#1426 Ephraim Mattos | Inside Life Saving Missions with a Navy SEAL

Ephraim Mattos is a former Navy SEAL, the Founder of Stronghold Rescue, and the author of “City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul.” In this conversation, we talk about how Ephraim went from a Navy SEAL to a humanitarian, what actually goes on in the ground in conflict zones, how he is saving lives on a daily basis, and all the complexities that go into this work. ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join. ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the premier crypto-friendly place to gamble on politics and sports, casino, poker and horse racing. BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure. Visit ⁠⁠⁠https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp⁠⁠⁠ and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today, we have a very special episode. You're going to want to sit down and pay a lot of attention. This story is not only inspiring, but it's going to make you think much more critically about the world. And it's going to teach you so much about the intricacies and the complexities of many of the conflicts that happen globally.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  In this conversation, I talked to Efrem Mattos. Efrem's a former Navy SEAL. He's the founder of Stronghold Rescue, and he's the author of a great book called City of Death. In this conversation, what we talk about is how Efrem went from a Navy SEAL to a humanitarian. What actually goes on on the ground in these conflict zones? How he's saving lives on a daily basis while being threatened by enemy fire? And all of the complexities and nuances that go into this work. Now, one of the interesting things about this podcast is that most people come on here and they talk about investing, how they invest their money, what the return on that investment is, and what their best ideas are. What strikes me about Efrem is that actually he is investing a much more precious resource. He's investing his time and his energy.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  And the ROI on that time and energy investment actually has nothing to do with finances. He measures his success in how many lives he can save. This conversation is very special. It's a little different, but I promise you that it is worth it. So make sure that you listen all the way to the end and let me know what you think. What do you think about this work? And if you're so compelled, feel free to go check out StrongholdRescue.org at the end. Here's my conversation with Efrem Matos.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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• 4:07Speaker 00

  You're a Navy SEAL, but actually, most of, the most interesting things that you've done is after being a SEAL, using the skills and the experience that you got in the military for humanitarian causes. And one of the things I'm probably most drawn to is, most people who come on this show, we talk about investing. They're usually investing money for a return. But you are very unique in that you're investing the single most valuable resource, which is your time. And the ROI calculation that you're making is not really something for you. It's about how many lives can you save in these war zones? And so in order to understand the work that you're doing today, I think we've got to go back and really understand kind of your background

• 4:49Speaker 00

  and how you grew up to become the person who wants to go as a civilian, volunteer into a war zone and get enjoyment out of that maybe? And so walk us through like, where did you grow up and what was your early childhood like?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So first I'll say I definitely don't get that much enjoyment out of it. That's one caveat. For me, it's definitely a labor of love going into these places and doing what we got to do. But yeah, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home. So had a wonderful childhood, was given, you know, great morals as a kid. Tried to follow those morals as best I could, you know, in my early adult life. But yeah, I had a great childhood. But a big part of that childhood was this kind of dichotomy between,

• 5:45Speaker 02

  you know, serving others. That was something that was heavily taught in church and in school. And my father was also in the military. He was, well, he was in the Air Force Reserves. So he would normally, normally home, but then after nine 11, he was activated and he was sent to Iraq and Middle East and several other places as well. And so that got me realizing that there's other ways to serve. And it kind of opened up my eyes to, I guess, the rest of the world opened up my eyes to the concept of the of the military and that there were, there were other ways to, as you lead to sort of use my time, use my life, the most finite thing that you have.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  How do, how can you use that to the most effect to help the most amount of people? And again, the value, sort of the moral value that I was taught as a kid was, we were always taught the idea that the greatest of these is the servant, right? And it's somebody who serves others. And that doesn't mean you can't be successful. It doesn't mean you can't, you know, do great things, but it just means that whatever you're doing, you need to provide value to others. And so for me, when I, when I graduated high school, for me, the, the biggest way that I thought that I could sort of upgrade myself and be the most service to the world at the time was to join the military. And that's why, or one of, one of the major reasons why I, I joined the military.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  I do think it's very interesting. People always ask me, you know, hey, why did you join the military? And pretty much everyone that I know has a patriotism streak or kind of belief, but a main driver is I think this is good for me as an individual in terms of discipline or leadership or kind of upgrading the situation that I'm in. And so it's this very kind of unique incentive alignment, you know, in economics or finance or business, people always talk about like, you know, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Joining the military is one of those very unique situations though, where like it is good for the country and it is good for the individual. And so, um, did you understand that it was good for you kind of joining? Or was it more of a, hey, I think that serving,

• 7:54Speaker 00

  you know, kind of the country is the driver? And like, how cognizant of you were, were you of the maybe positive improvements that it would have on you as an individual?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I would say I was very cognizant of the, of the hopefully positive changes that I, that I would have. I would say, um, part of it was service to my country. Um, I was not motivated at all by the money or the, the, the school, the school benefits. Well, but also like the school benefits, like that wasn't, I wasn't like, yeah, I get free college. Like I didn't even enter into my calculation, didn't really care. Um, a large portion of it was, um, I also wanted to fight. I just legitimately, I just wanted to go and take on bad guys and I wanted to do it at the highest level possible. But yeah, that, that sort of third, uh, portion of it was I wanted to become a better version of myself. I wanted to challenge myself. And I think that there's, um, something particularly with young men,

• 8:44Speaker 02

  where our society today is not really set up in such a way where men or young men kind of pass from being a boy to being a man. And usually that, that happens through some sort of trial, uh, or tribulation, right? And it happens over time and it's not like, it's not usually like a specific moment. Um, so for me, I, I looked at the, Military and particularly, you know, going through the SEAL program as my opportunity to sort of become a man, prove myself as a man, do it early and set myself up to, I guess, have a, to live an extraordinary life, as some would say.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  The, what's interesting is, that is something that people have done for a very long time, right? There are societies, after societies throughout history, that there was some sort of training, there was some sort of test, there was some sort of, you know, event where sometimes as young as 12 to 14 years old, sometimes as old as, you know, 18 to 20, but some period, people were told, hey, you now have crossed the chasm and become a man. With the SEALs, training is intense. You did it at a time where you knew there's a high probability of being deployed, given the wars that were going on. Did you join and think that you were going to be there for, you know, 20 years? So 20 years, for those that don't know, is kind of the magic number of the military, because you could

• 9:59Speaker 00

  retire? Or was it something where you're like, hey, let me sign the first contract and kind of see how it goes, and then I'll make a decision after that?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I, I was open to the idea of doing 20, but by no means did I go in thinking, this is what I'm going to do forever. I thought, if I love this, and it is something I want to do forever, well then, great, I get the opportunity to do it forever. And there's, there's even a part of me, too, I wish that I had loved it, I wish that I had found it as sort of to be the right spot for me long-term, because honestly, it's a, it's a, has the potential to be a really great life, if you like that environment, and you, and you, and you like that job. But I was open to, I was open to either. But either way, I wasn't thinking too much, too far in the future, because all I cared about was becoming a SEAL, and I want to go to war. So, yes, I joined during a time of war, but I joined

• 10:50Speaker 02

  a unit specifically for war, because I wanted to go to war. I wanted to, and again, it was, there's a part of me as a young man, I, you're looking for that adventure, you're looking for that, you want to prove yourself. Yeah, everyone's kind of has a chip on their shoulder, and you want, you want to see how you're going to react when the bullets start flying. And, but there was also a level of service. I wanted to serve as well, at the highest level possible, and then just sort of see where life would take me from that point.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  It always cracks me up, whenever somebody from the military describes, like, hey, why'd you sign up? Like, because it looked fun. Right, you know, like if you look at the commercials, they're like jumping out of planes and shooting guns and like all this stuff. And, and there's a certain part maybe of our country that like gets that. And there's a very large portion of the population that's like, wait, what do you mean? That sounds like that's dangerous, that's risky, that's, you know, whatever. You're like, that's the point, right? Is that like, you know, you, you don't try to become a SEAL because you want to be safe. Right, right. It's almost like, show me where the danger is and I will go. Which, you know, one is important, right? That our country has those types of people, but also two.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  I think that it's a psychologically different view of the world. Where, you know, again, in investing, I talk a lot about, people see volatility and they say volatility equals risk. If I see risk, I run away. But the best investors in the world, they're constantly seeking out risk, right? They, they want the risk because if there's risk, that means there's volatility. If there's volatility, well, if something goes up a lot, it means if I'm on the right side of the trade, then I could make a lot of money.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And so, you know, investing your time in something that is high risk is also a very asymmetric type of investment. You know, if it goes well, it's very rewarding for you. It's obviously very good for the country. And so, that's why I kind of think of a lot of what you've done in your life is through that investing lens. It's just time, energy, you know, kind of focus, more so than the military as of yet will not let you, you know, kind of make financial bets on certain outcomes.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think I, I've never heard it put that way, sort of analogizing it with finance and risk. But you're absolutely correct. And as you were talking, I was just thinking, yeah, you have some guys, many guys who are astronomically, you know, better, better than me in every single way. And they, for whatever reason, you know, they, they got hit in, during the war, or they were killed in training, or they got injured in training and never made it through the pipeline. Right, so there's, there's this massive amount of risk. So you talk about specifically risk of, of joining the, the SEAL program in particular. If you make it through the program, you're a Navy SEAL. And that's a really cool, and a really, that's, that's a really good place to be in life.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  But if you don't make it, again, you get sick, you twist an ankle. Anything happens, you're now in the Navy, right? So it's not like if you fail out of, you know, Green Beret selection or Ranger selection, hey, you're still in the Army. Here's, you can still have a rifle and you can still go be part of a pretty elite group of dudes that can go fight. And if you're in the Navy, it's like most likely you're going to end up on a ship. Right? So there's high risk, high reward in that, in that regard. And so you, it ends up, and guys are very aware of that. So that the program ends up attracting guys who are, I guess, looking for that volatility.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  You, you talk in the book, um, which is called City of Death, uh, humanitarian warriors in the Battle of Mosul. And, uh, highly recommend, everyone knows that, uh, if I read a book and I don't like it, I don't tell you about it. So, uh, highly recommend this one. But, um, in the book you talk about, uh, during SEAL training, uh, it's hard. It's cold, it's dark, it's, you know, kind of this very difficult, uh, training program. And I think you're laying in the water and you have this almost vision of, uh, kind of a future self or a future warrior. And you say that that was the moment you decided no matter what happened, you weren't going to quit. Talk about that kind of moment and like, was it the environment and the training? And like, was it like the SEAL teams working, right? Like it was almost like, hey, this is how we harden a warrior to not ever want to quit?

