Cleared Hot Episode 182 - Hollie McKay

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the business side of the house let's talk about my guest today an amazing woman in many respects her name is holly mckay you may have heard her recently on the jocko podcast or slightly before that on the mic drop which is mike ritlid's podcast both were fantastic episodes and i recommend you go listen to both in a nutshell holly is an author or a journalist born and raised in australia made the trek to the united states she got her feet wet in the journalism occupation and then made a choice a choice to go places and talk to people that i feel most would avoid at all costs for the majority of their life if not their entire life she spent time and actively sought out active war zones she's covered wars in iraq syria conflicts in israel afghanistan kind of all over the middle east and at a time where it was the height of the isis onslaught she is the author of a book called only cry for the living and i there's no way that i can do an accurate job describing what that book is about or the horrendous nature of some of the experiences that she covers in that book so instead of me trying to describe it i will let her describe it herself episode number 182 with holly mckay enjoy okay now staring at the stars i was like yeah on ios girl or something i don't have any experience with that so i'm going to take your word for it however i have so many friends who have gone down the ayahuasca ib games five meow dmt is my opinion i haven't done the open game down there did you do the five meow dmt because you were searching for something to help you deal with what you have gone through in the past i think it was it was that and then just sort of a combination of definitely that and then just kind of i just think there's something everyone can kind of get from it and the experience that there's something in there that that about yourself that you can learn that is what people who i know who have used that have described most of them actually i can walk that back everybody i know who has well other than joe but he's an explorer of a different realm right in both space time and substance right and i'm that's i'm repeating what he says so i'm not talking negatively about joe all the people i know are all ex-service members in the five i did it with a like a frogman from the 70s that is uh that's part of what they do they pair it with they do they go down to mexico and do the whole retreat yeah i know friends of mine have had amazing experiences in that i have no experience with psychedelics i have vast curiosity about it and if i'm being honest it terrifies me yeah that's why you should do it i've been pitched that reasoning and my response to that is maybe if the time and the set and setting are correct well the fda is doing a lot of trials on the psilocybin and so i'm you know i'm thinking of investing in some of the companies just you know small small stocks because i think it's going to be the big thing for mental health in the next decade less than that even i think it'll be bigger than any pharmaceutical absolutely option yeah and so i i see that as kind of the frontier now of mental health moving forward now that everybody's kind of aware of what these ssris are doing and all these other pharmaceutical crap so but did you have that experience with the uh 5mu dmt post writing the book or the experiences this was all after okay um i struggled with you know that they yeah they talk about this whole letting go of the ego thing and i thought yeah this is fine you know i got this and when you're in it all these distractions which you later kind of identify as being part of your ego come up and i i had to do it a second time because i didn't think the first time i found it kind of traumatic but i didn't think i got that much out of it the first time because i guess the second time i knew what to expect the first time i think i was still really like kind of fighting it a little bit and trying to be like i've got this i can i can take a whole bunch of this and it's not going to do anything to me and so i think once i had gotten over that and you're able to process it and and know what you're getting into i think it's a bit of a different experience but each person's different so yeah it took me a few times to be able to kind of go okay this is what i get now yeah one of these days maybe yeah it's as close as i can go to it yeah so i listened to your podcast with jocko and i'm gonna start this one by saying this one will be a tough one for me this episode as i think it was tough for jocko and i understand why because at the end of this i am going to want to kill people and i think that's basically where jocko right because the things that you guys talked about are there at a level a that i have struggled to describe to people unless you've physically been there to see them and and i actively try to not walk away from the person that i used to be because i'm still the person that i used to be but i try very hard not to be defined by the experiences that i had or a job title that i had or the places that i went however the way i describe war is if you touch it it touches you back so it leaves an indelible mark on you and you probably do on other people as well but it was hard to listen to you guys talk about the level of evil that you voluntarily went and got very very close to so we'll see here see how this goes try to stay out of prison for the rest of the day afterwards i got a question for you though yep what do you how do you describe evil i think it's a very nuanced evil's very nuanced but if i had to simplify it it's definitely with the intention of hurting innocent people that have done you no wrong and yet you somehow find a justification and they're always a justification in their minds for for doing harm on someone that's never done harm on you i kind of land near there as well i i want people to always believe whatever they want to believe and you'll i've had people ask me well what's the difference between you and the people that you were fighting you were over there not me like the royal you know we the us militaries over there taking life too and i fall back to hey there is a huge difference in not only the ideology of what it is that we're fighting for but at least in my belief system i can't stand those that prey upon the innocent and my definition of evil falls back on that as well too those that will either prey upon or stand on the shoulders of those that are incapable of defending themselves absolutely it's very hard to sit back and do nothing about it once you've actually seen it right so absolutely indeed side note that has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about my sister was born in australia oh yeah whereabouts i'm going to say this wrong obviously i'll correct you i want to say melbourne but i know that's not right it's melbourne melbourne like bin laden melbourne yeah very young my dad was a pe teacher and he was doing an exchange program and went over and they were living on a dairy farm and came back plus one that's pretty neat yeah yeah i think she still has dual citizenship okay it was before i believe now they make you pick that you can't have both i'm both okay yeah yeah i got i got my american citizenship in 2017. so what made you decide to do that versus staying in australian cities well i could do both so it was a gain to me as opposed to anything that was a loss i mean i came over here originally in 2006 i was studying got a working visa then got my green card and then you sort of hit that five-year mark and i was so excited to get my american citizenship i couldn't wait yeah so yeah to me it was um it was a little positive and i think when you're working overseas too a lot it's just nice to be able to have both it just makes going to a us base easier it kind of you know if you ever needed help um you sort of have these two governments that can go to bat for you so to me it was just co-located as well at those bases yes ish so yeah it was it was a plus for me um did you ever find that a us passport closed doors for you totally so i experienced this a lot especially going to the middle east in the beginning when i'd be with american friends and they would have their american passport so then i'd pull out my australian and my treatment was a hundred times different you know and even i think a lot my fixes liked the fact that i was australian too when i was working over there because then they could sort of be like oh she's australian she's australian it's different even though you know australia is still there fighting the same fight in a smaller capacity but they've been there since the beginning so but i think people just sort of see it as america and then and then everybody else is is separate yeah it seems very polarizing and uh the response i have received is vastly different depending on where you are in the globe so for a journalist it probably is very beneficial like yeah and also aid workers too so when i would go and embed say with the international community the red cross or any of these big aid groups they loved the fact i had an australian passport and i probably wouldn't have been able to go into places with them if i just had my american um because then it puts the you know all of them at risk as well and i think you know last time i was in africa and did some stuff with them and any i think anyone that was french and american they were kind of like ah no but um australian having that has been has been beneficial except the only place that they really tell me yes use your american passport is in kurdistan in the north of iraq they're extremely pro-america and um yeah so anytime that i was around there and you flash an american passport it's uh it's a opening doors as opposed to closing them but do you travel with both i do have you ever had to explain oh god it screwed me i've been i've had my global entry cancelled i've had everything and i was like why what is happening and you know i asked an fbi friend of mine when i came back i was like they cancelled my global android i don't know what happened he's like you're probably just using two passports i was like yeah it was so i kind of screwed the system a little bit yeah most people are not used to having multiple passports jocko actually messed it up when it was on the podcast with you oh he did he did because he described the us passport as maroon he had him backwards they gave us the military were maroon and the civilians are just good old blue yeah but it wasn't a diplomatic passport i think it was just a u.s i don't think there's a military-specific one i think it was just a u.s government one right he makes so few mistakes that i just realized i needed to pounce on that immediately jocko said this they're wrong how did you link up with jocko so actually through uh sequoia at d'angelo publications um and she does a lot of work with jocko and he's a warrior kid series and um yeah she said it would be a great fit with the book that i was writing with the military aspect of it but but being from a civilian and being from a sort of a human perspective and obviously joker was very versed in iraq in the middle east and so it was just sort of a good fit to uh to publish with the d'angelo and with jugger publishing it was a fantastic episode it was episode 271 for people who want to go listen to it and i highly recommend that you do like i said it was eye opening it uh i had to i had to listen to it in chunks i was driving my oldest son to work today and he was as most teenage boys are doing not paying attention to anything that his parents were doing and then he pulled off his uh his headphones he's listening to his music on he's like what are you listening to and what are they talking about like just put your headphones back on and we'll have this conversation a little bit later in life yeah so again fascinating where you started and what you were doing and then where it led you i think one of my favorite parts of the podcast with giaco is when you were talking about the pop-tarts oh yeah which i find might be a more dangerous industry than being on the front lines of war as far as survival totally you know it's so funny um you might have to describe to people what it is yes brief background yeah yeah so i was fortunate enough i was studying in new york obviously i'm australian i was studying in new york i got this random internship at fox news in new york and i didn't have any idea what it was this was in 2006. so it was sort of the beginning of that digital era and i love to write and i think i was 20 at the time and so they said look we'll sponsor you do you want to go to la you can have your own column and uh basically we'll throw you to the wolves and it's all on you and i just thought what an amazing opportunity at that age to get and so i jumped on it and went out to la and it was literally baptism by fire i remember my first day there you know learning to drive on the other side of the road and getting an apartment in santa monica and arriving in this just totally new world um i remember you know we talked about you know was paris hilton had just come out of jail and somehow you know i had some aussie friends of mine that were friends with her and so we ended up spending the summer at her house these bizarre things were happening um and i think i just i never really took it very seriously i just thought oh this is a bloody circus you know and i just i think that's what enabled me to be able to really do my job and get really entrenched in understanding how to piece a story together was that i wasn't their friend i was just sort of part of this sphere of trying to understand the dynamics of something but very early on i was also kind of involved in a lot of investigative stuff so i i was lucky in that i got to sort of straddle a general assignment world with the entertainment industry did you see people who are also under the banner of journalism going the other direction where it became less about reporting anything and more about becoming part of the scene i would say 95 you know it was 95 percent um kissing people's ass and yeah and i i knew very early on that i had zero interest in that and um i turned down quite a few opportunities at some of those big entertainment networks at the time because i just saw what they you know what are you wearing kind of stuff and it just it had about zero appeal for me that was just a launching pad to get into journalism to get my american sponsorship and to be able to kind of take it and run from there but it was a great training ground because you do smell that [ __ ] very early on you learn to navigate these big networks of people where there are just so many layers of managers and agents and all this kind of nonsense and so you sort of have to learn how to infiltrate that space a little bit and so really it really taught me a lot an interview technique so if they're throwing johnny depp in front of you you're going to get three questions if you're lucky so you really have to know what you're asking and you have to be succinct and you have to get it out and get the answer you need to craft a story and so you can't sort of diddy daddle around and ask 10 questions and talk about hair and chews or whatever you really have to get to the point of it and so i think very young i i had to really learn how to to be very direct not to use johnny depp as an example would just say anybody who's in that sphere is it that they don't want to answer more than three questions or the people that are around them that are handling them don't want to give any one person that time i think it's a combination of both um depending on who the person is i think that generally speaking it's it's a rushed process and you go into a press junket for a film and they will time you at five minutes and they'll say last question you'll have people waving their hands if you continue to go over which i always did because i said more i had to ask but um but i think you know a lot of the time depending on the person they'd probably love to sit there and chat with you and there are definitely situations where you can do kind of a full sit down for a lot longer but generally speaking it's it's very quick and it's it's very sort of in and out in and out and they have a lot of people to process um so yeah it's usually they're basically told what they you know what their time frame is too i've only touched that world and by that i mean been around it very very peripherally i had my head in i guess the literal and metaphorical sand for over a decade popped out of it with the military background there are people in that industry like hey come and do some technical advising so very very limited roles but it was it was pretty startling to see that world and i don't think i knew anybody who had had any level of fame before that and i found that there were two pretty distinct tranches there were people who were completely and utterly out of their mind and consumed by who they were who they thought they were and then there were some actually really genuine people kind of at the same level of fame and i didn't find that many that were in between it was as if you were able to maintain yourself or you lost yourself in that world it i wanted no part of it i couldn't back step away from that fast enough yeah i actually found that a lot of the really a-list people were were quite grounded and were very level-headed and very polite and very respectful and it was this sort of cd up-and-coming people that really you know thought the world of themselves and and were usually the ones that were a little bit you know worse for wear so i mean let's be honest they would cut their co-stars throat to stand on their shoulders to get the b level job to get the a level job i totally yeah totally that's what i saw and i was like okay you guys are cutthroat i want none of this and you can have all the fame and all the money and all this [ __ ] i'd rather be completely poor and have a life rich with experience than all the [ __ ] you guys are doing out here yeah and i said yeah and i would look at it too and i it was baffling to me because they just make so much money pretending to be other people and you know you meet the real people the real people that are doing stuff and he just kind of like who actually has it better because you might you're making money pretending to be someone but you know someone else may not have much money but they're actually living a very full life and and i think i gravitated more to the music world especially when i was younger and i thought possibly about going into music journalism because i'd grown up as a dancer and grown up just loving music and and it was just such a big part it still is a big part of my life uh in many ways and i found musicians were often very creative and it's not really an industry you can fake as much so i i really enjoyed being able to kind of do the music pieces that was something and i would go on little you know tours with different artists and and stuff and and really get to know them from the early days you know i remember taylor swift she would have been about 15 and she invited me and a couple of other people to a little guitar thing and she was just a new girl you know her publicist paul would stand there with a little card saying this is taylor and she's a new artist and dada and we went and she would just play a few songs on the guitar for us and then she'd send these beautiful handwritten notes just thanking us for coming and so it was just lovely to see people like her who you sort of saw before that they were anything just you know become sort of the superstars they are today and just really deserving of it i think just a really good human being yeah i don't actually know i know a few people in the entertainment industry like i've seen in the