#9 Tu Lam Former - Green Beret / Call of Duty / CEO Rōnin Tactics

Retired Green Beret Tu Lam, CEO of Rōnin Tactics and Call of Duty Character has a conversation with Shawn Ryan to discuss how he was smuggled out of Vietnam, his 23 year military career (20 of which as a Green Beret), his dark transition into civilian life living with PTSD from a long career of war fighting in Special Operations, Lam opened up about his childhood, how he overcame Asian racism at a young age, his military career and success in the entertainment industry. He recounts a visit to the principal's office when he was in third grade where he was belittled by the mother of his bully and the administration did nothing. "She told me that my kind don't belong here and that I need to go back home to my country," said Tu Lam. "I made a promise to myself that day that I was stronger than hate." Lam fulfilled his promise, joined the Army and became a Green Beret. He served in the military for 23 years, 20 of those years in special operations. After retiring from the service he founded Ronin Tactics, became the inspiration behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Daniel "Ronin" Shinoda and Co-Host of Forged In Fire: Knife or Death on History Channel. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Shawn Ryan?

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Tu Lam?

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Tu Lam?

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:00Speaker 04

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• 2:11Shawn Ryan?

  This episode of The Sean Ryan Show is brought to you by Nutrien Survival.

• 2:29Tu Lam?

  Ene Asher said, "Do you want to be a fucking commander tonight?"

• 2:34Tu Lam?

  I had to go through eight months of training with the CIA. And the reason why we had to cross-train one day is because we four deployed later on into these countries where we had to work underneath the chief of station. You know, it was really funny because you and I, after talking last night, we were in the same country.

• 2:56Shawn Ryan?

  On the same project.

• 2:57Tu Lam?

  On the same, hunting down the same person.

• 2:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Tu Lam?

  There was this fight promoter named Santo. He was a Japanese guy and he took underneath, obviously he wanted to make money out of it. And he said, "Would you want to fight?" You know, at Japanese dojos, at matches. He was talking about the underground matches. And the technology was used against the enemy and how we would find, fix, and locate and kill them.

• 3:27Shawn Ryan?

  He got killed, uh, was that 2006?

• 3:30Tu Lam?

  Yep.

• 3:33Tu Lam?

  I tracked down a tiger.

• 3:35Shawn Ryan?

  Get this, are you shitting me?

• 3:37Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Shawn Ryan?

  A tiger?

• 3:39Tu Lam?

  I tracked down a wild tiger.

• 3:49Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome back to the Sean Ryan Show. This is episode 009, and we've brought you our most requested guest to date. I want to kick things off by saying thank you to all the patrons on Patreon. Because of you guys, we're getting an entire new studio, which will be done by the end of next month. I want to say thank you to everybody who's left us a review on iTunes. If you haven't done that yet, please go to iTunes. Leave us a review, even if it's just one word. That's all we ask.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  Just one word on iTunes. And lastly, please go to vigilanceelite.com. Subscribe to the newsletter for all of the other content that we release on all the other platforms. There are hundreds of other videos to include. Behind the scenes footage of the Sean Ryan Show. Let's get on with it.

• 5:00Shawn Ryan?

  Number 009. He was smuggled out of Vietnam at an extremely young age. And later found himself in the United States where he would serve a 23 year military career. 20 of which as a Green Beret in Special Operations. After retirement, he went on to become Call of Duty's character, Ronan. He co-hosted History Channel's Forged in Fire, Knife, or Death. He founded Ronin Tactics.

• 5:43Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome 009, Mr. Tulam.

• 5:53Shawn Ryan?

  Tu, welcome to Tennessee, man.

• 5:57Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. It's great being here.

• 5:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's great having you.

• 6:00Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 6:01Shawn Ryan?

  You are the number one most requested guest for the Sean Ryan Show. And so I'm just ecstatic to have you here. We, ever since episode one, it's been. Can you get Tulam on the show? Can you get Tulam on the show? And now you're here and, you know, we had some talks before today on the phone and then meeting you at dinner last night. And dude, we got a lot to dive into.

• 6:27Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely. Looking forward to this.

• 6:29Shawn Ryan?

  Me too, man. But just, I mean, so many accomplishments. 23 years military service, 20 years Special Operations, if I'm not mistaken.

• 6:42Shawn Ryan?

  You have beat the game Call of Duty more than anyone I know.

• 6:48Shawn Ryan?

  Because you're a character in it. Forged in fire. You had an extremely successful transition out of the military and overcoming, you know, the dreaded transition. And, you know, something that I think a lot of people leave out that is extremely commendable is you've been with your wife for 20 years. And it sounds like she was with you the whole time.

• 7:16Shawn Ryan?

  Through all those deployments and. And that is no easy task for, for any spouse. And, you know, coming from a occupation that has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, that's pretty amazing.

• 7:31Tu Lam?

  Thank you.

• 7:31Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah. And, and Meadner, what an amazing woman you've got there.

• 7:37Tu Lam?

  So. Appreciate that, thank you.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome. But, all right, so.

• 7:44Shawn Ryan?

  Every show. I always start out with a gift. So because your name's Two. We got you two gifts.

• 7:54Tu Lam?

  Hey, I like that.

• 7:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right, so.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  Here we go, you ready?

• 8:03Shawn Ryan?

  One.

• 8:06Shawn Ryan?

  And there's the other one.

• 8:12Tu Lam?

  Wow. I have me some elite candy.

• 8:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's right.

• 8:18Tu Lam?

  This is awesome, thank you so much.

• 8:20Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 8:21Tu Lam?

  Wow.

• 8:21Shawn Ryan?

  Those smore bikes have been compared to crack, they're so good.

• 8:25Tu Lam?

  Yeah, well, I can't wait to try this crack.

• 8:28Shawn Ryan?

  Be careful with those.

• 8:35Tu Lam?

  Awesome, man. I appreciate this. Looks so great.

• 8:39Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Thank you. So that hoodie, we had modified, you know, so you're a pretty fit guy. So it's, it's a large torso with double X arms. So.

• 8:54Shawn Ryan?

  But, yeah, man.

• 8:56Tu Lam?

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, just diving into it. Your story starts, uh, at birth and, uh, you know, you were born in, to war. And, uh, so I kinda wanna cover some of that, but in 1973, Nixon, uh, signed a peace agreement with North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the US, which unfortunately, nobody followed. And then the US started pulling troops out in 1973. You were born in 1974 in Saigon.

• 9:41Shawn Ryan?

  The hospital was getting mortared.

• 9:43Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, so I'd like to start right there.

• 9:47Tu Lam?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's, let's put us back in that timeframe, you know? Huge unpopular American war. You know, it was a war of a body count, you know? Um, the Americans, uh, that came in and fought against the, uh, the communist regime, the North Vietnamese. Well, during that time when Americans drew, withdrew, um, you know, I'm South Vietnamese. I was born on the, the losing side of war.

• 10:16Tu Lam?

  Um, on, on the morning of my birth, you know, my mother, I was born on the basement floor of the Saigon hospital. My mother shielded my body from incoming artillery fire in the morning of my birth. At three months old, I lost my freedoms to the communist regime. You know, like any occupying force, you know, you're they're going to take the leadership out of that government. So Saigon was a capital of Vietnam, you know, South Vietnam, you know, the the country was divided north, south, the North Vietnamese surrounded the country, the city of Saigon,

• 10:57Tu Lam?

  mortared us, artillery fire, eventually the troops came in. And that's when the post-war genocide started happening, you know. Our family, we, the North Vietnamese will go through the homes, they'll look for valuables, good belongings, they'll push out the the civilians out in the streets. And, you know, if you serve with the South Vietnamese Army, then you are immediately executed. All right. If my my uncle who served with the the South Vietnamese, along with the Americans, they were immediately executed. My other uncles were imprisoned in what they call reeducation camps.

• 11:40Tu Lam?

  Let me explain this, Sean, you know, when I these reeducation camps are torture camps. You know, by the time I received my uncle after fifteen years imprisonment, he had no skin on the bottom of his foot. Damn. All right, so they torture him, beat him, broke him as a human being. So at three months old, you know, I we we endured that. My mother held on to me as they killed our family. We were facing genocide at we lived underneath communist occupation till I was three years old. During that time, there was a flux of refugees leaving Vietnam.

• 12:22Shawn Ryan?

  Was the violence happening the entire three years leading up to?

• 12:26Tu Lam?

  Uh, no, the initial violence, and this is history, me studying history, that initial violence of occupying, taking out the current regime, the power in that government system, imprisoning people. Once that was established, then the oppression started, you know, social ideology, you know, you're going to pay the government system this. The oppression, we started starving, you know, so we're facing, you know, them oppressing us as a human race. And then eventually, we started facing genocide. You can read the history on it, you know.

• 13:07Tu Lam?

  They looked at our lives as in, we're not even worth a bullet. They would take us out in rice paddies and they would murder people by putting a plastic bag over their heads.

• 13:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 13:19Tu Lam?

  Suffocating them to death, you know. So at three years old, my parents, my biological father and my mother and my brother, we escaped on a wooden fishing boat with hundreds, hundreds of other, hundreds of thousands of other fleeing refugees. You know, I want to put you in this scenario. Imagine like escaping in this country, right? Hundreds of thousands of refugees escaping on wooden boats. Well, that brought in the piety that was going on around other countries, neighboring countries like Thailand, Philippines. You know, pirates, the bandits that came in. And basically, they would stop our boats when we were escaping.

• 14:02Tu Lam?

  They would board the boats, they would murder the men, rape the women, and torture the children.

• 14:07Shawn Ryan?

  Were you, just backing up for just a second, on these boats, who was orchestrating?

• 14:14Shawn Ryan?

  This kind of migration out of South Vietnam.

• 14:18Tu Lam?

  People, they just, they're trying to leave. So think about like Syria or any, any country that's war torn. They're just trying to escape that area, right? So after the fall of, um, South Vietnam, you know, we are facing the communist regime. So a lot of people are just, they're walking out of the country. They were getting on these wooden boats, smuggling themselves out. It was, it was not like the, the communist regime let us leave.

• 14:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Tu Lam?

  We had to escape, you know? And the, the people that, um, own these boats, they're like fishermen's and they're just trying to make a living too.

• 14:50Shawn Ryan?

  So these are like, can you describe the boat?

• 14:55Tu Lam?

  A normal wooden fishing boat.

• 14:57Shawn Ryan?

  Just a motor, no motor?

• 14:59Tu Lam?

  Motor.

• 15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Tu Lam?

  A motorboat. Now this normally fits about maybe 20 people. My mother said on our boat, it was a hundred plus people.

• 15:10Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 15:11Tu Lam?

  We couldn't sleep. Um, we had to, um, basically, we, we're, we're in the basement area of the boat, the bottom deck of the boat. And we had to sleep sitting up, right? Because they were jam packed in there. So think about the smell, think about, uh, the, the desperate, you know, how desperate these people were. The rich were in the same boat as the poor.

• 15:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 15:38Tu Lam?

  You know, so we are truly trying to survive and truly, you know, trying to escape. So the piety was going on. Um, my mother told me the, the, uh, the captain of the boat, he used to have been ex Navy for the South Vietnamese military. So he employed the tactics that you needed to navigate past these piety. And basically all he did was we escaped at night, he shut off the lights. And we just kind of so, uh, sailed past the piety by cutting off the motors. Right? And then once we got out of sea then he cut on the motors and we went, our first destination was Malaysia.

• 16:19Tu Lam?

  Right? So you think about it, man, like we're escaping and all these neighboring countries, they don't want, they don't want to deal with you.

• 16:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Tu Lam?

  They don't want your issues. They don't want escaping refugees in their country where now they have to house and feed you. They're third world countries themselves.

• 16:35Tu Lam?

  So we went into Malaysia and the Malaysian Coast Guard stopped us at gunpoint. They shot at us and then they told us that we will not enter their country. They anchored us in and then they pulled us back out into the ocean.

• 16:53Tu Lam?

  They shot our motor, cut the lines and left us drifting out of the oceans to die.

• 17:00Tu Lam?

  You know, so my mother said we drifted, you know, we, we were out there for nearly a month at sea. A month? Nearly a month at sea. And she said people started dying, you know, due to the lack of food and water, people were dying. And they're stealing or fighting from each other. They threw the dead bodies over the sea, you know. So we, my mother said we were in a very desperate survival situation. She, she actually told me she lost hope.

• 17:30Tu Lam?

  Do you remember any of this? No. Nothing? No. There's flashes of like the refugee camps growing up. There was a, a flash of like in my dreams where I see a light going through like the crevice of a boat. And I'll explain that, that light. But those like little flashes, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say I remembered the whole big picture. I was so young. How about your brother? My brother remembers. How old was he? He's four years older than me. So he was seven at the time. Wow.

• 18:03Tu Lam?

  Um, so you know, people started dying. We're, we're, my mother said they were throwing people off the boat, lack of food, water. And then, um, you know, my mother carried poison in her belongings. You know, it was a common practice for fleeing refugees to poison their children. When the journey ends, that means they know they're going to die. Or if the pirate, pirates entered a boat, then they'll give the poison to their children. So they won't die, uh, being tortured.

• 18:34Tu Lam?

  That they have the peaceful, you know, death. So my mother contemplating on this poison because she knew that we're not going to make it, you know?

• 18:44Tu Lam?

  So she said a huge storm hit us, you know, imagine a fishing boat, man, out in the middle of the South China Sea, right? And she said this huge storm, she thought the boat was gonna tip over.

• 18:54Shawn Ryan?

  With no motor?

• 18:55Tu Lam?

  No motor. And we drifted and drifted, um, but the, the rain, she said, saved us because it allowed us, you know, uh, the water source we needed in order to survive a few more days, you know? She, she said that we drifted out, that the, the storm took us further out into this, the, the ocean, they didn't know where, the, the captain didn't know where we're at, you know, we're just out at sea, had no motor, we're just drifting. And, um, a miracle happens, man, you know? There was a Russian supply boat that was exiting out of China, I mean, out of Vietnam. They were leaving Vietnam and they saw refugees.

• 19:39Tu Lam?

  Now, I, I wanna paint the story, these are Russians. The, the, the, the government, the, the system, the ideology that took me out of my country, that took away my freedoms, you know, murdered my family, you know? And these Russians were coming out of Vietnam and they saw fleeing refugees and they, um,

• 20:00Tu Lam?

  they saved us. They brought us on board and, um, well, they brought us on board one at a time, is what my mother said. And they, um, basically they provided medical aid to us, you know? We were drifting out of sea for nearly a month. And they anchored us on and then they told the captain, and my mother said it to the T, they told the captain that you're lucky because if we were going into Vietnam, we would have drug you back into Vietnam.

• 20:30Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 20:31Tu Lam?

  But because we're going out of Vietnam, we have no other choice but to take you with us.

• 20:38Tu Lam?

  Right? So their destination was Singapore, right? So, um, they basically tugged us along, you know, on their, their line and, uh, they dropped us off at a refugee camp in Indonesia.

• 20:54Tu Lam?

  You know, I want to explain this, you know, this situation to you is that um

• 21:00Tu Lam?

  these refugee camps are, they're very dangerous, man. They're, they're a plot of land in the middle of the jungle. You know, and there's maybe a control post in the middle, right, where people go there and check their mails and that's their communications, you know, uh, sponsorships to get into other countries, you know. So um, we lived on this plot of land in the middle of the jungle in a grass hut, in a tropical island, you know. No food, no water is given to you. So you have to survive off the land.

• 21:37Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you there for?

• 21:38Tu Lam?

  A year and a half.

• 21:40Shawn Ryan?

  So up until four and a half or five and a half?

• 21:46Tu Lam?

  Yeah, four and a half.

• 21:47Shawn Ryan?

  Four and a half years old?

• 21:49Tu Lam?

  So we, we were living off the land and, you know, my brother growing up, he would tell me, you know, I used to gather firewood around the camp. You know, and I would see dead bodies all around the camp because people were getting murdered for supplies. You know, women were drug into the woods and getting raped.

• 22:06Shawn Ryan?

  Is this, you said Indonesia, correct?

• 22:10Tu Lam?

  Indonesia.

• 22:11Shawn Ryan?

  Is this Indonesians?

• 22:14Tu Lam?

  This is refugees on refugees.

• 22:16Shawn Ryan?

  This is South Vietnamese on South Vietnamese, not caring, not taking care of each other.

• 22:21Tu Lam?

  It's about survival.

• 22:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Tu Lam?

  You know, at that point, and um, you know, then you have, you know, bandits in these, in these jungles as well. You know, I asked my mother, I said, okay, so how did we survive? Well, my mother is, she's hard, right? She's badass and um, what she told me was, you know, there were rich refugees. And they had these, you know, jewelry and stuff that they would tape to them. And she will go and basically bid because they need to sell their jewelry to eat, right? So my mother would take this jewelry from him, be the middle person, make the track through the jungle where people are murdered and raped and killed daily, go to the northern portion of the island and deal with these bandits.

• 23:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 23:10Tu Lam?

  And sell them these valuables for money and she'll track back and take her earnings and that's what kept us alive.

• 23:19Shawn Ryan?

  Did she have to hide that from?

• 23:22Tu Lam?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:22Shawn Ryan?

  From pretty much everybody, right?

• 23:25Tu Lam?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I just think like, you know, a young Asian lady tracking through the jungles.

• 23:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Tu Lam?

  You know what I mean? So her children can survive.

• 23:38Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 23:40Shawn Ryan?

  Who, so who was watching you guys?

• 23:44Tu Lam?

  You know, I don't, I don't hear too much stories on my biological father. You know, it's just they divorced when I was very young. Um, but I'm sure he, he, he had a, you know, helping hand on, you know, how we survived them in the refugee camps as well.

• 24:01Tu Lam?

  So, um, so we lived off this, in this plot of land. Now, what's really unique was my aunt married a American Special Forces Green Beret and he was an officer. Uh, his G base got overran during one of the battles, right? Um, and he got stabbed by SKS bayonet, uh, in the back of his rib cage area. And, um, he ended up killing the, the Vietcong. He'll, he'll make sure he'll let you know I killed him too, you know? But, um, he was evacuated out of Vietnam, you know? And, um, my aunt went with him after the, the fall of South Vietnam and she moved over to the United States, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, right?

• 24:42Tu Lam?

  So him being an officer in United States military, he was able to sponsor us to come over to America. Now, what I want to explain to you is my mother waited a year and a half for the sponsorship. We got accepted to New Zealand. We got accepted to Canada. We could have been, you know, I mean, we could have been in all these different Australia. We could have been in all these different countries that accepted us as refugees. America, that time it took a little longer, you know, unpopular Vietnam war.

• 25:14Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:15Tu Lam?

  But because of the sponsorship, we were able to get to America. And I asked my mother, you know, later on in life, I said, why? You know, why in America? She said, before I left, you know, your grandfather, who, who funded the escape?

• 25:31Tu Lam?

  Who funded Escape made me promise that if I can, if I survive this journey, then you must do what you can to become an American. Because you need to reunite with your sister in America. And that's the land of the free. So my mother waited, you know, literally for a year and a half. And then eventually we got accepted to come to America. And we made our way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where that was the, if you know Fayetteville, North Carolina, anybody's ever been there. It's a, it's a town right outside of the biggest military base, biggest army base in America.

• 26:14Tu Lam?

  You know, for special operations, the home of special operation, which was Fort Bragg, North Carolina. And that was where I was raised.

• 26:24Shawn Ryan?

  Before we go into Vietnam, how many of your family members that made it to the US? Was it your mom, your brother and you? Was there more?

• 26:35Tu Lam?

  Yeah, yeah. Eventually, because my mother made it, you know, my mother has a giving heart. So she, she never forgot where she came from. So we were able to free my uncle from the prison camp. So she brought him and her family over. We brought my grandmother over, you know. So our uncle, you know, that survived the camps eventually came over.

• 26:59Shawn Ryan?

  How many family members did not make it over?

• 27:03Tu Lam?

  She told me like more than five.

• 27:06Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. On the boat, you spoke about bodies being thrown overboard and people dying of starvation, thirst, I'm sure probably sickness was in there too, being out there for, you know, over a month. How many, how many? And you said there was maybe over a hundred people on that boat. Do you have any idea?

• 27:31Tu Lam?

  I don't, man. You know, I did ask my mother one time, I said, out of, you know, the people that came on the boat, can you tell me like roughly how many people die? She goes, a lot.

• 27:41Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 27:43Tu Lam?

  Obviously, she doesn't, you know, keep track of that, but she told me like when they slept,

• 27:50Tu Lam?

  she had to sleep with all her valuables clothes pinned to her clothes, right? So we had layers of clothes. We were escaping. We didn't have luggages or anything, you know? We had to travel very light, so she would layer us with, you know, two outfits. And then she would take our valuables as our birth certificates, photos that she had reminding her her childhood. It's amazing. So some of these photos that she showed me later on in life, like you could tell that's that's been through an escape, you know? So she would stuff it into a Ziploc bag and she'll tape it and then she'll clothespin it to her body. Any jewelry that she have, any, any money that she had, she'll put it into

• 28:32Tu Lam?

  a Ziploc bag and basically clothespin her to her body. And when she slept, you know, she had to sleep sitting up, so she would sleep it with this stuff underneath her. So nobody can steal because everybody was stealing from each other, you know?

• 28:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Tu Lam?

  Survival situation.

• 28:49Shawn Ryan?

  Do you talk with your mom a lot about, you know, kind of what led up to, like, were there any early signs

• 28:57Shawn Ryan?

  before the war actually kicked off of, you know, certain freedoms being taken away? I don't know, maybe like

• 29:06Shawn Ryan?

  we have the Second Amendment here. Were there any freedoms that just started disappearing slowly but surely?

• 29:14Tu Lam?

  You read the history on, on the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh, you know, he, he first came to America to ask for help because the French were trying to colonize. He was fighting against that regime and, you know, Americans didn't want to get involved. So then he switched over to the Russians and the Russians started helping Ho Chi Minh. So that's why he took on more of that socialist ideology. Ho Chi Minh's goal was to unify all of Vietnam under one rule, which was because he took on the socialist ideology, the communist ideology. He wanted to press that into the South, which was more a democracy.

• 29:56Tu Lam?

  You know, I think what's really unique was there was a north and south divided, you know. The south enemies, which the country I was born on, was sided with Americans. They fought for democracy and freedom. The north enemies fought for more of a communist ideology. You know, obviously, the communists won in that country. And I think what's unique was like, you know, this, the crimes that happened after that. Like, there was no humanity. There was no compassion. You know, they were trying to wipe out a whole race of people because we thought differently.

• 30:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it's, it's, uh, it's, you don't hear a whole hell of a lot of stories where the Russians are showing anybody compassion. If there's one thing they're kind of known for, it's being pretty ruthless. And so the fact that, you know, they showed you that fishing boat, you know, at least a little bit of compassion and fed you and gave you water and, and actually brought you, you know, to a refuge, a refugee camp where you'd eventually, you know, get out. That's, uh, that's, I, I've never heard of the Russians doing anything like that.

• 31:14Tu Lam?

  But you know, I think what's unique is, you know, now that I'm older in life and, you know, you kind of study how the human being develops and, you know, the mind develops. And, you know, from two to four, that's where you develop a lot of your, your code, your values, your ethics, whatever you live by, right? So a lot of kids at that age, if they get abused, they're going to have a really hard time in life, you know? I mean, two to four, man, that was.

• 31:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Tu Lam?

  E and R, you know?

• 31:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Tu Lam?

  I was trying to E and R, we were trying to survive. So I think with that energy, you know, kind of, that's what I grew up with. You know, I just couldn't pinpoint what that energy was. I was off growing up. It's just, you know how you feel like you were meant for something? You don't know what it is, or there's an emptiness inside, you just don't know what it is. There was a rage, definitely, you know? But I didn't know why, you know? And it wasn't until later on, is when you mature, you realize that. Man, you're escaping for your life during that age when when a normal human being is developing his code, his his way, you know, of who he is in this world, you know, two to four.

• 32:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's about as traumatic as it gets. And I'm kind of curious, you know, you said you have flashes here and there, but would would is, if you can remember, what is your first childhood memory?

• 32:44Tu Lam?

  Is it in the States? Yeah, it was America.

• 32:50Tu Lam?

  I mean, dramatically, you know, we we came to America and, you know, it wasn't a popular war. Vietnam was not a popular war. And I want to bring us back into history. And the reason why Vietnam was not a popular war was because up until then, right, you think about like World War One, War Two, you know, Korean War. Everything was censored through the military. Reporters will come in, you had your your military reporters, and it was censored through. And then that's what the public saw, you know. Vietnam was the first time that they allowed unprecedented covering of story. So all these reporters were coming in and obviously they didn't want to capture war, right?