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Or do you think it's something that was like already inside of you? And in that moment, you kind of had to decide what type of person you were going to be moving forward in your life?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  I think it's probably more the, the latter. So again, just a quick, quick summary. It was Monday night or I think it was Sunday night or Monday night of, like, I don't even remember at this point. You're sleep deprived and I had just injured my back and I was also sick. So I was vomiting, projectile vomiting. Um, I just injured my lower back, so I've got a bulging disc at that point. Wasn't ruptured, so I could still function, but very painful. We're laying in the water and I'm, I'm sitting there contemplating the idea of quitting. And I'm thinking, I wasn't quitting, I was like, oh, this is too hard. My thought process was there's no way I'm going to make it through this. This is, they're going to kick me out. I'm going to, I'm going to fall on my face. They're going to drag me out of here and I'm going to have to do this again. So might as well just quit because I'm not going to make it anyway.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And so in that moment, I, I, it was, I don't know how else to explain it. Other than maybe a hallucination because I'm miserable. I, I don't know. I mean, if you're sleep deprived and you're in pain, all this stuff, dehydrated. And I, yeah, I saw sort of a future vision of myself as a, as a warrior, uh, alone, going into these jungle mountains and on a helicopter and, um,

• 15:59Speaker 02

  That that moment, I think it was important because it I was able to see myself in the future and I was able to see sort of my, this sounds super corny, but I was like, I was able to see sort of my warrior self. I was able to see my true self. And then the choice was, at that point, I saw who I truly was and I didn't even make a decision of like, which am I going to go left or am I going to go right? Am I going to quit or am I going to stay? I just saw my, I saw who I really was. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm not, I'm not the guy who quits and it doesn't matter.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Became an identity.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  It became an identity. Absolutely. Yeah. It became an identity because I saw myself in the future. And yeah, so that was the moment where I just was like, yeah, I'm never, I'm never going to quit. I'm never going to make it. Or sorry, I'm, they're never going to make me quit.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of the other things about the SEALs, which, you know, you can kind of visualize this idea of you're laying there in the water. It's cold, your back hurts, you're throwing up, and you've got all these kinds of problems. I forget if it was Sean Ryan or somebody had said to me at one point, you know, SEALs are unique in that they constantly fall back to the water. Almost every other military unit, every, you know, bad guy in the world, they don't want to go in the water. Right? They want to get the high ground. They want to go and get a fortified position and they want to hide in tunnels. Like, there's all these other things that they want to do. Going in the water is actually to them death because they're not skilled. They don't know how to operate there, etc. SEALs are unique

• 17:23Speaker 00

  in that they see what many people look at as risk or as kind of difficulty as safety to a degree. And obviously, the training is very involved in the water. SEALs are kind of tested quite often. But a lot of missions, a lot of kind of stories that people have told over the last 20 years in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, were raging on, they were going around the world and, you know, they were running to the beach, they were coming out of the water. They, it was just like constantly like safety is in the water. Did you get that sense in the training? Like, was it something where you started to realize like, hey, this thing that everyone else seems to be scared of, like, that's our home? Or is that something that maybe people tend to, in hindsight, you know, kind of talk about

• 18:07Speaker 00

  if maybe their personal experience in certain missions or whatever, kind of aligned with that?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I actually, again, this is a great question too. No one's ever asked me this. I viewed, I started to view the water, I guess, subconsciously as a tactical advantage. It was this environment that other people didn't take the time to learn how to, to learn how to operate in, didn't learn how to function in. And it was, that was the exact area that we were supposed to excel in and were tested in. And so what that did is it sort of, it opened up the entire, it opens up the entire globe. It opens up the entire world. It opens up everything. So on a tactical level, when other people, like you said, are running away from the river, we're thinking, oh, like, perfect, let's swim across this river and we can, you know, we can do this tactically or we can do that.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And it takes, it opens up the entire world. It's like, and then also, we also operate and are able to hit targets that are centered around the water. So docks, ships, ships out at sea, gas and oil platforms. And so there's all these other opportunities in life, or not in life, but in war, there's other targets that op, that open up because you are comfortable and able to operate in those environments. And I think there's a great lesson there in life. The more sort of tactical advantages you have, the more skill sets that you have. It opens up all these different opportunities. People are always looking for opportunity in life and they're looking for that element of, of luck, which as you say, is not real. But what is real is opportunity. And the more skills you have, the, the more sort of tactical advantages you have,

• 19:34Speaker 02

  the more complex and, the more complex things you can do and the more opportunities that come your way.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  It's, it's interesting how we're talking about this today. Last night I was at an event and I was talking to a guy who's very, very successful. Most people would know the companies that he owns. And I asked him, I said, you know, what, what has been one of the secrets or advantages to your success? Everyone knows about the wins, but you know, are there certain losses or skills or whatever? And he said to me, he goes, I know how to operate in environments that most people run away from.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's great. Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And I said to him, well, what does that mean? Right? It sounds awesome. You know, you're rich. Like, what does that mean? He said, the best investments I ever made is I bought things out of bankruptcy. And so his whole thing was this is some, this is somebody else's trash. This is the thing that isn't working. It's broken. It's, you know, it's losing money.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Oh, he was buying bankrupt companies.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  He's going in and he's buying the bankrupt companies. So his whole point was, you know, everyone else wants to buy the company that's working. Everyone else wants to, you know, operate the thing that is going well. He goes, I look for the things that are, you know, literally left to, to die. And I go there and that's my specialty is I go and I'm able to fix this thing. And so it's the equivalent of, hey, I don't want to go in the water. Right. But the SEAL says, no, that, that, that is the advantage. Right. Is I have a skill that nobody else has. Let me go and use it. Um, and so it's just interesting how that, you know, kind of framework applies across, uh, across life. Um, you, you're unique in that, uh, you deployed with the SEALs, um, you know, in these combat zones. Uh, and when you left, as we'll talk about, you go back into the combat zone as a civilian.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  So the SEAL teams, you know, with the uniform or without a uniform on, uh, you're not scared to go into the combat zone. Right. But talk about the difference of experience of like doing it as a SEAL versus some of the work that you do later, uh, on the humanitarian side, you're in the same locations, you know? Yeah, you don't have a flag on your shoulder, maybe, uh, you know, later with the humanitarian work. But are there major differences that people might not really understand of kind of what combat is, you know, as a SEAL versus, uh, some of the stuff that you're doing now?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so just quick context there. Yeah, I got out of the military 2017, bought a one-way ticket to Iraq. Uh, I thought I was just going to be doing humanitarian aid work.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Uh, let's repeat that for a second. So you're in the SEALs, you're deployed, you get out of the military and the first thing that you do is you buy a one-way ticket to Iraq, but you're now going as a civilian.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  To meet up with a group and act as a humanitarian in the heart of one of the worst areas of Iraq during the war.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, yeah, interesting life choices. Um, uh, talk about, yeah, high risk, high reward. But, um, yeah, my intention was to go do, you know, humanitarian aid work and whatnot. And so it was very different. So it was obviously it was extremely different and, and a huge culture shock, completely getting out of my comfort zone, which was the, which was the SEAL teams. And you have all the backup and support of the entire US military at the highest level and anything that you're doing. And so landing in Iraq as a civilian to just show up and help, you lose that entire protective cone of the government, of everything else. You don't have your team anymore. You don't have the air assets. They don't, you know, they're not there to protect

• 22:45Speaker 02

  you. So you don't have the weapons, the body armor, like literally everything. We don't have night vision anymore, right?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  When you fly in, you don't even have a gun with you at first, right? You're like meeting up and then getting the gun on the ground when you're there?

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I have nothing. So I literally just show up. I have a backpack with some camping supplies and that's it.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  And, you know, some of the details here probably will kind of help people understand just what the situation is. So when you're flying in to Iraq, you have no weapons, you have no body armor, any of that stuff. Who is driving you out to meet up with, you know, Dave Ubanks and kind of the Free Burma Rangers and all that? Like, are you just renting a car, right? Are you hitching a ride? Like, how are you getting out there? And obviously, that's a very dangerous part of being in these areas is when you're in a vehicle that is exposed, you know, without the might of the military behind you.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the way it worked was I landed in Erbil and at the time, the group I was meeting up with, FBR, they had basically had a safe house in Erbil, northern Iraq. So it's in Kurdish-controlled area. And yeah, so you literally just walked out of the airport. Someone was there to meet me. It's actually my buddy, my buddy, Sky Barkley. And then I was just driven to the safe house, which is just a normal, you know, kind of rented house. And then a few days later, we ended up getting in a convoy of vehicles and just driving outside of Kurdish-controlled territory, straight into literally no man's land. I mean, we're talking about driving through, we're driving through, you know, hostile Shabi checkpoints, which is an Iranian-backed militia group. And we're

• 24:15Speaker 02

  driving through their checkpoints and they hate us. They want to, you know, they'd happily kill us, but the Iranians haven't given them permission to do so. So, yeah, you're driving through the Iraqi countryside in a small convoy. And to be, to be clear, we're intentionally meeting up with an Iraqi army unit. We had interpreters with us. Everything was sort of, everything was pre-planned. The calls were made ahead of time. So if we got stuck at a checkpoint, which happened very often, you call the commander and local Iraqi army commander and he knows who we are and all that kind of stuff. So I'll be very clear. It's not guys just running around willy-nilly.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  You're there essentially as on the invitation of the Iraqi military. They're very happy that you guys are there.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because at the time, the Iraqi army, they didn't have medics and they also didn't have the humanitarian support needed when they would liberate a village, when they liberate a town. So people, thousands of people would break free from ISIS positions and the Iraqi army has no, has no food to give them. They don't have medics to treat the wounded. They don't, they have, they have nothing. And so we provided that for them. And that was, that was a great way to work in conjunction with them.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  So the safe house that you mentioned, people watch movies, they see the CIA safe house in the movie and it's got all kinds of, you know, biometric scanners to get in. It's got hidden doors. It's got weapons underneath, you know, the tabletop or whatever. That's not the safe house that you were in.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  No, no. It was a condo in a neighborhood with a bunch of trucks parked out front. Yeah, no, it's just a normal, just a normal condo kind of thing. It wasn't undercover. It wasn't anything secret. You know, all the neighbors knew exactly who we were. The Kurds obviously knew who we were. So yeah, it wasn't like that at all.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  And I think maybe for people to understand the humanitarian work that goes on in these war zones, the way that I think about it is there's really kind of three parties in a war zone. There are the two sides that are fighting and I'm going to make it simple and say there's two sides, Iraq specifically, but many other places. There's usually kind of a multiplayer, you know, battle going on and depending on the day or, or the season, who's on whose side. Sometimes it's a little confusing, but you basically have, you know, one side fighting another. But many people forget there's this third group of people, which is the locals. And sometimes the locals are on a side or not. But many locals, you know, I would say, well, what would you do if somebody invaded America? And the American military was fighting.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  There's some people who say, I pick up a gun and I'd go fight. There's a lot of people who say, well, I would have to live my life. I'd have to support my family. It'd have to, you know, get kind of live and try to survive. The humanitarian work is really focused on that third group, right? On the on the locals and providing support and supplies and medical aid, et cetera. When you think about like the day to day, obviously in the book, you talk about many days. But like, what is the average day from a humanitarian standpoint? What are you guys actually trying to accomplish there?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Every day is going to be very different. So basically, in a nutshell, in one sentence is you're looking for problems that you can solve. That's it. Sometimes it's a group of people just got freed from ISIS. And now they need food because they're going to be camped out in the middle of the desert for a week or so until the Iraqi army can kind of go through and do a security check on everybody. Or it might be somebody just broke free from ISIS and they've been shot. Or it could be, you know, you're working with the Iraqi army to, you know, do like a