the acting genre i don't think i know any performance artists i do think it would be harder to fake i mean you can either sing or you can't yeah i don't know exactly what auto-tune does i've heard people talk about how good it is but i'm not i don't think i'll ever be a singer we'll leave it at that yeah i don't think i will be either i think it'd be pretty dangerous do you still do ballet nothing not in a formal sense uh i still it's still a big part of my life and that i love it i follow it you know i'm reading a beautiful uh susanna farrell memoir now and she was sort of george balanchine's prima ballerina and so i still love it it's still a big part of life and just basic kind of training to keep my flexibility and to keep my feet working i was i just taught a class for the first time in a really long time on the weekend in virginia so that was that was kind of a lot of fun so it's still something i love and it's still a very grounding thing for me but it's not something i do in any sort of formal capacity you and jocko touched on it briefly but not nearly in depth enough and that is how savage ballet is oh it's coming up in and achieving a level of stardom in ballet yeah because you were you were talking about you were still in australia you were in a boarding school which is it was dedicated to the arts right specifically ballet let's unpack what a day would look like at this particular boarding school right i still say it was the best years of my life even though it was crazy and it was just you know you put a bunch of of you it was a co-ed school but mind you that the guys were very outnumbered by the by the girls and we had a boarding house which was relatively small but it was 20 but about 20 girls but uh it was amazing so we it was had a scottish heritage so they would make us wear these ridiculous uniforms with kilts and berets and and all of that and we'd go usually do some academic stuff you start pretty early and then most of the day was spent in in whatever stream that you chose so there was people that were in musical theater people that were drama people that were dance ballet um and then and then music of course and then i was a ballet girl so yeah most of the day was spent just training pretty hardcore how many hours are we talking um and then we did after school too so we're probably looking at god and then saturdays so you're looking at could be up at least 20 to 30 hours a week on top of school in academics and you know still having to pass the same tests and exams as as ordinary high schoolers were what type of tool does that take on your body huge and i i think i have had every possible injury under the sun and i would have permanent physio sessions every other day i'd be at that we had a a physiotherapist in in the studio that was just there full time so every time i've heard people who come from the ballet world they describe that hours toes that are you know the ballet slippers they look fantastic they're like yeah take those things off and it's not that it's horrendous in a bad way but it's the physical manifestation of what it requires has it always been like that in ballet like if to get to the top does it require that level of incredible discipline and torture on your body or is that something that has just attached itself so military training has changed over time they've realized that you don't actually always have to grind people into dust to reshape them into the tool that you need like as things evolve maybe our training can evolve too i almost feel like ballet has this history of this is what it is this is what it takes this is what how hard it's always going to be you know i mean i'm trying to figure out totally yeah so i think in the beginning with ballet you know uh it was very the french sense and king louie and he loved to have this idea of ballet dances and i think it was a little frivolous back then they certainly didn't have to have the there wasn't the weight restrictions there wasn't the um you know kind of technique that was required it was more just a lighter entertainment and i think really throughout the 20th century it evolved and probably the most famous instructor was a russian man named george balanchine who defected from russia i think it was in the 50s now or 60s and he founded new york city ballet and he really revolutionized this idea he was the one that kind of had this idea that ballet dances had to be real thin they had to have you know incredible feat incredible flexibility and it really just entirely shifted i think the world dynamic of what ballet was i think since the balanchine era it's it's gone back to a little bit more um flexibility so to speak in diversity sense in that is a lot more contemporary the sort of the strenuous technique has maybe eased a little bit but i i would say that this discipline is still there because it is so competitive and yet you can really only make it if you're this sort of ethereal creature what does it look like to make it in ballet like what is the absolute shooting star so that it depends i would say that i mean definitely don't go into it for money so that sort of puts you're doing it really for the passion and the love of the craft and it's often a very short-lived career injury-wise um so you know being a principal dancer i guess in in a major company is the pinnacle i would say that the russians still do it pretty much the best um their school the bolshoi and the morinsky theater are just the russian dancers are insane their level of technique their level of flexibility their level of uh it's a whole other level i think even to the united states but to make it to the top is is really getting into one of the the top-notch companies and and moving up the echelons of that to sort of become a soloist or a principal i'm going to take a hard pass on that right mostly because the outfits if i'm being totally honest those pants the guys wear incredibly tight yeah it's not it's not acceptable not acceptable not here in montana you wear those pants out here oh yeah that's probably why hey man what's going on we don't do that up here i bet you i bet you so when you were how did you find your way into ballet actually you know i think it was just i was young we grew up in the country there wasn't really that much to do and my mother stuck my sister and i in classes um so and then call that paid child care yeah and then she really she really forced us to stick it out though because for me i yeah got a bit bored and wanted to you know go run around and climb trees with everyone else but mum would make me make me stay and i think you said once you push through that i'm bored this is boring i want to do this um you find the love for it i think for me it was also a place to go so i think i had a fairly undisciplined upbringing in the sense that growing up in the country i was able to pretty much do what i wanted you know that kind of running around till the sun came down type thing i think ballet was really something that gave me a sense of discipline that i didn't otherwise have and so i i kind of enjoyed it it gave me structure it gave me a place to be um and then as i got older and something i started to take more seriously and once i'd pushed past the boredom of it all um it really there was something just freeing about that kind of discipline and structure yeah i did i really found a love and i found a love for the music and i found a love for choreography and i found a love for just being able to explore these different things and and being able to choose these incredible costumes and you know we i'd go away a lot on weekends to different competitions and it just yeah you sort of developed this healthy sense of competition but it was always about just trying to be better and and and improve on what you could do and i think that from a young age was really beneficial for for me when you were at the boarding school which obviously was arts based did you have any aspirations to head towards journalism or did that come later on where did you make the jump between yeah i always loved to write and actually i published a book when i was very young um i think i was about 12 or 13 that i'd written really yeah so a lot of my childhood was spent my grandfather had a sugar cane farm the very top of australia in north queensland so we'd have to go away for these really long stretches and it was in the middle of nowhere there was no you know it was just nothing there was no other kids there was just this big sort of open land and i couldn't go anywhere so i really just love to write and i love to read and so i would spend my entire summer writing a book and again using that sort of creativity that dancing had given me um and so yeah that i published that when i was about 12 or 13 and i look back and regretted a bit now because i was so embarrassed well not just the book but i was just so embarrassed about the book even being published in you know the newspaper the local newspaper would come to take a picture and i would just be oh i don't want my picture in the newspaper so i wish that i'd embrace that a little bit more but you know that's being 12 or 13 years old so i always love to write so that was always something that i had in my back pocket but i just didn't i guess understand what what that career necessarily could be um and then the journalism yeah it definitely wasn't something i i didn't have any desire to sit in front of a a television screen and read a teleprompter i knew that that wasn't for me and i i don't think sort of any type of camera job would have been for me it just wasn't something i was interested in and that actually worked to my advantage because when i ended up becoming an intern and basically everybody wanted to be on camera so they were sort of you know shuffled off to um do probably quite generic internship stuff and i was really the only one who sort of stuck my hand up and said i just want to write so i ended up being the only one in the in the digital area and then the only one who got sponsored so what year was this that was 2006. and this is it in new york at the in new york yeah i've actually been to that building the fox news uh studio there and kind of seen behind the scenes not a job i would want either yeah it's a talent for sure to be able to sit and look semi-normal and read the teleprompter if people actually think though that they're saying maybe what they personally believe or they're making it up on the fly they're a little bit misguided what's happening at those places yeah it's a it's a cool building for sure though in an interesting place in new york not queensland for sure definitely different uh geography and topography i would say slightly different although i loved my life in new york i really did yeah i hate that i only just gave up my apartment last year oh i can't stand i don't like being that compressed i'm not gonna new york is beautiful i've been there a handful of times i actually love going to new york i what i realize by moving here to being in a more rural area is that i really enjoy a little bit of space which i think we can agree new york is city specifically is not defined by yeah and i'm with you and i'm at a point in my life where i definitely love the space and i love the quiet and i love that less hustle and bustle life and i don't know that i will go back to it ever or you know if i do it would have to be for a really alluring offer but i think that my time that i sort of spent there both you know turning 21 in new york plus um the last between 2017 and then up until the end of last year that i was there were just really incredible times to kind of be able to go to the city and to be in that sort of vibe and the connections that you make and the friends that you make and i just think that i was i'm glad that i had that experience because there is you know new york is sort of a dirty very compressed place but there's just something about it that is just is freeing in a way i think because you can just really be anyone you want to be yeah no it's almost like a lot of the things you write about in the book hard to describe but if you've been there and felt it like oh i understand yeah so you start with the pop tart working for new york yes and then you decide i am going to go and essentially seek out the front lines of war those are very different genres we shall say what what sparked that i mean even the initial thought process i mean you talked a little bit about you know hey you realize the bs of the entertainment industry we can leave it at that but that doesn't necessarily drive people to saying maybe i want to go to the front lines of war i mean there's a lot of other options to choose from what was it that drove you in that direction i think it was really just curiosity so i've always been a very curious person i've always wanted to really understand things at a deeper level and i just felt you know so many friends of mine had gone to iraq and afghanistan to serve and and i just felt that we weren't getting a full picture of what was really happening there and it bothered me and i felt that it was just things were simplified in a way that they shouldn't have been and i had done a lot of investigative journalism not necessarily in the foreign space but just sort of locally uh with politics and a few big stories um so i kind of knew how to piece things together in a way and i really just sort of pushed for that opportunity and and told my bosses that this was something i wanted to do and they were extremely supportive of that and um i think because i was very self-sufficient i didn't require big crews i didn't you know i need to go in there with big teams of people i didn't go in there with security i was very under the radar which i felt to be you know better security policy for me than than trying to sort of go in with a bunch of people so pros and cons to it for sure absolutely you and jocko did a very good job of discussing the pros and cons of that a smaller footprint can be great until you're in a position where a bigger footprint would be really nice to have security personnel yeah how do they teach investigative journalism i mean writing is one thing the investigative portion of that is fascinating too is it something you fall into that you have again like ballet maybe you get through that initial process and find your own love for it because i feel like it would be much more of an art form than maybe a skill that is taught yeah yeah no one ever taught me what i relied upon was other journalists that could sort of mentor me into understanding how to put it together so essentially an editor might call me and say hey this we heard this is happening can you look into this and you really i think a lot of it's very instinctual you have to kind of pare it down you have to look at well how can i break this down who can i talk to what doors can i knock on what court records can i i bring up what you know you go through every sort of background you possibly can on a computer in in way back machine in trying to piece together um as many sources as you know that might be surround a person and and it's really just it's it's like a little jigsaw that you just start to piece together and somebody might give you a lead here and someone else might give you a lead there and then you might get completely stuck and go oh my god what do i do now um and then you have to let it go for a week and then you come back to it so it's really a lot of it really does come down to as well and depending on the topic is your sources so you have to be able to you know if it's a local crime you have to be able to have really good resources within the local police department or you go to the family or you know it just it really depends on the story but it is it's instinctual and it's patience but looking back on it i i definitely think instincts play a really big role and you have to know how to smell that [ __ ] and who's telling you the truth and who's not so that is um and it was always a challenge and i i can't tell you how many stories i would devote weeks and months to that never went anywhere because i could just never put it all together quite right is there supposed to be or is there a governing principle when it comes to journalism and i guess when i ask that i'm looking at it from the lens of you know as a journalist you could perhaps get information through sources that are not necessarily legal um you know you could go outside of the boundaries of the law to try to report or gather information i don't want to say you know in the military we have the ucmj right you violate the ucj you get punished so it's it's a buffer that you know when you're getting to the edge of it and you definitely know if you uh you recognize it when you see somebody cross it but in the journalism world is there are there principles that are hard and fast like that can you break the law uh in the pursuit of information i don't think you can break the law specifically i just think there are ethical obligations or murky ethics i was going to say are they written anywhere do we have the ten commandments of ethics and journalism but you know journalism schools and things will teach people this is what you can and can't do and and i'd always try to to stay by those ethics and i definitely wouldn't do anything that wasn't you know breaking a law so to speak but um but you know it's pure curiosity i didn't know very little about journalism and i come from a world where black and white is a terrible metaphor for the world that i operate in but i had a framework to operate from and i knew as i got farther from the framework it would get more gray or even a different color palette yeah yeah i was just curious and then you can look at you know situations where maybe government entities are the ones that are breaking the law in leaking the information so then what role do you play as the journalist if you're going to publish that so they're in their ethical obligations and and things like that would often come up and that wouldn't require discussions with my editors with legal department at work and there's sort of a team of people that that generally have to come in and kind of make a consensus over what the best course of action would be well i could see it getting to a place where perhaps the reporter has a different ethical or moral stance on the information than say the publishing organization yeah absolutely and i can imagine those conversations could get pretty tense at times absolutely and i remember the san bernardino terrorist attack and and there was a big ethical issue with that because the police had left the the door open for the where the terrorists were living and so it was this dilemma of do you go into the house and take photographs of the where the terrorists were living and you know find clues of you know into what their mindset was or is that sort of illegal entry you know the door's open but um you know what what is the the blurry ethical line here and it was quite a hoopla for a long time and you had two very distinct camps on that when you got your first uh you know obviously you described that you went to the people you were working for and saying hey you know i want to make a shift this is where i want to go or probably it was more along the lines of this is what i want to do where was your first trip to a war zone so the first time i was covering really i'd been into syria before but it wasn't in a sort of a coverage capacity but i guess the gaza israel conflict in 2014 i was in jordan at the time and so i was able to kind of go back and and that was the first time i was really able to cover something um in that sense and and really get this baptism by fire understanding of of that conflict and timely given what's currently going on it's i don't know if that one that's gonna i think be a also a pendulum that goes back and forth they're going to have i think times of peace and then times of what's going on right now yeah and it's going to be nothing new to what we've seen in the past 30 40 years and it's a really unfortunate and i think i can definitely see that from both sides having been able to cover and speak to people on both sides of that conflict and um and definitely see where where both points of view have their pros and and cons of that and it's just going to require compromise that isn't isn't quite there yet when was the first time that you embedded with u.s military so i didn't i started then after that i was going into iraq to cover isis but i didn't do an in bed i'm trying to remember the first because the us weren't in iraq until much later it was the initial invasion oh i mean for the isis conflict gotcha so i think i did an embed with them must have been 2015 when they first sort of started coming in to go back a step yeah you know i was thinking about this before we sat down i i think i was out of the military before i heard the term isis right for me it was taliban in afghanistan tied to creating a safe haven for al-qaeda however you want to say it in iraq it was i don't remember ever hearing the term isis i think it was a term that came about i got out the last day of june 2013. i think it was after my time right when was the first time you remember hearing that term or when was that i remember it specifically i remember being at work on june of 2014 and that's when isis came in and took mosul and that was the first time i'd heard of them was this sudden group that you know had sort of quote unquote come out of nowhere and had taken over the second largest city and that was that was my first hearing of what they what they were even though they'd been around for for a bit at that point how would you describe them as a group when somebody says to you what is isis what kind of answer can you give to them uh there's a lot of conspiracies but i would say it's an offshoot of al-qaeda and i know a lot of people try to sort of say well they're much more brutal than unkind i really think they're all the same um yeah it depends on who you ask what your touch point was with them yeah so they're just a you know a terrorist organization islamic terrorist organization um and they have an idea of wanting to create a caliphate which people should google before we continue on on the podcast because we may be talking about the caliphate a touch and those who want to have one of those uh not my cup of tea i will say no i'd rather pass i would rather pass as well so i want to go back just so i get the timeline right when you were first in gaza in israel what year was that 2014. 