 And the biggest thing that we find with special operations families, I think the divorce rate
03:54:57 is like 95%.
03:55:00 And so they work so hard with these families.
03:55:03 They take them on retreats, these husband and wives, and they get them to connect again
03:55:06 after being separated over such a long period of time.
03:55:09 There’s other places like Children of Fallen Patriots out of DC, where they fund education,
03:55:14 university for people who have lost their parents in deployments, whether their kid’s
03:55:20 even born yet.
03:55:21 If they’re still in utero, they still pay.
03:55:23 They do not care.
03:55:24 Then you’ve got people like in Canada, you’ve got Vets Canada, you’ve got in the States,
03:55:30 you’ve got True Patriot Love, you’ve got, who else in the States is really great that
03:55:35 we’ve worked with.
03:55:36 I know there’s a Green Beret Foundation that’s great.
03:55:39 One More Wave gives amputees, teaches them to surf with amputees.
03:55:44 They’re really great.
03:55:45 There’s so many organizations.
03:55:46 But at the end of the day, I focus on a small subset because you cannot fix everyone’s problems.
03:55:55 The least you can do for people is focus.
03:55:57 If you can provide focus, you can provide the proper amount of funding.
03:56:01 Proper amount of funding can get the proper amount of tools.
03:56:03 Those tools can actually be implemented properly and then those people can go on to hopefully
03:56:08 have successful marriages and families and we don’t have to watch our parents drink themselves
03:56:14 to death and wonder why daddy’s yelling at mommy all the time and daddy storms out and
03:56:18 leaves.
03:56:19 Well, daddy had some shit happen in his life and mommy had some shit happen, but that does
03:56:22 not mean that’s who they are.
03:56:24 And yes, so trauma has completely destructive effects on family and relationships and correcting
03:56:31 that as like ripple effects.
03:56:34 Oh, just astronomical ripple effects.
03:56:38 Because the problem is we are so quick to tell people they’re suffering from PTSD.
03:56:44 We’re so quick to give them drugs.
03:56:45 We’re so quick to kick them out of the military.
03:56:48 We’re so quick to let them be homeless on the street.
03:56:50 We’re so quick to let them fucking kill themselves.
03:56:52 We’re so quick.
03:56:53 And then all of a sudden, when when a politician goes, veteran suicide is an issue, that’s
03:56:57 when it’s a problem.
03:56:58 Well, if you prevent the problem from happening in the first place, or you give people the
03:57:02 right funding and tools to do the job, you won’t have this problem.
03:57:05 Do you have advice for young people, think high school students, maybe undergrads, college
03:57:14 students about career, life, how to live a life they can be proud of?
03:57:21 You’ve had one heck of a life.
03:57:25 Some of them are really cheesy, but they’re true.
03:57:29 Live a life you can be proud of, number one.
03:57:32 If you wake up every morning and you hate what you do, change the fucking station.
03:57:37 Do not live and stay in that perpetual cycle of bullshit.
03:57:41 It’s not worth it.
03:57:42 It’s not.
03:57:43 It’s not what you’re on this planet for.
03:57:45 You’re worth more than that, than the monotony of waking up, going to work, hating your life,
03:57:51 drinking yourself to sleep, and functioning.
03:57:54 Do yourself a favor.
03:57:55 The thing I scream about on the show so much is move your fucking body.
03:58:00 Move your body.
03:58:02 Get your blood moving.
03:58:04 Allow your body to do what it’s here for.
03:58:07 Go for a run.
03:58:08 Go for a walk.
03:58:09 If you can’t run, walk to the fridge three times more than maybe you did before, but
03:58:13 you’re moving.
03:58:15 Pay attention to the shit you look at.
03:58:20 More now than ever, we are seeing our younger generation just be force fed information from
03:58:25 one side or the other, and none of it makes sense.
03:58:28 None of it’s understandable.
03:58:29 It just causes chaos in the brain.
03:58:32 Really pay attention to what you listen to.
03:58:36 Something I’ve had to learn to do is make time for myself.
03:58:42 All of this working 18 hours a day, not sleeping, just work, work, work.
03:58:47 That doesn’t work.
03:58:48 That’s not sustainable.
03:58:49 That’s not healthy.
03:58:50 And it’s not anything anyone should be doing.
03:58:52 Balance is important.
03:58:55 But if you’re going to take the time to do something for yourself, don’t make it sitting
03:59:00 in front of the TV for six hours, eating a bag of chips, drinking a Coke.
03:59:05 Make it, I’m going to go for a walk, maybe listen to a podcast where I can learn something.
03:59:09 Make it, I’m going to go volunteer somewhere.
03:59:12 Nobody does that anymore, but make it I can go volunteer somewhere.
03:59:15 Honor House, they have no paid employees.
03:59:18 They have one, everybody is a volunteer.
03:59:20 They’re fucking phenomenal.
03:59:23 Just do whatever you’re going to do.
03:59:26 Do it with some fucking drive, put some goddamn effort into your life and pick something in
03:59:31 a career that’s going to make you happy.
03:59:34 Not something that’s just going to give you six figures because that’s not going to make
03:59:36 you happy.
03:59:37 I can tell you right now, I have everything in the world and the last thing I want is
03:59:41 more things.
03:59:42 I want less.
03:59:43 I want the woods and I want quiet because that’s what’s important to me.
03:59:48 I want my family to matter, the people around me to matter, and the small group I keep,
03:59:53 that tight knit I have, I want them to wake up every minute knowing that they have a friend
03:59:58 that they can call on the other line that isn’t just like, how’s it going?