• 27:44Speaker 02

  do like a medical clinic of people who are in the villages. Everything's fine. Their area has been secured, but you just kind of go and help and help the locals do a medical checkup or something like that. So each day is is going to be very different. But the overarching thing is you're looking for a problem and you're and you're solving it.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  If we bring it back kind of again to kind of business and finance, you know, one of the things that's interesting is that sounds a lot like a founder. It sounds a lot like an executive of like, hey, every day I just wake up and actually the things that are going well get none of my time. It's just like all the problems. And, you know, this is obviously very unique kind of problem set and dangerous area. But when you're trying to solve those problems, I think another component, you know, people understand that the military is dangerous, but the humanitarian work is probably just as dangerous, if maybe not even more, I would argue. Because you're trying to provide aid to the locals and many times that means that you are

• 28:41Speaker 00

  a threat to the other side that the military is fighting, right? They see it as, hey, you're here to provide aid. You're here to actually make these people's lives better. They don't want that, right? Whether it's ISIS or whoever, like they are ruling based on chaos and the threat of violence and kind of destruction is a very big part of their strategy. And so, you know, if we make this tangible for people, there's a famous video that, you know, when you and I first met, I told you, we were talking and somehow the video came up, I think somebody else who was at the table said, hey, you know, have you ever seen this video? And I told you that I'd seen this viral video, which I believe is yourself and two other guys. You all are in

• 29:26Speaker 00

  front of a tank and the tank is kind of moving down the street. And as that tank is moving, all of a sudden, I think it's you pop out from behind the tank, you start laying down cover fire, somebody runs away, it appears in the video at first, and they come back a couple seconds later and they have what appears to be kind of a young teenage girl or young girl. And in that video, you see the danger of humanitarian work, right? And what I didn't know is that at dinner, you then showed me another video from the same day, where as you guys continue progressing down the road and you're trying to pull these people, literally

• 30:08Speaker 00

  take civilians off of the battlefield who have been injured, I think even maybe one of them had lost some of their family members in this battle, you're then shot by ISIS. And so, talk about maybe like that situation as a way to exemplify for people that, you know, it sounds awesome to go and provide medical aid and food and kind of do this stuff. And frankly, it sounds kind of like a great charitable work.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  But you also have a gun in your hand, you're getting shot at, like this is super dangerous to be able to do this in a combat zone where people want to kill you.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so first I'll qualify the question and say a little more that the, so we were working as, working as humanitarians and then we ended up basically embedding with the Iraqi army as frontline combat medics because they didn't have medics. So they gave us weapons, the Iraqis allowed us to carry weapons and such. That is not traditional humanitarian aid work. Most humanitarian aid work, they're going to be as far away from the fighting as they need to be to keep it, keep their personnel safe. And then they'll have someone else sort of responsible for security. The, the work that we were doing in Iraq was sort of filling that gap between the frontline and sort of the traditional humanitarian groups. So it's a totally different animal. It's a 1% of 1% are actually going to carry weapons and do the kind of stuff that we were, that we were doing to, to do

• 31:24Speaker 02

  those life-saving operations and treat people on the front lines. But yeah, what happened that day was, again, we were embedded with the Iraqi army. We came across a huge, sorry, maybe a four or five lane highway where about 200 people had been killed in the street. And I remember when I first saw, we got up in the rubble buildings and we looked out over this, this road and we had to hide in the building because ISIS is right across this highway. I remember looking at it in my brain for like two or three seconds, couldn't understand why I was seeing the image in color. And I was like, why, my, my brain just couldn't comprehend what I was seeing in color. And then I realized the only time

• 32:07Speaker 02

  my brain had ever seen images of piles of slaughtered dead people in the street or in a mass grave was only black and white photos from the past. And so my first thought was, why is this not in black and white? And so I realized, of course, after two seconds, I'm like, oh, this, obviously this is real. Just a funny thing my brain did. But then in the piles of bodies that ISIS had massacred, so ISIS had killed 200 people who tried to leave ISIS-controlled territory. And they do that to force people to stay with them as human shields. And so in the piles of bodies, there was a little girl, she was actually about three years old, and a couple of men as well who were wounded and hiding in the piles of bodies. And so, yeah, with the, the story there was...

• 32:48Speaker 02

  We talked with the Iraqi army and basically we, the Iraqi army sent a tank straight down the road, right at ISIS headquarters, which is of course was in a hospital. And so we get, you know, 50 meters away from the hospital. And so that viral video, myself and Sky Barkley, we laid down covering fire. And then Dave Eubank, the guy who runs FBR, he ran out and grabbed a little girl and brought her back. And then we also grabbed two men and started to move back toward Iraqi army positions. And this entire time, the Iraq, excuse me, the ISIS, they're firing at us from two positions, high ground, four of us and on our flank. And they're also firing pre-sighted mortars, which are landing behind us and around us.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  And so as we move back, the tank is being manned by Iraqi army soldiers. They can't see us. We can't communicate with them. And so the tank is just backing up. It's gonna, it's just backing up slowly to get back to Iraqi army lines ISIS is firing. And as we moved back, we ended up losing one of the men who we were trying to rescue. He fell off a tabletop that we were dragging him on. I moved him out of the way of the tank and then the tank just kept moving. There was no way to get him. So then as we, as I stepped back behind the tank, sort of that cone of protection, another burst of machine gun fire came in and took my leg out from under me. It was a through and through shot through the calf. So it wasn't, it wasn't a major wound.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  But I fell down behind the tank. The tank almost ran me over, stood up.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  In the video, you get up very fast.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And the funny thing is I had no intention of getting up. I was like, well, I was like, I was sort of shocked. My, my brain was just thinking, okay, did my leg snap? It, I don't think, I don't know if I had the ability to put weight on my leg. I didn't know because that was bullets, when they come in, they make the snapping noise. And so this, you know, the snaps of machine gun fire had, you know, gone through our lines and hit me. And so I don't know at that point if my leg is snapped because it's just the same. I guess I imagine it's the same sound of a bone snapping. So, but the tank was going to run me over in about two and a half seconds. So had to get up and put weight on it. Luckily my leg held and, you know, we were able to, able to get out of there. We were, we were able to rescue one little girl and then, and a man as well.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  But yeah, that's not, that's not very typical. But you know, you want to talk about again, high risk, high reward. In that situation, the ROI, so the, the risk is you're going to die. Your risk is your life. But the reward is those other two people might live. And there's a 100% chance you're not going to get the reward. There's 100% chance that they are going to die within the next 24 hours. If you do not go out there and get them, in particular, the little girl who'd been out there for, I think at that point, like 36 hours or more, just baking in the heat. And so, yeah, you, you know, we felt it was our job to risk our lives to, to save those, to save those people. Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  You have a, a quote in the book. This comes from Hamadi Hasim, who's a sergeant major of the Iraqi army.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Hamadi Jessim.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Hamadi Jessim, which is, in combat, it's not about the number of lives you take. It's about the number of lives you save.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Which I think is very counterintuitive for many people. When they think about war, they think about kind of an offensive, hey, we're going to kill people. But this quote of in combat, it's not about the number of lives you take. It's about the number of lives you save, I think is, you know, pretty descriptive of the situation that you're describing here.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that actually just brings to mind a, if I can quote Saving Private Ryan. So there's a, there's a great movie, right? But remember Tom Hanks's character? He's sitting there and he's kind of contemplating, he's thinking about the number of men under his command who've, who've died. And he says, for each one of those guys, he's like, that means if I've lost 100 men, he's like, that means I've saved twice as many, maybe three times, who knows, 10 times many, right? So he's justifying the fact that all these men under his command have been killed. And he's trying to rationalize it with not, you know, how many, he's not talking about how many Germans he killed. He's sitting there thinking, well, okay, that means that we've probably saved 10 times that number of lives from death, but certainly from, you know, life strangulation under the, under the Nazi regime, right?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's, it's, that's the thing too. One of the, one of the things I always say about war is You know, people think that like there's that world peace is this thing that can is sort of attainable and it's going to happen and it's just the reality is like that's just not true. It's don't get me wrong. It's a great impulse to want to have world peace. I want world peace. As somebody who's fought in too many battles, I can tell you, I wish there was world peace because I'm sick of doing it. Right. And it's a horrible, it's a horrible thing. But what I always say is you don't go to war to end all war. You go to war to purchase a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time. And then unfortunately, you're going to have to do it again because wars aren't going to end. Bad guys are going to continue to come back.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  And so if you are not doing a war of conquest, you're not doing a war of greed, right? Because that's, that's the bad guy. If your job, if you are fighting to save and protect lives, then that, you know, that's a, that's a justified war, but that needs to be your, your mindset and your motivation to go out there.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  That war is the ability to purchase a, say it again.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  A limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time. And then you got to do it again.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's very true. And, you know, another quote that you have in the book is war is not an adventure, it is a disease, right? And this idea that like bad guys will keep coming back, right? If I walk down the street and I ask people, hey, who are the bad guys in name, a region around the world? I mean, you could even do Iraq. In 15 years, it went from Al Qaeda to ISIS, right? And there's probably a lot of overlap, right? Of, you know, who was in those organizations? Yeah. But there's a lot of differences too, right? And so you start to look at this and you say, okay, well, in the Middle East alone, right? If, again, you walk down the street and ask a random person, how many terrorist organizations or, you know, bad organizations can you name? My guess is that people probably