• 33:33Tu Lam?

  The image of war and war is not beautiful. So when when they reported that American soldiers were killing, you know, innocent people, you know, and they had this on video and they're sending it back. Well, that's why it it became a non-popular war.

• 33:52Tu Lam?

  You know, so the Americans didn't have the support.

• 33:57Tu Lam?

  You know, and that reciprocated into the South Vietnamese. And we didn't have the support once the Americans left, you know. So when we came over to America, I am the image of a hateful war to them.

• 34:13Tu Lam?

  You know, and it was so fresh when we came over because it was right after the Vietnam War. So when we came over, man, I had my first memory was my mother took me to a grocery store. You know, and I remember what I saw was endless food.

• 34:32Tu Lam?

  You know, that doesn't mean anything to anybody, but when you starved, right, when you had nothing, you know, when you come from nothing, you see endless rolls of food, you know, and I remember I'm like, wow, you know, this is amazing. And I saw the, the joy in my mother's eyes because we're not starving, you know?

• 34:51Tu Lam?

  She grabbed her groceries and um, we came out and this older gentleman came up to us and

• 34:59Tu Lam?

  he spit on my face. And he flicked his fingers at my mother and uh, he called us all sorts of racist names. So that was my first memory.

• 35:13Tu Lam?

  You know?

• 35:15Tu Lam?

  So um, growing up in the States, you know, obviously after the war, it was uh, it was a very difficult time. It was very racist, very racist times in America.

• 35:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that has not only coming, you know, back to or coming not back to for you, but coming to the US, uh, you know, from Vietnam, but you moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is

• 35:41Shawn Ryan?

  probably the biggest special operations base out of all branches in the US. And special operations and a lot of times are, you know, the backbone of the war. They generally see the most action and to have you move there, uh, you know, and, and what they were doing can, you know, as you know, as well as I do, can create a lot of hate and uh, so I'm sure that was uh, extremely tough to deal with. And uh, but before we get into that, let's just take a quick break and uh, when we come back, we'll pick up with uh,

• 36:27Shawn Ryan?

  your journey in Vietnam.

• 36:29Tu Lam?

  Absolutely.

• 36:48Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient Survivor. Feed your freedom.

• 36:57Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Tu, we're back from the break and you're in Fayetteville, North Carolina. You've just immigrated into the United States and you, your mother and your brother are

• 37:14Shawn Ryan?

  in a town that holds more special operations commandos than than any other town in the United States, who are all, you know, fresh out of the Vietnam War. And so

• 37:29Shawn Ryan?

  what was that, what was that like growing up with that hatred and?

• 37:35Tu Lam?

  Yeah, you know, when we first moved to the States, we lived with my uncle and my aunt, you know, and they're, my uncle's an officer. So, you know, that was the best life I ever seen, like, you know, coming from Dill Press, you know, escaping Vietnam. I never lived in such a huge house, you know. So it was a huge eye opener. So we lived with my uncle for a few months until we got on our feet. It was my, my biological father, my mother, my brother and myself, you know. And, you know, just during that timeframe, was trying to get climatized to this environment, you know, I was in. It was so much going on there. And like you say, it was a home of special operations. My uncle was special forces Green

• 38:19Tu Lam?

  Beret. So when I walked down, I saw his awards, you know, all his war stuff. I thought it was really cool, really unique. Eventually, my, my biological father and my mother, we moved out and we went to, it was a very low income part of town. We had nothing, you know. When we left Vietnam, we have absolutely nothing. We have no country, has no freedom. We have nothing, you know. So my father and mother, they would work odd jobs because my mother always felt education was the answer to freedom.

• 39:01Tu Lam?

  You know, she said, if you have an education, you can never be oppressed.

• 39:06Tu Lam?

  So it means a lot to me if you concentrate on school.

• 39:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Tu Lam?

  So we lived in a, um, gosh, man, a really small apartment in a really poor part of town. The only furniture that we had in this apartment was one full-size mattress, one used full-size mattress that we all would sleep on. We had no other furniture. You know, we were very poor.

• 39:36Shawn Ryan?

  And how old are you at this time?

• 39:39Tu Lam?

  About six.

• 39:40Shawn Ryan?

  Six, so you had a six-year-old, a 10-year-old, and then two adults.

• 39:45Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Shawn Ryan?

  Mom and dad.

• 39:46Tu Lam?

  Right.

• 39:47Shawn Ryan?

  On a full-size, which is just a little bit bigger than our

• 39:50Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Shawn Ryan?

  twin-size bed.

• 39:53Tu Lam?

  So my mother, you know, she would, uh, we have other refugees, so they would donate clothes to us. And so we had like, really like, four hand-me-downs of clothes, you know, holes all over, you know, holes in our shoes. But my mother appreciated them, thanked them for, you know, their donations, and she would stay up at night and sew up the holes in my clothes. She would fix the shoes so we can attend school.

• 40:21Shawn Ryan?

  Do you remember your parents' demeanor? Did you?

• 40:27Shawn Ryan?

  Did they have a positive demeanor? I mean, it's shitty of a situation.

• 40:31Tu Lam?

  My mother was born a year to Tiger, so she has that aggressive,

• 40:37Tu Lam?

  aggressive attitude, you know, like you step out of line, she'll whip your ass kind of attitude. You know, my father, my stepfather was very, he's a quiet professional.

• 40:48Shawn Ryan?

  Did you know how poor you were at the time, or did you just think?

• 40:52Tu Lam?

  No, I just thought this was it, right? This was just life. I mean, we did go, I would tell you, days without eating a few times. My mother would obviously give us the food before she would eat herself, you know? So they went more days starving than we did. But we did go, you know, days starving, growing up. Along with that, you know, we started attending school, you know? And that's when you really see the, uh, the hate in, in our culture, you know, the hate to the Vietnamese people. The, um, you know, one of my first teachers openly discussed that she does not support the flux of refugees coming into her hometown.

• 41:37Tu Lam?

  You know, and she expressed it numerous times and obviously the kids, um, they would pick on us because we're poor and we look different.

• 41:48Shawn Ryan?

  How many Vietnamese kids went to this school?

• 41:52Tu Lam?

  We were the only one that was in, besides my brother that I knew, you know? It wasn't like that much Vietnamese refugees, uh, coming in. Remember getting to America was very difficult. And a lot of the refugees, they settled in more of California area. We settle in North Carolina because my uncle.

• 42:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Tu Lam?

  Right? So you think about like the biggest military base, right? You have all these veterans that are fresh out of war. Okay. Then you have they, some of them marry foreign women, you know? So you have all these people, right? Within this small town, different cultures and everything. But it was a very racist time. When I say that is, you know, I don't throw out that word lightly, you know? But it was because of the, the post Vietnam war hatred. You know, I was told, I was called by many names growing up.

• 42:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can see that, uh, being, uh, you know, ex- extreme racism, you know? And, uh, and, uh, I'm, I'm really curious, you know, that's a hot topic for today. Even, you know, there are Asian racism that's going on and, and, uh, and all the other communities and, but.

• 43:18Shawn Ryan?

  Somehow you've gotten through it and uh and I kind of, you know, I want to talk about how you how you did get through that and I think a lot of times, you know, people that either feel they're being oppressed or are being oppressed, they tend to go down that victim road. And, you know, unfortunately, it is going to take effort on your part to, to, to turn yourself other, turn yourself into something other than a victim and um

• 43:55Shawn Ryan?

  there's not a whole lot of people doing that these days. So I really want to pick your brain on, on how you kind of got over that and, and, and how you became, you know, the success story, the success story that you've become today with, with Ronin Tactics and an impeccable military career and, and everything that goes with that.

• 44:19Tu Lam?

  You know, there's, there's evils all over the world, Sean, you know that, you know, traveling around as a Navy SEAL, there's evils everywhere, man. So it's, it's, uh, we can dwell on what we can't change. Or we can work on what we can. And that lesson was taught to me at a very young age by my mother. You know, let me, let me explain this, you know, my mother would, we were very poor. But she would cook and she would deliver food to the other refugees that were in town, you know, there was not that much, but she would go to these communities and she would give.

• 44:58Tu Lam?

  And I remember, uh, I asked her, I said, you know, why, why are you doing this? They don't really appreciate it, you know? It's being kind of defiant at that age and she pulled the car over. And she grabbed my hand and she said, "Look at me." And I looked over at her and she goes,

• 45:18Tu Lam?

  "No matter how bad off we are in life, if we can, we must help others."

• 45:26Tu Lam?

  Somehow those words kind of resonated and obviously I can talk about that day even to today. So that day had a lot of impact, but I want to talk about this day. You know, I want to explain this to you. So substitute teacher days, man, they were the worst for me. Let me explain this to you. My Vietnamese name is pronounced Tho Thun Lam.

• 45:49Tu Lam?

  Imagine trying to pronounce that, right? Tho Thun Lam. I pronounced my name Two Lam's so you, you guys don't butcher my Vietnamese name, you know? So on substitute teacher's day, they'll try to pronounce my names, alright? And they'll butcher my name. And then that allowed for all the others, you know, students to mock me and make fun of me and throw paper at me or whatever, right? Because my name sounds weird and I'm different. Well, on this specific substitute teacher day, I had this bully, you know, in third grade. It really hated me. He hated who I was, the way I looked. He hated I was poor.

• 46:30Tu Lam?

  And he wouldn't make it a daily routine to pick on me, you know? But on this substitute teacher day, he started on me pretty early, you know? It was really loud and, and the substitute teacher didn't want to deal with it. So he told me and the bully to go down to the principal's office. I don't even know how I got in trouble. I was the victim, right? So we walked down to the principal's office and, you know, it was very racist times, you know? So the principal said, "Sit here until your parents come." Well, my mother don't have a car. So I knew I was going to be sitting here for a while, you know? So the principal was sitting right here and the bully was, you know, across the room

• 47:13Tu Lam?

  in, in a chair and I was sitting here in a chair and I was really...

• 47:18Tu Lam?

  I don't know, man, I was just really defeated, you know? And the mother comes in and she demanded to know what happened, right? And the principal stood up. He goes, "That boy right there?" He looked at me. He called him a chink.

• 47:36Tu Lam?

  He sat back down and continued on his day like it didn't even affected him.

• 47:43Tu Lam?

  She went over and grabbed her son and she walked up to me and she stood there, so he forced me to kind of look up at her.

• 47:51Tu Lam?

  And she had this look of hate, you know, and she's told me that um, that my kind don't belong here. And I need to go back home to my country.

• 48:03Tu Lam?

  You know, I swear, man, at that point, um, I was probably at the lowest point of my life. Wow. You know. Third grade. Third grade. Yeah, but an adult telling you that. Yeah, I was really defeated that day. I was having a bad day.

• 48:22Tu Lam?

  And I came home and

• 48:25Tu Lam?

  I I made a promise to myself that day that um,

• 48:31Tu Lam?

  that I'm stronger than hate, you know.

• 48:34Tu Lam?

  And what's that mean? What's that even look like? I I I got tired of being this weak child. The mindset of being defeated, you know, I hated that. So what was really unique about this was that, you know, eventually my biological mother and father were divorced. And my mother remarried to American Special Forces Green Beret. He was a ex drill sergeant Green Beret, very strict military discipline. So imagine going from no discipline to a life of getting up at four thirty in the morning, saluting the flag, raising the flag,

• 49:13Tu Lam?

  hands over your heart, saying the national anthem, making your bed, where he can bounce a quarter off if it's not good enough, he'll rip everything back out. Going from zero discipline to that and then working and so he had a company, a family company, and we would work in the family company in between going to school and we didn't have days off. It was seven days a week, four thirty in the morning, up in the morning. Ballad to Green Beret, I could still sing it to this day, national anthem, hand over your heart.

• 49:47Tu Lam?

  We had a dress code to go to school. I couldn't wear jeans. I had to wear slacks. Right button down shirt. It was that discipline. Going from zero to a hundred, right? So it was a very difficult time, you know, even though I love my stepfather, he gave me the discipline I needed in life. But man, it was a hard pill to swallow at eight years old, you know?

• 50:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:12Tu Lam?

  So, you know, I knew he was a Green Beret. I knew he was special forces and stuff like that. And, you know, people always ask me now that I'm Ronan, you know? They said, you know, you know, you follow a path of Bushido. The way, you know, you say it. What's that mean? And why? You're Vietnamese, so why, why are you following a, a Japanese code of honor Samurai? You know?

• 50:37Tu Lam?

  So I want to bring this story to you. So when my stepfather, I mean, when my, my father left us, you know, I didn't have any communications with him. You know, it was a very difficult time for me because I do love my father. I love my stepfather. But I did love my, my father as well, you know? We had history. He escaped us from Vietnam, gave us our freedoms.

• 50:58Tu Lam?

  So, you know, I didn't hear from him and my mother brought in a box one day. And my mother said, this is from your father. You know, I tell you, Sean, I didn't know how to take it, man, you know? So I put that box across the room and I remember sitting in my room and I had the doors closed. I was sitting in my room looking at this cardboard box. And I thought about my, my father. So finally I had the courage, you know, to go up to the box and I opened up the box and there was these, uh, there was four VHS tapes. Remember the VHS?

• 51:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 51:33Tu Lam?

  So it was four VHS tapes and, um, and it was obviously dubbed tapes, right? And it had Vietnamese writing on these tapes. So I didn't know, I don't, I don't read Vietnamese, you know? So I, I remember just randomly picking one of the tapes out. Uh, popping in a VHS player and the first tape was the art of Budo. You know, if you don't know what Budo is, it's a combat skill that the samurais use, the martial arts they use in war stating periods Japan. Right? And they're breaking down the different martial arts, but it was the combat side of being Samurai. It was the martial arts, right? And it's the way, the path.

• 52:15Tu Lam?

  And I was, I swear, that was the first tape that I saw, eight years old, and it intrigued me.

• 52:21Tu Lam?

  To live a life like that, wow. You know, you gotta understand, I was defeated.

• 52:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Tu Lam?

  At that point, I wanted strength.

• 52:28Shawn Ryan?

  How old are you at this point?

• 52:30Tu Lam?

  Eight. Yeah, I wanted strength. I wanted a change in my life. And I didn't know how to get there. You know, even though my father was a, you know, he was a great man, but he wasn't the warrior.

• 52:45Tu Lam?

  Right?

• 52:47Tu Lam?

  So, um, the, the other three tapes were like Fist of Fury, you know, inter, Bruce Lee stuff. So that's why I'm, I'm a big fan of Bruce Lee, you know? But throughout my childhood years, I grew up to revisiting the art of Boudot over and over and over. And I romanticized about being this path, this way. What is it? Right? So, you know, during the eighties, uh, special forces were, uh, deployed by Ronald Reagan to go fight in the drug wars. Remember those days? Or the drug war days that would go down, my, my, my stepfather would go down to Central America and South America.

• 53:29Tu Lam?

  And he would train fit ops and they would do the counter drug missions. You know? And, you know, he had his teammates over and they'll, they'll talk over their, their team room talks in this house. And I'll be in the next room, like, trying to listen in. Like, what do you mean, you free no press? What's that mean, right?

• 53:50Tu Lam?

  And, you know, uh, eventually I put it all together.

• 53:54Tu Lam?

  The way, the path, you know? What is the way? The way is to, to better humanity.

• 54:02Tu Lam?

  To better yourself. And the warrior's path is extremely hard, right? So I was able to take that tape that I was viewing and tie it into a higher purpose, which was, you know, because I was indoctrinated more into a Green Beret lifestyle. Growing up, I chose the Green Berets. I knew their mission. And their mission was to free no press. It was to, to fight for the people that were like my mother and myself and my brother and my, my father. It was to fight for their freedoms. Man, if I could be a force to go around the world, free no press and enslaved in modern day world, that's the way for me. That's what I want to do. So I'm this weak, little frail eight-year-old with this concept of the way.

• 54:48Tu Lam?

  Right? So, you know, we, you know, we, my father was a enlisted man, you know, he worked in his job. We're not rich, you know, we're not poor like I used to been. We ate every day. He made sure that we're taken care of, but we did work. We worked very hard, you know? My stepfather loved this like his own. He raised us very strict though, you know, but that's just the way it was.

• 55:17Shawn Ryan?

  When I was researching you, and I don't know if I read this or heard it,

• 55:23Shawn Ryan?

  but you'd talked about, so it sounds like the Bushido tapes were a major turning point for your childhood and to overcome some of the racism and, and everything else that you had been through as well.

• 55:39Shawn Ryan?

  We also were talking about, and I forgive me, I can't remember if it was your uncle or your father, but you were driving and they were saying, you know, to sometimes if you're gonna feel down.

• 55:55Tu Lam?

  Commando.

• 55:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 55:57Tu Lam?

  My uncle would.

• 55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Do you want to be a fucking commando? And that, that resonated with me, you know, and, and I thought about that and the impact that could have on anybody, let alone, I believe you said you were 11 at the time. Did that have a major impact?

• 56:16Tu Lam?

  You know, I love my uncle, man. What a great American, you know, to this day. He would pick us up. He would pick me up on a Sunday and he would drive me to Dairy Queen. You know, it was just uncle and nephew time, you know, and my uncle, he's, he's very blunt. He don't hold, he don't hold the punches back.

• 56:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Tu Lam?

  Um, and he's driving his little Volkswagen Doom buggy that he reconstructs for hobbies, you know, and he goes to.

• 56:49Tu Lam?

  I want to tell you something. You know, the days that you're feeling bad, the days that you want to quit, you need to ask yourself, just out of the blue, he just told me,

• 56:59Tu Lam?

  you need to ask yourself, do you want to be a fucking commando tonight?

• 57:03Tu Lam?

  You know, when the bones hurt and you're aching from your injuries, do you want to be a fucking commando?

• 57:11Tu Lam?

  When it's raining, it's wet outside and it's five o'clock in the morning, you know, you have to go for a run because that's the thing to do. And you're feeling sorry for yourself, do you want to be a commando today?

• 57:24Tu Lam?

  Eleven years old, can you imagine that impact?

• 57:28Tu Lam?

  Can you imagine the discipline of being a commando? You know, it takes so much discipline, right? To be there, commitment, discipline, day in, day out. It's not just a way of a weapon in war, it's the whole encompass of life. Right? To look at life differently as a warrior. You know? So he truly taught me to never quit, to never give up, no matter what. And you know, it drives home what my mother did, you know, no matter what, no matter the circumstances, doesn't matter.

• 58:03Tu Lam?

  You know, so I was taught at a young age that the conditions and circumstances doesn't define us as a human being. We define ourselves by the actions we take daily. Do you want to be a commando today?

• 58:17Tu Lam?

  You know, so at eleven, I realized that, you know, and and I tell you, Sean, you know, getting back to the racism, I didn't get over it. You don't get over hate like that. You know, I was bullied through my junior high years, my my high school years, I was called by racist names during training, during my military career, all the way to the end. You know, I'm not saying everybody, I'm saying there's bad apples everywhere you go.

• 58:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Tu Lam?

  And there's racism and hate wherever you go. And racism is a mean to control a human being. Right? You think about like some of the countries you went into, the people that are oppressed and enslaved, that's a mean of controlling a human being, to degrade a human being, to spit on him. Right? You're oppressing the person.

• 59:10Tu Lam?

  So that's why it was so strong for me to live this life, you know, as a Green Beret. Because the motto is to free to oppressed. You know, and I knew that that was my ticket. That was my ticket.

• 59:25Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you didn't get over it, but you definitely got through it. And um. So. After watching the VHS tapes and uh and the words of encouragement from your uncle.

• 59:42Shawn Ryan?

  What was kind of the next encounter like and how did you?

• 59:48Shawn Ryan?

  I know you carry a lot of that, but you did get through it. And so I guess kind of what I'm asking is what? What was the next encounter like? How did you? How did you roll with the punches?

• 59:59Tu Lam?

  You know, at eleven years old, I knew I wanted to be a Green Beret. At sixteen, it was already programmed in my.

• 1:00:08Tu Lam?

  Training, my timeline, right? That I need to start training at sixteen to start developing the cardiovascular, the strength I needed in order to pass through this rigorous training that I I need to go to. You know, at sixteen, I started. Reading, I read since I was thirteen, so I read a lot of the warrior philosophies, a lot of the book. I read the Book of Five Rings when I was thirteen years old.

• 1:00:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:00:31Tu Lam?

  You know, I read the Art of War and I did a thesis on the Art of War in high school. So these were the subjects of interest throughout my life. I knew I wanted to live a warrior's life, you know? And at sixteen, I started the the training. It just intensified closer to I got to the timeline, which at eighteen was when I enlisted in the military. Now, I want to, I want to tell you this story, right? My mother wanted me to be a doctor, wanted me to be a lawyer, engineer, anything but a soldier. Because, gosh, man, right? She escaped Vietnam, she lost her freedom, she knows what war smells, looks and feels like. And she don't want her son to do that.

• 1:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Tu Lam?

  But because I was indoctrinated into the special forces life. And you know, my uncle never pressured me, man. He never said, hey, when you're going to be a Green Beret, you should be a Green. My stepfather has never uttered those words, you should be a Green Beret one day, never. I felt no pressure from them.

• 1:01:36Tu Lam?

  But I felt a draw to that world, right? So at seventeen, I went down to the MAP Center and I enlisted into the military. There was no special forces contracts coming in. You can't just enlist out of the street. You have to be E5 in the Army, right? Or you have to have this amount of time in the Army. So either rank or a certain time in the Army. And one of them is waivable, you know? So I'm like, oh, I can't go green beret, but I can be an infantryman. I can learn all these basic skills, right? So I enlisted in the Army and I went through infantry basic training. And I chose to be an eighty-second paratrooper.

• 1:02:20Tu Lam?

  And the reason why is because that'll put me back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I can be around my parents, right? So when I came there to the eighty-second, it was a real funny story. They lined all the new recruits up, the privates, right? So I came there, I'm spit-shined boots, you know, starched butts. I was so proud of being a soldier. And the first sergeant lined us all up and there was at least eight of us privates in this office, right? And you had the first sergeant out there and the first sergeant yelling at us and calling us "piece of shit" and whatever, right? And the commander then comes in, we slapped two attention, and he asked one question.

• 1:03:05Tu Lam?

  He asked one question. He goes, "Who wants to go to Ranger School?" "We're all privates." You know, with less than, I think I had, oh gosh, less than a year in the Army, right? So I raised my hand and I said, "I want to be Ranger-qualified." And he looked at the first sergeant and then he looked at me and then he walked back in his office, closed the door. The first sergeant kicked everybody else out of the room. He goes, "Private Lamb, stay here." So I stayed there, slapped two, you know, I was at parade rest. And he said, "So you want to be Ranger-qualified?"

• 1:03:45Tu Lam?

  So there was, you know, the tile floors, you know, the, the square tile floors. So he, he smoked me. So smoking me means, um, physical training. So a starched uniforms, spit shine boots, you know, I'm doing burpees, I'm, you know, pushups into that tile floor. One of those tile floor is full of my sweat. He tried to make me quit. I was dehydrated and it went on for hours, the hazing, the yelling. And finally, he, you know, he got me back up. He said, how do you feel now? I said, I still want to go.

• 1:04:28Tu Lam?

  So, uh, within, you know, I swear within four days, I was at the recondo training site in outskirts of North Carolina where they run the pre ranger corps. I graduated with honors, you know, because I didn't have any bad habits. I listened to what the instructors said and I did it to the T.

• 1:04:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Tu Lam?

  You know, all these other senior guys, they were here with the instructors saying, you know, try the war game and they'll do it their own way. I didn't know anything else. So I listened to what they had to say and I did it to the T, you know? And I graduated that and went to ranger training and graduated ranger school and, and I was, now I found I was this E4, those ranger qualified if training. You know, it was great, but I wanted to do more. So I tried out for the long ranger reconnaissance team. Now it's really hard to leave the 82nd when you get in, right? Because they lock you in, they invest money into you and they need you, they're, you know, want to grow you into a leadership position, but I wanted something else, you know?

• 1:05:27Tu Lam?

  So I tried out for the long range reconnaissance team, which is a descendant of the LRP teams and Vietnam, long range patrol teams. So their mission is to forward deploy. I was on amphibious team. So we were forward deploy on amphibious team. We'll insert in by helicasts and zodiacs and I will lay on and report what I see, you know? And we learned the advanced communication at the time, which the H F, um, jungle antennas. I learned all that, you know, at a very young age. And my time came up. I made E5.

• 1:06:04Tu Lam?

  A year and a half in the Army, I was E5.