2014 okay so fast forward 2015 your first embed with americans right that was americans in iraq and then later afghanistan where did where were you in iraq and who were you embedded with so honestly i my inbeds are very small and most of my work is is outside in bed but um i did some work with in the north with where the americans were based there and also in baghdad and then also with the australians in baghdad and then i was with the italians for a little while too and they were in mosul dam and i'm trying to remember if that was it and then just i guess the iraqi army and some of the advise and assist programs uh in in and around baghdad so um taj taj i think we were there for a while and then um up to sort of ramadi area near the border and yeah that was with the marines i believe and then yeah but my my embeds were usually they weren't necessarily all that long they're usually just short i was generally had a very clear focus it was usually just kind of wanting to to interview the general about particular situations and then kind of get a feel for the work that iraq was doing and i think that the press department also are very uh what's the word they're very much wanting to highlight what the iraqis were doing and it was all about the iraqis are in charge of this mission and you can take it that or leave that um well it shifted how should i say this people think because they were told that we left iraq what was about 2010 ish reality is um no there have always been american boots well not always but there have been american boots on the ground since the initial invasion in o3 was it drastically reduced yes it was but in from a policy perspective it shifted to by with and through so it probably was directed or dictated to you that hey these are the important talking points because that's what was being told to everybody was there an aspect of buy with and through absolutely but is that also if you want to play on the chessboard that is presented to you is that also an opportunity to buy with and through a small partner force to do the things that you want to do yes right so there's both that were going on uh it doesn't surprise me that that wanted to be that they wanted that to be the focus for you because that was what was driving policy at that time period and that's probably you know a lot why i generally spent most of my time either with local sort of forces or different sort of ragtag groups and things on the ground because i just felt that that was an area that i could cover a little bit more freely and not that not that i was in any way censored so to speak but i just they can censor you by limiting your access yes you know it's it's just a it's a step removed and i was i was going to ask you that question when you were there embedded with us forces or uh nato countries how close would they let you get to what was actually going on um because there's a variety of yeah embeds like hey you can come and visit our talk which is tactical operations yeah you can watch from behind these streets that's very different than sitting in a vehicle convoy or getting on a helicopter and going and actually involving yourself with a local park so most of my sort of more combat oriented were local with local groups because you know again the narrative was that the us wasn't fighting on the front line with this with the isis conflict in particular and so i think it would have defeated the purpose of what they were trying to say if i was going anywhere kind of near a front line with the us um so most of that i did with either the iraqi army or with the kurds or with the syrians and sort of did that on my own terms probably this uh similar in afghanistan as well yeah similar very similar in afghanistan again the focus was on what the afghan troops were doing and and you know to be honest though i i did find it a little perplexing in afghanistan in iraq just you know you have these wonderful men and women that are going over to serve and and they've spent 18 months there however long the deployment is and just have never been able to leave the base like step foot outside of it and i to me that was sort of a reflection of perhaps what is going wrong in a place like afghanistan where and i would talk to talk to the soldiers and things and and i was surprised that their limited view or understanding of the politics in the streets of kabul and i really had to put that down to that's because they're not allowed to go and mingle and understand how the local people are thinking and what they want and what they feel and so i sort of think the the perspective then only becomes who is allowed to come onto that base and who's past that clearance and all that sort of stuff and you're not really getting that full sense and i think that that was missed a lot in afghanistan and i thought unless you're kind of going to do it properly what's the point of doing this it doesn't surprise me that most of them had less of an understanding of the local politics or even a tribal culture versus a democracy which at least u.s forces are coming from and and the reason for that is is it's not made an emphasis in their training yeah you know the soldiers that go over there the u.s military is very very good at some things one of the things they're not great at is nation building which we have demonstrated many times throughout the course of history but another one is and i and i and i understand it to a degree even from my own occupation we would have a reading list you know one of the books that they uh heavy early on in afghanistan three cups of tea oh yeah do a little research on that author and the authenticity of that book we'll leave that for we'll shelf that for some other time people can research that on their own it made the main reading list and so they'd give you six or seven books and i remember at team three my last appointment we were getting ready to go in 2010 and right before they would bring somebody who had a foreign national from that country who they would talk a little bit about cultural things you know maybe from an interaction perspective things that you might expect like hey if one of the guys comes up and grabs your hand don't you know don't a maybe don't be surprised by it you don't have to snatch it out of their hand because you a lot of cascading things are going to come badly from that i was in special operations that's the level of training that i was getting we had i wouldn't say an unlimited budget but we had the ability at least a little bit to craft our training schedule inside of the parameters that we needed to do take it a budgetary level down a precise level of training down and those are the people that you are talking about i'm not saying that negatively at all they just had a very different more broad role and responsibility and if you don't if you don't own it and train it it shouldn't be a surprise but then you drop those people overseas for 18 months and it's possible that they could come back with the exact same lack of understanding of that country that they went there and that's to me that's not how you and i don't know if win is the right term that's not how you inch towards success in my opinion right and i i definitely felt that there was you know and it's not that they want i mean of course they wanted to go out and be able to really do their job to the best of their ability but i think it yeah it just was something especially after benghazi things got really locked down even more after that in in combat sort of areas and i think that it was sort of in a way a disservice even though i do understand it and and but i think in the overall picture well you said if you're not going to do it right why do it at all what's the point yeah there is no point is the answer and then you could put a tinfoil hat and suit on and say it's all about the military-industrial complex and the point is we're just gonna enrich some people while standing on the shoulders of the young and lifts like okay i'm not gonna go down that hole anymore some people could say those things i don't know i might have like a tinfoil visor on sometimes but i'm not gonna put the whole hat on because i can see shades of all of that but it's it's a tough one tough one to describe tough one too explain and i can't even imagine being on a deployment in either afghanistan or iraq and not being able to leave the base for 18 months it's a very bizarre view if you only see it from behind barbed wire and hescos it's not some of the most beautiful things i've ever seen in afghanistan in my entire life we're in afghanistan and in iraq as well too like along the western euphrates river valley the yeah beautiful area down there um pandya valley oh my god oh my goodness hard to describe yeah i've seen pictures of it you're like that's that's nothing you should see it in person yeah you know as the sun's just like holy [ __ ] yeah and uh i feel fortunate to some degree that we well we got to go out and interface more than a lot of conventional units did not necessarily interfacing probably in the ways that most people are thinking but like my last deployment we were completely doing village stability operations we were living amongst doing our best that we could to help going to the weekly meetings sitting down with the elders whether or not any of that stuff helped do anything at least it's a different perspective and you're getting out you're trying to get a better understanding of the country um and if i'm being honest i left afghanistan my last rotation more frustrated than i've ever been in my life because you try as hard as you can for 10 months and you realize none of that is going to change anything and it's not going to change anytime soon now or whether we leave now or we leave in 10 more years it's just it's afghanistan the soviets couldn't win you know no other force is able to sort of beat that and and i think we missed opportunities in looking at the root causes it was sort of fixated on certain symptoms in afghanistan yeah yeah we can we have the physical ability i think as a us military to take almost every chess piece off of the board and again you and jocko talked a little bit about this tens of thousands of isis soldiers can be killed the ideology if unless you are able to get the correct individuals the ideology can still live on or not even necessarily individuals unless you can correct i really like how you talked about corruption and how corruption can how can change people's views when it comes to the decisions that they make if you don't set the stage properly then that ideology is going to continue to live on if one of those people exists and they have that ideology and the stage is correct they're going to be able to pull those people across the line you know at some point you know bombs and bullets are not going to be the solution not that i have the solution anybody listen to this by any stretch but i am in a place now where i think bombs and bullets are not enough alone no i you definitely need the diplomatic aspect but you definitely in my opinion it's just the the level of corruption that happens in government that for some reason we the us has decided that it's so systemic and there's nothing we can do about it and it's just going to exist regardless so we throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can really do so to me terrorism is so often a symptom of it and i just think unless you're going to get to the root cause of it you never you're never going to really deal with it and i don't have the answers necessarily of getting to that root cause of it but i think just throwing money at a government that is going to you know service themselves and that can be whoever's in power and the different echelons of power and if it's not going to the people or people don't see a betterment in their lives then they're going to get pretty frustrated after a while and i would like people who are listening to you and i talk about this i would like them to shift their focus on the u.s because i can see flavors of the decisions people are making in groups that they're getting behind in the u.s right for exactly the same reasons that we're talking about isis remove that term and i'm not trying to make a value comparison between any of these organizations there are people in the u.s and i think the number of people is growing that believe that our government is corrupt at a i don't know at what depth of level but you hear them talking about it and you see small fringe organizations inside of the us and i'm going to pick one that's recognizable and i'm not saying this is the only one because i got into a [ __ ] instagram argument with a guy today about this cubanon i made a joke about queuing okay the guy's like [ __ ] you man how come you're not making fun of the left i was like sorry dude you caught me at a moment where i was writing this post and i said that it's hanging on like a q a on follower in the reddit threads joke right and he got pissed because i didn't list the organizations on the left and for full disclosure i think there's idiots on the right and the left 100 they're both equally dangerous some people will say that the left is more dangerous than the right i don't know i'm not smart enough my point in all of that is i think the more people feel that there is corruption the more likely they are to start aligning with those organizations to say things like we're here to correct the problems we have the solution for you let me identify your enemy and then they rally behind a cause and again they're on the left and the right-hand side but to me as i was listening to you guys talk i was looking at it through the lens of an american and watching these fringe organizations like huh i wonder what those turn into if the perception of corruption or the actual corruption continues could it ever get to something at the level of isis which maybe you know the answer to this how many countries do you think have an isis presence oh gosh um i would say it's a to a degree it depends what you pledge allegiance yeah so usually what how we would identify it would say if you've pledged allegiance to former abba baghdadi or you know i would say it's a huge presence in a place like mozambique and parts of africa afghanistan still has its contagion of isis it's still in iraq and syria i would i would beg to sort of say it's at least 10. yeah yeah i mean i don't know i don't know about any of the organizations in the u.s it just for me it clicked a little bit i was like oh okay that at least makes me they feel that the power above them is corrupt that they feel like the current system is not going to correct itself so they are finding a cause that resonates with them is that cause correct i'm not smart enough to make that uh determination but i have a little bit of a better understanding of how they can cross that threshold which to me full disclosure is [ __ ] insane some of these are mentality i think and when i think it's really amplified in the us by social media so the way that the algorithms are constructed with twitter with you know facebook they they're the ones who sort of rally against this stuff but they're perpetuating it so you can take a relatively benign tweet tweet that might be extremist it takes one or two people with big followings to retweet it you have all sorts of and then all you're seeing on your feed is is that echo chamber of people reinforcing this idea and so suddenly you start to not feel alone so then you feel a lot more you sort of compelled to come out and speak and you feel that you're part of a community and i think it comes down to a lot of that gang mentality too so where you're you're part of a system and you're part of a like-minded group and you're all together and you're all pushing for something that's that's greater than yourself and i think that's being perpetuated essentially by the same people who are cancelling it out um and and i think that's why we're seeing it move so quickly compared to 10 years ago where it sort of would have stayed either fringe or it would have just sort of taken a long time to become anything now it's it's sort of easy to to get caught up into into that fold it can make the rounds pretty quick yes and it's pretty easy to say hey let's all get together here let's all do this let's all do that and you you don't start to feel that anything you're saying is is fringe because you have so many people also reinforcing the same thing that you believe and it's um i guess a shared bonding experience so to speak how do you unwind that it's difficult i think is it even possible to put that horse back in the stable i don't even know because the sort of level of disinformation misinformation distrust in authority just trust in media distrust in whoever that i think that that people are going to believe what they're going to believe and i think it is difficult not to say that you know there are of course certain people will wake up and realize that maybe they were being screwed but it is hard to it's hard to wind it down it's hard to wind it back and then of course then you're running into the the first amendment issues of what is censorship and what is not and and where does that cross a line and where is it a double standard