04:00:01 That can actually have a conversation, a meaningful, intelligent, caring conversation.
04:00:09 We are just breeding these kids to be followers who digest bullshit, who reverberate things
04:00:16 they don’t fully understand and have opinions on stuff they have no business talking about.
04:00:22 Yeah, with an open mind, humbly think deeply about the world.
04:00:29 How has your relationship with death changed?
04:00:32 This is a Russian program, I have to ask you.
04:00:36 So you’ve considered suicide throughout your life.
04:00:38 You have been in the line of fire, you have witnessed death.
04:00:43 You as a human being, a mortal one, do you think about your death these days now that
04:00:50 you have begun the journey with dealing with your trauma?
04:00:55 Do you think about your death?
04:00:57 Are you afraid of your death?
04:01:01 Well you don’t die, so that’s why.
04:01:02 What do you mean you don’t die?
04:01:05 You move on.
04:01:06 Where do you go?
04:01:08 To another plane, and another vibration, and another whatever you want to call it.
04:01:13 This isn’t it.
04:01:14 This isn’t all of it.
04:01:16 This is a blip.
04:01:17 This is a moment.
04:01:18 This is a…
04:01:19 I used to be afraid of death before the military.
04:01:22 I was always afraid of dying.
04:01:24 I don’t know why.
04:01:25 I had this irrational fear that I was going to be kidnapped in my room, like seriously,
04:01:29 like irrational fear, like afraid.
04:01:30 And it’s funny because I talked to Michaela yesterday and she said the same thing and
04:01:37 I was like, oh my God, I know what you’re talking about.
04:01:39 Being afraid of being kidnapped?
04:01:41 Yeah, she had this fear that someone was going to come in and take her out of her room.
04:01:45 I had the same fear.
04:01:46 By a human being or a monster of some kind?
04:01:49 No, I think like by a human being.
04:01:50 And I had this irrational fear that something was going to happen to me.
04:01:54 And like I said, I don’t know if it was because my parents were always made me aware of my
04:01:57 surroundings.
04:01:58 People take people.
04:01:59 This is a real thing that happens.
04:02:01 I was really small and I looked like a little boy.
04:02:03 My hair was like that when I was training.
04:02:06 I had short, no hair, flat as a board.
04:02:08 You would have thought I was a 12 year old boy.
04:02:11 And so my mom’s like, people take people, sweetie, that’s just the reality of life.
04:02:14 You need to be aware.
04:02:15 So I don’t know if I had this ingrained in my mind.
04:02:18 I was always like training to protect myself or fight someone off.
04:02:21 So I was like afraid of like this irrational thing.
04:02:25 And then I went overseas and then I realized that I could just be literally there talking
04:02:28 to you, having a conversation, and I could just be taken off the face of the earth.
04:02:32 And there’s nothing I can do about it.
04:02:34 And then I adopted this idea that when it’s my time, it’ll be my time.
04:02:37 But the difference is now, at least I know that if I do go and I do cross and I am and
04:02:50 I do move on, I know that I live my life the way that I always hoped I would be proud to
04:02:59 live.
04:03:00 Can I ask you a dark question because we, you mentioned Robin Williams, you mentioned
04:03:08 Anthony Bourdain and your own struggle with suicide.
04:03:12 Why do you think they ultimately lost the battle, that battle?
04:03:18 Why do you think they took their lives?
04:03:19 Man, that’s a, that’s a loaded question because you could look at everything from, from biomarkers
04:03:25 in the brain to know if their serotonin and dopamine levels were crashed in the ground.
04:03:30 Like there’s, there’s biological reasonings for some people where they’re born bipolar
04:03:35 and they have, or, you know, they’re schizophrenic, like there’s so many things we don’t fully
04:03:40 grasp about the brain.
04:03:43 But what we do know from my perspective, for me at least, there really is no rhyme or reason
04:03:52 why I survived and others didn’t.
04:03:56 Stuff and things don’t make you happy.
04:03:59 People don’t always know why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling, but they also are,
04:04:05 also are not always willing to talk about it or be, they put on a good front.
04:04:15 And if nobody knows any different, what do you expect?
04:04:18 And it’s especially clear with the, the two of them that on the surface they’re, you know,
04:04:24 exceptionally successful in so many dimensions and still that means nothing.
04:04:29 Well possessions, anything really is not, doesn’t guarantee you happiness.
04:04:36 No, it doesn’t.
04:04:38 Well that’s terrifying, but when it’s good, that’s what makes it joyful.
04:04:49 Like that’s what happiness is, is like holy shit somehow amidst all the absurdity, all
04:04:54 the things that you can’t predict, you, you nevertheless feel really good.
04:04:59 That’s why I feel really fortunate to be getting this feat of happiness all the time.
04:05:05 Well to be or not to be, that’s a good place to end it.
04:05:10 Kelsey, you’re an amazing human being.
04:05:13 I’m really fortunate that you would spend your valuable time with me.
04:05:18 As I said, you’re so good at not just talking, but listening.
04:05:23 So I definitely will listen to your podcast because I can tell you’re an incredible person
04:05:27 as an interviewer and as a storyteller.
04:05:30 So again, thank you for talking today.
04:05:33 Thank you so much, bye.
04:05:36 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kelsey Sharon.
04:05:39 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
04:05:43 And now let me leave you with some words from Herbert Hoover.
04:05:47 Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die.
04:05:54 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.