• 1:06:08Tu Lam?

  I'm like, that's, that's a criteria to go Special Forces.

• 1:06:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's, uh, that's, that's, that's definitely fast track.

• 1:06:15Tu Lam?

  Yeah, yeah, because nobody wanted Ranger's training, right? They didn't want to go through all this hard school. And for me, it was just, um,

• 1:06:24Tu Lam?

  I had something to prove to myself. I didn't want to be this weak human being anymore.

• 1:07:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient Survival. Loaded with forty essential nutrients.

• 1:07:12Shawn Ryan?

  So you, you know, you were chasing it, you know, from the get-go. Since eleven years old, you were chasing, you know, that lifestyle. Was there, what conflicts were going on, uh, that early in your career, if any?

• 1:07:25Tu Lam?

  You know, my first, uh, phase in my career, it was, it was just smooth sailing, man. It was education, military education after military education. Uh, I was young, I was fit. I trained since I was sixteen. So I was able to pass through the really physically demanding schools at a very young age. You know?

• 1:07:46Tu Lam?

  So when I made E5, I, I realized that that's wavable now. I can apply for the Special Forces. So I submitted my packet. I applied for, uh, Special Forces Selection and Training out of Fort Bragg.

• 1:08:01Tu Lam?

  Twenty-one day, uh, select. And then, um, I went through the pipeline for, uh, weapons training, uh, for the Q course.

• 1:08:10Tu Lam?

  So then I went through the weapons training phase, of course, and then we went into unconventional warfare phase, you know, and um I got orders to go to seventh group, which is at the time located in North Carolina. What I found out was my stepfather was talking to the guy who worked at Bryan Hall who runs orders and say, yeah, he needs to be here.

• 1:08:36Tu Lam?

  And I found this out because uh after unconventional warfare phase, I was in the mess hall and I saw uh Mr. Joe Lupiac, which he's a legend in special forces. He he was part of the Sante raid, you know? And now he's this retired civilian who runs uh orders where they're gonna put these new candidates, these students, you know, when you graduate. And he always talks like this, hey, my man, come over here, hey, my man, right? So I came out and was like, Mr. Lupiac, you know, I'm he I knew him since I was a child, you know? And I'm coming out unconventional warfare phase and I say, Mr. Lupiac, how's it going? He goes, hey, my man, come over here.

• 1:09:17Tu Lam?

  He sat me down. He goes, hey, I got you in seventh group, you know, I know that you want to stay here with your parents and.

• 1:09:26Tu Lam?

  You know, I love my parents, I still do to this day, but I had a a journey, you know? I wanted to go to Asia. I wanted to go back to affect the country that, you know, I was born in, if I can possibly do. You know, it was a long shot. So I said, Mr. Mr. Lupiac, I really wanted to go out to first first group.

• 1:09:53Tu Lam?

  He goes, your daddy go like that, you know? Um but he changed my orders and uh he rerouted me to first special forces group out of Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa, Japan, that's where all the seniors are at, you know, like the guys that did their team time. Okinawa, Japan is a forward deployed uh battalion that affects Asia, you know, you're in that continent. So it was very hard to get out there. It's the first assignment, but that was my first assignment, Okinawa, Japan. So here I am, 21 years old. Went out to Okinawa, Japan, and I was assigned to a combat search and rescue team, CSAR team.

• 1:10:33Tu Lam?

  So during that time, it was really heavy reconnaissance of North Korea. You know, they had the No Dong missiles that could strike, you know, US soil. So that was a really concern for us. And then, you know, the unstable country, you know, the dictator. So we were doing a lot of reconnaissance around South Korea, working with the command of force. I was the CSAR team. So when the pilots are flying over there, they were to get shot down. And we were the teams that come in with a two-man PJ packet, heavy guns, and we would come in and do offsets to try to rescue these pilots. So that was my first assignment. It was cool.

• 1:11:16Tu Lam?

  You know, I went through a lot of training, but not my thing.

• 1:11:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Tu Lam?

  You know, you just know that that's not what you're destined to do.

• 1:11:25Shawn Ryan?

  Going back to training, you know, people are always dying to know kind of what got you through it. And, you know, I guess every once in a while, you meet the guys that say that, you know, they just breezed right through it. But I would say for 99% of us, that is definitely not the case. So did you have any hiccups? Did you have any, is there any particular point in training where you were ready to call it? You know, it was, you know, I'm done.

• 1:11:55Tu Lam?

  During selection and training, during the special forces assessment and selection process, I was, so we stayed in these barracks, right? So everybody stayed in these, like, confined barracks. And I went in February. It was very cold in North Carolina during that time. And if one person gets sick in the bay, everybody else gets sick in the bay. It's just, that's the way it is. Well, we had one guy get sick, and I caught a flu. And we were doing land navigation that night. So we're doing the map and compass, they're teaching us how to dead wreck and they're teaching us terrain, orientation. So advanced land navigation training.

• 1:12:39Tu Lam?

  It's not like a basic land navigation training, because we had to pass through what's called the STAR exam, which is one of the hardest land navigation course in the United States Army.

• 1:12:50Tu Lam?

  So during that time, man, I was coming down with the flu, right? I had, gosh, man, I my, I had a high temperature over a hundred and, you know, I was cold, I was breaking out of sweat. And I really wanted to quit. I really wanted to quit that night. Well, I tell you, my uncle is a special forces, you know? And he was the commander of the SWIC assessment selection during that timeframe that went through. It was his last class before he took over Just Mag Thai. So this was his last class before he takes over a different command. He was in charge of the whole thing.

• 1:13:29Tu Lam?

  Before I went through, I say, hey, look, I don't, I don't want any, you know, I know that we're family members and, you know, I don't want any hammy outs, you know? Don't, don't look after me. He goes, oh, you don't have to worry.

• 1:13:40Tu Lam?

  He goes, you don't have it, you don't have it. Yeah.

• 1:13:44Tu Lam?

  So I wanted to quit. So at night, I wanted to quit so bad, man, right? And I remember it was thundering out, lightning outside. It was raining really hard. I was feeling sorry for myself. It was two o'clock in the morning after ten, you know, just after a got ran down to the ground during that day of, you know, assessment and selection. And at night is when we go into our academics, you know? So we're just messed up. And I wanted to quit and I remember the NCOIC said, on your feet and the lights shut off.

• 1:14:21Tu Lam?

  So I'm like, oh, God, you know? So I got up and my uncle walked across to the stage.

• 1:14:32Tu Lam?

  It was wasn't planned because we talked about it later. He goes, oh, I was just paying a visit, right? But he, he walked up to the stage and the lights turned back on. Everybody's on their feet.

• 1:14:43Tu Lam?

  You know, you're a full bird colonel standing there. And he said a speech that I'll never forget, man. Walk or die was the speech. And he talked about Cabanatuan. About when, you know, when we were engaged in the, in combat against the Japanese and islands of the Philippines, how the Americans and the Filipino soldiers were captured and forced to march the baton death march.

• 1:15:13Tu Lam?

  And if one of the soldiers would fall back past hand touching distance, then the Japanese soldiers will pull him, rip their ID tag and shoot him where they, you know, where they're taking a knee. The baton death march. So he was talking about the baton death march. And he said to the general, there was, gosh, man, I would say there was at least 400 candidates out there. We graduated with 70. So 400 candidates. He's looking across, he didn't even see me. He's looking across and he said, march or die. When you want to quit, you walk until you die. Right?

• 1:15:56Tu Lam?

  This is, it's not if you want or not, if you want it, you're willing to die for it, you know? And he talked about the baton death march. And I'm like, I'm gonna die here tonight. I'm gonna die here because I'm not gonna quit now. I'm not, that, that moment came. Let me tell you how toxic that, that, that is, you know? I'm talking to the viewers because you understand. If you want to quit and you actually go through with quitting,

• 1:16:23Tu Lam?

  you, you establish that.

• 1:16:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Tu Lam?

  You can never, ever go back from that again. You quit once, you're gonna quit again. You quit again, it becomes a norm. Right? So I knew at that moment, if I quit, I would never go through this training. I would never make it. You know, so I was willing to die that night.

• 1:16:44Tu Lam?

  So that night, you know, after land navigation, we, we, we, uh, we went to go eat, uh, our breakfast, right? After all the training and there was one guy who smuggled a, a molten, 800 milligram. He had to smuggle it in, right?

• 1:17:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:01Tu Lam?

  And I was part of his team and he said to, what's going on? I said, can I have that molten, please?

• 1:17:08Tu Lam?

  And he gave it to me. That's like Ranger candy.

• 1:17:11Shawn Ryan?

  Hell yeah, it is.

• 1:17:12Tu Lam?

  Right? And it broke my flu, man. It broke the flu and then I was able to continue on with training and graduate. You know?

• 1:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever feel any, uh, I mean, do you think that the fact that your stepdad was a Green Beret, your uncle was a Green Beret, sounds like he had a lot of inspiration and, uh, and, uh, you know? Do you want to be a fucking commando? Uh, was there any fear of letting them down?

• 1:17:41Tu Lam?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:42Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh?

• 1:17:43Tu Lam?

  Even to this day.

• 1:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  Even to this day?

• 1:17:45Tu Lam?

  Even to this day. I think about them all the time, both of them. Even to this day.

• 1:17:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's part of what, you know, that is what got me through training is, uh, it got to the point where I just, I didn't, I didn't care about myself anymore. It was just the fact that I didn't want to, I just didn't want to let my old man down. And, uh, that's kind of, I did not want to make that call saying, "Hey dad, I fucking quit." And, uh, and, um, so I was just curious, you know?

• 1:18:20Tu Lam?

  Yeah, it was one time in Ranger School, uh, we had to airborne infiltration to Fort Benning, Georgia, and it was an 18 mile force march. When I say force march, they're running at that running pace and you have, you know, combat load and weapons on you. So we had to airborne infiltrate in, uh, in Fort Benning. We form a road, a forced road march, uh, basic formation and we start humping it for 18 miles very fast, you know? And, you know, during that time, man, I was, I was 19 years old. I don't know how to be a soldier, right? So I'm like, what is a better way to break in a new pair of boots than to road march it in? Right?

• 1:19:04Tu Lam?

  Didn't think.

• 1:19:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Tu Lam?

  Right? So we airborne dropped in that that morning and we we set up for their force road march and they started running. Guys were dropping like flies. Right? Guys were quitting. And you know, sometime, you know, somehow I held on, man, you know, I I basically light trot behind people. And we we made this turn into Darby. Right? So Darby was a long dirt trail road. It went into Darby phase of training, which is small unit tactics, raids ambushes. And man, I I tell you, Sean, like, I had no skin on the back of my foot. Right?

• 1:19:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Tu Lam?

  In fact, I had blisters throughout all of Ranger School, all the way down to Florida face, you know, from that road march. I was suffering from heat exhaustion, like I could feel my body shutting down where I'm falling asleep, walking. Like, you know, like you're heated, like you're about to die. And I was falling behind on the road march. As soon as we turned, man, I only had a thousand meters left on this road march.

• 1:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Tu Lam?

  And I was contemplating on quitting. That's how painful it was. But somehow I just put one foot in front of the other and then instructor came up behind me. He said, if you fall one more step behind the pack, I'm going to pull you from training. And this is not a lie. This is what I did. I punched myself in the face.

• 1:20:33Tu Lam?

  And I continued to punch myself in the face because I was falling asleep, walking, you know? And so that was the only way that I could stay awake. So I punched myself in the face, my nose bleeding, kept on punching myself in the face. And this is what the Ranger instructor said, drive on.

• 1:20:48Tu Lam?

  Yeah, man. So obviously, you know, if the training is hard, that that mindset is normal to want to quit. It's just, you know, what do you do? What do you do when that that moment of struggle? Do you want to be a commandant?

• 1:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, that's what they're looking for. They want to see who who's going to fucking switch it on when the going gets tough and and the going gets tough real fast in those outfits. And which is why, you know, there's such a high attrition rate. But another question that I'm curious about is when you do feel pain.

• 1:21:24Shawn Ryan?

  And I'll give you, you know, just one example of mine. Do you have a certain thing that you pinpoint all your attention on? So, um, like as an example, for me personally, going through BUDs, I was about a buck nineteen soaking wet. And, uh, and the waters, you know, it's fucking cold there. One of the, one of their tools that they like to use is to, uh, they utilize that cold and get guys to hype out. Well, guess what?

• 1:21:56Shawn Ryan?

  I'm eighteen, nineteen years old, a buck twenty soaking wet. And, uh, so I'm one of the first ones to hype out and cold affects me a lot faster than anyone else. So, you know, to, what I would do is,

• 1:22:14Shawn Ryan?

  believe it or not, I would try to accelerate the hypothermia kicking in. And the only thing I would concentrate on, and when we were getting surf tortured, or, um, or whatever it is out in the, out in the ocean, you know, constantly going back and forth is I would concentrate only on making my body stop shaking to re-warm myself because I knew I was going to hype out anyways. And then it, in the initial stages, you, you feel no pain anymore. And, uh, so I'm wondering if you had any particular thing that you focused on,

• 1:22:55Shawn Ryan?

  uh, whether that be, you know, your, your, your stepdad and your uncle or the Bushido, uh, code or is there anything?

• 1:23:05Tu Lam?

  You know, you, you always hear me say, you know, Sean, smile and be brave. You always hear that, you know, when I'm scared, when I'm facing it, when I'm suffering. My mother told me a young age, smile and be brave. Right? What's that mean? You know, it, it goes into a science because the mind is connected to the body. If your mind is telling you, if you're smiling, you're telling your mind everything's okay. And your body's going to feel that. You know, so when I'm suffering, I want to quit or I'm afraid, I'm smile, man, I'm brave. Right? Because I'm tying it that neurological pathway from my mind recognizes a smile.

• 1:23:49Tu Lam?

  The muscles, the exercising those, the muscles of a smile is connected to the brain. And that's telling my brain through my body, everything's okay.

• 1:24:02Tu Lam?

  Right? So when, when the suffering is there, you know, I smile.

• 1:24:08Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, two, let's take a quick break again. And when we come back, I want to talk about how, you know, what it's like being 21 years old on an SF team back then and, and talking about how it came full circle from being the oppressed to freeing the oppressed.

• 1:24:31Tu Lam?

  Yep.

• 1:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient survival. Feed your freedom.

• 1:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  All right, two, we're back from the break again and you're now in an SF team, you're 21 years old.

• 1:25:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's your time to free the oppressed. So where are you going to take us?

• 1:25:19Tu Lam?

  So, you know, after graduating to Q course and unconventional warfare phase, you have to go through language training and you have to go through survival, escape, resistance training. And then I made it to the A team. So as your pipeline in the Navy, I mean, it takes a long time to train one of us to even get out the door, right?

• 1:25:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Tu Lam?

  So I got on the teams and

• 1:25:45Tu Lam?

  You know, we got some cool stuff on the teams, you know, so that was my first exposure to the toys of SOCOM. Oh, nice. The dirt bikes, the ATVs, you know, the M4s with the mod kits. So I was like really, really in that world, right? And I got assigned to a CSAR team. And one of my first cross, so we, as Green Berets, we cross train with different countries all the time. So the tactics that we learn, you know, just from the Q course is not just it. We're learning from the Malaysian commandos, we're learning from the British commandos, we're learning all around the world, you know, you're extracting information. So truly like your tactics is very unconventional, you know?

• 1:26:28Tu Lam?

  So one of the first training that I went through was Malaysian tracking school. So the drop is in Pulata, Malaysia, where we have these Malaysian commandos, right? So you think about the Malaysians, they fought the wars in the jungles and, you know, against the British, Rhodesians. So they have years and years of combat experience working in this type of jungle vegetation. So the course was roughly about six weeks and I went through Malaysian tracking school. I want to tell you the story. So we were tracking, I was the lead tracker, right?

• 1:27:10Tu Lam?

  So a lead tracker is you have a team of trackers behind you, but you're the lead tracker. So you have a tracking stick, right? And what a tracking stick is, you know, the human body can only step so much. So if you lose a track, then you take the tracking stick and there can only, they can only pivot their body so much, then you take the normal step from one step to the next and you have this tracking stick. And somewhere within that range of that tracking stick, you should be able to pick up the signs again in tracking, right? I couldn't pick up anything, right? So I lost, I lost the track and I couldn't pick up anything. And I, you know, I was pretty good at tracking. My teams are, I just got these teams, I definitely don't want to let my teams down,

• 1:27:55Tu Lam?

  right? So I couldn't pick up anything and I saw in the distance, there was a broken twig. That's it. That's the scent, right? So I ran up to it and I started seeing vegetation break and, you know, I started tracking again.

• 1:28:10Tu Lam?

  You know, it was really weird because you know, I had my backpack combat equipment. It required me to like get on all fours and start crawling around to to to find this tracking. I tracked down a tiger.

• 1:28:23Shawn Ryan?

  Get this, are you shitting me?

• 1:28:25Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Shawn Ryan?

  A tiger?

• 1:28:27Tu Lam?

  I tracked down a wild tiger.

• 1:28:29Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 1:28:31Tu Lam?

  Yeah, he was in the distance. I saw the track. Apparently that thing uh must have ate something, right? Because it didn't attack me. It just ignored me actually and just walked off, but. You know, what I want to explain is like a lot of the training, man, we die in training more than we die in combat.

• 1:28:51Tu Lam?

  You know, you push training to that that that edge.

• 1:28:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Tu Lam?

  Um, after that, I went into Malaysian survival school.

• 1:28:58Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, hold on, rewind. You just tracked a fucking tiger down.

• 1:29:05Shawn Ryan?

  Did it see you?

• 1:29:06Tu Lam?

  Yeah, it saw me.

• 1:29:08Shawn Ryan?

  Were you armed or were you running around with a rubber duck?

• 1:29:11Tu Lam?

  No, M4. No, I was actually using a M16A1 rifle.

• 1:29:17Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:29:18Tu Lam?

  Because uh when we went through the training, the Malaysians were still running uh you know, M16A1s. So I had an M16A1 Vietnam Air um AR and um yeah, that's what we're that's what we're rolling with.

• 1:29:34Shawn Ryan?

  How close were, how close did you get to it?

• 1:29:36Tu Lam?

  Uh, man, it was probably about 20 yards away.

• 1:29:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 1:29:41Tu Lam?

  Yeah, and you see wild boars. I mean, you see wildlife out there. It's just you're you're in their habitat.

• 1:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  Did it see you?

• 1:29:51Tu Lam?

  Yeah, it saw me and it just kind of just walked off into the jungle.

• 1:29:54Shawn Ryan?

  What'd you do? Oh, okay.

• 1:29:56Tu Lam?

  I shit my pants.

• 1:29:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll bet you did.

• 1:29:59Tu Lam?

  Yeah, I mean, the, a wild tiger is just bigger in in real life uh in in its natural habitat than uh what you see in a zoo. Like in a zoo, it's like, yeah, that's a tiger.

• 1:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Tu Lam?

  You got a huge glass cage. No. It's there in the, in, you know, in the wild, right? So, um, we would sleep, um, high on vegetation because the, at night, that's when we get snatched. You know, the jungle comes alive at night.

• 1:30:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I thought I had run into some encounters in the jungle, but I didn't run into any tigers. That's for damn sure.

• 1:30:35Tu Lam?

  Yeah. In fact, in Africa, we had lions track us, you know? We had to surround these vehicles and put, you know, snipers up on the, uh, the top of the roofs of these, uh, Land Rovers and we would look through our thermals and we'll see the, the lions, you know? So what I'm saying is just because we're out there doing military ops, I mean, you can die from, you know, wildlife.

• 1:31:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:01Tu Lam?

  So went through that and then, um, graduated that. I had maybe two days off on the weekends. I went into Kuala Lumpur and hung out down there and then we went back, reported back, uh, to camp and I went into Malaysian survival training.

• 1:31:19Tu Lam?

  Malaysian survival training, man, was just miserable. It was a miserable time. I just realized how horrible I am at surviving in that environment. And, and one of the trainings that they had us do is we just had jungle fatigues. Uh, they gave us a machete and a chicken and they drop us off at a, uh, at a point in the jungle and you live in that point. There's leeches, you're in the rain jungles, there's leeches, there's wildlife and everything else and all you have is machete and this chicken, right?

• 1:31:49Tu Lam?

  So during this, this portion of training, somehow I just developed a friendship with this chicken, right? So, um, I would walk the chicken, it was on the news and, uh, he was really lonely in the jungle, so I had this companion. It would remind me of that movie, um, Castaway.

• 1:32:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, with Wilson.

• 1:32:06Tu Lam?

  Where Tom Hanks and he, he made a, a friend with that, uh, volleyball, right?

• 1:32:14Tu Lam?

  That was what it was, you know, I was in the middle jungle and nothing was around me. And I had this chicken, right, that, um, that kept me alive. And when I said that, it, it, it would make noises when things come around, you know? So, um, I had a noose on him, like, you know, like you put on a dog and that thing just hung around me. So I survived through that without killing the chicken. You would think I'll kill the chicken to eat the chicken, right?

• 1:32:39Shawn Ryan?

  Was it laying eggs?

• 1:32:41Tu Lam?

  No.

• 1:32:41Shawn Ryan?

  No? No, no joy with the eggs?

• 1:32:44Tu Lam?

  No, this chicken looked like it was on crack or, you know, it was a Mount Nurse.

• 1:32:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 1:32:48Tu Lam?

  Third world country Malaysian chicken, you know?

• 1:32:50Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 1:32:51Tu Lam?

  So, um, I survived through that and then, um, they, they drove a deuce and a half. And I remember the old, old Tac vehicles, a deuce and a half drove down and there was a Malaysian commando jumped out. And I had the chicken in my hand and he was helping me onto the back of the deuce and half. Now imagine how, um, deprived your body is at that point, right? So here I am trying to climb on the back of this deuce and I handed the Malaysian my chicken. He grabbed the chicken, broke the neck, you know, I'm like, you know, here I am, you know, crying on the back of a, a deuce and a half. All the way back to camp because he killed my chicken. So that, that was my, my survival training.

• 1:33:32Tu Lam?

  Then you eat, you know, bugs and grubs and, you know, you just learn how to live off and navigate off that, that train.

• 1:33:39Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you out there?

• 1:33:42Tu Lam?

  In Malaysia, training?

• 1:33:43Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, for the, for the, uh, survival training.

• 1:33:46Tu Lam?

  Survival training is three weeks long.

• 1:33:48Shawn Ryan?

  You were out there for three weeks?

• 1:33:50Tu Lam?

  The survival portion with the machete was 10 days long.

• 1:33:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's a long time.

• 1:33:55Tu Lam?

  That was a long time. And, you know, when I say leeches are everywhere, man, they're everywhere.

• 1:34:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:01Tu Lam?

  Everywhere. There was no dry spot, you know? You gotta build a jungle hammock because you gotta get off that ground. You know, you had to get off the ground and there's monkeys everywhere. They'll kick in their hands and throwing at you. It was just horrible, horrible, horrible experience.

• 1:34:17Shawn Ryan?

  What was, uh, what was your favorite dish you've prepared?

• 1:34:23Tu Lam?

  We were um

• 1:34:26Tu Lam?

  in Malaysia or my career.

• 1:34:28Shawn Ryan?

  And survival for those ten days. Is there anything that you were?

• 1:34:32Tu Lam?

  Yeah, we we ate. Uh, there was these banana trees all through the jungle and you peel the bark away. You'll see these maggots looking worms, right? And they're really thick, really thick, but if you eat it, you you gotta pop the head and the, you know, um, you gotta pop the head out and then uh, when you eat it, you eat the grub. It tastes like a banana. So that was my favorite. So I had a sack of that. I would I would throw it into this like a like a dump bag. And you know, a sack of grubs, you know, that I would eat. But yeah, it was it was uh, it makes you respect things a little bit more.

• 1:35:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Tu Lam?

  You know, when you're suffering that that much out there and you're cold and you're wet and you're hungry. You make sure you respect things more. You know, what I want to say is, so a few months later, I so I graduated a few months later, I came back for jungle warfare training. So now I know how to track and how to survive. And now it's raids, ambushes, hit and run tactics, patrol bases. You know, you're doing that Vietnam era jungle. You know, stuff, you know, reconnaissance, all of that.

• 1:35:44Tu Lam?

  Man, you know, it was long days, man, you know, hit and run jungle, you know, long, long distance moving through triple canopy jungle. And um, I started feeling sorry for myself.

• 1:35:57Tu Lam?

