Kelsi Sheren: War, Artillery, PTSD, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #230
the following is a conversation with kelsey sharon canadian forces veteran artillery gunner who served in afghanistan at 18 years old and came home with severe ptsd she went on to found brass in unity which creates unique jewelry large part of the proceeds from which go to help rehabilitate the lives limbs and mental health of veterans and first responders she has a big personality big heart and an intense passion for life so when our paths happened across i knew we needed to talk this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with kelsey sharon you mentioned that studying history had a big impact on you and that your grandfather was a world war ii vet so people that have gone through world war ii in my family too they don't seem to talk about it much like the worse the tragedy the less they talk about it i mean it's understandable i can respect that but i don't think people fully understood the value in human stories over over time and sharing that that certain civilizations don't have written language the value in that being passed down is is extraordinary but we didn't really have that with the world war ii vets it seems like well they kind of want to protect you from the pain like my grandfather my grandmother went through holler more which is the ukrainian starvation of millions of people and then obviously uh went through world war ii with the nazi occupation and uh same on the grandfather's side who uh on my dad's side grandfather fought in world war ii and they seem to not want to talk about those experiences to protect you from the suffering to protect you from the evil that they've experienced which is uh sad because the lessons from that history are not then propagated through you and also there's something about the strength you carry with you knowing that that's in your blood those great heroes are in your blood and that suffering overcoming that suffering is in your blood i would argue that's exactly correct if you if you have someone you know that comes from your lineage that has done something super gnarly that's just been a badass and in so many different ways you want to know about that person you have that person's blood in you that's important to acknowledge and when that isn't shared i feel like it's just a detriment to that individual what do you make of world war ii in terms of history do you think about uh those kinds of wars where uh two times more civilians died than the number of uh military personnel so most of the wars basically just the death of civilians and the invasion of homes the burning of homes the bombing of homes all of that world war ii for me i find that was the first experience where i became just obsessed with history world war ii really did it for me um i'm not sure if it's because of the dramatization of film and tv and the way that our generation has looked at it but for me it was more than that i felt a deep connection to it and i still can't figure out why like a pull almost uh people joke around about those past lives and those things or those connections and there's something deeper within me that feels a pull towards that and i'm not quite sure if um it's because i had family that you know escaped hungary once the soviets came in so thanks for that um or if it was because my grandfather served in it or for whatever reason i just i have this pull to it and so when you think about the mass casualty of the civilian population that's very difficult for me to wrap my brain around after being in a war and seeing when you have a small subset of civilians die how much of an impact that has on that community right there and just in just a tiny area so to try to wrap my brain around what happened in europe and all across and and all that i really struggle with that because i don't know that i can comprehend what that would truly mean to somebody if i if i didn't experience it or or see it for what it is does that make sense yeah but uh so first of all you're right a lot of people are drawn to world war ii for different reasons so one is hitler and stalin trying to understand how it's possible to have that scale of evil in very different flavors of evil it's almost fascinating that human nature can allow for that and then also it's fascinating that so many people can follow leaders like that with with the pride and with the love of country yeah and that's like it's almost like this weird experiment it's like wow i wonder if i'm the the same i'm made from the same uh cloth as those people like would i be a good german if uh if i lived in germany uh and was you know during the time of hitler would i believe that germany has been done wrong i'm jewish by the way which what makes me a little bit more comfortable talking about this uh is what i would i believe in the dream sold by a charismatic dictator who says that wrongs have been done and we need to correct those wrongs that to me is the compelling thing that draws me to world war ii uh the human nature question i would agree with you on that i think there's a way to look at people like that and at that time there was no real well there wasn't a full understanding of the psyche the way that we're starting to i mean we still don't understand any of it but it seems like the you know the time gap back then there was no real understanding of sociopaths and narcissists and you know psychopaths and really what those traits were and i feel like you you know people will follow blindly if they're given a good enough reason well if you have an individual who is ranting and screaming at the top of his lungs in the middle of these town squares and he's getting this attention it's human nature to want to understand and be a part of a group mentality it's human nature to want to fit in and so i don't know if it's more of people were at the beginning were just this is the cool thing to do or if it was they were genuinely terrified or if there was an aspect that was like this guy is saying something that resonates with me there could be a lot of different things i think it's unfortunate that we didn't get to or no one got to really you know examine this individual's brain and this person and and why they thought the way they thought because i that's always been the biggest thing for me is i'm really curious about why people do what they do like deeply deeply curious about it i'm not sure who's more interesting the people that follow hitler or hitler himself so i mean that the the question that's coupled with that is uh would history roll out in similar ways even if there wasn't a hitler you know it's the people that created the hitler or did hit or create the events of world war ii i think the people would be more interesting in my opinion that seems to be the that the charismatic leaders are all out there uh the failed artists in the case of hitler they're all out there right and it's just when there's this environment of anger and fear charismatic leaders can take over right and uh it doesn't matter if they're evil or good it's like a role the dice in terms of history what uh how evil how truly insane they are like us i think stalin was much more cold than calculating he wasn't as insane as hitler hitler was legitimately insane uh like especially later on in the war where he would do irrational actions i would say so that but that that that's like a weird roll of the dice you could have gotten a totally different leader uh the the wanting to take over the entirety of europe and then invading russia that's that's like insanity yeah that just even just the the first part of that wanting to take over europe if you really think about the scale if you really sit down and go he want this one individual was like i want all of this if you really sat down and you were to sit down and put him in his traits that we know of into any sort of document nowadays that that deems somebody a psychopath or a narcissist this guy would set it on fire there's you know he himself was so i think so damaged and he reminds me a lot of um people now who who struggle to find their way he reminds me a lot of angry individuals who are told no either by women or by business or by whatever the sector they're in he reminds me very much of that like what's the word i'm looking for just that individual who's just like the world is shit and the the world owes me everything and just it's that mentality he really came from that it seems like and when you foster that too long you get that there's a book called uh what is it man from underground by dostoevsky i might be misnaming the book but it's about the bitterness of a man it's like it breathes within his mind and it just grows that bitterness i mean we we all have that sort of uh resenting of the world when you're when you're younger when you have a choice when you fail do you blame the world or do you hold it's the jackal thing do you hold do you care the responsibility of that and uh become a better man or woman because of that that's that's the decision and in some sense i mean unfortunately see that because he took responsibility and leadership he wasn't a leader yeah so it's not that he's a failure he's not a person not a failure but it's it's you can't say he's powerless did not take action i think he's just basically uh embodiment of the anger and the fear of people at the time and but the insanity of obviously many of my relatives not just murdering them but putting them in camps and torturing them but many of those people jewish people were also some of the best scientists the insanity of murdering some of the best germans yeah uh is i it makes no sense but so that's why it's fascinating to kind of look back at that time in history it's like and think are these the same humans and also are there echoes of that now yes and and are we is that going to happen again is there going to be a world war 3 this in some other kind of way is there going to be some mass scale injustice in some other kind of way which uh we're not uh yet like because of our blindness uh and maybe not learning the lessons of history will will allow to happen again and and then obviously it's a very common thing to whatever political leader you don't like to call them hitler that that to me i gotta i gotta tell you when somebody calls somebody hitler the weight behind that has been completely lost in this generation this generation does not understand what that truly means to call someone hitler or a nazi or stalin i to be honest the uh the starvation has i've just been talking to a lot of folks recently especially like north korea yeah starvation and i remember from my grandmother it wasn't any time and time again not having food to eat is the thing that people say is the worst everything it's way worse than murder not having food and the places that takes your mind and the actions that forces you to do that's terrifying and all of that seems very distant in our history yeah i love her i watched that interview with her she is i want to talk to that woman so bad because when she was on joe and she sat there and said joe's like do you have you done any therapy and she laughed i was like oh that's my girl it's such a fascinating i mean i would love for you to kind of talk to her and explore her mind because we kind of explored her story right and that's there's power and importance to her story but it's so difficult to understand like how does she become healthier and better uh even more so than she's already she's she's recovered quite a bit you know she's found herself quite a bit but i wonder is she haunted you're saying questions i want to ask like that's what i mean because after being in a war there are certain things there's certain atrocities that you see that it doesn't matter the therapy that you do and i don't care what all the special ops guys say like i know plenty of them that have a light switch and they turn it off and they can function but i also know them when they've been out for 10 years there's things that haunt people differently but there's no way there's not something going on there deeply yeah but there's also extra levels of complexity in her case because um i mean this is what just looking at history about family is she spent much of her early life loving the dictator right we like the water or something like we like water or we like this because there is no like individual like when they said there was no love or anything but there is a love for the just that individual for that individual and so i mean it's like the ultimate abusive relationship oh yeah and but but it's still love the experience like you don't know the alternative so it's not even it's complicated because like i i wonder if she truly explored it what you would find because uh the trauma much of her trauma i think comes from when she was escaping north korea treatment by china uh it's like the mom and what she had to witness within that and being helpless with that on yeah so it's like evil men essentially abusing her trading her you know and and doing so nonchalantly like it's part of just the way of of life that i wonder if she sees kind of yeah it's so complicated because childhood it would be normal to her because she didn't know any different exactly and there's like uh i grew up poor but i i never sensed that because parents didn't make you well and everyone else around was too right and so you don't notice it i mean it's a cultural thing so the way you grow up you only start to notice it when you compare yourself to others when you learn of the alternative that's a dark reality when you're abused you um i wonder i mean you truly and begin to suffer in some kind of way when you understand that you were being abused that that's a dark kind of thought that i wonder if you live your whole life just in that abuse if you don't know better that that's a safer that's like uh what's a better life going suffering and then learning that you were suffering or just suffering until your last days there's a two ways to look at this i'd argue on one side that's suffering and suffering till you die you know no different so you can't have hope you can't have this idea that there's better and sometimes that's keep that in its box but then if you have kind of what you have with park where she she knows now that there's different she knows that there's better then you run into those what is the damage that has been done what is going to be passed on as intergenerational trauma i know she's a mom so it's like now you got to look long-term a little bit because now she's an influence on a child and there's there's a positive to looking at both i would say and i know that sounds horrible for the living and trauma your whole life and just not knowing any better but there's i don't know if that saves the brain and the body and just just that overall or if it actually would be better because there's no way to really find that out i don't think yeah i think but the reality is when you give people hope and you make them realize that they're suffering you're putting a burden on them that's the first step on a long journey and so and obviously she now that she knows that the suffering she wants to make uh people in north korea currently suffer less and that's that admirable goal it's it is it's what we do to each other is try to like when you see suffering in the world you try to make it better and unmask that's probably in a long arc of history going to make for uh for a better world i'm hopeful at that idea for north korea i'm hopeful for that because you you never want to leave individuals suffering when you know that they're actively suffering while you're just living your day-to-day life in the western world just out grocery shopping and you see all this food and you know in the back of your mind like that interview fucked me up a little bit i won't lie like and i had some of the girls in my office listen to it they're just bawling because there's we're all parents and there's this idea that not being able to feed our children that just the idea of that damages the psyche it brings up the pain in the chest like just the idea of it and so going to the grocery store for about a week after that i just remember standing there looking and just going what the fuck are we doing but then there's that snap reality that comes into play and goes so how do we fix that you got to take on china that's never going to happen and the reason that's not going to happen it's happening again so akani comes down through afghanistan chinese all through afghanistan iran makes the deal with china for her the roadway to get the oil well that's done in the blink of an eye without anyone knowing there's no way there's just so much at play with china they control such a large aspect of our world unfortunately that to take and free north korea a drastic action would have to happen and then your people would come in it would be a mess what do you mean your people what do you mean your people you're russians did you hear what she said about russians did you hear what she says russians i love russians you know what i didn't love the russian recruiting video that came out that shit was terrifying did you watch it i told you about it of course you didn't watch it i didn't watch it oh shocker um the usa put out a recruiting video yes and then like a day or two later russia put one out and the recruiting fruit video in the states was a animation of a a female soldier yeah with two moms and she was gonna go change the world right russia came out with one it's like it's the the character from like rocky essentially and there are guys in the mud and just in the rain just fucking doing push-ups just pushing it out they're just like they see their boot they're just like crushing things and i'm like and it's all like and the deep rush in the voice i'm like oh my god yeah which one is better would you say which bothered you more what do you mean by bother specify so deception is a funny thing because when you're young and you're choosing to go to the military or not it's not like you know like none of us know what the best trajectory for life is right for many people going to the military is a really makes them incredible human beings some of the best people in this world i know are soldiers so it's i'm not i don't mean like it's somehow bad to go to the military i think it's a great choice but there is something the honest truth is i just don't like marketing people well and so this is essentially a marketing effort yeah it is a marketing effort so which one do you like as a marketing effort better russia yeah there you go i do because canada doesn't you know what our recruiting videos are it's like um uh i love it they're the best sorry a yeah oh fuck here we go it's starting it started awesome so canada does these ones where it's like um it'll have a bunch of like soldiers doing movements and then they'll like snip it together really quick it'll be like a navy one and then a guy jumping of a plane and then it'll be like an artillery and then like an armored then it'd be like join the canadian forces today and like that's like their their videos so it's like very marketable very palatable to canadians who don't really want war and who don't really acknowledge their military in the first place and do everything they can to make sure that vets don't get any support when they come home so they i can see why that one is uh acceptable what russia did was meant to be more of an intimidation tactic in my opinion i like that style better though i think we need harder i need i think we need people to be harder i think it's acceptable and okay to say that our soldiers need to have a harder mindset a stronger mindset a better mentality and mental health support going into the service and a harder body because i know when you go to the u.s i've also encountered plenty of soldiers that are 600 pounds what are you going to do so we should say that you when you join the military you're in incredible shape or not maybe incredible no i was an incredible show it was the best shape of my life yeah yeah so i'm okay with that it's okay i you know what i used to do sit-ups like no i would do sit-ups in the morning when i was little until i could see myself like i always had a six-pack because all i did was train but like if i couldn't like see it i would just sit there morning cartoons and just do sit-ups and my mom and dad thought that was like normal acceptable behavior so if you had like instagram back then you'd be a david goggins you would be just like without the cursing that cursing started once the military started okay got it so i mean the people should know because they probably already know that you also competed in taekwondo like you were an athlete of all kinds they even saw rugby in there yeah i was i was i was good at rugby i played that for seven six years i guess you could say total i think the worst injury i've ever ended up having was i tore my right eyelid off we were doing an exhibition game i don't do exhibition games well i don't do like for fun well i don't do like be very competitive no not me so you're being funny ah there it is he gets it you see he's not he's not a robot what i was saying though to you was that we did an exhibition game and the team ahead was winning the team we were playing was winning which was annoying and so there was an opportunity to take out a girl that was going one end of the field to the other and she just kept hitting tries left right and center she was fast so i figured if i just aimed her up like she's a target and i just run full force at her because she was really she was a tall individual if i just if i do that i'll take her out of the knees so i did that um but that what that resulted in was she put her tooth through her mouth guard and knocked out and didn't just she just stayed there but when i stood up i tore the right eyelid off and it was hanging from the inner corner yeah my mom was there because mom was my mom's my biggest fan she was supportive oh she's supportive of everything and she didn't miss a game she didn't miss anything and um i stood up and i kind of turned around and we had already had a girl break her nose that day so she was on the sideline with her nose sideways and just bloody my mom was like i'll take her to the emergency after once the game's over and so i turned around and looked at her and she just she almost vomited on the spot and i was like what's wrong she's like don't move your eyelids off i'm like but i can see like i was trying to blink but like it was just down so i could just constantly see she's like we're just gonna go to the emergency we're just gonna go there now was there blood yeah there's lots of it but i couldn't really tell okay were you okay with blood at that point yeah i mean i guess we did taekwondo and all that yeah i didn't get knocked out very often i didn't really when i was younger in taekwondo i was really good i only lost a handful of times so when i did lose that was bad um but i never had like a broken nose or a lot of blood on my feet like nothing like that really so nothing freaked me out too much was there aggression there or just purely competition over skill a mix of both i was this was right after not too long after my coach went to prison for statutory rape um and that was like how you talk about park talking about how that was like she knew love because of that person that person was like a god to me and so when that happened i was just an angry individual from that point on so there was competition and aggression mixed in there oh like it was betrayal that this is somebody that is was a symbol of love for you was could also be a very bad person i used to eat sleep and breathe whatever that man said from four years old on i lived with my coaches at a point so i could train that much i i helped look after their daughter i i was at the club 24 7. it just the idea that somebody could do something like that yeah that really messed me up where were you on 9 11. i was 11 and i was in my parents basement and in uh where ontario in ontario canada canada what did you think of 911 at that age from canada they have an impact on you in terms of uh changing the uh the level of evil you thought is there in the world today not initially i remember it really vividly i have a decent memory for certain things it seems like stuff like that i'd stick with really well um i remember watching i was sitting on the couch and um my mom my mom called my dad because my my parents are truck drivers my dad was on the road i'm not mistaken and he would go in and out of cities all the time and i think he was on the east coast my mom was like a little panicky so she she tried to get a hold of him on i think she at the time it was like beepers and um yeah so he'd get a beep he would go to a payphone and call us he was fine and um i remember my mom being like really upset and i couldn't quite grasp why she was so upset i knew something really bad had happened it's when i then saw the second plane go into the tower and i remember her just like the stereotypical like hand over her mouth and she just felt sick and she just was so confused and i knew it was bad but i didn't fully grasp it we went to school that day and they had talked about it briefly you could hear the teachers kind of reminiscing about it there was a point the that week that all of a sudden all of the children who were from a middle eastern family were not the school i just remember them saying like a lot of people aren't coming to school but it was it was in particular i think parents were afraid once it got out that it was of a certain um group they were afraid for their own kids and fair enough i mean you never know you don't know and um i knew it impacted me enough that i did write i remember i the school was doing a memorial for it and i remember they asked i wrote a poem and a reporter was there and i read it on air that's like i remember like it was like it was a very short one but i remember i wanted to do something but i didn't know why or for for what reason i just i knew i wanted to do something to honor it but i didn't i couldn't grasp why you eventually went to afghanistan yeah did that begin to plant a seed of thinking about conflict in the world it's a good question i've never thought about it that in depth i mean i've done 12 years of therapy you think that would have come up dr passi but apparently not we'll work on it though i mean when did uh like when did the idea of war start entering your mind late high school i think it was for me um i was i finished high school at 17. i moved away and went to college i went to algonquin college because i wasn't smart enough to get into ottawa u so i was like well algonquin she is i just wanted to play sports and frankly i wanted away from my small town that i was living in i went through like a bad high school breakup as a kid and you know that where you think that's like the love of your life and you just can't bear to be anywhere near anybody and so i moved away as fast as i possibly could and i didn't grasp it still at that point love and heartbreak okay why did you become a soldier why did you want to become a soldier my parents told me from an early age they always figured i would either be a cop i would do they didn't think military but they thought it would be like a type a personality possibly carry a gun situation and um i'd never hunted before we never had guns in our house i was never exposed to weapons of any kind if anything it was it was the opposite we just all the hunters on the property like all the deer would come to our property and all the hunters would be no i'm not my mom would put salt licks out so that they wouldn't get killed your property was the safe space for the deer yeah it was 17 acres of forest and they just we had two turkeys that used to walk up and down the driveway every day we had bears in there nobody bothered them and so there was no aspect of like i want to go kill shit that was not like a thing i had no idea i wanted to take anybody off the face of the earth or anything i went to school and because i'm a history person i my parents has always always made it uh really important that remembrance day is the thing in our life so that's veteran's day for