you know uh you you delete president former president trump off twitter but you're still allowing the ayatollah to remain there and all sorts of other horrible dictators around the world you know is that a double standard i think to me yes but you know to other people they might see him as a threat and the others is not i have cons i think we're gonna be okay but i have concerns if we can't figure out a solution to election security that will restore people's faith in the electoral process i feel like if we have another election cycle like we did where everything is contested and then we're contesting the fact that it was contested and people are lost in all the fray i mean i hope there's some very smart people who are trying to figure out a way that can because if it goes another cycle of that i think everything that we're seeing is going to take another step forward or if we're in third gear now it'll go into fourth gear then i start having concerns i think we can correct it but that's one of the biggest concerns that i have three years from now if we cannot figure that out i think we are headed into some rough waters yeah definitely and i think i mean we've got to start i know it's difficult and everything online is hackable to a degree but you know have to start some forward thinking in in what technologies and things we can use for the voting process and and that will enable much greater scores of the population to to pass you know the civic duty so i think we need to start instead of thinking of mail-in and this and that what can we do on a technological level and and i think there's a lot of great innovators out there and to me that's something that i'm more interested in than trying to figure out the postman's kind of trajectory yeah i want to figure out how we can restore people's faith in a process that has been doing okay we don't have to say great we don't say terrible but we're here you and i are here holly yeah okay if you have to show you know if you have to show an idea to get a vaccine and everybody's being encouraged to get a vaccine you know shouldn't the same standards kind of apply and as an australian you show an idea there aren't many places in the world that you cannot yeah you know so and i saw a list one time with things you have to show an id for in the u.s it was a very long list um i think if you and i people of course will correct me if i'm wrong i believe that the argument that i've heard against it is that you know a not everybody does those things that require those ids and it's often difficult for people specifically in lower uh rungs of the economic ladder or inner cities to get those said ids well let's figure out a solution for that i guarantee you there are dozens if not hundreds of ngos if you know foundations that will give you your id for free that will be you know uh pay for your id there are so many foundations out there to support that kind of thing i guarantee if that's what is required there will be a number of people willing to come up and say hey i'm going to start a 501 3c and i'm going to you know you can't afford an id come to me yeah i don't feel it's unreasonable to show an identification card to vote and i feel that for what i have heard people arguing against it that they're solvable problems so let's solve that and maybe that will start to reinstill that faith in the system itself i don't know and then there are people who just don't want to you know want to evade the government and don't want to be on an extra thing and i get that but how do you buy a house how do you get get a lease how do you get a car like i mean what generally what are you doing to survive if you don't have an id how does that work i would love to know actually i would love to actually sit down with somebody who's like yes i have no paper trail with the government yeah i'll have to figure out how to do like a blurry face on that i never forget this this one store in california of hearing a guy who used to drive in the carpool lane with a bunch of government documents because you know quote unquote he you know was an entity or you know corporation so to speak as our capitalized versions of our names are and he could not wait to get pulled over for being in the carpool lane that poor police officer i think he lost the case i think you know he went to court with it wanted to argue well you know you government makes me a corporation therefore there's an extra entity in the car here i think he lost if you have some free time go on youtube and look up sovereign citizen police interactions okay there it's worth a google and it's worth a laugh you'll have a good time the arguments that they make sound pretty good until you put a little bit of rational reasonable thought into it and then it's just it's pure gold i'll have to check it out it's it's worth the time back to afghanistan and iraq wow we got off tianjin but i like it um because there actually are as i was listening to you guys talk there i i love the experiences that i had from being overseas i hate some of them as well they did not make me the person that i am nor did my job make me the person that i am but i am the person that i am because i went through those experiences i don't know if that makes sense they left a mark on me for sure i listened to your descriptions of evil and the things that allowed that evil to take place and i was thinking more about our country than over there but also i i just also thing i think about a lot when i see a lot of the protests that start in you know whether it's the women's march whatever and they i just think there's so much and there are certain many many things that we all need to address and to fix and you know and i'm all about that but i also think there's this insatiable need for people that i think in a whole so many people live very meaningless lives whether that's their job whether they're just not fulfilled in what they do whether they're just going through this kind of motion of a nine to five trying to pay the bills trying to get by as most people in the country are and there's this need to feel part of something that's bigger than yourself there's this need to feel like a part of a revolution and so i i've often observed over the years things that i i guess i i wrap my head around a little bit because i've seen a different level of extremity overseas but they sort of need to be part of history or part of something bigger or feel that you're fulfilling a bigger purpose and you could also say that with the sort of the social justice warrior on twitter and so that just is something that i think is also driving a lot of the the movements and the extremities we have it's just this unfulfilled lives i think that people are just trying to find meaning and a life that is easier than most in the u.s right first world country it the first world doesn't apply itself equally to everybody in this country obviously but some of the levels of oppression and poverty and pain and suffering that i have seen overseas some of the people that i interacted with said nothing about it and they found an actual fulfilling life in their words not mine living in that environment it's a tough one for me to see people and again i am aware that we live in a first world country but that doesn't necessarily mean that that blanket of being in the first world covers everybody there's different economic levels socioeconomic it's a tough one for me to watch somebody complaining on their thousand dollar smartphone holding a six dollar latte about oppression and suffering when i have that other experience in the back of my mind it's it's not i'm not saying that to them it makes it any different but the the difference in optic between the pressure of one of those lives versus the other it is i i don't have the the vocabulary to describe it i really i'm a believer in and one thing i've observed that's so different say in the middle east compared to the us is this family-centric or this community-centric environment that people live in overseas where people will you know they're often living together uh first of all and you know meals are just you roll out that plastic sheet of paper and you sit there and everyone eats and it kind of doesn't matter if there are six people there or 16 you know there's a however much food and there's this sort of community and i think that that's something we've lost a lot of in the united states is this being part of a broader family or being part of a bigger support network and i think that's what gets a lot of people by with very little in those places is they have strong support systems yeah you'll see that you know with the yazidi girls when they were trying to raise money to to bring you know pay a ransom to get some of the girls to come back and it was this entire community effort it wasn't just on the the father or something to to have to come up with the money it was him being able to go to the neighbors and the neighbors went to the neighbors and someone else went here and everybody's sort of pulling in and without question and we just see that you know to a degree here but there it's just it's so ingrained and it's something so beautiful that i observed in in the way that they live their lives that i just think we've lost a lot of that they're more connected in many ways from a physical perspective i think people in the u.s believe they're more connected from a digital perspective and they're not it's not the same it's not they'll try to support and nothing against gofundme i've created them for people before or for the seal foundation it's not the same that digital interaction is not the same i actually haven't thought about it from that lens when you describe how they will the meals and together and the community because they certainly i mean i've been to some of the most remote villages i mean i can't say necessarily anywhere on earth but at least in afghanistan and iraq and man they were actually the people that were living there were very very tight with no understanding or idea what was going on in in the rest of the world for that matter yeah i remember where's osama bin laden they're like who's that yeah i had the same experience the same exactly that ties into what we're talking about i know but that was that was typical they would they would they couldn't understand what was going where is osama bin laden they're like uh you got a picture because i don't know who you're talking about yeah yeah what yeah it but and again it's so hard to describe the environment that they live in and what would just be just complete abject poverty here in the u.s in how they describe their own life in the context of what they even think is possible it's a tough one for me that's one that i that i struggle with given my experience and i usually will just keep my mouth shut because i want to come off the top wrong on people a little bit when they start complaining but war is an interesting thing yeah it's definitely taught me to be a lot more of a minimalist human being i think it strips away what matters is what actually doesn't and what i need and what i don't and really how comfortable that i can be um you know being anywhere and this idea of i guess for me personally home not necessarily being a physical place but more home is sort of home is people home are the people that you love and home is where your support system exists and that can change maybe months to weeks or to a year but i think that that's what really the work overseas taught me is that it's it's people it's not a place things don't matter yeah people do i mean you could my i have a home that could burn down now and if i had you know my son who's living with me right now my girlfriend i'd be like you know what i'm good mm-hmm i mean it wouldn't be good for that day we get a sweet hotel that's about it but we're in kalispell should be like an average hotel right but it goes on you know it's you're not defined by the things that you have what's the fight club quote uh khakis end up owning you or something yeah your stuff ends up earning the things you own and they end up owning you yeah the first world i have noticed many times probably maybe this is more in the u.s it's almost defined by its excess and that excess it ends up owning people a lot of the time i've fallen and i'm talking about myself when i say this too i will start having this very bizarre uh value of objects that actually in the end at the end of the day mean nothing and maybe that object is just money for people or the status or whatever it may be strip all that away if you got the people that you care about the most i think you're going to be okay absolutely especially if you have a community yeah and i think to for me to in la and in my new york kind of lives i you're surrounded by people that maybe have different levels of money and fame and and i'd often look at that and just sort of wonder about the emptiness of it and i always found that i could relate so much more to you know to the women in afghanistan that were you know going through hardships or sitting on the floor than i could to people in venice beach with a 12 green juice sitting you know i i just i couldn't wrap my head around that that just didn't make any sense to me and i i much prefer there's a there's an authenticity about these people and something that i really appreciated too was i felt that so much in my in my life and as a journalist was was transactional so people always wanted something from you or you were sort of the token uh she works for you know you weren't just i wasn't just holly it was holly at fox or you know there's this sort of additive that comes to everything every time you're introduced which really annoyed me and then there's everything felt very transactional aside from a very small group of friends who don't want anything from you but but what i loved about working in these places is you you meet people who really share a story with you and they share some really intimate and horrific things that have happened to them and they don't want anything from you they don't expect you to give them money they don't expect you to you know and and they're just the most giving sort of human beings and you'll walk into a refugee camp and i'll be leaving and some little girl will come and give me the only orange that they you know have left in their tent because they have to give you a gift and i just it was just a really sort of eye-opening beautiful thing to see human beings just wanting to to give and to talk and to not expect anything in return it's incredibly humbling and it can reset your optic for how you view the rest of the world it's powerful i actually wish that everybody at some point in their life was forced to experience that because i think it would really round the edges on a lot of the energy that in my opinion is needlessly spent on things that don't [ __ ] matter hundred percent and all that money you spend on the the starbucks lattes every every day you know what could you do with that you could by the end of the year probably go on a really lovely uh you know vacation somewhere or have some sort of wonderful life experience something for sure yeah how close to the uh the front lines of war were you able to get uh i mean on each trip that i've been in definitely um i've gotten to the front lines in a lot of situations i have always found it interesting but usually more on the scale of the less interesting aspects of war i guess for for me personally and what i sought to cover i found it interesting more in in understanding the things that soldiers would talk about or the way that they would think about their families or just sort of the waiting period i guess before any type of conflict happened that's what i found interesting to sort of sit there in the early morning while they were waiting for the bombing to start and talk to them about their families or how long they've been there but i think from my perspective i found it much more interesting away from what we call the bang bang and really the people that were just living these lives sort of on the periphery of it all that's what i found to be more engaging i guess the bang bang is the price yeah the impact it has on everybody else is the cost yeah they're two very different things uh and yeah i look at it at i'll use myself for an example what was the price of war for me time away from my family deployments you know the people that i loved overseas what was the cost living through the experience that i did the decisions that i had to make even though i chose that occupation one of those choices led to those decisions and the weight that it will have and that varies per person for the rest of your life the price and cost are very very different things i wish as a country and as a decision makers we spent more time on the cost than the price i think it's probably the thing that's left off of the menu when the people sit down and talk about these things what the country's going to do foreign policy i think the price is on there the cost is often left off yeah and that's definitely what i tried to sort of do with the book is to highlight that human toll and the consequences of that and what happens what happens when the war doesn't want a war anymore what happens when you know something is quote unquote liberated um you know what how do families pick their lives back together you know what happens in the shadows and i think that's something that i i wanted to bring to light and that i felt was was better suited to my skills than you know there's a lot of people out there who are going to be much better than i am at identifying the different uh weapons being used and you know how many jdms were dropped today and you know all that kind of stuff that's not my forte my forte is to be able to go into a situation and just really sit and listen and it's so again it's not about you know always asking the question and always talking and it's just a lot of listening and i think we've lost that in journalism today so often people want to be the story journalists want to go in and be the story and that's the kiss of death and people always sort of want to come back and ask me about what was it like to be you know in a dangerous situation or in a suicide bombing and i always felt and i still feel very uncomfortable speaking about it and not that i have a problem talking about it but it's more who am i to ever go into a situation and act like oh my gosh you know this this and this when people living through that every day they're getting through that with their kids with their family and to me that is incredible you know maybe i've i've been in a few but that to me that's not a story what i went through is not a story what they go through that is the story and i think i've just seen it a lot and in the invent of social media too is this idea of journalists wanting to be the story and this sort of defeats the purpose of what journalism is we're supposed to go in there and be neutral observers of a situation and um you know certainly i do my best not to draw any attention to myself in that way but to be able to have a platform to you know tell the stories and to to really speak to the people there and again that's listening how did it feel to be near the front lines to really be again another thing that's very hard to describe unless you've been close the sound the smell the communication the movement the cadence the pace of all of those things that happened and i say that from somebody who has taught to do those things over nearly two decades and for me it's still hard to describe what that actually feels like i mean maybe you have a totally fresh context on it so i'm curious how that felt being that close to it i think it for me it was almost a strangely a strangely calming experience in a funny way and i say that because it obviously wasn't my job to have to fire a weapon in the you know