  You know how you you're sweat, you're hungry, you're cold and and you're just miserable and you just kind of give in to man, this sucks. And I really, I couldn't quit, but I wanted to, but I couldn't, right? So I remember this this story, man. We're we uh, we we found this village. And um, the command was to move past through the village because it was a friendly village, right? You still have bandits out there. You're you're training in these jungles, but there's still bandits, terrorists. You know, so you can actually get killed out there. So we moved through this uh, village. And they had snipes on overwatch and these kids came running up to me because I was the first

• 1:36:41Tu Lam?

  Westerner that saw a soldier to seen. And man, they started singing. It was raining and they were singing and this lady came out of her.

• 1:36:52Tu Lam?

  Termite infested hooch that was getting eaten away by termites. And she gave me some food. Some guy came up to me, you know, asked to help me carry my equipment. I'm like, no, but this is where it blows down to. You know, I looked over and they had nothing. They were living in the mud, nothing. Their grass hut was getting eaten away by termites. And this little girl smiled and the parents held her and loved her and they were happy. You see where this comes full circle, Sean, is that we over complicate our lives. Happiness is found anywhere.

• 1:37:32Tu Lam?

  It doesn't have to be success and I have to have the best car, the best, the best house, the more money. You know, that's what we, those are the stresses we place on ourselves, you know? The reason why I felt sorry for myself, because I wanted to be warm and, and not hungry anymore. But there was the answer. You know, it's, it's simple as in that it's the mind, it's the mindset.

• 1:37:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, talking about full circle, did it occur to you that that was you?

• 1:38:02Tu Lam?

  No, man, you know what's really weird is like during my growth, you know, as a Green Beret, I never really thought back to my suffering as a child, never really did.

• 1:38:14Shawn Ryan?

  Never once.

• 1:38:14Tu Lam?

  Never even tied it together.

• 1:38:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's crazy, man. I mean, to be in the, you know, the same region in the world and, and, and, and see a small child, you know, living in that, knowing that that's where you came from, maybe subconsciously, just, you know?

• 1:38:35Tu Lam?

  I would tell you the story to kind of tie it into what my mother said. You know, I told you earlier, my mother said, education is freedom. So we were doing a demining mission in Laos and, um, back during the Vietnam war, you know, we dropped hundreds of thousands of landmines through the rice paddies, the jungle floors. Right? So that's from the Vietnam war, hundreds of thousands of landmines.

• 1:38:59Tu Lam?

  You know, kids are playing, you know, and then on ninety-seven, kids were playing in the jungles and they're, they're getting their legs blown off, they're, you know, by these landmines that we, as Americans, dropped. So our mission, one of my first missions, was to, to forward deployed into Laos and do a demining mission. So we were gonna train the local villagers how to, to isolate these landmines and how to demine this armed landmine and clear these landmines so the kids can go and play, you know? That was the mission. So, being a young Green Beret, twenty-one years old, I came in initially and I had a linguist come running up to the helicopter, right?

• 1:39:42Tu Lam?

  So helicopter's spinning, I'm coming off the LZ, I'm moving towards the village, my linguist came running up, we're talking, he's giving me a, you know, introducing himself, we're walking, and then this little girl from the village came running up to me. And, you know, I read about it, you know, villagers, you know, give them candy, give kids candy, build that rapport, so I, I, I was prepared, so I dug out my candy and I gave it to the little girl, and she, she said, "No," she handed it back to me. And, um, she said something in Laos, and the linguist looked at me and he goes, "She wants a pencil or pen, do you have that?" And I'm like, "Yeah," so I pull my, my pen, I gave it to her, she grabbed my hand, pulled

• 1:40:26Tu Lam?

  me down, kissed my cheek and ran off. And, um, I didn't think too much of it, I was more worried about the defense plan, where's the mines, how to do the mining missions, the, the phase lines that we need to train them up and... And, um, during lunch, you know, I was looking at the, the security infrastructure of the camp, and then the linguist stopped me and he says, "Sir, do you realize what you did this morning?" I said, "What do you mean? When that little girl came running up to you, do you realize what you did?" And I said, "I'm sorry if I done something wrong, but I don't know what I did, what did I do?" He goes, "Sir, you gave that girl education. You see, we don't have pens or pencils or paper, we don't have a school here, this is what they have."

• 1:41:11Tu Lam?

  Wow. And, you know, it was really weird, man, it was my mother's voice came in and said, "Education is the key to freedom."

• 1:41:21Tu Lam?

  So we had operational funds and stuff like that and I um I wrote back to my command and asked for more operational funds so we can build a school.

• 1:41:33Tu Lam?

  And reroute the running water from the rivers to give them running water.

• 1:41:38Tu Lam?

  You know, so that was one of my memories of my first, my twenty one year old days of being a Green Beret was that what was the demony mission now turned out into giving this village an education so they could have a better life for themselves.

• 1:41:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:41:54Tu Lam?

  You know?

• 1:41:57Tu Lam?

  And I think about that to this day. You know, when I was doing it, I didn't think about it. Didn't even think about it, to be honest with you, I didn't. The only thing was my mother's voice. You know, but as I got older, you know, you start realizing that, you know, in like in Southern Philippines, the reason why they turned to terrorism because they had nothing else.

• 1:42:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Right. Just think about the impact that you've had on just by making that call, you know? And now that school, you know, it's probably still there. You know?

• 1:42:30Shawn Ryan?

  They definitely didn't upgrade, I'm sure, but uh that's awesome.

• 1:42:36Tu Lam?

  So during that time too, man, it was um so when I graduated from high school, you know, my mother, I told you, she cried all night. She did not want me to join the army. And I was walking across the stage, so literally, high school graduation, right? I got my diploma, walked across the stage and um at the end of the ceremony, my mom had this special ceremony, so she'd been cooking all day.

• 1:43:03Tu Lam?

  And I handed her the diploma, picked up my sister and kissed her, my little sister. And I hugged my mom and I said, I have to go. And she said, why? What what you mean? You know, and I pointed towards the recruiter who was gonna drive me to the bus station because I was leaving that night for basic training.

• 1:43:24Tu Lam?

  See, I knew what I wanted.

• 1:43:27Tu Lam?

  I knew what I wanted, you know, in eighteen. When I walked across that stage, I knew I needed to take that journey. You know, since I was sixteen, you know, I've been training for it. So she cried and, man, and I remember I thought about which the sacrifices she made for me.

• 1:43:46Tu Lam?

  For me to have an education, for me to be free. So I looked at my mother on the day of my graduation and I told my mother that I promised you that I would graduate from college. I know that means a lot to you. So imagine being a Green Beret on a team, right, that travel all through the world, right throughout my whole career, travel all through the world, but at that time it was Asia. And, you know, you're going into all the countries, man, you know, there's no internet infrastructure. There's no technology like that, you know, so back in the old days, we had dial-up internet. So I started college that way. So I would drive to local internet cafes. So I can log on, you know,

• 1:44:31Tu Lam?

  and get my assignments, so I can burst out a thesis, so I can take a final exam, you know. So I would drive to internet cafe in these countries that, you know, there are some of the countries that are not so nice. You know, so I'm driving to local internet cafes and on the weekends when the team does their thing and I would go to college.

• 1:44:54Shawn Ryan?

  Sad drive, man. That's, you have a real powerful drive.

• 1:44:59Tu Lam?

  Thank you.

• 1:45:03Shawn Ryan?

  You know, to, a little off subject here, but I've always wondered, when you're, part of the mission of being a Green Beret is to, you know, take an indigenous force, lift it up, train it, and turn it into, turn it into an effective warfighting, you know, asset or capability. And.

• 1:45:26Shawn Ryan?

  Throughout the last 20 years, all the other units started kind of doing that too, to include the SEAL teams, which we get no formal training at all on what the hell we're doing. And when it comes to training Indigenous forces, I mean, I can train somebody, but I'm not, I'm not going to be, it's not our mission. You know, we are, we're assaulters. And

• 1:45:58Shawn Ryan?

  so when we did kind of take part in that, the commandos or the Jundies or whoever we're getting, they were just handed to us, you know, whether, whether they have any skill, whether they have a lot of skills, it was always different. And that moved into even when I moved into the agency. But one thing that I never got to see is from the ground up, actually, you know, day one, in country, in a village, third world, you don't speak the language. What in the hell are you guys, how do you do it? What are you looking for? How do you identify somebody that you think would be an effective commando that you're going to work side by side with?

• 1:46:41Tu Lam?

  Yeah. So a lot of times when we go into country, they're usually vetted, you know, depending on the mission, the operation, it can be vetted at the CIA level, you know, depending on the targeting that we're going to use with this fit force. So day one, ground zero, it's, it starts off with the human being, right? The individual. So we put them through the tests, like assessment, selection, you know, we put them through the hardships. And through the hardship, if you have the, the commandos, there's able to rise past all the misery, the suffering, then they actually become who I work with. Because now, you can't teach a guy leadership. Right? I guess you could teach him leadership, but

• 1:47:26Tu Lam?

  you can't teach him the non-quitting attitude, the mindset, strong mind, right? You either you got it or you don't. So, once I assess that, hey, he has this, you know, code that he lives by, then I can mature that code. You know, obviously, you know, it's it's heavy intelligence for Green Beret. You know, Green Berets are very intelligent driven, intelligence driven. That means if I go into country X, I study that country. I study history, I study infrastructure, I study the people, the culture, the religion. I studied the demographics, I studied the terrain, I studied the environment, the weather. I study everything. So I know when I go in there, how can I, you know, is it rainy season? You know, that changes tactics, you know?

• 1:48:11Tu Lam?

  It changes your your night vision capabilities if you're running night vision. So it changes a lot of that. So we study, study, study, and then when we get in, we link up with that indigenous force. I have a general intelligence of this group, right? And then then you realize, you know, you break it down into the tribes, right? Certain tribe, because they could put certain different regions of tribes into this mosh-podge group of rebels, and they're fighting amongst each other. Because they've been at war for, I don't know, hundreds of years. You know, now you gotta separate that, you know, and work as a cohesive unit. And they're probably educated, third, third grade education.

• 1:48:54Tu Lam?

  Note, some, some of them have discipline, some of them have no discipline. Some countries I go to, they have zero discipline. Some of them have great discipline, you know? So it's about understanding the human being, understand their history, their motives, the enemy on the, on the ground, you know? And then training that fit force to combat whatever tactic that the enemy is employing based off of intelligence, terrain, environment, whatever. How are they attacking that locals? What are they using? You know, and we talked about the effectiveness of unconventional warfare. You know, unconventional warfare is, that's the most effective means of warfare. You agree? Being a man of war? Absolutely. Yeah, right?

• 1:49:38Tu Lam?

  We, we got our independence. We became Americans because unconventional warfare, you know? Sanju, Art of War, talks about unconventional, united all of China. So it's a very effective means. And this unconventional warfare is, has been going on all around the world. In fact, the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets were developed in Vietnam by John F. Kennedy to counter. Guerrilla tactics. That's our birth, that's our existence.

• 1:50:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Tu Lam?

  And to understand at that level. You know, obviously, the more I matured as a Green Beret, the more operational environments I went through. So the jungle, the desert, you know, urban to Africa villages. You know what I mean? So all that has changed because the terrain's changed, the people has changed, the culture's changed, the environment's changed, you know? So you have to quickly understand that. And these rebels can turn on you anytime.

• 1:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. We saw, I mean, we saw that multiple times in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• 1:50:43Tu Lam?

  Yeah. So what happens if you have a six man team, training guerrilla tactics in the jungle? And then you have your command group at, you know, when I say the command group is the captain, the team sergeant and the warrant, right? And they're maybe at the G base. What happened if something happened at the G base where they had the E and R? Because this rebel group is turning on you.

• 1:51:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Tu Lam?

  So how are you going to link up your friendly forces that are training out in the jungle with the command force and E and R out of the country? All that's planned.

• 1:51:17Tu Lam?

  No cons plan. If the, if the FID force turns against you, if the government turns against you, how are you going to get out of country?

• 1:51:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:28Tu Lam?

  You know, when, when, when they throw us in these countries, sometimes you have an exit plan. We have a plane coming in, you load up, and sometimes you don't.

• 1:51:39Tu Lam?

  You know, you got to figure it out on the ground. Can I, this LZ is about this Y. This is a survey. Can I get a helicopter in and evac me out? Or do I need to put a jungle penetrator in? Because I don't have that, you know? So it, it gets really complex. And but every phase of operation is carefully planned. You know, with contingencies.

• 1:52:00Shawn Ryan?

  You were talking about, you know, different countries and different units that you've worked with have more discipline. Is there any, any nation in particular that you've stood a force up that

• 1:52:14Shawn Ryan?

  stands out as, is having more drive, more discipline, better performance than anyone else? Who is your favorite to work with?

• 1:52:25Tu Lam?

  Yeah, the Korean 771 is pretty badass.

• 1:52:27Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:52:28Tu Lam?

  Yeah, they were, they were pretty cool.

• 1:52:32Tu Lam?

  You know, their effectiveness, their speed, they're rappel masters, they can rappel into windows, they run down walls. So they're, you know, they're truly like the martial arts commandos, you know, they, they run around jungle tiger stripe boutiques in snow, barefooted, no shirt on. Tiger stripe camouflage in her face, you know, I mean, like, how badass is that? You know, so I really enjoy working with those guys. I thought they're, they're really cool. Obviously the British 22 SAS, they're amazing. I mean, we've worked with so many, so many commando forces, you know?

• 1:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient survival for when you're a survival expert and you don't catch a damn thing.

• 1:54:02Tu Lam?

  But I I truly feel like we we have one of the best. You know, SEALs, Green Berets, I I truly feel like our country is one of the best countries because we have intelligent warriors. Very smart warriors.

• 1:54:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17Tu Lam?

  You know, and that's like, you know, obviously, we have our our meathead warriors, right? But overall, I mean, our selection process to weave out, you know, and and look for the the intelligent soldier and then make him into an athlete.

• 1:54:34Tu Lam?

  You know, so. Yeah, man, I mean, I there are some forces that I don't want to work with anymore, but overall, like ninety, I would say about ninety percent of the forces that I work with. I'll fight alongside him.

• 1:54:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:50Shawn Ryan?

  What is the? What do you think the fastest you could stand up from from from from day one to? You're comfortable enough to to take him on an op with you? What what do you think the fastest?

• 1:55:05Tu Lam?

  You know, it really depends on the op, but like in the Philippines, um, it took us six months.

• 1:55:10Shawn Ryan?

  Six months?

• 1:55:11Tu Lam?

  For a tier one capability, but when I say that is this, the the CIF guys, which is the Green Berets that focus on direct action FID operations. So in the Philippines, right, so we had to stand up this national level counter terrorist capability. So the the normal team guys, the Green Berets, uh, come in, they'll teach them unconventional warfare. Right, so the basic land navigation, physical training, you know, uh, raids, ambushes. And then from there, they take us, they they hand off the packet to us, which then we take them into urban phase, which is, you know, grew, uh, FID, direct action, counter terrorist, hostage rescue.

• 1:55:54Tu Lam?

  Uh, so it took us a good six months to get them to a a good baseline. You know, no, I mean, it just really depends, man, you know, like, um, like Libya, you know, these, these were rebels from the Gaddafi, you know, countering the Gaddafi regime. So they had war experience. They're just really undisciplined. So we had to teach them discipline and leadership. You know what I mean? So it's, it goes more on just pulling the trigger. You have to teach people how to be a cohesive unit. And when they're coming from different tribes and they hate each other, how can you, how can you have them work together?

• 1:56:29Shawn Ryan?

  That's gotta be tough.

• 1:56:31Tu Lam?

  Until they start dying.

• 1:56:34Tu Lam?

  Right? If you hit a target and they start dying and they're dragging their dead buddy out of the house, then they realize we all bleed the same.

• 1:56:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43Tu Lam?

  And just because you're in different tribes doesn't mean anything. You need to work together if you're willing to survive.

• 1:56:50Tu Lam?

  So, you know, it's just really, um, cultural awareness, you know, all, all that, all of it, it plays.

• 1:57:03Shawn Ryan?

  Let's go back to Malaysia because at dinner last night, you kind of opened up about some of your extracurricular activities that you were doing over there.

• 1:57:15Tu Lam?

  Yes.

• 1:57:15Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and I found that, which actually wound up leading you into a, an entirely new unit and, and, uh, new career path. So I'd like to dig into that. I think that is, uh, extremely interesting and I know the audience would love to hear that.

• 1:57:32Tu Lam?

  Oh, okay. So let me paint you the picture of my status on the team. I was an E5 on a special forces A team, the youngest, I was 21 years old. Everybody else is senior to me. They're new, they're in their thirties, right? With combat experience, world experience, and I'm this new guy. So I remember my first day showing up to team room, I show up in my starched uniform, my spit shine boots. I was a soldier. And I came in, they kicked my boots to scratch it up.

• 1:58:04Tu Lam?

  They call me all sorts of names, right? And then, um, they told me that they're not going to give me the combo to the team room because they don't trust Charlie. And at the time, I'm like, I'm not a Charlie, I'm a Bravo.

• 1:58:17Tu Lam?

  And they're like, no, Charlie. Oh, okay, that was a racist thing. So um, my thing was I take out the garbage and I had to clean the floors every day. I had to police up after a team. I didn't even have a job. I didn't have a desk. So um,

• 1:58:36Tu Lam?

  man, I was really good at cleaning those floors and taking out the garbage. I buffed the floors during the weekends. I would come in and glass floor. Yeah. My team sergeant was giving me all these assignments and he was like, he don't get it. Like, yeah, we're harassing him, but he's taking it to the next level, right? And I would, I was just, um, I was just very humble, you know, I was grateful to be there. But I was a student of the martial arts. All right, since I was eight, I'm in training in martial arts, the way, the path, you know?

• 1:59:12Tu Lam?

  Okinawa was a huge experience because, man, that was the birthplace of Okinawan karate, Japanese jiu-jitsu, you know, very spiritual, very. So I um, I participated in training uh, in submission wrestling and, and I got into uh, Muay Thai when I deployed to Muay Thai, I mean to Thailand. I went to Jump Master in Thakli, Thailand, which is an air force base in uh, in Thailand. And on the weekends, my buddies would go to Bangkok and, you know, they'll hang out. And I went to a Muay Thai camp, right? And I would train with the uh, the local fighters and literally uh, there was the ring.

• 1:59:55Tu Lam?

  There was the mat that I slept on and there was bowls of rice that we would eat. You know, like you're sleeping on a dirt floor next to a ring.

• 2:00:05Tu Lam?

  You know, I had a mosquito net around me and it was miserable, right? And I would kick this uh, this pole with a rope wrapped around on, you know. So I got into really heavy fighting and UFC was starting to uh, get more popular at that time. You know when UFC first came out? Yeah. They had the uh, the divides between all of the styles, right? You could truly say, that's a karate guy, that's a judo guy, that's a jiu-jitsu guy, right? You could see it. Now it's just a mixture, right? But back then, um, I thought was really fascinating that jiu-jitsu.

• 2:00:39Tu Lam?

  Was dominating that fight world and that Muay Thai was doing really well in the striking world, you know? So, man, you know, I started fighting. So it started off at tough man contests on the weekends. There was a tough man contest at a marine base called Camp Foster. And you can go there, you can sign in your name, you fight a bunch of Marines. So I did. I did, and I did very well, you know? So then there was this fight promoter named Santo. He was a Japanese guy and he took underneath, obviously, he wanted to make money out of me.

• 2:01:23Tu Lam?

  And he said, would you want to fight? You know, at Japanese dojos, at matches? He was talking about the underground matches. So I'm like, yeah. So I went there and I fought in parking lots, I fought in dojos. And then I became really good. So I got invited to this match called the Budokan. The Budokan match is kind of like a big deal in Okinawa, Japan. It's like a no holds bar, like a UFC. But it's not as popular as UFC. It's, I don't know, you heard of Pride?

• 2:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah, I've heard of Pride.

• 2:02:02Tu Lam?

  Okay, so Pride Fighting was developed in mainland Japan, but the Budokan came down to Okinawa and I was selected as the main fight.

• 2:02:12Shawn Ryan?

  The main fight?

• 2:02:13Tu Lam?

  I was selected as the main fight. So then I started training up for it. And then they, they hand me down this policy letter from, from Yususok, from a two-star general, because UFC started becoming popular and the team guys were getting hurt trying to fight in these no-holds-bar matches. So there was a letter, a policy letter saying that team guys would not participate in no-holds-bar matches. And I was on the final card, right, to fight. So I'm like, oh, I don't know what I'm going to do with this. Right? So I gave it to you. I remember talking to my team sergeant, my captain.

• 2:02:57Tu Lam?

  I was like, hey, I'm training for this fight. I really want to fight this. And my captain said, absolutely not. This is a policy for a two-star general. You would not fight.

• 2:03:09Tu Lam?

  But I'm gonna go to the match down in the Budokan and you happened to be there and I don't know.

• 2:03:18Tu Lam?

  So I'm like, wow, right, I could fight. So I started training up. I started, um, I was that guy who runs with a stone underneath the beach. Right. I was, you know, depriving my body oxygen. I was really getting into a fighting shape and then our pagers went off. Uh, I was part of a counter terrorist team and our pagers went off and it was a training off. So we got pushed out into Malaysia. Uh, we rotted our bodies in a hangar for a month because, uh, the sniper's employed. It was a hostage rescue situation. They're building up the scenario. It was just training up, but I was, uh, in this Malaysian hangar and I had a fight due in less than a month, right?

• 2:03:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:59Tu Lam?

  So my body's rotting away and, um, man, I got sick along with, you know, the whole troop got sick and we did our, our training out there and redeployed and I had four days right before I fought and I had, oh man, I had diarrhea, you know, just, just really bad, you know? And I was really in a bad way because when I did the striking, dude, I was out of breath like within the first 30 seconds. Cause of my body was just that weak coming out of the jungles and I had a fight in four days.

• 2:04:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:33Tu Lam?

  And, um, my medic told me, drop out. He goes, don't do it, dude. Drop out. They're seeing a guy from mainland Japan to fight you. So the fight car was this Pan Kreis champion coming from mainland Japan to whoop my ass because I was doing good in these, uh, little small fights. I was an up and comer. And, uh, he came in from, uh, mainland Japan. He's a big Japanese fighter. You know, I was fighting at a weight of 190 and he was 210.

• 2:05:05Tu Lam?

  You know, in that Budokan open match.

• 2:05:09Tu Lam?

  So I remember the fight night, man. Um, my team shows up. Right. So I poke my head out from the, the back dressing room when I'm doing my strikes. My team is there, the command is there. I'm like, oh, so I poke my head back in. I'm like, oh God, I gotta win this fight. But I'm really sick, you know? I'm throwing up in the bathroom, literally right before the fight. And then Santo comes in, he goes, you can't fight like this.

• 2:05:42Tu Lam?

  And then that walk or die speech came through my uncle. Do you want to be a commando today?

• 2:05:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Tu Lam?

  And I said, yes, I want to be a commando. So I, so I put on my fighting clothes and I, I walk out.

• 2:05:56Tu Lam?

  Right. I wasn't the champ, so he, he walked out last. So I came on the ring, you know, the music's playing. I'm all amped up. This is my first like semi-professional fight.

• 2:06:07Tu Lam?

  And then this Japanese guy comes in and he was like one of the biggest Japanese dudes I ever seen. Long story short, he whipped my ass like bad, bad.

• 2:06:20Tu Lam?

  But uh, yeah, man, I fought in those matches and um,

• 2:06:25Tu Lam?

  so fast forward it, I was in Thailand. And um, I was suiting up for a Muay Thai fight, right? So these Thai fighters, man, they can kick. They're like lightning fast, you know? And I, I went into the ring and um, well, I was in the dressing room. I was prepping to go to the ring. And one of my friends come back. He goes, hey, man. Hey, there's a guy here. I want to say his name because he still does classified stuff. But uh, he was the command sergeant major of a tier one unit. He was gonna go back and take that command. And uh, he wanted, uh, just they wanted to let me know that he's there.

• 2:07:06Tu Lam?

  So I'm freaking out. I'm like, what's that mean?

• 2:07:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:09Tu Lam?

  Should I be fighting? And they're like, hey, dude, I don't know. You do what you do. So I'm like, oh, I'll go fight, right? So I went down there and the fight didn't last long. The Muay Thai fighters, they can kick, but they can't, they can't take a punch. Right? So that, that cross, man, you know, he got hit. And I took the kick and I came in and I exploded with my hands. And he went down and I wanted to fight and I went back in the dressing room. And my medic friend comes in, he goes, did you know that he was here, that guy? And I'm like, yeah, I heard. And then my buddy came and he dropped a business card. And he said, hey, just letting you know, he, he saw the fight and he wants you to call him. I was like, for what? You know, I thought I was in trouble. He goes, you know where he's going?