you so it's november 11th and it's you go you honor i don't care if you don't want to go i don't care if it's raining you go and so i went to the remembrance day ceremony in ottawa that year which was it's our capital which is yeah it's our capital and it's really small and so i went but i took the bus and i was on the bus back to algonquin and i met a lady who was like a world war ii vet really old lady she had an air force uniform on and just like this row of metals and i mean i think you can tell by our limited to extreme interactions we've had over the short period of time i'm curious and i'll just ask you and so i just got up and talked to her and just started talking to her and she didn't say like i don't remember exactly her words but she served she was one of the first females to fly and you know all all these kind of things that stuck in my head and we just kind of kept talking and i missed my stop and then i finished talking to her and i got back on the bus and went back to the college and walked into my uh my small apartment where i had two roommates these two guys i went to high school with one of them went to high school with one was from out of town and i i just didn't like what i was i wasn't happy i wasn't doing what i wanted to do and i didn't know what i wanted to do truthfully something just said why don't you join the army like in myself my my self-talk was like let's just join the military let's do it are you in general somebody just follows the gut like when your heart tells you something you go with it for the most part because i figured out at least now i figured out what parts i could like what feeling i can trust and which one i can't which one's anxiety versus which one's my actual intuition talking so why did you sign up to be an artillery gunner because they wouldn't let me be infantry i mean is it why why would you want to be infantry i mean this you're you're you're you're naming a lot of dangerous activities yeah but that wasn't a thought in my mind at the time my idea was if i was going to do this and i was going to put myself through the bullshit and the training and all of the hell and the push-ups and the mama screamed at i wanted to do something that i know was actually going to be affecting something and what i knew was making change or affecting or on the front lines was infantry artillery or armored so i was like one of those can you explain the difference infantry artillery and armored do you want like the layman's term or do you want me to actually explain explain well listen to a conversation with giaco especially i love how you get into details okay so let's detail this then okay so infantry is your front line door kicking you know blasting the door open running and get the fuck on the ground just that that that they're the guys that you know the double tap you in the face and they show up in the middle of the night and put a barrel in your head like those are the guys that are sleeping in the trenches that are eating mres who are being shot out who are being blown up who are doing the dirty work and not sleeping and carrying the hundred pound pack and and are side by side with your buddies in the trenches i wanted that that they said i was too small for that so that's your side to interrupt you or what too small under 100 pounds um at the time i was about 103 and i'm i'm five foot like on a if you roll my back out like i really try i'm five foot at the time though i think it might my license said 411. so so you were too small too small for infantry yeah they just like there was no mandate at which they said you can't be but they said you know we don't want to put you through training that you're going to fail out of and then have to recourse you and then find a new job for you and they want to try to if this is what you're going in for they want to have you follow through that path so then there was armored which are your tanks so that's your movie like fury where your tank battles and which we don't really do anymore but you're rolling around in tanks you got guys in the back you're a driver you're a turret gunner which i would have enjoyed but the idea of being in a closed metal box something about it made me panic so i was like maybe not for me oh there's of course power to that kind of uh big gun well that's why i went for the bigger one okay by the way i think russia leads the world a number of tanks they're still it's very like uh what is it alpha demonstration of like force look we have largest number of tanks you know what takes tanks out though what some gasoline some old batteries and a wire yeah but tanks still look badass they look great but they don't last but so much of the military like we said with the recruiting videos it's a display of power versus the actual implementation of power fair okay artillery so i'm doing my best here yeah i don't even know what double tap means which you said earlier so double top is like two shots to the face why two to be sure okay all right you guys the taxpayers pay for the ammo it's fine but you don't want to do three because that's wasting money well that's now that's a waste okay double tap the face there's so much awesome terminology here or uh gruesome terminology depending on your perspective okay so artillery yeah so that's the hand of god sorry no i that's that's intensely uh romanticized version but okay artillery the hand of god so because it will reach out and touch you from wherever we want it's like it's like f um f 18 pilots or bombers they'll you won't know they're there until they're there and so for artillery i i really honestly didn't think artillery would be a fit for me i didn't know much about it they were just like these are what you can pick from and i was like i'll go here so in world war ii they used much closer artillery so it's the we were called the royal canadian horse artillery because the queen made us royal canadian artillery and um we we shoot these rounds when you're in training you shoot smaller smaller ammunition they're about 40 pounds they go i'm gonna get this wrong 20k 20 kilometers so whatever that is in your mile things and um they have a casing on them and they're much easier they're easier to handle the guns are smaller you need less people for them they're basically what you train on nowadays it's not what we use overseas what we use overseas now those things are beautiful those are just a sheer work of the engineering behind them just makes my heart skip a beat yeah the engineering on modern guns is amazing so are we talking about machine guns here so no you're talking fully automatic no you're talking about an artillery gun so what it is it's a 155 millimeter howitzer that shoots up to up to 40 kilometers accurately 45 unrecorded and it shoots a hundred pound round oh [Music] okay so that but there is still precision accurate as hell accurate okay accurate if the people behind it that are shooting it and aiming it are accurate okay uh so so how at which stage of the warfare do they come in are they saving you like say a bunch of people get uh raided a bunch of the soul infantry get raided and then the artillery saves them or are they the first line of attack or what where are they wh where does their artillery go like the hand of god presumes because it's yeah yeah that's well that's it so depending on the operation or whomever is running it or how they want it done sometimes if they just know there's targets they'll use us you know high value targets so we have this round it's called the excalibur round it costs about half a million dollars per round it comes in a special tube that is like sealed and locked and you have to get permission from ottawa to shoot it and it's only used for vip targets so like we have vip for everyone and it will it's gps guided it's rocker propelled and when you fire it it will if if this is a wall and somebody's standing on this side of it we'll hit you right there we won't touch that wall it will hit you pinpoint it'll go right through whatever concrete whatever and it will destroy so it's basically uh the same thing as being a sniper but with a much more damaging we don't use that round often i think it's only been used a handful of times max in afghanistan that i'm aware of again i haven't i wasn't there from 2009 until 21. but i i know people that still deployed in that in those units and i don't know that it was used very often but the regular rounds so there's hg there's loom so he's high explosive there's a loom you shoot that it explodes in the sky it lights up the sky for the infantry below um and then there's shrapnel rounds that will explode in the sky and the shrapnel just rains down hell on you h e is what you use normally in my i'm trying to say this right because i i know people squawked at me about some of the stuff on jacob so i'm trying to be very accurate in my experience we used he rounds to wipe people off the face of the earth when the infantry needed us so we would get a call at any time and there's always two guns together so you never you never go solo gun ever if you are it's there's it's sketchy and there's a bad shit's happening can you explain that to those two got two people two guns no two guns with each gun troops so each gun troop has five to seven people running a gun at all times oh wow it takes a lot of people to run one of those how much electronics is there the gps like the computer system that's on it itself i never ran that much but it is completely technologically it's gps guided all you have to do is literally type in the coordinates then you've got the two big um there's a there's a technical word for it but basically wheels and one does the trajectory you know you do here right and you're just kind of doing this and you're watching the watching it and once you hit your target that's you know it'll tell you that's where you need to hit do you know if there's any like ai stuff like computer vision like where there's cameras and they help you target using like all different kinds of cameras to see through like the fog all those kinds of things no we use um the foo which are forward observation office officers which are an artillery individual that is embedded with an infantry unit oh wow okay they call from the front give us their grid coordinates and basically say like don't drop this on us got it so well you know what not to sh which parts not to shoot correct and then there's no one moves don't move stay still but you can hear it coming yeah but you can't hear it until it's too close so like when i went sorry go ahead you were gonna say no what's i was gonna say what's the experience on the other like what does it feel like to be maybe infantry or underneath it underneath the artillery well i i had the rare opportunity to do that and i have a video i'll show you after it's terrifying because i know the people that were shooting it and i know them personally and i know what they're like as humans and for the most part they're dialed but you get the odd duck where you're like i've seen people have an nd which is a negligent discharge you basically get charged for it you get a lot of trouble because you can blow people up and i it's like accidents happen and so i know accidents can happen in stressful situations and when i was with the brits we had to call danger close artillery and when it goes over top of you it sounds like thunder and lightning so you fire it and it's not the stereotype that you hear in world war ii where it kind of like that it's more of like a crackle and then you just hear like a whiz and it shit just goes everywhere it's loud it shakes the ground it shakes you it you feel it okay okay is there some more words you can put to like the experience of what it's like to be in the heat of of battle there so what is i is there literally is it hot is it are you talking about being under it or shooting it under it oh yeah it 55 degree heat you're you know that you're waiting for it to be called you feel an overwhelming excitement to start because for me i'd never been under it so i was like okay i had my camera ready like i was a kid at a candy store and i'm like i want to watch this happen and once you hear the crackle i got really fearful my anxiety kicked up significantly i i got to the point where i got numb like i was my nerves were on overdrive so much that like my body would go like numb like i could move but like my nerves were numb if that makes sense what what were the nerves like are we talking about fear or is it just anxious excitement anxious excitement hopeful that they wouldn't blow it up on us and there was this there was this excitement that's hard to describe because you don't want to be excited that you're dropping bombs on people but when you just saw their faces and they're shooting at you there's this overwhelming feeling of got you motherfucker yeah yeah well we'll talk about that because that's such a difficult thing about wars you forget that it's other human beings yeah because those other human beings are doing really bad things to you and so the very basic anger takes over um hate can take over and then also just the excitement of almost like video game like you know aspect of war like sport it's it's like sport that all of those elements are all baked in it's hard to be philosophical in that situation it seems like i've never played video games so i can't compare it to that but like from from like a sports perspective yeah i could i could argue that like i felt like we won there for a second and it's it's not just like a heat from outside it's like this radiation within you that is something i've never felt since you uh just to take a small step back to the weapons training what uh what kind of guns did you train on because you also mentioned a rocket launcher i love karl kristoffs what are those what what are those carl g carl g's what what's that what's uh uh my only experience with the rocket launches is from the movie commando with arnold schwarzenegger oh yeah and we've all discussed i haven't seen that yet and i've heard about it and people have made me tell yeah i know i feel like you haven't seen a single movie that's relevant to war military because every time anyone brings it up you say you haven't seen it i don't have time to watch movies lex platoon you haven't seen platoon which is um you're the scientist how do you have the time i'm not a scientist i just play one on tv okay sure so uh what can you talk about the rocket launcher yeah and maybe any other yeah for both engineering actually to me those guns are very interesting from an engineering perspective too well they should be they're fascinating when you take them apart and you see how small the parts get down to and how how necessary every single little piece is to make that thing run and even without the tiniest little bb smaller than a piece on there an artillery gun might not run so we were trained on carl g's um called m72s which are disposable rocket launchers i'll back up carl g's are around i don't know the exact millimeter of the round it's been a while since i shot them we only did those in training but essentially it takes most people one person can fire it you know effectively hold it and fire it it takes another person to load it so you put it onto your shoulder and it weighs i would i don't know 30 pounds 40 pounds oh wow can't remember it's been a minute it's been one person can carry it oh yeah okay i don't know it just seems like a rocket launcher's pretty uh intense kind of device it for sure is i mean it's the diameter i can't even tell you the diameter they're about that big i mean and it goes on your shoulder it goes on your shoulder and then it has a little sight that pops out that's almost like plastic-like which is kind of funny because it reminds me of like the little um green army men it i just felt so flimsy to me i was like this is hilarious and then another person stands behind you and opens the hatch and so there's this there's these two um levers and you just kind of open it and then the back end which is flared so it's just a tube and then it's flared that will open it and drop down and you load around into that and then you load it back up and you're never supposed to stand behind it because the blast behind it will kill you it's yeah but in my case when i fired it it was me and another individual um i want to say it wasn't sarah pellegrin but it was another girl that was smaller and the person is supposed to wrap around your waist and tuck low and hold your stability and we were just aiming at tanks that day and they were just concrete um heads so they would just either they would hit and bounce off or whatever and so when my sergeant saw that he just kind of looked at both of us i was like no i'm just gonna and he got real low and just like wrapped both of us and then we'd fire it and it feels like you're getting punched in the side of the head on repeat by jocko yeah it you lose all your hearing you just like just snot comes out of your nose and you're just kind of discombobulated for a minute it's a real mind fuck is it is there other uh any other kind of guns that um in at that time because you were new to this you haven't shot guns when you were younger that were really impressive to you in in the training all of them because i i've never fired a weapon so we had the c7s which are like your m16s i believe um the long barrel the cute thing about those is when i have that slung my barrel drags on the ground so that's fun and they shoot you know your 762 or your 556 round i loved that i preferred the um the c8 which was a short barrel which is what the sf guys use not because it's cooler looking which it obviously is but because it was functional for my body height and it didn't drag on the ground when i ran i loved those they're your personal weapon being an artillery gunner if you're not an officer at least in our unit you didn't get a side a side piece i didn't have a slide piece lex um so i never had a handgun of any type i fired those in training you can't get over that side piece comment look at you uh i was gonna say i know what a side piece is you don't have to explain to me but you're single so how do you even have a side piece if you don't have a main piece the joke the joke would be the fact that we have a total misunderstanding what side pieces okay grace you didn't have a side piece as a non-officer right so i never fired those much we did grenades and training oh cool yeah grenades are fun i love grenades i have a massive one tattooed on me i have them all over my office how does a grenade work there's the spoon and the pin so this the pin holds the spoon in place when you pull that pin the firing mechanism inside as long as that the spoon is up against it it won't fire as soon as that spoon goes i believe it causes a reaction on the inside and you've got about five seconds to check it you'd be better to ask that question too i don't want me to get philosophical no you're not but there's something about a grenade because you're essentially committing suicide unless you get rid of the thing there's something like or if you're unlucky and it just goes off when you pull the pin which has happened to tons of people so it just feels like a very kind of leap it's a it's a dangerous leap into the abyss every time you use the thing because when you shoot a gun like the gun is much less likely to malfunction in terms of like all the possible ways to go wrong it just seems like grenade is like primitive almost yeah it's primitive it's it's also real like in the way that like a bar fight is like being punched in the face is real it's like you're here with the weapon of destruction it's just you and in the thing yeah you have to get rid of it i don't know is that is that terrifying to you like p do people still use grenades in warfare oh yeah okay yeah those are fantastic the taliban were throwing them over the wall at the airport in kabul people use them all the time because when you're in afghanistan if you're in a rural area you're going from village to village and they're they're you know they're mud hut walls like they're tall but you're walking through corridors and stuff oh you gotta lob one of those it's gonna take the whole unit out that just walked by like it's they're accurate if you're close enough and they're effective if you're close enough um i love them though i think they're fascinating to me because they're such a tiny little thing with such devastation they just can cause such devastation but for me when i had them the some of the canadians would make fun of me because when i did go outside the wire with the british i had two right here and i remember i put a piece of tape over the spoons because in my mind i could picture myself searching someone and grabbing me and pulling that and that would be me that that would have been like yep that if anyone that was gonna happen to it was her for sure so you were deployed to afghanistan in 2009 okay and uh like we said you were in uh great no perfect physical shape fucking epic shape epic shape six-pack or i mean yeah okay so uh you could do pull a lot of pull-ups and push-ups and [Music] yeah okay uh and well-trained would you say we were you already what like no no no i'll argue that point till i'm blue in the face i spoke to him recently i actually spoke to my sergeant he's not a sergeant anymore but sergeant mark leblanc he's in africa right now on a deployment he gave me a call the other day and i remember talking to him about this and it's frustrating because we were at an active war we were involved in an active war where we the units that i were in were dagged red which meant they needed people so when you need people things go quick whether or not that's right i mean you could argue that's the similar thing to what's happening in the world right now we needed a vaccine we got a vaccine is it the best it could be could it be better could it do more things sure probably but with the time that we had we did the best that we could that's my logic on that for me i joined the military in november of 2007. i was in basic training in january of 2008 i was graduated basic sq which is all your weapons training your dp1 which is your trade specific training so whatever trade you're going to go into whether it's infantry armored artillery medic whatever that's your dp1 it's called different things in different units and then i got posted to my unit in september so january to september i had done all my training and i'm an english-speaking individual i got posted to a french unit that only speaks french and had to learn that all of the weapon systems everything again that i just learned in that short time frame in french this part of your story that we you you're telling this to jocko is one way to say is very impressive that you had to learn all of this in french so there's also the camaraderie the social aspect of it which is difficult probably it didn't have any that's enough yeah it didn't have any but it also make you a more effective soldier to be socially for that cohesion to be there right um but also just understanding the the basic um terminology correct and uh great way to say something on the radio the right way to run a gun the right way to because you got to move with those guns you've got seven people it's it's it's really magical i i'll send you a video we when we did um some live fire in workup training in texas before we left we did a competition between the other gun to see who could fire 10 rounds fast like faster wow um it is truly beautiful to watch an artillery unit fire a gun because it's it's like a symphony everyone has their parts and everyone knows and everyone's yelling but they know why they're yelling and everyone this guy's got to do this in order for this guy to load the round it's just it's beautiful it really is it is gorgeous to watch i miss it deeply is there by the way for a gun is there like one person responsible for the for the aim and the or like the specification of the location and somebody else that pulls it presses the lanyard is that the lanyard is there a button it's bet it's better than a button you'll like it i'll tell you in a second okay um yours there's your sergeant in charge and then they have their two ic and so the comms come in to the sergeant and the sergeant is the or your master bombardier bomba de chef um yeah sorry what a chef what chef oh that's the french master bombardier yeah so it goes like private in the north like an infantry or in a regular unit it's like private corporal master corporal sergeant in artillery it goes gunner bombardier master bombardier sergeant weren't on and off like that so you have two people but the sarge is like you don't move till he says move you don't fire until he says fire like he's your guy he'll give you the coordinates he'll feed him to the guy that's doing the the gps that that portion i really never did it much i wasn't tall enough to see it like legitimately the way how high it is up on the gun like it was i couldn't see clearly enough it was not good so obviously you have a big personality you're strong person you don't say yeah and you have a big hat currently i always wear a hat legs okay it seems like your height and your size was a factor oh for sure how were you able to step up in all those moments and uh how difficult was it i don't know that i realized it was difficult while i was doing it because that's just the way it's been i've always been the short person that's life nothing i can do to fix that so there was no point when am i gonna whine about it i'm gonna break my femurs and insert things to make me grow a little bit maybe maybe since you're in robotics you can figure that out okay that's your task now make me be five foot three that'd be great um for artillery really what it came down to was the unit when i got there there was only a couple people who spoke any sort of english and my sergeant was not one of them but once he kind of started to get to know me a little bit the best that he could he started to put effort into making sure i could lift the rounds train make sure my my capacity to do my job was there and so he took me under his wing in that in that aspect so he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically help me load the round so pick the round up from the ground pick it up like a trick to put your knee under it use your legs instead of just pick it up use your back pull your back out he would work on that and then depending on the position i was running the gun in if i was running the side that had the charge bags i'll explain that in a second but if i was running the side that had the charge bags i could step up onto the gun and if i leaned inward enough with my right hand with the charge and i kind of kicked off i could kind of jump and shut and shove it up the tube got it almost enough yeah if i was running the lanyard which is the thing that makes it go boom it's really easy it's a long rope you hook it on and you put it your right hand on your hip and on your left and you and you hold it there and you just stare at your sergeant like this and you just wait for him to yell fire and he points at you when he does it and when you do it you turn your whole body with it and when you do that it alleviates the a misfire essentially because if you just pull it sometimes that's not enough you got to really give it your whole body into it and so he would train me on how to do things differently so that i could do them effectively and i wasn't a shit pump uh a what so ship pump is a term that we use in canada to call somebody useless a ship pump is a useless soldier who is just you're there and that's the ship pump and so we all just deal with it but somehow they're still there yeah what were we talking about the lanyard okay yeah uh we're talking about artillery guns so those things though what you would find fascinating is just how they break down when you have to take one of those apart i think your mind would really find it fascinating how a breech comes apart all the way down to like ball bearing size and the only and there's a way to just make that gun completely ineffective and all you have to do when you're on the charge side there's a magazine that's a long linear magazine and it holds like 15 little rounds if you just