• 38:57Speaker 00

  couldn't think of them off the top of their head. But if you start rattling them off, they're like, yep, I heard of that one. I heard of that one. I heard of that one. And so that's one region of the world. Yeah. Right? And we're talking about 10, 15, 20 major organizations. We're not talking about, you know, local gangs, right?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  And so it, it is this kind of, you know, multi-headed snake that you cut one off and two more appear. And so what do you think is kind of the solution there, right? If you could philosophically think about the humanitarian who's willing to pick up a gun, protect people, save them. I think a lot of people get behind that and they say, you know what? That's like a, a very

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Big, important, you know, action that I can get behind.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  What is maybe the military, you know, solution to, to some of this?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  I guess I'll answer that in, in sort of two ways. So first and foremost, I'm very aware that the work that I do now as a humanitarian running stronghold and the work I've done in the past, a lot of that is sort of just throwing a tourniquet on a bleed. Right? You didn't stop the gunshot. You're just throwing a tourniquet and, and literally, but also figuratively as well. It's like you're just sort of managing an emergency situation.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  So the, the real solution to, to prevent, the, the real solution is prevention. How do you prevent the war from happening? How do you prevent people from joining these groups? And the answer that I've come up with in, unfortunately, having been in so many of these different situations, it all comes down to ideology. It all comes down to the ideas. Ideas have consequences. We have this perception, all humans do it. But we have this perception of the other. We look at, we look at ISIS and we go, they're a bunch of psychopaths. No, they're not. They're like, they're a bunch of crazy people. They're a bunch of like, no, they're not. They are normal human beings who believe that they are doing the right thing.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And they believe it so much so that they're willing to, I've seen them do it. Strap a bomb to themselves, walk out and blow themselves up. They truly believe that they are, that they are doing good things. These are not mentally impaired psychopaths. These are normal people who have been embedded with a virus of an ideology that manifests itself in these evil demonic ways. And they do these evil horrible things because of the ideas. So more important than.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Fighting and sort of trying to stop the bleed. It's well, why are people doing this stuff in the first place? So morality, ideology, philosophy, all of that, in my opinion, is astronomically more important than dealing with the sort of the symptom, right? As opposed to the the actual problem. So and then on the military side, on the military, on the military side, the the way of handling a lot of these problems is it's similar, in my opinion, it's similar to peace through strength. But I would say a little bit more nuanced, I would say stability through deterrence. And you're never gonna have peace, but you can't have stability. Things are gonna, things are gonna wobble, but you can bring it back, right? You're gonna have groups are gonna act up, but you smack it down immediately. And you do that through

• 42:13Speaker 02

  deterrence. You let them know whether it's whether it's through crime policy or foreign policy, you let people know you act out of line, you cross this line, here's what's gonna happen every single time, right? To use an example, if you look at the war on drugs, how effective is it for us to send out tons of troops or soldiers overseas, or police officers to go and raid drug houses and such? It's like, well, you're just dealing with the symptom. But if you change the policy, and let's say, anybody who deals drugs, death penalty, right? You have a reduction of the problem by 90, 95%, right? A lot of other countries have done this, and it works, right? So it's it's stability through deterrence. There's still gonna be people do, there's still going to be people doing drugs, there's

• 42:56Speaker 02

  still gonna be people dealing those drugs and infecting people. But you're gonna have a 90, 95% reduction because of deterrence, because guys are gonna go, you know what? I'm not gonna get into the drug business. Too much risk, not enough reward. You gotta pay me a lot of money, right? And so that, I think, is the is the way to stabilize the situation. But fundamentally, why, after you stabilize the situation, you have to expose people to good ideology, and good moral ideology, and they need to make the decision to accept it themselves. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, you know, the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. You get to choose, you get to choose which which side, which side you're gonna be on.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  What it makes me think about is in the technology world, there's so many people who will point and say, you know, Facebook or Telegram or Signal or Twitter, name your platform. It's being used by bad people to coordinate bad things. And objectively, that is true. But nobody ever talks about how impactful those platforms have been in getting what many would consider kind of Western ideals into some of these areas. Right? And so if, you know, if you're growing up in an ISIS controlled area where you're literally being brainwashed into believing X or Y thing, and then you get an internet connection, and all of a sudden you start to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think exactly

• 44:21Speaker 00

  what you think, how many people have been saved? Right? Through that internet connection? And it's an impossible number to get, right? You can't measure it. But we do know that, you know, in North Korea as an example, if people start to realize that there's another way of life, some people are like, well, maybe I want the other way of life. Right? Maybe I don't want this thing. Not everybody, right? One of the things that's really interesting is there's a lot of people who understand. I think there's certain religions where, you know, people are kind of indoctrinated in that religion. They then are allowed to leave for a year or two, but there's a very high rate of return. People say, hey, I went and I tried that other thing. It was fun, but this is, you know, how I grew up. This is what I actually want to live in. And so, you know, these are tools, right?

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Like, you know, going back to the ideology thing, if you have a platform, any ideology can spread. And so we focus always on the negative component of it, which again, we should address, but there is a positive side to it, where maybe actually our ideologies are able to penetrate into these areas via the internet where otherwise they just don't know, right? If you're a 15 year old boy who grows up in an ISIS controlled territory, everyone you know is in ISIS, and it's seen as the kind of heroic thing to do, well, what do you expect a 15 year old boy to do?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  He's just going to follow the cultural norms.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  It also reminds me of the saying, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Right?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Exposing people, if on the market of ideas, everyone is exposed to all the different ideas, right? Let's just take some extreme examples like, okay, you've got Nazism, you've got ISIS, you've got Communism, you've got Capitalism, you've got, you know, different religions, you've got all these different ideas, right? On the marketplace of ideas, when people are exposed to all the different ideas equally, let's say, or they're given the opportunity to sort of look at all of them, the ideologies that stand out as true, the ideologies that stand out as productive for humanity and for society as a whole, they stand out above everything else, right? So you can look at all the different market systems or whatever, capitalism, obviously, right? So if you've never even been exposed to the concept of

• 46:31Speaker 02

  capitalism, but then you are exposed to the idea of capitalism, you then suddenly realize, oh, wait, we don't have to do this silly, you know, whatever, socialistic system or whatever, whatever stuff it is, because the truth will make you free. And so this is also to going down another rabbit hole of just, you know, media censorship and things and things of that nature. That's why in authoritarian states and people who have authoritarian impulses, they silence the ideas of others because they know that their ideas can't stand against these other ideas which might be superior. And so, again, it's all about you shall know the truth, the truth will make you free.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  So you're sharing a lot of this from the perspective of you became a SEAL, you deployed to Afghanistan, you end up in Iraq as a humanitarian, a pretty insane story, just that, right? If you, after Iraq and kind of the Free Burma Rangers and that whole situation, you said to yourself, you know what, I did my job, I'm gonna go and be a mid-level corporate accountant, you know, and hang out in Iowa, no offense to Iowa. I think everyone would say, you know what, you did a fantastic job, you served our country, you saved a lot of lives, and you're a hero in many people's, you know, viewpoint.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  That's not in your DNA.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  You did the opposite. You're like, all right, let's ramp this shit up, right? And you basically were like, where else can I go? And so, um, talk a little bit about, uh, kind of the start of Stronghold Rescue, kind of, you know, the idea, what maybe your vision for doing this was, and then we can talk about some of the areas that you guys have gone into and what you guys are doing on the ground there.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Hmm. So, uh, you know, when I was, when I was in Afghanistan in 2014, I was in a situation, I almost had to shoot a couple of little girls who the Taliban had clearly sent at us. Luckily, I didn't have to, uh, take the shot, but that got me thinking about these civilians in conflict zones.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  In, in, starting to, but I think that that story in particular is really important to, uh, help people understand, um, they think sometimes that military members are just these like bloodthirsty, you know, warriors who see, shoot, kill, right? Is, is kind of the, um, the thought process. In this story, you basically know that you guys are in Taliban-controlled territory. There's an impending Taliban attack and, uh, two little girls with backpacks start running towards you guys. And, um, the way you tell the story in the book is you basically tell them, stop, don't come, they, they, you know, they're young little girls. They have no clue that they've

• 49:04Speaker 00

  got bombs strapped to them and, uh, they do turn around and you don't have to shoot them. But if you had, it would have been completely justified. Right? I mean, again, you have suicide bombers, although they are, you know, young little girls, you have suicide bombers running at you. And so that decisive couple of seconds had a huge impact on you.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a, it was a huge impact. So the, that, that particular moment, the, the, the final moments when those girls finally stopped and turned around.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  In the heartbeats before they stopped and turned around, I already made the decision I was going to shoot them. The decision had been made. I was putting pressure on the, on the trigger to take a shot, a headshot. It was, it was that close. It was down, it was down to literally heartbeats. And so I went through the mental process of making a decision, I'm going to do this. And then eventually the girl stopped and they turned around, which was great, obviously. But yeah, it would have been a, unfortunately, a justifiable shot at the time. And later I was sort of unofficially kind of reprimanded for not taking the shot. They're like, hey, we get it, but like next time.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And explain that, right? Cause that'll shock people as to why somebody would come to you and say, actually you should have shot.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, the reasoning behind that is because the, the way the battlefield was set up, I was kind of in a, in a lone position just because I, there was only, there was a spot for cover that was only big enough for one person. I was the youngest, newest guy. So you, that's your spot. You're sitting there with a machine gun. Good luck. Yeah, exactly. Good luck. We'll be over here. We can see you. Let us know if you need any help, right? So when that happened, when the girls got closer, they, they got close enough to where if they had detonated, they probably would have injured me, probably not killed me, but they, I would have been injured.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  And then