• 2:07:55Tu Lam?

  He wants to talk to you about something. I don't know. So I called him. And he, he, he said it straight. He goes, I want to hire you on in, in CAG as the combatant. You're going to work in selection and training.

• 2:08:11Shawn Ryan?

  That's insane, dude.

• 2:08:12Tu Lam?

  Right? So, you know, at that time, I was gearing up to go to the Philippines. So I was doing that op in Thailand that was closed off. And went back to Okinawa, Japan to compensate on it. You know, I thought about what his offer was. You know, and I knew like the timeline where he was going to go back and take the unit. And I, I deployed with my team into the Philippines.

• 2:08:36Tu Lam?

  Let me tell you something about a tier one unit, man. They can do whatever they want. It was a dirt trail road in Zamboanga. And I had to go through the direct support

• 2:08:49Tu Lam?

  selection process, which was road Mars, physical training, PT, psychological evaluation, academics, you know? So you have to pass all that and then you get accepted into that role. So it's a three day process, the interview and, and the physical fitness. So I had to fly to North Carolina to do that. I'm in Zamboanga, Philippines right now.

• 2:09:11Tu Lam?

  They they had a dirt trail road where I had to put these little lights up and it landed this plane and they flew me to North Carolina to to go through, you know, I was CAGS direct support, you know, selection. And I made it, got hired on as a as a combatant guy. And what was that in title? I was working in selection and training and I was training under these guys called Team Rock who were qualified or a Hoist Gracie, I was trained with Hoist Gracie. I would travel around America and train with all these prize fighters. I would bring that knowledge back. I would fight all day long and work out all day long. What a life, right?

• 2:09:55Tu Lam?

  Then there was a Sergeant Major from a C Squadron. He came in and he was a big jujitsu guy and he asked me to go with him on a combat op. So they were, the squadron was fixing to rotate him for their rotation of Iraq and we're hunting down, you know, Zarqawi at that time. So, you know, a combatant guy, right? So I got together my my my team gear. I got the intel brief from the intel guys, got attached to C Squadron and came in and, you know, I was, I did a lot of stuff that they need me to do, like, you know, I was a gunner on, I was a attack vehicle driver. So I in fielded

• 2:10:35Tu Lam?

  the teams in and then eventually I was containment for the assault, you know, so near term containment. But, you know, during that timeframe and I saw some capabilities in that unit.

• 2:10:48Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet you did. And for for those listening that don't know who Zarqawi is, I believe he was the number two most wanted high value target in in the war.

• 2:11:02Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Shawn Ryan?

  He got killed, was that 2006?

• 2:11:07Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Tu Lam?

  So you know, obviously, he was

• 2:11:10Shawn Ryan?

  And you were after him.

• 2:11:12Tu Lam?

  Well, I was one of the, the unit was after him.

• 2:11:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Tu Lam?

  And I worked within that organization. I wouldn't say that I was, you know, besides the intel gathering and everything else that everybody was trying to, it was a unit effort.

• 2:11:25Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't mean, I meant, yeah.

• 2:11:26Tu Lam?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 2:11:27Shawn Ryan?

  You were part of the effort.

• 2:11:28Tu Lam?

  Yes. So during that time, you know, we were hitting, gosh, man, they were, that was the height of the war. You know, think about Iraq back in that, no, here. So it's a height of war. You know, gunfights happen on a daily, every day, you know. So I saw some special

• 2:11:52Tu Lam?

  capabilities within that organization that set it apart from anything else. You know, anything else is their intelligence gathering capabilities, working with the CIA. You know, and I gave them that lethality, like that piece where you could find, fix and strategically hit a target. Man. That's it, that's it, right? So, you know, during that time, we were doing a lot of the infrastructure exploitation. I don't want to get into it too much, but that's how we would find somebody, you know? And the, the technology was used against the enemy and how we would find, fix and locate and kill them. And so I started seeing the birth of that.

• 2:12:34Tu Lam?

  Working with NSA, you know, starting to see the special reconnaissance piece rise up. And I saw the capability. I wasn't part of it, but I saw it, you know?

• 2:12:45Tu Lam?

  So being in gunfights every day, you know, I, I came back, I was put in for a valid award and I was really happy, you know, by the unit. And I went to back to selection and training and the, the sergeant major of selection and training said, hey, you, you got put in for a valid award. Good job. You know, you did great, heard great things about you, but you're fired. And I'm like, whoa.

• 2:13:07Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 2:13:09Tu Lam?

  What's that mean? They're like, look, look, nothing personal. You did a great job, but you're far from the combatant's program because he goes, son, you're taking up a sergeant major position in selection and training. We just gotta, you know, have that career progression for the operators to take that position so they can get promoted and you're E7, right? And I'm like, okay, got it. He goes, look, you know, we have a lot of other positions that I think you're going to be good at, like dog handlers or breachers where brought up.

• 2:13:41Tu Lam?

  Go down to Ops and, you know, find that assignment, apply for that assignment and then, you know, but you're far from here. Yeah. Cause you're taking up a sergeant major position.

• 2:13:54Tu Lam?

  You know, I'll tell you, man, I didn't know what to do, right? I'm like, okay. So I walked down to Ops and I was walking down and there's a very classified wing within that already say, I want to get into it, but there's, there was a very classified area and it had reconnaissance under, right? Special reconnaissance.

• 2:14:14Tu Lam?

  So I'm like, those are the guys that I saw that special capabilities from when I was a combatant's guy, right? And I really liked that. So I knocked on their door, banging on their door and then this camera turns on. I was looking at them and they're like, who are you?

• 2:14:34Tu Lam?

  The door started speaking, who are you? Oh, my name's Tulam and I want to, I want, I want to come inside and talk to the troop commander, you know, and they're like,

• 2:14:45Tu Lam?

  we don't know you. What's your business here? I'm like, I want, I need to talk to them because I want to apply for, you know, possible job. I'm talking to this door, right? And the door unlatches and I came in, I saw the, the troop sergeant major. I sat down, he said, who are you? You know, when I was out in first special forces group, I did a lot of the low vis stuff. I was part of a project called Trojan, Trojan Lancer, which they recruit from native warriors, the guys that can blend in into indigenous areas and we would do.

• 2:15:19Tu Lam?

  Black Dax, you know, I don't want to get into the Black Dax, but we, we do that stuff working with the handlers up in the embassy, you know, the little biz handlers. So, you know, I, I told them about my background. I did a little bit of that and, you know, I tried out for their, their interview process. I got hired on and I started learning and man, I tell you, you're talking about, Sean, you're talking about a fish out of water, right? Because up in Sudan, I kicked in doors. I was a commando. I tracked down human bees in the jungle. So mine was very direct action commando stuff, right? And the first day of reconnaissance training was this is how a cell phone works and this is how the towers work and this is

• 2:16:02Tu Lam?

  how a Irenium phone works and this is how a global star satellite and this is where it orbits around the world and this is where the direction you need to point towards if you need to latch on to this satellite and this satellite. So they're really teaching me covert means of communication. You really think about it. I just didn't see it at the time. I'm like, it was really long hours, man. It was, you know, long training, long training. I didn't, I didn't think I was going to make it through so many training because this is really technical, very technical. So then I, I started deploying, started doing the special reconnaissance piece and they stood up another capability within the unit to work with the CIA. I was part of the technical reconnaissance piece for that and I had to

• 2:16:47Tu Lam?

  go through eight months of training with the CIA. Now, it's not all CIA, certain, certain portions of it were especially the trade crap, the street crap portion. And the reason why we had to cross train one day is because we four deployed later on into these countries where we had to work underneath the chief of station, you know? It was, it was really funny because you and I. After talking last night, we were in the same country.

• 2:17:14Shawn Ryan?

  On the same project.

• 2:17:15Tu Lam?

  On the same, hunting down the same person.

• 2:17:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  So. It's, it's, it's, it never ceases to amaze me on how small the special operations community actually is. And, you know, it won't be the first time that's happened. It's, it won't be the last time that's happened. But yeah, when you, you know, unfortunately can't really go into any details, but when you started, when we started kind of shooting the shit and I was like, wait a, hold on, what year was that? And, uh,

• 2:17:52Tu Lam?

  And you heard about what we did there?

• 2:17:54Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:54Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:55Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe, yeah, we were in both locations too, on the north and the south and, and, uh, yeah, that's, I had no idea that I was, uh, you know, working with two land.

• 2:18:54Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient Survival. Spec Ops Grade Nutrition.

• 2:19:02Tu Lam?

  Sean, you know, what's funny is I was going to college at that time, too. Like, you know, we had our CIA safe houses out in town and, you know, when, when the ops were low, I would log on and do my college. So it was a continuous, continuous process, you know? But getting back to when I was fired, you know? And then I got accepted on to that, but you know what? You know, sometimes what we think is a curse is a blessing.

• 2:19:30Tu Lam?

  Right? Me, there's no way I would have saw that capability unless I was invited to go to that combat rotation. And there was no way that I could have gone there unless I was fired from selection and training. I wouldn't say I was fired, I just took it, started major position, you know? But I did eight years there.

• 2:19:52Tu Lam?

  You know, I travel all around the world.

• 2:19:57Shawn Ryan?

  How did you like that kind of that change of pace when you went into kind of an advanced surveillance and, and all of that stuff? We did, we did a course similar to that, not at that level. When I was in, when I was in the SEAL teams and at that time we were, I was jumping into a team that was going to go to Bosnia. Long story short, we were running down war criminals, you know, from back in the day. And then, and then I wound up going to Afghanistan and said, but we did a course with the MI6 that the, we had contracted out to the MI6 to come to Virginia Beach and put us through that course.

• 2:20:40Shawn Ryan?

  And we didn't fire one shot. We didn't blow anything up. We didn't jump out of any planes. We didn't do any of that shit. Totally new change of pace. And instead, what we were doing is running around on the 20th floor of the Bank of American Building in Richmond, Virginia. And nobody knows who the hell we are, what we're doing. And it was all about to blend in. And the, the area of operation started in, you know, Virginia Beach and, and, and a mall. And then it was downtown Norfolk. And then it was, you know, the whole eastern seaboard in Virginia. And it just kept.

• 2:21:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's some of the coolest training I've ever done today and I and and definitely some of the most practical and and I loved it, you know, even though I wasn't blowing shit up all the time and shooting things and did how was your experience?

• 2:21:47Tu Lam?

  Man, you know, like with the certain reports, you know, that we had to write after surveillance.

• 2:21:56Tu Lam?

  The casing reports, right, was just, man, brutal because, you know, you had to write like six pages of of this describing in detail, you know, you had to be able to map out certain areas, you know, so it was very, very outside my realm. Very, I mean, you're flying on non-commercial aircrafts, you know, civilian aircrafts, trying to pinpoint a, we call it a dumb beacon, which is pulses, you know, how do you find just a dumb beacon, you know, something you just pulse a frequency, you know, how can you triangulate it down to a pinpoint location where I could put the kill capability there? You know what I mean? So flying in commercial aircrafts, hell, so it was totally out of my realm.

• 2:22:42Tu Lam?

  You know, I would tell you, it took me a good year to kind of really like get over that hump because, dude, I was just treading water.

• 2:22:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:51Tu Lam?

  You know, I mean, I felt like I was totally out of my realm, you know, totally out of my realm, but once I got that training, right, and I graduated from that training, I got some real world ops behind me, it was really cool. Because people think like a commando, right? Tell me what's more dangerous? A SEAL team coming in and hitting a pinpoint target where you know what the bad guys are in that house, you know the exact location, right? And you're coming in with a whole SEAL team?

• 2:23:26Tu Lam?

  Or a singleton driving around country X doing reconnaissance where you shouldn't be doing that. If you get caught, you don't know if your head's going to get lobbed off, you're going to be on the news, you have no X field plan, your weaponry is only a pistol, if even that, if you can diplomatic pouch that in, you know?

• 2:23:48Shawn Ryan?

  For me, well, that's, I would say that's more dangerous, uh, or at least has the potential to be. But for me, in that environment, when it's, when it's only you, I mean, it's like the best and the worst feeling in the world. And, uh, and then, and then to fast forward, and we were talking about this last night, too, when you fast forward 10 years, and you're like, holy shit, I was one guy, you know, and I'm a white guy, you know, and, uh, one guy running around, you know, Yemen by myself, or with one other dude, and then, you know,

• 2:24:31Shawn Ryan?

  doing these sort of things, and then you fast forward, and it's like, holy shit, like, that really is some Jason Moore shit, you know?

• 2:24:38Tu Lam?

  You know, it's what's really unique is, you know, you asked me last night, you're like, when you're doing it, did you know, like, this is some dangerous shit you're doing? And I told you, like, I never knew. I knew it's dangerous, obviously, right? You, you know, you go to the funerals of your friends, you know how real this war is, you know? But when I was doing it, I wasn't nervous. It was a thing, you know? It was a thing. And I knew surveillance was on me. I knew they were on me. But you have to go about your daily routine, even though you're being followed, right? And they're trying to draw intelligence from you, you know, you know, your training kicks in. But what's really unique is when you're doing it, it was, I'm not saying I'm brave, you know, it was just a thing. It was just work.

• 2:25:23Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't feel the same because the bullets aren't flying.

• 2:25:26Tu Lam?

  That's right.

• 2:25:26Shawn Ryan?

  Explosions aren't happening. You don't have A-10s over top, Apaches, you know, you don't have any of that. It's, it's, it means you're doing it right, because none of that is happening. And in the middle of it, it can almost, it can get to the point where it seems boring, but you make one wrong move, you know?

• 2:25:48Tu Lam?

  And you know what I wanted to say, too, is like, you know, in war, we have layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of support, right? The pred, the imagery, the intelligence packet, you know, you have your half, your gaff, you have all these packets, man. Those are war assets. You go into, like you said, Yemen.

• 2:26:09Tu Lam?

  It's not a declared war zone.

• 2:26:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:12Tu Lam?

  So you're not going to have everything from the war. You're not going to have pred fees. You're not going to have certain SIGINT platforms. You're not going to have any of that. Cause they can't even fly into the location. You can't get resupplies in because it's not a part of the, the country agreement.

• 2:26:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:29Tu Lam?

  So you can't get weapons in. You know? So when I think about that, man, when, when people think like, oh, you know, spec ops is about door kicking. That's, yeah, we do that, but there's a lot of guys like you that are out there as singletons. That's living in it.

• 2:26:48Tu Lam?

  You're living in it. I mean, how many stories have we heard about guys like us getting their heads lopped off?

• 2:26:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:53Tu Lam?

  They end up on the news, they get kidnapped, they go up missing. You know, it happens. So it gets really real when you think about it. And I, when I think back to now, sometimes I get anxieties, right? I think back, I'm like, oh my God, I did that. Like, that's really crazy. You know, and now it's hitting me more than when I was actually doing it.

• 2:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. The same, same here, you know, but it really rounds, it really, it, it, it turns you into an extremely well-rounded and, uh, and, and, and talk about learning how to adapt.

• 2:27:33Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:33Shawn Ryan?

  That you have no choice, you know? So.

• 2:27:38Tu Lam?

  But you know, during that, that, you know, special missions unit assignment, I mean, I cross trained with two, two SAS. I was able to get their, um, their tactics when they're fighting, you know, uh,

• 2:27:53Tu Lam?

  Ireland, you know, I mean, they're finding the terrorists out there. I was able to cross train with Israelis. I got to cross train with all these high level units in the art of surveillance and reconnaissance. In intelligence, you know, the Israelis, man, they're one of the leading companies in their intelligence gathering capabilities.

• 2:28:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14Tu Lam?

  You know, I mean, they have to be based off their geographical location.

• 2:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  I never got to work with them.

• 2:28:18Tu Lam?

  Oh, right. They're they're they're amazing. Their technology and the way to do stuff, their intelligence gathering is amazing. So what I'm saying is, you know, that that assignment allowed me to cross train all these different entities. And even within our country, you know, the NSA and, you know, CIA and I got to work with the the marshals. You know, because the marshals are great at tracking human beings down. You know, we just had to change it to how we do that overseas. You know, and you know, um, working in like countries like Yemen, uh, is is a non-permissive environment. Semi non-permissive environment. So you you know, you being a a white guy, you're not going to get killed driving down the street, but you're going to get looked at.

• 2:29:03Shawn Ryan?

  No, yeah.

• 2:29:04Tu Lam?

  And if you go into the wrong part of town, you're going to get killed.

• 2:29:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07Tu Lam?

  Right? And if you're looking for bad guys in that part of town, then that country

• 2:29:14Tu Lam?

  can either snag you up because you shouldn't be doing that, or or um, is a terrorist that snags you up. And some of these fake checkpoints that we have to go through, where there there could be a terrorist trap, or it can be the government, you know, trying to see what you're doing. So what I'm saying, it was very complex in that arena. And they're tracking your your cell phones and everything else. And they they triangulate where you're at. So you have to understand that level.

• 2:29:41Shawn Ryan?

  There's so much to think about when you're operating in that kind of an environment and in that capacity. Because it's it's it's the bad guys that we're tracking. But not only that, it's also all the other spy games that are happening over there with the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the Israelis, you know, and and and and and running into them, you know? And they know who you are, you know who they are, and it's it just gets real weird.

• 2:30:13Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  And uh, and uh, yeah.

• 2:30:17Tu Lam?

  You know, being a two hundred and ten pound Asian guy walking around in some of these mid eastern countries, I mean, you stand out, man.

• 2:30:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:25Tu Lam?

  You know, even though I'm Asian, I look like a Western.

• 2:30:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:28Tu Lam?

  You know, I stand out. I am a prime target for kidnapping. Prime. Yeah. You know, and some of the ops that we go out and man, you're a singleton, one up in a car. You're sitting out in, you know, bumper position somewhere, you know, that somebody can roll up on you and take you out, you know, they know where your safe house is at. You know? Yeah. And, uh, and like you said, it's not just the bad guys. It's not just the terrorists, it's the, the host nation. They want to know what you're doing in their country. And then it's the Chinese, they want to know what you're doing in their country or in, in that area. Right? And then, you know, you got all these different embassies, right? And you gotta work, you gotta work in that silent mode throughout all of them.

• 2:31:12Tu Lam?

  And you gotta find, fix and locate whoever you're, you're there to find, you know? It takes a lot of work and, but I found out like, you know, we can't do that physical reconnaissance or as physical surveillance, that's, you can't do it because I'm a 210 pound Asian guy. I don't blend in. Yeah. So that's where, you know, the, the agency training came in, the infrastructure. You know, I can track a human being without even being in country. Yeah. All right. So, and that's where I learned from that.

• 2:31:48Tu Lam?

  That journey, you know, I mean, uh, it was so funny because like you said, it started off as combatants. Right? And then, uh, it went to me getting fired in that position, but, um, it was a blessing because it made me, like you said, well-rounded. So when I came out of, um, working in that organization for roughly eight years, Libya fell during that time. When I say Libya, remember the attacks on Libya, the annex, the CIA headquarters, you know, the Americans were drug out in the street, killed, you know?

• 2:32:25Tu Lam?

  And, um, we didn't respond it right away.

• 2:32:29Tu Lam?

  You remember that incident? I remember that. We didn't respond it right away. And so that was the need for, uh, a special operations Africa command.

• 2:32:41Tu Lam?

  Right, they needed a strike capability within Africa in case something like that happens.

• 2:32:48Tu Lam?

  So, um, you know, I, I requested from JSOC to, to go there and take that, apply for that assignment. You know, it was the, uh, the SIF teams, you know, the Commander Stream is Forces or CRIF, Crisis Response is Force is what they changed it to, and it was continent Africa. So we became the action arm of Africa. You know, and, and the thing about what people tell me is like, what makes Green Berets you so unique, right? It's, yeah, we got that FID capability and force multiplying, but we're there. That means that I have a capability to go in and train indigenous force.

• 2:33:30Tu Lam?

  My presence there because the country team allows it, but I can quickly react to hostage situation. I can go border crossings if I need to recover a human being, you know what I mean? So being in that continent, I knew I needed to be in that continent. Because that's where all the heavy fighting was and the unit was kind of pushing me that way anyways. But I wanted more of, instead of doing the surveillance piece now, I wanted to go back to direct action.

• 2:33:58Tu Lam?

  So that's what made me switched over again. So doing the low vis piece, I mean, gosh, man, I did it for so long. And then I'm like, okay, I want to go back to kicking in a door again. Right. I want that direct action piece again.

• 2:34:13Tu Lam?

  So I, I left, um, the unit and, um,

• 2:34:18Tu Lam?

  I got offered a troop sergeant major position in that unit to stay.

• 2:34:23Tu Lam?

  During that time, I picked up E8 as in the special forces. And we had to go back to special forces, uh, group and do our team sergeant timing. And then that's when I'll go back to, to the unit and take my troop sergeant major time. So that was the agreement. Um, I decided that, um, I fell in love with Colorado. It's beautiful out there. You should come visit me out there. I will. So beautiful. And I found somewhat of my peace when, when I was off work, but, uh, I deployed into Africa. Uh, I did the Libya piece.

• 2:35:01Tu Lam?

  That was long, you know, we were training a FID force, we're finding a a strike capability within that unit. It was a very hard assignment because a lot of these guys were

• 2:35:14Tu Lam?

  some were crooked, you know, they were vetted by the CIA, but some were were were bad guys, you know.

• 2:35:23Tu Lam?

  Our area operation then allowed us, you know, the freedom of movement of a war zone. Where we can just strike, right? We had, it was more intelligence gathering, no lie, 100% they're here. And then we do a truly strategic strike because if you ruin rapport of that country, then you get kicked out of country. You lose your footing within that continent.

• 2:35:47Tu Lam?

  Right? So that's what people don't understand. You strike the wrong target, you're going to get kicked out of country and you lost your mission. So it was really heavy, heavy, heavy intelligence and standing up a fighting force.

• 2:36:02Tu Lam?

  So, you know, I was part of a rotation. We stood up the fighting force. We started doing some, uh, some confidence targets. And, um, my rotation is over and then I got pulled out and I got sent into South Africa where I protected our former president.

• 2:36:22Tu Lam?

  Obama, you know, Barack Obama, and he was there to attend Mendelo's funeral. So that was one of my last missions, you know, with with that organization. But this is where it it came to head with me. You know, roughly around that time, I was at 14 and a half years of war and combat. Seven years of that was heavy, heavy war and and combat and conflict areas within a tier one organization, you know, so you're thrown out there. So after seven years of that, and then before that was the first group. You know, I mean, so I was, it was compounding on me. And I didn't see it. You know,

• 2:37:05Tu Lam?

  you know, you hear about, uh, post-mag stress, you hear about PTSD, you hear about all of it. It can't happen to me. Yeah. I'm bred to do this, but it was. And, um, I started getting numb to the world. I started, uh, losing focus at work. Just didn't care.

• 2:37:27Tu Lam?

  And that's dangerous in a, in a dangerous man game, right? That's a dangerous mindset where you don't care in that world. So I, I just realized that, um, you know, I just need to, to move on with my life. And, um.

• 2:37:43Shawn Ryan?

  How long do you think you were just kind of going through the motions before, before it finally clicked? It's time to hang it up.

• 2:37:51Tu Lam?

  Two years.

• 2:37:52Shawn Ryan?

  Two years. Did it gradually get worse?

• 2:37:56Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Shawn Ryan?

  Did you start getting complacent?

• 2:37:59Tu Lam?

  Yes.

• 2:38:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:00Tu Lam?

  Didn't care, get complacent. You know, and I'm, hey, man, everybody makes their mistakes, right?

• 2:38:08Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:38:09Tu Lam?

  Right, so I, I just, I'm just letting you know that it was a hard time in my life. And, um, I had to reflect back on my life and, and I realized that maybe I'm just not made for this anymore. You know, even though I was, I had all this experience, I was top of my game, it's just, I wasn't feeling anymore. You know, i- it bothers me, um, seeing women and children get killed. You know, and you're in that environment and it bothers me. It bothered me that I couldn't affect certain areas and people and free those people. So it bothered me. So at that time, I had a lot of guilt, I had a lot of, um, pain. So I started hiding that pain.

• 2:38:52Tu Lam?

  Right, um, I was hurt, I've been shot, I've been blown up, you know, so, uh, they give us, um, obviously painkillers, you know, to keep you, you're, you're, you're in an NFL team, right? So they're gonna give you whatever you need to stay on the battlefield and, um, I self-medicated myself a lot during that time to hide that pain.

• 2:39:12Shawn Ryan?

  What were you self-medicating with?

• 2:39:14Tu Lam?