take that thing out nothing's not firing how many people does it take to move that like how easy it is to move that thing to move a triple seven triple seven i like it that's what they're called m triple seven is a lot of the terminology cross over the same in english and french no okay i mean m triple seven does because it's an obvious howitzer i'm sure has a separate word but like if you're running it you're running it in french so like when i'd be running the when i'm doing the charge bags and i'm doing i'm doing you know i'm loading everything and i'm getting that ready and that's my position that day i'm also controlling the breach so like how it opens how it closes when it locks and so but you have to yell that as you do it so you're yelling like my lib coulas like you have to yell all these things you have to learn them though and so for a long time it's it's it's it was a little frustrating i won't lie it's really exciting i took a lot of french but i forgot all of it but i think it's a beautiful romantic language it's a good language if it's from quebec yeah that's true it's a good language to fall in love with not as good as russian but uh i mean second english is uh all right i mean russian really is that like a love language it is to me i mean because you're russian but like if somebody walked up to me was like hey kelsey i like you i'd be like oh god he's gonna put me in a camp that's because you don't understand love and kelsey i don't we'll talk about that okay how many people does it take to move them triple seven it depends if you're moving it by ground you're moving it on a truck and when you're moving it on a truck you're hooking the back of it onto you're hooking the front of the barrel onto one of those big transport looking trucks that has those cargo tents that's got soldiers in it you don't want to ever move an m triple seven by that way if you don't have to the barrel is worth a million dollars wow okay so this is like a serious piece of equipment you don't want to move them okay when we got to kandahar we were there for a couple days we got flown out to the fall we were going to be at ford observation base kandahar is the safe space or was the major base in afghanistan that we were at there's things like tim hortons there there's canada house there's a british side an american side a canadian side and you know that's where you see all the different countries in the world kind of come together you would see italians you would see germans you would see french you would see all these different uniforms and you never know who to salute because you don't know what each thing means it doesn't feel like a war zone no oh god no there's a boardwalk there's hockey there like floor hockey because canada had to have that there's a tim horton's a subway a pizza hut a px um i think there's a restaurant there somewhere but i never i didn't get to go you know stuff like that there's gyms you can run around it you feel fairly safe you always have a weapon on you but you can you know live your life um when you get out to the fob the guns are already there so those m triple sevens get lifted by a chinook normally if they're going by air they go by chinook because they're heavy as hell and chinooks can hook them under the bottom and they fly them and then they'll drop them down they have wheels on them but you don't need them if you're gonna leave it in place gotta and you're getting information about ieds you're getting a land a lay of the land as to what's been going on in the country for the past six months and this you know nothing you're just like this is your first time you're getting deployed so what was your deployment like can you tell the story of your deployment to afghanistan like the whole deployment getting like actual deploying not the deployment itself what's the difference between the two well actually getting ready to deploy is a little different so i mean the emotional build up to it got it and uh some of the some of the memorable things that kind of uh you remember from that experience both on the excitement i get to see battle i get to be part of this and the fear and also like being surprised like with the tim hortons and all those kinds of things so like the lead up before everything should hit the fan okay cool so you're such a fascinating person but yes something like that i've been called many things yeah let's start with the letter f yeah no i don't know i don't know many words with f okay so with the build up so the uh deployment so for the build up for the deployment i was in quebec and my unit was deploying from quebec and at that time you kind of get your marching orders you know you're deploying i knew i was deploying before i even graduated that's how much they needed people so once i did all that training on graduation parade day a couple men from quebec in uniforms came over and said you you you and you are all being posted to vacation and you're going to deploy with us in april so that's how i found it i was deploying why was there such a need for troops in afghanistan is that that was a well-known thing that there's a scaling up of troops 2007 on canada really started taking a combat role before it was very much more a u.n type deal where doing what we normally do in most wars where we just we wear blue and we don't shoot anyone and so we're there to help and so they were really they were scaling up and there wasn't a lot of people in those uh trades initially i think when the war kind of started so canada really started to scale and so when i got to quebec we've kind of found oh yeah we're deploying and it was a weird situation because i've never actually been at a unit on a non-deployable unit so i don't know what they do day to day that's different from what i did i just know what i did so we would do things like in the morning we would get up and we would meet for pt at 5 a.m and that would include going for a 10k run or playing ball hockey for a few hours in the gym or lifting weights together or you know just going on a ruck march along rock mart should just stuff like that you would have a shower you would meet and then you would just sit around the regiment you would just sit around the regiment and you would if there was busy work you'd mop the floors you would clean weapons there wasn't a whole lot until there was a whole lot to do we did a lot for a while and then we went away on workup training to texas for a week we came down here and we did live fire with um with our other troop that was going to be with us so alpha alpha had two guns and two guns has two groups of people and so we all would go down to texas and we did live fire here for a week and i end up getting gastro which was awesome so thanks for that apparently there was uh they were having water problems and sanitary problems so everyone was getting it on the base okay so it just makes your life way harder i didn't get it towards the end till towards the end so that was fortunate so we would fire live fire we would go out to the middle of nowhere the guns would be there and we would get uh offload a truck of uh rounds and we would do live fire and we would practice just constant practice what's that saying perfect practice makes perfect yeah so this is a sensory uh like a shooting range for artillery for artillery for long range so what does practice look like so you roll up in your trucks and you're you're you know you've got uh each group of people you've got two trucks and then you've got like a medic vehicle and then you've got like an officer vehicle and a coms vehicle and you you go to your perspective guns and then you offload your ammo and then you basically wait for them to send you like a uh a fire mission wow get that together they would call they would say and miss y'all sit so it'd be a fire mission so we'd wait for that and once we got that then you all run like a bunch of scattered rats to the gun like it's like the greatest thing you've ever seen and then um you just wait you wait for the call for the sergeants to say and then you'll hear it because it's not headphones you can hear it on a speaker and it'd be like i'm not gonna do it in french don't ask it'd be like um uh so and so 10 rounds fire when ready and then you'd get your rounds ready and everyone would have them writer would be in their perspective um respected positions and then you would wait and then they would say fire when ready and as soon as i say fire when ready that means just start going just start and then that's when the magic starts you go like the loop like you you shoot one or whatever there's a reloading process there's a loop so what you would do you get the fire mission you would find out the rounds the two ic would be standing by the rounds and it was his job to make sure the amount of rounds that was told would be the only rounds that would go downrange and so he'd stand there and on each round depending on the type of round is a fuse which gets screwed onto the top of the round so they're about that big and it's just a point and then you would have to put it on give it a spin and depending if it was the time release you had a little um what do you call you get those at ikea when you have to build everything allen k allen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you know what i'm talking about yeah and then like a big one or something no just a little one because it's a tiny little hole and you just got to click it to where it's supposed to go and it depended on what the columns were and it was a timer when you said like wheel you mean like a little thing then is that is that what we're talking about i'm talking about the round itself so you would put a fuse on top of the round so you would unload the ammo and then you would put fuses on them and the fuses are on the top and they're like a little like a ice cream topper kind of thing and you would spin those on okay okay and then once they're on depending if it's a time release or not you would take this little thing and you would move it the top and that would it's almost like a little timer cool yeah it depended so you're just assembling a bullet essentially a very big one that goes up to my waist yeah this is this is very cool and you're you're a fascinating person okay so that you just that you still even years later have all this in your memory it's not all perfectly accurate and that's what irritates me though is because i'm it bothers me when i can't remember things accurately but i have a lot of i've had a lot of memory issues and problems after like having too many hits to the head and this is from earlier in childhood or later uh both okay both the military did not help it where was the hits in the head in the military well when you have a car go stuff beside your face like this and it shoots around it it gives you a concussive blast also there's new research being done i'll find out exactly what it is but there's new research that's being done that shows that if you're an artillery gunner and you stand within a certain range of that gun you get the same amount of concussive blasts and it there's a there's a range i had no idea but you feel it when it goes off like it hurt your whole body feels it your mind is fascinating because it's like literally the opposite of my one you're able to speak very quickly very clearly very sharply sorry no what i talk too fast no that's perfect it's my hearing i admire i mean i admire that i can't do any of that and you listen extremely well and you're extremely attentive and you have a good memory so anyways just fun fun to watch you at um i can tell you were a great soldier and just all different aspects of it thank you but what the heck we're talking about oh build up to the deployment how did we get to texas because that was part of the build-up to my deployment and li-fi you got to did that feel good it's so good what's the favorite what's the best part about like shooting artillery like what what's the thing that's that feels good which part the well the full the feeling of power when is the best moment of the highest moment of the feeling of power is it the whole process that you love or is there like when you actually shoot it it's symbiotic it's a beautiful thing to watch to know that a gun can fire and it takes kind of a dance to make it work there's something about that to me that just got my heart racing when you actually shoot the round and you see it go and you hear it it's unlike it you can't describe there's no i've never felt another feeling i've also never been in like an f-18 or an f like 16 or like any i've never been in anything like that and i've you know i've never tried to think of something else to be comfortable i've never been in like a formula one car those are the only things i can picture being that much for me because to shoot one of those and to know that you've done your job right means that you've helped and that to me was really what it did it for me when you hear your sergeant say mission accomplished target hit tired acquired then you're like that's a good feeling that's the stuff quick pause take a break lex okay so live fire in texas we're in texas by the way fort worth or fort hood one of them well okay so like it's what is that close to a big major city do you do you remember visiting a city oh god no we we fly right into the tarmac and they're like don't touch the snakes and then they send you out to the field we got it let's see the only instructions no really we went into a classroom and they're like these are the animals that are in the wildlife in texas if you see any of them do not approach do not go pee outside do not squat down it is snake season people and i was like i have to pee and squat down why why texas and from like canada is it a simulation of uh afghanistan okay so that's okay so you're getting and that's the way the live fire was seen in artilleries like you're trying to simulate certain aspects of what you might actually see in afghanistan i would think so i mean we it it looks like it's hot like it you're out in the middle of nowhere very similar to rain that's the first time we started to get to where our tan boots and our tan like our combat tan stuff before you couldn't wear that so it gave us an opportunity to kind of break in break in how we were going to be doing this what it was going to look like how the guns were going to work and all of those lovely things how do you go from there to being deployed what was the next part of the journey so then we go to wainwright alberta often called or referenced as wayne cock because it sucks so bad it is a massive open space in alberta which most of alberta is and it's outside of a small town called wainwright and it is a field ex training area for all of the canadian military and it's where you do live fire but you also do work up training so you go out there for a month or two i think it is i don't remember the exact time we were there because it was just you sleep in a tent you're in your cot you're in like full mission mode and you go outside and we did this operation called operation maple leaf i think it was and you put on these little suits these uh hap they have haptic uh you can feel when you're shot and then there's a little camera and a sorry screen in the front of it and it's got button options and so it's to mimic if you get shot it'll say gunshot wound and then you have to choose okay do i do this or do i do this and depending on your response person dies or lives and they have other people who aren't on a rotation for deployment come and act as the taliban and attack you in the middle of the night is there a good understanding of the tactics that the taliban used to attack i mean this may be fast forwards to our conversation a little bit but is there a strategies on the other side that are being used in afghanistan by the taliban by the taliban ieds suicide bombers uh vehicle-born ieds um their their standard way to hit people really was ieds and vehicle board ieds suicide bombers they'd put um like backpacks full of an ied and then put like toys around it and then just be like so they will conceal it certain ways and probably use civilians oh 100 yeah and women were a great way to get close to the soldiers because women seem non-threatening when you see a burka walk up to you you're not expecting an ak-47 to roll out of that and then or you know but they're they're great ways to get clothes okay so what is wayne something wing cock no that's not how wayne right so let's go to alberta okay okay so i mean we don't have to go to alberta nobody wants to no let's in our minds in our imagination so okay so that's getting you closer to afghanistan right uh what what was that like i mean are you getting anxious at this point is there a build up what are you thinking or is it just all part of the training for me it was more part of the training i was i was excited to go because i did know that we were going to do some live fire i did know that we were going to be doing more of the military type job i i thought we were going to be doing because up until that point i had just done training so i was learning how to march and salute and who to salute and not salute like that was the focus of that was my experience of the military and then the next experience was sitting in a regiment just working out a lot and going for breakfast a lot and drinking like that was so i was like this is the army so when i actually got to go to wayne right i got my first full taste of okay well there's fire picket duty so one person gets picked every night to you know do sentry there's a little less sleep you're eating out of a canteen now you're drinking a canteen you're in your kit more you're in your deployable kit now you're in your you know you're wearing um your tack vest you're you're getting ready to practice having plates on you're having ammunition on you you've got your weapon with you all the time when you're on base and that can't say in quebec you're you're just like an everyday job maybe you can paint a clear picture to me when was there an understanding that you're actually getting deployed was it just a sense that you're getting deployed or was this officially told to you i was officially told on graduation day you're deploying in april with that hits oh there were okay there's no date they're like they they knew so what had happened is the reason that that could say the unit needed more people so they came to that and they picked five people there was five english-speaking people that went to vacation it wasn't just myself there was a couple other people i knew that were english-speaking that got put on other guns within the regiment i wasn't with any of them we all kind of got split up and so there was an understanding that we were going to always be deploying next year it was like 2009 you're deploying whether you left in may or april we were deploying because that was the rotation time so each canadian unit did between six and nine months and then you knew right around that point another base of individuals would then deploy so you would go on these rotations and so even when i was on my deployment then i was slated to go again the following year but towards the end of the year so there was always a rotation if you were in a combat arms unit and you were in one that was a deployable unit so if you were from edmonton a ppcli which were you know the princess patricia's which were their infantry unit if you were rcr out of uh petawawa ontario you knew you were deploying if you were at vacate you knew you were deploying there's combat arms bases and then there's like naval bases i didn't know their deployment structure i didn't know how they worked i i'm on the ground don't worry about the boats so i didn't know how the air force deployed i knew that can't say it was deploying in april you were going get ready that was that so you show up to afghanistan right what is a combat arms unit looks like what's the situation look like how much chaos is there how much clarity about mission is there what are your feelings about the whole thing so when you leave uh the day you leave we left quebec we got driven to the airport and then we walked onto the tarmac and we load our own bags and we got on a plane and it's just empty it's just it's our plane right and you don't go right to afghanistan you go to a stopover point which i don't know if i'm allowed to say where that is frankly so i just say it's somewhere overseas okay and you go there and you go there for a couple days i think it's like a day or two and that's where you get like your kit that's where you get your bulletproof plates for the first time and realize how heavy those fucking things are it's where you get your your weapon and your ammunition your first few mags it's where you get your helmet and your vests and you get everything that you need while you're there it's pretty nonchalant it's it's hot as hell it's your first time being in that kind of heat so you just never stop sweating the place we were in it's just the second you got out of the shower you were still wet after you got out what the hell is happening it's so humid and i'm like is this going to be like this in afghanistan like no it's not humid there at all i'm like why is this so bad here like it'll be fine don't worry about it so and where we were there it was kind of cute we were like in a base within a base and they had like turf and we had like ice cream and fruit and you could go get on a computer you could go make calls you had showers you had a real bed it was very kind of okay for that point and then you got all your stuff and then okay we're rolling out which is about a five hour flight again my experience with helicopters is mostly uh from uh another arnold schwarzenegger movie the predator i'm not do you want me to say i've never seen it i've never seen it last year yeah no you want to tell the audience the all the uh excellent shows that you mentioned me offline that you watch instead instead of platoon listen yeah that's sex in the city was that more important oh no i've never seen that don't don't put me in that category did you just put me in a box i did i watch like homeland i watch no i watch like i watch a lot of documentaries i watch i like to watch real real things more than than than just film i did a little bit of um film stuff when i got back um into canada and i was like once you're once you've seen how it's made like i don't want to do yeah i mean i'm the same with superhero movies it doesn't i want i want uh i want something closer to reality but then movies like platoon reveal some deep aspect of reality without it i did superman man of steel wait you sorry you you were what do you mean you did i was not a military expert but i was a a stunt expert even though i didn't actually have to do any stunts it's just because i had previous military experience and they were going to have me as an extra as a military person but if you have preview experience they have to make it as like a stunt roll like you get paid more you got it so i got to sit at a desk and i was in that i was in that like you'd see me like for like two seconds so you're what you're saying is you were the mastermind behind that movie for the entire thing you're so accurate okay great your representation of me is just fantastic the combat arms unit right in afghanistan um the ice cream machine what like when you actually get closer and closer to the mission what well when does that happen when i you know got to where we were before we were leaving to get on the plane i don't really really i don't think i realized what the hell i was doing truthfully like you're asking me all these like what did you feel how do you like when i really think about it if i sit there and really think about it i was deploying i was aware i knew what i was going to do i knew my job but once we actually stepped onto that hurt to leave to get into the afghan airspace i think that's when it hit me yeah i think it smacked me in the face so hard and that's when the overwhelming just reality was oh fuck oh oh when they said uh make weapons ready put the barrel to the ground put your helmets on that's when they start flying tactically which means they're going between the mountains that means we're gonna land soon which means if you're flying like this it's because rpgs can hit you so that was my first moment of oh i could like just be shot down right now like i i couldn't i didn't grasp it i was how old was i 19 19 yeah wow okay so that's why i feel bad when i'm trying to explain you because it's hard because i don't know that i actually did grasp it until i was in the air getting ready to land in kandahar was the first time you heard bullets enemy enemy bullets or enemy explosions well when you're in canada when you're in kandahar when you're at cafe there's you're fairly insulated away from the main walls you would hear stuff go off or you would hear the rocket sirens would go off so you would hear though and everyone just kind of got down on the ground and just waited for the all clear and then got back up i didn't hear any actual live fire until i got to the fob it was more just a lot of noise you would hear a lot of helicopters a lot of planes going in and out of the base so there was that sense you could feel the ground shake when they took off but there was that sense you know things were going around things were happening you just weren't far enough you were not close enough to the edges of calf to see it what's uh what's the fob fob is a forward observation base which is a small little base out in the middle of wherever and that's that's uh specific to our artillery that's in general just an observation base from which cramping tree to go in and out of um for armor to go in and out of special ops go in and out of them they fly they'll stop there they'll pick people up or do whatever then they'll go out so it's a forward observation basis is is used essentially to have eyes in that area without having to be doing patrols every five seconds but there's not is it like is there like medics there is oh yeah yeah yeah so it was actual base yeah i was a it's a i don't call it an actual base you sleep in tents and cots and it is the walls are this mesh material that are filled with gravel and that's the walls and then you have towers you had five i think we had five towers because the americans ran four and we ran one and so it was an american fob it's called ramrod and there was a were they marines no i think they were the 101st they were out of their this is where i get dicey because i was moved a lot so when people are like who are you with i'm like i know what their patches looked like i don't know the full ins and outs so i'm working on getting that back so that i can tell it accurately because i believe it deserves that type of respect but that being said i'm still trying to you know wrap my brain around all of this yeah you almost have to go back and do like research to understand the full details of all the things you were experiencing and so i reached out to actually a bunch of people even before i wrote the book and i didn't get a lot of answers well once i did jocko all the people have reached out to me and were like hey and i'm like called you so now i'm work that's why i'm doing the rewrite is i'm working on making sure that things are exact and so there was infantry units going in out of that fob and it was a really tiny fob it was uh run by the americans and then there was a tiny little corner that was the canadian artillery unit and the americans normally it's americans shooting for americans canadian canadians the rest of the regiment that deployed so bravo and charlie they were at canadian fobs massim guard and another one and these were huge fobs ours was this tiny like three kilometer around place and we had this tiny little subsection of it and the rest was so it was like this and then all american here and when we got there we landed the guns were already there so you ripped out the unit before you so those guys were just leaving and we were just replacing them so that we knew the guns they were canadian guns we understood you know how to run those that was fine when we got there though we had come in on chinook and chinooks are super loud and they're like we're