• 50:59Speaker 02

  the, the, the line, so the imaginary line in my head that I drew was if they get close enough to where they can hurt my team, that's when I'm taking the shot. But my job, if, if, if I get shot in that situation, or if I get wounded in that situation from the explosion, my team is now going to be put at huge risk trying to get me out of there. And if I'm incapacitated with the first bomb, maybe the second bomb gets through, Taliban are going to attack us potentially. They're everywhere at this point. So I put my team at risk by not taking the shot. Because at the time I was thinking, oh, I'm only putting myself at risk. But no, if you go down, we've got to get you out of here. And this is going to delay our, our medevac. This is going to delay everything.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  And much higher chance that we have to stay out here longer and more dudes are getting shot. Cause at the time we were actually medevac-ing an Afghan ally who was shot at the time. So, um, yeah, these are horrible. God awful decisions that you have to make and you're sitting there as a 22 year old kid. Just sitting there, you know, making this life or death decision of these children. And you're in a, you know, in a rough spot. So that was, you know, that was,

• 52:09Speaker 02

  you know, just a couple of months after my 22nd birthday.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  It's fascinating too, because I think back in such a watered down, non-serious way. There's this famous story of Stanley Druckenmiller, who's one of the best investors of all time. And he's probably mid to late twenties, I think. And he gets called into his boss's office, or I'm sorry, he's like boss's boss's office. And, um, you know, the head guy of the firm says to him, hey, Stanley, uh, moving forward, you're going to be in charge. And he's like, what do you mean? Like I'm the, I'm the young guy, right? Why am I in charge? And he goes, cause look out there, every single one of those guys, he's like, they went through the last big bear market. So they're all now gun shy.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  And what we're doing is we're heading into this bull market and we need somebody who they're just ready to go. Right? They just, they don't understand the complexity. They don't understand the danger. They don't understand that like, like, we need the right type of person in this thing. What's fascinating to me about these situations is again, it's finance. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Right? You're talking about a life or death situation is there's this balance between a Navy SEAL who has discretion. And who, uh, can clearly see, hey, these are children who, um, I don't want to just indiscriminately kill. But also can understand as you did, right? Hey, here's a line. Here's where, who could get hurt, right? Kind of all the complexities of it. And so these teams are fascinating because I think it would surprise people.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  The variety of people who make up a SEAL team, right? Everyone thinks it's like, you know, six, five, 230 pound, uh, just savage. It's like there, there's definitely some of those.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  There's definitely some of those. But there's also many other types of people and it is kind of the collection of these individuals who even you as a 22 year old who doesn't take the shot and you probably walk away and you're like, you know what, I feel good about not having killed these kids who ended up turning and moving. Somebody else shows up and says, hey, well, you know what? I've got 10 more years of experience. Did you think about, here's this super crazy edge case, you know, that the bomb explodes, Taliban have a complex attack set up, blah, blah, whatever. And you're probably like, you know what? No, but that's how you learn, right? And so it's kind of the, the matching of young people, experienced people, people who come from different backgrounds. Like, it is truly the creation of a team that is able to deal with what frankly is just

• 54:38Speaker 00

  completely unpredictable, complex situations and a decisiveness that's needed in a matter of seconds with super high gravity, you know, outcomes or, or kind of repercussions.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're, you're dealing with, like you said, life or death things, but you're also looking at, if you make the wrong, if you make the wrong call, you're looking at prison, you know?

• 54:59Speaker 02

  And yeah, it's, it is interesting because in the, in the teams, they are made up of so many different guys with different, different mindsets and whatnot. And like you said, the, the, the, those, those older guys with more experience, yeah, they're gonna, they're gonna talk to us younger guys and go, hey, man, you need to, you know, you need to think through, you need to think through this. But I was also very grateful too, to have that experience. That was my second mission ever. You know, I'd been, I'd only been in sort of a combat outpost for all of, I don't know, 72 hours at that point. That was my second mission. And so that was a huge wake up call for me to, to, to understand a little bit more of the, the realities of war. And I was grateful to sort of have that experience and luckily it ended well.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  But I know, I don't personally know, but I know there are other situations where guys have, you know, had to make it, had to make a difficult call and had to live with that, yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  When you set up Stronghold Rescue,

• 55:55Speaker 00

  to me, from the outside looking in, it seems like you took the SEAL Team experience and skills, the experience in Iraq from a humanitarian perspective. And you kind of broaden yourself and you said, hey, where else do people need help?

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Why did you set it up in the way that you did? And why did you pick some of the areas that you guys operate in?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, so I set up Stronghold in, in 2018 is when I technically filed the paperwork and such. My, my concept was, um, originally I didn't, I didn't know the difference between a for-profit or a non-profit in any kind of real sense. I didn't know what that meant, you know, kind of, uh, you know, uh, dipping my toe into the world of business and entrepreneurial stuff. But, um,

• 56:36Speaker 00

  They don't have LLCs on the battlefield?

• 56:38Speaker 02

  No, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, no LLCs. But, um, but yeah, I, I wanted to create an organization of some kind where I could hire guys with my background to go and help people in whatever conflict is going on, um, in sort of places of our choosing, places where we can see that there's a need and being able to be flexible and kind of make that, make that decision. The sort of the mental turning point for me was I was, uh, I was on a deployment in Southeast Asia. And we were, uh, working for like six weeks with the Thai SEALs in Thailand. And it was, you know, it was great working with those guys and it was good, important work. But I remember just being frustrated. You have a full platoon of SEALs right here with all of our weapons and ammo.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  And we've just completed a, an 18 month workup in preparation to deploy overseas. And now we're sitting here with everything and we're a few hours helicopter ride away from villages where people being raped and murdered and massacres are happening and there's genocide. And I just remember being frustrated and thinking I, I, I signed up to be on that side of the border. I, I signed up to be over there helping those people. And I understand obviously the US government can't just send us in there. But I thought, well, if I could go in as an individual, if, if you could send three or four of us in there, um, and we can work with them and help them. Uh, I don't know what that looks like, but, um, that was sort of my heart. And then I ended up going to Iraq and kind of seeing what that could look like.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Um, and then I took the experiences from Iraq and my experiences, um, from the world of special operations and, uh, was able to set up Stronghold. And basically the, the way that we select places where we, where we work is we kind of look for situations that are very much. Clear cut, good versus evil. That's my first criteria. I don't want to get involved. And you know, it's like if you have two bad groups that are fighting each other or two good groups who maybe have a border dispute or something, it's like, I'm just, I'm like, I'm not going to operate in that area. I want to work in areas where it's very clear. Okay, ISIS is killing civilians in Iraq. You know, gangs are trying to take over Haiti.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  You know, the Burma Army is trying to commit genocide in Burma. So those are the kinds of places that we that we choose to to work in. And the way that I set it up is I operate our humanitarian missions based on a couple of a couple of simple rules. So the first and foremost, our mission set is two things. It's one, it's frontline mentorship for groups that are, you know, trying to protect and care for their own populations, right? So it's like working directly with police and government and law enforcement and such in places where there is active fighting and active genocide because these guys, they don't know what to do. Often they're up against and super bowl odds. So we help them in whatever

• 59:22Speaker 02

  ways we can. Sometimes that's training. Sometimes that's just basic supplies and things like that, communications, radios, all civilian grade stuff, to be clear. Just helping them use what they already have, fill in some of those gaps. And then the other is frontline medical evacuation and and medical training. So that's the majority of what we do is the is the medical side of things. Working in these active in these active war zones and working directly with frontline police and soldiers and such, teaching them how to do it. And then also treating the wounded as well during the active fighting. So the guys, myself and the guys on the team, I've an incredible team of guys, incredibly courageous, incredibly selfless, and they'll go out and will be on the frontline. Whether it's, you

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  know, the trenches in Burma, or whether it's patrol with, you know, Haitian police, or whether it's working with anti-poaching park rangers out in the middle of middle of nowhere Africa where poachers are running around. Who and again, with the poaching situation, it's poachers are typically also selling drugs and weapons and stuff. It's not just the poaching and they're backed up by these huge crime syndicates. So and our mission is to Effect the best possible change and most sustainable, scalable help that we can give to the civilians who are kind of caught in the middle of these crossfires. Our primary mission right now is in Burma, that's where most of our resources are going. And the other reason why I choose the places that I choose is I choose places where most

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  people and most organizations are not able to operate effectively or not operate at all. And so we're just basically trying to fill the gap because you'll have large organizations will go into places like, let's say like Ukraine, right? There's just probably billions of dollars worth of just humanitarian nonprofit aid going into helping Ukraine, which we were in Ukraine at the beginning. But once all the big organizations showed up, we're like, cool, our job is done, you know, sort of filling that gap as much as possible. And then we go to places where the other organizations just aren't going to go.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Let's talk about Burma, maybe and kind of what's going on there. And for those that come more from kind of the business or investing world, one of the ways I think about what you've done is the SEALs were kind of your college. And then your work in Iraq with the Free Burma Rangers was kind of, you went to work at a startup.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  As an intern, yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  And then, and then you started your own startup.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  And so like, you know, that's a very classic, I think, trajectory for people in the business world is kind of like, hey, you get some like formal, you know, education training. Some people would argue maybe you need to unlearn all of that, but, but you know, you get some training, then you kind of like, got to go try it, but usually it's better to kind of try it out under somebody else's risk, right? Like somebody else set up the organization, somebody else has already kind of got a lot of infrastructure in place, whatever. So you go and you kind of learn like, this is what operating in a startup is like. And then you're sitting around one day, you're like, I got an idea, right? And you leave the company and you go and you start your own. And it feels like kind of in you doing that, you were able to take, you know, the best lessons from a bunch of these different experiences and go do it. But going into Burma, there's not a lot of other organizations there, right?