and hit a precision target and all of that it was my job again to observe and you really are in a situation where nothing else matters except what you're doing right then and there and you can't be thinking about the bills you have to pay at home and um you know what you're going to have for dinner and you know whatever else you really are in and it's a rare it's a rare thing in today's very distracted society to just have to have nothing but a clear focus and that's what i found to be in a strange way calming for me and i think that's why i've gravitated to doing the work because i'm not somebody who i think you have to have a natural sense of fear don't get me wrong i think we know we all have a natural sense of fear but to not panic or to not want to run away or to not want to i think for me it was just a sort of very black and white experience almost of you're either here or you're not and and i knew that i'd made it a voluntary decision to be there nobody had forced me to be there i didn't have to be there i was under no obligation to be there but i made that decision and i had to embrace that i'd made that decision and i think that's always easier for you to do than than people who love you who um are often the ones that are panicked for you i guess so for me i just found it was it really brought out the things that we think about as as human beings that are the most important and and i found that to be yeah strangely serene do you ever miss it 100 every day same hair every day i think about you know i can't you know i often think where am i going next what am i doing what is the next chapter i don't know i mean i'll always write and i'll always be very vested in foreign affairs but will i still be covering war will i be covering a different kind of war will i be covering a cold war um but i would go back and you know a heartbeat to any of those places and i and it's not an adrenaline thing i think that's often a misnomer um for journalists people tend to to pinpoint it as sort of an adrenaline junkie and i never found that for me i think you know there is an adrenaline i'm not going to deny that it exists but it's it's sort of this incredibly fast bonding experience i think that i found with people so i came from my life you know in the us where i have some great friends but obviously my family is still in australia and so it's almost a lonely life to a degree because you are living you're working you're living your own life you're traveling and then i would be in these places where people who never knew you from a virus suddenly you were the most important person in their life and they take it their job of taking care of you so seriously and you have these incredibly fast bonding experiences and i think that's what i miss a lot is sort of being with people in those moments that you can't describe to people but there's just this sense of of protection and care about each other that it's very hard to replicate in any other situation very well put were you when you started reporting on isis i'm assuming before you went overseas you had some idea of what the organization was you'd probably heard the term before before you went over were you shocked at what you found when it came to the absolute savagery of what those individuals are capable of yes and then i've i was shocked i was shocked um i think yeah i mean when you're burning people in cages and you know for me the yazidis is something i take very personally is you know when you can just sort of take an entire you should describe what happened with them yeah so the yazidis generally um they live on a mount mount sinjar in and around that area they're a very ancient religion and so they're sort of a blending of different forms of of christianity and of islam and they worship a toeic and angel um so isis considers them devil worshipers and so they justified uh taking these women but and men too they came into the village it was august in 2014 surrounded the base of the mountain and unbeknown to the yazidis who were all disarmed because both the iraqi army and the peshmerga had run away and so they were sort of sitting ducks when isis came in and really had nowhere to go so a lot of them were obviously killed at the base of the mountain men i mean they were just lining up men and and executing them the women often were taken as sex slaves and what i found to be so heartbreaking was that many of them had nowhere else to go but up the mountain and we're talking iraq in august it is what she's saying is it's not cold brutal and the crazy thing was i mean you had people as we were watching it necessarily on tv just starving and and dying of dehydration you had women that were throwing their babies over the mountain because that was going to be a better way to die than to die yeah or to die of starvation and i thought with all this modern technology that we have um and we couldn't really do anything about it you know i think the brits started doing some drops some food drops and water drops in the area but it was fairly limited at that point and it was really that moment that brought the us back into iraq because prior to that obama was still calling them the jv team and we weren't you know he was determined that we'd gotten out in 2011 we weren't going back and then after that it was just like we cannot let this continue um and there's such a beautiful sweet very peaceful people that were minding their own business in their village and and this happened to them and the thousands are still missing you know thousands will never never come back and yeah they'll be unfortunately probably missing until the end of eternity and what's crazy to me is that this is something i've done a lot of investigative work on is so many of those women have been or the boys as well because they took a lot of the young boys and brainwashed them and they gave them islamic names and told them they weren't yazidi and um all of that but now these people have essentially been given new identities and moved in with families and a lot of them are in turkey and other places and so you have a lot of these yazidis and these you know women and little boys that have been brainwashed into this group or brainwashed as a wife or whatever it is and and they're still out there and yet have no recourse of they've been given entirely new identities and little recourse of ever being found and and a lot of the boys i think are in jail and have probably been executed as fighters but you know they were taken as as children and so it's really hard it's a hard stomach it's a really hard stomach especially when you start talking about the methodology that they use whether it be the drugs that you guys were talking about yeah what was the name of it captain captain yeah which was a combination of methamphetamine what else was it gosh i can't remember as methamphetamines and it mostly came from iraq and syria i have to i'm blanking on the other the other ingredient but nothing paired with meth is good from my limited understanding yeah it was mostly you know it's a it's a it's an upper and a huge huge one so and they're giving it to all these young kids and and they're going out to the battlefield absolutely willing to die and and take as many bullets as necessary and just shoot like crazy animals um sometimes back at their own families yeah i would imagine depending on how how long ago they were taken or when they were taken and that's something that you know people say well ten thousand isis fighters were killed it's like okay let's talk about this for a second how many of those people that were killed are in that category kidnapped early on brainwashed didn't start out as somebody who was a true believer hopped up on fill in the blank and that's not a new thing when it comes to warfare whether it be somalis chewing on cot you know for the black down type incident they gave us uppers and downers to stay awake was the justification but i will tell you right now it does it modifies your head space for sure you feel like your hair is on fire and like [ __ ] it i'm charging into 50 cal today yeah not that that ever happened but i think if the situation presented itself i don't still don't think i would have done it but you would have viewed it differently because you're in a modified headspace those people the people you're talking about like i said the kidnapped the brainwashed they're hopped up if you kill 10 000 of those people and zero of the ones who are the devoutly just incredibly devout and it is their entire goal to recruit we're not actually making an impact yeah so it again numbers mean something but it has to be the right numbers and i don't know i don't know if people pay attention to that you got youngjacker talked about the recruitment and the western women wanting to go and be wives and leaving their families or going with their husbands and then their husband gets killed and it's like hey well here's your next husband i mean it's it's more complex than people believe i guess is the point i'm getting 100 percent yeah and i think to uh really the issue of religion is a factor not the factor yeah so it if for many who are true believers they will um you know that's that's their motivation but it's kind of one of five motivations and we frame it here in a very simplistic term of well that is the motivation and often i will say when we do see loan attacks in the united states or in the west it usually is a religious motivation because those are the individuals that are driven to being radicalized but when you're actually in that vortex where it is is so prevalent religion is usually not even one of the top three factors of joining it's usually again i i strongly stand by this idea of being pissed at your government and wanting to do whatever you can to find back sometimes it's just necessity so if isis comes into your village and you're working in a bakery and they say well you know we can either kill you or you can make five dollars a month working in the bakery you're probably just gonna say okay i'm gonna keep my job now i have a new boss um and you know so some of it's just pure necessity of of survival afghanistan is a great example of that yeah you can go back through the history of afghanistan kind of as far as as you want to and it can be it could be bluntly described in that country from my perspective at least that they have lived under the rule of the thumb or a stick or an axe or a sword really far back and first off you need to survive before you're going to thrive and you will see a shifting of allegiance throughout the course of that i completely agree with you it's a poor man's description to say that this is only religiously ideological ideologically based i think that i think it would for most people be farther down the rung i think it would shock people actually how far down the rung it normally is yeah that most devout fighters though that i i would and i say this based off of like probably more of the things that we found on them whether it be a journal or the videos or fill in the blank the most committed fighters were the ones that had that ideological root to it from a religious perspective but they were so few and far between yeah they were not they were the exception not norm by a substantial margin yeah like i in the book i talk about interviewing one of the head ied makers for isis he was recruited and was making all the car bombs and things and and you know suicide vests and and i said to him would you go i mean is it would you strap a vest to yourself are you ready he's like oh absolutely not you know he's not but i'll make him happy what size are you yeah he's like i don't have that level of faith yet and i thought well here you are you know strapping invests onto people to go to a quote unquote paradise but you're certainly in no means willing to do that yourself so i think um yeah that to me was sort of just the exemplification of the reason people are joining it and it was often money and and a lot of ice especially in the beginning and why they were so strong in the beginning were saddam's generals saddam's military who the u.s debated quote unquote and when you leave a whole bunch of angry men with their weapons on the street and no jobs and and no sort of political allegiance they're gonna get pretty mad too um and then i think we really underestimated just how far the shia would take their sudden you know moment in power after being oppressed by saddam who was sunni at the time and i think the u.s just completely underestimated the degree to which they were going to to toot their own horn and you ended up with the same problem in reverse i don't think many understand how the sunni and shi even tie into the religion of islam or where they came from or you know the disagreement when it comes all the way back to the days of muhammad where that initial split came from i have a limited understanding of it because i was curious and so i went and explored it on my own that was not something that i was taught when i was in the military so again it's there's varying levels of understanding and i if i'm being totally honest i don't think it was it was after i got out of the military that i had more interest in that and and having an understanding of them it wasn't even during the time period that i was going over there and and being you know as a member of the us military military deploying to that area so it's it's complex yeah and and most of them are sunni 90 i believe and but iran is the leader of the shia so that's sort of where that vortex comes in of the iran versus saudi arabia yeah no it's very if once you develop a little bit of a better understanding of the sunni shia rift and the geography there it makes a touch more sense not saying that it describes everything in perfect detail but like i was saying my optic shifted when i was listening to you in shock talk and started viewing our own country through perceived corruption or real and the decisions it's like okay i the pieces now are less vague to me i still can't connect them a lot of the times conceptually but it's a little bit of a better understanding we could see where things can start i mean at the very least you can see where like oh maybe this is the inception of origin maybe this i don't know what this would look like in 10 years but holy [ __ ] yeah could it look like that maybe probably depends on how far uh that perceived corruption goes yeah and the actual corruption and another thing that i've thought a lot about especially in covering venezuela and other places but you could you could almost apply it to the middle east in a murky way syria at least is when you have an authoritarian government who has deliberately unarmed a population what degree does and and i try to sort of try to point this out to my friends who are very pro-gun control is you can then pray essentially or you can know that you can oppress an entire group of people because they've been unarmed whereas sometimes the idea of a population being able to defend themselves is a huge deterrence you know and i think a lot of my venezuelan friends will will tell me that in venezuela which was a country where you could own arms and then over the course of chavez's time he started to do buy back schemes and other things and buy around 2012 i think just before he died it was sort of a blanket no one is allowed to to own a gun and the government's going to protect you well sure enough maduro came to power and what happened these peaceful protests were completely annihilated and a lot of venezuelans i think look back at that now with regret and say you know not that i mean it could have been a complete extra bloodbath you know have the citizens been able to defend themselves but you could also look at it saying the government you know they may not have taken the action that they potentially change their decisions yeah if you look back at history for totalitarian regimes one of the first things that they generally try to do is disarm the populace absolutely and there's a reason for that yeah it's not accidental that that repeats itself over time yeah and i think that's that's often missed in the argument that when you know when people are fighting well it's a slippery slope when you have this control and that control and this control you know where does that slippery slope end and i and i seen that play out in you know even in mexico and other places and mexico is one of the three countries in the world that has in their constitution that you are allowed to own guns well they make it so hard for anyone to legally purchase a gun there um so that sort of enables the cartels and and other groups to to have free reign over that population and i just think you know i don't know that that works in the least but again afghanistan iraq those places you aren't legally allowed to go into a gun store and buy a gun you have to have some sort of military purpose to do that and yet time and time again we've seen the own government oppressing its people yeah what was it like sitting across from an isis fighter somebody who believed in that ideology and having a conversation with them or an interview however you would want to describe it i think the first time for me that was in 2014 so it was still a very relatively new concept um and i wasn't quite sure what to expect and you know you sort of had there were two young guys that came in and i was i mean first of all you sort of have these ampish looking human beings and one of them had killed 70 people and i thought how does this guy do that and he only had he only had one hand because i guess he stole something and they chopped one of his hands off so then he had to learn to shoot with the other side and so it was just sort of a fascinating it was really sad in some ways because you thought these young people that kind of got swept up into something and now they've ruined their lives they've probably been executed since then um and in in one case the guy that had killed 70 had been forced into a marriage who he didn't know the woman and she turned out to have something wrong with her he said and tried to run away couldn't go back to his family because couldn't pay then his family had to pay the dowry which he knew that they couldn't afford sort of poor family went back to land in mosul and isis came in and said well if you're going to stay here you've got to fight for us um so that was kind of his foray in and then he he got i guess scared or wanted to get out and tried to do a runner up north and got busted and they took him in and yeah it just it was sad to me that somebody had obviously killed a lot of people but had just made those sort of life decisions i think that were in a difficult situation and i wanted to go in there and really hate all the you know hate both of them and and i and i remember in that car ride back afterwards feeling angry at myself that i even had any sort of depth of understanding of what they went through because i definitely think they're evil and horrible human beings who did a lot of horrible things but at the same time it's not black and white i can't look at somebody and hear their story and not to some degree have something that i can understand about that story how did he talk about killing those 70 people was it matter of fact was it is it even something that hit his radar scope is i don't know abnormal i think him for him yeah he wasn't a hugely empathetic creature i'm not you know empathy is a sliding skill yeah people need to understand that some people he was quite a matter of fact about it um yeah he was pretty he was pretty uh i wouldn't say he was boastful but he was pretty matter-of-fact about what he'd done remorseful at all i wouldn't say particularly remorseful no was that a theme at all with some of the people that you had sat down how many isis uh fighters are people that have sworn their allegiance to that ideology have