hearing protection they don't you're not no that's this is not reality like this is why i'm partially deaf now like that's not real so sorry to take attention but do you usually wear uh ear protection in any aspects of warfare of this whole process you wear comms like you have a com on like in a radio if you're outside the wire oh so comms is that like a bluetooth headset yes it's a bluetooth headset okay no like from nike or like um i was gonna say adidas okay maybe apple was involved at some point i don't know this equipment looked like it was from world war ii so there's comms but is that having ear protection uh like no no and i didn't wear them that's just what some people were people when you were as low as me like we weren't privy to conversation like we were just told what to do and you do it so when you're doing like on the op tower you have a radio you pick up and you call in and then you put the radio down but for a hearing protection i mean i would put in ear plugs but those things are so violently loud that ear plugs they don't do it justice either i feel like when you go shooting there's uh certain kinds of earplugs that you you it blocks out the gut like certain kinds of sounds associated with guns and you can still hear other types of stuff so the ones they issued us were these big things that had like a headpiece like here but you have to wear your helmet when you're firing right so you can't have both on okay so how much are you aware of the logistics of the whole thing that's always fascinating with warfare like in terms of setting up you mentioned gravel and the fobs like setting all those bases up were you seeing any of this or again it's a 19 year old kind of just well it's not that i was oblivious that's the one thing i would say i wasn't i was i'm very aware of my surroundings that's something that's always been taught to me from a very early age because i traveled a lot with my dad in the truck and so my dad would be like you're gonna go into that bathroom and i'm gonna watch you come out and you're gonna watch everyone around you because people get kidnapped like that's just the reality i was always very paranoid so so you're paying attention to surroundings but the fob was already built up when we got there okay this is already like well-established basis already like there's there's established enough all right and that is one of the first times you've heard actual fire yeah that was like the i mean i heard it on the when we when we shoot when we you know zero in weapons and we do all that stuff but i had never heard it heard it like that before and then you would see the the the guys the americans would roll out every day and go on patrol and come back look back and so you would see them you would hear them they would tell the stories those types of things but i never experienced it because we never we never got attacked like our base never got hit we were really lucky that way there were other ones around us that were getting hit but we weren't we weren't getting hit so we were very fortunate um at least we didn't get hit when i was there i believe the entry got there was an attempt there was an attempt at some point in a past but i i wasn't privy to that but we were in the op towers so we had to do our own security but because we were such a small subset of canadians and we always had to have people running the guns and ready to run the guns at all times we only had to man one tower so you would do four hour shifts with a fire team partner in the tower depending on whatever but you do it every day so i would look out into the the rest of afghanistan at that opportunity otherwise it was just like your walls what did it look like is it beautiful just the full landscape or is it where i was there was mountains in the distance it was just very sandy very flat and there was a couple small compounds on the outside it wasn't a lot to look at there was a long road that you knew that got hit all the time there wasn't a lot to look at such a strange place to be the center of superpowers over the decades it really is like and and the fact that the populace the civilians are almost completely clueless to the full history of things in terms of globally the geopolitics of it all yeah well if you look at the location of it right on a map it makes more sense right you can wrap your brain around it but i met plenty of people who had never even seen a picture of themselves when i was in that country so i mean how much more are they going to understand if they don't know what even exists outside you tell a small story of taking a picture of a girl and showing it to her an afghani girl yeah we were i was with the british at that time and we were on that operation that gets highlighted quite a bit and uh we had stopped and we the icom radios were pinging and icon radios are a radio that we have an interpreter on that the taliban basically we can hear what they're saying it's their coms it's us tapped in when it's really clear they're close when it's scatty and it's they're far enough away normally you know they're not planning an attack although you never know really and we we were going door-to-door kind of like what they're doing now and we were pulling people out of their houses and we knew there were there was people in there that were active taliban and we knew the icons were pinging when we got in there they had hidden all the women and kids and locked them inside the house because often nowadays women the women they would hide things on them that they shouldn't have because no one would be ever there to search them because there isn't a lot of women on the front lines but i got borrowed to go specifically search women and children so they had me and one of the little girls kind of snuck out and was kind of sitting near me and i was eating something and i had like these little these little candies they're called little sweeties the british have them in the ration packs i don't know they're good though and she saw me eating them and so i gave them to her and then her brother came over and slapped her upside the head and took him from her so then i just went over and slapped him upside the head and just pointed my gun at her while she ate them all yeah because i was like no yeah like you can have these i'm gonna stand here and make sure you do and i remember asking can i take a picture with her i asked the trip can you ask her can i take a picture with her um and she was very confused and when you look at the photo you see her face she's very stunned she's very stunned and it was a wasn't my camera it was my officer's camera it was a hot pink like fluorescent pink camera so i pulled this like huge pink thing and i'm like let's take a picture like and so she stood there and took a picture but then she grabbed the camera because i flipped it and showed it to her and her eyes got huge and she grabbed it she ran inside and they're like oh that's gone forever like that's it's over for you and then she came out and she kind of snuck out and i went in and grabbed it and the mom lifted up her burger and was showing me that she like shaved her legs to be more western and i was just at that moment i don't know that i could have realized how much that moment affected me how much of how much that moment would affect me later on in my life until it's been later on in my life yeah there's little like glimmers like that in uh in parts of the world that are basically you're taking away everything from the populace like freedoms and and so on and when they um when you see that glimmer of humanity like yeah shaved legs or or or like using technology for the first time it's magic or like food being presented with certain kinds of foods that you've never tried i mean right you want to see true like joy of discovery is you bring basically the american supermarket anything from it to most parts of the world and they i just i mean i remember even i mean we weren't like in poverty in russia just poor but just the supermarket was full of joy i thought i could just die happy in an american supermarket when i first saw it and how old were you when you came here 13. did you speak english yeah not well i thought i was i never was good at languages so i it was very much like why would i need to learn another language okay it was that attitude it was very like doesn't i don't know well no i think culturally in not in america but everywhere else in the world it's constantly kind of seen it's a good thing to do to learn other languages because especially english because it's like that's the language of the world right and i i just thought like um i don't need english to discover the beauty of the world like what this doesn't like i enjoy life i enjoy soccer i enjoy i mean i don't remember what else i enjoyed in life but math like why do i need english for this so that kind of attitude got me in a lot of trouble when i came here because i i couldn't reluctant yeah but also just couldn't speak well and when you move 13 years old as middle school you get made fun of a lot you get bullied and all those kinds of things which in retrospect is a very positive thing because it makes you harder i thought being russian would make be like hard enough no well me everyone is different i mean the part of the russian thing is uh it's kind of you know i'm joking because if you know me i admire being hard i admire fighting and these kinds of things right these um what would you call them struggle in all of its forms martial arts wrestling all those kinds of things but i'm all ultimately like i'm so much about love like i'm clearly sensitive to the world in some weird genetic way that um it was important for me to harden up when i when i came here and i was in love with people and it's like and everybody's being mean to me and it's like what that it's like it's a little like like slap like oh okay like it's not like life is not often fair and then that's when for me personally everybody has has different journeys of hardship that are much much more difficult like your story is much more difficult uh is you know i started to read a lot it's like something happens some kind of challenge where you start to think about the world start to think about yourself that that can ultimately create really interesting minds it can break some people it can create interesting minds and uh to be weeded out i thought we talked and then they it's about this yeah the strong will survive the week will die off yeah now you're talking uh russian to me i'm not speaking russian i'm just giving solid life advice just be harder and then everyone will be fine uh yeah this is your inner david goggins coming out real quick here okay the fob yeah and then i was just explaining to you that the way it is run you're gonna love this when we walked up to those tents for the first time the people that were there before us left us a noose i have a photo of it like it's a like hanging from the tent like at the front of the tent like welcome so you were also mentioning like the the dark humor of it it was is it basically a funny joke correct yeah it was funny at first that's pretty funny it was funny during the time now when i look back at it i was like come on and that was a poo i mean i get it because they had already been there and like so i afterwards i can see how it's funny um now with like the suicide epidemic in the veteran community now i'm like i don't post that photo really so doesn't that dark humor still somehow help even when you're considering suicide doesn't it some of it somehow somehow yeah it's like you're not hiding it it's it's like humor is one of the way to reveal reveal the reality of abuse of suffering if you look at there's this photo that generates around right around suicide prevention month which is september and it's always like a photo of like robin williams and bourdain and all of these other individuals who were comedians who all took their lives and they're all smiling and they're like this is the face of depression there's a way our brains work where humor is a necessary part of survival whether it's used for joyous things or it's used for ways to cope through life for me the military humor was one of the things that helped get me through and it still does to this day frankly because humor humor makes some of the horrific things i say not seem so horrific and people can digest it rather than being like you need to be locked up somewhere yeah that's why i mean one one of the aspects of russian humor there's a darkness to it because um through it reverberates all the the millions of people who died right it seems like the only way to make sense of it is to joke about it i i still love it because if you don't it'll break you yeah something like that or also humor is just seems to be the highest form of us humans in the human experience it just seems it seems to somehow uh accumulate the full thing the absurdity of it the unfairness of it the because like ultimately all the suffering is like it's all just apes fighting for power and love and somehow torturing each other in the process hello podcast listener lex here quick intermission to say that some of the names in the following story have been silenced out to protect their privacy the story of and witnessing i think your first somebody you met somebody you saw somebody you began to be close with his life him dying can you tell the story sure that's uh no problem i will tell you that i have i'm gonna leave some of the names out of the people because uh they have reached out and asked that i do such i've also been informed of other things i forgot that happened during the thing that were way worse than i thought so i'll i'll try to uh add those in as because that's new information to me because my brain has blocked it out but i've been i've been told which is good because it's better detail um so we were we were doing a movement that morning and we were going from uh compound to compound i was never told what we were doing i knew what my job was i didn't know the operational overview i didn't i didn't know who we were looking for i wasn't there for that my job was specifically to look after the women and children and to provide support if need be and when you have certain people so the i.e the bomb dog handler and the bomb dog and then you have the medics and then you have like a female searcher that there's only one of those in each unit or if if there's even one in each unit i got passed between units so that they could have access to me for for both and we were kind of sitting and we were waiting for the all clear to move and at that time the the compound wall i was leaning up against i had my back up against i wasn't facing the direct direction where actually blew up i was had my back to it and i had happened to turn and look to the left and on the right hand side across the road of where we were leaned up against was another compound two stories high people inside a sniper on the roof and a spotter there was a handful of us on this wall and in front of me there was a road the road went straight that compound's here there's another road here on the right-hand side in front of it and then this road went along here and this was a wide open space just a huge we hate those you hate those because it's too much space it's too easy it's like fish in a barrel you don't want to be in that field um because there's too much line of sight line of sight could be ieds it could be it could be it could be anything and so uh when i was leaning up against the wall we'd send a couple people ahead to go and clear the road so that we could all go along it and then clear the gray pup off to the left hand side we are doing that because they use those locations to put ieds so that when you're going to search it it's just it's a better chance of you blowing into a million pieces essentially why they love that put bombs in small places send people into small places small places go boom they paint the walls so we were just kind of sitting and waiting and then i turned happened to turn i was looking in that direction and i heard the ground shake before i even realized what i was seeing with my own eyes the ground shook and i saw a big piece of a body i think it was the torso just kind of fly through the air and land into the field and as soon as that happened all hell broke loose it was like the they were sitting and watching and waiting and they do that and i say they mean the taliban they do that they they love that because then they can record it for propaganda and they can use it against us and they just love being able to take take our people out and we had the interpreter sitting beside me and he had the icon radio on and as soon as the blast went off i heard just the scream i heard it and i knew what that meant but i couldn't i didn't understand what was about to happen i couldn't i couldn't wrap my brain around what was about to happen because i had never been outside the wire and people are like people say to me now they're like no there's no way that shit's true there's no way that she was involved in that and then that and then and that and then in that well let me explain i was one person i was being passed around to units i was with a ton of different people i had no comms and i was just being told where to go um and i just happened to be like a shit hit the fan magnet it felt like and then i found out later it was not just me it was all of us were getting it so that made me feel better because then i was like well that i have a lot of survivors guilt that's like a thing that's still stuck with me i've worked through a lot of shit but survivor's guilt that's a big one for me certain food is a big one for me um [Music] yeah uh skin on food so like chicken with skin on it oh just because of the biology of death just well when you hold people's bodies and your hands with no gloves on you know what that feels like when you touch raw meat again it's the same thing that's what that feels like when when there's a dying or dead body well my friend was blown into a million pieces so i just had pieces of him so there was no there was no differentiator of like this was his thigh or this was his torso or there was like there was none of that there was only one instance with the boot but um but i i what i i at that point we had been in some fire fights and we had been taking some rounds but it was more like take around we you know get hit and then we duck into a compound we would set up and then we'd be firing i wasn't i wasn't really involved in a lot of the firefights until after this after that the rest of the week i was like i was angry and i wanted them all to go and i wanted to be in every position to take them out myself so i put myself in every position so i made sure i was on the roof i made sure i was there i made sure if hey you need something i'll fucking run it i don't care if i die anymore because as soon as that happened my light switch went off it didn't matter anymore to me can you go through what happens yeah you were hearing these screams yeah so the id went off and what had happened was they put an ied inside of a grape hut and the gray putt has rectangular wall um rectangular holes in the wall and there's just like one door and it's this tall mud hut with just all these like holes in it and they had put an ied underneath a pile of sticks and had a a metal detector the brits carry them i've never seen i think other countries have them but i've only ever seen them use it and that's how we were kind of detecting if there was an id we must have hid it the sticks or something and set it off and it just it was over he there's no way he felt anything and then there was another guy at the door bent down on one knee and he was facing and kind of watching for and then the blast hit him on this side and so it took him out and pulled his kid off pulled his helmet pulled everything off fucked him all up big time this is one ied yeah but it was in a contained area and he was in the doorway up and out can you explain what an ied is and how does it work i can do my best uh they're improvised explosive devices they can be used pretty much out of anything to make anything so um garbage when we got to afghanistan they did the id meeting with us they're like these are what we're finding that they would show us diffused ieds so they would see those big blue drums filled with gasoline buried in the ground you would see a wire it would go to a pressure plate you hit the pressure plate that would hit that and it would go you would see ieds some of them were ridiculous the inju in the uh the engineering that went into some of these was hilarious because they were thinking they were thinking to use everything they could there was a cigarette pack they had used they lined the inside with tin foil and when you stepped on the tin foil it had a piece of wire it was enough of a spark to set off a line of batteries that we had thrown out that were all dead when you fuse them all together there was enough juice to make it go then they would attach that to like like phosphorus or gasoline or whatever they could that would make a big boom they would use um yeah that's why you never kick garbage on the ground you'll never see me kick something on the ground you'll see me walk around it always if i ever see a pile of rocks or something that looks like it shouldn't be there i won't walk near it even now because they use that pile of rocks to remind people there's something there we don't know what that means but we know that something's there and very often they would use anything garbage wires we were very we had to burn everything for a reason it's so terrifying to not for the source of death to be like little parts of the environment and then people that don't look like that they're not dressed as soldiers like civilians and like regular because then you when you have to come back or even there is you're just surrounded by danger and then you distrust everything essentially that's the problem and that's why you have such ptsd issues with the soldiers we have now because you're in the environment in which it's very similar so so there's this one ied so this one ied i i still don't know what it was um went off my body flew the guy at the door um he kicked out he was all broken and bleeding and a mess um at that point the radio started going crazy like i could hear the guys yelling and screaming trying to figure it out and then you could hear the numbers being called k.i.a number number number number i don't know anybody's service number i i don't know what's going on next you know mortar rounds start like coming down and like live fire starts happening and i'm like holy fuck things are popping off and i remember just looking at him being like we need to go we need to go now and i just got this like like i was i was like we're going and they're like hold on burns and i'm like we're fucking going like i wasn't dealing with it well and they're like all right all right go go go go go go so we went and we um and i helped out with that other individual kind of held him down started doing medic work on him and he just kept saying where's where's where's he was in such a state of shock i've never seen somebody's eyeball so big in my life she's like where's where's where's the guy he's good buddy he's good he's good picture like a super thick scottish accent though because these guys were just oh and when they talk fast it's even worse and then so i ran over and we we jumped down into the ditch along the side of the road because the road hadn't been cleared and we're running through these tall they look like cannabis plants but they're not but it there's it's just very thick bush and i felt like i was running in slow motion so if you picture one of your video games where like the tunnel vision and you're just you can hear your breathing it's like that and you're running and you can't move fast enough and you're like trying to get there and we hit the road and the rounds are coming down and mortars are coming down and they're like okay on three run so we run on three and we run into the compound i mean into the great putt and i remember looking around and very seriously going where is he just genuinely asking i think it was been messaging me he's been incredible he's one of the best soldiers i've ever served with he was a higher up so he was running part of this he he's messaged me and he was giving me some information and um he's like i was in there with you and he goes i remember because you handed me the boot and because i walked over and i all the rounds were like we were being shot at mortars were coming down but it was this slow motion and i remember walking over to the hole in the ground and seeing his boot in the ground but it was his leg was still hanging like uh but just below his knee was still in it but the boot was perfectly laced up like the boot was fine and i just i held it and i turned and i looked at the guys and i was like we could reuse the boot no that wasn't even what is what is that was that was that actually an intelligent attempt at humor or was it some kind of deeply lost like you were completely just lost i think my brain broke i think my that's the moment i call my light switch went off did you understand that he was dead at that point like intellectually you were just something is it just broke no emotion like it just broke it just shattered it shattered i felt it happen i felt i didn't feel i didn't feel anything it just broke and at that moment because later there's some anger almost at that moment none of that i couldn't comprehend what happened i knew he wasn't there anymore because they looked at me and said what's here is here start grabbing pieces we need to fucking move and so um i handed the boot over they took it and then i started just grabbing anything out of the walls because those little rectangulars just had flesh hanging from it and i didn't have my gloves on um suddenly used them to search and um so you want to bring everything back this is what even if they're dead do you want to save save those you served with yeah because they deserve that they don't deserve to have a piece of them drugged behind a truck for propaganda it's not it's not fair what are the others i mean was there just a focus on mission or was there a panic no panic with these guys these guys are the most switched on motherfuckers i've ever seen in my life they we started grabbing and reminding me he said you know you uh that's how he goes when people say that's the worst part of your day that wasn't even the worst part of the day do you remember when you handed me the bag of intestines no no i do though thank you for that so there's parts you don't even they're just not they don't register because i had some people contact me and be like you didn't tell it right and war is subjective and war is from your perspective and war is messy and horrific and war is graphic and violent and painful your brain remembers what it wants to remember and your brain allows you to remember what it allows you to remember and there's reasons that you don't remember everything and so we were getting we were really getting hit we were getting it was bad and some of the guys machine gunners had come up to cover fire and i know uh we were calling in for air support to come pick up the guys uh because they had to go and we we just collected everything we could but i did remember screaming like we didn't get them all we didn't get them all there's no way we got them all we did not fucking get them all and i remember one of the guys looking at me like we got him we got him i'm like we didn't fucking get him we didn't get him like no we got him and i couldn't say it enough and so i grabbed as much as i could i i i slung one of their weapons and it was just a twisted heap and i had his helmet helmet someone else's helmet in my arm and then i had um my weapon in front of me and i was carrying it and then we we piled everything we had onto a stretcher those things are super fucking flimsy anyway and there was a couple guys in front of us and there was a couple behind me and i was kind of in the middle and we we said okay we're just gonna have to run we're gonna have to fucking run the road we're gonna just have to run it just chance it so