#230 – Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love

Kelsi Sheren is a veteran, artillery gunner, and founder of Brass and Unity. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get 14-day free trial – Justworks: https://justworks.com – Novo: https://banknovo.com/lex – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Kelsi’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/kelsiburns Kelsi’s Website: https://brassandunity.com Kelsi’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kelsie_sheren Charity: https://www.heroicheartsproject.org/ Do the F*cking Work (book): https://amzn.to/3mGhguF Notes from Underground (book): https://amzn.to/3mN5TRF Brothers in Arms (song): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhdFe3evXpk PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:50) – World War II (18:54) – Yeonmi Park, starvation, and mental health (33:10) – Kelsi’s 9/11 experience (36:39) – Becoming a soldier (43:07) – Artillery: The Hand of God (52:49) – Weapons training (1:10:35) – Pre-Deployment (1:26:42) – Arrival to Afghanistan (1:48:55) – Tragic war story (2:13:59) – Feelings after tragedy (2:17:41) – The Taliban (2:23:17) – Retrospective: 20 years in Afghanistan (2:39:57) – How war changes people (2:45:18) – PTSD (3:14:13) – Ayahuasca and mental recovery (3:46:09) – Love (4:04:12) – Advice for young people (4:07:33) – Death (4:13:22) – World War II

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Kelsey Sharon, Canadian Forces veteran artillery gunner who served in Afghanistan at 18 years old and came home with severe PTSD. She went on to found brass in unity, which creates unique jewelry, large part of the proceeds from which go to help rehabilitate the lives, limbs and mental health of veterans and first responders. She has a big personality, big heart and an intense passion for life. So when our paths happened to cross, I knew we needed to talk.

• 0:36Lex Fridman?

  And now a quick few second summary of the sponsors. Check them out in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. First is Shopify, a platform for anyone to sell stuff online. Second is Just Works, an HR platform for managing remote employees. Third is Novo, a business banking app. Fourth is Indeed, a hiring website. And finally, fifth is Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. So the choice is money, business, hiring or health. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

• 1:22Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day to day operation. A few folks asked me about putting out a few T-shirts related to the podcast. I'm not sure about that. So if you have ideas, please let me know. I think maybe something minimalistic or something related to a particular episode, maybe art related to a particular episode. I think it'll be pretty cool. I like wearing certain sort of subtle minimalist kinds of T-shirts related to something I love. So maybe that's what these kind of shirts could represent.

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  And definitely, I would be providing those on Shopify. That seems like the easiest platform to work with. Anyway, Shopify powers over 1.7 million entrepreneurs. Go to Shopify.com/lex, all lowercase, for a free 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. That's Shopify.com/lex. If you have cool T-shirts ideas, maybe you should open up a Shopify store and maybe I will buy some from you. This show is also brought to you by Justworks, an HR platform that makes it simple to onboard and manage remote employees. They help with employment and tax regulation and requirements, give access to national health insurance plans,

• 2:52Lex Fridman?

  help set up sick leave policies, time track that syncs with payroll, plus access to 24/7 expert support. I think there's a lot of components to running a business that are very difficult. So you have to definitely have the right tools for the job. Managing employees, especially remote employees, both the onboarding and the ongoing sort of, once they're hired, process is exceptionally difficult. So it's really nice to have a tool like Justworks that makes that easier and more organized. So manage your remote team and run your business with confidence by going to justworks.com. That's justworks.com. Sometimes I wonder how difficult it is to run a business

• 3:35Lex Fridman?

  that's 100 employees, or 1,000 employees, or 10,000 employees. In part, it seems almost inconceivable that human beings at that scale can collaborate.

• 3:48Lex Fridman?

  All starting from an idea that's in the mind of one or two people. That's kind of an incredible aspect of human civilization. This show is also brought to you by Novo, which is a business banking app. The process is simple. You sign up, they'll mail you a Novo debit card and you get free ATM use. From my perspective, if there's any industry that needs to be disrupted, it's the old school banking industry and that's exactly what Novo does. It's backed with FDIC insurance, like the old school banks are. No hidden fees, unlike the old school banks. No monthly fees or minimum balance requirements. Easy to use mobile apps, great customer service, free transfers,

• 4:33Lex Fridman?

  mail checks and incoming wires, integrates with other small business tools like Stripe, Shopify, QuickBooks and many more. Refunds all ATM fees, like I said. So go ahead and get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at banknovocom/lex. That's bank N-O-V-O dot com slash lex. You'll get their Small Business Starter Guide. Banknovocom/lex. That made me feel like I was singing YMCA, N-O-V-O. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. A hiring website I've actually used quite a bit recently and I've used them many times in the past for the hiring efforts

• 5:18Lex Fridman?

  I've done on the teams I've led. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes and Indeed feature top description immediately. I wonder if some of the people listening to this right now have applied through Indeed to join our team. If you have, I hope you make it. I'm rooting for everybody. There's a lot of incredible people that reached out. I personally think no cost or effort should be spared to put together an incredible team. So use all the tools you can and Indeed is one of the greatest tools for this task. Anyway, right now get a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex.

• 6:01Lex Fridman?

  Get it at indeed.com/lex. Offer valid through December 31st. Terms and conditions apply. Join 3 million businesses that use Indeed by going to indeed.com/lex.

• 6:14Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I use it to boost my deep work sessions when I know I'm going to be thinking through a difficult problem. I don't rely on it. I don't take it every day, but when I need that sort of supercharged, superboost, whatever you want to call it, it really clears the mind and helps me maintain focus. And it's just like this catalyst for a serious focused, deep work session. Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain.

• 6:58Lex Fridman?

  That's lexfridman.com/onnit. I highly recommend you read the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport. It kind of puts the right terminology and structure around how to put long stretches of focused work as part of your day. And then, once you have that structure, I think you have to make sure you have the right supplements, the right diet, the right exercise to support that. And that's where Onnit can help out. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Kelsey Sharon.

• 7:50Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned that studying history had a big impact on you and that your grandfather was a World War II vet. So people that have gone through World War II, in my family too, they don't seem to talk about it much. Like, the worse the tragedy, the less they talk about it.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's understandable. I can respect that, but... I don't think people fully understood the value in human stories over time and sharing that, that certain civilizations don't have written language. The value in that being passed down is extraordinary, but we didn't really have that with the World War II vets, it seems like.

• 8:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, they kind of want to protect you from the pain. Like, my grandfather, my grandmother went through Holodomor, which is the Ukrainian starvation of millions of people, and then, obviously, went through World War II with the Nazi occupation. And same on the grandfather's side, who, on my dad's side, grandfather fought in World War II. And they seem to not want to talk about those experiences to protect you from the suffering, to protect you from the evil that they've experienced, which is sad because the lessons from that history are not then propagated through you. And also, there's something about the strength you carry with you, knowing that that's in your blood.

• 9:13Lex Fridman?

  Those great heroes are in your blood. And that suffering, overcoming that suffering is in your blood.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I would argue that's exactly correct. If you, if you have someone you know that comes from your lineage, that has done something super gnarly, that's just been a badass, and in so many different ways, you want to know about that person, you have that person's blood in you, that's important to acknowledge. And when that isn't shared, I feel like it's just a detriment to that individual.

• 9:38Lex Fridman?

  What do you make of World War II? In terms of history, do you think about those kinds of wars where two times more civilians died than the number of military personnel? So, most of the war is basically just the death of civilians and the invasion of homes, the burning of homes, the bombing of homes, all of that.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  World War II, for me, I find that was the first experience where I became...

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Just obsessed with history? World War II really did it for me. I'm not sure if it's because of the dramatization of film and TV and the way that our generation has looked at it, but for me, it was more than that. I felt a deep connection to it and I still can't figure out why, like a pull almost. People joke around about those past lives and those things or those connections and there's something deeper within me that feels a pull towards that. And I'm not quite sure if it's because I had family that, you know, escaped Hungary once the Soviets came in, so thanks for that.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Or if it was because my grandfather served in it or for whatever reason, I just, I have this pull to it. And so when you think about the mass casualty of the civilian population, that's very difficult for me to wrap my brain around after being in a war and seeing when you have a small subset of civilians die, how much of an impact that has on that community right there in just a tiny area. So to try to wrap my brain around what happened in Europe and all across and all of that, I really struggle with that because I don't know that I can comprehend what that would truly mean to somebody if I didn't experience it or see it for what it is. Does that make sense?

• 11:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But so first of all, you're right, a lot of people are drawn to World War II for different reasons. So one is Hitler and Stalin trying to understand how it's possible to have that scale of evil in very different flavors of evil. It's almost fascinating that human nature can allow for that. And then also it's fascinating that so many people can follow leaders like that with a pride and with a love of country.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:02Lex Fridman?

  And that's like, it's almost like this weird experiment. It's like, wow, I wonder if I'm the same, I'm made from the same. Cloth as those people like would I be a good German if if I lived in Germany? And was, you know, during the time of Hitler, would I believe that Germany? Has been done wrong. I'm Jewish, by the way, which would makes me a little bit more comfortable talking about this.

• 12:30Lex Fridman?

  Is what I would I believe in the dreams sold by charismatic dictator who says? That wrongs have been done and we need to correct those wrongs. That to me is the compelling thing that draws me to World War Two, the human nature question.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  I would agree with you on that. I think there's a way to look at people like that. And at that time, there was no real, well, there wasn't a full understanding of the psyche, the way that we're starting to. I mean, we still don't understand. Any of it, but it seems like the, you know, the time gap back then. There was no real understanding of sociopaths and narcissists and, you know, psychopaths and really what those traits were. And I feel like you, you know, people will follow blindly if they're given a good enough reason. Well, if you have an individual who is ranting and screaming at the top of his lungs in the middle of these. Town squares and he's getting this attention.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  It's human nature to want to understand and be a part of a group mentality. It's it's human nature to want to fit in. And so I don't know if it's more of. People were at the beginning were just, this is the cool thing to do. Or if it was, they were genuinely terrified.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Or if there was an aspect that was like, this guy is saying something that resonates with me. There could be a lot of different things. I think it's unfortunate that we didn't get to. Or no one got to really, you know, examine this individual's brain and this person and. And why they thought the way they thought, because I that's always been the biggest thing for me is I'm really curious about why people do what they do. Like deeply, deeply curious about it.

• 14:12Lex Fridman?

  I'm not sure who's more interesting, the people that followed Hitler or Hitler himself. So I mean, that the the question that's coupled with that is, would history roll out in similar ways, even if there wasn't a Hitler? You know, it's it's the people that created Hitler or did Hitler create the events of World War Two?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I think the people would be more interesting, in my opinion.

• 14:35Lex Fridman?

  That seems to be the that the charismatic leaders are all out there.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 14:39Lex Fridman?

  Uh, the failed artists, in the case of Hitler, they're all out there.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:43Lex Fridman?

  And it's just when there's this environment of anger and fear, charismatic leaders can take over.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:49Lex Fridman?

  And it doesn't matter if they're evil or good. It's like a roll of the dice in terms of history.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:56Lex Fridman?

  What, how evil, how truly insane they are. Like, I think Stalin was much more cold and calculating. He wasn't as insane as Hitler. Hitler was legitimately insane. Like especially later on in the war, where he would do irrational actions, I would say. So that but that that that's like a weird roll of the dice. You could have gotten a totally different leader. The the wanting to take over the entirety of Europe and then invading Russia. That's that's like insanity.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that just even just the the first part of that wanting to take over Europe. If you really think about the scale. If you really sit down and go, he want this one individual was like, I want all of this. If you really sat down and you were to sit down and put him in his traits that we know of into any sort of document nowadays that that deems somebody a psychopath or a narcissist, this guy would set it on fire. There's, you know, he himself was so, I think, so damaged. And he reminds me a lot of people now who who struggle to find their way. He reminds me a lot of angry individuals who are told no,

• 16:09Speaker 01

  either by women or by business or by whatever the sector they're in. He reminds me very much of that, like. What's the word I'm looking for? Just that individual who is just like, the world is shit and the world owes me everything. And it's that mentality. He really came from that, it seems like. And when you foster that too long, you get that.

• 16:33Lex Fridman?

  There's a book called, what is it? Man from Underground by Dostoevsky. I might be misnaming the book, but it's about the bitterness of a man. It's like it breeds within his mind and it just grows. That bitterness. I mean, we all have that sort of resenting of the world when you're younger. When you have a choice, when you fail, do you blame the world? Or do you hold, it's the Jaco thing. Do you carry the responsibility of that and become a better man or woman because of that? That's the decision. And in some sense, I mean, unfortunately, see that's because he took responsibility in leadership.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I know you can't, you can't say he wasn't a leader.

• 17:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you can't. So it's not that he's a failure. He's not a person, not a failure, but it's, you can't say he's powerless, did not take action. I think he's just basically embodiment of the anger and the fear of people at the time. And, but the insanity of obviously many of my relatives, not just murdering them, but putting them in camps and torturing them. But many of those people, Jewish people, were also some of the best scientists. The insanity of murdering some of the best Germans is, it makes no sense. But so that's why it's fascinating to kind of look back at that time in history is like, and think, are these the same humans?

• 18:03Lex Fridman?

  And also are there echoes of that now?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:06Lex Fridman?

  And are we, is that going to happen again? Is there going to be a World War III in some other kind of way? Is there going to be some mass scale injustice in some other kind of way? Which we're not yet, like because of our blindness and maybe not learning the lessons of history will allow it to happen again. And then obviously it's a very common thing to, whatever political leader you don't like, to call them Hitler.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Of course. Which is, that to me, I gotta, I gotta tell you, when somebody calls somebody Hitler. The weight behind that has been completely lost in this generation. This generation does not understand what that truly means to call someone Hitler or a Nazi.

• 18:52Lex Fridman?

  Or Stalin. To be honest, the starvation, I've just been talking to a lot of folks recently, especially like North Korea with Whitey on me park. Starvation, and I remember from my grandmother, it wasn't, I mean, time and time again, not having food to eat is the thing that people say is the worst. Everything. It's way worse than murder, not having food, and the places that takes your mind and the actions that forces you to do. That's terrifying. And all of that seems very distant in our history.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love her. I watched that interview with her. She is, I want to talk to that woman so bad because when she was on Joe and she sat there and said, Joe's like, do you, have you done any therapy? And she laughed. I was like, oh, that's my girl.

• 19:41Lex Fridman?

  It's such a fascinating, I mean, I would love for you to kind of talk to her and explore her mind because we kind of explore her story.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:49Lex Fridman?

  And that's, there's power and importance to her story. But it's so difficult to understand, like, how does she become healthier and better, even more so than she's already. She's, she's recovered quite a bit. You know, she's found herself quite a bit, but I wonder, is she haunted?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  You're saying questions I want to ask. Like, that's what I mean because after being in a war, there are certain things, there are certain atrocities that you see that, it doesn't matter the therapy that you do, and I don't care what all the special ops guys say. Like, I know plenty of them that have a light switch and they turn it off and they can function. But I also know them when they've been out for 10 years. There's things that haunt people differently, but there's no way there's not something going on there deeply.

• 20:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's also extra levels of complexity in her case because um I mean, this is what just looking at history about family is she spent much of her early life loving the dictator, right?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we like the water or something like we like water or we like this because there is no like individual like when they said there was no love or anything.

• 21:07Lex Fridman?

  But there is a love for the

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Just that individual.

• 21:09Lex Fridman?

  For that individual. And so, I mean, it's like the ultimate abusive relationship.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:15Lex Fridman?

  And but but it's still love the experience like you don't know the alternative. So it's not even it's complicated because like I wonder if she truly explored it what you would find because the trauma, much of her trauma, I think, comes from when she was escaping North Korea, what treatment by China. It's like the

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And her mom and what she had to witness within that and being helpless with that on her own.

• 21:45Lex Fridman?

  So it's like evil men essentially abusing her, trading her, you know, and and doing so nonchalantly like it's part of just the way of of life that I wonder if she sees kind of yeah, it's so complicated because childhood

• 21:59Speaker 01

  It would be normal to her because she didn't know any different.

• 22:02Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. And there's like, I grew up poor, but I I never sensed that because

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Your parents didn't make you.

• 22:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, and everyone else around was too.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:13Lex Fridman?

  And so you don't notice it. I mean, it's a cultural thing. So the way you grow up, you only start to notice it when you compare yourself to others, when you learn of the alternative. That's a dark reality when you're abused. You um

• 22:28Lex Fridman?

  I wonder, I mean, you truly begin to suffer in some kind of way when you understand that you were being abused. That that's a dark kind of thought that I wonder if you live your whole life just in that abuse, if you don't know better, that that's a safer, that's like, uh, what's a better life going, suffering and then learning that you were suffering or just suffering until your last days?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  There's two ways to look at this. I'd argue on one side that suffering and suffering till you die, you know, no difference. So you can't have hope, you can't have this idea that there's better. And sometimes that's, keep that in its box. But then if you have kind of what you have with Park where she, she knows now that there's difference, she knows that there's better, then you run into those, what is the damage that has been done? What is going to be passed on as intergenerational trauma? I know she's a mom, so it's like now you gotta look long term a little bit because now she's an influence on a child. And there's, there's a positive to looking at both, I would say, and I know that sounds

• 23:38Speaker 01

  horrible for the living in trauma your whole life and just not knowing any better. But there's, I don't know if that saves the brain and the body and just, just that overall or if it actually would be better because there's no way to really find that out, I don't think.

• 23:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think, but the reality is when you give people hope and you make them realize that they're suffering, you're putting a burden on them. That's the first step on a long journey. And so, and obviously she, now that she knows that the suffering she wants to make people in North Korea currently suffer less, and that's an admirable goal.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  It is.

• 24:16Lex Fridman?

  It's what we do to each other is try to like, when you see suffering in the world, you try to make it better. And unmasked, that's probably in a long arc of history going to make for a, for a better world.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  I'm hopeful at that idea for North Korea. I'm hopeful for that because you, you never want to leave. Individuals suffering when you know that they're actively suffering while you're just living your day to day life in the Western world, just out grocery shopping and you see all this food and you know in the back of your mind, like that interview fucked me up a little, but I won't lie. Like, and I had some of the girls in my office listen to it. They're just bawling because there's, we're all parents and there's this idea that not being able to feed our children, that, just the idea of that damages the psyche. It brings up the pain in the chest, like just the idea of it. And so going to the grocery store for about a week after that, I just remember standing there looking and just going,

• 25:13Speaker 01

  fuck are we doing? But then there's that snap reality that comes into play and goes, so how do we fix that? You gotta take on China. That's never gonna happen. And the reason that's not gonna happen, it's happening again. So a Kanye comes down through Afghanistan, Chinese are all through Afghanistan, Iran makes the deal with China for the roadway to get the oil. Well, that's done in the blink of an eye without anyone knowing. There's no way. There's just so much at play with China. They control such a large aspect of our world. Unfortunately, that to take and free North Korea, a drastic action would

• 25:55Speaker 01

  have to happen. And then your people would come in, it would be a mess.

• 25:59Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean your people? What do you mean your people?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  You're Russians.

• 26:03Lex Fridman?

  Did you hear what she said about Russians?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Did you hear what she said? Russians? I love Russians. You know what I didn't love? The Russian recruiting video that came out? That shit was terrifying. Did you watch it? I told you about it. Of course you didn't watch it.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  I didn't watch it.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Oh, shocker. The USA put out a recruiting video.

• 26:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And then like a day or two later, Russia put one out. And the recruiting for it video in the States was a animation of a, a female soldier.

• 26:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  With two moms and she was gonna go change the world, right? Russia came out with one. It's like, it's the, the character from like Rocky, essentially. And there are guys in the mud and just in the rain, just fucking doing pushups, just pushing it out. They're just like, they see their boot, they're just like crushing things. And I'm like, and it's all like, and the deep Russian voice. I'm like, oh my God.

• 26:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Which one is better, would you say? Which bothered you more?

• 27:01Speaker 01

  What do you mean by bother? Specify.

• 27:04Lex Fridman?

  So deception is a funny thing because when you're young and you're choosing to go to the military or not, it's not like you know, like none of us know what the best trajectory for a life is.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:14Lex Fridman?

  For many people, going to the military is a really, makes them incredible human beings. Some of the best people in this world I know are soldiers. So it's, I'm not, I don't mean like it's somehow bad to go to the military. I think it's a great choice, but there is something.

• 27:30Lex Fridman?

  The honest truth is I just don't like marketing people.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Well.

• 27:33Lex Fridman?

  And so this is essentially a marketing effort.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is a marketing effort.

• 27:37Lex Fridman?

  So which one do you like as a marketing effort better?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Russia.

• 27:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 27:42Lex Fridman?

  There you go.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  I do because Canada doesn't, you know what our recruiting videos are? It's like, um, uh, I love it. They're the best.

• 27:50Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, A.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, fuck. Here we go. It's starting. It started. Awesome. So Canada does these ones where it's like, um, it'll have a bunch of like soldiers doing movements. And then they'll like snip it together really quick and it'll be like a Navy one and then a guy jumping out of a plane. And then it'll be like an artillery and then like an armored, then it'll be like, join the Canadian forces today. And like, that's like their, their videos. It's so it's like very marketable, very palatable to Canadians who don't really want war and who don't really acknowledge their military in the first place and do everything they can to make sure that vets don't get any support when they come home. So they, I can see why that one is, uh, acceptable.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  What Russia did was meant to be more of an intimidation tactic, in my opinion. I like that style better though. I think we need harder, I need, I think we need people to be harder. I think it's acceptable and okay to say that our soldiers need to have a harder mindset, a stronger mindset, a better mentality and mental health support going into the service and a harder body. Because I know when you go to the US, I've also encountered plenty of soldiers that are 600 pounds. What are you gonna do?

• 29:04Lex Fridman?

  So we should say that you, when you joined the military, you were in incredible shape, or not maybe incredible, but very good shape.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  No, I was in incredible shape. It was the best shape of my life.

• 29:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:13Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  I'm okay with that. It's okay. I, you know what? I used to do sit-ups.

• 29:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  My, like, no, I would do sit-ups in the morning when I was little, until I could see my, like, I always had a six-pack because all I did was train. But like, if I couldn't, like, see it, I would just sit there in morning cartoons and just do sit-ups. And my mom and dad thought that was like, normal, acceptable behavior.

• 29:35Lex Fridman?

  So if you had, like, Instagram back then, you'd be a David Goggins. You would be just like screaming.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Without the cursing. That cursing started once the military started.

• 29:42Lex Fridman?

  Okay, got it. So, I mean, the people should know, because they probably already know, that you also competed in taekwondo. Like, you were an athlete of all kinds. They even saw rugby in there.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was good at rugby. I played that for seven, six years, I guess you could say, total. I think the worst injury I ever ended up having was I tore my right eyelid off. We were doing an exhibition game. I don't do exhibition games well. I don't do, like, for fun well. I don't do, like.

• 30:12Lex Fridman?

  So you're very competitive?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  No, not me.

• 30:15Lex Fridman?

  So you're being funny.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Ah, there it is. He gets it. You see, he's not, he's not a robot. What I was saying, though, to you was that we did an exhibition game, and the team ahead was winning. The team we were playing was winning, which was annoying. And so there was an opportunity to take out a girl that was going one end of the field to the other, and she just kept hitting tries left, right, and center. She was fast. So I figured if I just aimed her up, like she's a target, and I just run full force at her, because she was really, she was a tall individual. If I just, if I do that, I'll take her out of the knees. So I did that. But that, what that resulted in was she put her tooth through her mouth guard and knocked out and didn't just, she just stayed there.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  But when I stood up, I tore the right eyelid off, and it was hanging from the inner corner.

• 31:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  My mom was there, because mom was my, mom's my biggest fan.

• 31:10Lex Fridman?

  She was supportive of this?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Oh, she's supportive of everything. She didn't miss a game. She didn't miss anything. And I stood up and I kind of turned around, and we had already had a girl break her nose that day. So she was on the sideline with her nose sideways and just bloody. My mom was like, I'll take her to the emergency after, once the game's over. And so I turned around and looked at her and she just, she almost vomited on the spot. And I was like, what's wrong? She's like, don't move your eyelids off. I'm like, but I can see like I was trying to blink. But like it was just down. So I could just constantly see. She's like, we're just, we're just gonna go to the emergency. We're just gonna go there now.

• 31:44Lex Fridman?

  Was there blood?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's lots of it, but I couldn't really tell.

• 31:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Were you, were you okay with blood?

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Lex Fridman?

  Point?

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:52Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I guess you did Taekwondo and all that. Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  I didn't get knocked out very often. I didn't really, when I was younger in Taekwondo, I was really good. I only lost a handful of times. So when I did lose, that was bad. But I never had like a broken nose or a lot of blood on my face, like nothing like that really. So nothing freaked me out too much.

• 32:13Lex Fridman?

  Was there aggression there or just purely competition over skill?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  A mix of both. I was, this was right after, not too long after my coach went to prison for statutory rape. And that was like, how you talk about Park talking about how that was like, she knew love because of that person. That person was like a god to me. And so when that happened, I was just an angry individual from that point on. So there was competition and aggression mixed in there.

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like it was betrayal that, that there's this somebody that is, was a symbol of love for you was, could also be a very bad person?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  I used to eat, sleep and breathe whatever that man said from four years old on. I lived with my coaches at a point. So I could train that much. I, I helped look after their daughter. I, I was at the club 24/7. It just, the idea that somebody could do something like that. Yeah, that really messed me up.

• 33:11Lex Fridman?

  Where were you on nine 11?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  I was 11 and I was in my parents' basement and

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  In where?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Ontario.

• 33:23Lex Fridman?

  In Ontario, Canada. What did you think of nine 11 at that age from Canada? They have an impact on you in terms of changing the, um, the level of evil you thought is there in the world today?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Not initially. I remember it really vividly. I have a decent memory for certain things. It seems like stuff like that I'd stick with really well. I remember watching it. I was sitting on the couch and my mom. My mom called my dad because my, my parents are truck drivers. My dad was on the road, if I'm not mistaken. And he would go in and out of cities all the time. And I think he was on the east coast. My mom was like a little panicky. So she, she tried to get ahold of him on, I think she, at the time it was like beepers and um. Yeah. So he would get a beep, he would go to a payphone to call us. And he was fine. And um, I remember my mom being like really upset and I couldn't quite grasp why she was so upset. I knew something really bad had happened.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  It's when I then saw the second plane go into the tower and I remember her just like the stereotypical like hand over her mouth. And she just felt sick and she just was so confused and I knew it was bad. But I didn't fully grasp it. We went to school that day. And they had talked about it briefly. You could hear the teachers kind of reminiscing about it. There was a point. The, that week that all of a sudden, all of the children who were from a Middle Eastern family were not at the school.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I just remember them saying like, a lot of people aren't coming to school, but it was, it was in particular. I think parents were afraid once it got out that it was of a certain um, group. They were afraid for their own kids and fair enough. I mean, you never know, you don't know. And um. I knew it impacted me enough that I did write, I remember I, the school was doing a memorial for it. And I remember they asked, I wrote a poem. And a reporter was there and I read it on air. That's like, I remember like. It was, it was like, it was a very short one, but I remember I like wanted to do something, but I didn't know why or for, for what reason. I just, I knew I wanted to do something to honor it, but I didn't, I couldn't grasp why.