you sat down and spoken to i think uh overall um probably about a dozen and then i wrote probably about half a dozen in the book similarities between them that you saw again i'd say i don't know that any of them joined for first and foremost except for the european finder that i'd interviewed joined for religious reasons um there was a guy from belgium who i think was sort of indoctrinated or he he grew up in morocco and i think he was probably the only extremist that had made the effort to to go across the world to do that but the others like you know impoverished families i think um limited education limited financing um and just sort of saw it as a window of opportunity in their lives so i'd say that's definitely a similarity i found most of them to be um you had sort of two camps you had ones that were quite sorry for what they'd done and we're clearly trying to curry favor and apologize and and then you had the other camp that you could tell or maybe rehearsing lines of i'm sorry but didn't mean it yeah so and it was usually no one really in the middle that was kind of they were the ones that you knew would be back on a battlefield if they'd had the opportunity and then other ones that were clearly like i i really [ __ ] up and i'm sorry and i would encourage people not to join this group and genuinely mean it the path for the gentleman who came from europe how was he how was he radicalized what did what did that journey look like for him where did it start so he uh so he his moroccan family you know grew up i think fairly moderate i was part of a group it was called free free sharia in belgium or something and it was funny because they only really just outlawed this group but this group was extremely radical group that was very freely um you know espousing their thoughts in belgium and radicalizing each other and someone had told him go and join al qaeda and i think a lot of it was motivated by what was happening in syria with the war with the bashar al-assad regime cracking down on protesters there and a lot of them were extremely incensed by that and that was the initial idea for him to to go over there and he found that he could travel i think without a passport and just have id and so he was up and gone immediately and it was a guy who's working at dhl or some you know very standard delivery job ends up in turkey going through turkey you know they meet up with these people online um who smuggle them into syria and this was the pre-isis day i think he went in around 2013 when it was still al-qaeda and then when that split kind of happened around that time he ended up going in the isis path that way and and i think he really saw it as his mission to fight the assad regime did you ever have the opportunity to interview have conversations with female isis fighters i did so i had a conversation with a couple of them in syria um again sort of a similar i mean the women weren't fighting so to speak but the women were kind of the supporters the enablers and often something that i think is incredibly horrific is they were the ones really grooming these yazidi women so we cannot look at these women and think that they're somehow innocent or caught up in what do you mean by grooming so these women and it's just her so they would take these idiots buy them at a market um and buy them at a market yes so they were an isis run market yeah so the women were being sold as sex slaves or taken and chosen um you know by the wallis and the leaders and and different echelons and then the wives of the asses fighters were the ones that were sort of essentially responsible for putting makeup on them and sort of grooming them to be raped and that to me is just it's it's absolutely disgusting so i think that when we look at there's this sort of idea of wanting to look at these women as being innocent human beings or they weren't on the front line killing people so therefore they should be you know somehow exempt or returned to their country or put in some kind of re you know rehabilitation program and i think in a lot of cases no these women were doing just as evil things as killing people i almost think it's more savage than killing people just listening to the description of the grooming and facilitating absolutely [ __ ] that is a level of evil that yeah and then one of the women and the other thing i found was that isis would often recruit women that clearly had mental problems so um would they do that though i think you just prey on the vulnerable really i remember one of the isis women that i talked to she she was schizophrenic and it was quite evident because when i was sitting there one minute she was laughing and the next minute she was crying and the next minute she'd be you know trying to grab me and then the next minute you know she was telling me how much she loved the jail it was just this very bizarre experience of absolute extremities um but you know she you know pretended to be this very innocent oh i i got recruited by the driver and then my husband was going to divorce me and i didn't know what to do so i joined this group and i wanted some money and she was inca cook and then she ended up getting caught but she was one of the you know huge enablers for the yazidi sex life she was one of the ones that were going in the market and grabbing the girls with the with the fighters and sort of grooming them and abusing them too you know those are huge levels of yeah torture is yep is i mean it sounded like in some of the stories jacob was reading through the sections of the book and i mean for some people it was a daily occurrence yeah like you know let's just be hung from our feet with our hands tied and be beaten or put into a really isolated or small space so you're contorted i mean it's yeah it's horrendous yeah totally horrendous and and hard to i mean some of the boys as well that were recruited into fighting i mean they still just have these permanent their their rib cages are just black because of the level of torture that they had to sustain it's hard to wrap your head around it's hard to for me it's really something i'm very interested in exploring a lot more is this idea of how you even survive that you know how you how you survive just such extreme levels of torture and what is it that mentally what mental head space can you possibly get into that you can stand there and and be beaten and whipped senseless and have your fingers cut off you know for hours on end how do you survive that and i'm just so deeply curious very ordinary people do you you know and and you could argue that sort of on a psychological level you know do you but physically you know i've met many people and this was something interesting that came up for me in the very beginning of covering isis when you have these conversations with people what happens if you get kidnapped and i remember being in a room with a couple of other us veterans and and myself and a couple of locals and every single one of them said well if i get kidnapped just shoot me and i think i was the only one who said oh don't shoot me i'm gonna i'm gonna stick it out because is there another option yeah i think people like do you want to get into a gunfight or a knife yeah is there an option c and it doesn't evolve a gun or a knife i think so much of our human mind immediately goes to we can't i i could never survive that so just i want to end it i don't want i don't want to be kidnapped i don't want that to happen i'd rather die and for me i found that to be no i'm if i can talk to ordinary people that have survived the most extraordinary things and they've lived to at least tell the tale then i want that opportunity too so that's something i've always been fairly it's an interesting headspace yeah yeah was it how much concern did you have for the probability or uh realistic nature that you were in in a place where they might value kidnapping you was it something you were concerned about pretty constantly i wouldn't say i was pretty constantly concerned about it i mean certainly something you have in the back of your mind and um and something you try to avoid i'll never forget one time coming back from sinjar mountain and and coming back to abeel and this long winding road and i'd end up falling asleep in the back and it was a yazidi peshmerga guy driving and a friend of mine in the car and waking up and he'd taken a wrong turn and we were going into mosul and there was the black flag right there and my heart just dropped because i thought oh my goodness like what are we doing and and luckily there was like a kid isis kid at the checkpoint and and another guy was able to turn around and we were able to go back i think in that moment it was a little bit surreal because i was like okay what am i gonna do now i can't call anyone you know um so i think those things are always to a degree in the back of your mind but but just from a personal perspective and maybe that's just because of the research and work i've done i've always been a lot more concerned about being taken by a government like a a state actor so the syrian government or the iranian government that to me has always been something that has concerned me more than being taken by a terrorist i'm not sure why that's just me where my head's been in the past i thought you know once one of those places takes you it can take 10 years for your government to fight to get you out if you're lucky and that was something i i very much caused anxiety for me when i was traveling in those particular places one of the more common themes i hate even called that with isis seems to be the sex slaves yeah how does that fit into their ideology so they basically justify that as as yazidis being devil worshipers and is it just the yazidis or is it anybody that doesn't no no i mean fit with their ideology you could definitely have rogue people that will you know and i have heard stories about christians and other women that have had that happen turk the turkmen women is another group that are just have had a lot of missing women by isis and that they haven't come out to talk about it and i have tried and i've gotten a couple of their leadership to admit okay well we have a number of women missing but they're so deeply conservative that they just they they if those girls come back they'll probably get stoned to death and that's the sad reality of it is that the idea of them being taken by any sort of male entity regardless of whatever it may or may not have even happened they can never come back and those women usually end up not wanting to come back anyway so they won't try to escape or they'll kill themselves because they know that there's just no future for them after that and that to me is incredibly sad uh situation so the yazidis really broke a mold when they came and and started to talk about what had happened because up until that point you have these deeply conservative cultures who typically won't talk about it at all and a lot of muslim women that have had that happen to them they won't talk about it because that will you know cut them out of getting married or their lives would just be over or they do risk you know being honored killed by their own family so what the yezidis did was incredibly brave because they came out very early in the beginning when some of them were being rescued and and spoke to the international community about what's happening and it was it was quite incredible to see but isis does justify them as these devil worshipers and um you know isis is a very organized group they had you know piles and piles of doctrines explaining exactly what they could and couldn't do and so that was sort of all part of it but you had to take them as a wife quote unquote so you had to sort of stand there for two seconds and say you are my wife not that she had any um but that was their justification of it and um and then they would often sort of sell them and then they get a new wife or um sort of that was their process in that and these cds were really i mean there were just thousands of them that were taken and i interviewed many of the girls that were were taken and they're just extraordinarily brave and telling their stories and um and i guess their hope was that something would change i think if they keep telling their story something can change or if people pay attention to what they're saying the depravity of that situation or the choices involved in that again exceeds my vocabulary when it comes to ability to describe i can only imagine when they were taken that their life was a life of torture and imprisonment absolutely how long um how long were they i'm assuming some tried to escape some were probably killed probably more than some yeah some killed themselves yeah i was just going to say that some chose to kill themselves what percentage do you think survived that ballpark oh i do have exact figures i think that i would say there was probably around at least 8 000 that was taken and then i want to say two and a half have come back and so there's still a whole chunk of missing and i really thought you know when when they announced the mosul liberation and i was there and i i just thought oh my gosh this is going to be a great opportunity for the girls to get out and they're going to be free and really very little very few came out of that and that was that was crazy to me because i expected that there was going to be dozens if not hundreds that were going to be freed and they just they weren't so they were either killed in that fight and a lot of them were killed in that fighting too you know and i think they were essentially human shields um and so when you're in a house full of isis fighters and i talked to women i talked to one yazidi woman who was a sex slave and i don't know if you remember there was a i think it was a delta force group that went into syria and were like having hand-to-hand combat with some of the fighters and it sort of made a big news splash here because of the i guess the nature of the fighting and what had happened and months later i interviewed her and she'd been able to get out and was at a refugee camp or idp camp in northern iraq and she said i saw that she's like i was in the house i saw that happening and i was trying to get someone's attention but not that there was anything i'm sure that the americans really could have done at that point anyway but it was just fascinating to hear something that i'd seen all over the news and we'd all read about and then to have her sort of sit there and say i was just begging for someone to help me but and not being able to be helped and then a lot of the girls were showing me in a shrapnel marks and thing that they had in the back of their head because the house they were in was bombed and i don't know by who could have been syrians it could have been iraqis americans i don't know but they were sort of in the middle of it and i thought well that's going to be really difficult to avoid well it may be impossible to avoid because we're not the only people who understand our rules of engagement yeah or the the boundaries that we tried to put on war you and jack talked about absolute war the u.s i actually agree with jock a little bit the dropping of the atomic bombs that was about as close to like hey hold my beer everything is is on the menu that i think the us has gone to in iraq and afghanistan i had very precise roes uh mosques almost always off limits hospitals treated as exactly that hospitals ambulances red cross all of those things it doesn't take a genius to figure out the seams in your enemy or opponent's strategy or limitations so we started you know yeah they'd get in cars with kids and women and we could uh even way back in the day track a handset but are you willing to send a hellfire missile into a car of women and kids to kill one individual i'm not i've never been at a level where that value uh right mathematical decision needs to be made or what i don't even know what the threshold necessarily is but it's impossible i would imagine for these women urban fighting they're going to drag you in they're going to put you in front of the windows they're going to have you sleeping in the same rooms as them it's and it can get much more complex than that and i'm not even going to add the other things that i've seen because i don't want to give anybody ideas but it could become impossible for them because the people that we're trying to find and eradicate they understand the rules that we have to operate in one of the most fascinating things i saw was sitting on sinjar mountain when it was not long after the mosul liberation had kind of started and just watching back to back traffic of isis vehicles families moving from mosul into raqqa into syria along this sort of one road and i just remember sitting there and we're just watching it and and i'm sure you know the guys in were all sort of sitting there watching it as well and there was just nothing they could do because they were all families and i just thought you know here's your absolute you know probably the leadership that sitting right there in plain sight in front of me driving along this road and there's just nothing anyone can do no one's going to drop a bomb because they're all full of kids they're i'm glad that we didn't drop a bomb there has to be a difference yeah um because again the question i will get asked well what's the difference between you and you know the people that you were fighting you've interviewed u.s service men and women i'm assuming yeah 100 similarities and differences that you found between u.s servicemen and women and isis fighters male and female did you find any similarities between the two or was it more defined by their differences um i would say it was more defined by but define my differences but if you're going to talk similarities you have to believe what you're doing is right to a degree you know and i think that's where isis differs i mean not that the u.s soldiers definitely believed their their f they believed in their fight and they believe what they're fighting for but i think there's been a lot of disillusionment over the last two days a sliding scale for sure whereas i think isis to whatever degree they believe in their their mission and their fight and and i think that that has that has been an issue i think a little bit with your soldiers however i would caveat that by saying i think one of the big reasons that isis was eliminated not eliminated in a physical sense but at least by territory um in 2017 was because trump did come in and say this is the mandate get rid of isis militarily it wasn't let's fight iran it wasn't let's fight bashar it wasn't you know come let's build a nation let's you know it wasn't that it was a very clear and all the generals on the ground that i'd interviewed at the time were like that's what we needed we needed a clear mission and and uh basically the the freehand to go and do that and i think you know in their perspective when i interviewed them that was what they felt they'd gotten and that was what enabled them to to fairly quickly see that isis was run out of mosul and raqqa and at least taken in a in a territorial sense yeah from a geographic perspective took back their territory so i think when when you do have those clear mandates i think that definitely helped um but yeah i think you know i hate i hate to equate any sort of u.s with with what isis was doing well and it wasn't the attempt to do that people who fight for a living whether they enlist and they want to be issued a uniform or they become radicalized or they find a purpose that they want to fight for i wouldn't be surprised if there were similarities you know depth of belief does not necessarily equate to legitimacy of belief in my mind because again when i asked you about you know evil the preying upon those um and then the belief i would say for most u.s service members is they want to go and prevent that