we ran it and that was the close well that was i guess not the closest but it felt like it was the closest i could hear the the whiz of the rounds going by me it's a weird noise when they're coming at you then when you're leave they're leaving you and so they that slowed everything down for me and then one of the guys accidentally dropped the edge of the stretcher and everything fell off into the ditch and then we had to go back down and get it back up and so we kept running and we finally got back into the compound that that sniper was sitting off on the right-hand side and we got all in there and i know the i think said there was two flights i only thought there was one but apparently there was two flights so he went on one his body went on one and then i think i think he said went on the other and um and then they took off and then when they leave though they reign held down on anything they can see on the ground and that is a beautiful sight because they had mortar rounds coming down and it just it was getting really really bad and then as soon as the blackhawks took off all of a sudden it just stopped and went quiet like deafening quiet and we were sitting inside the compound and i one of the medics looked at me and you could see and i still do it now and i'm working on not doing it but i do it when i get really overwhelmed because i didn't have any gloves on i had blood all over my hands and just like body and stuff so he came over and he just gave me like sanitizer and i started rubbing rubbing and so i rub i do this when i'm stressed i'll rub my hands um and i still can't i still can't do i i still can't eat food with skin on it and i can't like like salmon and stuff like i can't anything with skin i can't touch it and like if i'm making meat at home like for my husband and my son like i have like meat gloves and then i have like a fork and a knife and i'm like cutting it like i never touch it i can't touch it so there's something almost like um the texture of the biology of a human flesh that just that's at the level of that's the level of your trauma yeah and it's been i mean it's 2021 this was an 09 and i've worked on this like and i mean i i've been in like treatment religiously just to be able to keep me alive for this this decade and so it's not like it's like oh i've never you never tried to get better it's like i never used to leave my house i used to call people that look like that horrific names in public i used to want to kill people on a regular basis i'm a fairly happy individual now what about so you're you're talking about sort of skin and parts and but there's also just the fact that we're mortal and there's somebody close to you who dies do you watch walk up and then never come back out again yeah it's like you're facing mortality in a very real way and if and uh in a way that's not the same as somebody dying from cancer in the hospital although it has echoes of that because that's also absurd and like it doesn't feel like there's justice to it in any kind of way but it's so sudden like have you been able to um make sense of that of your feelings about it like how do you feel about it or or is everything just shrouded in this like trauma that you're not able to just um feel for the loss of a human being like mourn the loss of a human being i think i had when he when i realized he wasn't there when i realized that he um that was the i that was what was left of him i found out afterwards there was other parts that were outside and and went back i think i think he said went back and they got they end up getting the rest of him so that made me happy because i just found this out this week uh so that that mean so that means you have a feeling like you still feel like parts of them were left behind yeah on the ramp ceremony when i lost my mind literally i i lost my mind and i was screaming that he wasn't all in there i'm happy now knowing that he was but i held on to that for ten years yeah this um yeah the sandbags like like it's the bulk of the weight is is not from human flesh yeah he was a young kid too it was i think it was his first deployment as well like he was he was a young kid and he was just just going to clear the road for the rest of us right like not like you know you're in war and you know that you're outside the wire and you know things could happen you understand that to the extent you can understand that when it's happening it's something very different also maybe you can correct me but um there's something much more like brutal about an ied it's very vicious versus like a bullet because a bullet you still like watching somebody close to you die from a bullet you still get the basic humanity like so ied basically converted a human being into sort of parts by biological parts a cheese crater yeah versus yeah i mean i don't that's that's tough that's tough because it's like um because it's hard for you to remember them as a human you remember them as parts for me that's how i remember him i would like to i've i have a picture that i post every year about them i see that but i don't put two and two to get does that make sense yeah no it does so i even i listening to your story and you know um thank you for sharing it first of all but uh it's not my it's well i'm just the one to tell it i was just involved one one set of eyes on this particular human being um but even i get angry i can't tell if it's exhaustion or anger i'm sorry i look always exhausted oh that's okay you're you're into robotics isn't that like your guys's thing you guys are just always working i think because i feel so much for the world i just don't do we were talking about resting bitch face earlier i just don't feel the need to maintain um all the effort of the musculature for presenting myself to you visually exhausting it's exhausting so i just focus on the feeling no hey and then let the face show whatever the hell it shows fair enough okay was there anger was there hate yes can you just talk to your feelings of what you remember yeah so after that operation with the british i went back to the canadians and i didn't go back as even remotely close to who i was when i left and that was really troublesome for a lot of people around me because the level of anger and hate that came out of me was palpable when i just walked by um i got shockingly quiet and you understand how you're learning that'd be terrified if you were quiet and i don't know if hate and anger do that justice i don't know another word but i don't think those two words do it justice to the extent that i was feeling like i got to a point when i got attacked by a woman um with some scissors like the i the idea crossed my mind like i could boot stomp her to death and not feel anything about it in front of her all of her family and her kids was it more like just not recognizing the basic humanity or was it legit hatred no it was legit hatred but also i no longer saw those people as humans yeah it took one event and when that happened the rest of the operation that was echoed in my in the way i was to those people but to what level can you see those people as human so this is where well like this is where like jocko shut down um i still think i'm right there's a dire straight song called uh brothers in arms and um actually anyway we're fools to make war on our brothers and arms and i brought that up to jocko because it's humans on both sides correct but he said not in iraq like to him he's like no that's the enemy these are people who use the civilians they rape they torture they they'll do anything and they put evil into the world and then it's like so there there stood on at that moment like the these two were humans and it's politicians waging war and it's it's kids on both sides but then jack was like no he's not wrong so which can you carry both things with you as a soldier i think when i was a soldier i could only carry one thing with me i think my perspective has changed drastically but not because i've lost the reality that they are the enemy but i've i've gained my humanity back again and that's what i lost when i was there i lost all humanity i lost all hope for humanity he's not wrong when he says the taliban or like he was in iraq but for me the taliban are evil i still hold a spot of hatred for them that could set this building on fire you you don't i don't know that anybody can fully understand that when you watch what they do to women and do kids and they do it in the name of god they are the enemy they are less than they don't exist they're barely worth the bullets we put into them but then because they use civilians dicey so like then everybody uh it becomes the enemy and how are you supposed to make sense of that like what um but here lex you can't make sense of it this is why they've done a really good job of blending into the civilian population they've done it intentionally they've done it on purpose so they're brilliant this is why you guys couldn't beat them this is why we couldn't fucking beat them they use their people so effectively they have no shame in that they have no issue with that they take no qualms with wiping a kid off the face of the earth if it means they can get close enough to a soldier to throw a fucking bomb into their tank this is why they're affected how do you beat them then is this there's no winning that you just basically do policeman type work or you do your best i mean that's one way so the other is uh you come from the artillery background a fucking hellfire missile yeah the whole place off the face there you can't beat radicalism like that right now the problem is is we've we've let it go unchecked we had it kind of in check for 20 years we just shot ourselves in the foot the chest and the face so the the problem with uh force is it creates long-term hate because young kids in propaganda and like propaganda works so you you see your father your brother died because of a bomb it's very easy to convince that person that they died because of evil americans and tell whatever story you want about america or canada russia that's the biggest problem so it seems like there got to be better solutions because um i mean i talk about love but it's it's honestly basically uh figuring out sneaky ways of empowering women of educating people of like yes and like and not in a not a cheesy way but not realistic like like in the same level of like mass warfare but with love so you're talking about darpa budgets dod budgets but like do that where you educate and empower women by force they want to learn right i mean you're not like forcing anybody you're setting them free that's exactly it like combat flip-flops does this they do this they give literacy they teach girls to read nothing else to read because as soon as you can read you know what that happened you know what happens then what's combat flip-flops that's the scarf right there that's made in afghanistan so when you buy something from them the proceeds go to literacy in afghanistan for girls they've given literacy to 800 girls over there yeah they're really cool uh griff owns the one he was army ranger and his buddy but lee i think is his name they were on shark tank a long time ago but they um they do shoes and i think they're called schmongs chamongs i don't know how to say it properly built in afghanistan yes and then the proceeds go back there they do great work for literacy and you know as well as anyone if you can teach someone to read good color dark like your soul x matches you on the inside just on the inside all right the outside is just the it's just the suit i feel like you think that's your suit of armor but i feel like it's it's there all right i think there is room if you teach education the problem is we've taken a massive step backwards i know that the taliban have just instituted uh this week honor killings will be back stonings are back and um uh dismemberment as well holly mckay is the reporter that's been reporting that from the ground she's still there the way to pull people in my opinion out of something like that is through education well we just took all of that away which is pretty horrific in my opinion because you've taught over 20 years you're perfectly right lex when you say that hate and violence won't work it won't because you see dad get killed on the battlefield well that 14 year old little boy is going to pick up an ak-47 and go avenge dad's death that's just the way it's going to be well we think about it you were there for 20 years there's a couple of generations in there there's another generation that's either grown up in this or has seen enough of this so they're always going to be a subset that think that we're the enemy and fair we haven't done always the greatest things but the one thing that we have done that i did participate in was giving literacy giving girls an opportunity letting them know that you aren't second-class citizens you can do things too and that's why we have to look at war differently there's times for violence oh ho ho there is time for violence and there is time for missiles and there is time for detainees and there's times for bag and tags and double taps of the fucking face there's times for all of that but there needs to be more time to educate the problem is you can't educate if you're in a country where their culture doesn't believe in that you're fighting so many different things that you it's an almost an impossible situation when you look at the 20 years in afghanistan and we just pulled out there's a sudden pull out of troops what do you think about those 20 years uh well let me ask a hard question which is uh was it worth it going into afghanistan and you're sort of you're one person my limited capacity you have experienced specific set of extremely difficult things you've met a lot of humans you understand certain aspects of the way this war is carried out but if you zoomed out at the big story like you like history too when you think of the history 100 years from now we look at uh the invasion of afghanistan i don't even think you need to go far that back to know that it was we went in on false pretenses we did we that's not that's not a good start what's that saying future behavior is um a good was it past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior right so i struggle with that because when i first found out that the pull-up was going to happen i um i got really angry because my government skated the whole situation because he he's having a snap canada's having a snap election it's happening on the 20th so that was beautifully planned by my government to hold no accountability zero accountability and um the media won't talk about it they reached out to me to do an interview about afghanistan and then i told them what was going on after i talked to my people that were on the ground and then they canceled the interview when you say my government is america any better at this that like it feels like there's no accountability no no the government no the american government is a is a dumpster fire i'm not saying i'm not saying that but what i am saying is at least they sent people to pull people or pull some people we sent no one to pull anyone and i know for a fact because i helped move a family i was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to help move a high-value nine-person family out of that country that worked in the government that worked in prosecuting the taliban that were on the top of the list i learned really quickly the ins and outs of things and i'm really disgusted by it i learned that canada had the one email address that all canadian afghani or visa holders were supposed to email ottawa put two people on that email address that's confirmed canada put no more than 70 people on the ground for that pull out and they were not allowed to leave the airport and they left well before the pull-out date they left on the thursday before the tuesday that was the 31st there were high value canadian visa holders that are still in that country that are on the top of the kill list canada's not doing anything about it um i'm disgusted in the way my government has acted because number one there's an active lawsuit with veterans against the supreme court of canada right now um we are leaving our vets and our canadians stranded over there and we are leaving the vets that have been maimed by this war in canada um they're turned down for everything i've been turned down for hearing loss they're saying it's not military related i they have pis follow me it's this is normal behavior there's a veteran named brock who was told by trudeau in a meeting that after he lost his leg he was just trying to get a new a new prosthetic because it was just killing him trudeau stood up in a meeting and said you're just asking for too much less than six months later he gave 10.4 million dollars to an afghan terrorist that was in the canadian prison system he won and got 10.4 of our million taxpayer dollars so i don't know that american government's any better but what i do know is that the absolute fucking machines of human beings that stepped outside of the chain of command to pull my family out for me i know they were there the british that stayed on the ground that i could contact to literally confirm my biometric data and passports to get that family moved they weren't there that family would still be there that three-year-old that got the shit kicked out of him by the taliban that i was trying to ex-fill canada left him what what is it about politicians and governments not willing to um do their job well doing not willing to do that was a big part of the job which is like you send people to war these are heroes and then you should spend most of the time repaying the debts to those right well what is it about why can't we because we're disposable numbers and we hire them out of high school when they're stupid enough to understand what they're going to get themselves into and then we blame it on themselves for making that decision by volunteering yeah but i mean that that doesn't this still doesn't make sense so it's a cop-out i mean trudeau would i feel like he is a good human being that wants to do good for i mean i tend to i want to believe that leaders want to do good by the heroes of this world and it doesn't like i i don't understand the system of delusion you have to live in to not understand who the heroes are like i refuse to believe trudeau is somehow a bad person you haven't met him though i don't actually i'm speaking about trudeau without knowing but i mean in general think that way about leaders i just think they surround themselves by people who delude them who like they're yes people who yes people that lead them into a kind of reality that uh becomes detached from actual reality and so they they misunderstand the priorities of this world they think maybe some kind of special interest they focus on that versus like the humans if you look back was there a way we could have done something uh better in afghanistan assuming we do the invasion so is it ultimately about taking care of the veterans um like investing more money in the um education of women and liberating people who are uh suffering injustice in those parts of the world like what what's the better way to do it and one other aspect is on the u.s side paid over six trillion dollars for them for the wars in the middle east since 9 11. so the financial side as well is there something you can comment on things we could have done better that's a loaded question because you're talking to someone who had no hand in what happened other than do this and do that so i can go from my perspective which is there was probably plenty of things that we could have been doing better um i think there was a lack of leadership from the get-go i think the preparation that the canadian military gave me was nowhere sufficient for a deployment of that level mind you things happened they didn't realize things would happen but yet they happen with little to absolutely no cultural idea was that i was walking into um like when the man one male in the family grabbed the back of my vest because my hair was tucked in he thought it was a man going into a room with a bunch of women i couldn't understand why he was attacking me there was no real breakdown of this is what you're going into this is the culture this is why they do what they do this is how they do it um this is how you should handle a situation like that there was none of that and something i speak about frequently and i think it's important to acknowledge is when you're doing any of that training we are giving none of our soldiers proper mental health training tools in that fucking toolbox or ways or things to look for on their body because we've created a system and a problem where if you say that you're ill or that you're struggling with ptsd you're done no one's going to say that they're going to keep struggling with it and that's when you get loose cannons when you get problems happen so you get fractures start to happen in leadership and that's being seen and has been seen now for a while so in terms of what we could have done say for a better um a better way to go into the country a better way to help the country i can't speak to that as much as i wish i could because i don't know that i would have all the answers um what about withdrawal oh my god that's a cult do you think grab more gradual well you think it's you think it's better to maintain presence there for indefinitely like i don't know about that but i do know we have bases we i say weeks i serve with them americans have bases in japan americans have bases in korea americans have bases in germany there's reasons there's bases everywhere there's a smart there there's an intellectual way to look at this you want to be able to have eyes and ears you can't have eyes and ears when you do things like you just did the way that we pulled out of that country that's right the way that i hate saying american british because it puts like a blame on them i say we because i'm a soldier i i'm a nato soldier the way we pulled out of that country my five-year-old could have done it better he could have said mommy why are we not keeping that bagram base mommy why are we not keeping that base just until we get everyone else that we need why are we going to a civilian airport that we don't control that we don't understand mommy why are we doing this when there's only one road to it my five-year-old would have that conversation with me it was so poorly done it was so poorly executed and no fault of the soldiers on the ground on their own my god i can tell you there's operators i just call him a i don't say who he is because he's told me not to there's a guy named a and there's another guy named r and there's a few other named d and these guys they gave everything to try to pull my family when no one else would pull my family for me they just got me on the phone and said i don't know who the fuck you're talking to i don't know how many people you're trying to get a hold of here but you've got everyone looking for your family six i've gone to everyone i know i've done stuff on instagram i've got a contact the contact called me i called them i got i was handling this family and when they call you and say we can't go back to the gate my three-year-old just got beat up by the taliban and they say what do we do now i'm in vancouver why am i being left to deal with this why is the civilian and ex-military population being left to deal with this why was this not thought out we knew this was coming we knew the time frame yeah i ultimately blame it it almost starts at the top oh is it the leadership sorry this is the civilian leadership uh i don't i think probably the generals know the right thing to do here um even if they're sometimes overzealous in terms of being wanting to increase i think the great generals understand what's needed and then it takes great leadership on the civilian side to listen to the generals and understand that war is not just about like it's not binary yeah and it's not about the invasion and saying mission accomplished you know like it's it's not about the pr it's about um like the full complexity of geopolitics can i ask you this can ask me whatever you want i'm looking at a book that you gave me do the fucking work it's very motivating good fucking design advice that's their company called good fucking design advice that's great i know they're great website because good gfda okay so the f is the f is uh for friendship something like that they are a design company they've worked with apple and nike and this is their book it's been published by harpercollins and it is really just uh it's an incredible they're an incredible company they they're they're artistically like they're a design company so you can see that um you can see it's a design company oh yeah they signed it for you and uh the pages are beautiful but it's they have a saying and then a paragraph about each saying get fucking started obstacles are fucking opportunities fail fail and fucking fail again right ask for fucking help show some fucking passion finish the fucking job that's right so we should send that to biden so i um she said that i didn't say it lex said it i didn't say it lex said it i'll say it i should also send it to trudeau as well so but i mean he probably won't know how to read it he just taught drama instead so i'll send it to the previous four presidents how about that that's fine we can also send it to them too because they're all just as much at fault so and they most of them have all the same last names but okay let me tell you about them quickly because we did a mug with them and i was really excited about it not because it was a mug i'm a mug person but you are that's your bug obsessed i'm obsessive about my mugs what's your favorite mug currently it's mine right now the one that i have with them okay the gm what does it say is it can i do you want me to read what it says on yeah please okay because i'm really happy about it because we created this with them with gfda i found out about them because my husband's office atlas neck brace he had his very first office he had one of their prints done and it was their original like do the fucking work and i was really excited about them once i found out because i'm like well uh fuck is my middle name and i want to make sure that i am going to whoever i work with i want to make sure that i'm working with people that i believe in that i believe what they stand for and i just think they're brilliant so i got on the phone with them and i said hi i would like you to sponsor my podcast and they said cool what's your podcast and i was like it's called brass immunity uh podcast and i want to work with you guys somewhere and they're like okay so like what are you thinking and i said you know i'm i'm looking to do i would love one day to do something with you i don't know what it would be but i would like it to be something and they said you know we do like we have this book but we also have like shirts and mugs with our sayings on them and prints and so i was thinking to myself i was like well if i just did like a mug with them well then i could you know that could work for what my company does which is it's a jewelry company and sunglass company but it could be like an add-on kind of deal mm-hmm these guests are really good designers yeah i i knew you would like us why products i'm like certain people would appreciate this and so my whole thing my my like hashtag is work hard help harder and that's the whole concept of what i do now and so we did a mug and it's called fucking help somebody that's their like first tag and then the rest is kindness is a wealth that increases at it is given as it is given away what you get in return isn't passed between hands but felt between hearts it's precisely because you've been at the bottom that you can raise others up it's because you've so i'm reading a photo here you've been lost in the dark you can lead others to the light it's because you fought with yourself that you can bring peace to someone else you now have the strength because you've once struggled the best you have to come the best you have to come from the fucking worst you've had to take so it's this is the mug there and we're sold out of them we just got it what