• 35:39Lex Fridman?

  You eventually went to Afghanistan.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:43Lex Fridman?

  Did that begin to plant the seed of thinking about conflict in the world?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I've never thought about it that in depth. I mean, I've done 12 years of therapy. You think that would have come up, Dr. Passy? But apparently not. We'll work on it though.

• 35:58Lex Fridman?

  I mean, when did uh, like, when did the idea of war start entering your mind?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Late high school, I think it was for me. Um, I was, I finished high school at 17. I moved away and went to college and went to Algonquin College because I wasn't smart enough to get into Ottawa U. So I was like, well.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Algonquin, she is. I just wanted to play sports and frankly, I wanted away from my small town that I was living in. I went through like a bad high school breakup as a kid and you know that where you think that's like the love of your life and you just can't bear to be anywhere near anybody. And so I moved away as fast as I possibly could. And I didn't grasp it still at that point.

• 36:41Lex Fridman?

  Love and heartbreak. Okay, why did you become a soldier? Why did you want to become a soldier?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  My parents told me from an early age, they always figured I would either be a cop, I would do, they didn't think military, but they thought it would be like a type A personality, possibly carry a gun situation. And I'd never hunted before. We'd never had guns in our house. I was never exposed to weapons of any kind. If anything, it was, it was the opposite. We just, all the hunters on the property, like all the deer would come to our property and all the hunters would be, no, I'm, I'm not, my mom would put salt looks out so that they wouldn't get killed.

• 37:20Lex Fridman?

  Your property was the safe space for the deer?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was 17 acres of forest and they just, we had two turkeys that used to walk up and down the driveway every day. We had bears in there and nobody bothered them. And so there was no aspect of like, I want to go kill shit. That was not like a thing. I had no idea. I wanted to take anybody off the face of the earth or anything. I went to school and because I'm a history person, I, my parents has always, always made it really important that Remembrance Day is the thing in our life. So that's Veterans Day for you. So it's November 11th and it's, you go, you honor, I don't care if you don't want to go, I don't care if it's raining, you go. And so I went to the Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa that year, which was, it's our capital,

• 38:06Speaker 01

  which is, yeah, it's our capital and it's really small. And so I went, but I took the bus and I was on the bus back to Algonquin and I met a lady who was like a World War II vet, really old lady. She had an air force uniform on and just like this row of medals and.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you can tell by our limited to extreme interactions we've had over the short period of time. I'm curious and I'll just ask you.

• 38:33Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  And so I just got up and talked to her and just started talking to her. And she didn't say like, I don't remember exactly her words, but she'd served. She was one of the first females to fly and, you know, all of these kinds of things that stuck in my head. And we just kind of kept talking and I missed my stop. And then I finished talking to her and I got back on the bus and went back to the college and walked into my, uh, my small apartment where I had two roommates. These two guys I went to high school with, one of them I went to high school with, one was from out of town. And I, I just didn't like what I was, I wasn't happy. I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. And I didn't know what I wanted to do, truthfully.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Something just said, why don't you join the army? Like in myself, my, my self-talk was like, let's just join the military. Let's do it.

• 39:25Lex Fridman?

  Are you in general somebody that just follows the gut? Like when your heart tells you something, you go with it?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  For the most part, because I figured out, at least now I've figured out what parts I could, like what feeling I can trust and which one I can't, which ones anxiety versus which ones my actual intuition talking.

• 39:42Lex Fridman?

  So why did you sign up to be an artillery gunner?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Because they wouldn't let me be infantry.

• 39:47Lex Fridman?

  I mean, is it, why, why would you want to be infantry?

• 39:54Lex Fridman?

  I mean, this, you're, you're, you're, you're naming a lot of dangerous activities.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that wasn't a thought in my mind at the time. My idea was if I was going to do this and I was going to put myself through the bullshit and the training and all of the hell and the pushups and the screaming dad, I wanted to do something that I know was actually going to be affecting something. And what I knew was making change or affecting or on the front lines was infantry, artillery or armored. So I was like, one of those.

• 40:19Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain the difference infantry, artillery and armored?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Do you want like the layman's term or do you want me to actually explain, explain?

• 40:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, listen to a conversation with Jaco, especially I love how you get into details.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So let's detail this then. Okay. So infantry is your frontline door kicking.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  You know, blasting the door open, running and get the fuck on the ground, just that, that, that, that, that. There are the guys that, you know, double tap you in the face and they show up in the middle of the night and put a barrel in your head. Like, those are the guys that are sleeping in the trenches, that are eating MREs, who are being shot at, who are being blown up, who are doing the dirty work and not sleeping and carrying the hundred pound pack and, and are side by side with your buddies in the trenches. I wanted that. That. They said I was too small for that.

• 41:06Lex Fridman?

  You were, sorry to interrupt, you were, what, too small, under a hundred pounds?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Um, at the time, I was about one oh three and I'm, I'm five foot, like on a, if you roll my back out, like I really try, I'm, I'm a five foot. At the time, though, I think my, my license said four eleven. So.

• 41:25Lex Fridman?

  So you were too small.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Too small.

• 41:27Lex Fridman?

  For infantry.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just, like, there was no mandate at which they said you can't be, but they said, you know, we don't want to put you through training that you're going to fail out of and then have to recourse to you and then find a new job for you and we, they want to try to, if this is what you're going in for, they want to have you follow through that path. So then there was armored, which are your tanks. So that's your movie like Fury, where your tank battles and which we don't really do anymore, but you're rolling around in tanks, you got guys in the back, you're, you're a driver, you're a turret gunner, which I would have enjoyed. But the idea of being in a closed metal box, something about it made me panic. So I was like, maybe not for me.

• 42:08Lex Fridman?

  Uh, there's of course power to that kind of, uh, big gun.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, that's why I went for the bigger one.

• 42:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay. By the way, I think Russia leads the world in number of tanks. They're still, it's very like, uh, what is it? Alpha demonstration of like force, like, look, we have largest number of tanks.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  You know what takes tanks out, though?

• 42:27Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Some gasoline, some old batteries and a wire.

• 42:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but tanks still look badass.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  They look great, but they don't last.

• 42:34Lex Fridman?

  But so much of the military, like we said with the recruiting videos, it's a display of power versus the actual implementation of power.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 42:43Lex Fridman?

  Okay, artillery. So I'm doing my best here. Yeah, I don't even know what double tap means, which you said earlier.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  So it's double tap is like two shots to the face.

• 42:51Lex Fridman?

  Why two?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  To be sure.

• 42:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, alright.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  You guys, taxpayers pay for the ammo, it's fine.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  But you don't want to do three because it's wasting the ammo.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's now that's a waste.

• 43:00Lex Fridman?

  Okay, double tap to the face. There's so much awesome terminology here, or gruesome terminology, depending on your perspective. Okay, so artillery.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the hand of God.

• 43:13Lex Fridman?

  Sorry.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  No, I.

• 43:15Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's intensely romanticized version, but okay, artillery, the hand of God, so.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Because it will reach out and touch you from wherever we want. It's like, it's like F, um, F-18 pilots or bombers. They'll, you won't know they're there until they're there. And so for artillery, I, I really honestly didn't think artillery would be a fit for me. I didn't know much about it. They were just like, these are what you can pick from. And I was like, I'll go here. So in World War II, they used much closer artillery. So it's the, we're called the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, because the Queen made us royal, so it's Canadian artillery. And we, we shoot these rounds. When you're in training, you shoot smaller, smaller ammunition. They're about 40 pounds.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  They go, I'm gonna get this wrong, 20K, 20 kilometers, so whatever that is in your mile things. And they have a casing on them and they're much easier, they're easier to handle. The guns are smaller, you need less people for them. They're basically what you train on nowadays. It's not what we use overseas. What we use overseas, now those things are beautiful. Those are just a sheer work of, the engineering behind them just makes my heart skip a beat.

• 44:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the engineering on modern guns is amazing. So are we talking about machine guns here? So like fully automatic?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  No, you're talking about artillery guns. So what it is, it's a 155 millimeter howitzer that shoots up to, up to 40 kilometers accurately, 45 unrecorded, and it shoots a hundred pound round.

• 44:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, okay.

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  So that, but there is the precision.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Accurate as hell.

• 44:56Lex Fridman?

  Accurate, okay.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Accurate if the people behind it that are shooting it and aiming it are accurate.

• 45:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay, uh, so, so how, at which stage of the warfare do they come in? Are they saving you, like, say, a bunch of people get raided, a bunch of the infantry get raided, and then the artillery saves them? Or are they the first line of attack? Or what, where are they, where, where does the artillery go? Like, the hand of God presumes they're helping.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's, well, that's it. So depending on the operation or whomever is running it or how they want it done, sometimes if they just know there's targets, they'll use us, you know, high-value targets. So we have this round, it's called the Excalibur round. It costs about half a million dollars per round. It comes in a special tube that is like sealed and locked, and you have to get permission from Ottawa to shoot it. And it's only used for VIP targets. So like, we have VIP for everyone. And it will, it's GPS-guided, it's rocket-propelled, and when you fire it, it will, if, if this is a wall and somebody's standing on this side of it, it will hit you right there. We won't touch that wall. It will hit you, pinpoint.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  It'll go right through whatever, concrete, whatever, and then it will destroy.

• 46:11Lex Fridman?

  So it's basically the same thing as being a sniper, but with a much more damaging weapon.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  We don't use that round often. I think it's only been used a handful of times, max, in Afghanistan that I'm aware of. Again, I haven't, I wasn't there from 2009 until 21. But I, I know people that still deployed in that, in those units, and I don't know that it was used very often. But the regular rounds, so there's HE, there's Loom. So HE is high explosive. There's Loom. You shoot that, it explodes in the sky, it lights up the sky for the infantry below. And then there's shrapnel rounds that will explode in the sky, and then shrapnel just rains down hell on you. HE is what you use normally. In my, I'm trying to say this right because I, I know people squawked at me about some of the stuff on JAKA. So I'm trying to be very accurate.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  In my experience, we used HE rounds to wipe people off the face of the earth when the infantry needed us. So we would get a call at any time and there's always two guns together. So you never, you never go solo gun ever. If you are, it's, there's, it's sketchy and there's a, bad shit's happening.

• 47:18Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain that? So there's two gun, two people, two guns?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  No, two guns with each gun troop. So each gun troop has five to seven people running a gun at all times.

• 47:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  It takes a lot of people to run one of those.

• 47:27Lex Fridman?

  How much electronics is there?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  The GPS, like the computer system that's on it itself, I never ran that much, but it is completely technologically. It's GPS guided. All you have to do is literally type in the coordinates. Then you've got the two big, um, there's a, there's a technical word, word for it, but basically wheels. And one does the trajectory, you know, you do your.

• 47:49Lex Fridman?

  Right, right.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  And you're just kind of doing this and you're watching, the watching it. And once you hit your target, that's, you know, it'll tell you that's where you need to hit.

• 47:56Lex Fridman?

  Do you know if there's any like AI stuff, like computer vision, like where there's cameras and they help you target using? Like all different kinds of cameras to see through, like the fog, all those kinds of things.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  No, we use, um, the FOO, which are Forward Observation Officers, which are an artillery individual that is embedded with an infantry unit.

• 48:19Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  They call from the front, give us their grid coordinates and basically say like, don't drop this on us.

• 48:26Lex Fridman?

  Got it. So, well, you know, when not to shoot, which parts not to shoot?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 48:30Lex Fridman?

  And then.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  As long as no one moves. Don't move, stay still, but you can hear it coming.

• 48:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  But you can't hear it until it's too close. So like when I went, sorry, go ahead. You were gonna say.

• 48:40Lex Fridman?

  No, what's, I was gonna say, what's the experience on the other? Like, what does it feel like to be maybe infantry or?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Underneath it?

• 48:48Lex Fridman?

  Underneath the artillery.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Well, I, I had the rare opportunity to do that and I have a video I'll show you after. It's terrifying because I know the people that are shooting it and I know them personally and I know what they're like as humans and for the most part they're dialed. But you get the odd duck where you're like, I've seen people have an ND, which is a negligent discharge? You basically get charged for it. You get in a lot of trouble because you can blow people up. And I, it like accidents happen. And so I know accidents can happen in stressful situations. And when I was with the Brits, we had to call danger close artillery. And when it goes over top of you, it sounds like thunder and lightning. So you fire it and it's not the stereotype that you hear in World War II where it kind of like that.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  It's more of like a crackle and then you just hear like a whiz and it shit just goes everywhere. It's loud. It shakes the ground. It shakes you. It, you feel it.

• 49:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Is there some more words you can put to like the experience of what it's like to be in the heat of, of battle there? So what is, is there literally, is it hot? Is it?

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Are you talking about being under it or shooting it?

• 50:05Lex Fridman?

  Under it.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. It 55 degree heat, you're, you know that you're waiting for it to be called. You feel an overwhelming excitement to start because for me, I'd never been under it. So I was like, okay, I had my camera ready, like I was a kid at a candy store and I'm like, I want to watch this happen. And once you hear the crackle, I got really fearful. My anxiety kicked up significantly. I, I got to the point where I got numb. Like I was, my nerves were on overdrive so much that like my body would go like numb. Like I couldn't move, but like my nerves were numb, if that makes sense.

• 50:42Lex Fridman?

  What, what were the nerves like? Are we talking about fear or is it just anxious excitement?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Anxious excitement, hopeful that they wouldn't blow it up on us. And there was this.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  There was this excitement that's hard to describe because you don't want to be excited that you're dropping bombs on people. But when you just saw their faces and they're shooting at you, there's this overwhelming feeling of got you, motherfucker.

• 51:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, we'll talk about that because that's such a difficult thing about wars. You forget that it's other human beings.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Lex Fridman?

  Because those other human beings are doing really bad things to you. And so very basically anger takes over. Hate can take over. And then also just the excitement of almost like video game like, you know, aspect of war, like sport. It's like sport that all of those elements are all baked in and it's hard to be philosophical in that situation, it seems like.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  I've never played video games, so I can't compare it to that. But like from, from like a sports perspective, yeah, I could, I could argue that like I felt like we won there for a second. And it's, it's not just like a heat from outside. It's like this radiation within you that is something I've never felt since.

• 52:02Lex Fridman?

  You, just to take a small step back to the weapons training, what, what kind of guns did you train on? Because you also mentioned a rocket launcher.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  I love Carl Gossops.

• 52:15Lex Fridman?

  What are those? What are those Carl G?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Carl G's?

• 52:19Lex Fridman?

  What's that? What's, uh, what's it like? My only experience with a rocket launcher is from the movie Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we've all discussed, I haven't seen that yet and I've heard about it and people have made me tell, yeah, I know.

• 52:30Lex Fridman?

  I feel like you haven't seen a single movie that's relevant to war, military, because every time anyone brings it up, you say you haven't seen it.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  I don't have time to watch movies, Lex.

• 52:40Lex Fridman?

  Platoon, you haven't seen Platoon, which is, um.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  You're the scientist. How do you have the time?

• 52:45Lex Fridman?

  I'm not a scientist. I just play one on TV.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, what, can you talk about the rocket launcher? And maybe any other?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:55Lex Fridman?

  For both engineering, actually, to me, those guns are very interesting from engineering perspective, too.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Well, they should be. They're fascinating. When you take them apart and you see how small the parts get down to, and how, how necessary every single little piece is to make that thing run. And even without the tiniest little BB, smaller than a piece on there, an artillery gun might not run. So we were trained on Carl G's, um, I think called M72s, which are disposable rocket launchers. I'll back up. Carl G's are around, I don't know the exact millimeter of the round. It's been a while since I shot them. We only did those in training. But essentially, it takes, most people, one person can fire it, you know, effectively, hold it and fire it. It takes another person to load it. So you put it onto your shoulder and it weighs, I would, I don't know, 30 pounds, 40 pounds?

• 53:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Can't remember. It's been a minute. It's been a minute.

• 53:47Lex Fridman?

  One person can carry it.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I don't know. It just seems like a rocket launcher is a pretty, uh, intense kind of device.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  It for sure is. I mean, it's the diameter, I can't even tell you the diameter. They're about that big. I mean,

• 54:05Lex Fridman?

  And it goes on your shoulder.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Goes on your shoulder, and then it has a little sight that pops out. That's almost like plastic-like, which is kind of funny, because it reminds me of like the uh, little, um, Green Army men. It's, I just felt so flimsy to me. I was like, this is hilarious. And then another person stands behind you and opens the hatch. And so there's this, there's these two, um, levers and you just kind of open it. And then the back end, which is flared, so it's just a tube and then it's flared. That will open it and drop down and you load a round into that. And then you load it back up.

• 54:38Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  And you're never supposed to stand behind it because the blast behind it will kill you. It's, yeah. But in my case, when I fired it, It was me and another individual, um, I wanna, it wasn't Sarah Pellegrin, but it was another girl that was smaller. And the person is supposed to wrap around your waist and tuck low and hold your stability. And we were just aiming at tanks that day and they were just concrete, um, heads. So they would just either, they would hit and bounce off or whatever. And so when my sergeant saw that, he just kinda looked at both of us and was like, no, I'm just gonna, and he got real low and just like wrapped both of us.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  And then we'd fire it and it feels like you're getting punched in the side of the head on repeat by Jaco.

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  It, you lose all your hearing, you like just, ugh, snot comes out of your nose and you're just kind of discombobulated for a minute. It's a real mind fuck.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  Is there, is there other, uh, any other kind of guns that, um, in, at that time, because you were new to this, you haven't shot guns when you were younger, that were really impressive to you in, in the training process?

• 55:49Speaker 01

  All of them, because I've never fired a weapon. So we had the C7s, which are like your M16s, I believe. Um, the long barrel. The cute thing about those is when I have that slung, my barrel drags on the ground. So that's fun. And they shoot, uh, you know, your 7.62 or your 5.56 round. I loved that. I preferred the, um, the C8, which was a short barrel, which is what the SF guys use. Not because it's cooler looking, which it obviously is, but because it was functional for my body height and it didn't drag on the ground when I ran. I loved those. They're your personal weapon. Being an artillery gunner, if you're not an officer, at least in our unit, you didn't get a side, a side piece. I didn't have a side piece, Lex.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Um, so I never had, uh, a handgun of any type. I fired those in training. You can't get over that side piece comment. Look at you.

• 56:39Lex Fridman?

  Uh, I was gonna say, I know what a side piece is. You don't have to explain to me.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  But you're single, so how do you even have a side piece if you don't have a main piece?

• 56:46Lex Fridman?

  The joke, the joke would be the fact that we have a total misunderstanding what side piece is. Okay, great. You didn't have a side piece as a non-officer.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Right. So I never fired those much. We did grenades in training.

• 56:58Lex Fridman?

  Oh, cool.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, grenades are fun. I love grenades. I have a massive one tattooed on me. I, I have them all over my office.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  How does a grenade work?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  There's the spoon and the pin. So the, the pin holds the spoon in place. When you pull that pin, the firing mechanism inside, as long as that the spoon is up against it, it won't fire. As soon as that spoon goes, I believe it causes a reaction on the inside and you've got about five seconds to check it. You'd be better to ask that question too.

• 57:26Lex Fridman?

  I don't mean to get philosophical on this.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  No, you're not. You don't have to.

• 57:28Lex Fridman?

  But there's something about a grenade, cause you're essentially committing suicide.

• 57:35Lex Fridman?

  Unless you get rid of the thing. There's something like.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Or if you're unlucky and it just goes off when you pull the pin, which has happened to tons of people.

• 57:43Lex Fridman?

  So it just feels like a very kind of leap, it's a, it's a dangerous leap into the abyss every time you use the thing. Cause when you shoot a gun, like the gun is much less likely to malfunction in terms of like all the possible ways it can go wrong. It just seems like grenade is like.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Primitive, almost.

• 58:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's primitive. It's a, it's also real, like in the way that like a bar fight is like being punched in the face is real. It's like you're here with the weapon of destruction. It's just you and, and the thing.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:13Lex Fridman?

  You have to get rid of it. I don't know. Is that, is that terrifying to you? Like, do people still use grenades in warfare?

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:20Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are fantastic. The Taliban were throwing them over the wall at the airport in Kabul. People use them all the time. Cause when you're in Afghanistan, if you're in a rural area, you're going from village to village and they're, they're, you know, they're mud hut walls. Like they're tall, but you're walking through corridors and stuff. All you gotta lob one of those. It's gonna take the whole unit out that just walked by. Like it's, they're accurate if you're close enough and they're effective if you're close enough. Um, I love them though. I think they're fascinating to me because they're such a tiny little thing with such devastation.

• 58:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  They just can cause such devastation. But for me, when I had them. The, some of the Canadians would make fun of me because when I did go outside the wire with the British, I had two right here. And I remember I put a piece of tape over the spoons. Because in my mind, I could picture myself searching someone and grabbing me and pulling that, and that would be me. That, that would have been like, yep, that, if anyone that was gonna happen to, it was her for sure.

• 59:20Lex Fridman?

  So you were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:25Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And like we said, you were in a great, no, perfect, physical shape?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Fucking epic shape.

• 59:32Lex Fridman?

  Epic shape, six pack, or, I mean?

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 59:36Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So you could do a lot of pull-ups and push-ups?

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And well-trained, would you say? Were you already, what, like?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:47Lex Fridman?

  No?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  No. I'll argue that point till I'm blue in the face. I spoke to, recently, I actually spoke to my sergeant, he's not a sergeant anymore, but Sergeant Mark LeBlanc, he's in Africa right now on a deployment. He gave me a call the other day, and I remember talking to him about this. And it's frustrating, because we were at an active war, we were, sorry, we were involved in an active war where we, the units that I were in were dagged red, which meant they needed people. So when you need people, things go quick. Whether or not that's right, I mean, you could argue that's the similar thing to what's happening in the world right now. We needed a vaccine. We got a vaccine. Is it the best it could be? Could it be better? Could it do more things? Sure, probably. But with the time

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  that we had, we did the best that we could. That's my logic on that. For me, I joined the military in November of 2007. I was in basic training in January of 2008. I was graduated basic SQ, which is all your weapons training, your DP1, which is your trade-specific training. So whatever trade you're gonna go into, whether it's infantry, armored, artillery, medic, whatever, that's your DP1. It's called different things in different units. And then, I got posted to my unit in September. So January to September, I had done all my training. And I'm an English-speaking individual.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I got posted to a French unit that only speaks French and had to learn the all of the weapon systems, everything again that I just learned in that short timeframe in French.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  This part of your story that you're telling this to Jaco is, one way to say is very impressive, that you had to learn all of this in French. So there's also the camaraderie, the social aspect of it, which is difficult probably.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I didn't have any, that's, yeah, I didn't have any.

• 1:01:37Lex Fridman?

  But it's also make you a more effective soldier to be socially, for that cohesion to be there, right?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  But also just understanding the basic terminology.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:01:49Lex Fridman?

  In.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  The right way to say something on the radio, the right way to run a gun, the right way to, because you got to move with those guns, you got seven people, it's, it's really magical. I, I'll send you a video, when we did some live fire in workup training in Texas before we left, we did a competition between the other gun to see who could fire 10 rounds faster, like faster.

• 1:02:09Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Um, it is truly beautiful to watch an artillery unit fire a gun, because it's, it's like a symphony. Everyone has their parts and everyone knows and everyone's yelling, but they know why they're yelling and everyone, this guy's got to do this in order for this guy to load the round. It's just, it's beautiful. It really is. It is gorgeous to watch. I miss it deeply.

• 1:02:32Lex Fridman?

  Is there, by the way, for a gun, is there like one person responsible for the, for the aim and the, or like the specification of the location and somebody else that pulls it, presses?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  The lanyard.

• 1:02:44Lex Fridman?

  Is that the lanyard? Is there a button?

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  It's, it's better than a button. You'll like it, I'll tell you in a second.

• 1:02:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Um, yours, there's your sergeant in charge and then they have their two IC. And so the comms come in to the sergeant and the sergeant is the, or your master bombardier, bombardier chef. Um, yeah.

• 1:03:03Lex Fridman?

  Sorry, what? Bombardier chef, what?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Bombardier chef.

• 1:03:08Lex Fridman?

  Bombardier chef, oh, that's a French.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Master bombardier.

• 1:03:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  So it goes like private, in the nor, like in infantry or in a regular unit, it's like private corporal. Master Corporal Sergeant. In artillery, it goes gunner, bombardier, master bombardier, sergeant, and off like that. So you have two people, but the Sarge is like, you don't move till he says move. You don't fire till he says fire. Like, he's your guy. He'll give you the coordinates. He'll feed them to the guy that's doing the GPS, that portion. I really never did it much. I wasn't tall enough to see it. Like legitimately, the way, how high it is up on the gun, like it was, I couldn't see clearly enough. It was not good. So.

• 1:03:50Lex Fridman?

  Obviously, you have a big personality. You're a strong person.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  You don't say.

• 1:03:54Lex Fridman?

  And you have a big hat currently.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  I always wear a hat, Lex.

• 1:03:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay. It seems like your height and your size was a factor.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:04:03Lex Fridman?

  How were you able to step up in all those moments?

• 1:04:08Lex Fridman?

  How difficult was it?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  I don't know that I realized it was difficult while I was doing it because that's just the way it's been. I've always been a short person. That's life. I would, nothing I can do to fix that. So there was no point, when am I going to whine about it? I'm going to break my femurs and insert things to make me grow a little bit? Maybe, maybe since you're in robotics, you can figure that out.

• 1:04:26Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  That's your task now. Make me be five foot three? That'd be great. For artillery, really what it came down to was the unit, when I got there, there was only a couple of people who spoke any sort of English and my sergeant was not one of them. But once he kind of started to get to know me a little bit, the best that he could, he started to put effort into making sure I could lift the rounds, train, make sure my, my capacity to do my job was there. And so he took me under his wing in that, in that aspect. So he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically help me load

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  the rounds. So pick the round up from the ground, pick it up like a trick to put your knee under it, use your legs. Instead of just pick it up, use your back, pull your back out. He would work on that. And then depending on the position I was running the gun in, if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I'll explain that in a second. But if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I could step up onto the gun. And if I leaned inward enough with my right hand with the charge and I kind of kicked off, I could kind of jump and shove it up the tube.

• 1:05:45Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Almost enough, yeah. If I was running the lanyard, which is the thing that makes it go boom, it's really easy. It's a long rope. You hook it on and you put it, your right hand on your hip and on your left and you, and you hold it there. And you just stare at your sergeant like this and you just wait for him to yell fire. And he points at you when he does it. And when you do it, you turn your whole body with it. And when you do that, it alleviates the, a misfire essentially, because if you just pull it, sometimes that's not enough. You gotta really give it your whole body into it. And so he would train me on how to do things differently so that I could do them effectively. And I wasn't a ship pump.

• 1:06:26Lex Fridman?

  A what?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  So ship pump is a term that we use in Canada to call somebody useless. A ship pump is a useless soldier who is just, you're there and that's the ship pump. And so we all just deal with it, but somehow they're still there.

• 1:06:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What were we talking about? The lanyard? Okay.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. We were talking about artillery guns. So those things though, what you would find fascinating is just how they break down when you have to take one of those apart. I think your mind would really find it fascinating. How a breach comes apart all the way down to like ball bearing size. And the only, and there's a way to just make that gun completely ineffective. And all you have to do, when you're on the charge side, there's a magazine that's a long linear magazine and it holds like 15 little rounds. If you just take that thing out, nothing's not firing.