  Opiates.

• 2:39:15Shawn Ryan?

  Opiates, oxy?

• 2:39:18Tu Lam?

  And you know as well as I do, that's a normal, that's a normal thing on a team, like a normal issue.

• 2:39:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:24Tu Lam?

  Team guys hide their, uh, their pain through that, you know? So I, I started, um, just losing my way. And, um,

• 2:39:38Tu Lam?

  I was out in Africa one day and um I was drinking some chai tea. And we're ready to uh to go out and do our patrols and uh the counter potion wars in Africa. And um the sun was coming up. You ever found your peace, man? You ever like had a moment where you're like, wow, that's beautiful?

• 2:39:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:40:00Tu Lam?

  And you're there in that present moment? Well, that was that present moment I was there. In Africa, right? So at that time, I was at uh nineteen years in the military. You know, majority of it was special operations. So I was really messed up, you know? And I found my peace there and I I said to my, I wrote, I carry a notebook everywhere I go, like a samurai, I write stuff down and. I wrote the word peace. Because that was my new journey. You know, so born in war, fought racism, fought, you know, the oppressed and freedom enslaved.

• 2:40:44Tu Lam?

  And now is, you know, I'm really messed up and I needed to find my my peace in life. Myself again.

• 2:40:52Shawn Ryan?

  You've got to do you.

• 2:40:54Tu Lam?

  Yeah, you know, they Lao Tzu was a uh the founder of Taoism and he said, the journey of a thousand miles began with a single step. And I read that when I was uh twelve years old, you know, that saying. And I wrote down the piece and I I started my first steps towards peace. And that means to um so I got off the teams, I put in my retirement. Uh packet and I was off on my new journey to find myself again.

• 2:41:30Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it's pretty huge of you, you know, and you know, a lot of guys, it's just, it's just, you know, one more deployment, one more, one more, one more. And, you know, just like a drug, it's just never going to be enough. You're just going to have to cut it eventually.

• 2:41:50Tu Lam?

  I mean, we're all addicts. If you're on a team, you're an addict. You're addicted to adrenaline.

• 2:41:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:55Tu Lam?

  You're addicted to that fast-paced life. You're addicted to it. That's why we stay in so long. You just don't know when to call it. Well, at that moment, you know, peace was more important than anything in my life.

• 2:42:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think we're getting ready to start transition. So let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll get into how bad it got and how you dug yourself out of that hole and get into some Ronin tactics.

• 2:42:57Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrients survive them. Feed your freedom.

• 2:43:04Shawn Ryan?

  All right. So just covered some of your military career, went pretty in depth with that. And we're wrapping it up. And now you're getting ready to go back into civilian life for the dreaded transition.

• 2:43:23Tu Lam?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, first I want to start off with, you know, my mission in Cameroon, doing the counterpolishing campaigns. I actually graduated from college then. So I fulfilled that promise to my mother. You know, I promised my mother when I graduated from high school that I would finish college. And throughout my whole military career, still fighting and employing, I was going to college. And I was on a Cameroon commando camp and I took my final exam. And I graduated with honors while fighting counterpolishing campaigns.

• 2:43:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:43:56Tu Lam?

  But I was facing depression during that timeframe. But that was a promise I made to my mother, you know, and that I kept. So here I am, you know, I I knew I was really messed up, you know, and I I didn't want to admit it to anybody. It was a personal pride thing for me, but I knew I wasn't there anymore. Mentally, I wasn't there. I was, um, I was just lost, man. You know what I mean? I was just lost. And I wanted to find my path again, you know, so I decided that 23 years, 23 years was was good enough. And and I had a lot of unfinished business in the military, but it was at a point where I had to find my my peace.

• 2:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:42Tu Lam?

  You know, I had to find it. And that journey was, it's, you know, as a veteran, that journey is very difficult.

• 2:44:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's very difficult in a lot of ways. And I don't know what the first thing that hit you was. But one of the major things that hit me before, or that I kind of came to the realization of before I realized everything else that was going on, you know, in my head from, you know, being in combat that long is is one of the hardest things to do is leave the team and watch the team go on to the next stop. And you're not there anymore. And what what was the first thing that kind of hit you?

• 2:45:31Tu Lam?

  You know, I wanted to retire, so I moved over to more the operations side of the house. And I wasn't very well put together back then, you know, it was just really dealing with some internal issues. So when I, when the teams were deploying, you know, yeah, I felt the same thing, Sean, you know, you just don't know, you just feel like you can do more. You don't know when to quit. Yeah. My father told me once, when I first joined the teams, I asked him, I said, when, when did you know, you know, when, when is it enough? He goes, you'll know. You'll know. He never even talked about it, you'll know.

• 2:46:12Tu Lam?

  And I did, at that point, I, what was more important to me than anything, operations or being a commando, was finding my peace. You know? And that was, that was a long process, right? You don't just find your peace. You know, you don't just go from the teams and then you, now you're in the civilian world and instantly you're, you're safe and at peace. That's not how it works. You don't find your peace by, you know, reaching a level of money and success. You don't find it there. That's not where peace is at. You know, it took me a while to realize that. Peace is found in what you do daily. Peace is found in growth and spirituality and, and stuff like that.

• 2:46:55Tu Lam?

  So I want, I want to explain this to you because this is the seed of how I healed myself. Okay? So when I was going through all my times, you know, I, I honorably retired out of the military, 23 years, now I'm at home, I'm this retired civilian, you know, no direction, Ronin has, Ronin isn't Ronin yet, you know, Ronin tactics isn't Ronin tactics yet. My wife was working up in Denver, Colorado, you know, she uses, she has a business degree, accounting degree, masters, you know, so she's a big deal in that world, you know? And here she is, you know, she's this big time manager, managing all these people in

• 2:47:34Tu Lam?

  a major, you know, corporation and you got a commando with 23 years, free, right? Free from the military. And what I did all day was I slept. I slept in a dark room, shades down. I was in bed all day.

• 2:47:54Shawn Ryan?

  Were you still on the drugs, the oxys, the benzos, the sleeping pills?

• 2:48:00Tu Lam?

  Yeah, you know, and that's what people, you know, and people have judged me on it and they're like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. You're right. You're right. But when, when you've been hurt, when you've been, when you got hit by IED, when, when you have over a certain amount of free fall, jumps, combat equipment, you know, you're just living that life, that team life. Man, your body takes a beating. Am I right, Sean?

• 2:48:23Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah. Definitely takes a beating.

• 2:48:25Tu Lam?

  So, you know, the, the painkillers that they prescribe to us, I mean, that's a failed situation because what works in this

• 2:48:34Tu Lam?

  treatment, the next treatment you're going to require too, and it just continues to grow into as spars your world out of control, you know?

• 2:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  The other thing with those that got me was

• 2:48:47Shawn Ryan?

  it started as, as treating injuries, physical injuries. But then when you're taking those, and especially the, you know, the oxy or the, the, the opiates is

• 2:49:01Shawn Ryan?

  you, you immediately start to realize the, it suppresses your thoughts. It slows you down. You don't really give a shit about anything. And just, you know, just like you were saying, it, you'd finally become numb. That makes you even more numb. And I think that's where the, the addiction really comes in is you're, you're suppressing all those thoughts.

• 2:49:27Tu Lam?

  I wanted that numbness.

• 2:49:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:29Tu Lam?

  You know, I, I was in pain.

• 2:49:32Tu Lam?

  You know, like

• 2:49:34Tu Lam?

  lost friends, you know, and I, and it really bothered me because, you know, some of these, man, some of my teammates, I actually physically carried off the battlefield. They're dead bodies and some of them I laid down in their final resting place at funeral services. So that pain is there, you know, you just, I don't care how, how much you mask it with, you know, but the medication, it allowed me to numb it. And I almost lived in this state of numbness.

• 2:50:02Tu Lam?

  You're talking about, you know, the sleeping pills. It's not just opiates. I was addicted to sleeping pills. I was addicted to uppers. And the reason why is that during the height of the war, I mean, we're on a pager, right? So you're going out and you're conducting these nightly raids or reconnaissance missions and everything. And in daytime, you know, you come back and you sleep. But if there's a daytime HVI target, you're gonna get, your pager's gonna go off and you're gonna get in and do what you need to do, even those day. So it's, it's never a, a cycle. It's, it's gonna happen anytime, the missions, right? So you never really rest, right?

• 2:50:43Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:50:43Tu Lam?

  In these combat deployments.

• 2:50:47Tu Lam?

  So, you know, the recy missions, I mean, we have to stay awake 72 hours sometimes, maybe seven days, 10 days, depending on the op. You know, I'm not saying stay awake, but you're, you're sleep deprived. You're, you know, you're not eating right. You're laying in some kind of old abandoned mall or somewhere across Baghdad in a hide site.

• 2:51:09Shawn Ryan?

  And you're hypervigilant.

• 2:51:10Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 2:51:11Tu Lam?

  Yeah, so, you know, they gave us, um, they gave us uppers, you know, to stay awake for that long time. And then when you come off of that op or you can't sleep because your mind is spinning on when does that pager gonna go off again? So you know, you take downers, which was, you know, Ambien, which is a sleeping pill, and you know that could be addictive.

• 2:51:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:36Tu Lam?

  Right? So it caused you to change your mood, right? Change your, you know, change your mood sometimes. And, and for us, a person that's in that much pain, you don't wanna be in that painful state. So you wanna always constantly change your mood or you wanna mask it.

• 2:51:51Tu Lam?

  So, um, that was my roller coaster, man, you know? I was, I was really addicted. And you ever had a moment in your life where you look in the mirror and you're just not happy with who you are?

• 2:52:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I've had several of those.

• 2:52:08Tu Lam?

  Hmm. So, you know, my wife was going up into Denver. She was working in these jobs. I was laying around in this, um, bed all day. And I was just so tired, man, like just really rundown, you know? Fatigue, my body's aching, um.

• 2:52:28Tu Lam?

  I just had enough.

• 2:52:31Tu Lam?

  Had enough.

• 2:52:34Tu Lam?

  And I wanted a moment of change. I really wanted that, but I didn't know how. I was, um, sitting on my couch one day in a dark house, you know, I had a blanket wrapped around me. My wife was up working in Denver and was just really feeling down that day. It was just a bad day.

• 2:52:54Tu Lam?

  You ever stared at an empty TV that's off? You're sitting there staring at a TV that's not even on.

• 2:53:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, I have.

• 2:53:05Tu Lam?

  So the house was dark and I had a blanket wrapped around me and I, I don't, I was walking around the house and I can't tell you what drew me to the final location. You know, I walked around this dark house and

• 2:53:19Tu Lam?

  somehow I ended up in my office. You know, I have a war room of all my war trophies. I have a huge library because I'm a big reader. And it put me in front of my bookcase. Don't even know how I got there. Don't even know why I'm opening up my, my bookcase and my hand reached in there without even looking. I'm gonna pull it out, the Book of Five Rings.

• 2:53:45Tu Lam?

  Haven't read this book since I was 13. You know, and the Book of Five Rings, if you don't know, it was written by Ronan back in the late 1500s. He died, uh, after, um, writing the Book of Five Rings, uh, in a Buddhist cave where he meditated. He was a warrior. He was a philosopher. He was a gardener. He was a renowned swords, master swords, swordsman. You know, undefeated as a warrior. And this Ronan fought in major wars and he killed a lot of people and he, um, the story is that, you know, he, he came to a point in his life that he needed peace.

• 2:54:25Tu Lam?

  And he retreated to, uh, Kuhomoto, Japan, where, uh, it was a mountainous region in Japan and used to have been all covered in water, you know? Back in the, you know, the, uh, prehistoric days, that whole area and used to been, Japan's an island, you know? And so it's a lot of coral reefs in this, this area. So imagine the terrain, rugged, uh, mountainous terrain, coral reefs.

• 2:54:51Tu Lam?

  There was a Buddhist temple there and Misashi went there and he meditated.

• 2:54:57Tu Lam?

  There and found his peace. For three years, he meditated and reflected on his life. And at two o'clock in the morning, he said it on the, on the book. He, he finally, after meditation for three years, he picked up the ink and he wrote The Book of Five Rings. Ten days later, he died in the Buddhist cave. You know, when I picked up this book, you know, I opened up the book and I didn't know even what I was looking at, you know, and it was a passage that said, all your strength, all your, all your love, all your passion is within you. Everything exists within you. Don't look anywhere else.

• 2:55:42Tu Lam?

  The answer is within you, nowhere else, you know? And you know what was really unique was at that time, I was looking for the answers everywhere else. I was looking for happiness and success and everything externally. You know, so I would call my, my stepfather and I'm like, hey, man, how did you do it? How, how did you do it? How did you do a career and, and get over that war? You didn't have an answer. I'll call my teammates, you know, hey, guys, how's it going? What you guys up to? You know, I was looking for the answers everywhere else.

• 2:56:21Tu Lam?

  So Masashi, you know, that, that, that book, The Book of Five Rings, reminded me that everything is within. All of our love, all of our compassion, everything is within. I needed to fix this broken man, you know, spiritually. So I remember closing that book and um, you ever had a moment of rage when you look in the mirror and you're just like, I really hate this person? Mm hmm. It was rage. It wasn't anger. It was rage. I was very upset at the path. I lost myself, you know? So I remember opening up my, my medicine cabinet and things started falling out from all the medication that was in this cabinet.

• 2:57:03Tu Lam?

  I mean, guys, you know, how many, how many veterans have died from overdosing drugs? I mean, that's a normal thing nowadays, right? It's sad. Yeah. So I saw this dropping down and.

• 2:57:19Tu Lam?

  I don't know, I just had that rage, that that fire. So I took it, I dumped it all down the toilet, I flushed it, every, everything I had. Let me tell you what happens when you go quit Code Turkey. After, I don't know, five to eight years of being on these meds. You know, that wall, that numbness that you talk about, that wall that we, that holds us from the realities of life, where that wall is gone. And I felt it, man. I felt the weight of the world. It came, my whole life can crash in hell, because I didn't have the, the chemicals, right, to block it. So I felt it.

• 2:58:00Tu Lam?

  It, if you think about a stream of water, all that emotion hit me at once. And, you know, it was really hard. It was a really hard time in my life. And, um, that's when I, I reflected, right, like Masashi. So I basically took his concept and I closed myself off to the world. Right, and there was a, in my office, you know, I set up a meditation area, you know, and I made a promise to myself that I need to find my here and now, you know? So when I say that is when, when people say, what's that mean here and now? You know, what does Zen mean? What's that mean? You know, how many times have you gone throughout your day in subconscious, you're just thinking

• 2:58:44Tu Lam?

  about, man, you're thinking about more negative stuff? You know that a normal human being thinks about seventy-five percent of their life, like their day, seventy-five percent of their day is thinking about negative stuff? I did not know that. Monitor your thoughts. Seventy-five percent of your day, a normal human being, seventy-five percent of their, they're focusing more on the negatives, they're focusing on the anxieties of the future, they're focused on mistakes of the past. So you're always living within those two time zones, the past or the future, never in that present moment, you're never there. In that present moment.

• 2:59:22Tu Lam?

  And in all of time, in the past, future, present, the present encompass all of time. What you do now reflects your future. What you do now is will either get you over your past or imprison you from your past, right? So I, I, I realized that and, um,

• 2:59:44Tu Lam?

  You know, I reflected. And man, you know, I made my share of mistakes. I'm a human being. And the first step was forgiving myself. I wrote it all down. You know, I had this book and I wrote it all down and I remember getting into, uh, I wrote down mindfulness meditation was a practice I wanted to get into. Now, when I was out in first group, you know, I travel all through Asia, you know? So I got to see the monks, like I meditated with the Tibetan monks, the Thai monks, you know, the Philippine, I meditated, they were more Catholic, but there were certain countries that are very Buddhist and I meditated and I, not that I'm Buddhist, but I, I, I

• 3:00:26Tu Lam?

  wanted to learn the practice of zazen here and now. Now, I wanted to bring you back. I was doing mountain operations in, um, in Lai, India, which is the border of Pakistan. So we're doing a mountain warfare training. So you're at eighteen thousand five hundred feet, right? So you're carrying oxygen tanks up there. We're doing cliff assaults. And on the weekends, you know, we have time off and I would go to the temples. And there was this Tibetan monk. It was after my, uh, my time in the Philippines, you know, the war in the Philippines, we lost some teammates in the Philippines and, and, uh, the Philippines was, it was cruel,

• 3:01:06Tu Lam?

  man. You know, the, the, the Abu Saeif Bannets with rape, murder, kill, you know, the, uh, the, the Christians and Catholics in that area because they wanted an independent Muslim state. So after my time there, there was, uh, there was pain there from that, you know? So, um, I had a linguist with me and I went to go visit to Tibetan monk and I asked the linguist to translate for me. And I asked the monk, you know, why is the world so cruel?

• 3:01:39Tu Lam?

  You think, you think about this, Sean, like, you know, I was born out of war. You know what I mean? So that's, that, that's a legitimate question for me. Why, why is it so cruel? And the monk shook my hand, took me out back of the temples and there was a dirt courtyard. Right, and he, the monk took a stick and he drew a circle onto just dirt ground. And he sat there and he had these two sacks that he threw outside of the circle. And one sack was full of black rocks and the other sack was full of white rocks. And he told the, the linguist, he said, um, when he, he would sit here for years.

• 3:02:24Tu Lam?

  You know, four years is what kind of is coming to my mind right now, but he sat there for a long time, every single day.

• 3:02:33Tu Lam?

  And he said he would look at this circle on the ground and when he would think of a negative thought, he would take a black rock and cast it into this circle in the dirt. And he said for many years, you know, he, he was, he, he was casting black rocks into the circle. And eventually, um, he started casting white and now it's all white rocks. And I'm like, whoa, what changed? Why, why did negative to the positive? How's that changed? And he said, it's simple.

• 3:03:07Tu Lam?

  The human being, we don't, we go through life focusing on the negatives. And if, unless you know what you're, you're thinking about subconsciously, then you can't do anything about it. So because I'm totally aware of my thoughts, my negative thoughts, then I'm able to influence my negative thoughts. But I'm unaware of this, then I go through living life negative. And the world is so cruel because people are unaware of the negative in this world, the evils of this world. And if they, and he said, if people are able to control their emotions, the world will be less cruel. Makes total sense. It does. Right, if we're able to control our emotions.

• 3:03:52Tu Lam?

  So I thought about that, right? What was weird is fast forwarded to now this dark room depression. That image came back in my mind. When I was war gaming, how am I going to get through this depression? Right? So I Googled, right? The reasons for laying in bed all day in a dark room. And the word depression popped up, well, that can't be, that can't be. So I re Googled. Causes for being fatigued post-war. Depression popped up PTSD, I'm, oh, no. So it worried me enough where I went to go see, you know, a doctor. And the doctor's like, look, son, you know, this is normal.

• 3:04:36Tu Lam?

  You've been through it. You have depression. Here's some antidepressants, good luck. You see? The army, the military practices Western style medication, right? Western style medicine is I'm going to fill you up with meds to make that go away. But all of it's temporary. The eastern side of medication is internal. Right? You're not relying on the external, you're relying on the internal to heal your body internally. So the monk said that it resonated with me and I wanted to walk the path of eastern practice.

• 3:05:16Tu Lam?

  All right, so it started off with me carrying a book notebook around and writing down my thoughts throughout the day. And my hard days, I would write the deepest notes. And I would practice meditation every morning, every afternoon and every night. The monk did say to me that I say, hey, hey, monk, what's the best form of meditation? I asked him that. And the monk smiled and he said, the one that you do every day.

• 3:05:45Tu Lam?

  So I Google, right? Mindfulness meditation. So I got the, you know, the the Khan op. I got that down. I'm like, OK, I can do this. I can do this. How hard is it to sit there and just concentrate on your breathing? It can't be that hard. I focus on my breathing. That's it. Nothing else. So I was so confident. I bought a meditation seat mattress that you sit on the ground. Bought it on Amazon. I'm like, this is gonna be an easy day. So I went down into my quiet office. I closed the door. Closing the door means I'm trapping my spirit in that room. The spirit walks in that room. If I'm talking to you right now and you're thinking about your wife,

• 3:06:29Tu Lam?

  then your mind drifts over to wherever she's at. If I talk about your past, your mind then drifts back to your childhood. Your mind is always floating. How do you capture that? So in my Khan op, I was like, well, if I lock this door, then my spirit is locked in here with me. So then I sat down. I started into my meditation practice of breathing, you know, where you focus only on the breathing. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. I'll tell you what, I thought about Yemen, Libya. I thought about my wife up in Denver. I thought about everything else but breathing.

• 3:07:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:09Tu Lam?

  The noise. The noise. I I've been hearing this noise for so long and you just can't turn off that noise because you've been doing this every single day for, I don't know, your whole life. So how can you reprogram a mind that's used to going to? Your mind is free floating like this. You're not controlling it. Man, I failed. I failed the first day, the second day, the first year, the second year.

• 3:07:40Tu Lam?

  Around the third year, I was sitting out in the deck, right? Now, when I say I failed, I went down there every morning and I did it. Every afternoon, I did it. Every nighttime, I did it. Even though I was failing, I was sitting there over and over and over and doing it.

• 3:07:57Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you attempting? Like, what was your daily? Did you have a time limit or?

• 3:08:03Tu Lam?

  Yeah, yeah. So initially, I was overachiever. I was like, I want to go thirty minutes. And then it cracked down to two minutes. And then it went to five minutes. And now I'm back up to forty-five minutes.

• 3:08:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:08:15Tu Lam?

  Right? So, so I had to go back down because I couldn't lock in at that long of the iteration. My mind started drifting.

• 3:08:25Tu Lam?

  You know? So when I was failing all this, man, I was really depressed because I'm trying to make myself better and I'm failing and failing and failing every single day.

• 3:08:36Tu Lam?

  It was around the third year, I was sitting outside on the deck and I was just enjoying the day. You know?

• 3:08:47Tu Lam?

  And heard the birds chirping. Let me, let me explain this to you. My mind was never there enough where I can hear birds. It was always somewhere else. I haven't heard birds since the beginning of the war.

• 3:09:05Tu Lam?

  You can hear them, obviously, right? I can hear the noise, but I never really said, wow, how beautiful is that?

• 3:09:10Shawn Ryan?

  You weren't present.

• 3:09:13Tu Lam?

  And so those were the signs and I wasn't really seeing it in the beginning. But later on, I started catching on, like, I have to be present to hear those birds. I have to be present to see the sun come up.

• 3:09:50Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient Survival. Spec Ops Grade Nutrition.

• 3:09:58Tu Lam?

  You know, so now I was slowly indoctrinating myself to live in the present moment.

• 3:10:06Tu Lam?

  Okay, I was still failing meditation. Right, also during that time of me finding my peace, you know, I entrepreneur a company, Ronin Tactics. Ronin tying it back into the Book of Five Rings. Masashi, the words that gave me the courage I needed to take the first steps in finding my peace. So that's why I was Ronin.

• 3:10:29Tu Lam?

  That's why I call myself Ronin Tactics. Because at the birth of my company, I was at the lowest point in my life. And Ronin, if you understand that word, means masterless. Right? Wade Man, wonder, but it also means during the frugal periods of Japan, disgrace.

• 3:10:50Shawn Ryan?

  It does, it means disgrace.

• 3:10:52Tu Lam?

  Right? So at that point, I was really low, so that's why I named myself initially, I named myself Ronin, because

• 3:11:01Tu Lam?

  I was embarrassed to be in my own skin.

• 3:11:04Tu Lam?

  So when I was starting to practice the form of meditation, around three years, I started getting into it. But you know, what's really funny is because I was starting my company, and I'm a really big martial artist, and I started just filming my training events. I started going around and teaching. That's part of my healing process. That's why you see me traveling all through America. I can, I can easily be in Colorado and just teaching Colorado and all that, but that's not the journey I wanted to take. The journey I wanted to take was take my wife and for us to experience our new journey together, and our steps together, in helping to reshape our Americans.

• 3:11:43Tu Lam?

  Right, and I could start doing that by the human beings that swore allegiance to God and their community to protect that community, so our police officers. If I want to affect a community, right, as a Green Beret, I trained the command of force that sworn an allegiance to protect that community. So, that's where I started. I started with the police officers. Right, so it became a warrior in the garden. You know, people ask me, "What's that look like, the warrior in the garden?" I don't know what that looks like, but I am a warrior in the garden because I took my life experience, into combat experience, I'm giving back to what I perceive as the good in this world.

• 3:12:28Tu Lam?