does it say fucking help fucking help somebody fucking help somebody and so we did they were so gracious enough to sit with me and be like what do you want the copy to be like and i said what do you think i want it to be like what would you if you could write one for me would it be and they're like it's gonna be around lifting people up and i was like okay cool and they're like do you want fuck in the title and i was like every other word if we can have it and they said we'll just do once and i was like okay compromise and so we came up with that copy and we put it on a mug and we're gonna be doing a shirt with them but the the whole thing to me was that that embodied what i stand for now and the healing i've gotten to now and the point i've gotten to now in my life because that fucking sand pit almost broke me like off the face of the earth broke me first of all can we go through the full journey of that in terms of your psychological development who were you before who were you after can you think about that like what was your yeah if you had to put a brain on the table before and after and try to analyze it well they both have cte so we know that they're both bruised and gray matter is a little dicey on them yeah um and it may sound the same and it's it's not so i'll try to explain it to you before that don't you laugh because i can i know it's coming i i was even louder even more obnoxious even more outgoing i know it's hard to believe this is you humble and quiet right now this is this is like this is you like this is normal me now this is who i am now and i love that but who i was before was you know motocross taekwondo tomboy uh i didn't know how to dress i thought that if you just wore like the same jeans and t-shirt all the time that was like acceptable behavior as a woman yeah um i wore skate shoes i went to a catholic school that i refused to wear a skirt at i wore pants i played hacky sack i was so into sports i cut and split wood with my dad on weekends we heated our house that way um i would go in the transport i i stayed out of trouble for the most part but i think i was a fairly good kid i was pretty angry though for most of my teenage life after my coach i lost my way a little bit there um i was just crazier but happy i don't know if i was happy i'm realizing that now i think i was i think anger overtook who i was and i think that's why i was such an angry individual towards my parents when i was in high school so parents was a little rough relationship with parents i mean yeah i mean my dad was gone a couple a couple weeks at a time so my mom stayed home mom had to handle me and my brother who were both competitive athletes at the time by herself and when you come home and you have a daughter that just calls you like a bitch to your face because she can't she's being bullied so bad that she can't understand why but also doesn't know how to fix it but has no other outlet anymore to kind of get rid of it i was not nice i was a really mean person i broke my mom i remember the day she stopped yelling that's the day i know i broke her i broke her did you have a source of discipline in your life like what like maybe like where your dad somebody who says you're being a bitch like who would call me like yeah yeah oh no no no my parents were incredible like my dad came from like a family of like a bajillion kids who lived in a farm with no running water with like super my dad was brash and abrupt so like i've caught myself doing that once in a while so like if i did one thing wrong if he was just in a mood i would know it so we you weren't okay so that that anger just took different forms it took different forms but it mostly would be directed at my mom got it because i know she would take it right and that was who i had and i i feel bad about it to the day like i still she listened to the jocko podcast and so did my dad and my mom promised me she would never read my book because there's certain parts i just my dad on my deployment when i called him and told him some of the stuff he started crying my dad doesn't cry and he just said please never tell your mother this don't do that to your mom my mom like my grandfather came from hungary he escaped when the not um when the nazis left when the soviets came in he wasn't great as a dad my mom went through a lot as a kid and that was because her dad was in the war that was because her dad didn't know any better and she knew she couldn't be like that so her way would yet be yelling um and then i hit about 16 and i wore her down i broke her i shattered her ability to think that she could have any sort of relationship with me you wouldn't want to have had a relationship with me but the the the funny thing is you've rediscovered that now so she is she are you guys close now yeah she's she's so funny she's coming out to help out again she comes out to help out um with jack all the time and um my dad they're still they're still truck drivers they're still on the road they team drive they have their little dogs and they go and they do their thing and i've had that relationship now it's it's it's still strenuous like i still when i'm having a hard time she'll be the person i'll take it out on because i know she can take it even though i know i shouldn't it's like she's my safe space to be like blah about everything and she'll just be like well that's not nice i'm like well you're not fuck it like i and i'll take it out on she knows i don't mean it and i try um but for whatever reason she just she takes it and um and it brings it out of you yeah can you describe sort of the various characteristics the the shape of your ptsd the the trauma the how the anger and hate took shape in you in the in the seconds minutes hours months years after and after the full trauma of all the things you've experienced in afghanistan so it's funny because draco asked me something and it made me it's made me i've really been thinking a lot about it and he's like do you think if somebody of a leadership would have just sat you down and said hey burns what you're feeling is okay what you're feeling is normal what you're feeling is what happens when you're in something like this do you think you would be where you are and they said well i thought about it and i'm like you know i don't think i would be because i wouldn't have been medicated out of my mind i wasn't able to process anything because i was just given medication right from the get so for me what happened was once that light switch was off um i was sent back to kandahar to well i once the operation was over we flew back to kandahar like with the brits and then because there was deaths and we lost people on that operation i had to go to the british side for the next i think three or four days and recant word for word why what happened to a british mp who hand wrote statements but we had to do that on repeat to make sure we all had the same story and so nobody shot anybody in the back and so that i don't think is a great way to do that after and after action after action reports happen but i don't think beating a dead horse and having somebody repeat repeat repeat and then just imprint more and more and more i don't i don't know that that is a great way of doing that um and especially from a perspective of what are they uh liability almost like that kind of that perspective as opposed to the full perspective i mean so for for people who don't know uh one is the the over medication and that you had to undergo and then the other is the social isolation in terms of yeah i mean more than what jaco what you just mentioned you also kind of uh mentioned that just being with um with other soldiers you're close with just sitting there in silence and um just sitting in that shared understanding even that in itself communicates like these feelings are normal like you don't have to talk and you were robbed of that as well essentially yeah because i was because i was borrowed i think jacob had a name for us when we get borrowed it was like there was like a i don't know what they call us but it's like when you take a person and you put them in another unit there's a name for it i don't remember what it was you never see those people again but because i was in kandahar the doctors gave me the medication because i i think i was the one who said i don't this isn't right i don't feel right this is wrong because when i got back that night there was supposed to be somebody there to pick me up to take me the other side of the base and no one showed so i humped on my kit back to the canada house and i remember getting in the shower and the rule was quick fucking showers there's no water i must have sat on that floor of that shower for half an hour 45 minutes i just held myself and cried i didn't even know why i was crying i just knew i needed to cry and i still this day i and when they sent me back to the fall they sent me back with all this medication after spending that time with the brits um and they put me back on the guns medicated out of my fucking tree i almost shot someone but they didn't tell my staff that it was on meds so when the artillery gun was going off and i didn't run to the gun and i was still asleep inside the tent with the gun beside my head they didn't know i was just drugged they just thought i was fucking off somewhere hanging out with some americans they just thought i wasn't doing any of what i should be doing and then i remember the moment my sergeant we did a night shoot and he he's so funny because he called me goes ah fuck burn zach go alist i remember this yes you were standing there with me and i look at you and go hey barnes are you okay cause your eyes are all fucked and i i looked at sergeant leblanc i just remember going yeah like i'm good like just huh yeah he's like i still remember that and i'm like i know because they never tell me anything fuck burns i did not know the drugs you were on and as i was on all of them he goes i know i walk in you show me the bottles that fuck burns you shouldn't have been there i guarantee you sounds just like that that's great he's brilliant he's brilliant yeah so uh what i mean i suppose this is a lazy way of dealing with trauma yeah and it's for the military in some sense if you don't have a good program in place this makes sense but you should have a good program in place just like you said on the prep on the mental prep side like just any prep like training people training people on the as opposed to i guess train the fact that you're going to have somebody close to you blow up like you have to probably visualize that you have to think to that you have to have a process of how to deal with something like that with that kind of trauma and then that's it exactly i mean and it's not like weakness it's actually strength it's uh like you have to be mentally strong enough to process that that probably takes a lot of training but it's a great training right well worth it to to protect your investment training right that's a very cold but correct way to put it i mean it's called i thought you would appreciate the coldness of the way i articulated that well yeah i mean i'm of two minds in this i i don't i sometimes wonder like what i would be like as a soldier actually i don't know because i love country and i love all the things you're mentioning like i could see myself probably dying from my country and also enjoying the skill of it the the the very like ocd like very proficient yeah but then also the human side i fall in love with people i fall in love with everything so i don't know i don't i i suppose you have to shut off the part of your brain when you're executing a mission that cares about the hu about other humans uh outside your close-knit group but like there's no time for philosophical thinking i don't know i i suppose that's why it's better to be young young and dumb you're not necessarily dumb it's just like you were over that energy of excitement of proficiency and excellence is is just higher than it is later in life sure it's you're not dumb i was not dumb but i was naive uneducated not well trained and had an arrogance because we were told we were the fucking shit yeah you're amazing okay i'm amazing so i wonder do they think if we do mental training that makes you weak do you think they the the military thinks that makes you weak well yes and the reason i can say that is because it's it's obvious in the way that they handle it now right so like if a soldier says hey i'm really struggling with that last stop we were on man it's just really it's getting to me i'm just having a hard time sleeping they're gonna go okay well how how hard of a time sleeping are you having and then you get that wreath and you go oh no i'm not it's not that bad i'm not i don't need anything for it like i'm just like once in a while i'm losing some sleep like okay because you know that pen moves it's all getting written down and then you're dead right you're dead red which means you're not deploying again yeah and then you're not able to do the thing you love the most with the people you love the most right i mean but also this is really difficult and i i'd love to talk to you about ptsd but like sorry yes i keep going off no please no but so i'm i'm hoping to um like launch a company you know in the engineering space and the and i currently leave i've led a few people and it's always this kind of like how much are you supposed to push people because people are everyone is weak and lazy are you quoting our text messages from earlier yeah exactly exactly i'm quoting this all i have is just quotes from you it's okay uh it tells you how much we've spoken in the past week or so i just i don't know what to do because sometimes people are really struggling like really struggling in a way they're being they're like it's the the goggins thing is like where's the line to where you're actually breaking the human being versus where you're breaking them at the places where they will grow back stronger like so and that line is tricky uh to truly understand i think the military errors on the side of like they you know like push them beyond all limits physical limits physical but mental they don't they need to respect the mental more uh they fuck with the brain a little bit i mean in basic training they like scream in your face and to see who's gonna crack and they they put you on sleep deprivation to see who's weak enough that they can't handle sleep death they'll they do stuff to you like i know if you're a downed pilot you have to go and you have to do this training and like it's you get captured it's like this whole thing and they fuck with your brain but there's a line there's a line my issue is go to the line cross the line give them the tools to come back from the line right yeah we don't do that we don't we we know there's ptsd we know there's such a thing we understand there's anxiety and depression we understand there's major depressive disorder we understand that there are precursors there are signs and symptoms we understand that so why are we not building enough of a toolkit whether that be i'm not talking medication i'm talking it sounds but fucking trust me it works i'm talking meditation i'm talking yoga i'm talking about peer group support i'm talking about if you go to your doctor and report this there's you're not automatically going to be losing your job why aren't we giving the proper tools and the education needed these things are not difficult to teach they don't take a lot of time they don't take a lot of money the only time it takes a lot of money is when you want to medicate we don't need to medicate you yet you only need to be medicated if you're a danger to someone else or yourself and most of the time because of the way the system is set you'll lie about it through your fucking teeth just so that no one touches you so from the perspective of the military do you think you can still be a bad motherfucker and do all the mental work yes some of the baddest dudes i've ever known are like i gotta go to yoga i gotta go meditate yeah i go do aya with those guys why because they know that that's not okay to be like that in your life can you answer the ridiculously big question of what is ptsd like do you understand the basic characteristics of it is there universal characteristics from your own unique experience like from what you've understood about it yeah of course there are so there's you know there's the the basic things that a doctor looks for when when they're diagnosing ptsd i'm not a doctor let me make that fucking clear but there are things that you look for you look for insomnia you look for anger and aggression you look for people to fly off the handle you look for avoidance you can tell in somebody's body people who can't sleep if you can't sleep you you know that after a certain amount of time they're just gonna deteriorate you know sleeplessness uh triggers when you say avoidance do you mean avoidance so like when i first got back to canada i avoided everybody that was middle eastern at all costs no matter how much of a difference it made in my day if i had to not go somewhere for one of the greatest events of my life i wouldn't have went but isn't there some aspect there combined with the triggers like maybe it's wise to avoid triggers even like for your own personal health well-being well that's it it's for me that was one of my triggers so that you have triggers so and then you also deal with things like um sounds and smells you can tell you can tell when someone's triggered a lot of vets don't like fireworks it's like okay we'll remove yourself from the situation so there's there's other things within ptsd that kind of rear its head that with ptsd kind of attach other things so like when i was diagnosed with ptsd it was like four years later i was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and that was kind of a compilation of things that was just like a shit show there what is major depressive good question is there an answer i don't have one i was told i had it okay so i mean um what does your mind go through where are the places that my mind goes your mind goes like the dark places when i get triggered and when it was like really bad yeah okay yeah so um you thought about suicide every minute of every day what are the pros of suicide in your mind at that time what at that time the pros were no one has to deal with this anymore i don't have to feel this way anymore i'm a burden to my family i'm a burden to the military system i'm weak i'm a bad soldier i didn't do my job i don't deserve to be alive i don't deserve veterans affair support i don't deserve my my parents don't deserve to watch me go through this the guy i was dating didn't deserve to put up with the bullshit i put him through the people who drive with me in cars didn't deserve to almost hit medians because i swerved because of a piece of garbage people didn't deserve my racist outburst people didn't deserve people didn't i did not deserve to be breathing anymore i should have died there and i wished i died there so um self-hate there too oh not even a big deal though right that's at the core of it that that's like this um and so uh how do you escape from that place how do you overcome that those that depression essentially at the core of the desire to kill yourself what um what basic principles i mean we could talk about ayahuasca but basically principles of like literally like how do you escape that moment yeah previous to any of that i i did from 2009 i got out so i was medically i was 3b medical honorable discharge in 2011 may 23rd 2011. so i left the military then and so it's been 10 years just over 10 years oh my god it's 10 and a half years i just realized happy anniversary thanks man awesome so i've been out for 10 years and i would say the reason i didn't kill myself for the longest time was the individual i was dating that that was that was straight across the board that was it um for me there was no relief for about six years of the the thought of just kill yourself kill yourself kill her it's easier if you just do it like that voice was so strong for that long there was really no relief what there was though was implementation of different medications realizing they weren't working trying different things getting myself to a point where i could leave my house comfortably comfortably ish again and i wasn't triggered which then allowed me to travel which then allowed me to slowly try to go back to school which by the way was a very bad idea that was a bad idea that was that was bad i went too early they started practicing active shooter drills in our school it was it was a it was bad my professors understood school is full of triggers it turns out um it is when you live in vancouver there's a theme to this conversation about your love for canada i look at me i love my fucking country i am one of the most patriotic people you will meet in it i think canada is one of the greatest fucking places on the earth i think in the past two years or three years i have seen what i loved so deeply so proudly preached about so i'm so proud of what i did there and i'm so proud of the country i got to represent because i was good at my job being being great at your job for a country you love you just don't like some of the politicians some of the time it's not even the politicians anymore it's the state of the country i'm a second class citizen in my own country right now i can't travel to see my parents within my own country i'm not allowed to step foot in my son's school i am not allowed to go to a restaurant with my family i'm not allowed to leave canada without i told you all the stuff i have to do to get here to even get home i have to do the same i'm watched by the rcmp i'm neighbors rat you out so so for somebody who fought for their country i hate it it makes me so sad to be to go through this process of uh what many considered to be power overreach by government in the face of uh this particular pandemic yeah yeah i always knew i had a hard time with like i loved canada the day i got spit on when i got home was not ideal but yes spit on yeah um [Music] but the thing was i knew long enough that if i just put one foot in front of the other and kept going to treatment and kept doing what my doctor told me to do that i could pull out of this if i if i tried i i was told that i could do anything in my life it didn't matter as long as i tried was trying really hard trying was trying was harder than breathing it it was exhausting it was i would be awake for like half a day and every minute of that day i just stare at the wall and just want to kill myself yeah that's what i've had people close to me who suffer from depression and it was like it's unclear how to escape but it's clear that you need to try some something and they didn't want to even try because you have no try in you yeah you have no no i'm watching a person who has no energy essentially to like do any of it and it's like so hopeless but you have to try and i think some of that has to do with all the different physical feats you have to do like when you have nothing left you still keep going that same like weird drive when you're empty you still keep going um i wanted to give up i tried i it's i did i'm really lucky because it really was the one person that i'd wake up to next every day and he'd be like hey so that new drug you're on fun fact if you don't go to sleep right away you talk and when you talk you just don't fucking stop and you go off about everything that's horrible and i'm like what are you talking about no last night yeah you took that pill guess what you just you just you didn't stop i have no recollection i'd get up in the middle of the night i would cook food like on a stove and it would be hopefully we don't die because i would have no recollection because of the drugs the idea that when people say well just pull yourself out of depression i'm a highly motivated individual the idea of lifting my head up to turn over was daunting that's terrifying it's like for somebody so as driven as you to completely lose all of that for moments of time for for stretches of time fuck the mind is a motherfucker this is uh it is i i can't um for somebody like i can't i can't i'm so i'm so grateful for people like you to be able to pull out of that i i've i've been always the opposite like i've been very fortunate to just always find joy and meaning in everything even the stupidest shit can i ask you something yeah do you think that's because you of how you're raised where you came from no no it was my own person i i honestly think it's uh the the biology the the uh this because i had my parents i'm very cognizant of had nothing to uh do with that they they never understood this little engine i had i just i always liked just sitting looking at people and just enjoying how amazing they are and just like looking at like it's i think it's straight up just biology whatever the neurochemistry is like i'm just getting like a good drug you're just getting hit yeah i'm getting hit all the time from stupid shit and i love that and it doesn't and yeah so that's why i can be sometimes i'll talk like so very self-critically about myself because that's almost makes me it makes life more fun it challenges stuff it makes you more productive but ultimately it's because i'm getting that like i'm getting the good stuff all the time i wondered about that i was thinking about that when i listened to you for the first time on i think when you're on rogan for the first time water shouldn't do that oh it's not water you shouldn't trust see this is the thing it's don't buy coca-cola well no i had to oh well i resealed i mean i didn't go that far but now i'm really starting to question what's in this but that's okay if i offered you tea should really be worried but yeah why i mean that's just no that's the the like the more famous way that russians usually assassinate to put poison in the tea because a lot of russians drink tea and you know all right well i mean there is a blade right there so wait that was somebody um andrew huberman gave that to me he's also a good you i don't know if you know him but he's cool i don't know all the people you know i'm new okay i'm new here lex you're gonna i'll send instructions yeah you're gonna have to send what is what does my friend say he says uh he's an ex-operator and he'll message me once in a while and ask me something and i'll answer back if i answer in the correct way he'll go candidate meets expectations i'm like fuck you i'm not a candidate of anything yeah yeah but yeah it's essentially well andrew huberman is kind of a celebrity andrew you should check her out uh you're you're an interesting person you guys should connect he's a stanford neuroscientist was a i think the number one podcast in the world in health uh he's a is he on the beer does he feel like a a beard thing going uh yeah i'm knocking him down too like does he have a beard i don't look i don't look at people's visual appearance man of shit no i don't i don't uh does he have a beard i think he has a beard yeah he is i think i know who you're talking about this is a very handsome gentleman i think i know you're talking about cause i think i was looking at his stuff this morning yeah exactly no seriously on instagram no no no okay probably no yeah that's what i mean i don't know him but he's very very humble very intelligent yeah probably would understand like i'm very kind of poetic and so on he's he's probably the most like rigorous um reference machine of science like he's a legit scientist like he knows every paper and everything has to do with the mind in your science like he would be fascinating performance yeah he's much more he's he's much more actually and the focus is always on um how to help how that helps people so like protocols like like here's what you need to do to get better sleep yes yes i know who it is it's like a thousand papers yeah and he just goes like hammers nonstop i mean jesus he um he spent a week in austin he's coming back and spending uh a couple weeks in austin we just hang out and it's like you think that was like a teleprompter or something like the way he does this podcast yeah but like in person he's the same like all right this is this is intense but i like it anyway uh why did we bring