• 1:07:18Lex Fridman?

  How many people does it take to move that? Like how easy it is to move that thing?

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  To move a triple seven?

• 1:07:23Lex Fridman?

  Triple seven. I like it.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's what they're called, M triple sevens.

• 1:07:27Lex Fridman?

  Is a lot of the terminology crossover the same in English and French?

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:30Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  I mean, M triple seven does, because it's an obvious, how it's, or I'm sure it has a separate word, but like if you're running it, you're running it in French. So like when I'd be running the, when I'm doing the charge bags and I'm doing.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  I'm doing, you know, I'm loading everything and I'm getting that ready and that's my position that day. I'm also controlling the breach.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  So like, how it opens, how it closes, when it locks. And so, but you have to yell that as you do it. So you're yelling like, "Mélib, culasse, orvay." Like, you have to yell all these things. You have to learn them, though. And so, for a long time, it's, it's, it's, it was a little frustrating. I won't lie.

• 1:08:10Lex Fridman?

  It's really exciting. I took a lot of French, but I forgot all of it. But I think it's a beautiful, romantic language.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  If it's from Paris, if it's from Quebec, it's a "ah."

• 1:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's true. It's a good language to fall in love with. Not as good as Russian, but uh,

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 1:08:24Lex Fridman?

  English is eh, alright.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  I mean, Russian, are we really, is that like a love language?

• 1:08:29Lex Fridman?

  It is to me.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  I mean, because you're Russian, but like, if somebody walked up to me and was like, "Hey, Kelsey, I like you." I'd be like, "Ah, God, he's gonna put me in a camp."

• 1:08:38Lex Fridman?

  That's because you don't understand love, Kelsey.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:08:41Lex Fridman?

  We'll talk about that, okay. How many people does it take to move the M777?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  It depends. If you're moving it by ground, you're moving it on a truck. And when you're moving it on a truck, you're hooking the back of it onto, you're hooking the front of the barrel onto one of those big, transport-looking trucks that has those cargo tents that's got soldiers in it. You don't wanna ever move an M777 by that way, if you don't have to. The barrel's worth a million dollars.

• 1:09:04Lex Fridman?

  Wow. Okay, so this is like a serious piece of equipment.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  You don't wanna move them.

• 1:09:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  When we got to Kandahar, we were there for a couple days. We got flown out to the FOB we were gonna be at. Forward Observation Base. Kandahar is the safe space, or was the major base in Afghanistan that we were at. There's things like Tim Hortons there. There's Canada House. There's a British side, an American side, a Canadian side, and, you know, that's where you see all the different countries in the world kinda come together. You would see Italians, you would see Germans, you would see French, you would see all these different uniforms, and you never know who to salute, cuz you don't know what each thing means.

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't feel like a war zone.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  No. Oh, God, no. There's a boardwalk, there's hockey there, like floor hockey, cuz Canada had to have that. There's a Tim Hortons, a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a PX. Um, I think there's a restaurant there somewhere, but I never, I didn't get to go. You know, stuff like that. There's gyms, you can run around it, you feel fairly safe. You always have a weapon on you, but you can, you know, live your life. When you get out to the FOB, the guns were already there. So those M777s get lifted by a Chinook. Normally, if they're going by air, they go by Chinook because they're heavy as hell. And Chinooks can hook them under the bottom and they fly them and then they'll drop them down. They have wheels on them, but you don't need them if you're going to leave it in place.

• 1:10:23Lex Fridman?

  Got it. And you're getting information about IEDs.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  You're getting a lay of the land as to what's been going on in the country for the past six months.

• 1:10:31Lex Fridman?

  And this, you know, nothing, you're just like, this is your first time, you're getting deployed. So what was your deployment like? Can you tell the story of your deployment to Afghanistan?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Like the whole deployment? Getting like actual deploying, not the deployment itself.

• 1:10:47Lex Fridman?

  What's the difference between the two?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Well, actually getting ready to deploy is a little different.

• 1:10:51Lex Fridman?

  So I mean, the emotional buildup to it.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:10:55Lex Fridman?

  And some of the, some of the memorable things that kind of you remember from that experience, both on the excitement, I get to see battle, I get to be part of this and the fear. And also like being surprised, like with the Tim Hortons and all those kinds of things.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  So like the lead up before everything shit hit the fan? Okay, cool. So.

• 1:11:16Lex Fridman?

  You're such a fascinating person, but yes.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Something like that. I've been called.

• 1:11:21Lex Fridman?

  Many things.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Lex Fridman?

  That start with the letter F.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't know. I don't know many words with F. Okay, so with the buildup to the deployment.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  So for the buildup for the deployment, I was in Quebec and my unit was deploying from Quebec. And at that time, you kind of get your marching orders, you know, you're deploying. I knew I was deploying before I even graduated. That's how much they needed people. So once I did all that training, on graduation parade day, a couple of men from Quebec in uniforms came over and said, you, you, you, and you are all being posted at Akhetse and you're going to deploy with us in April. So that's how I found out I was deploying.

• 1:11:58Lex Fridman?

  Why was there such a need for troops in Afghanistan? Is that, that was a well-known thing that, that there's a scaling up of troops and?

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  2007 on, Canada really started taking a combat role. Before it was very much more a UN type deal where doing what we normally do in most wars, where we just, we wear blue and we don't shoot anyone. And so we're there to help. And so they were really, they were scaling up. And there wasn't a lot of people in those trades initially, I think, when the war kind of started. So Canada really started to scale. And so when I got to Quebec. We've kind of found, oh yeah, we're deploying. And it was a weird situation because I've never actually been at a unit on a non-deployable unit. So I don't know what they do day to day. That's different from what I did. I just know what I did. So we would do things like in the morning, we would get up and we would meet for PT at 5:00 AM.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  And that would include going for a 10K run or playing ball hockey for a few hours in the gym or lifting weights together or, you know, just going on a ruck march, a long ruck march. Just stuff like that. You would have a shower, you would meet, and then you would just sit around the regiment. You would just sit around the regiment and you would, if there was busy work, you'd mop the floors, you would clean weapons. There wasn't a whole lot until there was a whole lot to do. We did a lot for a while. And then we went away on workup training to Texas for a week. We came down here and we did live fire with, um, with our other troop that was going to be with us.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  So Alpha, Alpha had two guns and two guns has two groups of people. And so we all would go down to Texas and we did live fire here for a week. And I ended up getting gastro, which was awesome. So thanks for that.

• 1:13:44Lex Fridman?

  From?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Apparently there was, uh, they were having water problems and sanitary problems. So everyone was getting it on the base.

• 1:13:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So it just makes your life way harder.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  I didn't get it towards the end till towards the end. So that was fortunate. So we would fire, live fire, we would go out to the middle of nowhere, the guns would be there and we would get, uh, offload a truck of, uh, rounds and we would do live fire and we would practice, just constant practice. What's that saying? Perfect practice makes perfect?

• 1:14:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so this is essentially, uh, like a shooting range for

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Artillery.

• 1:14:17Lex Fridman?

  For artillery.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  For long range.

• 1:14:19Lex Fridman?

  So what's, what does practice look like?

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  So you roll up in your trucks and you're, you're, you know, you've got, uh, each group of people, you've got two trucks and then you've got like a medic vehicle and then you've got like an officer vehicle and a comms vehicle. And you, you go to your prospective guns and then you offload your ammo and then you basically wait for them to send you like a, uh, a fire mission. Wow, get that together. They would call, they would say, "Mission sit." So it would be a fire mission. So we'd wait for that. And once we got that, then you all run like a bunch of scattered rats to the gun like it's like the greatest thing you've ever seen. And then you just wait, you wait for the call for the sergeant to say, and then you'll hear it. Cause it's not headphones, you can hear it on a speaker. And it'd be like, I'm not gonna do in French, don't ask.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  It'd be like, um. Uh, so and so, ten rounds, um, fire when ready. And then you'd get your rounds ready and everyone would have them ready, it would be in their perspective, um, respective positions. And then you would wait and then they would say. Fire when ready. And as soon as they say fire when ready, that means just start going. Just start and then that's when the magic starts.

• 1:15:27Lex Fridman?

  You go like the loop, like you, you shoot one or whatever, there's a reloading process.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  Yep, there's a loop. So what you would do, you get the fire emission, you would find out the rounds. The two I see would be standing by the rounds and it was his job to make sure the amount of rounds that was told would be the only rounds that would go down range. And so he'd stand there and on each round, depending on the type of round is a fuse. Which gets screwed on to the top of the round. So they're about that big and it's just a point and then you would have to put it on. Give it a spin and depending if it was a time release, you had a little, um. What do you call it? You get those at Ikea when you have to build everything. Alan, Alan.

• 1:16:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

• 1:16:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  And then.

• 1:16:08Lex Fridman?

  But like a big one or something?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  No, just a little one, cause it's a tiny little hole and you just gotta click it to where it's supposed to go. And it depended on what the call was for and it was a timer.

• 1:16:17Lex Fridman?

  When you said like wheel, you mean like a little thing then? Is that, is that what we're talking about?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm talking about the round itself. So you would put a fuse on top of the round. So you would unload the ammo and then. You would put fuses on them and the fuses are on the top and they're like a little, like a. Ice cream topper kind of thing and you would spin those on.

• 1:16:36Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I got you.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  And then once they're on, depending if it's a time release or not, you would take this little thing and you would move it. The top and that would, it's almost like a little timer.

• 1:16:45Lex Fridman?

  Cool.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, depended.

• 1:16:46Lex Fridman?

  So you're assembling a bullet?

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Essentially, a very big one that goes up to my waist.

• 1:16:52Lex Fridman?

  Cool.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Lex Fridman?

  This is, this is very cool. And you're, you're a fascinating person. Okay, so you just, that you still, even years later, have all this in your memory in some part.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  It's not all perfectly accurate. And that's what irritates me, though, is because I'm, it bothers me when I can't remember things accurately. But I have a lot of, I've had a lot of memory issues and problems after like having too many hits to the head. And

• 1:17:14Lex Fridman?

  This is from earlier in childhood or later?

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Uh, both.

• 1:17:17Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Both. The military did not help it.

• 1:17:20Lex Fridman?

  Where was, where was the hits in the head in the military?

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Well, when you have a Carl Ghost up beside your face like this and it shoots around, it, it gives you a concussive blast. Also, there's new research being done. I'll find out exactly what it is. But there's new research that's being done that shows that if you're an artillery gunner and you stand within a certain range of that gun, you get the same amount of concussive blast and it, there's a, there's a range. I had no idea. But you feel it when it goes off, like it hurt, your whole body feels it.

• 1:17:49Lex Fridman?

  Your mind is fascinating because it's like literally the opposite of mine. One, you're able to speak very quickly, very clearly, very sharply.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:17:56Lex Fridman?

  No, what?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  I talk too fast and I'm really loud because of my hearing.

• 1:18:00Lex Fridman?

  I admire, I mean, I admire that very, I can't do any of that. And you listen extremely well and you're extremely attentive and you have a good memory. So anyways, just fun, fun to watch you. And I can tell you were a great soldier in just all different aspects of it.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:18:15Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:18:17Lex Fridman?

  But what the heck we're talking about? Oh, build up to the deployment. How did we get to Texas?

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Because that was part of the buildup to my deployment.

• 1:18:23Lex Fridman?

  And live fire, you got to, did that feel good?

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 1:18:31Lex Fridman?

  What's the favorite, what's the best part about like shooting artillery? Like what, what's the thing that's, that feels good? Which part? Well, the full, the feeling of power. When is the best moment of, the highest moment of the feeling of power? Is it the whole process that you love? Or is there like when you actually shoot it?

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  It's symbiotic. It's a beautiful thing to watch, to know that a gun can fire. And it takes kind of a dance to make it work. There's something about that to me that just got my heart racing. When you actually shoot the round and you see it go and you hear it. It's unlike, you can't describe, there's no, I've never felt another feeling. I've also never been in like an F-18 or an F like 16 or like any, I've never been in anything like that. And I've, you know, I've never, trying to think of something else that'd be comparable. I've never been in like a Formula One car. Those are the only things I can picture being that much for me because to shoot one of those and to know

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  that you've done your job right means that you've helped. And that to me was really what did it for me. When you hear your sergeant say, "Mission accomplished, target hit, target acquired," then you're like,

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  "That's a good feeling. That's the stuff."

• 1:19:52Lex Fridman?

  Quick pause.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Take a break, Lex.

• 1:19:55Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so live fire in Texas, we're in Texas, by the way.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Fort Worth or Fort Hood, one of them.

• 1:20:02Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so like it's, is that close to a big, major city? Do you, do you remember visiting a city?

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Oh God, no. We, we fly right into the tarmac and they're like, "Don't touch the snakes." And then they send you out to the field.

• 1:20:15Lex Fridman?

  Got it. Let's see the instructions.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  No, really, we went into a classroom and they're like, "These are the animals that are in the wildlife in Texas. If you see any of them, do not approach, do not go pee outside, do not squat down. It is snake season, people." And I was like, "I have to pee and squat down."

• 1:20:30Lex Fridman?

  Why, why Texas and from like Canada? Is it a simulation of Afghanistan?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:37Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so that's, okay, so you're getting, and that's the way the live fire was seen in artillery is like you're trying to simulate certain aspects of what you might actually see in Afghanistan?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  I would think so. I mean, we, it, it looks like it's hot, like it, you're out in the middle of nowhere. Very similar terrain. That's the first time we started to get to wear our tan boots and our tan, like our combat tan stuff before you couldn't wear that. So it gave us an opportunity to kind of break in, break in how we were going to be doing this, what it was going to look like, how the guns were going to work and all of those lovely things.

• 1:21:11Lex Fridman?

  How do you go from there to being deployed? What was the next part of the journey?

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  So then we go to Wainwright, Alberta, often called or referenced as Waincock because it sucks so bad. It is a massive open space in Alberta, which most of Alberta is. And it's outside of a small town called Wainwright. And it is a field X training area for all of the Canadian military. And it's where you do live fire, but you also do workup training. So you go out there for a month or two, I think it is. I don't remember the exact time we were there because it was just, you sleep in a tent, you're in your cot, you're in like full mission mode. And you go outside and we did this operation called Operation Maple Leaf, I think it was.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  And you put on these little suits, these, uh, they have haptic, uh, you can feel when you're shot. And then there's a little camera and, uh, sorry, screen in the front of it. And it's got button options. And so it's to mimic, if you get shot, it'll say gunshot wound. And then you have to choose, okay, do I do this or do I do this? And depending on your response, person dies or lives. And they have other people who aren't on a rotation for deployment, come and act as the Taliban and attack you in the middle of the night.

• 1:22:31Lex Fridman?

  Is there a good understanding of the tactics that the Taliban used to attack? I mean, this may be fast forwards to our conversation a little bit, but is there predictable strategies on the other side? That are being used in Afghanistan?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  By the Taliban?

• 1:22:48Lex Fridman?

  By the Taliban?

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent. IEDs, suicide bombers, uh, vehicle borne IEDs. Um, their, their standard way to hit people really was IEDs and vehicle borne IEDs, suicide bombers. They'd put, um, like backpacks full of an IED and then put like toys around it. And then just be like,

• 1:23:09Lex Fridman?

  So they will conceal it certain ways and probably use civilians.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. And women were a great way to get close to the soldiers. Because women seem non-threatening. When you see a burka walk up to you, you're not expecting an AK-47 to roll out of that and then. Or, you know, but they're they're great ways to get close.

• 1:23:27Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so what is Wayne something?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Waincock?

• 1:23:30Lex Fridman?

  No, that's not how Wayne Wright. So let's go to Alberta.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:35Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't have to go to Alberta. Nobody wants to.

• 1:23:37Lex Fridman?

  No, let's in our minds, in in our imagination. So, okay, so that's getting you closer to, I guess.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:46Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what what was that like? I mean, are you getting anxious at this point? Is there a buildup? What are you thinking? Or is this just all part of the training?

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  For me, it was more part of the training. I was I was excited to go because I did know that we were gonna do some live fire. I did know that we were going to be doing more of the military type job I I thought we were gonna be doing because up until that point, I had just done training. So I was learning how to march and salute and who to salute and not salute. Like, that was the focus of that was my experience of the military. And then the next experience was sitting in a regiment, just working out a lot and going for breakfast a lot and drinking like that was. So I was like, this is the army. So when I actually got to go to Wainwright, I got my first full taste of, okay, well, there's fire picket duty. So one person gets picked every night to, you know, do sentry.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  There's a little less sleep. You're eating out of a canteen. Now you're drinking in a canteen. You're when your kit more, you're in your deployable kit. Now you're in your, you know, you're wearing um your tac vest, you're you're getting ready to practice having plates on, you're having ammunition on you. You've got your weapon with you all the time. When you're on base in in Vecchiette, say in Quebec, you're you're just like an everyday job.

• 1:24:56Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you can paint a clearer picture to me. When was there an understanding that you're actually getting deployed? Was it just a sense? That you're getting deployed? Or was this officially told to you?

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  I was officially told on graduation day, you're deploying in April with Vecchiette.

• 1:25:09Lex Fridman?

  Oh, there was. Okay, there's a date.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  They're like they they knew. So what had happened is the reason that Vecchiette unit needed more people. So they came to that and they picked five people. There was five English speaking people that went to Vecchiette. It wasn't just myself. There was a couple other people I knew that were English speaking that got put on other guns within the regiment. I wasn't with any of them. We all kind of got split up. And so.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  There was an understanding that we were going to always be deploying. Next year, it was like 2009, you're deploying. Whether you left in May or April, we were deploying because that was the rotation time. So each Canadian unit did between six and nine months. And then you knew right around that point, another base of individuals would then deploy. So you would go on these rotations. And so even when I was on my deployment then, I was slated to go again the following year, but towards the end of the year. So there was always a rotation. If you were in a combat arms unit and you were in one that was a deployable unit. So if you were from Edmonton, a PPC LI, which were, you know, the Princess Patricia's, which were their infantry unit.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  If you were RCR out of Petawawa, Ontario, you knew you were deploying. If you were at Vacuitset, you knew you were deploying. There's combat arms bases and then there's like naval bases. I didn't know their deployment structure. I didn't know how they worked. I'm on the ground, don't worry about the boats. So I didn't know how the air force deployed. I knew Vacuitset was deploying in April. You were going.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Get ready. That was that.

• 1:26:42Lex Fridman?

  So you show up to Afghanistan.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:44Lex Fridman?

  What is a combat arms unit looks like? What's the situation look like? How much chaos is there? How much clarity about mission is there? What are your feelings about the whole thing?

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  So when you leave, the day you leave, we left Quebec, we got driven to the airport and then we walked onto the tarmac and we load our own bags and we got on a plane and it's just empty. It's just, it's our plane, right? And you don't go right to Afghanistan. You go to a stop over a point, which I don't know if I'm allowed to say where that is, frankly. So I just say it's somewhere overseas.

• 1:27:17Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  And you go there and you go there for a couple of days. I think it's like a day or two and that's where you get like your kit. That's where you get your bulletproof plates for the first time and realize how heavy those fucking things are. It's where you get your, your weapon and your ammunition, your first few megs. It's where you get your helmet and your vests and you get everything that you need. While you're there, it's pretty nonchalant. It's, it's hot as hell. It's your first time being in that kind of heat. So you just never stop sweating. The place we were in, it's just the second you got out of the shower, you were still wet after you got out. What the hell is happening? It's so humid. And I'm like, is this going to be like this in Afghanistan? They're like, no, it's not humid there at all. I'm like, why is this so bad here? Like it'll be fine. Don't worry about it. So, and where we were there.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  It was kind of cute. We were like in a base within a base and they had like turf and we had like ice cream and fruit and you could go get on a computer, you could go make calls, you had showers, you had a real bed. It was very kind of okay for that point. And then you got all your stuff and then, okay, we're rolling out, which is about a five hour flight.

• 1:28:23Lex Fridman?

  Again, my experience with helicopters is mostly from another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Predator.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  I'm not. Do you want me to say I've never seen it? I've never seen it, Lex.

• 1:28:36Lex Fridman?

  You haven't seen it? No, you want to tell the audience the, all the excellent shows that you mentioned me offline that you watch instead, instead of Platoon?

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  Listen.

• 1:28:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, no, I understand. Is Sex and the City, was that more important than?

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I've never seen that. Don't, don't put me in that category. Did you just put me in a box?

• 1:28:55Lex Fridman?

  I did.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  I watch like Homeland, I watch, no, I watch like, I watch a lot of documentaries. I watch, I like to watch real, real things more than, than, than just film. I did a little bit of film stuff when I got back into Canada and I was like, once you're, once you've seen how it's made, I'm like, I don't want to do that.

• 1:29:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm the same with superhero movies. It doesn't, I want, I want, I want something closer to reality, but then movies like Platoon reveal some deep aspect of reality without it.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  I did Superman Man of Steel.

• 1:29:28Lex Fridman?

  Wait, you, sorry, you, you were, what do you mean you did?

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  I was not a military expert, but I was a stunt expert, even though I didn't actually have to do any stunts. It's just because I had previous military experience and they were going to have me as an extra as a military person. But if you have previous experience, they have to make it as like a stunt role, like so you get paid more.

• 1:29:45Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  So I got to sit at a desk and I was in that, I was in that, like, you'd see me like, for like two seconds.

• 1:29:52Lex Fridman?

  So you, what you're saying is you were the mastermind behind that movie?

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  For the entire thing. You're so accurate.

• 1:29:58Lex Fridman?

  Okay, great.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Your representation of me is just fantastic.

• 1:30:01Lex Fridman?

  The Combat Arms Unit in Afghanistan, the ice cream machine.

• 1:30:07Lex Fridman?

  What like when you actually get closer and closer to the mission, what when does that happen?

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  When I, you know, got to where we were before we were leaving to get on the plane, I don't really, I don't think I realized what the hell I was doing. Truthfully, like you're asking me all these like, what did you feel? How did you like? When I really think about it, if I sit there and really think about it, I was deploying, I was aware, I knew what I was going to do, I knew my job. But once we actually stepped onto that Herc to leave to get into the Afghan airspace, I think that's when it hit me.

• 1:30:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  I think it smacked me in the face so hard. And that's when the overwhelming just reality was, oh, fuck. Oh, oh, oh, when they said,

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  uh, make weapons ready, put the barrels to the ground, put your helmets on. That's when they start flying tactically, which means they're going between the mountains. That means we're gonna land soon, which means if you're flying like this, it's because RPGs can hit you. So that was my first moment of, oh, I could like just be shot down right now. Like I, I couldn't, I didn't grasp it. I was, how old was I?

• 1:31:18Lex Fridman?

  Nineteen, nineteen, yeah. Wow, okay.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  So that's why I feel bad when I'm trying to explain to you because it's hard because I don't know that I actually did grasp it until I was in the air getting ready to land in Kandahar.

• 1:31:32Lex Fridman?

  When was the first time you heard bullets, enemy, enemy bullets or enemy explosions?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Well, when you're in Kandahar, when you're in Kandahar, when you're at KAF, there's a, you're fairly insulated away from the main walls. You would hear stuff go off or you would hear the rocket sirens would go off. So you would hear the and everyone just kind of got down on the ground and just waited for the all clear and then got back up. I didn't hear any actual live fire until I got to the FOB. It was more just a lot of noise. You would hear a lot of helicopters, a lot of planes going in and out of the base. So there was that sense, you could feel the ground shake when they took off. But there was that sense, you know, things were going around, things were happening. You just weren't far enough. We're not close enough to the edges of CAF to see it.

• 1:32:21Lex Fridman?

  What's the FOB?

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  FOB is a forward observation base, which is a small little base out in the middle of wherever.

• 1:32:30Lex Fridman?

  And that's, that's specific to artillery?

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:32:35Lex Fridman?

  That's in general, just an observation base from which-

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  For infantry to go in and out of, for armor to go in and out of, special ops go in and out of them. They fly, they'll stop there, they'll pick people up or do whatever, then they'll go out. So it's a forward observation base is used essentially to have eyes in that area without having to be doing patrols every five seconds.

• 1:32:53Lex Fridman?

  But there's not, is it like, is there like medics there?

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was-

• 1:32:57Lex Fridman?

  Actual base?

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, it's a, I don't call it an actual base. You sleep in tents and cots and it is, the walls are this mesh material that are filled with gravel. And that's the walls. And then you have towers, you had five, I think we had five towers because the Americans ran four and we ran one. And so it was an American FOB. It's called FOB Ramrod. And there was a, were they Marines? No, I think they were the 101st. They were out of there. This is where I get dicey because I was moved a lot. So when people are like, who are you with? I'm like, I know what their patches looked like. I don't know the full ins and outs. So I'm working on getting that back so that I can tell it accurately because I believe it deserves that type of respect.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  But that being said, I'm still trying to, you know, wrap my brain around all of this.

• 1:33:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you almost have to go back and do like research to understand the full details of all the things you were experiencing.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  And so I reached out to actually a bunch of people, even before I wrote the book and I didn't get a lot of answers. Well, once I did Jaco, all the people have reached out to me and were like, hey. And I'm like, called you. So now I'm working, that's why I'm doing the rewrite is I'm working on making sure that things are exact. And so there was infantry units going in and out of that FOB. And it was a really tiny FOB. It was run by the Americans and then there was a tiny little corner that was the Canadian artillery unit. And the Americans, normally it's Americans shooting for Americans, Canadians shooting for Canadians. The rest of the regiment that deployed, so Bravo and Charlie, they were at Canadian FOBs. Massam Guard and another one. And these were huge FOBs. Ours was this tiny, like three kilometer around.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Place and we had this tiny little subsection of it and the rest was so it was like this and then all American here and when we got there we landed the guns were already there so you ripped out the unit before you so those guys were just leaving and we were just replacing them so that we knew the guns they were Canadian guns we understood you know how to run those that was fine when we got there though we had come in on Chinook and Chinooks are super loud and they're like we're hearing protection they don't you're not no this is not reality like this is why I'm partially deaf now like this not reality

• 1:35:15Lex Fridman?

  So sorry to take a tangent but do you usually wear uh ear protection in any aspects of warfare of this whole process?

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  You wear comms like you have a comm on like and a radio if you're outside the wire

• 1:35:28Lex Fridman?

  Uh so comms is that like a Bluetooth headset?

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a Bluetooth headset.

• 1:35:32Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:33Lex Fridman?

  Like from Nike or like?

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Um I was gonna say Adidas.

• 1:35:35Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Maybe Apple was involved at some point I don't know this equipment looked like it was from World War II so.

• 1:35:41Lex Fridman?

  So it's comms but is that have any ear protection uh like?

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:45Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  And I didn't wear them that's just what some people wore people when you were as low as me like we weren't privy to conversate like we were just told what to do and you do it so when you're doing like on the OP tower you have a radio you pick up and you call in and then you put the radio down but for ear hearing protection I mean I would put in earplugs but those things are so violently loud that earplugs they don't do it justice.

• 1:36:07Lex Fridman?

  I feel like when you go shooting there's uh certain kinds of earplugs that you you it blocks out the gut like certain kinds of sounds associated with guns and you can still hear other types of stuff.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  So the ones they issued us were these big things that had like a headpiece like here but you have to wear your helmet when you're firing.