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  And so again, kind of this idea of like running towards risk, running towards the volatility, but like why that area and like, what is actually happening on the ground that is so clear cut in terms of good versus evil?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I'll go a little bit on the. Two minutes on sort of the the history of what's going on there. So World War II ends, the British leave Burma and the basically the the ethnic Burmese in the middle of the country were sort of left with all the weapons and such from the British leaving. The problem with that was the Burmese had actually fought alongside the Japanese during the war and then the Burmese, the Burma Army switched sides once they realized the Japanese were leaving. And so then they made peace with the British and fought the Japanese. And then basically, they never disarmed after the war. And so what ended up happening is for this is gross oversimplification, but basically, they had all the weapons, they had all the experience. And so what they then

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  started to do was build up their army and they started to oppress and subjugate the ethnic minority groups in the country. And so there's a lot of different ethnic minority minority groups that, you know, have historic lands from thousands of years ago, but they're, you know, very rich in timber, hydroelectric, hydroelectric power because of all the rivers, lots of other rare earth minerals, gold, emeralds, all kinds of stuff. So and then not to mention drugs. So the Burma Army started. So basically, what happens, the Burma Army took over the country. So the central government of Burma is what's called a military junta. It's a it's the government is the military. And they started setting up their own, they started, they started making their

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  own weapons. They started doing their own mining. So their entire culture, the Burma Army, their entire country is based on this idea of of sort of martial prowess of building, building their own weapons and subjugating everyone else in the country. Again, gross oversimplification. But so what they do is they then go into ethnic minority groups territory and they try to either subjugate them, genocide them, commit genocide, or they'll also do what's called Burmanization. So they'll go in, kick a bunch of people out of the villages that are ethnic minorities, and then they'll bring in people from the ethnic group that they like, right? And so it's sort of this expansionist, they're trying to colonize the whole territory, but. That's and then also they're involved in illicit drugs and weapons and stuff.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  Um, and so that's why the situation there is so clear cut now, to be clear, there are a lot of different ethnic minority groups and some of the ethnic minority groups are also involved in drugs and all these different things. So we don't have anything to do with any of those groups. The tribe that we work with is the Koren tribe and they are, they're, they're a fantastic group of people. Um, they're I think, I think they're like 60 or 70% Christian and then the rest are Buddhist and animist, like a very peaceful, kind, uh, really good, really good group of people. They fought shoulder to shoulder with the British, um, all during World War II, some of the same valleys and roads and villages that I walked through. Um, it's the same trails and the same,

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  same rivers and the same villages where, uh, British commandos, um, fought Japanese during the Japanese, uh, occupation of Burma during World War II. So, um, very pro-Western, very pro, uh, you know, democracy, really, really good group of people, not perfect, of course, like any group, but, um, so that's how we're able to sort of do black.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Just so people understand, um, the Burmese military, who is kind of on, let's just call it a conquering of this region.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Obviously, kind of going back to this idea of, you know, there's an ideology, there's humans on the ground. If you're not part of that group, you kind of have a mentality of like, leave me alone. And you could tell someone, leave me alone, but if they're being the bully, at some point, you gotta fight back. And that's really, that's really where you start to get the conflict is, um, there would be no conflict if people just laid, you know, laid down and just said, hey, we do whatever you want. And, you know, you want to kick me out of my village or whatever, but really, I think, um, again, it goes back to like, imagine if, you know, somebody came to your house and said, get out. By the way, in the United States, a lot of people would just say, okay.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  But there is a group, there is a certain percentage of the population who say, no, I'm not leaving. And so that's essentially, you know, again, as you said, a simplification, but like that is how these conflicts occur is there's one group that is very offensive and advancing, et cetera. And then there's another group that says, hey, we don't want to be messed with. And so we're going to stand our ground. And obviously those two things don't, you know, kind of work together and you get conflict.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the, and one of the analogies that the tribal leaders use is they call it, you know, Pax Romana. Roman peace, right? Like it's peaceful and it's stable because the Romans have come in through and then killed all the, killed all the men and all of your fighting men. So yeah, now there's peace because there's no one left to fight them. Right? And that's sort of what the, they call it the, the Berman mentality of sort of ethnic superiority. They believe that they should control all the land and it's, it's, uh, so the other thing too is the Burma Army, when they do go into a place, they will, they're not necessarily going to kill everybody if you just sort of bow the knee in a way and you're sort of live peacefully under them. Like, yep, Pax Romana, you have Roman peace.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  But of course people are not okay with that because then that leads to abuse. There's, you know, um, stories I shouldn't, you know, talk about publicly, but like, you know, just rapings and murderings and things like that, that they, that the, uh, that the groups will do or that the Burma Army will do. So, and I, and stuff that I've, I've seen, um, I've been very close to this stuff. I've been very, uh, you know, on, on the scene after it happened. Um, and it's the, yeah, it's, it's awful what these guys do.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  It's evil. I mean, that's ultimately what it is.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  It's objectively, it's just objectively evil. Yeah. And so our job in Burma, we do a couple of things. We help, uh, the local, uh, you know, the local pro-democracy groups. Like we're like, hey, here's, here's how you can best protect your people using what you already have. And here's some radios and, you know, civilian grade stuff to, to help you out with, um, you know, helping your people. And we're really trying to, we really try to help them communicate and avoid these incursions. The war in Burma has really shifted now. Now the Burma Army is kind of on the back foot because, um, the ethnic minority groups are all fighting at the same time to basically get rid of the, get rid of the Burma Army. And then people who used to support the Burma Army actually turned against them recently.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  This is, it's so funny, right? Every single person that I ever talked to, I say, um, Regional conflicts only know one path and that path is the same path of history. And so if you look at Afghanistan, right? How many different regional groups or tribes or, you know, uh, kind of different alliances get formed? If you look in Iraq, how many different groups come together and they kind of all pick and say, hey, you know, the bully in the room and uh, that doesn't mean that they're going to be successful. But uh, there is something about these conflicts that follow a very similar trajectory and a very similar path. And um, through collaboration of the smaller groups, that is how they gain strength. And so if you really think about stronghold to a degree, you know, you guys are kind of like another tribe showing up. Right?

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  And you're saying, hey, we're going to support a specific view of the world. We're going to be here to train, et cetera. You guys may not be ethnic, you know, kind of native to the region. But yeah, if you want to, you know, kind of band together with a couple of other tribes, stronghold's a pretty good one to have on your side, right?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we, and I really pull on the, the, and draw on the um, the special operations experience of, you know, sort of like Green Beret mentality, right? You go in, you train the locals to do things. And so that's actually ironically, so again, kind of going to the, the medical side of what we do. Again, that's majority of what we do in Burma. We run uh, the only ambulances in a certain part of, of East Burma where they've never had ambulances before. And so we build the, we build the roads um, with, with backhoes. We build bridges. We uh, you know, do all these different things to, to make sure that people have access to emergency medical care because, and we're going pretty deep into the country uh, in very, very rough terrain.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  And so our, our ambulance crews, uh, so the ambulances are built on Hiluxes. So that we've got, you know, we've got the entire underbody redone so they can handle uh, you know, rough roads and carry patients, um, you know, bumpers, winches, snorkels, the whole nine yards to, so they can cross these rivers. And uh, we put patients in them to uh, to, to evacuate. But the, the crews are run entirely by local refugees. It's all people who are affected by the fighting. It's all people from the hills. It's all people who are from. That territory because one of the policies that I run stronghold under is this concept of charity with dignity. And instead of just coming and giving you a handout, we're going to give you a hand up and we're going to stick with you.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  To make sure that you have this capability.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  What's an example of of how you can give a hand up rather than handout?

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Okay, so several ways. One is. Let's just say, let's just say you're a villager. You just had the worst day of your life. You just watched your wife get get killed. You don't know where your kids are. Your village is burned. You just ran all night through the jungle to get to safety. You just this horrible experience. You get to safety. And you are you're starving, you're hungry, and then all of a sudden. Me, I walk up to you with a with a with a phone and then taking a selfie with you and I give you a bowl of rice and I give you some food and I'm like, hey, spot for the camera here. Here I am in Burma helping, right?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  You you would be grateful for the food. You'd be you'd be happy to be safe, but. There's a there's a lot. There's an entire lack of, I guess, dignity with that. So what we do is. All of our relief efforts, all of our ambulances, all of the stuff that we do, we train the locals to do it. And so you just had that worst day of your life and you show up and the person who's helping you, the person who's giving you the rice, that stronghold bought that we organize, we taught. The locals how to organize it. And a lot of times they're organized themselves just fine, like they just need support. And so now it's somebody from your tribe who speaks your language, who's been through the same thing as you. And they're the one who's giving you the food and the rice. And so now it becomes this community building.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Experience as opposed to just outsiders coming in and just doing a handout, right? So that's a hand up. Because now. Now, if you're one of those relief workers, instead of instead of spending excessive amounts of money to send. American volunteers over there who need an interpreter, don't have a clue what they're doing and just want to take pictures for, you know, take selfies for Instagram in the middle of the jungle because it's cool. Now, you can hire the locals to do it. And so now you're giving you're providing. And they're doing something that's meaningful to them. The same thing with our ambulance crews especially. So we have all the time, and I can show you off air too, all the time, every week, multiple,

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  you know, reports we get of video and photo reports of people stepping on landmines, people getting shot, pregnant women having pregnancy complications needing to get evacuated. And our ambulances are moving these people constantly.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Let's start with the ambulances because I have more information than maybe the audiences right now, which is, these are remote areas. You know, it's nice to live in the United States and if, you get the flu, you can call, you know, you can call an ambulance, right? They'll show up for anything if you call them.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Not only are you in a remote rural area in many of these villages, but no one's coming to save you, right? Like there is no ambulance to come. And so part of the effort that you guys have done is when we're talking about ambulances, these are ambulances that you guys got onto the ground so that then people can get, you know, evacuated, can get the care that they need. So just like talk through like when you say an ambulance, like is it the same one that I see going into, you know, the local hospital here in New York City? Or is it, you know, some other version? Like what does that really entail?