him up i don't know a lot of knives we were talking about he gave it to me that's right ptsd and then you talk about poison and how you were poisoning me and i said knives we're talking about russians and then we were kind of talking about the brain and ptsd yeah i think for for most people though the biggest thing when they see somebody who's struggling with ptsd their their first you know reaction is how do i help them well often just saying hey i'm here when you're ready to talk i know you're going through something whether you want to talk about it right now or not i'm here and then keeping a close eye on behaviors when you start to see somebody having you know four five six beers at night let's ask why when you see somebody you can tell they're not sleeping hey buddy you're sleeping no i just i'm not sleeping instead of just going oh that sucks hey why aren't you sleeping you having nightmares are you you just having insomnia are you just eating sugar before bed like care enough about your people to just ask one follow-up question because often that's really all it takes because then somebody goes somebody cares enough to ask and then they'll just yeah just showing that you care it's honestly grocery store lineup i'll say oh i like your dress oh thank you and then i'll go how's your day going they'll be like actually it's going all right it's not as great as i thought it would be today but i'm doing okay but like they'll give you instead of could you instead of just giving you this fake false reaction if you just show any effort in somebody that you care at all about someone's well-being you'd be amazed amazed and some of it is just energy the reason honestly i moved to austin is some lady at a walmart said honey you look handsome in that suit but like but the care that she put in that she just looked at me yeah it wasn't like hitting at me or something she was like the love like just love yeah i was like okay i'm moving here i guess there was uh that's so funny you said that because i told my i told my husband this happened and it was it threw me off there was an older lady at a store and this was right after we we got a brief period of no masks in canada like just like a brief like five minutes oh yeah it was not even that and i i had come from like an interview or something so i had actually had makeup on that day and i had my hat and i was you know just at the grocery store she walked up to me and she got real close and i didn't know what was happening and she got closer and then she just grabbed my arm like this she goes i love that hat on you and i looked at her and i was like she touched me during a pandemic and she's old oh my god i love you too thank you so much i said you're so amazing i just and i just sparked a conversation yeah yeah that's amazing it doesn't take much yeah at that little moment of genuine care maybe you can tell me actually the the journey you took with ayahuasca like what that's such a fascinating journey so like uh letting your mind go to different places in order to rediscover itself like like what is it like a rocket ship to somewhere else so you can land in a better place here how about i show you something that'll help your brain okay yes this is not for you to lift up either and show on the camera because there's leaves in it like there's leaves and some pages so just don't dump it out cause it'll go all fucking everywhere got it got it instructions i like this yeah well you feel like you need them um ayahuasca is a beautiful psychedelic that we have been so blessed to have on this earth that we have so underutilized and could be i don't say saving humanity but just you ever hear that saying if you could just give everyone mushrooms one time the world would be a better place okay so psilocybin is i use for microdosing uh for depression i did ayahuasca in january of this year um and i've at that point that was the last time i was on a pharmaceutical drug i've been off everything ever since 10 different ones so if you backtrack a little bit just to so you'll understand my doctor gave me the opportunity dr um greg passi he is a veteran himself served in bosnia and rwanda he's a medic he's a colonel colonel lieutenant he's gonna watch me right in the face for that he's high up officer um he's one of my saviors he's like my old i call him my old man he's my favorite and um rides a harley like that kind of guy nice yeah and um he said you know kels this is i just don't i was hitting a wall i wasn't getting any better and he goes how do you feel about cannabis and i was like i don't feel good about it because family histories or my parents always told me if i smoked weed you know it's just this this perception because i just want you to try it just would you be willing to try it so i was like okay so i was willing to try it then i started going to these groups called women grow and um learning about it and then i realized oh i'm starting to sleep a little bit i don't feel groggy in the morning i don't feel like a bag of shit and i also want to have a baby one day and i can't have all this stuff in my system so i started using cannabis and then i started using it as a main medication and i'd been using it now since 2014 got married jack was born in 60 15 2015 i started using it um and i've been using it ever since and that was the way i got off of all the pharmaceutical drugs was keeping cannabis the constant finding the right strains for me and then slowly with the doctor's advice and under supervision going off of those medications cut to january of 2021 i had hit a really bad spell last year um and the year before was a really big struggle uh i almost lost my company last year due to covet just like many many millions of people did um and instead of me just laying down and taking it i pivoted really quickly and called the factory and said you guys make masks they're like yeah we're making masks i was like i'm going to call the canadian government i'm going to get my medical license and i'm gonna try to sell the masks and see if we can do that and so we did that and so we did 200 000 masks for ontario hospitals um which ironically went to my entire community i was born and raised in so it was really weird and that kept us afloat long enough um we lost 200 retail locations that i all single-handedly spent five years going like door-to-door getting myself um i would just say this is brass and unity jewelry yeah the jewelry and sunglass company and um i started a witch it looks like a serious community i mean sunglasses you do look good in them i won't lie to you thank you well okay we'll call them deluxe that's those are now called the lex fuck the gun or they're the lux i like it deluxe i'm jumping around here but just bear with me i i started my doctor suggested art therapy dr passi did and that's really how the company started i bought beads and a pipe cutter and a hammer and a drill and i fucked up our kitchen table and i taught myself how to build jewelry because my husband was like you can do it go for it so i was like okay he says i can believe in me so i guess i can do it no idea what i'm doing and then got to this point um you know where covet hit and people lost companies and we pivoted and we did what we could and then i really started to go downhill psychologically i've found purpose again with this company i found a way to help again i found myself again and then that was in danger of being gone again so the company is 2015 we started i started building jewelry in 2015 under like a just it was called her wearables and it was really small and it was just i was just trying to make stuff it wasn't supposed to be a company and you were on a ton of medication throughout the whole process and my mom being the tenacious truck driver she is she was driving for kevin hart's what now to her and so she got she just harassed them and was like you need to meet my daughter yeah so he finally saw the picture of you and kevin hart that's cool but he just gave me a good piece of advice hey if you're gonna make this something you can't really if you want it to be for everyone you can't call it her wearables i was like cool and then we drove home that night and then he tweeted it out to people wow to 24 million people this was before he was like who is now yeah and um that was a giant deal and then my husband kind of looked at me and being he's so fucking brilliant he looked at me goes all right yeah we got to come up with that rename let me start thinking let me start brainstorming like let's make you want to make this real let's make this real and so we did and he was like what do you think about like we were doing like grass collective co brass this but i just knew i wanted brass in the name and then he said what about brass and unity you're trying to like unify people like why wouldn't you do i'm like fucking name of course you came up with it like everything else that's a great name well he's a brilliant person it's annoying yeah so the idea of losing this thing that we had just built and just got me kind of functioning with was devastating so i got this opportunity given to me by griff combat flip-flops um again brady my husband was like hey you should get sponsors for your podcast hey have you heard of this company combat flip-flops remember we watched him on shark tank and then i reached out he emailed me back he's like yeah we go to together like peanut butter and jelly are companies that sounds great and then i was like hey also like do you think one of your owners would want to come on the podcast just like tossing it out there kind of like i did with you and um he was like yeah i'd love to come on and i was like and he came on the podcast and it went great and then at the end of it we stopped recording and he just kind of did this thing he he does this just like leans in real close looks into your soul and goes how you doing and they're like great he's like how are you really doing [Laughter] everything just this whole just like water works happen and he goes listen have you ever heard of ayahuasca and i was like yeah like in movies and like psychedelics in the 70s you know and he's like no no no let's like have a talk he goes i've got an opportunity for a spot i'm going with this charity called heroic hearts um they have off they have uh spaces in uk canada and the united states they're owned by an army ranger named jesse gould um you know they're really trying to help vets and this has worked would you want to come and before he even said like would you before i even got like an invite i was like can i come when can i when when do we when do we go and he's like oh it's in like three weeks um you can't be on any ssris if you're on any you're gonna have to wean off and at the time i was on my last one and so i was like i called my doctor and i was like listen and he was like what and i was like guess what i'm about to do and he's like am i gonna go to ayahuasca and he goes you could he he does the same where he just goes all right because he knows he's not going to win yeah knows i'll just fight him on it let's just call that like the the jocko reset yeah because he does a pretty much yeah exactly and he goes i said but here's the kicker i have to go off of this medication and he goes well you know we're supposed to do that in the summer months when the depression's not like bringing you know blah blah blah listen i hear you but i'm doing it whether you want me to or not so i'm letting you know hey this is gonna happen and he's like okay just try to do it properly i was like yeah yeah i know the drill i know the drill whatever whatever i went to school to be a paramedic i know the girl i'll go off on the properly if i can like drop that within a week that stuff was i was done taking it and i was going through like the world's worst just withdrawals it was like you were at a rock concert and your head was banging up and down but you were sitting perfectly still it was horrible but you had like a thing to look forward to with the sidewalk i had a light at the end of the tunnel and i knew if i got to the light what's the worst that's gonna happen just get to the light but at that point like i again i had a son i had a husband i had a great company i have a great house i have a nice car i have everything why did i want to die every minute of the day i was at that point again and i'm like this has got it something's got to give and so i went and i got there and she is um the most intense beautiful divine deity or entity or visualization whatever you want to deem ayahuasca as mama i is real and she takes no prisoners she shows you exactly what you need to see to help yourself but she does not discriminate against whether you're ready or not if you've ingested it she's coming for you she's gonna be either gentle or she's gonna beat your ass and sometimes it's what you need but she does it in a way that is profound so what were some memorable profound moments for you what uh what what are the places it took you people had you meet for the first time i got to be in a group of people who didn't judge me or question my service they just respected me that was number one so that group i lost i just found again um big shocker i was the only woman there again seems to be the the thing for me and so i was surrounded by all these special operators like these aren't like normal soldiers like these guys that i'm with are like bronze star fucking purple heart just the coolest people people i've always wanted to be like that's my buddy now i can be like those are my buddies like those motherfuckers will go to bat for me they will bend over backwards they will x fill me out of anywhere they will take a bullet for me and these guys welcomed me in in a way i didn't i didn't expect so that hit me weird right off the get i was nervous and now i was just felt at home for a minute and then when i stepped into ceremony um the first night because you do you do three nights over like over like friday saturday sunday the first night i was so nervous and so anxious because you go up in ceremony and your the shamans come in and they they cleanse themselves and then you get served the ayah individually you go up they give it to you you can take your time and pray you can do whatever you want then you drink it i was so just like i got back to my mat and i sat there and i was like trying to keep it in but i could feel that like heat come from my toes all the way up and you're like your mouth starts to water my throat i'm gonna throw up and i looked over to griff and i looked at bishop and they're like swallow it and i was like okay and you can't talk or anything so i like my buddy um we call him the viking or soul viking he looks like a viking his head's tattooed he's he's been on the show he's so cool he's sitting directly across like you and i and he can see me he's looking at me and i'm throwing up and and i do it about three times and then the last time he just saw me i couldn't do it i just i threw it up and so i like to think that was her way of easing me in so i didn't get like a full punch to the face but i gotta let me take your hand and show you what i'm gonna show you we're gonna make you better we're gonna take the pain away aren't you supposed to eventually throw up no matter what it's not supposed to some people don't you purge yeah if something's happening you're going through something yeah you purge but it doesn't have to happen but this i mean within like the first 20 minutes no okay this takes like you got to sit and meditate for or sit still basically and meditate in the pitch black for about 45 minutes before the effects even before you even feel her so it's very so here she figured out the right dose you need well because i did the same dose as everyone else i think it was 20 mils which doesn't seem like a lot but when you've never done ayatus oh my god so um i felt like such a bitch god i felt like such a bitch okay that was the thought going through your mind oh you just fucked it all up you ruined it you ruined this again you couldn't do this right yeah and so at that point um we we went through the meditation part and the shamans were they literally sing for like six hours straight so you said that you take it and then there's just you just you're quietly listening to them meditate and you wait and you wait and you're in pitch black like can't see this far in front of your face cool and you have a little puke bucket and then you have a little light that has a red filter on it you have to get up to go to the bathroom to get out of the you use that so you don't turn lights on and um me i brought like what no it's just a cool visual of just a puke bucket and a little light for the like i can imagine these like little lights going every once in a while and then the rest is just in darkness meditating with this with the singing it's it's so beautiful it's cool i'll take you some time because trust me you would i i wouldn't offer if it wasn't the group i would trust yeah that's in you had a very interesting group so it's the the the heroic hearts yeah heroic hearts so that yeah this is my jesse gave us all these journals they're like you're gonna want these so he gave us all these journals and now this is like my bible like my work my everything goes in this with me everywhere it's just this like silent reminder for me and so heroic hearts does fantastic work um i'll get into them after the thing with this group is there's such care it's not like go do aya and like you're done there's like integration coaches and there's like doctors and there's like people to make sure that you're doing the work because i is just this is just the gate now you have to take it and you have to implement it into your life people don't do that though did you do uh like integration did you do conversations with somebody did you talk to you like is there a process to because i've uh similar with philosophy you mentioned i i've as i understand it's exceptionally beneficial for when you also do like talk therapy like you couple that with the integration in some form where you talk through your experience you talk through different things like that that seems to be a really you know i need to do that more with uh basically every substance i take like if i get which have been every once in a while known to do a bit of vodka or whiskey or whatever like do integration the next day well what did you learn what did you get from that what did you get because you you learn a lot but you sometimes kind of just move on and you celebrate that that happened but like really kind of think through it write it down yeah that's important because that's what this was so the first night i'll give like a very cause trust me we could spend a whole podcast on both of the all three of those nights but the first night the biggest thing that happened for me is i got to see my daughter which was my first baby and so people say well you know blah blah blah fuck you that was my daughter and i'm very aware it was i'm very conscious that it was and at that point she just eased me in enough to let me know and showed me enough that this wasn't it this wasn't the end-all be-all where you are right now on this plane on this dimension in this life this is this is a flip and it is it is so minuscule to the big picture and so she really did that by she showed me just a black and then like a crack and then these vibrant colors that i can't describe because there aren't words alex gray does really great um art and that is like been the closest thing i've been able to find colors um he's a famous uh guy who does ayahuasca and he's an artist i think he's got stuff in new york as well but um she just she eased me in and gave me some relief and showed me enough that i could go i could wake up the next day and not want to die the next day and so what heroic hearts did because they gave us all these journals they're like you know the next day you kind of wake up and you you do a meet like a meeting you do like a circle all of us sit in a room and talk about what just happened the night before people are crying and people are quiet and you just listen and that's what you do and then you write on your free time so after that it's like up to you what you want to do do you want to just go walk in the woods well i chose to go find a fence post and lie on it for an hour i'm not kidding i lied there and stared up at these two eagles that were just in like the i'll tell you where we were after and you look you'll be like oh okay i get it and then i found a forest and i just walked up with my book and i just lied there for hours and then she all of a sudden started giving me what you call your downloads so the stuff you learn the stuff that you were all of a sudden you're remembering and these messages that come through and that's what this is what kind of things are we talking about so my biggest thing that she tried to reiterate to me at the beginning of that first night was that i don't breathe i just i don't i don't breathe i don't fucking breathe at all i just one thing the next thing the next thing the next thing the next thing just to survive i don't take a minute and breathe and so she made when i say she and i say it because it's hard for people to understand but i showed this to my husband i showed it to my doctors and they're like uh bitch that's not you you don't write like that you don't talk like that so like you can flip through it but it was like i'll just give i'll just let lex read for a second and just i'll just do here let me do i'll do an ad for heroic hearts heroic hearts here i'll get my papers while you read connect to her listen to her open to her do you mind if i read some of these you can read some of it yep go right ahead the dark has lifted judge my spelling and i'll punch you in the face well there's like um it's very sporadic-y sporadically written it's okay to be still it's okay to be quiet this is a good like and these are over a stretch of that was the first the cup first couple pages were from the first night this was just that weekend i'm not just there laying looking at the eagles yeah with with the pen just frantic as well lex not like writing where you're like oh i'm just writing it's like i had to get it down or i was gonna lose it you are warrior you are power you can choose now breathe now be now be present be warrior be strength breathe be the strength you are the strength there's some soul-searching going on here this is incredible yeah we wait till you get to get in there she gets deep real aggressive like crack the door for i am the light the giver the taker i am warrior i am life i am air i am water i am fire i am light this will this can this will this can for i am warrior for i am light and there's a leaf here what's the story with the leaf i don't know i was walking and every single time over the over those three days any time i like went for uh a walk by myself i would just hear like take this like just almost like as if a voice was standing there like you need this take it take it with you and keep it in your book keep it ground you and it just goes off this is from there yeah it's cool to have sort of it's almost like time travel i have poppies from france too when i did uh i did a 75th anniversary d-day ride in france where we rode 600 kilometers on our road bikes for charity and we landed on the beaches of juno on the 75th and we got to go buy the poppy fields and i'm like covered in poppies and i i have some in a in a book i don't know why i do that i just i do that that's cool because like these are your thoughts and those are the physical items as it really helps transport to that place somehow let the light in let her in and she would show me these visuals so my drawings are just like yeah there's drawings here and you're seeing this stuff oh yeah i can't draw either so that's why they're so i wish i could draw because if only i could translate what i could see visually onto paper and you're talking to her yeah it's time i'm here to listen is this mama aya yeah we call her mama aya mama aya mama i see what who who are you seeing is this a woman so for me at first it was just eyes floating in the sky these unbelievably gorgeous beautiful eyes that i and i was like literally looking up at the top of the year and i kept going to myself is that anyone else seeing this there's eyes in the sky yeah and so there's these eyes floating and they just kept looking at me and i remember when i kept telling myself like oh don't worry there's nothing there she would get angry i'm right here pay attention to me and i'd be like okay like forceful like very forceful so at first it was just the eyes the second night is i'm crazy when i say this great that's gonna be my clipping down crazy it's what i do when i get uncomfortable i do weird hand gestures and movements um voices i like it yeah i do yeah uh you would hate to be in my office because most of the day it's just [Music] this i love it weird lunges and uncomfortable moments um she turned me into a wolf i i know i said it out loud i said i hear it i said it yeah head to toe and her takeaway for me was i'm trying to be this pack leader i'm trying to be this leader in my life i'm trying to do these things but i'm going about them the whole wrong way so like when the shamans call you up to do their special prayer over you you go up you don't touch them they flash their little light you see the little light spot you walk to the light you sit down on the light and then my shaman he's so funny because he's got this great tone in his voice he goes uh how you doing kelsey and i'm like um so hi yeah i have a problem um i'm a wolf and i need it to stop and he'd be like don't you worry girl i got you you ready and i was like uh-huh uh-huh and so i'm sitting there cross-legged i've got my palms out like this and i had a really traumatic shoulder injury so i don't just sit slanted like this my shoulders actually permanently detached and no one in the world will touch it or fix it my collarbone comes out my back here nice and i don't have any collarbone here okay so nobody will fix it no one will touch it even i've had specialists i've had surgeries no one will do anything with it so i'm permanently down and forward so i slouch um it's horrible so before i well functionally too oh there's nothing i can't do a pull-up anymore oh so weak oh wow oh you should i'll show you how to do a push-up after you'll fucking throw up an embarrassment yeah it's bad so before i though chronic pain like had to drink a bottle of cbd every day just the pain is so bad because the trauma in it was so bad the surgery went wrong the collarbone dissipated and no longer exists like there's just and they're not sure how i lift things with it and do stuff with it it's like over compensation everywhere like my the my back fli like um my trap my scapula like flares out where it's i'm all messed up from it and so i was in chronic pain so he's praying over me and all of a sudden all i feel is this arm just start just fucking vibrating and my hair is really long and i feel somebody grab the back of my ponytail and snap my head back like this and it felt like something was coming out of my throat like being pulled out of me and the takeaway that i end up in the whole the rest of the night there was a million other things but the takeaway was you no longer need to bite you may only show your teeth you can be the leader that you want to be you do not always have to be the traditional type of leader you can be in the back of the pack you have to watch the rest around you be mindful of those around you instead of just being up front be be behind as well make sure that everything that you're doing is all being looked after because my thing was i will rip your fucking head off if you just say the wrong thing to me before the whole thing was you can just show your teeth and that is more than enough stop trying to be stop trying to overcompensate you don't need to do that any longer and then i had this weird astral projection thing happen like where i was in my house and there were these flyers all over my husband and my son and like i went ham on them i like shredded them to pieces like i was this protector and it's crazy because the guys told me after like someone would be like there were