• 1:36:28Lex Fridman?

  Right so you can't have both on. Okay, so how much are you aware of the logistics of the whole thing? That's always fascinating with warfare. Like in terms of setting up, you mentioned gravel and the fobs. Like setting all those bases up, were you seeing any of this? Or again, it's a nineteen year old kind of just?

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that I was oblivious. That's the one thing I would say I wasn't. I was, I'm very aware of my surroundings. That's something that's always been taught to me from a very early age. Cause I traveled a lot with my dad in the truck. And so my dad would be like, you're gonna go into that bathroom and I'm gonna watch you come out. And you're gonna watch everyone around you because people get kidnapped. Like, that's just the reality. I was always very paranoid.

• 1:37:08Lex Fridman?

  So, so you're paying attention to surroundings?

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  But the fob was already built up when we got there.

• 1:37:14Lex Fridman?

  This is already like well-established bases already, like there's, there's.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Established enough.

• 1:37:19Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:37:21Lex Fridman?

  And that is one of the first times you've heard actual fire?

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was like the, I mean, I'd heard it on the, when we, when we shoot and when we, you know, zero in weapons and we do all that stuff. But I had never heard it, heard it like that before. And then you would see the, the guys, the Americans would roll out every day and go on patrol and come back, look, back, back. And so you would see them, you would hear them, they would tell the stories, those types of things. But I never experienced it because we never, we never got attacked, like our base never got hit. We were really lucky that way. There were other ones around us that were getting hit, but we weren't, we weren't getting hit. We were very fortunate. Um, at least we didn't get hit when I was there. I believe the entry got, there was an attempt. There was an attempt at some point in the past, but I, I wasn't privy to that.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  But we were in the OP towers, so we had to do our own security. But because we were such a small subset of Canadians and we always had to have people running the guns and ready to run the guns at all times. We only had to man one tower. So you would do four hour shifts with a fire team partner in the tower, depending on whatever, but you would do it every day. So I would look out into the, the rest of Afghanistan at that opportunity. Otherwise it was just like your walls.

• 1:38:34Lex Fridman?

  What did it look like? Is it beautiful? Just the full landscape or is it?

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Where I was, there was mountains in the distance. It was just very sandy, very flat. And there was a couple of small compounds on the outside. It wasn't a lot to look at. There was a long road that you knew that got hit all the time. There wasn't a lot to look at.

• 1:38:55Lex Fridman?

  Such a strange place to be the center of superpowers over the decades.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  It really is.

• 1:39:03Lex Fridman?

  Like, and, and the fact that the populace, the civilians are almost completely clueless to the full history of things in terms of globally, the geopolitics of it all.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, if you look at the location of it, right, on a map, it makes more sense.

• 1:39:17Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  You can wrap your brain around it. But I met plenty of people who had never even seen a picture of themselves when I was in that country. So, I mean, how much more are they going to understand if they don't know what even exists outside?

• 1:39:30Lex Fridman?

  You tell a small story of taking a picture of a girl and showing it to her, an Afghani girl.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. We were, I was with the British at that time, and we were on that operation that gets highlighted quite a bit. And we had stopped and we, the ICOM radios were pinging, and ICOM radios are a radio that we have an interpreter on that the Taliban, basically, we can hear what they're saying. It's their comms, it's us tapped in. When it's really clear, they're close. When it's scatty and it's, they're far enough away, normally, you know, they're not planning an attack, although you never know, really. And we, we were going door to door, kind of like what they're doing now. And we were pulling people out of their houses. And we knew there were, there was people in there that were active Taliban, and we knew the ICOMs were pinging.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  When we got in there, they had hidden all the women and kids and locked them inside the house. Because often nowadays, women, the women, they would hide things on them that they shouldn't have, because no one would be ever there to search them, because there isn't a lot of women on the front lines. But I got borrowed to go specifically search women and children. So they had me. And one of the little girls kind of snuck out and was kind of sitting near me, and I was eating something, and I had like these little, these little candies, they're called little sweeties. The British have them in the ration packs, I don't know, they're good, though. And she saw me eating them, and so I gave them to her. And then her brother came over and slapped her upside the head and took them from her. So then I just went over and slapped him upside the head and just pointed my gun at her while she ate them all.

• 1:41:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  Because I was like, no.

• 1:41:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Like, you can have these, I'm, I'm going to stand here and make sure you do. And I remember asking, can I take a picture with her? I asked the trip, can you ask her, can I take a picture with her? Um, and she was very confused. And when you look at the photo, you see her face, she's very stunned. Very stunned. And it was a, wasn't my camera, it was my officer's camera. It was a hot pink, like fluorescent pink camera. So I pulled this like huge pink thing and I'm like, let's take a picture. Like, and so she stood there and took a picture, but then she grabbed the camera. Cause I flipped it and showed it to her and her eyes got huge and she grabbed it and she ran inside. And they're like, oh, that's gone forever. Like that's, it's over for you. And then she came out and she kind of snuck out and I went in and grabbed it.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  And the mom lifted up her burger and was showing me that she like shaved her legs to be more Western. And I was just, at that moment,

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  I don't know that I could have realized how much that moment affected me. How much, how much that moment would affect me later on in my life? Until it's been later on in my life.

• 1:42:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's little like glimmers like that in, uh, in parts of the world that are basically, you're taking away everything from the populace, like freedoms and so on. And when they, um, when you see that glimmer of humanity, like, yeah, shaved legs or, or, or like using technology for the first time. It's magic or like food, being presented with certain kinds of foods that you've never tried. I mean, you, you wanna see true like joy of discovery is you brings, basically the American supermarket, anything from it to most parts of the world. And they, I just, I mean, I remember even, I mean, we weren't like in poverty in, in Russia, just poor.

• 1:43:01Lex Fridman?

  But just the supermarket was full of joy. I, I thought I could just die happy in an American supermarket when I first saw it.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  And how old were you when you came here?

• 1:43:09Lex Fridman?

  Thirteen.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Did you speak English?

• 1:43:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, not well, I thought. I was, I never was good at languages, so I, it was very much like, why would I need to learn another language?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:22Lex Fridman?

  It was that attitude is very like, doesn't, I don't need. Well, no, I think culturally, in, not in America, but everywhere else in the world, it's constantly kind of seen, it's a good thing to do to learn other languages.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:38Lex Fridman?

  Because especially English, because it's like, that's the language of the world.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:42Lex Fridman?

  And I, I just thought like, um, I don't need English to discover the beauty of the world. Like, well, it just doesn't, like, I enjoy life. I enjoy soccer. I enjoy, I mean, I don't remember what else I enjoyed in life, but math, like, why do I need English for this? So that kind of attitude got me in a lot of trouble when I came here because I, I couldn't.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  You were reluctant?

• 1:44:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but also just couldn't speak well. And when you move, thirteen years old is middle school, you get made fun of a lot, you get bullied and all those kinds of things, which in retrospect is a very positive thing because makes you harder.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  I thought being Russian would make, be like, hard enough.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  No, well, me, everyone is different. I mean, the part of the Russian thing is, uh, is kind of, you know, I'm joking because if, if you know me,

• 1:44:31Lex Fridman?

  I admire being hard. I admire fighting and these kinds of things, right? These, um, what would you call them? Struggle in all of its forms, martial arts, wrestling, all those kinds of things. But I'm all, ultimately, like, I'm so much about love. Like, I'm clearly sensitive to the world in some weird genetic way that, um, it was important for me to harden up when I, when I came here and I was in love with people and it's like, and everybody's being mean to me. And it's like, what?

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  That, it's like, it's a little like, like slap, like, okay. Like, it's not, like, life is not often fair. And then that's one, for me personally, everybody has, has different journeys of hardship that are much, much more difficult. Like, your story is much more difficult. Is, you know, I started to read a lot. It's like, something happens, some kind of challenge where you start to think about the world, start to think about yourself. That that can ultimately create really interesting minds. It can break some people, it can create interesting minds and it's ultimately your choice.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  But those people are weak and then they just need to be weeded out. I thought we talked about this.

• 1:45:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  You know, the strong will survive, the weak will die off.

• 1:45:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, now, now, now you're talking Russian to me.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  I'm not speaking Russian, I'm just giving solid life advice. Just be harder and then everyone will be fine.

• 1:45:52Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, that's your inner David Goggins coming out real quick here. Okay, the FOB.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  Yep, and then I was just explaining to you that the way it is run, you're gonna love this. When we walked up to those tents for the first time, the people that were there before us left us a noose.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  I have a photo of it.

• 1:46:12Lex Fridman?

  Like is it, is that?

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Like hanging from the tent, like at the front of the tent, like, welcome.

• 1:46:17Lex Fridman?

  So you were also mentioning like the, the dark humor of it, is it basically a funny joke?

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah, it was funny at first.

• 1:46:24Lex Fridman?

  It's pretty funny.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  It, it was funny during the time. Now, when I look back at it, I was like, come on, that was a, I mean, I get it because they had already been there. And like, so I, afterwards, I can see how it's funny. Now with like the suicide epidemic in the veteran community now, I'm like, oh, I don't post that photo.

• 1:46:45Lex Fridman?

  Really? So doesn't that dark humor still somehow help even when you're considering suicide? Doesn't that some of it somehow?

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  Makes it culpable.

• 1:46:53Lex Fridman?

  Somehow, yeah, it's like you're not hiding it.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:57Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's like humor is one of the ways to reveal, reveal the reality of abuse, of suffering.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  If you look at, there's this photo that generates around, right around Suicide Prevention Month, which is September. And it's always like a photo of like Robin Williams and Bourdain and all of these other individuals who were comedians, who all took their lives, and they're all smiling.

• 1:47:20Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  And they're like, this is the face of depression. There's a way our brains work where humor is a necessary part of survival, whether it's used for joyous things or it's used for ways to cope through life. For me in the military, humor was one of the things that helped get me through. And it still does to this day, frankly, because humor.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Humor makes some of the horrific things I say not seem so horrific.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  And people can digest it rather than being like, you need to be locked up somewhere.

• 1:47:58Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's why, I mean, one of the aspects of Russian humor, there's a darkness to it because

• 1:48:06Lex Fridman?

  through it reverberates all the

• 1:48:10Lex Fridman?

  the millions of people who died. And it seems like the only way to make sense of it is to joke about it. I still love it.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Because if you don't, it'll break you.

• 1:48:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, something like that. Or also, humor is just seems to be the highest form of us humans and the human experience. It just seems it seems to somehow accumulate the full thing, the absurdity of it, the unfairness of it, the because like ultimately, all of the suffering is like, it's all just apes fighting for power and love and somehow torturing each other in the process. Hello, podcast listener. Lex here. Quick intermission to say that some of the names in the following story have been silenced out to protect their privacy. The story of

• 1:48:59Lex Fridman?

  and witnessing, I think, your first, somebody you met, somebody you saw, somebody you began to be close with. His life. Him dying. Can you tell the story?

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  Sure. That's no problem. I will tell you that I have gonna leave some of the names out of the people because

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  they have reached out and asked that I do such. I've also been informed of other things I forgot that happened during the thing that were way worse than I thought. So I'll try to add those in because that's new information to me because my brain has blocked it out. But I've been I've been told, which is good because it's better detail. So we were, we were doing a movement that morning and we were going from compound to compound. I was never told what we were doing. I knew what my job was. I didn't know the operational overview. I didn't, I didn't know who we were looking for. I wasn't there for that. My job was specifically to look after the women and children and to provide support if need be.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  And when you have certain people, so i.e. the bomb dog handler and the bomb dog, and then you have the medics, and then you have like a female searcher, that, there's only one of those in each unit. Or if, if there's even one in each unit. I got passed between units so that they could have access to me for, for both. And we were kind of sitting, and we were waiting for the all-clear to move. And at that time, the, the compound wall I was leaning up against, I had my back up against. I wasn't facing the direct direction where it actually blew up. I was, had my back to it, and I had happened to turn and look to the left. And on the right-hand side,

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  across the road of where we were leaning up against, was another compound, two stories high, people inside, a sniper on the roof, and a spotter. There was a handful of us on this wall. And in front of me, there was a road. The road went straight. That compound's here. There's another road here, on the right-hand side in front of it. And then this road went along here. And this was a wide-open space. Just a huge... We hate those. You hate those because it's too much space. It's too easy. It's like fish in a barrel. You don't want to be in that field.

• 1:51:35Lex Fridman?

  Because there's too much line of sight.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Line of sight, could be IEDs. It could be, it could be, it could be anything. And so, huh... When I was leaning up against the wall...

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  We had sent a couple of people ahead to go and clear the road so that we could all go along it and then clear the grape up off to the left-hand side. We were doing that because they use those locations to put IEDs so that when you're going to search it, it's just, it's a better chance of you blowing into a million pieces, essentially, why they love that. Put bombs in small places, send people into small places, small places go boom, they paint the walls. So, we were just kind of sitting and waiting, and then I turned, I happened to turn, I was looking in that direction, and I heard the ground shake. Before I even realized what I was seeing with my own eyes, the ground shook, and I

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  saw a big piece of a body, I think it was the torso, just kind of fly through the air and land into the field. And as soon as that happened, all hell broke loose. It was like the, they were sitting and watching and waiting, and they do that, and I say they, I mean the Taliban, they do that. They love that, because then they can record it for propaganda, and they can use it against us, and they just love being able to take, take our people out. And we had the interpreter sitting beside me, and he had the ICOM radio on, and as soon as the blast went off, I heard just the scream of "Hala lah, pah lah lah," like I just, I

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  heard it. And I knew what that meant, but I couldn't, I didn't understand what was about to happen. I couldn't, I couldn't wrap my brain around what was about to happen because I had never been outside the wire. And people are like, people say to me now, they're like, no, there's no way that shit's true, there's no way that she was involved in that, and then in that, and then in that, and then in that. Well, let me explain. I was one person. I was being passed around to units.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  I was with a ton of different people. I had no comms. And I was just being told where to go. Um. And I just happened to be like a shit hit the fan magnet. It felt like. And then I found out later, it was not just me, it was all of us were getting it. So that made me feel better. Cause then I was like, well, I have a lot of survivor's guilt. That's like a thing that's still stuck with me. I've worked through a lot of shit, but survivor's guilt, that's a big one for me. Certain food is a big one for me. Um.

• 1:54:21Lex Fridman?

  Certain food.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, skin on food. So like chicken with skin on it.

• 1:54:29Lex Fridman?

  Oh, just because of the biology of death? Just.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Well, when you hold people's bodies in your hands with no gloves on. You know what that feels like. When you touch raw meat again. It's the same thing.

• 1:54:42Lex Fridman?

  That's what that feels like when, when it's a dying or dead body.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  Well, my friend was blown into a million pieces, so I just had pieces of him. So there was no.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  There was no differentiator of like, this was his thigh or this was his torso. Or there was like, there was none of that. There was only one instance with a boot, but um.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  But I, I, what I, I, at that point, we had been in some firefights. We had been taking some rounds, but it was more like. Take a, we would, you know, get hit and then we duck into a compound and we would set up and then we'd be firing. I wasn't, I wasn't really involved in a lot of the firefights until after this. After that, the rest of the week I was like, I was angry and I wanted them all to go. And I wanted to be in every position to take them out myself. So I put myself in every position. So I made sure I was on the roof. I made sure I was there. I made sure, hey, you need something, I'll fucking run it. I don't care if I die anymore because as soon as that happened, my light switch went off. It didn't matter anymore to me.

• 1:55:46Lex Fridman?

  Can you go through what happens?

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:48Lex Fridman?

  At Akbar, you were hearing these screams?

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the IED went off. And what had happened was they put an IED inside of a grape hut. And the grape hut has rectangular wall, rectangular holes in the wall. And there's just like one door and it's this tall mud hut with just all these like holes in it. And they had put an IED underneath a pile of sticks. And had a metal detector, the Brits carry them. I've never seen, I think other countries have them, but I've only ever seen them use it. And that's how we were kind of detecting if there was an IED. Well, he must have hit it, the sticks or something, and it set it off. And it just, it was over. He, there's no way he felt anything. And then there was another guy at the door, bent down on one knee. And he was facing and kind of watching for.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  And then a blast hit him on this side. And so it took him out and pulled his kit off, pulled his helmet off, pulled everything off, fucked him all up. Big time.

• 1:56:46Lex Fridman?

  This is one IED?

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was in a contained area. And he was in the doorway. Up and out.

• 1:56:55Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain what an IED is and how does it work?

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  I can do my best. Uh, they're improvised explosive devices. They can be used pretty much out of anything to make anything. So, um, garbage. When we got to Afghanistan, they did the IED meeting with us. They're like, these are what we're finding, that they would show us diffused IEDs. So they would see those big blue drums filled with gasoline buried in the ground. You would see a wire. It would go to a pressure plate. You hit the pressure plate, that would hit that and it would go. You would see IEDs. Some of them were ridiculous. The engineering that went into some of these was hilarious because they were thinking.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  They were thinking to use everything they could. There was a cigarette pack they had used. They lined the inside with tin foil. And when you stepped on the tin foil, it had a piece of wire and it was enough of a spark to set off a line of batteries that we had thrown out that were all dead. When you fuse them all together, there was enough juice to make it go. Then they would attach that to like phosphorus or gasoline or whatever they could that would make a big boom. They would use, um, yeah, that's why you never kick garbage on the ground. You'll never see me kick something on the ground. You'll see me walk around it always. If I ever see a pile of rocks or something that looks like it shouldn't be there, I won't walk near it. Even now, because they use that pile of rocks to remind people there's something there. We don't know what that means, but we know that something's there.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  And very often they would use anything, garbage, wires. We were very, we had to burn everything for a reason.

• 1:58:29Lex Fridman?

  It's so terrifying to not.

• 1:58:33Lex Fridman?

  For the source of death to be like little parts of the environment and then people. That don't look like they're not dressed as soldiers.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:58:44Lex Fridman?

  It's like civilians and like regular, because then you, when you have to come back or even there. You're just surrounded by danger and then you distrust everything essentially.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  That's the problem. And that's why you have such PTSD issues with the soldiers we have now. Because you're, you're in the environment in which it's very similar. So.

• 1:59:07Lex Fridman?

  So there's this one IED.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  So this one IED, I, I still don't know what it was, um, went off. Body flew. The guy at the door, um, he kicked out. He was all broken and bleeding and a mess.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  At that point, the radio started going crazy. Like I could hear the guys yelling and screaming, trying to figure it out. And then you could hear the numbers being called. KIA, number, number, number, number. I don't know anybody's service number. I, I, I don't know what's going on. Next thing you know, mortar rounds start like coming down. And like live fire starts happening and I'm like, holy fuck, things are popping off. And I remember just looking at and being like, we need to go, we need to go now. And I just got this like, like I was, I was like, we're, we're going. And they're like, hold on Burns. And I'm like, we're fucking going like, I wasn't dealing with it well. And they're like, all right, all right, go, go, go, go, go.

• 2:00:03Speaker 01

  So we went and we, um, and I helped out with that other individual, kind of held him down. Started doing medic work on him and he just kept saying, where's, where's, where's? He was in such a state of shock. I've never seen somebody's eyeballs so big in my life. She's good, where's, where's, where's? Yeah, he's good, buddy, he's good, he's good. Picture like a super thick Scottish accent though, because these guys were just, oh, and when they talk fast, it's even worse. And then, so I ran over and we, we jumped down into the ditch along the side of the road. Cause the road hadn't been cleared and we're running through these tall, they look like cannabis plants, but they're not.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  But it just, it's just very thick bush. And I felt like I was running in slow motion. So if you picture one of your video games where like the tunnel vision and you're just, you can hear your breathing is

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  like that, and you're running and you can't move fast enough. And you're like trying to get there. And we hit the road and the rounds are coming down and mortars are coming down. And they're like, okay, on three, run. So we run on three and we run into the compound. I mean, into the great putt. And I remember looking around and very seriously going, where is he? Just genuinely asking, I think it was

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  been messaging me and he's been incredible. He's one of the best soldiers I've ever served with. He was a higher up, so he was running part of this. He, he's messaged me and he was giving me some information and, um, he's like, I was in there with you. And he goes, I remember, cause you handed me the boot. And cause I walked over and I, all the rounds were like, we were being shot at, mortars were coming down. But it was this slow motion and I remember walking over to the hole in the ground.

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  And seeing his boot in the ground.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  But it was, his leg was still hanging like, uh, but just below his knee was still in it. But the boot was perfectly laced up. Like the boot was fine.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  And I just,

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  I held it and I turned and I looked at the guys and I was like, we could reuse the boot.

• 2:02:18Lex Fridman?

  Now, that wasn't even... What is that? Was that... Was that actually an intelligent attempt at humor? Or was it some kind of deeply lost, like you were completely just lost?

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  I think my brain broke. I think that's the moment I call my light switch went off.

• 2:02:40Lex Fridman?

  Did you understand that he was dead at that point? Like intellectually, you were just... It just broke? No emotion? Like, it just broke?

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  It was just shattered. It shattered. I felt it happen. Felt... I didn't feel... I didn't feel anything. It just broke.

• 2:03:13Lex Fridman?

  And at that moment, because later there's some anger almost? At that moment, none of that?

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Uh-uh. I couldn't comprehend what happened. I knew he wasn't there anymore because they looked at me and said, "What's here is here. Start grabbing pieces we need to fucking move." And so, I handed the boot over, they took it, and then I started just grabbing anything out of the walls because those little rectangular's had flesh hanging from it. And I didn't have my gloves on, because I only used them to search. And...

• 2:03:48Lex Fridman?

  So you want to bring...

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 2:03:51Lex Fridman?

  Bring back?

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  You didn't want to leave.

• 2:03:53Lex Fridman?

  This is what, even if they're dead, do you want to save? Save those you served with?

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they deserve that. They don't deserve to have a piece of them drug behind a truck for propaganda. It's not... It's not fair.

• 2:04:07Lex Fridman?

  What did the others... I mean, was there just a focus on mission? Or was there a panic? What did...

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  No panic with these guys. These guys were the most switched-on motherfuckers I've ever seen in my life. They... We started grabbing and... Remind me, he said, you know, you... That's not... He goes, "When people say that's the worst part of your day, that wasn't even the worst part of your day. Do you remember when you handed me the bag of intestines?"

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Now I do though, thank you for that.

• 2:04:41Lex Fridman?

  So there's parts you don't even, they're just not.

• 2:04:44Speaker 01

  They don't register.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  Cause I had some people contact me and be like, you didn't tell it, right? And war is subjective and war is from your perspective and war is messy and horrific and war is

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  graphic and violent and

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  painful.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  Your brain remembers what it wants to remember and your brain allows you to remember what it allows you to remember. And there's reasons that you don't remember everything.

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  And so we were getting, we were really getting hit. We were getting, it was bad. And some of the guys, machine gunners that come up to do cover fire. And I know, uh, we were calling in for air support to come pick up the guys, uh, because they had to go. And we we just collected everything we could, but I did remember screaming like, we didn't get them all. We didn't get them all. There's no way we got them all. We did not fucking get them all. And I remember one of the guys looking at me being like, we got him, we got him. I'm like, we didn't fucking get him. We didn't get him. Like, no, we got him. I'm like, we didn't. And I couldn't say it enough. And

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  so I grabbed as much as I could, I, I, I, um, I slung one of their weapons and it was just a twisted heap and I had his helmet, helmet and someone else's helmet in my arm. And then I had, um, my weapon in front of me. And I was carrying it and then we, we piled everything we had onto a stretcher. Those things are super fucking flimsy anyway. And there was a couple of guys in front of us and there were a couple behind me and I was kind of in the middle. And we, we said, okay, we're just gonna have to run. We're gonna have to fucking run the road. We're gonna just have to run it. There's a chance it, so we ran it and that was the closest, well, that was, I guess not the closest, but it felt like it was the closest. I could hear the, the whiz of the rounds going by me.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  It's a weird noise when they're coming at you than when you're they're leaving you.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  And so they that slowed everything down for me. And then one of the guys accidentally dropped the edge of the stretcher. And everything fell off into the ditch. And then we had to go back down and get it back up. And so we kept running and we finally got back into the compound that that sniper was sitting off on the right hand side. And we got all in there. And I know the I think said there was two flights. I only thought there was one, but apparently there was two flights. So went on one, his body went on one. And then I think I think he said went on the other. And um, and then they took off. And then when they leave, though, they rain hell down. On anything they can see on the ground. And that is a beautiful sight.

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  Cause they had mortar rounds coming down and it just it was getting really, really bad. And then as soon as the Blackhawks took off, all of a sudden it just stopped.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  And went quiet. Like deafening quiet. And we were sitting inside the compound and I, one of the medics looked at me and you could see and I still do it now and I I'm working on not doing it, but I do it when I get really overwhelmed. Because I didn't have any gloves on, I had blood all over my hands and just like body and stuff. So he came over and he just gave me like sanitizer and I started rubbing. And so I rub, I do this when I'm stressed. I'll rub my hands. Um, and I still can't, I still can't do, I I still can't eat food with skin on it.

• 2:08:23Speaker 01

  And I can't like, like salmon and stuff, like I can't, anything with skin, I can't touch it. And like if I'm making meat at home, like for my husband and my son, like I have like meat gloves and then I have like a fork and a knife and I'm like cutting it like I never touch it. I can't touch it.

• 2:08:40Lex Fridman?

  So there's something almost like um. The texture of the biology of a human flesh that just that's at the level of, that's the level of your trauma.

• 2:08:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's been, I mean, it's 2021, this was in 09. And I've worked on this, like, and I mean, I've been in like, treatment religiously, just to be able to keep me alive for this, this decade. And so it's not like, it's like, oh, I've never, you never even tried to get better. It's like, I never used to leave my house. I used to call people that looked like that horrific names in public. I used to want to kill people on a regular basis. I'm a fairly happy individual now.

• 2:09:21Lex Fridman?

  What about

• 2:09:24Lex Fridman?

  you're, you're talking about sort of skin and parts and but there's also just the fact that we're mortal. And there's somebody close to you who dies.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Who you watch walk up and then never come back out again?

• 2:09:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's like you're facing mortality in a very real way. And if, and uh in a way that's not the same as somebody dying from cancer in a hospital, although it has echoes of that because that's also absurd and, and like it doesn't feel like there's justice to it in any kind of way, but it's so sudden. Like, have you been able to um make sense of that? Of your feelings about it? Like, how, how do you feel about it? Or, or is everything just shrouded in this like

• 2:10:15Lex Fridman?

  trauma? That you're not able to just um feel for the loss of a human being, like mourn the loss of a human being?

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  I think I had, when he, when I realized he wasn't there. When I realized that he um that was that I, that was what was left of him. I found out afterwards, there was other parts that were outside and and went back, I think, I think he said went back and they got, they end up getting the rest of him. So that made me happy because I just found this out this week.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:10:54Lex Fridman?

  That, that mean, so that means you have a feeling like you still feel like parts of him were left behind?

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  On the ramp ceremony, when I lost my mind, literally, I I lost my mind. And I was screaming that he wasn't all in there. I'm happy now knowing that he was. But I held on to that for 10 years.