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Picture a, picture a souped up Toyota Tacoma, but overseas are called Hiluxes. Picture a souped up Toyota Tacoma with a, with a cage on the back. And we have oxygen tanks in there, medical supplies, full time medic, radios and everything they need and a bed back there, basically. That's, that's what it looks like. And so these, these, you're, you're, you're doing, our drivers are going through extreme roads, up and down mountains, they're crossing rivers. The driving is intense, very difficult, very highly, highly technical driving that you have to do. So the, you cannot use regular vehicles in these, in these, in these situations.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  You have to use, you know, off-road, you know, four-wheel trucks and things like that. So that's what these ambulances are. They're these souped up off-road trucks. And then, yeah, we get them, we get them deep into the jungle and we set them up with crews of locals. Make sure that crews are trained, they've got the radios they need, uniforms, medical training, all the supplies that they need, oxygen tanks in the back. I mean, the fact that we're driving around in the middle of these places. With oxygen tanks in the back to keep patients alive is like unheard of. It's not, it's not a thing. It doesn't exist.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  Well, also you need gas, right? Like, yeah, there's no gas stations. No, you start thinking about the operational complexities, the pre-planning that needs to go into some of this stuff. You know, oxygen is the last thing frankly, that people are worried about if they're just trying to figure out, how do we get from point A to point B with a vehicle? Uh, there's a lot of other planning that goes into it. And so the fact that you have oxygen is like, you know, icing on the cake. Compared to just the fact that you figured out how to get there.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And so, so that is, that is where we really come in, right? So that's where we are really able to enable the locals. So they don't have the ability financially, or they, and they just don't have the background of organizing ambulances and vehicles and that kind of stuff. It's just, it's just sort of, it's, it's, it's in an, it's in, it's in an entirely different realm of thought. Like, how would you organize this stuff? And how do you get parts for the vehicles when they break down? And how do you get fuel? And how do you have it pre-staged? And how do you pre-plan it? And all of that stuff. And then how do you fix the vehicles on the side of the road when you're 20 miles out in the middle of some mountain, jungle valley in the, in the middle of the night, the vehicle breaks down, there's no cell phone towers, there's radios, you can maybe do a radio relay, maybe, right?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  So how do you organize all that? And so that's, those are the problems that we go in and we solve. And so it's all ex, uh, all ex-military guys, and we go in and we do this kind of problem solving. And then we teach the locals and, and we, and every single time there's a, there's a problem, we go, okay, how do we fix this? And then we talk with the locals, we talk with the leaders and we're like, all right, well, what, what do you know that we don't know? What do we know that you don't know? Let's put our heads together and then we provide the financial backing. And then not, not just that, it's not just the finances and sort of organization. It's, you know, the, the guys on the team, you gotta understand, like, and myself as well, but we're going into the jungle for months at a time.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Right? So this isn't a 10, 10-day mission trip. That's not what this is. Like this is, these are professional ex-soph guys who are gonna go embed for months and live in the jungle out of a backpack next to the side of the road, helping these ambulances move. When there's fighting, they're gonna move to where the fighting is and treat the wounded and evacuate them and work directly with the, the security forces that are, you know, protecting people. So our guys, they're, they're, they do really, really incredible work. Um, and there's a lot of different problems they have to solve.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  What is motivating the people on the team, right? It's obvious when you're there in the jungle and most people I know in the military, especially in the special operations community, if they hear gunfire, they run towards it. If they heard someone got shot, they will go and they'll treat them. But they're already on the ground, right there. They have the skills, the experience, hopefully the equipment, and they can do that. But they gotta make a decision to be in the jungle, right? They kind of like you're signing up for kind of being in the right position to then seize the opportunity. And so what is that motivator for many of the guys that work under Stronghold?

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  I can't speak for them in particular, but I can just tell you through observation. When I look at the guys on the team and I look at the people who stick around, there's only one motivator. And before I say what the motivator is, I'll kind of back up a little bit. The biggest way that the way that I am able to weed out people from coming to Stronghold, because so don't get me wrong, every week, every month, we get tons of emails. We want to join the team. I want to do this, I want to do that. I'm going to do what you guys do. The best way to weed people out is to say, okay, cool. The minimum, minimum amount of time you have to come out into the middle of the jungle for a month. We're not going to pay you.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  You have to pay your own way and you have to come out for a month. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty of people who kind of would kind of take that up, but we also have to vet you first. But the reality is most people are like, oh, oh, I can't, I've got work, I got this other stuff, I'd love to come help. The reality is most people want to show up for a two week trip, maximum, maybe three weeks, and they want to only go directly to where the action is. And they're doing it. And so when I see that, I know, I know exactly what motivates you. And you're not a bad person for this, but what motivates you is adventure, excitement, you want to be the hero, right? And there's again, I want to be a hero too. But That's not what we're looking for. The guy who's willing to go into the jungle, he's like, all right, cool. I'm going into the jungle for the next two months. I'm not going to come out of the jungle

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  for two months. And while I'm out there, I'm going to get bombed. I'm going to get shot at. I'm going to walk along trails, you know, that are recently de-mined. I'm going to treat the wounded. I'm going to stay with them when the bombs are falling, literally, and the mortars are dropping. And I'm gonna, so that that's air quotes, exciting stuff, but I'm also gonna sit for two weeks in a village and make sure that these guys know how to run this ambulance. And it's not exciting. And I'm not going to be the one treating the patients and doing the hands-on stuff. I'm going to be sitting there managing.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  Teaching them how to drive.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Teaching them how the oxygen tank works. Teaching them all this stuff. Exactly. And it's not fun. It's not exciting. It's not an adventure.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  The reason those guys on the team that stick around long-term and are willing to do this work, the only, the only way that I can describe it, the only, the only thing that makes sense why you would do this, because it, the adventure, the adventure wears off pretty quick. The only thing is, and it's gonna sound super corny, but it's true, love. They do it because they love the people. You can see the people who, you can, I can very quickly tell who shows up because they want to have an adventure, the love of themselves. And again, that's not always evil. I'm not saying it's evil, like, they want to help, they want to have purpose, but most people show up because they want to feel good about themselves. They want to be the hero. They want to go back and tell this cool story. They, it's more of a selfish thing. It's like, oh, I want to hand out this stuff. Well, why? Why do you need to be the one to hand it out? Because it

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  makes you feel good. So what you're doing is actually a selfish act. You're not doing this out of service. So the guys who go sit in the jungle for months at a time, and they, and they, and the guys on the team, they know, and we've all, this, this past, this past season in Burma, every single guy on the team, a very small team, but all of us had to have, all of, all of our tents had to be replaced. Because every single guy, every single guy on our team, his tent, the place where he sleeps, his tent had shrapnel through it from explosions going off. Like, that's the level of commitment. Every single guy had to have his tent replaced because there's shrapnel flying through his tent. And you can't fake that. You can't, you can't be there for any motivation other than.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  I love these people and I love humanity as a whole. Maybe I don't know, but I'm going to, I'm willing to serve these guys. Kind of going back to the beginning of our conversation. We're looking for guys who want to be servants. We're looking for guys who want to serve the world. I talk about opportunity cost. These guys are incredibly elite. They could be doing a million other things. They could be getting much bigger, much, much bigger and better paychecks, doing something else, living a peaceful life, but they're not. They're out there in the jungle, doing this year in, year out and serving people. So the motivation for that has to be, has to be love. Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  One of the things that I'm most intrigued by with what you guys are doing at Stronghold, the work itself, I think, just kind of speaks for itself, right? So people see what you're doing. They're like, obviously this is good. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to go do this and have the dedication, the level of service that you guys do have. But in a weird way, you know, I think that it is commendable that you're like, hey, when we are giving out aid, it is the locals doing it. You know, there's a lot of organizations, I know people who run some of them, who they're giving out the aid, they are taking the selfie. They are doing it, right? And their argument would be, well, I need to market what we're doing because I need to fundraise. I need to hire. I need to do these things. And so, you know, one of the

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  things that maybe people get misconstrued about a nonprofit, it's a nonprofit, but still an organization where there's people, there's funding, there's, you know, kind of operation. There's all these things that go into it. You all have been somewhat pioneering in the way that people who are not going into the jungle can participate and kind of provide some of that service to these people kind of from afar. And so you've created this monthly subscription. Talk a little bit as to like, you know, I'll call it a business model, but really it's from a nonprofit angle. You gotta be able to fund this stuff, right? And so when you're sending guys into the jungle, when you're buying the ambulances, when you're doing the training, you're kind of providing all these supplies, the money comes from, actually not people usually in the jungle. It's everybody else who is saying, hey, look,

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  I can't invest my time, but I can invest my money, right? It's kind of, you know, I almost think of for these missions to be successful, we started out talking About everyone who comes on the show talks about investing their money and the ROI they drive. You're investing time and energy in a way that drives a very different ROI of saving lives. But you do need people to invest money, right? And so like, talk about maybe the monthly subscription model and kind of like how that has empowered you guys to do a lot of the work that you do.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So at Stronghold, we're a nonprofit organization. So now I know what that means. So that's good. I recently learned what that.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Progress.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  Progress. Good. All right. But so I guess I'll frame it sort of in the problem I was trying to solve. So we did develop a very, very unique model and I haven't seen anybody else do, do what we do. So because we're a nonprofit, all of the service and support that we give to people, we take nothing from them. They're, we don't accept anything from them. There's no, there's no payment. We only give, we never take.

• 1:25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, the people in Burma or anywhere else are not like stroking you a paycheck. Thank you so much for.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Water.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Right. And they would never be able to pay us. And even if they could pay us, we wouldn't accept it. Because we are there only to give and only to do knowledge transfer and organizational transfer. And again, charity with dignity. So obviously we have to raise funds and whatnot. And so we operate entirely off of the donations of people around the world. So when I first started Stronghold, I, I didn't, ironically, I had the, the benefit of not knowing the way you're supposed to do it.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  So I.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Sounds like a startup.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I was like, I broke all the rules because I was like, well, I, I see several different ways of doing this. And I love entrepreneurial things as well. So I would, I always thought I would start a business at some point. But I ended up starting a nonprofit. But so what I looked at was I decided, you know what? If my, my, my original thought was like, okay, if I can just get, you know, a thousand people to give 20 bucks a month, you know? Okay. So that's 240,000 a year. Like, that's amazing. Like, that's, that would just be, that would just be incredible. Um, and we'd be able to, you know, survive forever. Well, we've 10x that. And so we've completely flipped the fundraising model on its head.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  Ninety-nine percent, literally, above ninety-nine percent of our funding actually comes from thousands of people all over the, all over the country. And it's growing every day, which is amazing. Um, thousands of people who each pitch in a little bit every month, and the average is about twenty dollars a month. Um, so the way I look at it is, it's just another Netflix subscription. Um, and it's a way to give to charity in, in a way, and to, to help people in a way that it doesn't, it doesn't hurt that much, right? It's not, I'm not asking people to give thousands and thousands of dollars. It's like, why don't you just give twenty bucks a month? And I also say too, if, let's say you have, let's say you have the budget where you want to give, you know, a hundred bucks a month, or two hundred bucks a month, or something like that. I say, great, well, why don't you give

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  uh, twenty, thirty bucks a month to Stronghold? But then why don't you also go support other organizations as well? There's also this proverb, uh, where your treasure is, there where your heart be also. And so if you have multiple causes that you care about, uh, it could be relief for, you know, uh, you know, hurricanes or whatever here in the US. It could be education for kids in Africa. It could be supporting, uh, medical evacuations in, in, uh, in Ukraine. Whatever it is that you want to support, um, I encourage people to support all these different things. Um, so that does several things for us. The reason this model works for us is because it provides a lot of financial stability in the long term for us. So I know six months, eight months, nine months out, approximately what our funding is going to be like. And so, um, we're able to focus on the mission

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  as opposed to me constantly having to go and do huge fundraisers and, and, and whatnot. Um, now don't get me wrong, we hope to in the future be able to do those kinds of things as well. Um, but I really wanted to build a model where it was really a community-based approach. Everybody pitches in a little bit, and you can have this massive impact. And so now, you know, we're, we're able to now raise millions of dollars a year in support. And again, ninety-nine percent of it comes from, uh, just people just pitching in a little bit every month. And it's, um, definitely a unique model. Every time I talk with other people who run Nonprofits. They're like, what? Like, how's that? How's that a thing? And I'm like, well, hey, man, Netflix. Like, I just saw what Netflix did. And I was like, let's try that. And it and it and it worked out. It worked out really well.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  Now, there's a bunch of business people who are going to watch this. And like, the jokes in the business world right now is everything is becoming a subscription.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  But like, pretty good reason to have a subscription.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  It's a nonprofit cause.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you put your Netflix on. You put your Netflix on subscription or whatever every month or your Audible account or whatever, Amazon. And it's like, why not do the same thing with with charitable giving?