flyers all over you the whole night they were just all over you and i'm like i was snarling when i was sitting there like the shaman had to be like i need you to try to calm your breathing after i could but before like i was like attacking things beside me that people could see and i could see but couldn't wrap my brain around that they were real like it was fucking weird this is crazy man that's day two that's day two and so what's so what's the big takeaway there my takeaway was i needed to be i needed to stop trying to stop trying to push everything too hard stop trying to force everything it's all going to come it's all going to happen but you are you are too aggressive you are too you're trying so hard that you're missing you're missing everything else got it that's just uh trying to be a better human kind of thing right this is this is getting intense aggressive yeah i get to grasp i mean there's love and light still it gets loving light love and light the warrior within is calm she will test you daily show her respect so that's what i mean you've read my book you know i don't write like that yeah this is strange see god you get it because people don't understand what i say i didn't i don't feel like i wrote that i feel like she gave me like i re reread this all of the time so i i wonder i mean well not obviously but this is somehow part of you i think it's a part of me obviously reconnect reconnecting you somehow to that part it kind of is incredible to think of what are the things that are part of us that we haven't really explored you know and well there's so many we just get nature to connect to her feel her flow through them use them for the strength for each day and your challenge will present itself love light breathe sorry i have too much hair never enough i used to have long hair what about day three so day three is the the stuff i talked about on jocko when i got taken over to the other side i almost missed that night too i almost missed that ceremony i got a false positive on my covet test and i got a call from the medical clinic that night being like you need to come in you got a false positive on your kova test and if you're gonna travel you have to we've got to figure this out you got to come do blood work you got to come do you know whatever it is you need to do if you want to get home but you got to come do something and so i didn't think i was going to be in ceremony i had to leave so i left and you know they waited they waited for me and so i think the biggest takeaway from all of this for me was this isn't it it this isn't everything this isn't the end-all be-all you can fight through this this is possible it's gonna take work it's gonna be fucking hard it's worth it though and if you just keep going the right direction everything that i wrote down everything every goal it'll happen what about love what about love tell me about your husband okay what role did he play in your life the most pivotal role he kept me alive and made me feel worthy enough to until i knew that i was worthy enough to be alive can you dissect that a little bit like what i mean what role does love play in the human condition i think love is the only reason that we haven't destroyed ourselves i mean we humans in general yes i think there is a subset of people where love will always be you know love conquers all you know but that's not always the reality the reality is life is messy and humans are messy and the way we choose to deal with things are messy and complicated and difficult but at the root of all good is love i think and for me i was fortunate enough to meet my husband through a friend would you listen to that podcast so i don't know that we need to unless you really want to go into that story again how i met my husband well i the only part of that story i like people should just go listen to the jocko podcast how you made them uncomfortable i love it i well okay so how it works let me explain in the super cross and motocross industry it's really small the people who are professional there's it's a small subset of people it's kind of like formula one 21 cars that's what there is that's the amount of riders and we should say your husband is uh as a motocross guy my husband was a professional supercross and motocross racer um for his whole life and he raced for kawasaki and suzuki he lived in california and raced still down there and when i met him i met him at the tail end of his career and so i went to montreal with a friend of mine to see somebody that i was currently sleeping with who was a friend of mine and end up meeting brady instead yeah and the funny moment in jacob's was saying that i was fucking him instead of just sleeping with him and then jocko's face exploded and jocko was like oh sleeping so like he was he was trying to get details of the sleeping quarters that you're he was trying to get you to define as a good interviewer would oh sleeping okay and then you're like it's fucking jocko [Laughter] or something like that that's great it was great but that's true because in that industry it's like we it's small we all share trust me this is what it is anyway so i met him there and he had broken his wrist real really bad and um i was this was before i deployed so i met him and i we stayed in touch and just became friends and just texted that was it nothing weird and um i was deploying though so we just agreed you know we'd be friends we weren't actually talking about anything romantically at all and then uh i deployed and we got talking and to know each other a little more a little more and then we decided that we liked each other and we wanted to try to give it at least a semi shot and so when i got home from afghanistan i went and watched him race his last one of his last two races that he did professionally before he retired excuse me and it was a montreal when was in vegas and i hadn't seen him and he didn't really know me we didn't really know each other we you know we met i slept in the bed beside him because my girlfriend didn't want to get in trouble from her boyfriend from sleeping beside a random dude and then um yeah we just we we started dating and he really slowly became my rock and he understands trauma he had some stuff happen in his life in his family that he went through a lot of therapy he went through a lot of shit he went he saw what traumatic situations can do to a family and to people and those that are suffering with it and so he was well equipped to handle me um thankfully and it got to a point where we were doing the long distance back and forth back and forth and back and forth and i finally got the call that i was going to be released from the military and i wanted to live near him but i couldn't afford to live in british columbia because i was from ontario and bc is like it means bring cash for a reason i'm like to know i can live there and then his family was like come live with us like they had a big enough they had a big enough house trust me it was fine so i was like okay and so i went from like dating this guy long distance to over you know from 2009 to 2011 just back and forth back and forth back and forth and then finally his parents were like shit or get off the pot here with her like come on you know it's obvious she loves you and i would never say it that word just as a love oh like it was just like you guys didn't say uh for a long time for a long time because i was dead inside wow i didn't know what that meant because i did i couldn't feel i didn't feel anything he loved it because he like we'd be go we go do something you would never complain about anything you wouldn't say a fucking word you would just sit there and now you got all your feelings back and your emotions back and now you're too hot and you're too cold anyways so yeah he loved it i was numb and dead inside seriously when when i called him back were you still able to have fun together that kind of thing like uh like when you say there's no emotion there's more emotion around the basics of like everyday life uh but you're still able to just like enjoy shit together i was enjoying stuff but i wasn't like feeling yeah i was like this is fun yeah right that was it that was surface level like lex this is fun like it wasn't uh there's nothing there yeah no there's nothing there's hey yeah nothing and so we went through that for a long time and then i lived with his parents and we we lived there and that was you know god damn it his family was so good to me because i was a nightmare i was a nightmare couldn't cook certain food around me anymore couldn't couldn't go certain places anymore couldn't you know crowds weren't hard no we didn't do canada today and like i just changed i moved in and was like shit's gotta change if you guys don't want me to kill everyone like and they were willing and they were accepting and they were amazing about it and then we finally said okay well like if does this is this we're good we're like i i used to say like i l you like i couldn't say love it freaked me out for a long time and then i finally said it and then that shithead said it like a month later and i was like that's not fair you should have said it the same exact time i wanted the response yeah and um he goes to treatment with me he whatever i need he knows that like hey he's more for like him and like how do i handle her yeah and um then we moved out we bought a house and then he took a sweet ass time we were dating for four years before we were engaged because just to be sure the crazy wasn't too crazy he waited four years on that smart man right yeah or you can you could say he's just a terrified commitment but both a little bit of both hey when you were the guy on the posters that all the girls sign up to that sent all the dirty pictures fucking why are you giving that up it's easy yeah commitment is a real commitment then yeah okay this is the jaco reset we talked about brass and unity a little bit what's the long-term mission goal and dream of your company and the podcast of the same name so for me what i've been trying to do with this company is create a community that can really work together to not only help vets first responders but to really bridge the gap with the civilian population and letting them know what we kind of go through and why it is such a epidemic and why there is over 22 suicides a day and we are losing people like it's going out of style like the amount of vets that are questioning the last 20 years of their life right now is is terrifying the you know i work with organizations that are doing this outreach and they're overloaded right now like they have never seen before because this whole thing is just it's hit ahead here and so what brass and unity tries to do is it is really just a vehicle to get the money in the hands of the people that are doing the work with it i couldn't start a non-profit because i'm not good at fundraising i'm not good at being like give me your money i'm gonna do this with it the least i could do was come up with a product that i know i could give to people or people could purchase and if i gave pretty much all of the pro like the the actual um profit from it to those organizations and i give them something to wear that is a touch piece or if they're out and somebody sees a bullet on their wrist they go hey what is that it's a conversation starter and that's exactly what it's been and it's it's done its job as that and so we like i said we are a way to get the vehicle we're the vehicle we're the money in the hands of the people people don't always want to just get a tax receipt it's great to donate to something great on you to do that but most people have a selfish aspect right and that's okay but if you can tap into that you can then fund these charities properly and give them the tools to do their jobs effectively up until this point they just count on people's goodness of their hearts i hate to break it to you humanity's rough right now we need to look at something a little differently so these things spark like a jewelry sparks conversations and then and then do you work with charities yes oh god yeah that's what i do so my whole mission every day is i get up i push jewelry and sunglasses on people and say but now that you're going to wear that now you're a part of the bnu army now you're a part of this community speaking of which let me uh let me put it put it right back on branded this is uh organic product placement yeah this isn't like marketing at all nothing weird about this at all and so we work with a lot of organizations and i'm very particular about where we send our money because there are it feels like thousands of vet organizations right now and if we were able to consolidate it would be more ideal i spoke about that on another show but that's not currently happening so i try to work with the non-profits i know number one are not paying six-figure salaries which trust me there's lots a lot number two i look at the actual resources that they're providing and if they're going to be something that are going to be useful in my opinion whether or not they're actually useful and i just don't think they are that's a that's up for debate i know it's worked for me so i try to fund the things that i know have been helpful for me and the people i associate with so that's why i brought all the paper because i didn't want to be an idiot and forget anybody that's really important because i get caught up in things and i think it's important to acknowledge so number one heroic hearts we just started working um to talk about them and really make them known but we're going to be donating to them as well are they doing uh more stuff than the ayahuasca things yeah so their points are i got jesse to actually i'm like what are your talking points because i need people to know exactly what you do so veterans have had to take their mental and general health into their own hands due to the failure of the government system so that is why they were created but heroic hearts is a peer supported mental health network involving full preparation integration coaching and connection to vetted psychedelic treatments so they don't just do aya they deal with psilocybin ketamine um ibogaine but they've got protocols in place they've got locations you go to that are safely vetted and they work they've got over right now jesse said they have over 800 veterans on a waiting list for treatment that's just before the spike of the end of this war um they have over a hundred they've helped over 100 veterans including dozens of special operation vets find effective care they've now got branches in the u.s uk and canada and the the biggest thing about them and why we talk about them is because the problem of psychedelics and the stigma around it is so significant but because of great universities that are now stepping up and doing the research behind it it is being legitimized so like they're doing that in canada there's a group called therasil they are currently fighting the government to get the rights for canadians under section 56 of our laws to get compassionate care for psilocybin use i've done a panel with them on that really great base of victoria really smart people one of the other bigger charities that we work with and they're honestly they were my first and foremost charity that i ever worked with and they're a big component in the veteran community in canada um they're called honor house and honor house was started by honoree colonel al dijanova it was started because of a guy named trevor greene he was a canadian soldier who deployed and he was so captain trevor green sorry trevor captain trevor green um he got an axe in the middle of his head a taliban member came up and put an axe directly into his head when his helmet was off and he survived he's done work with uh invictus games and prince harry he has an exoskeleton he uses on the island he's the he's so cool he hasn't changed one bit from like the infantry captain he you expect him to be and it was al saw there was a need for vets and first responders to get treatment because there's no real home away from home for people picture ronald mcdonald for cancer and families this is vets and first responders and so their whole thing and i'll read it so i say it exactly right because i used to be on the board of their charity but i ran out of time so now i just consult but um they are a home away from home for members of the canadian armed force forces veterans and first responders and their families to stay completely free of charge while they're receiving medical care and treatment in the vancouver area but since then they've expanded since i've come on board and they've opened honor ranch which is up in ashcroft bc and it's 140 acres 10 cabins and a main cabin they do equine therapy and they're more focused on operational stress injury clinics so sorry operational stress injury within the veteran community and they have specialists that do that they have uh they have their own bracelet with us so every time you buy an owner house bracelet all the proceeds go to them they yeah and it's actually the green one so that one so when you buy one of those honorhouse bracelets they have those they go directly to them which is really amazing they've been near and dear to my heart for a long time you've got the all secure foundation which is these guys are these guys are super dope i'm going to read exactly because jen texts me so jen and tom satterly i've had them both on the podcast tom was involved in black hawk down tom is a delta have you heard of them no no so okay so tom was involved in black hawk down it was one of his first operations he's a delta operator and i asked her i said listen i'm going to be doing these shows and i think it's great that we talk about you more so i said give me your three points of importance so the all secure foundation serves special operations combat families in healing from post-traumatic stress injury and secondary post-traumatic stress so that's often what the wife or the other husband or the other spouse suffers from we're starting to see that be more and more of an issue now so they also are devoted to rebuilding the couple's relationships on the home front after the separations of war and 80 of their warriors went on went um yeah 80 of their warriors want their families to be more involved with the healing the problem is is very often vets don't realize that they can have or just because the system doesn't pay for it actually have their spouse as a part of things and the biggest thing that we find with special operations families i think the divorce rate's like 95 and so they work so hard with these families they take them on retreats these husbands and wives and they get them to connect again after being separated over such a long period of time there's other places like children the fallen patriots out of dc where they fund education um university for people who have lost their parents um in deployments whether their kids even born yet if they're still in utero they still pay they do not care then you've got people like um in canada you've got vets canada you've got in the states you've you know you got true patriot love you've got um who else in the states is really great that we've worked with i know there's a green beret foundation that's great one more wave gives amputees teaches them to surf with it with amputees like they're really great there's so many organizations but at the end of the day i focus on a small subset because you cannot fix everyone's problems the least thing the least you can do for people is focus if you can provide focus you can provide the proper amount of funding proper amount of funding can get the proper amount of tools those tools can actually be implemented properly and then those people can go on to hopefully have successful marriages and families and we don't have to watch our parents drink themselves to death and wonder why daddy's yelling at mommy all the time and daddy storms out and leaves well daddy had some shit happen in his life and mommy had some shit happen but that does not mean that's who they are and yes so trauma has completely destructive effects on family and relationships and like correcting that as like ripple effects oh yeah astronomical ripple effects because the problem is we are so quick to tell people they're suffering from ptsd we're so quick to give them drugs we're so quick to kick them out of the military we're so quick to let them be homeless on the street we're so quick to let them fucking kill themselves we're so quick and then all of a sudden when when a politician goes veteran suicide's an issue that's when it's a problem well if you prevent the problem from happening in the first place or you give people the right funding and tools to do the job you won't have this problem do you have advice for young people i think high school students maybe uh undergrads college students about career life how to live a life they can be proud of you've had one heck of a life some of them are really cheesy but they're true live a life you can be proud of number one if you wake up every morning and you hate what you do change the fucking station do not live and stay in that perpetual cycle of bullshit it's not worth it it's not it's not what you're on this planet for you're worth more than that than the monotony of waking up going to work hating your life drinking yourself to sleep and functioning do yourself a favor the thing i scream about on the show so much is move your fucking body move your body get your blood moving allow your body to to do what it's here for go for a run go for a walk if you can't run walk to the fridge three times more than maybe you did before but you're moving pay attention to the shit you look at more now than ever we are seeing uh our younger generation just be force-fed information from one side or the other and none of it makes sense none of it's understandable it just causes chaos in the brain really pay attention to what you you listen to something i've had to learn to do is make time for myself all of this working 18 hours a day not sleeping just work work record that doesn't work that's not sustainable it's not healthy and it's not it's not anything anyone should be doing balance is important but if you're going to take the time to do something for yourself don't make it sitting in front of the tv for six hours eating a bag of chips drinking a coke make it i'm gonna go for a walk maybe listen to a podcast where i can learn something make it i'm gonna go volunteer somewhere nobody does that anymore but make it i can go volunteer somewhere honor house they have no paid employees they have one everybody is a volunteer they're fucking phenomenal just do whatever you're gonna do do it with some fucking drive put some goddamn effort into your life and pick something in a career that's gonna make you happy not something that's just gonna give you six figures because that's not gonna make you happy i can tell you right now i have everything in the world and the last thing i want is more things i want less i want the woods and i want quiet because that's what's important to me i want my family to matter the people around me to matter and the small group i keep that tight knit i have i want them to wake up every minute knowing that they have a friend that they can call on the other line that isn't just like how's it going that can actually have a conversation a meaningful intelligent caring conversation we are just breeding these kids to be followers who digest bullshit who reverberate things they don't fully understand and have opinions on stuff they have no business talking about yeah uh with an open mind humbly think deeply about the world correct how has your relationship with death changed this is a russian program i have to ask you so you've considered suicide throughout your life you have been in the line of fire you have witnessed death you as a human being immortal one do you think about your death these days now that you have begun the journey with dealing with your trauma do you think about your death are you afraid of your death well you don't die so that's why what do you mean you don't die you move on where do you go to another plane and another vibration and another whatever you want to call it this isn't it this isn't all of it this is a blip this is a moment this is uh i used to be afraid of death before the military i was always afraid of dying i don't know why i had this irrational fear that i was gonna be kidnapped in my room like seriously like irrational fear like afraid um and it's funny because i talked to michaela um yesterday and she said the same thing and i was like oh my god i know what you're talking being afraid of being kidnapped yeah she had this like fear that someone was going to come in and take her out of her room i had the same fear but a human being or some kind no i think like by a human being and i had this irrational fear that i was that's like something was going to happen to me and like i said i don't know if it's because like my parents were always made me aware of my surroundings like people take people this is a real thing that happens yeah that was really small so and i looked like a little boy my hair was like that when i was training i had short no hair i know flat as a board you would have thought i was a 12 year old boy and so my mom's like people take people sweetie that's just the reality of life you need to be aware so i don't know if i had this ingrained in my mind i was always like training to protect myself or fight someone off so i was like afraid of like this irrational thing and then i went overseas and then i realized that i could just be literally there talking you having a conversation and i could just be taken off the face of the earth and there's nothing i can do about it and then i adapted this idea that when it's my time it'll be my time but the difference is now at least i know that if i do go and i do cross and i am and i do move on i know that i live my life the way that i i always hoped i would be proud to live can i ask you a dark question yeah because we you mentioned robin williams you mentioned anthony bourdain and your own struggle with suicide why do you think they ultimately lost about that battle why do you think they took their lives man that's a that's a loaded question because you could look at everything from from biomarkers in the brain to know if their serotonin and dopamine levels were crashed in the ground like there's there's biological reasonings for some people where they're born bipolar and they have or you know they're schizophrenic there's so many things we don't fully grasp about the brain but what we do know from my perspective for me at least there really is no rhyme or reason why i survived and others didn't stuff and things don't make you happy people don't always know why they're feeling the way they're feeling but they also are also are not always willing to talk about it or be they put on a good front and if nobody knows any different what do you expect and it's especially clear with the the two of them that on the surface they're you know exceptionally successful in so many dimensions right and still that means nothing material possessions anything really is not uh doesn't guarantee you happiness no it doesn't well scary that's terrifying but uh when it's good that's what makes it joyful like that's what happiness is it's like holy shit somehow amidst all the absurdity all the things that you can't predict you you nevertheless feel really good that's why i feel really fortunate to to be getting this feat of happiness all the time um well to be or not to be that's a good place to end it uh kelsey you're an amazing human being i'm really fortunate that you would spend your valuable time with me i i as i said you're so good at not just talking but listening so i definitely will listen to your podcast because i can tell you're an incredible person as an interviewer and as a storyteller so again thank you for talking today thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with kelsey sharon to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from herbert hoover older men declare war but it is the youth that must fight and die thank you for listening and hope to see you next time