• 2:11:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this, um, yeah, the sandbags, like, like it's

• 2:11:28Lex Fridman?

  the bulk of the weight is is not from human flesh. Yeah.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  He was a young kid, too. It was, I think it was his first deployment as well. Like, he was, he was a young kid. And

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  he was just just going to clear the road for the rest of us, right? Like, not like, you know, you're in war and you know that you're outside the wire and you know, things could happen. You you understand that to the extent you can understand that. When it's happening, it's something very different.

• 2:12:04Lex Fridman?

  Also, maybe you can correct me, but um, there's something much more like brutal about an IED.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  It's vicious.

• 2:12:13Lex Fridman?

  Versus versus like a bullet. Because a bullet, you still

• 2:12:19Lex Fridman?

  watching somebody close to you die from a bullet, you still get the the basic humanity. Like, so IED basically converted a human being into sort of parts by biological parts.

• 2:12:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Versus, yeah, I mean, I don't.

• 2:12:38Lex Fridman?

  That's that's tough. That's tough because it's like,

• 2:12:45Lex Fridman?

  because it's hard for you to remember them as a human. You remember them as parts.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  For me, that's how I remember him. I would like to, I've, I have a picture that I post every year about him. I see that.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  But I

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Don't put two and two together. Does that make sense?

• 2:13:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, no, it does. So even I, listening to your story, you know, thank you for sharing it, first of all.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  That's fine. It's not my, it's,

• 2:13:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  I'm just the one to tell it. I was just involved.

• 2:13:19Lex Fridman?

  One, one set of eyes on this particular human being. But even I get angry.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  I can't tell if it's exhaustion or anger.

• 2:13:29Lex Fridman?

  I'm sorry. I look always exhausted.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Oh, that's okay. You're, you're into robotics. Isn't that like your guys' thing? You guys are just always working on tech?

• 2:13:37Lex Fridman?

  I think because I feel so much for the world, I just don't do, we were talking about resting bitch face earlier. I just don't feel the need to maintain all the effort of the musculature for presenting myself to you visually.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Exhausting.

• 2:13:52Lex Fridman?

  It's exhausting. So I just focus on the feeling.

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  No, hey, I,

• 2:13:55Lex Fridman?

  And then let the face show whatever the hell it shows.

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 2:13:58Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Was there anger? Was there hate?

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Lex Fridman?

  Can you just talk through your feelings of what you remember?

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So after that operation with the British, I went back to the Canadians.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  And I didn't go back as even remotely close to who I was when I left. And that was really troublesome for a lot of people around me because the level of anger and hate that came out of me was palpable when I just walked by.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  I got shockingly quiet. And you understand how you're learning.

• 2:14:39Lex Fridman?

  That'd be terrified if you were quiet.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And I don't know if hate and anger do that justice. I don't know another word, but I don't think those two words do it justice to the extent that I was feeling like. I got to a point when I got attacked by a woman um with some scissors, like the I the idea crossed my mind like I could boot stomp her to death and not feel anything about it in front of her, all of her family and her kids.

• 2:15:07Lex Fridman?

  Was it more like just not recognizing the basic humanity or was it legit hatred?

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  No, it was legit hatred, but also I no longer saw those people as humans.

• 2:15:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  It took one event and when that happened, the rest of the operation, that was echoed in my, in the way I was to those people.

• 2:15:27Lex Fridman?

  But to what level can you see those people as human? So this is where, well, like this is where Jaco shut down um.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 2:15:40Lex Fridman?

  I still think I'm right. There's a Dire Straits song called Brothers in Arms. And um, actually, anyway, we're fools to make war on our brothers in arms. And I brought that up to Jaco because it's humans on both sides.

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:16:01Lex Fridman?

  But he said, not in Iraq.

• 2:16:06Lex Fridman?

  Like to him, he's like, no, that's the enemy. These are people who use the civilians. They rape, they torture, they they'll do anything. And they put evil into the world. And then it's like, so there there stood on at that moment, like the these two were were humans and it's politicians waging war and it's it's kids on both sides, but then Jaco's like, no.

• 2:16:35Speaker 01

  He's not wrong.

• 2:16:36Lex Fridman?

  So which, can you carry both things with you as a soldier?

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  I think when I was a soldier, I could only carry one thing with me. I think my perspective has changed drastically, but not because I've lost the reality that they are the enemy. But I've I've gained my humanity back again. And that's what I lost when I was there. I lost all humanity. I lost all hope for humanity. He's not wrong. When he says the Taliban or like he was in Iraq, but for me, the Taliban are evil. I still hold a spot of hatred for them that could set this building on fire. You, you don't. I don't know that anybody can fully understand that.

• 2:17:23Speaker 01

  When you watch what they do to women and to kids, and they do it in the name of God, they are the enemy. They are less than. They don't exist. They're barely worth the bullets we put into them.

• 2:17:41Lex Fridman?

  But then, because they use civilians.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  It gets dicey.

• 2:17:46Lex Fridman?

  So like, then everybody

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Becomes the enemy.

• 2:17:49Lex Fridman?

  It becomes the enemy. And how are you supposed to make sense of that? Like what?

• 2:17:53Speaker 01

  You can, but here, Lex, you can't make sense of it. This is why. They've done a really good job of blending into the civilian population. They've done it intentionally. They've done it on purpose. So they're brilliant. This is why you guys couldn't beat them. This is why we couldn't fucking beat them. They use their people so effectively. They have no shame in that. They have no issue with that. They take no qualms with wiping a kid off the face of the earth. If it means they can get close enough to a soldier to throw a fucking bomb into their tank. This is why they're affected.

• 2:18:27Lex Fridman?

  How do you beat them then? Is this, there's no winning? That you just basically do policeman type work? Or you do your best?

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  I mean, that's one way.

• 2:18:38Lex Fridman?

  So the other is you come from an artillery background.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  A fucking hellfire missile and take the whole place off the face there. You can't beat radicalism like that right now. The problem is, is we've, we've let it go unchecked. We had it kind of in check for 20 years. We just shot ourselves in the foot, the chest and the face.

• 2:19:02Lex Fridman?

  So the problem with force is it creates long-term hate. Because young kids and propaganda and like propaganda works. So you you see your father, your brother die because of a bomb. It's very easy to convince that person that they died because of evil Americans and tell whatever story you want about America or Canada, Russia.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  That's the biggest problem.

• 2:19:28Lex Fridman?

  So it seems like there got to be better solutions because um I mean I talk about love, but it's honestly basically figuring out sneaky ways of empowering women, of educating people of like.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:19:44Lex Fridman?

  And like and not in a.

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  Not a cheesy way, but in a realistic.

• 2:19:48Lex Fridman?

  Like like in the same level of like mass warfare, but with love. So you're talking about DARPA budgets, DoD budgets, but like do that where you educate and empower women by force.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  And it they want to learn.

• 2:20:06Lex Fridman?

  Right. I mean, you're not like forcing anybody.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  No, but.

• 2:20:09Lex Fridman?

  You're setting them free.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  That's exactly it. Like Combat Flip Flops does this. They do this. They give literacy. They teach girls to read, nothing else, to read. Because as soon as you can read, you know what that happened. You know what happens then.

• 2:20:23Lex Fridman?

  What's Combat Flip Flops?

• 2:20:24Speaker 01

  That's the scarf right there that's made in Afghanistan. So when you buy something from them, the proceeds go to literacy in Afghanistan for girls. They've given literacy to 800 girls over there. Yeah, they're really cool. Griff owns the one. He was Army Ranger and his buddy, but Lee, I think is his name. They were on Shark Tank a long time ago, but they they do shoes and I think they're called shmongs, shmongs. I don't know how to say it properly.

• 2:20:49Lex Fridman?

  Built in Afghanistan.

• 2:20:51Speaker 01

  Yes. And then the proceeds go back there. They do great work for literacy and you know as well as anyone, if you can teach someone to read.

• 2:21:00Lex Fridman?

  Good color.

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  Dark like your soul, Lex.

• 2:21:05Lex Fridman?

  On the inside.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  Just on the inside.

• 2:21:07Lex Fridman?

  Alright.

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  The outside is just the, it's just the suit. I feel like you think that's your suit of armor, but I feel like it's, it's there.

• 2:21:16Lex Fridman?

  Say, what were you saying?

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  Sorry, what were you saying? I was saying.

• 2:21:19Lex Fridman?

  Go on, I will allow this.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Alright, I think there is room if you teach education. The problem is, we've taken a massive step backwards. I know that the Taliban have just instituted, uh, this week. Honor killings will be back, stonings are back and, um, uh, dismemberments as well. Holly McKay is the reporter that's been reporting that from the ground. She's still there. The way to pull people, in my opinion, out of something like that is through education. Well, we just took all of that away. Which is pretty horrific, in my opinion, because you've taught over 20 years. You're, you're, you're perfectly right, Lex. When you say that hate and violence won't work, it won't.

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  Because you see dad get killed on the battlefield. Well, that 14-year-old little boy is going to pick up an AK-47 and go avenge dad's death. That's just the way it's going to be. Well, we think about it, you were there for 20 years. There's a couple of generations in there. There's another generation that's either grown up in this or has seen enough of this. So there are always going to be a subset that think that we're the enemy. And fair, we haven't done always the greatest things. But the one thing that we have done, that I did participate in, was giving literacy, giving girls an opportunity, letting them know that you aren't second-class citizens. You can do things too. And that's why we have to look at war differently. There's times for violence. Oh, ho, ho, there is time for violence.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  And there is time for missiles and there is time for detainees. And there's times for bagging tags and double taps of the fucking face. There's times for all of that. But there needs to be more time to educate. The problem is, you can't educate if you're in a country where the culture doesn't believe in that. You're fighting so many different things that you, it's an, almost an impossible situation.

• 2:23:18Lex Fridman?

  When you look at the 20 years in Afghanistan, and we just pulled out, there's a sudden pullout of troops. What do you think about those 20 years? Let me ask hard question, which is, was it worth it going into Afghanistan? And you're sort of, you're one person.

• 2:23:38Speaker 01

  My limited capacity.

• 2:23:40Lex Fridman?

  You have experienced a specific set of extremely difficult things. You've met a lot of humans. You understand certain aspects of the way this war is carried out. But if you zoomed out at the big story, like you like history too. When you think of the history, 100 years from now, we look at the invasion of Afghanistan.

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  I don't even think you need to go far that back to know that it was. We went in on false pretenses. We did, we.

• 2:24:12Lex Fridman?

  That's not, that's not a good start.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  What's that saying? Future behavior is a good, was it past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior?

• 2:24:22Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  So I struggle with that because when I first found out that the pullout was going to happen, I, I got really angry because my government skated the whole situation because he, he's having a snap. Canada's having a snap election. It's happening on the 20th. So that was beautifully planned by my government to hold no accountability. Zero accountability. And the media won't talk about it. They reached out to me to do an interview about Afghanistan and then I told them what was going on after I talked to my people that were on the ground and then they canceled the interview.

• 2:25:02Lex Fridman?

  When you say my government, is America any better at this? Like it feels like there's no accountability.

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  No, no, the government, no, the American government is a dumpster fire. I'm not saying, I'm not saying that, but what I am saying is.

• 2:25:18Speaker 01

  At least they sent people to pull people or pull some people. We sent no one to pull anyone. And I know for a fact, because I helped move a family, I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to help move a high value nine person family out of that country that worked in the government, that worked in prosecuting the Taliban, that were on the top of the list. I learned really quickly the ins and outs of things and I'm really disgusted by it. I learned that Canada had the one email address that all Canadian Afghani or visa holders were supposed to email, Ottawa put two people on that email address. That's confirmed.

• 2:26:01Speaker 01

  Canada put no more than 70 people on the ground for that pullout and they were not allowed to leave the airport and they left well before the pullout date. They left on the Thursday before the Tuesday, that was the 31st. There were high value Canadian visa holders that are still in that country that are on the top of the kill list. Canada's not doing anything about it. Um, I'm disgusted in the way my government has acted because not, number one, there's an active lawsuit with veterans against the Supreme Court of Canada right now. Um, we are leaving our vets and our Canadians stranded over there and we are leaving the vets that have been maimed by this war in Canada. Um, they're turned down for everything. I've been turned down for hearing loss.

• 2:26:45Speaker 01

  They're saying it's not military related. I, they have PIs follow me. It's, this is normal behavior. There's a veteran named Brock who was told by Trudeau in a meeting that after he lost his leg, he was just trying to get a new, a new prosthetic because it was just killing him. Trudeau stood up in a meeting and said, you're just asking for too much. Less than six months later, he gave 10.4 million dollars to an Afghan terrorist that was in the Canadian prison system. He won and got 10.4 of our million taxpayer dollars. So I don't know that American government's any better, but what I do know is that the absolute fucking machines of human beings that stepped outside of the chain of command to pull my family out for me, I know they were there.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  The British that stayed on the ground that I contacted to literally confirm my biometric data and passports to get that family moved, they weren't there, that family would still be there. That three year old that got the shit kicked out of him by the Taliban that I was trying to exfil, Canada left him.

• 2:27:49Lex Fridman?

  What is it about politicians and governments not willing to um?

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  Do their job?

• 2:27:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, doing not not willing to do that, a big part of the job, which is like, you send people to war, these are heroes, and then you should spend most of the time repaying the debts to those, right? Well, what is it about, why can't we?

• 2:28:21Speaker 01

  Because we're disposable numbers and we hire them out of high school when they're stupid enough to not understand what they're going to get themselves into. And then we blame it on themselves for making that decisions by volunteering.

• 2:28:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I mean, that doesn't, this still doesn't make sense to me.

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  It's a cop out.

• 2:28:38Lex Fridman?

  I mean Trudeau, I feel like he is a good human being that wants to do good for, I mean, I tend to, I want to believe that leaders want to do good by the heroes of this world. And it doesn't, like, I don't understand the system of delusion you have to live in to not understand who the heroes are. Like, I refuse to believe Trudeau is somehow a bad person.

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  You haven't met him, though, have you?

• 2:29:04Lex Fridman?

  I don't, actually. I'm speaking about Trudeau without knowing. But I mean, in general, think that way about leaders. I just think they surround themselves by people who delude them, who like-

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  They're yes people.

• 2:29:17Lex Fridman?

  Who, yes, people that lead them into a kind of reality that becomes detached from actual reality. And so they misunderstand the priorities of this world. They think maybe some kind of special interest, they focus on that versus like the humans. If you look back, was there a way we could have done something better in Afghanistan, assuming we do the invasion? So is it ultimately about taking care of the veterans?

• 2:29:47Lex Fridman?

  Like, investing more money in the education of women and liberating people who are suffering injustice in those parts of the world? Like, what's the better way to do it? And one other aspect is, on the US side, paid over $6 trillion for the wars in the Middle East since 9/11. So the financial side as well. Is there something you can comment on? Things we could have done better.

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  That's a loaded question because you're talking to someone who had no hand in what happened other than do this and do that. So I can go from my perspective, which is there was probably plenty of things that we could have been doing better. I think there was a lack of leadership from the get-go. I think the preparation that the Canadian military gave me was nowhere sufficient for a deployment of that level. Mind you, things happen. They didn't realize things would happen, but yet they happen. With little to absolutely no cultural idea was what I was walking into. Like when one male in the family grabbed the back of my vest because my hair was tucked and he thought I was a man going into a room with a bunch

• 2:31:02Speaker 01

  of women, I couldn't understand why he was attacking me. There was no real breakdown of this is what you're going into. This is the culture. This is why they do what they do. This is how they do it. This is how you should handle a situation like that. There was none of that. And something I speak about frequently, and I think it's important to acknowledge is when you're doing any of that training, we are giving none of our soldiers proper mental health training. Tools in that fucking toolbox or ways or things to look for on their buddy. Because we've created a system and a problem where if you say that you're ill or that you're struggling with PTSD, you're done. No one's gonna say that. They're gonna keep struggling with it. And that's when you get loose cannons. It's when

• 2:31:46Speaker 01

  you get problems happen. So you get fractures start to happen in leadership. And that's being seen and has been seen now for a while. So in terms of what we could have done, say for a better, a better way to go into the country, a better way to help the country.

• 2:32:08Speaker 01

  I can't speak to that as much as I wish I could. Because I don't know that I would have all the answers.

• 2:32:15Lex Fridman?

  What about withdrawal?

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That's a cold.

• 2:32:21Lex Fridman?

  You think more gradual, you think it's, you think it's better to maintain presence there for indefinitely?

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  I don't know about that. But I do know. We have bases, we, I say weeks, I serve with them. Americans have bases in Japan. Americans have bases in Korea. Americans have bases in Germany. There's reasons there's bases everywhere. There's a smart. There, there's an intellectual way to look at this. You want to be able to have eyes and ears. Can't have eyes and ears when you do things like you just did. The way that we pulled out of that country. That's right, the way that I hate saying American British because it puts like a blame on them. I say we because I'm a soldier, I, I, I'm a NATO soldier. The way we pulled out of that country. My five year old could have done it better. He could have said, mommy, why are we not keeping that Bagram base?

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  Mommy, why are we not keeping that base? Just until we get everyone else that we need. Why are we going to a civilian airport that we don't control, that we don't understand? Mommy, why are we doing this when there's only one road to it?

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  My five year old would have that conversation with me. It was so poorly done. It was so poorly executed and no fault of the soldiers on the ground on their own. My God, I can tell you, there's operators, I just call him A. I don't say who he is because he's told me not to. There's a guy named A and there's another guy named R. And there's a few other named D and these guys.

• 2:33:52Speaker 01

  They gave everything to try to pull my family when no one else would pull my family for me.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  They just got me on the phone and said, I don't know who the fuck you're talking to. I don't know how many people you're trying to get a hold of here, but you've got everyone looking for your family. Six, I've gone to everyone I know. I've done stuff on Instagram. I've got a contact, the contact called me, I called them, I got, I was handling this family. And when they call you and say, we can't go back to the gate, my three-year-old just got beat up by the Taliban. And they say, what do we do now? I'm in Vancouver. Why am I being left to deal with this? Why is a civilian and ex-military population being left to deal with this? Why was this not thought out? We knew this was coming. We knew the timeframe.

• 2:34:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I ultimately blame, it, it almost starts at the top always, at the leadership, sorry, it's the civilian leadership.

• 2:34:45Speaker 01

  Always.

• 2:34:46Lex Fridman?

  I don't, I, I think probably the generals know the right thing to do here. Even if they're sometimes overzealous in terms of being, wanting to increase. I think the great generals understand what's needed. And then it takes great leadership on the civilian side to listen to the generals and understand that war is not just about like.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  It's not binary.

• 2:35:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and it's not about the invasion and saying, mission accomplished, you know, like, it's, it's not about the PR, it's about, um, like, the full complexity of geopolitics. Can I ask you this?

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  Can I ask me whatever you want?

• 2:35:20Lex Fridman?

  I'm looking at a book that you gave me, Do the Fucking Work. It's very motivating.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  Good Fucking Design Advice. That's their company, called Good Fucking Design Advice.

• 2:35:29Lex Fridman?

  That's great.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  I know, they're great.

• 2:35:31Lex Fridman?

  What's the website, because?

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  Good GFDA.

• 2:35:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so the F is, the F is for friendship?

• 2:35:37Speaker 01

  Something like that. They are a design company. They've worked with Apple and Nike, and this is their book, it's been published by Harper Collins, and it is really just, uh, it's an incredible, they're an incredible company. They, they're, they're artistically, like, they're a design company, so you can see that. Um, you can see it's a design company, oh yeah, they signed it for you. And, uh, the pages are beautiful, but it's, they have a saying and then a paragraph about each saying.

• 2:36:03Lex Fridman?

  Get fucking started, obstacles are fucking opportunities, fail, fail, and fucking fail again.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:11Lex Fridman?

  Ask for fucking help, show some fucking passion, finish the fucking job.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  That's right, so we should send that to Biden. So, I, um.

• 2:36:20Lex Fridman?

  She said that, I didn't say it.

• 2:36:22Speaker 01

  Lex said it.

• 2:36:23Lex Fridman?

  I didn't say it.

• 2:36:24Speaker 01

  Lex said it. It's fine. I'll say I should also send it to Trudeau as well. So but I mean, he probably won't know how to read it. He just taught drama instead. So.

• 2:36:31Lex Fridman?

  I'll send it to the previous four presidents. How about that?

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  That's fine. We can also send it to them too, because they're all just as much at fault. So.

• 2:36:39Lex Fridman?

  And they, most of them have all the same last names. But, okay.

• 2:36:44Speaker 01

  Let me tell you about them quickly, because we did a mug with them and I was really excited about it. Not because it was a mug. I'm a mug person. But.

• 2:36:50Lex Fridman?

  You are. That's your.

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  Mug obsessed. I'm obsessive about my mugs.

• 2:36:53Lex Fridman?

  What's your favorite mug?

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  Currently, it's mine right now, the one that I have with them.

• 2:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:36:58Speaker 01

  The GFDA mug.

• 2:36:59Lex Fridman?

  What does it say on it?

• 2:37:00Speaker 01

  Can I, do you want me to read what it says on it?

• 2:37:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  Okay. Because I'm really happy about it, because we created this with them, with GFDA. I found out about them because my husband's office, Atlas Neck Brace, he had his very first office, he had one of their prints done. And it was their original, like, do the fucking work. And I was really excited about them, once I found out, because I'm like, well, fuck is my middle name? And I want to make sure that I am going to, whoever I work with, I want to make sure that I'm working with people that I believe in, that I believe what they stand for. And I just think they're brilliant. So I got on the phone with them and I said, hi,

• 2:37:45Speaker 01

  I would like you to sponsor my podcast. And they said, cool, what's your podcast? And I was like, it's called Brass in Unity Podcast, and I want to work with you guys somewhere. And they're like, okay, so like, what are you thinking? And I said, you know, I'm, I'm looking to do, I would love one day to do something with you. I don't know what it would be, but I would like it to be something. And they said, you know, we do like, we have this book, but we also have like shirts and mugs with our sayings on them and prints. And so I was thinking to myself, I was like, well, if I just did like a mug with them, well, then I could, you know, that could work for what my company does, which is it's a jewelry company and sunglass company, but it could be like an add-on kind of deal.

• 2:38:25Lex Fridman?

  These guys are really good designers, I can already tell.

• 2:38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I knew you would like this, why I brought it. Because I'm like, certain people would appreciate this. And so my whole thing, my, my like hashtag is work hard, help harder. And that's the whole concept of what I do now. And so we did a mug and it's called Fucking Help Somebody. That's their like first tag. And then the rest is. Kindness is a wealth that increases as it is given away. What you get in return isn't passed between hands, but felt between hearts. It's precisely because you've been at the bottom that you can raise others up. It's because you've, sorry, I'm reading a photo here. You've been lost in the dark, you can lead others to the light. It's because you fought with yourself that you can bring peace to someone else.

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  You now have the strength because you've once struggled. The best you have to come, the best you have to come from is the fucking worst you've had to take. So it's, this is the mug there and we're sold out of them. We just got a bunch.

• 2:39:26Lex Fridman?

  What does it say? Fucking help?

• 2:39:27Speaker 01

  Fucking help somebody.

• 2:39:28Lex Fridman?

  Fucking help somebody.

• 2:39:30Speaker 01

  And so we did, they were so gracious enough to sit with me and be like, what do you want the copy to be like? And I said, what do you think I want it to be like? What would you, if you could write one for me, what would it be? And they're like, it's going to be around lifting people up. And I was like, okay, cool. And they're like, do you want to fuck in the title? And I was like, every other word, if we can have it. And they said, we'll just do once. And I was like, okay, compromise. And so we came up with that copy and we put it on a mug and we're going to be doing a shirt with them. But the, the whole thing to me was that, that embodied what I stand for now and the healing I've gotten to now and the point I've gotten to now in my life. Because that fucking sandpit almost broke me. Like off the face of the earth broke me.

• 2:40:16Lex Fridman?

  First of all, can we go through the full journey of that? In terms of your psychological development, who were you before? Who were you after? Can you think about that? Like, what was your?

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Lex Fridman?

  If you had, if you had to put a brain on the table before and after and try to analyze it.

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  Well, they both have CTE. So we know that they're both bruised and gray matter is a little dicey on them.

• 2:40:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:43Speaker 01

  And it may sound the same and it's, it's not. So I'll try to explain it to you. Before that, don't you laugh because I can, I know it's coming. I, I was even louder, even more obnoxious, even more outgoing. I know it's hard to believe.

• 2:40:59Lex Fridman?

  This is you, this is you humble and quiet right now.

• 2:41:02Speaker 01

  This is, this is like.

• 2:41:03Lex Fridman?

  This is you like.

• 2:41:05Speaker 01

  This is normal me now. This is who I am now, and I love that. But who I was before I was.

• 2:41:12Speaker 01

  You know, motocross, taekwondo, tomboy. I didn't know how to dress. I thought that if you just wore like the same jeans and T-shirt all the time, that was like acceptable behavior as a woman.

• 2:41:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Speaker 01

  Um, I wore skate shoes. I went to a Catholic school that I refused to wear skirt at. I wore pants. I played hacky sack. I was so into sports. I cut and split wood with my dad on weekends. We heated our house that way. Um, I would go in the transport. I, I stayed out of trouble for the most part.

• 2:41:47Speaker 01

  I think I was a fairly good kid. I was pretty angry though, for most of my teenage life after my coach. I lost my way a little bit there. Um, I was just crazier.

• 2:41:57Lex Fridman?

  But happy?

• 2:41:59Speaker 01

  I don't know if I was happy. I'm realizing that now. I think I was, I think anger overtook who I was. And I think that's why I was such an angry individual towards my parents when I was in high school.

• 2:42:09Lex Fridman?

  So parents, was it a little rough relationship with parents?

• 2:42:14Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I mean, my dad was gone a couple, a couple of weeks at a time. So my mom, stay at home mom, had to handle me and my brother. We're both competitive athletes at the time by herself. And when you come home and you have a daughter that just calls you like a bitch to your face because she can't, she's being bullied so bad that she can't understand why, but also doesn't know how to fix it, but has no other outlet anymore to kind of get rid of it.

• 2:42:39Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:42:40Speaker 01

  I was not nice. I was a really mean person. I broke my mom. I remember the day she stopped yelling. That's the day I know I broke her. I broke her.

• 2:42:47Lex Fridman?

  Did you have a source of discipline in your life? Like, what, like maybe like your dad, somebody who says you're being a bitch?

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  Oh, like who would call me like that?

• 2:42:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, no. My parents were incredible. Like my dad came from like a family of like a bajillion kids who lived in a farm with no running water with like super, my dad was brash and abrupt. So like I've caught myself doing that once in a while. So like if I did one thing wrong, if he was just in a mood, I would know it.

• 2:43:16Lex Fridman?

  So you weren't, okay. So that anger just took different forms?

• 2:43:21Speaker 01

  It took different forms, but it mostly would be directed at my mom.

• 2:43:24Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 2:43:24Speaker 01

  Because I know she would take it.

• 2:43:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:43:26Speaker 01

  And that was who I had. And I feel bad about it to the day. Like, I still, she listened to the Jaco podcast, and so did my dad. And my mom promised me she would never read my book because there's certain parts. I just, my dad on my deployment, when I called him and told him some of the stuff, he started crying. My dad doesn't cry. And he just said, please never tell your mother this. Don't do that to your mom. My mom, like, my grandfather came from Hungary. He escaped when the Nazis left, when the Soviets came in. He wasn't great as a dad. My mom went through a lot as a kid. And that was because her dad was in the war. That was because her dad didn't know any better.