  Right? And if I want to protect my communities in our country and make it better, then I train the people who swore allegiance to that community. I also trained some hands, you know? So during that process, me traveling around the United States, and I call it, my friend call it ninja camp, because I start off with combatants, right? And I go into the bushido and the way and the mind of a warrior, and the responsibilities that we need to, and the proper way of living, you know, as a warrior. And then I go into the skills of lethality. Because how do you control violence, Sean?

• 3:13:04Shawn Ryan?

  With violence.

• 3:13:06Tu Lam?

  That's right. So I give the good in this world, the art of violence, right, at that level that I fought in, I give them that with the way behind it, which is compassion. So now you have this, this skill set with compassion, right? And you control the hate and the violence and the evil in this world through violence, right? So, I teach them that, and then through that process, I started filming, I started posting on, on social media, and I got an email from the History Channel. So the History Channel, they knew I'm a big knife guy, right?

• 3:13:47Tu Lam?

  And they're like, "Hey, would you be interested in being on a TV show?"

• 3:13:54Tu Lam?

  And you know, this is what I want to talk to you about, man, because being a team guy, right, our world is so secret, right? We walk and we hang out with each other during operations and after work because who else can we talk these stories about? Who else can we vent that off to? Who else is read on?

• 3:14:19Shawn Ryan?

  There's nobody.

• 3:14:20Tu Lam?

  So you're very alone during that. And the only peers that you have is your team guys, if they're even read on to that project. Right? So I realized this and, you know, I wanted to change, right? So I started promoting my training, the training side of the house of Ron started picking up. All of our events, I can truly tell you, man, all of our events sell out, you know, even to this day. And it's very successful. Ninja camp, you know? So the History Channel contacted me, it was their talent team, and they're like, would

• 3:15:05Tu Lam?

  you like to be a co-host on a show for this show called Forge and Fire: Knife or Death, which is like Ninja Warrior, where they run through an obstacle course with a blade. I'm like, oh, how cool is that, right? I'm like, what do you need me to do? And they're like, I just need you to bring your expertise in. So talk about the geometry of the blade, talk about, will this blade do good as a forging blade, as chopping blade, based off of your survival skills? Because I know my knives, you know? I had to use those tools to fabricate living quarters in the jungle, you know? So I know my blades. And we linked up with, you know, the host of the show, which is Bill Goldberg, WWE wrestler, you know?

• 3:15:50Tu Lam?

  It was really cool because we hit it off, you know? So they flew me into Atlanta, which is the new Hollywood, you know, Atlanta, Georgia. And when I say that, it's a lot of the shooting in Hollywood is going on in Atlanta now, just tax breaks and location. So they had this old abandoned hangar, you know?

• 3:16:12Tu Lam?

  My first day on the set. Pull up limo, pulls me into this compound, right? And the security guard checks me in and then my assistant comes running out. She introduced herself and she walked me to a movie star trailer. It was huge, man, this movie star trailer. And I want to say this is I'm not used to this. I'm used to living in the dirt, the mud, eating like crap. You know, so now I have two assistants. I had a my name on, it said talent on the door and they had this movie star trailer. And that next to me was Bill Goldberg, his movie star trailer.

• 3:16:55Tu Lam?

  I'm like, what's going on here? So, you know, the producer comes in, introduce himself saying, you know, it's great to work with you. This is your lines. They sent me my strip, my scripts and I had to recite the script, you know? And then I had a makeup artist come in and put makeup on my face. And I had a tone coach come in and talk to me in tones, you know? It was really weird. And we would hang out in the trailer, right? Basically, you know, all morning and then until they need you on the set. So then they they call me to land to the set, right? So my assistant hangs on the door. She goes, sir, I need you on the set. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I come out.

• 3:17:37Tu Lam?

  I walked 15 yards from my front entryway to a golf cart. And the assistant would drive me literally 50 yards down the street to set. I couldn't walk there.

• 3:17:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:51Tu Lam?

  So they drive me down there and I step off of the go, of the golf cart. And the makeup artist then looks at my makeup just in case it might have smeared for me. Riding 50 yards down.

• 3:18:02Shawn Ryan?

  The 15 second golf cart ride?

• 3:18:04Tu Lam?

  Yeah. And, man, they had 15 cameras on us, you know, on tracks, you know, you do. Big time production, you know? They had 150 people on the set.

• 3:18:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:18:17Tu Lam?

  You know, setting up the stage, the background. It was, it was really cool. Had these fire barrels burning. It was just, whoa, this is Hollywood, you know? Bill Goldberg comes in, really, really cool dude, you know? He has a presence to him. And he was reading on the script, him and I hit it off, we're still friends to this day. But I want you to talk about this first day, right? So the producers in my face, talking about how I should act. I had a fiber optic earpiece in with the control room was talking to me and how I should, what conversation I should have about the blade, like to go into that blade. All right, so what, talk to me about the geometry and I believe so. I'm like, oh, the geometry and that way, you know?

• 3:19:02Tu Lam?

  I'm here on these earpieces, makeup artist going and I had my assistant asked me what I want for lunch. You know, so it's really like, I was, I was having a little bit anxieties.

• 3:19:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:13Tu Lam?

  Is out of my environment, because you know what was going on in my environment? In my mind was about 30 yards to that front door. That door is a metal saw core door, it swings open. That's my escape route. This is my exit route. Why is this guy so close to me? I'm looking at threats, I'm looking, that's what we're trained to do, right? So I had to like, close off that, that mindset and go, okay, too, you're in this present moment. You're in Hollywood, right?

• 3:19:43Tu Lam?

  Somehow I made it through it, you know, and we filmed for three seasons. It was a successful show. And, but during that time of filming, I was still traveling around United States with my wife and I would train.

• 3:19:59Tu Lam?

  And we were developing our business in, in, in Ronin Tactics as in, you know, merchandise. So it was really taking off for us.

• 3:20:10Tu Lam?

  I was still depressed. I was still fighting it, right? So every day I'll meditate, I was going through all this and then Infinity Ward, which is Call of Duty, contacts me and say, hey, we're really interested to have you capture your motions on the game, your movements, right, your martial arts. So, you know, we had an initial conversation with them. They wanted to capture my movements, you know, it's just.

• 3:20:39Tu Lam?

  We were just so busy, you know, so I didn't think too much of it. We did talk to him, but I just didn't think too much of it, you know, just wanted to capture my movements. And then we flew out to San Francisco where I was training with their law enforcement teams on close quarters combat. And then, uh, you know, they follow me on social media and they're like, hey, you're in San Francisco. We want to fly you from San Francisco to LA.

• 3:21:03Tu Lam?

  So here I am doing CQB training and in two days I got to fly to LA and interview with Infinity Ward, you know? So my wife and I, we flew into LA and they took us into their, their compound, basically. It's a more secure compound than a special forces compound. I mean, it's, it's legit, you know, they know what they're doing. So, um, we signed them on, we met the, the president of Infinity Ward and

• 3:21:32Tu Lam?

  we hit it off and he asked me to be a part of the game.

• 3:21:37Tu Lam?

  He wanted Ronin to be a part of the game. So that's how I was entered into the game. We do motion capture for them. So a lot of the martial arts moves, the gunfighting scenes, uh, it's coming up with our new contract with them. So, um, it was a huge journey and then, but I think what, what's really unique about Infinity Ward, Call of Duty, opportunities, and also the History Channel was, um, my platform, you know, it, it got bigger, right? So along with that comes, um, well, you have your haters, obviously, but along with that comes, I have a huge fan base. So why not, I'm working on myself.

• 3:22:21Tu Lam?

  Why not give others like the tools they need to find their happiness? So, you know, my healing process became me just writing my thoughts on Instagram. And then I found out that it helps other people and in that process I started healing.

• 3:22:37Shawn Ryan?

  Had you put together yet that all this good that you're injecting into the world is coming back around full circle to you?

• 3:22:43Tu Lam?

  It is.

• 3:22:44Shawn Ryan?

  With these opportunities?

• 3:22:45Tu Lam?

  Yeah, it was starting to come back around and, you know, at that time I didn't see it. I didn't see because I'm giving, I'm receiving, you know, I didn't see it like that. I just wanted to give because I'm healing that way. I was just healing that way, you know? One step at a time and I was like, man, I helped this person. I feel better about myself and I heal that way.

• 3:23:05Tu Lam?

  But I want to go back to this. So, you know, I, I started going and seeing a lot of professionals, like scientists. I, I would listen to lectures and, and how, how the human brain functions and all that, you know?

• 3:23:20Tu Lam?

  Because as special forces soldier, we dive into intelligence. Where we don't just fight a war. We look at the intelligence of situation and we develop a course of action in order to combat that. Well, my, my combat was in, within myself, right? I was fighting internal war, so I need to arm myself with intelligence. So I was going to these seminars, these doctors, these scientists and, and you know why 75% of our day is focused on the negative? Do you know why?

• 3:23:49Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 3:23:51Tu Lam?

  So, you know, everything goes back to the creation of a human being, right? So when we were created as cavemen's, our mind and body is hardwired, right? We're an animal. We're just an intelligent animal, but we're, we're still an animal, right? Every animal is born with a survival instinct. We see it, right? An animal that lives in a jungle, he has a survival instinct. That's what keeps him alive. A human being, since day one, has a survival instinct and our mind is connected to our body. We're highly intelligent, so that means that we can think about something that's very stressful and we'll feel that stress through our body.

• 3:24:35Tu Lam?

  Right? Think about like anxieties. When you think about something, it forms anxieties. You think about a loss or a failure. You have anxieties or whatever. You can feel it. You can physically feel this. Okay, so the human beings neurological pathways connected from the mind to the body. We're neurologically wired that way. Fast forward that, you know, fast forward that to modern times. Well, we're not being chased by saber-toothed tiger. We're not, you know, we're not trying to fight to survive for our next meal anymore. But what is today? What's today's saber-toothed tiger? What's today's threat? And I'll tell you, for a normal human being,

• 3:25:19Tu Lam?

  today's threat is the opinions of other people. And acceptance. Acceptance, opinions of other people on today's social world is social media. Right? When somebody talks bad about you, right? I think about how many kids are killing themselves today because they're getting insulted on a social media platform. Just words. Yeah. Right? But they're so focused on that because their survival instinct is saying, focus on that because that's negative. And you need to look at that because that's a threat to you. So imagine you can have a thousand people that says, you know, Sean, you're the man. Really respect you, man. Thank you for being such a great American. Then you have one guy who said, nope.

• 3:26:04Tu Lam?

  Do you focus on that? I do. You do. I do too. Because that's a natural instinct as an animal species. You're hardwired that way. You're going to focus on that because now that's negative. Right? Well, that's not a path to happiness. That might keep you alive, right? But that's not a path to happiness. So what I realized was my training and everything that kicked in, I will never find happiness.

• 3:26:35Tu Lam?

  If I continue to live with the same mindset that made me who I am in the military, I will never find happiness. So I went to Tony Robbins seminar. It's about leadership and life. And Tony Robbins, you know, claim to fame is he can change his physiology. He has this exercise that he does to change his physiology. And if the body is connected to the mind, if you change your physiology, your physical state, then you can change your mind and how it reacts. Remember that smile I talked about, smile and be brave? Yeah. Well, the brain is connected neurologically to a smile registers to your brain.

• 3:27:18Tu Lam?

  Everything is good, everything's okay, because you've been establishing that neurological pathway since you're a child. Smiling is good. Right? So now that your body is sending information to your brain, your brain is saying, hey, everything's good because you're smiling. Same thing. So Tony Robbins talked about if you have a bad day, you change your physiology and then that can change your mind state. So what he does is he changes physiology, it's like booting up a computer. Right? And then now he's going to inject positive thoughts into that computer, which is your brain. And that's how you do it. So I'm like, huh, that makes sense. It makes sense, but how's that happen? Right? So I went to his seminar because I wanted to learn it more.

• 3:28:02Tu Lam?

  And the guy took all these practices from around the world. He meditated with monks, he walked through fire. I mean, this guy's the real deal, you know? So I realized that majority of us, if we walk around, we focus on the negative and you're just going to be a negative guy. So if your survival instinct is to focus on the negative, and that's a human thing, how do you break it? You ever had something that happened to you and you can't shake it? You think about it all day, subconsciously, you just can't. It doesn't matter, you can beat your head to a wall and it's just there, it's always there. You can go cut the grass and it's still there in the background, talking to you. Yeah.

• 3:28:47Tu Lam?

  That's because you can't shake it. So Tony Robbins talked about changing physiology. So how do you do that? Right?

• 3:28:54Tu Lam?

  So you know, in the mornings is when I practice it the most nowadays, in the mornings. And the reason why I say that is if I'm able to wake up at a peak stake in the morning. You ever had a good morning with a lot of energy? And you feel like you can accomplish anything during the day?

• 3:29:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:11Tu Lam?

  You ever had a bad morning where you don't feel like doing anything?

• 3:29:14Shawn Ryan?

  Had those too.

• 3:29:15Tu Lam?

  So if I can tell you, if I could put your mind and body at a peak stake every single day, you think you're going to accomplish anything as a human being?

• 3:29:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:25Tu Lam?

  Right? So that's called living intelligently. So now I want it because now I understand how the the mind and body connection works. Right? I understand the intelligence, the situation. Now I can develop a course of action to intercept that. Right? So first is monitor my thoughts, going back to that monk. Certain monitor, I write down what I'm thinking. It was, man, it was so negative.

• 3:29:49Tu Lam?

  Just negative. And then I started changing my practice in the mornings. Just instead of meditating in the morning, right? I started throwing in other applications like gratitude.

• 3:30:04Tu Lam?

  You know, if I can express gratitude in the morning, then how can you not be happy? If you're grateful for everything in your life?

• 3:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  How are you expressing that?

• 3:30:16Tu Lam?

  Okay, so you have a lot of things that's great in your life, Sean. Have a beautiful family, a beautiful house, successful company. But yet you're focused on a negative. Why? Because of that animal instinct, it it forces you to focus on. But if I if I change your physiology and I inject, John, you have a great life. You have a beautiful family, you have a beautiful life and a beautiful company that you started yourself. Great job. And you inject that in every morning and you're grateful for that? How can you not have a great day? You're you're at a peak stake now.

• 3:30:51Tu Lam?

  Right, so I do, so my process now in the morning is I get up at four thirty in the morning. I changed my physiology is I take a shower and and for the next, for the last minute, I turn it to ice cold water.

• 3:31:08Tu Lam?

  And basically, I'm shocking my body. So I'm sending all these blood cells to my muscles to keep it warm, right? So now I'm truly alive. I could feel my body alive because muscle is rushing, I mean, blood is rushing through all my muscles to keep it warm. So I get out and get dressed and I go out to my quiet meditation place and there's a cross out there and I pray to God. Right, so prayer. So the thing is, I'm not here to talk about religion, right? But I am here to talk about if you believe in a higher form of living, right? If you believe in a higher purpose than yourself, a higher being, a creator, then you're going to live up to that creator.

• 3:31:53Tu Lam?

  You're going to live up to that power, the higher power. If you don't believe in a higher power, you're going to live up to yourself, which is addictions, selfishness. You're going to drive your whole day around everything that's good for you and not everything that's good for that higher power.

• 3:32:12Tu Lam?

  That makes sense. Okay.

• 3:32:15Tu Lam?

  So if you believe in that, right, now you can live up to the higher power. So first it was God. Right, and then I go into changing my physiology. So literally, I sit down and I change my breath, my breathing patterns. You think about when you're a seal, so when you hold your breath and you hold that breath and you exhale that breath, well, you have more oxygen in your brain. It changes your physiology. Right, so basically, I'm waking up my brain. I'm injecting more oxygen into my brain. So I take nine quick steps like and then I inhale my last breath at ten, ten seconds inhale, hold for ten seconds, ten second exhale.

• 3:33:01Tu Lam?

  And you, you're going to feel it. It changes your whole physiology.

• 3:33:07Tu Lam?

  Right, and then at that moment, when my brain's awake, I have a notebook.

• 3:33:13Tu Lam?

  And I physically, not thinking, I physically write down three to four things I'm grateful for in my life. You know, for me, it's, I'm grateful for my wife, her health and her love. I'm grateful for my parents, their health and support and love. I'm grateful for God and this day. I'm grateful for my health and I promise to this higher power that I will do everything within this day to be my best self.

• 3:33:44Tu Lam?

  So I inject those positive thoughts after I wake up the brain. And then after that, I go into meditation, so here and now. So basically, I'm training my brain to be in the present moment.

• 3:33:57Tu Lam?

  Okay, so I go into a form of meditation. It's called mindfulness meditation of zazen, where it's five seconds inhale, five seconds exhale, five seconds inhale, five seconds exhale. There's a posture, a form of meditation, you know. So I go into that and then I do about, for now, I do 45 minutes of that because I can lock in now. Back then, I couldn't, right? And as soon as that, man, I feel, it's like drinking coffee, right? That you feel that adrenaline going through your body, that that energy resonating through your body. They actually did a study on this monk that was meditating. And they had, I don't know, these spectrums of light,

• 3:34:42Tu Lam?

  and they found energy radiating from his body. No shit. Yeah, so I feel that's what's going on in my body. I feel incredible energy in the mornings. And after that, I burn it down, man. I go down to my gym and I destroy my body.

• 3:35:02Tu Lam?

  You know, depending on whatever fitness plan I have going on, that might, it changes. My goal changes and that changes. So the Tony Robbins Seminar,

• 3:35:14Tu Lam?

  this is the keynote here, and you're going to take away so much from this is...

• 3:35:21Tu Lam?

  There are moral needs of a human being. Tony talks about, he breaks it down into significance, certainty, uncertainty, love and connection, love and connection being the same thing, right? And then he has spiritual needs, which is growth and contribution. Okay, so a normal human being, man, you think about for us to be who we are, type A personality, to be who we were in the military, in the world and who we are in, in war. Man, you have to place a higher level of standard on yourself, right? You have this higher level than, than a normal person because you passed through that rigorous training. You have to have a strong mind.

• 3:36:06Tu Lam?

  So significance had to been your number one priority that you put as number one importance in your life because you have such a high standard. Non quit attitude. Because you hold yourself at a higher standard than anybody else. So significance is your number one. And that's going to get you pretty far in life when it comes to business and career because you're placing the higher standard first. Makes sense. And then being a SEAL or Green Beret, we work into uncertainty. We're not scared to take risk. That's why you're successful in your business. You're not scared to take risk. Right?

• 3:36:49Tu Lam?

  And then you have certainty and then you have love and connection. Now, where I went wrong was what worked for me in the military, I was trying to take that, what made me so successful and replicate that into the next evolution of my life, which is now business. Public exposure, fame, you know, being in, in TV shows and video games. I was trying to take what worked for me and made me significant in the army and trying to replicate that in a civilian sector and it didn't work. I never found happiness, but my career and my success in business was growing. But I wasn't happy.

• 3:37:31Tu Lam?

  I place too much emphasis on significance. And so after this Tony Robbins seminar, I realized that whatever you place value as first as a moral value would decide how you're gonna live. So you place significance first, Sean, because you're this badass Navy SEAL. And then now you go into a business world and you're this huge, successful person because your significance is first. A guy on social media who is jealous of your success badmouth you, now you focus on that because you place significance first. You care about what that other person think because that's so important to you

• 3:38:12Tu Lam?

  because significance is what's driving you in your life. I was that way. I was never happy. So I would place significance with compassion, love. You know, I place that first now. And love is tied to gratitude. Gratitude is tied to happiness. Right? Significance is tied to, yes, it's a powerful energy that can get you there. But the negative is you're concentrating what other people say about you. You care about living for somebody else's opinion because you value significance.

• 3:38:53Shawn Ryan?

  I think that also ties into ego.

• 3:38:56Tu Lam?

  Yes, huge. Do you believe me when I say majority of the team guys have a huge ego?

• 3:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  I, I more than believe it, I know. I know it.

• 3:39:07Tu Lam?

  Yeah, I was guilty for that. You know, because that's the culture. You just don't see it until you step away from that culture. You know, and you know, and I'm not bad mouthing the culture. You have to be who you have to be when you're there. And that's the fire and the drive that makes you who you are on the teams. But in this evolution, it's not gonna, it's not gonna work for you. It's not.

• 3:39:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:33Tu Lam?

  You know, like I said, you're gonna, like, the brain is hardwired like a caveman, you know, since the beginning of time. So you're focused on, because you value significance, you're focused on the negative.

• 3:39:46Tu Lam?

  So easily if you just place significance, it's still there. Your higher standard is still there, but you just don't place it first anymore. So when somebody badmouths me, when somebody's jealous of my success, when somebody ridicules me because they don't, man, I'm a human being, man. You know, and I have my own opinions on things and not everybody's gonna agree with you or like you, right? So how do you deal with that? You know, when somebody insults me online or in front of my face, or not really in front of my face, but when they do it online, you know, I just remind myself that I don't hold significance that important anymore.

• 3:40:28Shawn Ryan?

  Would you say the first step to that is probably don't just, don't engage?

• 3:40:33Tu Lam?

  Yeah, because, you know, we agree this is a hateful world. We saw the worst in humanity in our old former jobs. We saw the worst. So in a hateful world, what you gonna do? Give more hate?

• 3:40:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:48Tu Lam?

  It takes a stronger person to show compassion. So I do, I show compassion. So when a hater hates on me, you know, I'm grateful. I am actually grateful. I look at that, I'm like, wow, so grateful that you fabricated a fake account and you're talking to me, you're putting me down. So you're spending your day and your energy on somebody you don't even like. Thank you. Thank you for thinking of me. And because you have no control over your emotions, which is the cause of majority of the hate in the world, this is how you act out.

• 3:41:27Tu Lam?

  So I'm grateful that first you took time to insult me like that because you're thinking of me and you're viewing me at a distance. But second, I'm grateful because I don't want to be like you.

• 3:41:42Tu Lam?

  And I forgive you.

• 3:41:45Tu Lam?

  So what I just did, think about what I just did. I changed something that was negative into something that's positive. So it doesn't stay in my mind anymore because it's not negative, so I'm not going to think about it. It's defeating that survival mindset. Yeah. Now I look at that as, wow, that's a win. I'm grateful that you did that. So now I just don't care.

• 3:42:44Shawn Ryan?

  Nutrient Survival. Spec Ops Grade Nutrition.

• 3:42:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know,

• 3:42:54Shawn Ryan?

  you had mentioned before that you've written down all your flaws when you left the team. And

• 3:43:03Shawn Ryan?

  I think the most significant flaw maybe was kindness. Said you did not have kindness and you articulated that that was a weakness. You know, most guys coming out,

• 3:43:19Shawn Ryan?

  probably just about everybody I know, would not consider not having kindness a weakness. And so

• 3:43:29Shawn Ryan?

  being around that for 23 years.

• 3:43:33Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you don't know what you don't know. How did you figure out that by not, by not having kindness in your heart or in your daily life, that was a weakness? Because I think it's actually quite the opposite in the team where kindness would be considered weakness.

• 3:43:52Tu Lam?

  So you gotta think about like two different evolutions, right? So what I drove as a weapon in this evolution, which is hate, you know, because in war you do use hate as a weapon. You know, you drive off of that because you're, I mean, you are fearful for your life in a gunfight. So you use that aggression, that hate. But how do you take hate and put into a civilian world and business? It doesn't work. Right? And yeah, what the team guys, you know, and when I say this is, you know, when I left the teams, I left the teams, man. You know, the team life, and you can back me up on this, is a very opinionated world.

• 3:44:35Tu Lam?

  You're a type A personality, you know, so guys that they're going to tell you what they think and their opinions on things and it's just the way it is, you know? So when you step away from the teams, now you start hearing your own voice and what's truly important to you. And for me, it was happiness. So if I hold on to hate and my end state is to be happy and complete and successful in my life and be happily married with my wife, then that kind of goes against that. So I had to kill off the energy that kept me alive. It's like killing off your best friend. You know? So kindness, let's talk about that.

• 3:45:19Tu Lam?

  At one point, you know, and after the war, I realized I'm not a kind human being anymore. I'm not mean or rude or anything. I'm very respectful, but I was just, I wasn't where I wanted to be in kindness. So I would get dressed, I would go out in town and hang out at Starbucks and when somebody walks through the door, I'll open up the door for them and they have a nice day.

• 3:45:43Tu Lam?

  I'll go up to the counter, I'm like, "Thank you so much for making me this coffee." "I swear, I go here because of you and you make the best coffee." "Thank you so much," and I brighten up their day.

• 3:45:54Tu Lam?

  You think that was hard?

• 3:45:56Shawn Ryan?

  I do.

• 3:45:56Tu Lam?

  That was very hard.

• 3:45:59Tu Lam?