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  Now, when somebody gives, let's say, 20 bucks per month, they're able to write that off because it's a nonprofit.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the year, they get year end statement. Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Got it. My wife and I, we've given a donation.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Thank you for that, by the way. That's awesome.

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  I say that only because, and most people know, I almost never talk about anything that we do from a donation standpoint. I really believe in what you guys are doing, right? And I think that you have a very unique story. But probably more importantly is the work that you guys are doing. You said it earlier. It's like the 1% of the 1%. You need very unique people to have very unique skill set, to have a very unique view of the world, to go into very unique situations, and provide very unique kind of on the ground operations, right? And so when you add this up, I meet a lot of people. I know a lot of people doing great things around the world from a charitable cause standpoint, whatever. To me, this is, it's like an acute pain. There's a lot of charitable work that, in my opinion, is kind of vitamins.

• 1:30:14Speaker 00

  Feels good, right? It makes you feel good to participate, etc. But it's a painkiller.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Speaker 00

  Right? This is, there is somebody in Burma who just got shot, who literally is going to die unless an ambulance shows up and saves their life. It is, you know, somebody who, when a mortar hits, and that shrapnel not only tears through your guys' tents, it also tears through the local population. There's a lot of people who are hurt. And the Burmese citizens obviously provide aid. But having you guys there is really helpful, right? And providing that aid. But it's not just in Burma, right? And one of the things that I think is unique about you all is, there's many charities who say, I really care about this one cause. And obviously, you guys really care about the Burmese cause. But you also go elsewhere, right? And

• 1:31:03Speaker 00

  To me, Stronghold, it's like where people need help. And to your point about there's like a clear good and evil, you guys go, but you're a force multiplier, which is kind of a very military way of thinking about it, saying, look, yeah, we could send one person, but what if that one person could turn 500 people into effective operators on the ground? And it's, you know, a very unique model, not only obviously through a subscription where, you know, directly to the audience, if you can afford 20 bucks a month that you're going to write off at the end of the year, you know, that's not that much money, one, but two is it's going to a good cause. You get a tax break. So, you know, everyone on here loves tax breaks.

• 1:31:45Speaker 00

  But, but also, what you're really doing is you're being a force multiplier as well, right? Because your $20 a month, that can't hire one person, that can barely buy, you know, any amount of material goods. But what it does do is your 20 bucks plus everyone else's $20, multiplies into a team that's now on the ground, who then multiplies into the individuals that are the locals who then get trained, who get the supplies, who get the ambulances, etc. And it's this like, very crazy, you know, kind of connected series of events where one person's individual decision to put $20 into a charity can lead to hundreds of people on the ground having their lives saved, right?

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  You could also look at it as a, it's an exponential return on your investment. Because, again, one of my favorite moments, actually, so I'll tell a quick story. This is not my favorite moment, but it leads to one of my favorite moments. So my best friend in the world at the time was actually a guy from Burma, a guy from the Karren tribe named Babo. And he was my interpreter, and he and I had worked together for years before Stronghold ever had any real funding to start the organization. I sold my home, and I donated this, the proceeds from my home sale to be the sort of the seed money to get this nonprofit started. Again, not the best, not the best business advice in the world, but it, you know, obviously, I'm grateful I did it. But anyway, so I'd spent years working with this guy in the field.

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  And we were dealing with a particularly dangerous situation. The Burma Army was attacking a certain area. And hopefully in a few years, I can tell the story in more, in more detail, but in all the, in all the events around it. But, long story short, he was, he was hit in the head by, by shrapnel.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  And at the time, another soldier had just been shot about a couple of hours prior to that through the leg. And so the medics, the local, local Defense Force medics, they had taken this, this patient away. And so that, that patient, so actually, so he got shot that morning. They brought him to me. The medics brought him to me. I'm not a medic, but I double checked what they were doing. And I could see that actually the, the tourniquets weren't tight enough. And so I exposed the wound, look at the wound, and I could see that this guy's leg was still bleeding. I was like, this guy's gonna die in a couple of hours or he's, you know, because I just know the medical situation. There's no evac for him. At this point, we don't have ambulances either. We had just decided to set up ambulances a couple of weeks prior, and that process was starting. And so anyway, Babo, a couple

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  hours later, Babo's hit in the head, and there's no medics. So I have to be the medic. And so I get to him, and part of his head is blown off. Part of his brain matter is hanging out, but he's still, he's still alive. He's unconscious, but he's alive, and he's still moving. He's got some, obviously, some pretty serious cerebral and damage and whatnot. And we then proceeded to evacuate him on the ground. And again, there's no ambulances. There's no way to do this quickly. And so we had to carry him for six, eight, nine hours. I don't even remember how long it was. It was a long time. And we had village, local villagers came out to help us carry. And actually, they were, the villagers refused to let me help carry as we were moving him. They were feeling like, no. So I'm operating

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  completely alone behind enemy lines, literally, at this point. So we, we carry him six, eight, nine hours to get him to the edge of the jungle where we're able to, he's able to see an actual medic. And the medic lets me know, basically, I talked to, talked to the medic, and I'm like, hey, what's the chances he survives? And he's like, he, he said, I think he said he has a, a 20% chance to survive the night, let alone survive. He's like, he's not gonna make it. So there, in the middle of the jungle, as the sun's going down, I have to say goodbye to my best friend. Luckily, I had a second interpreter with me, and so we had to turn around and go right back to the frontline. And we get back to the frontline.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  The area that we were in, we ended up getting attacked by the Burma Army. Our position got overrun. Another soldier was killed. He was hit in the head. He had been in my unit the day prior. Another soldier was shot in the arm, was evacuated. I wasn't involved in that evacuation. But so that experience of having to drag my friend and watch him slowly die.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  And he would occasionally vomit up. He would occasionally vomit. And we had to roll him on his side and clear his airway, watching him slowly die. It gave me a lot of understanding of what it's like for the locals. Because these are parents watching their kids step on a landmine that the Burma Army left behind in their village. It's sons watching, taking their mother who stepped on a landmine. Or I have tons of photos I'll show you when we get off, just from this week of people being shot. Women getting hit in the face with shrapnel from the Burma Army, just dumping mortars into their village for no reason. And so I got to experience what it was like, that hopelessness of

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  of needing help, but there's no help there for my best friend in the world. Ultimately, Babo died the next morning.

• 1:36:58Speaker 02

  So then about two and a half weeks later, our first ambulance was put into commission. The guys on the team, they did an incredible job of getting it out there, getting it set up. Again, it's like the souped up, just off-road truck. And we get there. So we, the guys tell me, hey, we're good to go. We're going to launch this ambulance tomorrow is going to be the first time that we're going to use the ambulance. And so there was, there were several patients who needed to get evacuated to another area of the country, to the border. And the ambulance was the way we were going to do his first test run, you know, sort of a nice situation, like it may be a five hour drive to the jungle.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  And so then I go to see who the first patient is, and I get down there. And it's the same soldier from three weeks earlier, who I'd put a tourniquet on. The day that Babo was killed is the same soldier for three weeks. That soldier, three weeks. That soldier had been carried, hand carried through the jungle. To get to this clinic, once he was at the clinic, he only spent one night there and immediately our ambulance was taking him out. Three weeks. Now, in that same place where that soldier was shot, we can have people to a clinic in 12 hours. That's still a long, long time, but we have a relay. It's better than three weeks and we have, we have ambulances set up to relay all the way through the jungle.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  We have an ambulance boat that we take people across this large manmade lake. And so that all leads up to one of my favorite stories. So one of my favorite stories, I was, uh, it was right after all this stuff had happened. And I was, I was going to Nashville, Tennessee to talk at a, at a high school. And right before I got to the high school, a day or so prior, I got this photo and it was of our, it was of our ambulance crew transporting a soldier, a wounded soldier, loading, loading this soldier into the back of this ambulance. And I looked at the photo and I saw that, I saw what the injury was and it was a fairly similar injury to that soldier had been shot in the knee, but this guy had been hit in the knee with mortar shrapnel and his knee had been blown out.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  And he had been wounded, you know, maybe only six or eight hours earlier and he was very, very close to being able to actually get, you know, the care that he needed. So there's two parts to this story. That soldier, I found out later, he made it to the clinic and the doctor, an American doctor there, um, told me, he said, if this soldier showed up 30 minutes later, he would have died, he would have died. So that soldier lived, but my favorite part of that story, and so I actually told this story onstage to these high schoolers and I said, my favorite part of this story is I said, I showed the photo and I said, not a single member of Stronghold's foreign staff, us, like us, we are the foreigners, not a single member of Stronghold's foreign staff

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  is in Burma right now. This is run entirely by the locals. That's a Korean crew, Korean medics, Korean communications, these guys are the ones doing it. It's not us doing it, it's them doing it because our teams were on the ground for months earlier, getting this set up, getting it all set up.

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  What you guys are doing is incredible. I think that story perfectly encapsulates the power of selfless service and also the power of understanding how to be

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  that force multiplier that really kind of empowers the locals to take care of it. If anyone watching this wants to learn more about Stronghold or potentially donate, where should they go?

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can check out StrongholdRescue.org or they can check us out on social media at Stronghold Rescue.

• 1:40:43Speaker 00

  StrongholdRescue.org. If any of you guys believe in the work that they're doing, go check that out and we'll see you guys in the next episode.