• 2:44:08Speaker 01

  And she knew she couldn't be like that, so her way would be yelling. Um, and then I hit about 16, and I wore her down. I broke her. I shattered her ability to think that she could have any sort of relationship with me. You wouldn't want to have had a relationship with me.

• 2:44:28Lex Fridman?

  But the funny thing is, you've rediscovered that now. So she, are you guys close now?

• 2:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's, she's so funny. She's coming out to help out again. She comes out to help out with Jack all the time. And, um, my dad, they're still, they're still truck drivers. They're still in the road. They team drive, they have their little dogs, and they go and they do their thing. And I've had that relationship now. It's, it's still strenuous. Like, I still, when I'm having a hard time, she'll be the person I'll take it out on. Because I know she can take it, even though I know I shouldn't. It's like she's my safe space to be like, blah, about everything. And she'll just be like, well, that's not nice. I'm like, well, you're not, fuck it. Like, and I'll take it out on it. She knows I don't mean it, and I try. Um, but for whatever reason, she just, she takes it and, um...

• 2:45:17Lex Fridman?

  And it brings it out of you?

• 2:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:45:19Lex Fridman?

  Can you describe sort of the various characteristics, the, the shape of your PTSD, the, the trauma, how the anger and hate took shape in you in the, in the seconds, minutes, hours, months, years after? And after the, the full trauma of all the things you've experienced in Afghanistan?

• 2:45:39Speaker 01

  So, it's funny because Jaco asked me something, and it made me, it's made me, I've really been thinking a lot about it. And he's like... Do you think if somebody of a leadership would have just sat you down? And said, "Hey, Burns, what you're feeling is okay. What you're feeling is normal. What you're feeling is what happens when you're in something like this? Do you think you would be where you are?" And I said, "Well, I thought about it and I'm like, you know, I don't think I would be because I wouldn't have been medicated out of my mind. I wasn't able to process anything because I was just given medication right from the get. So for me, what happened was, once that light switch was off,

• 2:46:20Speaker 01

  I was sent back to Kandahar to, I, once the operation was over, we flew back to Kandahar, like with the Brits. And then because there was deaths and we lost people on that operation, I had to go to the British side for the next, I think, three or four days and recant word for word why, what happened to a British MP who handwrote statements. But we had to do that on repeat to make sure we all had the same story. Nobody shot anybody in the back. It's, uh. And so that, I don't think is a great way to do that after an after-action. After-action reports happen, but I don't think beating a dead horse and having somebody repeat, repeat, repeat, and then just imprint more and more and more. I don't, I don't know that that is a great way of doing that.

• 2:47:04Lex Fridman?

  And especially from a perspective of, what are they, liability, almost like legal, that kind of, that perspective as opposed to the full perspective? I mean, so for, for people who don't know, one is the, the over-medication that you had to undergo. And then the other is the social isolation in terms of, I mean, more than what Jaco, what you just mentioned, you also kind of mentioned that just being with, um, with other soldiers you're close with, just sitting there in silence and. Just sitting in that shared understanding, even that in itself communicates like,

• 2:47:49Lex Fridman?

  these feelings are normal. Like, you don't have to talk.

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  You don't have to talk.

• 2:47:53Lex Fridman?

  And you were robbed of that as well, essentially.

• 2:47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I was because I was borrowed. I think Jaco had a name for us when we get borrowed. It was like, there was like a, I don't know what they call us, but it's like when you take a person and you put them in another unit, there's a name for it. I don't remember what it was. You never see those people again. But because I was in Kandahar, the doctors gave me the medication because I, I think I was the one who said, I don't, this isn't right. I don't feel right. This is wrong. Because when I got back that night, there was supposed to be somebody there to pick me up to take me the other side of the base, and no one showed. So I humped on my kit back to the Canada house, and I remember getting in the shower. And the rule was, quick fucking showers. No water.

• 2:48:38Speaker 01

  I must have sat on that floor that shower for half an hour, 45 minutes.

• 2:48:43Speaker 01

  I just held myself and cried. I didn't even know why I was crying. I just knew I needed to cry. And I still to this day, I,

• 2:48:53Speaker 01

  and when they sent me back to the FOB, they sent me back with all this medication after spending that time with the Brits.

• 2:49:03Speaker 01

  And they put me back on the guns, medicated out of my fucking tree. I almost shot someone. But they didn't tell my staff that I was on meds. So when the artillery gun was going off and I didn't run to the gun and I was still asleep inside the tent with the gun beside my head, they didn't know I was just drugged. They just thought I was fucking off somewhere, hanging out with some Americans. They just thought I wasn't doing any of what I should be doing. And then I remember the moment my sergeant, we did a night shoot, and he's so funny because he called me, goes, ah, fuck, Burns, that, go, Alice, I remember this, yes. You were standing there with me and I look at you and go, hey, Burns, are you okay? Because your eyes are all fucked.

• 2:49:47Speaker 01

  And I I looked at Sergeant LeBlanc, I just remember going, yeah, I'm good. Like, just huh.

• 2:49:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:55Speaker 01

  He's like, I still remember that. And I'm like, I know. And he goes, they never tell me anything. Fuck burns. I did not know the drugs you were on. And I was on all of them. He goes, I know. I walk in. You show me the bottles. Ah, fuck burns. You shouldn't have been there. I guarantee he sounds just like that. You'll find out.

• 2:50:13Lex Fridman?

  Great.

• 2:50:14Speaker 01

  He's brilliant. He's brilliant.

• 2:50:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So what, I mean, I suppose this is a lazy way of dealing with trauma.

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  And it's for the military in some sense, if you don't have a good program in place, this makes sense. But you should have a good program in place, just as you said, on the prep, on the mental prep side, like.

• 2:50:36Speaker 01

  Just any prep.

• 2:50:37Lex Fridman?

  Like training people, training people on the, I suppose to, I guess, train the fact that you're going to have somebody close to you blow up. Like, you have to probably visualize that. You have to think through that. You have to have a process of how to deal with something like that. With that kind of trauma. And then that's it.

• 2:50:57Speaker 01

  Tools in the toolbox is what the doctors call it.

• 2:50:59Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. I mean, and it's not like weakness. It's actually strength. It's a, like, you have to be mentally strong enough to process that. That probably takes a lot of training, but it's a great training, right?

• 2:51:14Speaker 01

  Well, worth it to to protect your investment training.

• 2:51:18Lex Fridman?

  Right. That's a very cold but correct way to put it. I mean, it's cold.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  I thought you would appreciate the coldness of the way I articulated that.

• 2:51:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I'm of two minds on this. I don't.

• 2:51:34Lex Fridman?

  I sometimes wonder, like, what I would be like as a soldier, actually. I don't know. Because I love country and I love all the things you're mentioning. Like, I could see myself probably dying for my country and also enjoying the skill of it, the, the, the, the very like OCD.

• 2:51:52Speaker 01

  Maybe very proficient.

• 2:51:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But then also the human side. I fall in love with people. I fall in love with everything. So I don't know. I don't, I, I suppose you have to shut off the part of your brain when you're executing a mission that cares about the, about other humans outside your close knit group.

• 2:52:14Lex Fridman?

  But like, there's no time for philosophical thinking. I don't know. I suppose that's why it's better to be young.

• 2:52:21Speaker 01

  Young and dumb.

• 2:52:22Lex Fridman?

  You're not necessarily dumb. It's just like you were over that energy of excitement of proficiency and excellence is just higher than it is later in life.

• 2:52:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:52:36Lex Fridman?

  You're not dumb.

• 2:52:38Speaker 01

  I was not dumb, but I was naive, uneducated, not well-trained,

• 2:52:47Speaker 01

  and

• 2:52:50Speaker 01

  had an arrogance because we were told we were the fucking shit.

• 2:52:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:55Speaker 01

  You're amazing. Okay, I'm amazing.

• 2:52:58Lex Fridman?

  So I wonder, do they think if we do mental training?

• 2:53:01Speaker 01

  That makes you weak.

• 2:53:02Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the military thinks that makes you weak?

• 2:53:05Speaker 01

  Well, yes, and the reason I can say that is because it's obvious in the way that they handle it now. So like if a soldier says, hey, I'm really struggling with that last op we were on, man, it's just really, it's getting to me. I'm having a hard time sleeping. They're gonna go, okay, well, how hard of a time sleeping are you having? And then you get that read and you go, oh, no, I'm not, it's not that bad. I'm not, I don't need anything for it. Like, I'm just like, once in a while, I'm losing some sleep. They're like, okay. Because you know that pen moves, it's all getting written down, and then you're dead, you're dead red, which means you're not deploying again.

• 2:53:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:39Speaker 01

  And then you're not able to do the thing you love the most with the people you love the most.

• 2:53:42Lex Fridman?

  Right. I mean, but also, this is really difficult, and I'd love to talk to you about PTSD, but like.

• 2:53:49Speaker 01

  Sorry, yes, I keep going off.

• 2:53:51Lex Fridman?

  No, please.

• 2:53:56Lex Fridman?

  So I'm hoping to

• 2:54:00Lex Fridman?

  like launch a company, you know, in the engineering space.

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:54:06Lex Fridman?

  And I currently lead, I've led a few people. And it's always this kind of.

• 2:54:14Lex Fridman?

  Like, how much are you supposed to push people? Because people are, everyone is weak and lazy.

• 2:54:20Speaker 01

  Are you quoting our text messages from earlier?

• 2:54:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'm quoting, all I have is just quotes from you.

• 2:54:26Speaker 01

  That's okay. Tells me how much we've spoken in the past week, more so.

• 2:54:32Lex Fridman?

  I just, I don't know what to do because sometimes people are really struggling. Like, really struggling in a way where they're being, they're, like, it's the, it's the Goggins thing is like, where's the line to where you're actually breaking the human being versus where you're breaking them at the places where they will grow back stronger? Like, so, and that line is tricky to truly understand. I think the military errands on the side of like, they, you know, like, push them beyond all limits.

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  Physical limits.

• 2:55:06Lex Fridman?

  Physical, but mental, they don't, they need to respect the mental more.

• 2:55:09Speaker 01

  Uh, they fuck with the brain a little bit. I mean, in basic training, they like scream in your face and to see who's gonna crack and they, they put you on sleep deprivation to see who's weak enough that they can't handle sleep deprivation. They do stuff to you. Like, I know if you're a downed pilot, you have to go, you have to do this training and like, it's, you get captured, it's like this whole thing and they fuck with your brain, but there's a line, there's a line. My issue is, go to the line, cross the line, give them the tools to come back from the line.

• 2:55:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  We don't do that, we don't, we, we know there's PTSD, we know there's such a thing, we understand there's anxiety and depression, we understand there's major depressive disorder, we understand that there are precursors, there are signs and symptoms, we understand that. So why are we not building enough of a toolkit? Whether that be, I'm not talking medication, I'm talking... It sounds woo woo, but fucking trust me, it works. I'm talking meditation. I'm talking yoga. I'm talking about peer group support. I'm talking about if you go to your doctor and report this, there's, you're not automatically going to be losing your job. Why aren't we giving the proper tools and the education needed? These things are not difficult to teach.

• 2:56:30Speaker 01

  They don't take a lot of time. They don't take a lot of money. The only time it takes a lot of money is when you want to medicate. We don't need to medicate you yet. You only need to be medicated if you're a danger to someone else or yourself. And most of the time, because of the way the system is set, you'll lie about it through your fucking teeth, just so that no one touches you.

• 2:56:47Lex Fridman?

  So from the perspective of the military, do you think you can still be a bad motherfucker? And do all the mental work?

• 2:56:55Speaker 01

  Yes. Some of the baddest dudes I've ever known are like, I gotta go to yoga. I gotta go meditate.

• 2:57:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:03Speaker 01

  I go do Ia with those guys. Why? Because they know that that's not okay to be like that in your life.

• 2:57:10Lex Fridman?

  Can you answer the ridiculously big question of what is PTSD? Like, do you understand the basic characteristics of it? Is there universal characteristics from your own unique experience? Like from what you've understood about it?

• 2:57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course there are. So there's, you know, there's the, the basic things that a doctor looks for when, when they're diagnosing PTSD. I'm not a doctor, let me make that fucking clear. But there are things that you look for. You look for insomnia. You look for anger and aggression. You look for people to fly off the handle. You look for avoidance. You can tell in somebody's body. People who can't sleep, if you can't sleep, you, you know that after a certain amount of time, they're just going to deteriorate. You know, sleeplessness, uh, triggers.

• 2:57:57Lex Fridman?

  Wh- wh- when you say avoidance, do you mean?

• 2:57:59Speaker 01

  Avoidance. So like, when I first got back to Canada, I avoided everybody that was Middle Eastern at all costs. No matter how much of a difference it made in my day. If I had to not go somewhere for one of the greatest events of my life, I wouldn't have went.

• 2:58:13Lex Fridman?

  But isn't there some aspect that are combined with the triggers?

• 2:58:16Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 2:58:16Lex Fridman?

  Like, maybe it's wise to avoid triggers even like for your own personal health well-being.

• 2:58:21Speaker 01

  Well, that's it. It's for me, that was one of my triggers. So that you have triggers. So and then you also deal with things like sounds and smells. You can tell. You can tell when someone's triggered. A lot of vets don't like fireworks. It's like, well, okay, well, remove yourself from the situation. So there's, there's other things within PTSD that kind of rear its head that with PTSD kind of attach other things. So like when I was diagnosed with PTSD, it was like four years later, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. And that was kind of a compilation of things that was just like a shit show there.

• 2:58:55Lex Fridman?

  What, what is major depressive disorder?

• 2:58:57Speaker 01

  Good question.

• 2:59:00Lex Fridman?

  Is there an answer?

• 2:59:01Speaker 01

  I don't have one. I was told I had it.

• 2:59:04Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so, I mean, um, what does your mind go through? Wh- where are the places?

• 2:59:12Speaker 01

  That my mind goes?

• 2:59:13Lex Fridman?

  Your mind goes.

• 2:59:15Speaker 01

  Like the dark places when I get triggered and when it was like really bad?

• 2:59:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:59:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, um, you thought about suicide?

• 2:59:22Speaker 01

  Every minute of every day.

• 2:59:25Lex Fridman?

  What are the pros of suicide in your mind at that time? What?

• 2:59:28Speaker 01

  At that time, the pros were no one has to deal with this anymore. I don't have to feel this way anymore. I'm a burden to my family. I'm a burden to the military system. I'm weak. I'm a bad soldier. I didn't do my job. I don't deserve to be alive. I don't deserve Veterans Affairs support. I don't deserve my, my parents don't deserve to watch me go through this. The guy I was dating didn't deserve to put up with the bullshit I put him through. The people who drive with me in cars didn't deserve to almost hit medians because I swerved because of a piece of garbage.

• 3:00:08Speaker 01

  People didn't deserve my racist outbursts. People didn't deserve, people didn't, I did not deserve to be breathing anymore. I should have died there and I wished I died there.

• 3:00:20Lex Fridman?

  So self hate there too.

• 3:00:22Speaker 01

  Oh, just a monochromic. Not even a big deal though, right?

• 3:00:28Lex Fridman?

  So that's at the core of it. That's like this. So how do you escape from that place? How do you overcome that? Those that depression essentially at the core of the desire to kill yourself? What? What basic principles? I mean, we could talk about ayahuasca, but basic principles of like literally like, how do you escape that moment?

• 3:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, previous to any of that, I did from 2009. I got out. So I was medically, I was 3B medical honorable discharge in 2011. May 23rd, 2011. So I left the military then. And so it's been 10 years, just over 10 years. Oh, my God, it's 10 and a half years. I just realized, I don't know.

• 3:01:11Lex Fridman?

  Happy anniversary.

• 3:01:12Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Awesome. So I've been out for 10 years and I would say the reason I didn't kill myself for the longest time was the individual I was dating. That that was that was straight across the board. That was it. For me, there was no relief for about six years of the the thought of just kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. It's easier if you just do it like there that voice was so strong for that long. There was really no relief. What there was though, was implementation of different medications, realizing they weren't working, trying different things, getting myself to a point where I could leave my house comfortably, comfortably ish again.

• 3:01:57Speaker 01

  And I wasn't triggered, which then allowed me to travel, which then allowed me to slowly try to go back to school, which by the way, was a very bad idea. That was a bad idea. That was that was bad. I went too early. They started practicing active shooter drills in our school. It was it was it was bad. My professors understood.

• 3:02:16Lex Fridman?

  School is full of triggers, it turns out.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  It is when you live in Vancouver.

• 3:02:22Lex Fridman?

  There's a theme to this conversation about your love for Canada.

• 3:02:25Speaker 01

  I look at me. I love my fucking country. I am one of the most patriotic people you will meet in it. I think Canada is one of the greatest fucking places on the earth.

• 3:02:37Speaker 01

  I think in the past two years or three years, I have seen what I loved so deeply, so proudly preached about, so.

• 3:02:55Speaker 01

  I'm so proud of what I did there.

• 3:03:00Speaker 01

  And I'm so proud of the country I got to represent.

• 3:03:06Speaker 01

  Because I was good at my job.

• 3:03:09Lex Fridman?

  Being, being great at your job for a country you love, you just don't like some of the politicians some of the time.

• 3:03:15Speaker 01

  It's not even the politicians anymore. It's the state of the country.

• 3:03:20Speaker 01

  I'm a second-class citizen in my own country right now. I can't travel to see my parents within my own country. I'm not allowed to step foot in my son's school. I am not allowed to go to a restaurant with my family. I'm not allowed to leave Canada without. I told you all the stuff I have to do to get here. To even get home, I have to do the same. I'm watched by the RCMP. I'm.

• 3:03:48Speaker 01

  Neighbors rat you out.

• 3:03:50Lex Fridman?

  So, so for somebody who fought for their country.

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  I hate it. It makes me so sad.

• 3:03:54Lex Fridman?

  To be, to go through this process of, uh, what many consider to be power overreach by government in the face of, uh, this particular pandemic. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:04:06Speaker 01

  I always knew I had a hard time with, like, I loved Canada. The day I got spit on when I got home was not ideal, but.

• 3:04:12Lex Fridman?

  You got spit on.

• 3:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, um.

• 3:04:16Speaker 01

  But the thing was, I knew long enough that if I just put one foot in front of the other and kept going to treatment and kept doing what my doctor told me to do, that I could pull out of this.

• 3:04:31Speaker 01

  If I, if I tried, I, I was told that I could do anything in my life. It didn't matter. As long as I tried.

• 3:04:38Lex Fridman?

  Was trying really hard?

• 3:04:41Speaker 01

  Trying was.

• 3:04:44Speaker 01

  Trying was harder than breathing. It, it was exhausting. It was.

• 3:04:52Speaker 01

  I would be awake for like half a day and every minute of that day I'd just stare at the wall and just wanna kill myself.

• 3:04:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's what I've had people close to me who suffer from depression and it was like it's unclear how to escape, but it's clear that you need to try some something. And they didn't wanna even try.

• 3:05:13Speaker 01

  Cause you have no try in you.

• 3:05:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you have no, no, I'm watching a person who has no energy essentially to like do any of it and it's like so hopeless. But you have to try and I think some of that has to do with all the different physical feats you had to do like when you have nothing left, you still keep going. That same like weird drive when you're empty, you still keep going.

• 3:05:39Speaker 01

  I wanted to give up, I tried, I it's, I did, I'm really lucky because it really was the one person that I'd wake up to next every day and he'd be like, hey, so that new drug you're on, fun fact, if you don't go to sleep right away, you talk and when you talk, you just don't fucking stop. And you go off about everything, that's horrible. And I'm like, what are you talking about? No, last night, yeah, you took that pill, guess what, you just, you just, you didn't stop. I have no recollection. I'd get up in the middle of the night, I would cook food, like on a stove and it would be, hopefully we don't die because I would have no recollection because of the drugs.

• 3:06:20Speaker 01

  The idea that when people say, well, just pull yourself out of depression. I'm a highly motivated individual. The idea of lifting my head up to turnover was daunting.

• 3:06:37Lex Fridman?

  It's terrifying. So like for somebody so as driven as you to completely lose all of that for moments of time, for for stretches of time. Fuck, the mind is a motherfucker. This is a

• 3:06:51Speaker 01

  It is.

• 3:06:52Lex Fridman?

  I can't, for somebody like, I can't, I can't, I'm so, I'm so grateful for people like you to be able to pull out of that. I've, I've, I've been always the opposite. Like, I've been very fortunate to just always find joy and meaning in everything, even the stupidest shit.

• 3:07:12Speaker 01

  Can I ask you something?

• 3:07:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:15Speaker 01

  Do you think that's because you, of how you're raised, where you came from?

• 3:07:21Lex Fridman?

  No, no, it was my own person. I honestly think it's the biology, the this, because I had my parents, I'm very cognizant of had nothing to do with that. They never understood this little engine I had. I just, I always liked just sitting, looking at people and just enjoying how amazing they are and just like looking at like it's, I think it's straight up just biology, whatever the neurochemistry is, like I'm just getting like a good drug.

• 3:07:52Speaker 01

  You're just getting hit.

• 3:07:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm getting hits all the time from stupid shit and

• 3:07:56Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 3:07:57Lex Fridman?

  And it doesn't. And yeah, so that's why I can be sometimes I'll talk like self very self critically about myself because that's almost makes me, it makes life more fun and challenges stuff and makes you more productive, but ultimately it's because I'm getting that like

• 3:08:12Speaker 01

  You're getting a hit.

• 3:08:13Lex Fridman?

  I'm getting the good stuff all the time.

• 3:08:15Speaker 01

  I wondered about that. I was thinking about that when I listened to you for the first time on, I think when you're on Rogan for the first time. Water shouldn't do that.

• 3:08:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, it's not water. You shouldn't trust. See, this is the thing with the Russians.

• 3:08:26Speaker 01

  It's sewn by Coca-Cola.

• 3:08:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, I had it resealed.

• 3:08:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't go that far, but now I'm really certain to question what's in this, but that's okay.

• 3:08:37Lex Fridman?

  If I offered you tea, you should really be worried. But yeah.

• 3:08:40Speaker 01

  Why?

• 3:08:41Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's the

• 3:08:42Speaker 01

  Mushroom tea?

• 3:08:42Lex Fridman?

  No, that's the, like, the more famous way that Russians usually assassinate. They put poison in the tea. Because a lot of Russians drink tea and, you know.

• 3:08:52Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I mean, there is a blade right there. So.

• 3:08:56Lex Fridman?

  I thought it was somebody, Andrew Huberman gave that to me. He's also good. I don't know if you know him, but he's a cool.

• 3:09:02Speaker 01

  I don't know all the people you know. I'm new.

• 3:09:04Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 3:09:04Speaker 01

  I'm new here, Lex. You're gonna have

• 3:09:06Lex Fridman?

  I'll send instructions.

• 3:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna have to send. What is, what does my friend say? He says, an ex operator and he'll message me once in a while and ask me something and I'll answer back. If I answer in the correct way, he'll go candidate meets expectations. Fuck you. I'm not a candidate of anything.

• 3:09:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, it's essentially it.

• 3:09:24Lex Fridman?

  Well, Andrew Huberman is kind of a celebrity. Andrew, you should check her out. You're, you're an interesting person. You guys should connect. He's a Stanford neuroscientist, was a, I think the number one podcast in the world in health. He's a

• 3:09:39Speaker 01

  Is he the one, the beard, does he have like a beard thing going? Yeah, I'm knocking him down to like, does he have a beard?

• 3:09:47Lex Fridman?

  I don't, I don't, I don't look at people's visual appearance, man.

• 3:09:50Speaker 01

  You're full of shit.

• 3:09:51Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't, I don't, uh, does he have a beard? I think he has a beard. Yeah.

• 3:09:54Speaker 01

  I think I know who you're talking about.

• 3:09:55Lex Fridman?

  He's a very handsome gentleman.

• 3:09:59Speaker 01

  I think I know who you're talking about because I think I was looking at his stuff this morning.

• 3:10:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:10:02Speaker 01

  No, seriously, on Instagram. No, no, no. Okay.

• 3:10:04Lex Fridman?

  You probably know him.

• 3:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't know him.

• 3:10:07Lex Fridman?

  But he's very, very humble, very intelligent.

• 3:10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:10Lex Fridman?

  Probably would understand, like, I'm very kind of poetic and so on. He's, he's probably the most like rigorous, um, reference machine of science. Like, he's a legit scientist. Like, he knows every paper and everything has to do with the mind and neuroscience.

• 3:10:27Speaker 01

  Or he would be fascinating.

• 3:10:28Lex Fridman?

  Performance, yeah, yeah. He's much more, he's, he's, he's much more actually, and, and the focus is always on, um, how to help, how that helps people. So like, protocols, like,

• 3:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:41Lex Fridman?

  like, here's what you need to do to get better sleep.

• 3:10:44Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, I know who it is.

• 3:10:45Lex Fridman?

  Here's like a thousand papers.

• 3:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:10:47Lex Fridman?

  And he just goes like, hammers nonstop. I mean, geez, he, um, he spent a week in Austin. He's coming back and spending, uh, a couple of weeks in Austin. We just hang out. And it's like, you, you think that was like a teleprompter or something, like the way he does this podcast? Yeah, but like in person, he's the same. Like, all right. This is, this is intense, but I like it. Anyway.

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 3:11:11Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, uh, why do we bring him up? I don't know.

• 3:11:14Speaker 01

  We brought up knives. We were talking about.

• 3:11:16Lex Fridman?

  He gave it to me. That's right. PTSD.

• 3:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then you talk about poison and how you were poisoning me. And I said knives. We're talking about Russians. And then we were kind of talking about the brain and PTSD.

• 3:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:27Speaker 01

  I think for, for most people, though, the biggest thing when they see somebody who's struggling with PTSD, their, their first, you know, reaction is, how do I help them? Well, often just saying, hey, I'm here when you're ready to talk and you're going through something, whether you want to talk about it right now or not, I'm here. And then keeping a close eye on behaviors. When you start to see somebody having, you know, four, five, six beers at night.

• 3:11:54Speaker 01

  Ask why when you see somebody you can tell they're not sleeping. Hey buddy, you sleeping? I just not sleeping.

• 3:12:01Speaker 01

  Instead of just going, oh, that sucks.

• 3:12:04Speaker 01

  Hey, why aren't you sleeping? You having nightmares? Are you you just having insomnia? Are you just eating sugar before bed like?

• 3:12:12Speaker 01

  Care enough about your people to just ask. One follow up question because often that's really all it takes. Because then somebody goes, somebody cares enough to ask and then they'll just.

• 3:12:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just showing that you care.

• 3:12:24Speaker 01

  It honestly. Grocery store lineup. I'll say, oh, I like your dress. Oh, thank you. And then I'll go, how's your day going? They're like. Actually, it's going all right. It's not as great as I thought it would be today, but I'm doing okay. But like they'll give you instead of good you instead of just giving you this fake, false reaction. If you just show.

• 3:12:45Speaker 01

  Any effort in somebody that you care at all about someone's well being, you'd be amazed amazed.