from happening they can equally believe that that depth equally i don't have an issue with that that i feel that there are two very different values that are placed on those beliefs one protect and ensure that you know what the other individual male or female is trying to doing trying to do doesn't happen right i wouldn't have been surprised if you said that the the u.s soldiers at least from a a depth of belief perspective it probably is actually very similar um depending right depending and what i found too in my when i'm able to have those very one-on-one conversations you know maybe outside sort of the military military environment is really the level of compassion that you know a lot of the us soldiers and and sailors and things have for the people on the ground and the situation and the the frustrations of of wanting to the right thing and wanting to help people that are oppressed in really challenging situations in life and and and sort of hopefully seeing some of what they do as part of that mission even though it it does involve combat and killing and other things there is this the sense of wanting to do what's right and i found that that's been a very constant theme too and and even talking about it's funny i bring up i spent a little bit of time going in and touring uh sada city with the mahata yami and even though they're kind of the enemy of you know the u.s and and the cost of lives in inside a city in baghdad was horrific but every person i know who served in sardar city just just it stays with them and they talk about the smell and you know and and things but there's a sort of uncanny and you can probably speak to this and uncanny love for this place because even though they hated it it defined so much of of their lives and and their fighting yeah and it left this sort of incredible mark so i think there's this duality of loving and hating a place at the same time jacob would call that a dichotomy which is his favorite word and i feel like he should get a tattooed not on his forehead but somewhere oh he uses it well and he uses it often because they're everywhere yeah and that is war itself i think it's a the best and the worst of of humanity it brings out the best and and the worst of what we as humans can do for each other do you think and this is more speaking from using not speaking from but using the example of somebody who has been radicalized versus well they could have been recruited uh kidnapped and then brainwashed so a radicalized isis believer do you think it's possible through education or means other than taking their life to reorient their opinion on their beliefs i do i do and that's to say for everyone not um sort of that rehabilitation process isn't going to be for everyone there are going to be people that are way too far down that line to uh to be brought back to earth but there are many i think sort of with the right program it just depends do you want to invest in that and i'd say with the iraqis they were so damn pissed off about what had happened with isis and they were not there was no mercy there they were having you know very short very quick trials and and basically sending guys out to begin with yeah i feel like perhaps the verdict might have been preordained before it began totally and there was just no there was they were done there was going to be no sense of compassion and based off of what isis did when they yeah just the very deep level i can understand that and really how many iraqi soldiers had sacrificed their lives in that fight and i think we overlooked that a little bit or a lot is just i mean there's thousands upon thousands of and they actually think had to hide the numbers because they were so high because it would destroy morale of how many of these iraqi um soldiers that were killed in the fight and and that rightfully so um they were pretty pissed off about anything to do with isis and there was going to be no mercy at all there and and they certainly had no interest in and that's one thing that a lot of them have brought up with me in the past is well why are you why americans trying to do these rehab programs for these people we don't understand this just you know this is silly why would you spend money on that and to them it's you know it's weighing up what the what they see is the importance of a human life and i guess how we see it in a slightly different frame there there is a difference at least in my own experience and then the conversations and the things that i've physically seen express the beliefs physically expressed there is a difference and even actually honestly how they fight um i've watched them shoot well again i can't say i ever encountered somebody who was isis uh al qaeda probably a different story i've watched them shoot through their own fighters to attempt to injure americans there's just a it's a different value in life in the way that they conduct themselves on the battlefield um i don't know i prefer our particular approach to that as opposed to theirs but i'm not trying to make a value judgment on it but i think they've grown a lot and that's something that i i think that's been sort of nice to see in the from the beginning toward the end is how i mean obviously with the amount of experience they had but in the beginning i think a lot of the iraqi fighters i talked to really didn't know what they were fighting for or who they were fighting or you know it was a kind of a paycheck whereas by the end of it i saw a much more cohesive sense of we're fighting for iraq yeah and to me that was finally a nice thing to see because you know if you aren't fighting for something you're fighting for nothing so to sort of see that evolution i think by the end of it was was quite profound well without that evolution they would never be able to do it on their own absolutely you have to have that deeper level of belief and understanding and purpose and mission otherwise war will [ __ ] grind you up and spit you out because there is a cost to it that is huge yeah and that's one thing i really observed in yemen and i think why we're seeing that conflict continue to go on and why the houthis are so strong is because they're fighting and they're iran-backed and they're fighting for their they're a militia and they're fighting for their their purpose and and whereas the sort of yemenis at this kind of rag tag we don't really know we just want our caught we want to wake up at 11 and then you know stay up all night and chew and then maybe fire a few things and leave and i always got the sense working there that they never knew what they were fighting for and so it really doesn't surprise me six years on that they're still not really anywhere with that war and because i think yemen doesn't know what yemen is fighting for yeah how many trips have you done as a journalist to war zones do you have a ballpark counted um spitball here what do you think i mean it depends because a lot of it's not war zone either a lot of it might be you know venezuela or other other places um i guess you know 20 or so 20 25. i had to calculate it all out of all those 20 to 25 or not out of all of those but in all of those trips and the experiences that you have had can you point to something that has robbed you have a little bit of faith and humanity something that sticks with you like oh [ __ ] maybe we're not so well off as a species i think there are many unfortunately um i think for me there was a moment that just absolutely broke me and that was in sinjar city after it had been liberated and i was sort of living there no one was able to live there because it was still you know it was full of trip wires everywhere full of ideas and i was just with a small yazidi poshmaker group sleeping on a roof and i remember kind of going through the town and then seeing this man one time was just living in this bombed out house and there were two little kids and i just said you know stop the vehicle i want to talk to this guy and i went out and i sat with him on this totally broken down porch and he started to explain to me that he you know was a poor farmer his wife had been taken as a sex slave and so he had the two kids and he couldn't afford to stay at the refugee camp anymore because you know there was trouble and they needed some you know he just wanted to be back in his home and his home had nothing um had no electricity no water and it was mostly rubble but a little enough structure had survived to stay there and so he'd come back and he was just so broken and he said that and the isis captor which they often do would call and say well i have your wife here and if you pay me fifteen thousand dollars i will you know send her back to you so this guy had just gone around his village and was raising money and was selling his sheep and whatever he had to get the his wife the mother of his children back and it took him months and finally he was able to call the fighter back and say okay i have the money and the fighter says oh well it's doubled now. and he knew that he there's just no way he would be able to do that and raise that money again and who knows what would happen or how long that would take and it broke me because i knew i couldn't help him because and i couldn't ask anyone to help him i couldn't start a gofundme i couldn't ask an ngo there was nothing i could do because that would be supporting terrorism if i'd you know tried to do that yeah indirectly yeah so i just i remember that was a part of me that i felt absolutely broken because the helplessness the helplessness and i just felt completely wasted by the helplessness and these two little children who would grow up without a mum or any type of resource and they were living in this awful place and i just thought how sad is that this guy just he'd done everything he could he'd given up everything he could to trying to get his wife back and and it just became a hopeless mission and that nobody could really assist him on and that was just heartbreaking to me and i find that for me moments like that are so way way on me so much more than you know yeah the bang bang or even dinging up a mass grave or something that that is horrific but but death is death and i think when the living are like the dead there's something that's just incredibly haunting about that and it's stories like that and i often wonder about these people and and what lives they're living now and and those things stay with me a lot more i wonder if his wife was even alive to begin with right and yeah there's really and the rescues are just such intricate challenging things and for all people involved in those um but yeah that was just it was heartbreaking for me and i thought of the just the sheer helplessness what about the other side of the coin and all of your experiences what has stood out to you that restored your faith in humanity i think we can look at the same story to a degree and say the people that would get that were rallying around him to give him money and to support him it's that kind of community again that has given me faith and what people are willing to do for each other without anything in return and i think that has always been extraordinary as well and and seeing that play out in many different ways i know in another situation i was at a refugee camp and there was a a woman who was pregnant and i guess it had gone the baby gone really really overdue and they didn't have access to medical resources and and again you saw this sort of same rallying of people selling whatever they had in their tents going down you know onto the corner and and selling whatever little trinkets or whatever until they could raise enough money for the woman to be able to go to hospital and have her baby and i just thought it's little things like that that are just bringing the community together and that's all also what's restored my faith in humanity is the resilience and and meeting people who maybe this isn't the first time that they've run away from their had to run away from their home maybe it's the third or the fourth maybe they left in the iran-iraq war and then left again during the u.s invasion and now again with isis and yet the willingness to go back and rebuild the willingness to go back and start their lives again with nothing and to be able to accept that it couldn't happen again to me that's just remarkable i think that will and that resilience is just something that i've learned a lot personally when was the last time you went on a trip to a war zone how long ago uh i've i mean i guess i've covered a lot of cartel stuff over the last year so i've sort of been doing different mexico trips different type of war zones different but you know extremely i would say i would say in in case i'll say case in point cartels and a lot of what i see in africa make the brutality of isis pale a little bit really yes yes well you're going to have to unpack that the level of i mean isis is a high scale brutality and then stuff i've seen um both in cartels and africa i always point to is if you look at some of the places in in congo and things i remember meeting people that had triplets and they have to run because otherwise if people find out that you've had trips they will sacrifice them they will you know do some kind of ritual that is beyond me um because they because of the fact they were triplets yeah just this is a lot of uh like witch doctor type stuff that happens and it's it's really you know that's why people with alopecia you know they have to to run to so you see that all the time the women and what they endure um there is is crazy in terms of i think it's the congo where they they literally rape babies i mean it's horrific you have one week old and there's some incredible doctors the doctor mukwegee who won the nobel prize who's there and they will get one-week babies brought into their clinic that have just i mean i can't even put it into words and how can a human being do that i don't i don't even know you know it's it's just it's earth-shattering to me and then the women you know they'll have these children out of rape and then the children that have been born out of this rape are then subject to crazy sort of stigma and then their lives are upended as well and even at a refugee camp these different militia groups will come after them and and you know some of these women are just the strongest human beings i've ever met that i just i'm in awe of of what they are willing to yeah and it's it's horrific um and then similarly with the cartels just the sort of the the constant or the lack of of concern in in chopping up a body and sending it to someone's loved one is just dropping a a body in a bath of acid or um things like that that a lot of those small villages and places that have messed with the wrong person or subject to are also pretty unfathomable to me am i mistaken in the belief that cartels are nearly always tied to the drug trade in some way shape or form in some way shape or form obviously i think their their business enterprises expands it a lot beyond that but at the the nuts and bolts of it um is at a root cash level yeah it started with drugs and one thing i've been exploring a lot is the relationships between these labs in china that bring all the fentanyl um precursors into mexico and the sort of the relationship between these chinese groups and the mexican cartels which is killing americans in something that's right on our doorstep with fentanyl and other things that are coming through and how that's coming through and how that relationship has really grown you know a lot over the past eight or nine years and it's it's something that hugely affects affects all of us i think we all know someone who's died of a counterfeit pill or or an overdose or yep just had their life just inexplicably changed due to an addiction of some kind or you know just a catastrophic event involved by it yeah are you going to write a book about what you're researching or reporting on i've done a few different articles i would like to um i'd like to include it in something in the future i'm not sure what shape that's going to take yet but i think one thing as i mentioned earlier that i'm really exploring is this idea of survival so what are the what is it that people are um what gets them through uh these unfathomable situations is it is it faith is it family is it hope is it how do you pull through you know i have a good friend of mine and she was held by joseph coney and for eight or nine years and she had several children out of rape and i you know i talked to her often she just went back to uganda and i just think you know how did you survive that and not even just the own you know that that particular militia but just the threat of other militias and the threat the constant environment and you were taken out of a boarding school at the age of 14 into this and and you know how did you get through that how did you escape like what you know and she went on and got a masters at georgetown and just she's brilliant and i just think how do you how do you live your life after that and she's a real example of that to me and someone else who i i talked to and um fairly often and recently wrote who i know that you know is jessica lynch and she's someone i talked to and and jessica and i talked a couple weeks ago about her life now and and she's just incredibly vivacious beautiful she's a a student teacher in west virginia and she has her daughter and and just you know how she's able to pick up the pieces of her life and you know every day she's putting on the leg brace yeah and every day she's reminded of you know what happened to her and and i just think you know what what is it that that pulled you through you know how do you survive that and just become this beautiful human that you are today and she's just such an incredibly compassionate zero zero bitterness zero resentment just fully accepting of everything that happened to her and i just think that is something we can all learn from from people like her and people in iraq and in all parts of the world what is it that they get to get them through and i think when we tend to feel like or you know if i tend to feel like my world is falling apart because something very minor happened in comparison yeah and i'm i'm i totally you know and i find myself falling into that trap we all do it's like yeah god damn it i only have 5g yeah this is i'm just and i can't download this damn photo right now and i need to send it to someone i'll have those moments i'm like yep i'll go find a mirror and just look at myself like you're a piece of [ __ ] you need to call you need to recalibrate yourself totally and so i wanted to do a book in that realm and not because i want it to be dark and depressing but because i actually want it to be a little bit you know give us all a little bit of hope of what is it that we can draw upon in situations that is that human instinct for survival and i and i see many great survival books that are out there but they're all often by very trained people or people that are kind of doing masochistic things um and so i just really want it to be something from a very ground level so um that's sort of a project i'm working on um do you think you'll ever return to a war zone up uh put in the not i'm putting the cartel in a slightly different category but you know similar to the areas that you visited to write your book yes i i definitely am not done with that part of my life yet maybe not to the same level that i've i've covered in the past of really it's a lifestyle it's certainly not a life it's a lifestyle and everything that you do has to be somehow consumed by that and and i don't i don't know i guess i tend to look at life a little bit in chapters and i don't know that that chapter is ever going to be and it was sort of a repeat but i definitely think my life covering war zones is not done yet i'm very interested in i'm talking to a australian photographer