  It was very hard to even talk to a human being.

• 3:46:04Tu Lam?

  But because I wanted to be kind, right, I needed to change who I am as a human being. So I went out and I was polite and kind, and after a year, I was kind again.

• 3:46:16Tu Lam?

  You see, and the kindness led me to happiness.

• 3:46:22Tu Lam?

  So you have to pick your energies, right, in life. You have to pick your battles, your energy. And for me, I realized that I've put too much emphasis on significance, and that's why I failed in this evolution. I still have it, you know what I mean? You still see me getting up at 4:30 in the morning, I still meditate, I still... So that's significance, but I just don't put value on that as so high anymore.

• 3:46:48Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a whole lot of sense.

• 3:46:49Tu Lam?

  Yeah, love and compassion is where I put it, because I realize that's tied into gratitude and God and everything else. So if I put that as the most important thing, then how can I not live my life in beauty, in peace?

• 3:47:04Tu Lam?

  And if I realize that something's affecting me, I know the practice of changing my physiology and getting rid of that thought. So I always have great days.

• 3:47:16Tu Lam?

  Took me a long time to come realize that, you know? And let's talk about the last two, right? So spirituality.

• 3:47:24Tu Lam?

  So you have your spiritual needs, as in growth and contribution. You think about this, Sean, like if you, you know, you accomplish all this, and then one day, let's say you retire and you don't want to work anymore, you don't want to educate yourself anymore or anything new, and you just want to relax and just chill out. There's no growth in your life anymore. Within six months, you're going to be depressed.

• 3:47:48Tu Lam?

  The reason why I'm saying this is because, you know, I'm in the Hollywood world and I I meet some very successful people and they're very depressed. You know, you would think like you're you're an actor, you make this amount of money, you got all this stuff, that's not what gonna make you happy.

• 3:48:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:04Tu Lam?

  Let's say you, you know, one of the proud days in your life is probably graduating buds, right?

• 3:48:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:09Tu Lam?

  Okay, so you you felt the top of your world. How long that lasts?

• 3:48:14Shawn Ryan?

  Not very long.

• 3:48:15Tu Lam?

  Exactly. So growth. Right? You can be this successful businessman, millionaire, entrepreneur of your own, you know, be this role model and everything, but if you're not really growing on a daily basis, you're gonna be depressed. Robin Williams.

• 3:48:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think that has to do with ego at all, though? You know, constantly growing?

• 3:48:40Tu Lam?

  Yeah, remember why I told you last night and I said, you know, if you let go of the ego and realize that you're in a new phase of your life, just let that go. Who cares?

• 3:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:53Tu Lam?

  You know who you are. Let go of that ego. You don't need to, you don't need to defend yourself against this person. Show them gratitude. Thank you for thinking of me. And then continue on with your own ways, you know? But ego is a huge, um, it stops you from living a complete life.

• 3:49:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:11Tu Lam?

  It stops you from learning, growing, and growth is spiritual, right? So growth, uh, every day I educate myself on whatever, you know? I'm a huge science guy, I'm a huge history guy, so I read, educate myself, I learn new uh, tradecrafts, you know, cameras, I I I'm an artist, I'm a gardener, you know what I mean? So I get into all that and I find that that balanced me from a warrior. You know, and I'm growing as a human being. The gym is huge for me because I push myself to muscle failure and through muscle failure is growth.

• 3:49:52Tu Lam?

  And then I, uh, contribution, right? So during COVID, my wife and I would go, um, and pack groceries for elderly people that cannot go out and, and, uh, and go shopping for their own food. So we packed foods for them to deliver to their homes. And that was contribution. Contribution being a Ronin, to give, to teach, you know? So that's how I, I, I overcame the depression.

• 3:50:25Tu Lam?

  By changing what was important in my life. Restructuring the order of what's important in my life.

• 3:50:31Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to quit living in the past? That's something that most, I would say the majority of guys coming out, uh, that, that's, it's a major hurdle and it's a hurdle that a lot of guys don't ever get over is living in the past and, and, and, and consistently comparing themselves to their peers or, or, or the guys that are, you know, coming in or, or it doesn't matter who. Anybody who's been in the community, it's, a lot of guys are consist, are consistently comparing themselves. Their, their service record to the next guy's service record. And it's just this never ending, you know?

• 3:51:16Shawn Ryan?

  It just never ends.

• 3:51:17Tu Lam?

  Yeah, absolutely. So you, that's, that's tied into ego, right? So let's say you're this really successful career commando. And, and then you got this young guy who came in and you're like, oh, back in my day, I did this, this, I had this, you know, you're nothing compared to what I went through. That's ego. Man, he's a great American, just like you. He's just, this is his error. Right? So first I stopped comparing myself. And I, I show gratitude to, to the team guys. Cause that's a hard life.

• 3:51:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it is.

• 3:51:50Tu Lam?

  Right? So I, first I show gratitude. Thank you for what you do. You're the next generational warriors. And they think they're better than me? Okay, you're better than me. Thank you.

• 3:52:00Tu Lam?

  I don't, I don't place significance verse anymore. So that's what I'm talking about. It ties into that. You know, when team guys can't let it go, that's because they're not living in the present moment. They're not applying to practice to live in the present moment. You can't just, oh, I wanna live in the present moment and that's it. No, you have to practice. You have to, you're gonna have to fail. You're gonna have to try, you know, every single day and whatever you do every day becomes who you are, right? So for me, it was to practice a meditation every single day to live in the present moment. Like I told you, it took me five years.

• 3:52:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, all this leads to, you know, happiness, right? And everybody says, you know, happiness, it takes, it takes a lot of work. It's, it's a, it is a decision you have to make every day, you know, to, to actually be happy.

• 3:52:53Tu Lam?

  And that's, that's the beautiful word you just said, decision. So individual as a human being, no matter your teams or your past or whatever, you have to make a decision as a human being right now that I don't wanna be like this anymore. You know, that's where that moment of me reflecting in the mirror and that rage that came across me, me dumping that medication down the toilet. That was the decision I made at that point that I would not take one more moment of this.

• 3:53:24Tu Lam?

  Decisions, right? Man, I still have team guys coming to me, ego tistic, go guys, talking and all that, bad mouthing other guys. And you know what I do? I separate myself from them.

• 3:53:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Good for you.

• 3:53:39Tu Lam?

  Yeah, it's just, for what?

• 3:53:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:42Tu Lam?

  You know, you wanna bad mouth another American?

• 3:53:46Tu Lam?

  Okay, you're, you're, you're, you're who you are then.

• 3:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:50Tu Lam?

  And I'm not gonna judge you, man. I know you're going through it. So I don't judge them.

• 3:53:56Tu Lam?

  You know, I wish them the best. But as for me, you know, I know I'm not perfect and I'm just trying to right my wrongs. And I'm trying to live my life as a human being to be happy. So that's what led to a lot of my success, you know, is it's really the more you give, the more you receive. You know, and giving was a healing process for me. So, you know, I went to Japan, you know. So after five years, we filmed for the History Channel. It was right before I got asked to go into the Finney Award Call of Duty.

• 3:54:37Tu Lam?

  I was at a moment of, I wouldn't say I was totally at peace, but I was controlling my emotions better, right? And I told my wife that I wanted to go to Japan. And I wanted to walk the path of Bushido of a Ronin. And she goes, what's that mean? I'm gonna go visit the forty-seven Ronins. And I'm gonna pay homage to them. And I'm gonna go to Kumamoto, Japan and visit Masashi's cave. And I wanna have a talk with Masashi. And she was like, what? What's that mean, right? So we linked up with our Japanese friends.

• 3:55:19Tu Lam?

  One's a journalist and he wanted to do a story of a modern day Ronin, you know? So when I went to Japan, they gave us the red carpet treatment, man. They really took care of us, you know? To be a foreigner, as in not Japanese, for them to treat me the way they did was a huge honor. When I say that is, they took me to Osumo Town where sumo wrestling was developed. You know, sumo wrestlers were wrestlers back in, because there were a farming society in Japan, right? So the sumo wrestlers would fight and then they'll It it basically kicks off the harvest seasons for them.

• 3:56:03Tu Lam?

  So it's tied into that culture of farming and stuff like that. So I went to old farming town in in Japan where sumo wrestling was started, the birth. And they took me to this old dojo where they closed down the dojo. And they had this, uh, they had this dirt floor and they had this bam, uh, they had this huge log that was embedded into the ground with the sumos was slapped, you know? And they literally, they put me in the center of the stage and they perform like they were practicing back in the eighth century. And they, uh, they bowed and they paid their respects to Ronin.

• 3:56:44Tu Lam?

  And then, um, we went to a four, so they shut down this four floors of, uh, there was this sword collector, an armor collector. He had swords dating back eight hundred years. Wow. You know, and what I want to do is I want to put this history onto you. You know, the swords and the armor. After World War Two, General Rick Arthur demanded off a a peace treaty, he demanded that the Japanese on or the surrender treaty, that they would turn in all their swords. Because he was eliminating the Bushido code from the Japanese. Right? So the Japanese were turning in their swords.

• 3:57:26Tu Lam?

  Okay, and then, um, the Americans, uh, they they banned its swords. They destroy majority of the swords. These are war stating periods Japan swords that fought in histories that were hammy down by generations. So when I sat there, these swords that were around me survived the war, the bombings. Right? Yeah. The war stating periods, you know what I mean? This should have not been in existence. This all went underground. All this art, the art of Budo had to go underground after World War II. Because they couldn't even practice the art of combat anymore. So all of that was underground.

• 3:58:11Tu Lam?

  So here I am, I'm sitting, I'm seeing all this armor, the swords and everything. The sword collector had this book and he would talk about the history of this clan. It was really cool what they did. And eventually, we came out to, my bladesmith, who is, he lives in the town where Oda Nobagata was a daimyo. So Oda Nobagata, if you look at my weapon on my M4, is the sakura symbol, the clan symbol. What that was his clan symbol. Oda rose up to be one of the most powerful daimyos in all of Japan.

• 3:58:53Tu Lam?

  He almost united all of Japan during war staying periods. And here I am in his hometown. And that's where I received my swords, Heaven and Earth. Wow. Right, so it was a huge ceremony. They presented to me traditionally how they would, you know, the two swords. And what's really cool about these swords is they were scanned into the video game, Call of Duty. Heaven and Earth. So those are the swords I slice up my guys with on Call of Duty, but that's where I received it. That's amazing. And then the final culmination was, we flew out to Kiyomoto, Japan.

• 3:59:34Tu Lam?

  And I had a driver meet us at the airport, and Ruthie and I, and we had our friends, which was, they live in California, but they were there. And we drove about an hour and a half from the airport up in the mountains to where Masashi Miyamoto found his peace, that number that, the Buddhist grounds, the sacred grounds. So we drove into the sacred grounds and there was a huge statue of Masashi meditating.

• 4:00:03Tu Lam?

  And there was this bell and then basically you got this line that comes down this rope. And you pray and then you supposedly what you do is you pray and you ring the bell and that sends it to the Buddhas, right, the God, their God.

• 4:00:20Tu Lam?

  So they had a lot of warrior, like Bushido stuff, like digging this monk grounds, right? Cause it's very warrior base. So then you walk from the parking lot to the entrance of the temples. Remember this is sacred grounds, right? So there was a monk out in the temples and you had to walk through the monk temples. And when you walk through the monk temples, they had Masashi stuff laying in exhibit, his swords, his pen where he wrote the Book of Five Rings, his scrolls, I mean, it was really cool. This was his original stuff.

• 4:00:59Tu Lam?

  And then you you walk through basically this coral reef area and this trail and it leads you to the cave, right, where he wrote the Book of Five Rings. So we we went to the cave and

• 4:01:17Tu Lam?

  you know, it was really weird that morning because you know, it's an open ground, like that's a tourist area. It's a highly popular area for tourists to come. That morning, it was only us. Nobody else was on that sacred ground. The driver even said, I never seen it this empty, you know?

• 4:01:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:01:38Tu Lam?

  Basically, you know, and he, so he stopped at the entrance of the cave and Ruthie asked me, you know, this is your moment. So I climbed up the coral reefs to the entry of the cave and that's where I saw the rock where Miyamoto wrote the Book of Five Rings. I don't know, man, it was, it was so surreal, you know, that emotion. I can't, I can't describe it, you know? So when I entered that cave, you know,

• 4:02:10Tu Lam?

  I bowed to Miyamoto, I bowed to Masashi. And I took off my boots and I climbed up in that rock and I sat there. The rock where he wrote the Book of Five Rings, I sat there and I overlooked,

• 4:02:24Tu Lam?

  you know, the sacred grounds, the Buddha's sacred grounds.

• 4:02:29Tu Lam?

  And I meditated.

• 4:02:31Tu Lam?

  And I said my peace, you know, that closed off the chapter of war for me.

• 4:02:37Tu Lam?

  You know, and then, and I thanked Masashi for his words. And I climbed back down the cave and then Ruthie went up there and, you know, they did their thing. But it was really spiritual for me, you know? And I would say that it was so surreal because, you know, in my darkest moments, when I was wrapped in that blanket, walking around the house defeated, it was Masashi's words from the Book of Five Rings written in 1645. And here I am in this cave, sitting at the very spot that he wrote that Book of Five Rings. And that's where I closed the book on war. Wow. And when I came out of the cave, I don't know, I just felt

• 4:03:23Tu Lam?

  at peace.

• 4:03:26Tu Lam?

  Focused. Did you feel a sense of relief? I felt hungry, as in hunger for life.

• 4:03:35Tu Lam?

  And I knew my path now as a Ronin was, you need to come back and you need to influence as much people as you can. You need to utilize any platform to try to better this world. You need to walk the path of Bushido. And you're in the dull phase of your life, which is to give back.

• 4:03:53Tu Lam?

  And it resonated with me, I'm in dull. And this is it. So you need to live it, live it up. So after I came out, I felt, you know, this, this urge of purpose again. And then we drove about 45 minutes to Masashi's final resting place where he was buried. Masashi, in his final moments, felt death setting in. In that cave, you know, he felt death setting in. So at that point, he was this master swordsman that, you know, he was well respected as a warrior. And he asked his closest retainers to help him onto his knees. Now death is setting in. Mm hmm. Right, his final moments of his life.

• 4:04:39Tu Lam?

  And they got him to his knees and he held his sword in a kneeling position, the warrior position, and that's how he died. Because the path of Bushido is to not fear death, is to embrace death.

• 4:04:53Tu Lam?

  So what Masashi did was, death was setting in, and he was gonna walk into the afterlife as a warrior with a sword in hand.

• 4:05:02Tu Lam?

  So, after he died, he asked to be buried, right? He wanted to be buried at this burial ground, was a sacred burial ground. That's where I was going to. And it was an entry to the, uh, a temple, right? And what Masashi wanted was his spirits, his spirit to wave at the future samurais,

• 4:05:28Tu Lam?

  you know, as they walk past that road, you know, where his burial grounds are at. His spirit wanted to remain there so he could see the warriors of the samurais, you know?

• 4:05:40Tu Lam?

  So we drove there and, um, I went to Masashi's burial ground and, and it was really cool, man. It was, it was very surreal. It was in the zen garden, Masashi's statue was there, you know? I paid homage to that Ronin, I thanked him. And, um, I closed off my chapter on war.

• 4:06:06Tu Lam?

  You know, so by the time I came back to America, I was Ronin.

• 4:06:13Tu Lam?

  I was ready. You know, when I say I was Ronin is, I had the courage, the purpose, and the energy now, and the spirit to walk this path.

• 4:06:24Tu Lam?

  And I've been walking ever since.

• 4:06:27Tu Lam?

  You know, so that was the story of how I I closed that chapter in the war. You know, but Ronin Tactics were just blast, man. You know, my wife, she has a master's degree, a business degree. So she spearheads the the business side of the growth of Ronin. And I'm the face and I communicate with, you know, the people that are hurting in this world. And I try to heal them through my words, through my practice. I try to set the example on social media because you think about this, Sean. Social media, man, it can be such a powerful tool, right?

• 4:07:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:08Tu Lam?

  Like, think about when we were growing up, man, right? If you and I, if there was no social media, you and I would never met.

• 4:07:16Shawn Ryan?

  Uh uh.

• 4:07:17Tu Lam?

  Right? You, these, these fans and followers, they would never be able to access you or talk to you. But now, so basically, I'm saying the world is a smaller place.

• 4:07:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, it is.

• 4:07:29Tu Lam?

  Right? World is a smaller place. They, what we do as a society is we take something that's so good, that can help so many people. And the people that can't control their emotions, they use that platform to put down other people, to ridicule them, to make fun of them, to create hate sites, to make fun of other people. Right?

• 4:07:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:55Tu Lam?

  So I never wanted that. And I wanted to use my presence, my fame, my exposure to better this world. Because why not? I have the platform now.

• 4:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:08:07Tu Lam?

  You know, if I'm a Call of Duty character, I I realize that, you know, the next generation, the younger generations are playing my character. Why not give them a word to better themselves? Why not show them the path? You know, if they want to live a full life, then they'll walk that path. It's up to them. But I will never ridicule somebody. Man, words can help so many people.

• 4:08:31Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you're doing a hell of a job, man.

• 4:08:33Tu Lam?

  Thank you.

• 4:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you really are. And that's a, that's an amazing journey, you know, that you just brought us through. And, you know, I mean.

• 4:08:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty speechless. That's amazing. And, and you did it yourself, you know, so.

• 4:08:57Tu Lam?

  You know, people don't get is like, you know, when I said I study how the mind works, I actually did.

• 4:09:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:04Tu Lam?

  You know, I mean, it's like you said last night, you taught yourself this? Yeah, I, I realized that I had an issue and it was a wound that I can't see. If, if you were to shoot me in the arm right now, I got shot in the arm, I see that wound, I could put a tourniquet on, stop that bleeding. But if I can't see the wound, where do I start?

• 4:09:27Tu Lam?

  Right, so the five years of reflecting was, was healing my wounds since childhood.

• 4:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:37Tu Lam?

  You know, because, you know, like I told you, you know, when I was going through it, and I was free, no oppress and doing all that, I didn't really think about it. I didn't tie in like I was a refugee now and giving back, never. Now, I knew that as a child, I knew that was a path, but when I was doing it, I wasn't thinking about that. It wasn't too like when I shut off the world and I reflected back on my life was like, you did do that.

• 4:10:09Shawn Ryan?

  You're a lot more, you know, in the moment than probably just about anybody I know. And, um, do you pick up on a lot of details in life, coincidences and, and, is your faith in a higher power stronger now that you're more in the moment? Because maybe you've seen, you know, you were able to connect some dots or certain things have happened that maybe you wouldn't have noticed if you weren't in the moment.

• 4:10:42Tu Lam?

  You know, I wasn't raised about religion. You know, my mother's Buddhist and she's a great person, great human being. That's the religion she was raised on. And I don't judge anybody on their religion. If you're a good human being, you're a good human being. You know, I know if you respect a higher power, I got that. It doesn't matter what God, long as you're an extremist or hurting other people off of religion. But I never had religion, Sean. You know, I didn't, I didn't go to church when I was a child. My, my stepfather, he, he, he wasn't a very religious. He's a great man, beautiful guy, but I wasn't taught that.

• 4:11:22Tu Lam?

  And you know, when I was going through, uh, growing up and, uh, as a young soldier in the military, you know, they have chapels and all that. And I'm sorry to say this, but I have to tell you, you know, I was going through Ranger training and, uh, I would go to church so I can just eat the bread because I was so fucking hungry. I was so hungry that course. And I knew like that would break me away. So it was all for the wrong reasons, you know?

• 4:11:47Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I didn't necessarily mean, uh, religion.

• 4:11:50Tu Lam?

  Yeah.

• 4:11:51Shawn Ryan?

  I just meant something greater than, you know.

• 4:11:53Tu Lam?

  So it wasn't into when I faced depression was when I had to reflect on a higher power.

• 4:12:03Tu Lam?

  You know, I mean, the universe, man, so big.

• 4:12:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:07Tu Lam?

  Right, so big. We're, we're but a grain of sand in this world.

• 4:12:14Tu Lam?

  We're nothing.

• 4:12:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:15Tu Lam?

  Our problems, our issues is nothing. But that higher power, man, that created all this beauty. If you don't, if you don't believe in that, like I said, you're gonna live for who you think you are.

• 4:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:30Tu Lam?

  Right? So when I believed in the higher power, when I accepted that, you know, when I, when I truly accepted it and I surrendered myself to the higher power, then that allowed me to have the energy to wake up in the morning and to live up to the expectation of the higher power. Because when I, when I wanna lay in bed and I don't wanna do anything, I say, no, I have to get up because I believe in this power.

• 4:12:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12:59Tu Lam?

  And that drives me every single day. And when somebody's mean to me or they're, they're cruel in their words, whatever, because I believe in a higher power, I look at them with more compassion.

• 4:13:11Tu Lam?

  Because you know what, man?

• 4:13:14Tu Lam?

  If a veteran talks bad about me, you know what I say to them? And I used to go, oh, whatever, you know? But now I go, he's going through it.

• 4:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:13:24Tu Lam?

  And I forgive him.

• 4:13:27Shawn Ryan?

  I believe in him, man. You know, I do. And I think, you know, I wouldn't say it was in doubt, but the final, I've seen a lot of little signs or, you know, whatever, kind of stuff that you tell somebody and they think you're full of shit. But the last one was that flag behind you right there is all I have to remember my best friend by, you know, who's dead now. And he died on September 4th. And, uh, and I come up here and talk to him, you know, every once in a while.

• 4:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and my wife does too. She got close with him, uh, towards the end of his days. And, you know, nobody really knows us, but, um, you know, we've been trying to have a baby and, and, uh, and she's pregnant now. Congratulations. Thank you. And my son is gonna be born on September 4th, the day my best friend died. That's powerful. And, uh, you know, or at least that's the due date. But that's not a coincidence. No. So I'm all in, you know, I believe in it too, man. But, but, um, you know,

• 4:14:50Shawn Ryan?

  I kinda wanna wrap this thing up too. And I just wanna tell you, I mean, I really mean that, that the journey that you've been on is amazing, you know, from birth all the way until now. And, uh, and, uh, you are, you know, helping a ton of people. And you are so full of wisdom, you know, that anybody that's willing to listen.

• 4:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  They have a lot to benefit from, you know, from listening to you. And so, thank you.

• 4:15:27Tu Lam?

  Thank you. I appreciate you. And like I say, you know, the power of the universe is what brought us together. And with your platform, you're doing some great things, man. And I, and I really wanted to utilize this platform to, to send a message out, you know, to so many people that are in pain, so many people that has loss in this world. You know, don't give in to the hate.

• 4:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:15:49Tu Lam?

  Right. Give in to the, the powers that are going to bring you to the higher level. Right. Don't give in to the hate. It's so easy to, you know, in today's world, it seems like that's becoming a norm. And that's why you don't see me really talking too much about the Asian hate thing.

• 4:16:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16:08Tu Lam?

  Because you know what, man, I faced with racism my whole life, my whole life. But that don't ever, that would never decide the way I'm going to live. And that's not the energy that I will ever project to others.

• 4:16:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16:22Tu Lam?

  You know, so it's through that pain, you find a higher purpose. So when people ask me, you know,

• 4:16:31Tu Lam?

  what was a Ronin, like what's that mean? It's to be able to submerge yourself in pain and suffering. Right. Because you understand by going through pain and suffering in life, that that will allow you to grow as a human being. The discomfort is through the growth, right? When we're discomfort, when we're uncomfortable about things, we change. If I take a lighter and I put it underneath your hand, right, and the light is not on, and I just put it there, you're not going to move. There's no pain. But if I light that thing and it burns your hand, you're going to move it. So you have to go where that pain is at. You have to go where the struggle is at, because that's where the growth is at.

• 4:17:16Tu Lam?

  That's the only way that you will have enough energy to change as a human being. And, you know, I think back to my path as a Ronin and where I am today. It was because I was eight years old. And I was crying in my bedroom because I was tired of being weak and defeated and ridiculed, spit on. I wanted to be a stronger human being and I knew that I needed to go through the struggles and losses in order for me to arrive at being this person that I wished to be in life. You know, along with that comes a lot of pain, you know, but pain is needed.

• 4:18:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, I just want to say thank you for coming on. I really, really appreciate your time and, and I cannot wait to get this out. So.

• 4:18:15Tu Lam?

  Absolutely, brother. Well, I appreciate you and thank you for everything you do.

• 4:18:18Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. And best of luck to you.

• 4:18:21Tu Lam?

  Thank you.

• 4:18:44Speaker 02

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