• 3:12:53Lex Fridman?

  And some of it's just energy. The reason honestly I moved to Austin is some lady at a Walmart said. You honey, you look handsome in that suit. But like, but the care that she put in that she just looked at me. It wasn't like hitting on me or something. She was like the love like.

• 3:13:09Speaker 01

  Just love.

• 3:13:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I was like, okay, I'm moving here, I guess.

• 3:13:12Speaker 01

  There was a that's so funny. You said that because I told my I told my husband this happened and it was it threw me off. There was an older lady at a store. And this was right after we we got a brief period of no masks in Canada, just like a brief.

• 3:13:27Lex Fridman?

  Like five minutes.

• 3:13:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it was not even that. And I I had come from like an interview or something. So I had actually had makeup on that day and I had my hat and I was, you know, just at the grocery store. She walked up to me and she got real close and I didn't know what was happening. And she got closer and then she just grabbed my arm like this. She goes, I love that hat on you. And I looked at her and I was like, she touched me during a pandemic and she's old. Oh, my God, I love you too. Thank you so much. I said, you're so amazing. I just and I just sparked a conversation.

• 3:13:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 3:13:56Speaker 01

  Doesn't take much.

• 3:13:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that little moment of genuine care. Maybe you can tell me actually the. The journey you took with ayahuasca like what? That's such a fascinating journey. So like, uh, letting your mind go to different places in order to rediscover itself. Like, like, what is it? Like a rocket ship to somewhere else? So you can land in a better place.

• 3:14:19Speaker 01

  Here, how about I show you something that'll help your brain, okay?

• 3:14:22Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:14:23Speaker 01

  This is not for you to lift up either and show on the camera, because there's leaves in it. Like, there's leaves in some pages. So just don't dump it out, because it'll go all fucking everywhere.

• 3:14:31Lex Fridman?

  Got it, got it. Instructions. I like this.

• 3:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you feel like you need them. Um.

• 3:14:38Speaker 01

  Ayahuasca is a beautiful psychedelic that we have been so blessed to have on this earth, that we have so underutilized and could be, I don't want to say saving humanity, but just, you ever hear that saying, "If you could just give everyone mushrooms one time, the world would be a better place"? Okay. So psilocybin is, I use for microdosing for depression.

• 3:15:03Speaker 01

  I did ayahuasca in January of this year. Um, and I've, at that point, that was the last time I was on a pharmaceutical drug. I've been off everything ever since. Ten different ones. So if you backtrack a little bit, just so you'll understand, my doctor gave me the opportunity, Dr. Greg Passy, he is a veteran himself, served in Bosnia and Rwanda. He's a medic. He's a Colonel, I think Colonel Lieutenant, he's gonna fuck me right in the face for that. He's high up officer. Um, he is one of my saviors. He's like my old, I call him my old man. He's my favorite. And, um, rides a Harley, like that kind of guy.

• 3:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 3:15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, um, he said, you know, Kels, this is, I just don't, I was hitting a wall. I wasn't getting any better. And he goes, "What, how do you feel about cannabis"? And I was like, "I don't feel good about it, because family histories, or my parents always told me if I smoked weed", you know, it's just this, this perception. He goes, "I just want you to try it. Just, would you be willing to try it"? So I was like, "Okay", so I was willing to try it. Then I started going to these groups called Women Grow, and, um, learning about it. And then I realized, oh, I'm starting to sleep a little bit. I don't feel groggy in the morning. I don't feel like a bag of shit. And I also want to have a baby one day, and I can't have all this stuff in my system.

• 3:16:26Speaker 01

  So I started using cannabis and then I started using it as a main medication. And I'd been using it now since two thousand and fourteen, got married fifteen, sixteen. Jack was four and sixteen. Fifteen, two thousand and fifteen, I started using it.

• 3:16:44Speaker 01

  And then I've been using it ever since. And that was the way I got off of all the pharmaceutical drugs. Was keeping cannabis the constant, finding the right strains for me. And then slowly, with the doctor's advice and under supervision, going off of those medications. Cut to January of two thousand and twenty one. I had hit a really bad spell last year. And the year before was a really big struggle. I almost lost my company last year due to COVID, just like many, many millions of people did.

• 3:17:17Speaker 01

  And instead of me just laying down and taking it, I pivoted really quickly and called the factory and said, you guys make masks? They're like, yeah, we're making masks. I was like, I'm gonna call the Canadian government. I'm gonna get my medical license and I'm gonna try to sell them masks and see if we can do that. And so we did that. And so we did two hundred thousand masks for Ontario hospitals. Which ironically, went to my entire community I was born and raised in. So it was really weird. And that kept us afloat long enough. We lost two hundred retail locations that I all single-handedly spent five years going like door to door, getting myself.

• 3:17:57Lex Fridman?

  And we should say this is Brass and Unity Jewelry.

• 3:18:00Speaker 01

  The Jewelry and Sunglass Company. And I started.

• 3:18:03Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which. They put on the.

• 3:18:06Speaker 01

  Looks like a serial killer.

• 3:18:07Lex Fridman?

  Unity Sunglasses.

• 3:18:09Speaker 01

  You do look good in them, I won't lie to you.

• 3:18:11Lex Fridman?

  Thank you.

• 3:18:11Speaker 01

  Well, okay, we'll call them the Lex. That's, those are now called the Lex. Fuck the gun or they're the Lex.

• 3:18:15Lex Fridman?

  I like it, the Lex.

• 3:18:17Speaker 01

  I'm jumping around here, but just bear with me. I, I started, my doctor suggested art therapy. Dr. Passy did. And that's really how the company started. I bought beads and a pipe cutter and a hammer and a drill. And I fucked up our kitchen table and I taught myself how to build jewelry. Cause my husband was like, you can do it, go for it. So I was like, okay, he says I can, believes in me, so I guess I can do it. No idea what I'm doing. And then got to this point, um, you know, where COVID hit and people lost companies and we pivoted and we did what we could. And then I really started to go downhill psychologically. I've found purpose again with this company. I found a way to help again. I found myself again. And then that was in danger of being gone again.

• 3:19:03Lex Fridman?

  So the company is two thousand fifteen.

• 3:19:06Speaker 01

  Is we started, I started um, building jewelry in two thousand fifteen under like a, a, just it was called her wearables and it was really small and it was just, I was just trying to make stuff. It wasn't supposed to be a company.

• 3:19:18Lex Fridman?

  And you were on a ton of medication throughout this whole process.

• 3:19:22Speaker 01

  And my mom being the tenacious truck driver she is, she was driving for Kevin Hart's What Now Tour. And so she got, she just harassed them, was like, you need to meet my daughter.

• 3:19:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I saw the picture of you and Kevin Hart. That's cool.

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  But he just gave me a good piece of advice. Hey, if you're gonna make this something, you can't really, if you want it to be for everyone, you can't call it her wearables. I was like, cool. And then we drove home that night and then he tweeted it out to people.

• 3:19:48Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 3:19:48Speaker 01

  To twenty four million people. This was before he was like, who he is now. And that was a giant deal. And then my husband kind of looked at me and being, he's so fucking brilliant. He looked at me, he goes, all right, yeah, we gotta come up with a rename. Let me start thinking. Let me start brainstorming. Like, let's make, you wanna make this real? Let's make this real. And so we did. And he was like, what do you think about, like, we were doing like brass collective co brass this, but I just knew I wanted brass in the name. And then he's like, what about brass and unity? You're trying to like unify people. Like, why wouldn't you do that? I'm like, what a name. Of course he came up with it like everything else.

• 3:20:19Lex Fridman?

  That's a great name.

• 3:20:20Speaker 01

  Well, he's a brilliant person. It's annoying.

• 3:20:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:23Speaker 01

  So the idea of losing this thing that I, we had just built and just got me kind of functioning with was devastating. So I got this opportunity given to me by Griff Combat Flip Flops.

• 3:20:36Speaker 01

  Again, Brady, my husband, was like, hey, you should get sponsors for your podcast. Hey, have you heard of this company Combat Flip Flops? Remember, we watched them on Shark Tank? And then I reached out. He emailed me back. He's like, yeah, we go to together, like Peanut Butter and Jelly are companies. That sounds great. And then I was like, hey, also, like, do you think one of your owners would wanna come on the podcast? Just like tossing it out there, kind of like I did with you? And um, he was like, yeah, I'd love to come on. And I was like, oh my god.

• 3:21:04Speaker 01

  And he came on the podcast and it went great. And then at the end of it, we stopped recording and he just kind of did this thing. He, he does this. Just like leans in real close, looks into your soul and goes, how you doing? And they're like, great. And he's like, I really do.

• 3:21:19Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:21:21Speaker 01

  I had everything. Ah, just this whole, just like waterworks happen. And he goes, listen, have you ever heard of ayahuasca? And I was like, yeah, like in movies and like psychedelics in the seventies, you know? And he's like, no, no, no, no, let's like have a talk. And he goes, I've got an opportunity for a spot. I'm going with this charity called Heroic Hearts. Um, they have off, they have, uh, spaces in the UK, Canada and the United States. They're owned by an army ranger named Jesse Gould. Um, you know, they're really trying to help vets. And this has worked. Would you want to come? And before he even said, like, would you, before I even got like an invite, I was like, can I come? When can I, when, when, when do we, when do we go?

• 3:22:02Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:22:03Speaker 01

  And he's like, oh, it's in like three weeks. Um, you can't be on any SSRIs. If you're on any, you're gonna have to wean off. And at the time I was on my last one. And so I was like, I called my doctor and I was like, listen. And he was like, what? And I was like, guess what I'm about to do? And he's like, I'm like, gonna go do ayahuasca. And he goes, you could, he, he does the same where he just goes,

• 3:22:27Speaker 01

  all right, because he knows he's not gonna win. He knows I'll just fight him on it.

• 3:22:31Lex Fridman?

  That's just called that, like the, the Jaco reset.

• 3:22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:22:34Lex Fridman?

  Because he does a.

• 3:22:36Speaker 01

  Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. And he goes, I said, but here's the kicker. I have to go off of this medication. And he goes, well, you know, we're supposed to do that in the summer months when the depression's not bringing, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, listen, I hear you, but I'm doing it. Whether you want me to or not. So I'm letting you know, hey, this is gonna happen. And he's like, okay, just try to do it properly. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the drill. I know the drill. Whatever, whatever. Went to school to be a paramedic. I know the drill. Go off of it properly. Like, and like drop that, within a week, that stuff was, I was done taking it. And I was going through like the world's worst just withdrawals. It was like. You were at a rock concert and your head was banging up and down, but you were sitting perfectly still.

• 3:23:17Lex Fridman?

  Hmm.

• 3:23:18Speaker 01

  It was horrible.

• 3:23:20Lex Fridman?

  But you had like a thing to look forward to with the sidewalk.

• 3:23:23Speaker 01

  I had a light at the end of the tunnel. And I knew if I got to the light was the worst that's gonna happen. Just get to the light. But at that point, like I again, I had a son, I had a husband, I had a great company, I have a great house, I have a nice car, I have everything. Why did I want to die every minute of the day?

• 3:23:42Speaker 01

  I was at that point again. And I'm like, this has got it, something's got to give. And so I went and I got there and she is, um.

• 3:23:59Speaker 01

  The most intense, beautiful, divine deity or entity or visualization, whatever you want to deem ayahuasca as. Mama ay is real. And she takes no prisoners. She shows you exactly what you need to see to help yourself, but she does not discriminate against whether you're ready or not. If you've ingested it, she's coming for you. She's gonna be either gentle or she's gonna beat your ass and sometimes it's what you need, but she does it in a way that

• 3:24:45Speaker 01

  is profound.

• 3:24:48Lex Fridman?

  So what were some memorable profound moments for you? What, uh, what, what are the places it took you? These people it had you meet?

• 3:24:57Speaker 01

  For the first time, I got to be in a group of people who didn't judge me or question my service. They just respect me. That was number one. So that group I lost, I just found again.

• 3:25:14Speaker 01

  Big shocker, I was the only woman there again. Ooh, seems to be the, the, the thing for me. And so I was surrounded by all these special operators, like, these aren't like normal soldiers. Like, these guys that I'm, I'm with are like Bronze Star, fucking Purple Heart, just the coolest people, people I've always wanted to be like, that's my buddy. Now I can be like, those are my buddies. Like, those motherfuckers will go to bat for me, they will bend over backwards, they will exfil me out of anywhere, they will take a bullet for me.

• 3:25:48Speaker 01

  And these guys welcomed me in in a way I didn't, I didn't expect. So that hit me weird right off the get. I was nervous and now I was just felt at home for a minute. And then when I stepped into ceremony, um,

• 3:26:02Speaker 01

  the first night, because you do, you do three nights, so we're like, over like Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The first night, I was so nervous and so anxious, because you go up in ceremony and you're, the shamans come in and they, they cleanse themselves and then you get served the, um, Ayah. Individually, you go up, they give it to you, you can take your time and pray, you can do whatever you want, then you drink it. I was so just like, I got back to my mat and I sat there and I was like trying to keep it in, but I could feel that like heat come from my toes all the way up and you're like, your mouth starts to water. I'm gonna throw up, I'm gonna throw up. And I looked over to Griff and I looked at Bishop and I'm like,

• 3:26:47Speaker 01

  swallow it. And I was like, okay? And you can't talk or anything. So I like, my buddy, um, we call him the Viking, a soul Viking. He looks like a Viking, his head's tattooed, he's, he's been on the show, he's so cool. He's sitting directly across like you and I and he can see me and he's looking at me and I'm throwing up and,

• 3:27:10Speaker 01

  and I do it about three times and then the last time he just saw me and I couldn't do it and I just, I threw it up. And so I like to think that was her way of easing me in. So I didn't get like a full punch to the face, but I gotta, let me take your hand and show you what I'm gonna show you. We're gonna make you better. We're gonna take the pain away.

• 3:27:30Lex Fridman?

  Aren't you supposed to eventually throw up no matter what?

• 3:27:33Speaker 01

  It's not supposed to. Some people don't. You purge. Yeah. If something's happening, you're going through something. Yeah, you purge. But it doesn't have to happen. But this, I mean, within like the first 20 minutes? No.

• 3:27:42Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 3:27:43Speaker 01

  This takes like, you gotta sit and meditate for, or sit still, basically, and meditate in the pitch black for about 45 minutes before the effects even, before you even feel her. So it's very.

• 3:27:55Lex Fridman?

  So here she figured out the right dose you need.

• 3:27:58Speaker 01

  Well, because I did the same dose as everyone else. I think it was 20 mils, which doesn't seem like a lot. But when you've never done it, it is.

• 3:28:09Speaker 01

  So, um, I felt like such a bitch. God, I felt like such a bitch.

• 3:28:14Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that was the thought going through your mind.

• 3:28:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you just fucked it all up. You ruined it. You ruined this again. You couldn't do this, right?

• 3:28:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:22Speaker 01

  And so at that point, um, we, we went through the meditation part and the shamans were, they literally sing for like six hours straight.

• 3:28:32Lex Fridman?

  So you sit there, you take it and then there's just what you're quietly listening to them.

• 3:28:36Speaker 01

  Meditate and you wait and you wait. And you're in pitch black, like can't see this far in front of your face.

• 3:28:42Lex Fridman?

  Cool.

• 3:28:42Speaker 01

  And you have a little puke bucket. And then you have a little light that has a red filter on it. You have to get up to go to the bathroom to get out of the dirt. You use that so you don't turn lights on. And, um, me, I brought like what?

• 3:28:55Lex Fridman?

  No, it's just a cool visual of just a puke bucket and a little light for the, like, I can imagine these like little lights going every once in a while. And then the rest is just in darkness, meditating with this, with this singing.

• 3:29:08Speaker 01

  It's, it's so beautiful. I'll take you sometime. Cause trust me, you would, I, I wouldn't offer if it wasn't the group I would trust.

• 3:29:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's in, you had a very interesting group. So it's the, the Heroic Hearts?

• 3:29:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Heroic Hearts. So they, yeah, this is my, Jesse gave us all these journals. They're like, you're gonna want these. So he gave us all these journals and now this is like my Bible, like my work, my everything goes in this with me everywhere. It's just this like silent reminder for me. And so Heroic Hearts does fantastic work. Um, I'll get into them after. The thing with this group is.

• 3:29:46Speaker 01

  There's such care. It's not like go do Aya and like you're done. There's like integration coaches and there's like doctors and there's like people to make sure that you're doing the work because Aya is just the gate. Now you have to take it and you have to implement it into your life. People don't do that, though.

• 3:30:06Lex Fridman?

  Did you do like integration? Did you do conversations with somebody? Did you talk to like, is there a process to? Cause I've similar with psilocybin you mentioned.

• 3:30:17Lex Fridman?

  As I understand, it's exceptionally beneficial for when you also do like talk therapy. Like you couple that with the integration in some form where you talk through your experience and you talk through different things like that. That seems to be a really, you know, I need to do that more with basically every substance I take. Like if I get, which I have been every once in a while, known to do a bit of vodka or whiskey or whatever, like do integration the next day.

• 3:30:43Speaker 01

  Well, what did you learn? What did you get from that?

• 3:30:44Lex Fridman?

  What did you get? Cause you, you learn a lot, but you sometimes kind of just move on and you celebrate that that happened, but like really kind of think through it.

• 3:30:51Speaker 01

  Write it down.

• 3:30:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:52Speaker 01

  It's important because that's what this was. So the first night, I'll give like a very, cause trust me, we could spend a whole podcast on both of the, all three of those nights. But the first night, the biggest thing that happened for me is I got to see my daughter, which was my first baby. And so people say, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, fuck you. That was my daughter and I'm very aware it was, I'm very conscious that it was.

• 3:31:18Speaker 01

  And at that point, she just eased me in enough to let me know and showed me enough that this wasn't it. This wasn't the end all be all. Where you are right now on this plane, on this dimension in this life, this is, this is a blip and it is, it is so miniscule to the big picture. And so she really did that by she showed me just a black and then like a crack and then these vibrant colors that I can't describe because there aren't words. Alex Gray does really great art and that is like been the closest thing I've been able to find colors. He's a famous guy who does ayahuasca and he's an artist.

• 3:32:02Speaker 01

  I think he's got stuff in New York as well, but.

• 3:32:06Speaker 01

  She just, she eased me in and gave me some relief. And showed me enough that I could go, I could wake up the next day and not want to die the next day.

• 3:32:18Speaker 01

  And so what heroic hearts did, because it gave us all these journals, they're like, you know, the next day you kind of wake up and you, you do a meet, like a meeting, you do like a circle, all of us sit in a room and talk about what just happened the night before. People are crying and people are quiet and you just listen and that's what you do. And then you write on your free time. So after that, it's like up to you what you want to do. Do you want to just go walk in the woods? Well, I chose to go find a fence post and lie on it for an hour. I'm not kidding. I lied there and stared up at these two eagles that were just in like the, I'll tell you where we were after and you'll, you'll be like, oh, okay, I get it. And then I found a forest and I just walked up with my book and I just

• 3:33:03Speaker 01

  lied there for hours.

• 3:33:07Speaker 01

  And then she all of a sudden started giving me what you call your downloads. So the stuff you learn, the stuff that you were, all of a sudden you're remembering and these messages that come through. And that's what this is.

• 3:33:18Lex Fridman?

  What kind of things are we talking about?

• 3:33:22Speaker 01

  So my biggest thing that she tried to reiterate to me at the beginning of that first night was that I don't breathe.

• 3:33:30Speaker 01

  I just,

• 3:33:32Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't breathe. I don't fucking breathe at all. I just, one thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, just to survive. I don't take a minute and breathe. And so she made, when I say she, and I say it because it's hard for people to understand, but I showed this to my husband. I showed it to my doctors and they're like, ah bitch, that's not you. You don't write like that. You don't talk like that. So like you can flip through it, but it was like,

• 3:34:01Speaker 01

  I'll just let Lex read for a second and I'll just do here. Let me do, I'll do an ad for heroic hearts. Heroic hearts. Here, I'll get my papers while you read.

• 3:34:09Lex Fridman?

  Connect to her, listen to her, open to her. Do you mind if I read some of these?

• 3:34:13Speaker 01

  You can read some of it, yeah. Go right ahead.

• 3:34:16Lex Fridman?

  The dark has lifted.

• 3:34:18Speaker 01

  Judge my spelling and I'll punch you right in the face.

• 3:34:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's like, um.

• 3:34:23Speaker 01

  Very sporadic-y.

• 3:34:26Speaker 01

  Sporadically written.

• 3:34:27Lex Fridman?

  It's okay to be still. It's okay to be quiet. This is good, like, and these are over a stretch of.

• 3:34:37Speaker 01

  That was the first, the first couple of pages were from the first night. This was just that weekend.

• 3:34:42Lex Fridman?

  And you're just there laying looking at the eagles.

• 3:34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the pen, just frantic as well, Lex. Not like writing where you're like, oh, I'm just writing. It's like, I had to get it down or I was gonna lose it.

• 3:34:57Lex Fridman?

  You are warrior. You are power. You can. Choose now. Breathe now. Be now.

• 3:35:11Lex Fridman?

  Be present, be warrior, be strength, breathe.

• 3:35:16Lex Fridman?

  Be the strength, you are the strength.

• 3:35:20Lex Fridman?

  There's some soul searching going on here. This is incredible.

• 3:35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wait till you get in there. She gets deep, real aggressive, like.

• 3:35:30Lex Fridman?

  Crack the door, for I am the light.

• 3:35:35Lex Fridman?

  The giver, the taker.

• 3:35:39Lex Fridman?

  I am warrior, I am life. I am air, I am water, I am fire. I am light.

• 3:35:49Lex Fridman?

  This will, this can. This will, this can. For I am warrior.

• 3:35:59Lex Fridman?

  For I am light. And there's a leaf here. What's the story with the leaf?

• 3:36:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I was walking and every single time over the, over those three days, anytime I like went for a, a walk by myself, I would just hear like, take this, like, just almost like as if a voice was standing there, like, you need this, take it, take it with you and keep it in your book, keep it. Ground you. And it just goes on.

• 3:36:22Lex Fridman?

  This is from there?

• 3:36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:24Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's cool to have, sort of, it's almost like time travel.

• 3:36:28Speaker 01

  I have poppies from France too, when I did a, I did a 75th anniversary D-Day ride in France, where we rode 600 kilometers on our road bikes for charity. And we landed on the beaches of Juneau on the 75th and we got to go buy the poppy fields. And I'm like covered in poppies. And I, I have some in a, in a book. I, I don't know why I do that. I just, I do that.

• 3:36:52Lex Fridman?

  That's cool because like, these are your thoughts and those are the physical items. It really helps transport to that place somehow. Let the light in, let her in.

• 3:37:06Speaker 01

  And she would show me these visuals, so my drawings are just like,

• 3:37:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's drawings here.

• 3:37:16Lex Fridman?

  And you're seeing this stuff.

• 3:37:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:37:20Speaker 01

  I can't draw either, so that's why they're so, I wish I could draw because if only I could translate what I could see visually onto paper.

• 3:37:29Lex Fridman?

  And you're talking to her?

• 3:37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:32Lex Fridman?

  It's time, I'm here to listen.

• 3:37:37Lex Fridman?

  Is this Mama Aya?

• 3:37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we call her Mama Aya.

• 3:37:41Lex Fridman?

  Mama Aya. Mama Aya, so what, who, who are you seeing? Is this a woman?

• 3:37:47Speaker 01

  So for me at first, it was just eyes floating in the sky. These unbelievably gorgeous, beautiful eyes that I, and I was like literally looking up at the top of the yurt and I kept going to myself, Saying this. There's eyes in the sky.

• 3:38:01Lex Fridman?

  May.

• 3:38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so there's these eyes floating and they just kept looking at me. And I remember when I kept telling myself like, oh, don't worry about it. It's nothing there. She would get angry.

• 3:38:15Speaker 01

  I'm right here. Pay attention to me. And I'd be like, okay. Like forceful, like very forceful. So at first it was just the eyes. The second night.

• 3:38:29Speaker 01

  Is I'm crazy when I say this.

• 3:38:36Speaker 01

  Great. That's gonna be my clip. Easy. I'm crazy. It's what I do when I get uncomfortable. I do weird hand gestures and movements.

• 3:38:44Lex Fridman?

  Voices. I like it.

• 3:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. Yeah. Uh, you would hate to be in my office because most of the day it's just.

• 3:38:52Speaker 01

  Weird lunges and uncomfortable moments. She turned me into a wolf.

• 3:39:00Speaker 01

  I, I know I said it out loud. I, I, I hear it. I said it.

• 3:39:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:39:03Speaker 01

  Head to toe.

• 3:39:06Speaker 01

  And her takeaway for me was I'm trying to be this pack leader. I'm trying to be this leader in my life. I'm trying to do these things, but I'm going about them the whole wrong way.

• 3:39:19Speaker 01

  So like when the shamans call you up to do their special prayer over you. You go up, you don't touch them. They flash their little light. You see the little light spot. You walk to the light. You sit down on the light. And then my shaman, he's so funny because he's got this great tone in his voice. He goes. Uh, how you doing, Kelsey? And I'm like, um, so hi, yeah, I have a problem. Um, I'm a wolf and I need it to stop. And he'd be like, don't you worry, girl. I got you. You ready? And I was like, uh huh, uh huh. So I'm sitting there cross legged. I've got my palms out like this. And I had a really traumatic shoulder injury, so I don't just sit slanted like this. My shoulder is actually permanently detached and no one in the world will touch it or fix it. My collarbone comes out my back here.

• 3:40:03Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 3:40:03Speaker 01

  And I don't have any collarbone here. So nobody will fix it. No one will touch it. Even I've had specialists, I've had surgeries, no one will do anything with it. So I'm permanently down and forward. So I. I slouch.

• 3:40:18Speaker 01

  It's horrible. So before I.

• 3:40:21Lex Fridman?

  Horrible functionally too?

• 3:40:22Speaker 01

  Oh, there's nothing. I can't do a pull up anymore. Oh, so.

• 3:40:27Speaker 01

  Oh wow. Oh, you should. I'll show you how to do a push up after. You'll fucking throw up in embarrassment. Yeah, it's bad. So before I though, chronic pain, like, had to drink a bottle of CBD every day. Just the pain is so bad because the trauma in it was so bad. The surgery went wrong. The collarbone dissipated and no longer exists. Like, there's just, and they're not sure how I lift things with it and do stuff with it. It's like overcompensation everywhere. Like, my, the, my back fl- like, um, my tra- uh, my scapula, like, flares outward. It's, I'm all messed up from it. And so I was in chronic pain. So he's praying over me. And all of a sudden, all I feel is this arm just start, just

• 3:41:08Speaker 01

  fucking vibrating. And my hair is really long. And I feel somebody grab the back of my ponytail and snap my head back like this. And it felt like something was coming out of my throat, like, being pulled out of me. And the takeaway that I end up in the whole, the rest of the night, there's a million other things, but the, the takeaway was

• 3:41:32Speaker 01

  you no longer need to bite. You may only show your teeth. You can be the leader that you want to be. You do not always have to be the traditional type of leader. You can be in the back of the pack. You have to watch the rest around you. Be, be mindful of those around you. Instead of just being upfront, be, be behind as well. Make sure that everything that you're doing is all being looked after. Because my thing was, I will rip your fucking head off if you just say the wrong thing to me before. The whole thing was, you can just show your teeth and that is more than enough. Stop trying to be, stop trying to overcompensate. You don't need to do that any longer. And then I had this weird astral projection thing happen.