friend of mine at the moment about collaborating on some products possibly in afghanistan around the time that the u.s sort of officially departs because we'd like to see what happens there um so i think that will be also on my radar as well and i am curious about about that part of the world definitely um and then i think this sort of the nature of war is is changing a little bit too um again i think the big focus is in china iran and i don't necessarily know that they're going to be hot wars but they're going to be sort of cold simmering wars and and that is is very intriguing to me as well yeah um i think myanmar burma is also an interesting place that i i've covered a little bit but i would like to explore that a little bit more as well in in asia and see what um where that develops do you ever worry about how much time you spend in the shadows in the dark if you talk about good and evil you know as a metaphor light and dark you ever worry about how much time you spend in the dark the impact it might have on you the weight i do with the experiences it has tangible weight it does it does and i guess i take i made a decision you know nobody forced me to be in that situation nobody's forced me to to go back there or to cover assignments there they've all been decisions that i've made so i i take responsibility in that i've made those decisions um but i do think i look back and i guess you know having gone to boarding school and having left australia very young and all this thing so i've been always been a very independent person and i never put weight on support systems to the degree that i think now that i'm in my mid-30s that i um wish that i'd done when i was younger so i guess you know when you're in your 20s you're somewhat invincible and you don't think you need help and you don't think you need uh you know to talk about it to to friends and quite frankly it's hard to talk about those things with people that are not in that environment and i think that i just thought i was a little bit maybe invincible in that way and i didn't put those support structures in place when i should have and so now i'm looking back on it and kind of trying to work backwards a little bit but i think i didn't you know i tended to go into a hole a little bit more than i should have and i'm i'm definitely very aware of that and now for me it's more just being able to how can i restore some of the support systems or what is it what does the support system look like to me now that i think i didn't need as much when i was younger that i definitely recognize that i need now i know that writing is cathartic it helps me have you ever or do you now do you talk with a professional to unload some of that weight i have in time to time i'm not particularly great about doing that on a frequent basis as i should but i do have um a couple of really good friends that i tend to unload a lot of that onto where i'll talk about it a lot or i'll call um but yeah i write a lot it's hard and i guess this is where my stubbornness comes into a degree it is hard always to explain a lot and also i guess you don't want people who really love you to worry about you too much either good luck yeah yeah so that's why i've never i never really discussed it with my family so to speak you know they often didn't even really know when i was in places um until i came back and then i would tell them or you know i'd say i was in a you know i was in turkey when i was really in syria or whatever it is so um i tended to shield them from that too i think to a degree um yeah so it definitely is a work in progress in recognizing that you do need those outlets uh and at the same time i also think that i what helps me is is having knowing that i make it a conscious decision to to do those things that i'm no one's holding a gun to my head to to go to iraq and report on that the things that i feel that are part of my purpose as a journalist in this particular echelon of my life what do you do for hobbies and your down time in between these journeys that you're going on i i still do my ballet i still love my belly i'm a big runner i have a harley so which is i haven't been able to ride as much as i like because it's been it's been stuck in new york and i've been traveling but that will be you know a downtime thing for me is to go on a ride usually i'm not really much of a group writer but i'll go with a friend or i often you know will enjoy going by myself um you know do a little bit of a day trip or something somewhere so that's been been a really nice thing to have gotten into in the past i don't know if i'll do it forever but it's something you know it's been nice to get into in the past four or five years what kind of bike do you have i have a 883 but i really like the 48 so i'm kind of contemplating selling so i can get a 48. but then i'm like oh this is an expensive hobby maybe i need to give it up all together nope it's fun well i mean let's not do that bikes maintain their value you could swap them around a little bit i think there's a marketplace for these type of things yeah so no that's been fun and that's sort of you know that's actually was a really fun thing i got to do in iraq too and a lot of other places that i've gone is like steal one of those really shitty you know 180 whatever they are bikes um and i've logged a few miles on those bikes yeah yeah and then take him for take him for a ride which has kind of been fun and journey into places that you may not otherwise be able to get into so you have been on one hell of a ride yeah your experience is quite fascinating i would say you probably based on the trips that you've done you have probably more peripheral experience to combat in the cost than most people in the united states military even in the peak kinetic years it's it's good to see that you have uh that you've handled it the way that you have and it ha you haven't become defined by it or been smashed under the weight of it on the shoulders it's it's a real it's a real thing for sure it's very very hard to describe the cost you asked in the book and i don't know if it was you asking this because jacob was reading it what is war was that something that you ask people that's a running theme sort of throughout the book i guess it's a string that ties a lot of the the memos together but no they're they're my perceptions okay so take them from different situations yeah so in each sort of situation i think you can never define war as one thing or the other and so often i would i would ask this question to myself really what is it in this particular situation what is it in this particular situation what are the little different facets that we may not fully understand um and then they can be as small as war being something that sews distrust between people so suddenly you can't trust your neighbors you can't trust people who are your friends and right through from that to the much more macro picture which war is war is a suicide bombing war is um babies being killed war is you know and they're the big picture but i guess with that question what i wanted to do was bring out the micro in this uh the subtle aspect of what war does to to humans now that you've had some distance from it what does it mean to you now in your current headspace somebody listed ask you holly i've never been around it i don't want to be around it but you have been around it what's it like what's war is horrific and i'm someone who who really i guess over time has come to see that it often does very little good you know i think there's a lot more um it should always be the extremity of an absolute last resort and never a first resort i think i rarely see a purpose in going to war i rarely see a point of of us in any sort of full-scale capacity and that's not to say that you know we can't be involved in in some of these conflict and supporting local um groups or supporting humanitarian concerns but i rarely see the point of full-scale war having said that war again i go back to war will show you the best and worst of human beings it will show you absolutely incredible things and it will show you the absolute darkness and the light as well it's pretty damn good description probably better than i could do what's your definition of war that's tough because i had my personal experience and then the you know the grander what is war as a country war was one of the most beautiful things that i've ever been around the clarity of decision-making and i think the ability to have an impact is hard to match you and i could have a conversation for six hours and we could maybe change somebody's mind or set in motion for them a new routine or habit that could have a long-term impact maybe if they can see the course but my experience in war is that you can take what you perceive to be evil at a level that your it harmonizes in your bones and you can take it off the board the ability to have impact the ability to make a difference the selflessness that i saw from other people the sacrifice that i saw for other people i watched u.s service members on countless occasions risk their life to run into the middle of a road to grab a kid to shield women with their own body with incoming rounds or mortar and they don't know these people and they don't know necessarily what they believe in but they know that those people are trapped in a situation that they can do something about it and on the other side of that that you know the depths of what humans are capable of abuse um and the abuse that rubbed me the wrong the wrongest that's not correct way to say that the abuse that still has an impact on me oftentimes it didn't come from the soldiers it was from the way that the people treated themselves and their neighbors in addition to having either al-qaeda or the taliban around there just the savagery of neighbor against neighbor and holding onto grudges generationally and seeing how that would have an impact um but i i look back on it and to me war is a beautiful beautiful thing from the perspective of how i was able to find myself how i was able to grow in that process and i would never wish it on anybody and i wish it was an option that wasn't even on the table uh very complex for sure it also taught me really the value of a beautiful thing about america is the value that we do put on human life that we don't see in much of the world and in so many of the countries i've worked in a soldier goes soldier dies in the battlefield they're dead on the battlefield whereas the us will risk the lives of 20 more soldiers to go in and find the remains of that soldier you know which to a lot of you know foreign entities just look at that and think that's insane but yeah like you're an idiot yeah why would you do that and to me that's you know that's a beautiful thing about america is the value that we put on human lives and there are still people out there trying to to find remains of of uh pilots who went down in world war ii and just you know that is what makes america an incredibly special place i agree yeah it's uh [ __ ] i didn't think we'd be having this conversation today very deep where can people find your book uh you can go to amazon and also from the d'angelo d'angelo publications website and it's also an audible and kindle as well so if you're gonna listen to it on the audible please don't do so in your car with your kids in the back unless they're age appropriate yes late teens i would say at best yeah there's some there are some heavy moments in there definitely but then otherwise yeah i have my link on my social media which is holly s mckay h-o-l-l-i-e-s-m-c-k-a-y what's your next trip you're going on uh possibly africa next month kind of working on a few things there to see what pans out uh there um if not i was supposed to be in india next week but i decided to postpone that one because of the situation there and and hotspot private hotspot and i just didn't think that it was going to be worth getting the material that i needed to get so um definitely when that situation settles down i'd like to get back there um and also i'd like to get back to pakistan too there's some stuff i'm working on there i'm very passionate about the dr afridi case that's still ongoing there and and talking to his um his lawyer and he is obviously not familiar with that at all what's going on there so he's the doctor that uh went to the bin lading compound and got swabs that the ca then used to uh find bin or to verify bin laden's uh location pre-operation so he was thrown in um what basically in a nutshell uh you know panetta and a bunch of people came out after that operation and were very quick to relay the details publicly before the doctor you know he was offered to be able to leave my understanding is that he was offered to be able to leave but decided you know no one's going to know or he didn't really know who he was working for he was just taking money um and so of course the the pakistanis were very upset about what had happened they nabbed him um they didn't charge him you know with with treason or terrorism but they charge him with a [ __ ] uh part of being part of a terrorist group um which he wasn't and so he has been spent the last decade wasting away in a jail being abused every day he's been on hunger strikes his family has to move to a different location every other week because the radicals want to get them because they're so angry about it and i just think it's a real shame and it's a real stain on the united states that we had this this doctor that you know did a great service to us and he is you know sitting in a jail somewhere and he's been forgotten and that's something i've i've tried to bring up as much as i can i've brought it up in different interviews that i've done with the foreign minister and people over there and just it's like butting your head against a wall i bring it up with the state department you know whatever opportunity i can and i just it's one thing i don't want to forget about because this guy is just he's yeah he's on his death row and he's a 23 year sentence or something like i said i think near the beginning the united states specifically the dod or the military is great at it at a few things tying up all the loose ends probably not one of the ones that they're the best at yeah for sure and they admit they [ __ ] up on this they admit it openly and like we bring this up in high level discussions we'll keep going do more yeah you know there's aid there's other things we can do to with the push for this and it's very politically charged yeah i can imagine that it definitely would be wow so you have no intention of slowing down at all i can respect that immensely actually yeah people tell me that i sh well they used to tell me i've changed my hobbies much more safe hobbies now but they say well you're crazy why do you do that stuff mike i don't know it's what i'm called to do so i can totally understand that from that perspective yeah and i'm all about a good story and to me a good story and good writing isn't isn't necessarily always about being in a war zone or a crazy place i'm very you know deeply uh curious about things that you know everyday things here as well and i think there are a lot of great stories to be told you know pretty much on your back door so i think you know for people that are wanting to do that work i would suggest you know firstly stop and just learn how to tell a great story and then that doesn't have to be running to the other side of the world uh where there's bombs falling it can be you know going to talk to your 99 year old neighbor and and asking them what life was like in you know 1945 or you know they're just ways of of we we gravitate to great stories and i think that's something you know that's an art that we've lost a little bit of and i think everybody wants to sort of think that they can tell a story and da da da but i think we've lost that art of just what it is just to tell a story yeah and i think i took a lot of weight off my own shoulders when i i used to get very frustrated you know you go and you report these things and nothing changes and then once you take that sort of hubris away and say that's not what my job is my job is not to go in and of course you want to have an impact but that's not my job whether i have an impact or not my job is to tell the story as best i can and i think once i removed myself from that situation i was able to be much more free with the pen and just just tell it without expectation i think change will come from the stories i mean that like in a grander perspective because it has to be it has to see the light of day for the change to occur it's probably not a timeline most often that people don't have the tolerance for but i think you have to have one to have the other i think it's very important work thank you closing thoughts by holly i'll get you guys out of here so you can enjoy what apparently is gale force wins in montana all right yeah here's the thing about montana and i'm not a native people calm down they say if you don't like the weather in montana wait five minutes i've that's actually the first time i've said that but i have heard other people say it a lot right i think montana is one of the most stunning states in the country i think you mean wyoming yeah that's what i've been told to say well that's you know that's a john steinbeck quote where he says something to the degree of you know wyoming is beautiful but montana is heavenly or something to that degree i think you mean idaho yeah oh idaho that's colorado perhaps it's hard to say colorado perhaps perhaps we could uh but no montana is pretty stunning well i appreciate you taking the time to come up here um thank you for putting yourself out there and going to these places and taking the time to invest in what other people around the world are going through like i said i think the stories have to be told for there to be change and far too many people have their head buried in the sand so maybe they'll listen to you more than they'll listen to me i hope so and i hope that you know the memos are pretty diverse so i hope that you know if something gets a little heavy it's okay you can sort of turn the page and find a lighter one and i hope this do that go right through that yeah it needs to be heavy sometimes i know it does it does and that's that's the thing about um i guess war writing for me is there's no exaggeration needed it can be raw as broad as possible and i hope that in doing that it gives people a deeper sense i didn't i didn't want to sanitize anything i think that's the only way you can do justice awesome thank you holly thanks andy thank you again to kayla for supporting this episode of the podcast k.lo silicone rings are great no matter how active you are get 20 off at klo.com cleared hot check them out that's kalo quebec alpha lima oscar dot com slash clear dot and also thank you to babel for supporting the podcast right now when you purchase a three month babel subscription you'll get an additional three months for free that is six months for the price of three just go to babel.com and use the promo code cleared hot that's b-a-b-b-e-l dot com code cleared hot for an extra three months for free babel language for life ladies and gentlemen thank you thanks for taking the time to tune 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Channel: Cleared Hot Podcast

Views: 80,653

Keywords: andy stumpf podcast, andy stumpf, podcast, world record, jre, military, powerfuljre, andy stumpf wingsuit, navy seal, united states navy seals (organization), cleared hot, cleared hot podcast, andy stumpf cleared hot, joe rogan, fitness, motivation, us army, hollie mckay, andy stumpf hollie mckay, hollie mckay andy stumpf, cleared hot hollie mckay, hollie mckay cleared hot, Fox News Digital, foreign policy expert

Id: A1HIhXr8X1Q

Length: 167min 36sec (10056 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021