• 3:42:18Speaker 01

  Like, where I was in my house. And there were these flyers all over my husband and my son. And like, I went ham on them. I like shredded them to pieces. Like, I was this protector. And it's crazy, because the guys told me after, like, someone would be like, there were flyers all over you the whole night. They were just all over you. And I'm like, I was snarling when I was sitting there. Like, the shaman had to be like, I need you to try to calm your breathing after I could, but before like I was like attacking things beside me that people could see and I could see, but couldn't wrap my brain around that they were real like it was

• 3:42:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:43:00Speaker 01

  Weird. This is crazy, man.

• 3:43:03Lex Fridman?

  That's day two.

• 3:43:04Speaker 01

  That's day two.

• 3:43:06Lex Fridman?

  And so what's the big takeaway there?

• 3:43:09Speaker 01

  My takeaway was I needed to be, I needed to stop trying to, stop trying to push everything too hard. Stop trying to force everything. It's all going to come. It's all going to happen, but you are, you are too aggressive. You are too, you're trying so hard that you're missing, you're missing everything else.

• 3:43:31Lex Fridman?

  Got it. That's just trying to be a better human kind of thing.

• 3:43:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:43:38Lex Fridman?

  This is, this is getting intense.

• 3:43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get aggressive. Yeah, I get aggressive.

• 3:43:45Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's love and light still.

• 3:43:47Speaker 01

  It gets better.

• 3:43:48Lex Fridman?

  Love and light, love and light, the warrior within is calm.

• 3:43:54Lex Fridman?

  She will test you daily. Show her respect.

• 3:43:57Speaker 01

  So that's what I mean. You've read my book. You know, I don't write like that.

• 3:44:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is strange.

• 3:44:02Speaker 01

  See? Good. You get it. Cause people don't understand when I say I didn't, I don't feel like I wrote that. I feel like she gave me, like I reread this all of the time.

• 3:44:15Lex Fridman?

  So I wonder, I mean, well, not obviously, but this is somehow part of you.

• 3:44:21Speaker 01

  I think it's a part of me, obviously.

• 3:44:23Lex Fridman?

  Reconnecting you somehow to that part. It kind of is incredible to think of what are the things that are part of us that we haven't really explored, you know?

• 3:44:32Speaker 01

  And there's so many. We just get

• 3:44:34Lex Fridman?

  Nature, to connect to her, feel her flow through them. Use them for the strength for each day and your challenge will present itself. Love, light, breathe.

• 3:44:48Speaker 01

  Sorry, I have too much hair.

• 3:44:50Lex Fridman?

  Never enough. I used to have long hair. What about day three?

• 3:44:53Speaker 01

  So day three is the, the stuff I talked about on Jaco. When I got taken over to the other side. I almost missed that night, too. I almost missed that ceremony. I got a false positive on my COVID test. And I got a call from the medical clinic that night. Being like, you need to come in. You got a false positive on your COVID test and if you're gonna travel, you have to. We got to figure this out. You got to come do blood work. You got to come do. You know, whatever it is you need to do if you want to get home, but you got to come do something. And so. I didn't think I was gonna be in ceremony. I had to leave. So I left. And, you know. They waited.

• 3:45:38Speaker 01

  They waited for me. And so. I think the biggest takeaway from all of this for me was. This isn't it. This isn't everything. This isn't. The end all be all. You can fight through this. This is possible. It's gonna take work. It's gonna be fucking hard. It's worth it, though. And if you just keep going in the right direction, everything that I wrote down, everything, every goal, it'll happen.

• 3:46:10Lex Fridman?

  What about love?

• 3:46:12Speaker 01

  What about love?

• 3:46:14Lex Fridman?

  Tell me about your husband.

• 3:46:16Speaker 01

  Okay, he's the best.

• 3:46:18Lex Fridman?

  What role did he play in your life?

• 3:46:21Speaker 01

  The most pivotal role. He kept me alive and made me feel worthy enough to. Until I knew that I was worthy enough to be alive.

• 3:46:30Lex Fridman?

  Can you dissect that a little bit? Like what, I mean, what role does love play in the human condition?

• 3:46:36Speaker 01

  I think love is the only reason that we haven't destroyed ourselves.

• 3:46:42Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we humans in general.

• 3:46:44Speaker 01

  Yes, I think there is a subset of people where love will always be, you know, love conquers all, you know, but that's not always the reality. The reality is life is messy and humans are messy. And the way we choose to deal with things are messy and complicated and difficult. But at the root of all, good is love, I think. And for me, I was fortunate enough to meet my husband through a friend, which you listen to that podcast. So I don't know that we need to, unless you really want to go into that story again, how I met my husband.

• 3:47:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, the only part of that story I like, people should just go listen to the Jaco podcast. It's how you made him uncomfortable. I love it.

• 3:47:30Speaker 01

  I, well, okay, so how it works, let me explain. In the supercross and motocross industry, it's really small. The people who are professional, there's, it's a small subset of people. It's kind of like Formula One, 21 cars. That's what there is. That's the amount of riders.

• 3:47:42Lex Fridman?

  And we should say your husband is a motocross guy.

• 3:47:45Speaker 01

  My husband was a professional supercross and motocross racer for his whole life. And he raced for Kawasaki and Suzuki. He lived in California and raced still down there. And when I met him, I met him at the tail end of his career. And so I went to Montreal with a friend of mine to see somebody that I was currently sleeping with, who was a friend of mine and end up meeting Brady instead.

• 3:48:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And the funny moment in Jaco's podcast.

• 3:48:16Speaker 01

  Was saying that I was fucking him instead of just sleeping with him. And then Jaco's face exploded and.

• 3:48:22Lex Fridman?

  Jaco was like, oh, sleeping. So like he was, he was trying to get details of the sleeping quarters that you're, he was trying to get you to define as a good interviewer would, oh, sleeping. Okay. And then you were like, it's fucking Jaco.

• 3:48:36Lex Fridman?

  Or something like that. It was great. It was great.

• 3:48:39Speaker 01

  But that's true because in that industry, it's like we, it's small. We all share. Trust me. Is what it is. And anyway, so I met him there and he had broken his wrist really, really bad. And um, I was, this was before I deployed. So I met him and I, we stayed in touch and just became friends and just texted. That was it. Nothing weird. And um, I was deploying though. So we just agreed, you know, we'd be friends. We weren't actually talking about anything romantically at all. And then I deployed and we got talking and to know each other a little more, a little more. And then we decided that we liked each other and we wanted to try to give it at least a semi shot. And so when I got home from Afghanistan,

• 3:49:23Speaker 01

  I went and watched him race his last, one of his last two races that he did professionally before he retired. Excuse me. And it was in Montreal, one was in Vegas. And I hadn't seen him and he didn't really know me. We didn't really know each other. We, you know, we met, I slept in the bed beside him because my girlfriend didn't want to get in trouble from her boyfriend from sleeping beside a random dude. And then um, yeah, we just, we, we started dating and

• 3:49:57Speaker 01

  he really slowly became my rock and he understands trauma. He had some stuff happen in his life, in his family that

• 3:50:05Speaker 01

  he went through a lot of therapy. He went through a lot of shit. He went, he saw what traumatic situations can do to a family and to people and those that are suffering with it. And so he was well equipped to handle me, um, thankfully. And it got to a point where we were doing the long distance back and forth, back and forth and back and forth. And I finally got the call that I was going to be released from the military. And I wanted to live near him, but I couldn't afford to live in British Columbia because I was from Ontario and BC is like, it means bring cash for a reason. I'm like, there's no way I can live there. And then his family was like, come live with us. They had a big enough, they had a big enough house. Trust me, it was fine. So I was like, okay.

• 3:50:47Speaker 01

  And so I went from like dating this guy long distance to over, you know, from two thousand nine to two thousand eleven, just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then finally his parents were like, should I get off the pot here with her? Like, come on. You know, it's obvious she loves you and I would never say it. That word just says love. Like it was just like.

• 3:51:06Lex Fridman?

  You guys didn't say love to each other?

• 3:51:09Speaker 01

  For a long time. Cause I was dead inside.

• 3:51:12Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 3:51:13Speaker 01

  I didn't know what that meant because I couldn't feel. I didn't feel anything. He loved it. Because he like, we'd be go, we'd go do something, you would never complain about anything. You wouldn't say a fucking word. You would just sit there and now you got all your feelies back and your emotions back and now you're too hot and you're too calm.

• 3:51:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:33Speaker 01

  Anyway, so yeah, he loved it. I was numb and dead inside. Seriously, when I call him back.

• 3:51:37Lex Fridman?

  Were you still able to have fun together? That kind of thing? Like, uh, like when you say there's no emotion, is there more emotion around the basics of like everyday life? Uh, but you're still able to just like enjoy shit together or is it?

• 3:51:49Speaker 01

  I was enjoying stuff, but I wasn't.

• 3:51:52Lex Fridman?

  Feeling.

• 3:51:53Speaker 01

  Feeling.

• 3:51:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:51:54Speaker 01

  I was like, this is fun.

• 3:51:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Right.

• 3:51:57Speaker 01

  That was it. That was surface level. Like Lex, this is fun. It wasn't.

• 3:52:03Lex Fridman?

  Uh, there's nothing there. Yeah.

• 3:52:04Speaker 01

  No, there's nothing there. Hey, yeah, nothing. And so we went through that for a long time and then I lived with his parents and we, we lived there and that was, you know, god damn it, his family was so good to me because I was a nightmare. I was a nightmare. Couldn't cook certain food around me anymore. Couldn't, couldn't go certain places with me anymore. Couldn't, you know, crowds were a hard no. We didn't do Canada today. And like I just changed, I moved in and was like, shit's gotta change if you guys don't want me to kill everyone. Like, and they were willing and they were accepting. And they were amazing about it. And then we finally said, okay, well, like, is this, is this, we're good? We're like, I, I used to say like,

• 3:52:46Speaker 01

  I L you. Like I couldn't say love. It freaked me out for a long time. And then I finally said it and then that shithead said it like a month later and I was like, that's not fair. You should have said it at the same exact time. I wanted the response.

• 3:52:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:52:59Speaker 01

  And um, he goes to treatment with me, he, whatever I need. He knows that like, hey, it's more for like him and like, how do I handle her?

• 3:53:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:09Speaker 01

  And then we moved out and we bought a house and then he took a sweet ass time. We were dating for four years before we were engaged because just to be sure the crazy wasn't too crazy. He waited four years on that.

• 3:53:20Lex Fridman?

  A smart man.

• 3:53:21Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah.

• 3:53:22Lex Fridman?

  Or you could, you could say he's just a terrified of commitment, but both.

• 3:53:26Speaker 01

  A little bit of both. Hey, when you were the guy on the posters that all the girls sign up to that sent all the dirty pictures, fucking why are you giving that up? It's easy.

• 3:53:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Commitment is a real commitment then.

• 3:53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53:38Lex Fridman?

  Okay. This is the Jaco reset.

• 3:53:43Lex Fridman?

  We talked about brass and unity a little bit. What's the long-term mission, goal and dream of your company and the podcast of the same name?

• 3:53:53Speaker 01

  So for me, what I've been trying to do with this company is create a community that can really work together to not only help vets, first responders, but to really bridge the gap with the civilian population and letting them know what we kind of go through and why it is such an epidemic and why there is over 22 suicides a day and we are losing people like it's going out of style. Like the, the amount of vets that are questioning the last 20 years of their life right now is, is terrifying. The, you know, I work with organizations that are doing this outreach and they're overloaded right now like they have never seen before because this whole thing is just, it's hit head here. And so what brass and unity tries to do is it is really just a vehicle

• 3:54:38Speaker 01

  to get the money in the hands of the people that are doing the work with it. I couldn't start a nonprofit because I'm not good at fundraising. I'm not good of being like, give me your money. I'm going to do this with it. The least I could do was come up with a product that I know I could give to people or people could purchase. And if I gave pretty much all of the prof, like the, the actual profit from it to those organizations and I give them something to wear that is a touch piece, or if they're out and somebody sees a bullet on their wrist and go, hey, what is that? It's a conversation starter. And that's exactly what it's been. And it's, it's done its job as that. And so we, like I said, we are a way to get the vehicle, we're the vehicle. We're the money in the hands of the people. People don't always want to just get a tax receipt.

• 3:55:23Speaker 01

  It's great to donate to something, great on you to do that, but most people have a selfish aspect, right? And that's okay. But if you can tap into that, you can then fund these charities properly and give them the tools to do their jobs effectively. Up until this point, they just count on people's goodness of their hearts. Hate to break it to you, humanity's rough right now. We need to look at something a little differently.

• 3:55:46Lex Fridman?

  So these things spark, like Julie sparks conversations and then, and then do you work with charities?

• 3:55:52Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, God, yeah, that's what I do. So my whole mission every day is I get up, I push jewelry and sunglasses on people and say, but now that you're going to wear that, now you're a part of the being you army. Now you're a part of this community.

• 3:56:06Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which, let me, uh, let me, let me put it, put it right back on branded. This is a organic product placement.

• 3:56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, this isn't like marketing at all, nothing weird about this at all. And so we work with a lot of organizations and I'm very particular about where we send our money because there are, it feels like thousands of vet organizations right now. And if we were able to consolidate, it would be more ideal. I spoke about that on another show, but that's not currently happening. So I try to work with the nonprofits I know. Number one, are not paying six-figure salaries, which trust me, there's lots, a lot. Number two, I look at the actual resources that they're providing and if they're going to be something that are going to be useful, in my opinion, whether or not they're actually useful, and I just don't think they are, that's, that's up for debate. I know it's worked for me. So I try to fund the things that I know have been helpful for me and the people I

• 3:56:56Speaker 01

  associate with. So that's why I brought all the paper because I didn't want to be an idiot and forget anybody that's really important because I get caught up in things and I think it's important to acknowledge. So number one, heroic hearts. Um, we just started working to talk about them and really make them known, but we're going to be donating to them as well.

• 3:57:17Lex Fridman?

  Are they doing more stuff than the Iowa's good thing?

• 3:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so their points are, I got Jesse to actually, I'm like, what are your talking points? Because I need people to know exactly what you do.

• 3:57:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:57:27Speaker 01

  So veterans have had to take their mental and general health into their own hands due to the failure of the government system. So that is why they were created. But Heroic Hearts is a peer supported mental health network involving full preparation, integration, coaching, and connection to vetted psychedelic treatments. So they don't just do Iya. They deal with psilocybin, ketamine, ibogaine. But they're, they've got protocols in place. They've got locations you go to that are safely vetted and they work. They've got over, right now, Jesse said they have 800 veterans on a waiting list for treatment. That's just before the spike of the end of this war. They have over 100, they've helped over 100 veterans, including dozens of special operation vets, find effective care.

• 3:58:10Speaker 01

  They've now got branches in the US, UK, and Canada. And the, the biggest thing about them and why we talk about them is because the problem of psychedelics and the stigma around it is so significant. But because of great universities that are now stepping up and doing the research behind it, it is being legitimized. So like, they're doing that. In Canada, there's a group called TheraSyl. They are currently fighting the government to get the rights for Canadians under section 56 of our laws to get compassionate care for psilocybin use. I've done a panel with them on that. Really great base set of Victoria, really smart people. One of the other bigger charities that we work with, and they're honestly, they were my first and foremost charity that I ever worked with.

• 3:58:51Speaker 01

  And they're a big component in the veteran community in Canada. They're called Honor House. And Honor House was started by Honorary Colonel Aldi Genova. It was started because of a guy named Trevor Green. He was a Canadian soldier who deployed. And he was, so Captain Trevor Green, sorry Trevor, Captain Trevor Green. He got an axe in the middle of his head. A Taliban member came up and put an axe directly into his head when his helmet was off, and he survived. He's done work with Invictus Games and Prince Harry. He has an exoskeleton he uses on the island. He's the, he's so cool. He hasn't changed one bit from like the infantry captain

• 3:59:32Speaker 01

  he, you expect him to be. And it was, Al saw there was a need for vets and first responders to get treatment because there's no real home away from home for people. Picture Ronald McDonald for cancer and families. This is vets and first responders. And so their whole thing, and I'll read it so I say it exactly right, because I used to be on the board of their charity, but I ran out of time. So now I just consult. But they are a home away from home for members of the Canadian Armed Forces, veterans and first responders and their families to stay completely free of charge while they're receiving medical care and treatment in the Vancouver area. But since then, they've expanded, since I've come on board, and they've opened

• 4:00:12Speaker 01

  Honor Ranch, which is up in Ashcroft, B.C. And it's 140 acres, 10 cabins and a main cabin. They do equine therapy and they're more focused on operational stress injury clinics. So, sorry, operational stress injury within the veteran community. And they have specialists that do that. They have, they have their own bracelet with us. So every time you buy an Honor House bracelet, all the proceeds go to them. They, yeah, and it's actually the green one. So that one, so when you buy one of those Honor House bracelets, they have those, they go directly to them, which is really amazing. They've been near and dear to my heart for a long time. You've got the All Secure Foundation, which is, these guys are, these guys are super dope. I'm going to read exactly because Jen texted me. So Jen and Tom Satterley, I've

• 4:00:57Speaker 01

  had them both on the podcast. Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down. Tom is a Delta, have you heard of them? No. So, okay, so Tom was involved in Black Hawk Down. It was one of his first operations. He's a Delta operator. And I asked her, I said, listen, I'm going to be doing these shows and I think it's great that we talk about you more. So I said, give me your three points of importance. So the All Secure Foundation serves special operations combat families in healing from post-traumatic stress injury and secondary post-traumatic stress. So that's often what the wife or the other husband or the other spouse suffers from. And we're starting to see that be more and more of an issue now. So they also are devoted to rebuilding the couples' relationships on the home front

• 4:01:40Speaker 01

  after the separations of war and 80% of their warriors went on, went, um, yeah, 80% of their warriors want their families to be more involved with the healing. The problem is, is very often vets don't realize that they can have, or just because the system doesn't pay for it, actually have their spouse as a part of things. And the biggest thing that we find with special operations families, I think the divorce rate's like 95%. And so they work so hard with these families. They take them on retreats, these husbands and wives, and they get them to connect again after being separated over such a long period of time. There's other places like Children's Have Fallen Patriots out of DC where they fund education, um, university for people who have lost their parents, um, in deployments,

• 4:02:24Speaker 01

  whether their kid's even born yet. If they're still in utero, they're still pay. They do not care. Then you've got people like, um, in Canada, you've got Vets Canada. You've got in the States, you've, you know, you've got True Patriot Love. You've got, um, who else in the States is really great that we've worked with? I know there's a Green Beret Foundation. That's great. One More Wave gives amputees, teaches them to surf with, with amputees. Like, they're really great. There's so many organizations, but at the end of the day, I focus on a small subset because you cannot fix everyone's problems. The least thing, the, the least you can do for people is focus. If you can provide focus, you can provide the proper amount of funding, proper amount of funding, can get the proper amount

• 4:03:08Speaker 01

  of tools, those tools can actually be implemented properly. And then those people can go on to hopefully have successful marriages and families. And we don't have to watch our parents drink themselves to death and wonder why daddy's yelling at mommy all the time and daddy storms out and leaves. Well, daddy had some shit happen in his life and mommy had some shit happen, but that does not mean that's who they are.

• 4:03:29Lex Fridman?

  And yes, so trauma has completely destructive effects on family and relationships and like correcting that has like ripple effects.

• 4:03:40Speaker 01

  Oh, just astronomical ripple effects because the problem is we are so quick to tell people they're suffering from PTSD. We're so quick to give them drugs. We're so quick to kick them out of the military. We're so quick to let them be homeless on the street. We're so quick to let them fucking kill themselves. We're so quick and then all of a sudden, when, when a politician goes veteran suicide's an issue, that's when it's a problem. Well, if you prevent the problem from happening in the first place, or you give people the right funding and tools to do the job, you won't have this problem.

• 4:04:13Lex Fridman?

  Do you have advice for young people, think high school students, maybe undergrads, college students about career, life, how to live a life they can be proud of? You've had one heck of a life.

• 4:04:30Speaker 01

  Some of them are really cheesy, but they're true.

• 4:04:34Speaker 01

  Live a life you can be proud of, number one. If you wake up every morning and you hate what you do, change the fucking station. Do not live and stay in that perpetual cycle of bullshit. It's not worth it. It's not, it's not what you're on this planet for. You're worth more than that, than the monotony of waking up, going to work, hating your life, drinking yourself to sleep and functioning. Do yourself a favor. The thing I scream about on the show so much is move your fucking body. Move your body. Get your blood moving. Allow your body to, to do what it's here for. Go for a run, go for a walk. If you can't run, walk to the fridge three times more than maybe you did before, but

• 4:05:19Speaker 01

  you're moving. Pay attention to the shit you look at.

• 4:05:25Speaker 01

  More now than ever, we are seeing our younger generation just be force fed information from one side or the other, and none of it makes sense. None of it's understandable. It just causes chaos in the brain. Really pay attention to what you, you, you listen to. Something I've had to learn to do is make time for myself. All of this working 18 hours a day, not sleeping, just work, work, work, that doesn't work. That's not sustainable. It's not healthy and it's not, it's not anything anyone should be doing. Balance is important. But if you're going to take the time to do something for yourself, don't make it sitting in front of the TV for six hours, eating a bag of chips, drinking a Coke.

• 4:06:10Speaker 01

  Make it, I'm gonna go for a walk, maybe listen to a podcast where I can learn something. Make it, I'm gonna go volunteer somewhere. Nobody does that anymore, but make it I can go volunteer somewhere. Honor House? They have no paid employees. They have one. Everybody is a volunteer. They're fucking phenomenal. Just do whatever you're gonna do. Do it with some fucking drive. Put some goddamn effort into your life. And pick something in a career that's gonna make you happy. Not something that's just gonna give you six figures, because that's not gonna make you happy. I can tell you right now, I have everything in the world. And the last thing I want is more things. I want less. I want the woods and I want quiet. Because that's what's important to me. I want my family to matter.

• 4:06:55Speaker 01

  The people around me to matter. And the small group I keep, that tight knit I have. I want them to wake up every minute, knowing that they have a friend that they can call on the other line that isn't just like, how's it going? That can actually have a conversation, a meaningful, intelligent, caring conversation. We are just breeding these kids to be followers who digest bullshit, who reverberate things they don't fully understand and have opinions on stuff they have no business talking about.

• 4:07:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with an open mind, humbly think deeply about the world.

• 4:07:33Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 4:07:34Lex Fridman?

  How has your relationship with death changed? This is a Russian program, I have to ask you. So you've considered suicide throughout your life. You have been in the line of fire. You have witnessed death. You, as a human being, a mortal one,

• 4:07:52Lex Fridman?

  do you think about your death these days? Now that you have begun the journey with dealing with your trauma? Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of your death?

• 4:08:06Speaker 01

  Well, you don't die, so that's why.

• 4:08:09Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean you don't die?

• 4:08:10Speaker 01

  You move on.

• 4:08:12Lex Fridman?

  Where do you go?

• 4:08:14Speaker 01

  To another plane and another vibration and another, whatever you want to call it. This isn't it. This isn't all of it. This is a blip. This is a moment. This is a...

• 4:08:26Speaker 01

  I used to be afraid of death before the military. I was always afraid of dying. I don't know why. Had this irrational fear that I was going to be kidnapped in my room. Like, seriously, like irrational fear, like afraid.

• 4:08:38Speaker 01

  And it's funny, because I talked to Michaela yesterday and she said the same thing. And I was like, oh, my God, I know what you're talking about.

• 4:08:45Lex Fridman?

  Being afraid of being kidnapped?

• 4:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, she had this like fear that someone was going to come in and take her out of her room. I had the same fear.

• 4:08:52Lex Fridman?

  By a human being or a monster of some kind?

• 4:08:54Speaker 01

  No, I think like by a human being. And I had this irrational fear that I was, that like something was going to happen to me. And like I said, I don't know if it's because like my parents were always made me aware of my surroundings. Like, people take people. This is a real thing that happens. And I was really small, so, and I looked like a little boy. My hair was like that when I was training. I had short, no hair, I had flat as a board. You would have thought I was a 12-year-old boy. And so my mom's like, people take people, sweetie. That's just the reality of life. You need to be aware. So I don't know if I had this ingrained in my mind. I was always like training to protect myself or fight someone off. So I was like afraid of like this irrational thing. And then I went overseas and then I realized that I could just be literally there talking to you, having a conversation, and I could just be taken off the face of the earth. And there's nothing I can do about it.

• 4:09:40Speaker 01

  And then I adapted this idea that when it's my time, it'll be my time. But the difference is now.

• 4:09:47Speaker 01

  At least I know that if I do go and I do cross and I am and I do move on.

• 4:10:00Speaker 01

  I know that I live my life the way that I I always hoped I would be proud to live.

• 4:10:08Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a dark question?

• 4:10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10:09Lex Fridman?

  Because we you mentioned Robin Williams, you mentioned Anthony Bourdain and your own struggle with suicide. Why do you think they ultimately lost that battle? Why do you think they took their lives?

• 4:10:24Speaker 01

  Man, that's a that's a loaded question because you could look at everything from from biomarkers in the brain to know if their serotonin and dopamine levels were crashed in the ground. Like you there's there's biological reasonings for some people where they're born bipolar and they have or you know, they're schizophrenic. There's so many things we don't fully grasp about the brain.

• 4:10:49Speaker 01

  But what we do know from my perspective, from me at least,

• 4:10:56Speaker 01

  there really is no rhyme or reason why I survived and others didn't. Stuff and things don't make you happy. People don't always know why they're feeling the way they're feeling, but they also also are not always

• 4:11:14Speaker 01

  willing to talk about it or be they put on a good front. And if nobody knows any different, what do you expect?

• 4:11:23Lex Fridman?

  And it's especially clear with the two of them that on the surface, they're, you know, exceptionally successful in so many dimensions.

• 4:11:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:11:31Lex Fridman?

  And still, that means nothing. Material possessions, anything really is not doesn't guarantee you happiness.

• 4:11:41Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't.

• 4:11:44Lex Fridman?

  Well,

• 4:11:44Speaker 01

  It's scary.

• 4:11:45Lex Fridman?

  That's terrifying. But when it's good, that's what makes it.

• 4:11:53Lex Fridman?

  Joyful, like that's what happiness is. It's like, holy shit, somehow amidst all the absurdity, all the things that you can't predict, you nevertheless feel really good. That's why I feel really fortunate to be getting this feat of happiness all the time. Um, well,

• 4:12:12Lex Fridman?

  to be or not to be, that's a good place to end it. Uh, Kelsey, you're an amazing human being. I'm really fortunate that you would spend your valuable time with me. I, I, as I said, you're so good at not just talking, but listening. So I definitely will listen to your podcast.

• 4:12:31Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 4:12:31Lex Fridman?

  Because I can tell you're an incredible person as an interviewer and as a storyteller. So again, thank you for talking today.

• 4:12:39Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 4:12:41Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Kelsey Sharon. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Herbert Hoover. Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.