00:05:52.240That was your job, is to be prepared to go to war.
00:05:55.160And then after September 11th, then it became what we thought it was going to be when we first got to our SEAL teams.
00:06:00.560And then from September 11th all the way through today, it became exactly what we thought was going out there and executing the mission for the country.
00:06:17.840So the relief of because you've trained so much and you've prepared so much for this, but you really don't know until you go out there and do it if you're going to perform.
00:06:28.760So that little part, that little Megan question in the back of your head, and I didn't anticipate what it would feel like to go out and do those first missions, what that would feel like internally.
00:06:40.860I know I would go out, do the mechanics of it, but it was this sense of relief that I had been tested in combat and I was not found wanting.
00:06:49.640I did not let the guys down to my right and left.
00:06:52.420And that was this feeling of relief for me anyway, I don't really know for anybody else, but I had this sense of relief like, okay, it wasn't just training.
00:08:10.760I think the confusion of how hard it was to tell where the enemy is, where the bullets are coming from, where the mortars are coming from, where the RPGs are coming in from.
00:08:19.840In the chaos of combat, in particular, the campaign for Najaf, which was a two-week campaign in Iraq to retake the city from the Jay Shah Mahdi militia in August of 2004.
00:08:39.360You're hearing these tracks, and you're just not sure exactly what's going on because you're getting these Bradleys, these fighting vehicles.
00:09:18.960You're not as a sniper in the back or as an assault team leader in the back.
00:09:21.980You're not really in communication with the guys that are driving.
00:09:26.340And even if you were, you wouldn't be exactly sure.
00:09:28.420It looked like a math study that you did.
00:09:30.400And all of a sudden, boom, you're out there, and it's time to go.
00:09:32.920So that would be the most similar, but I don't think it's anything could ever be like with those guys experienced going over the beaches at Normandy.
00:10:18.500A couple months later, they said, there's a movie coming out that's about your unit that you guys are going to get a chance to see it before anybody else sees it.
00:10:59.780Have you seen the movie Fury with Brad Pitt?
00:11:01.460Have you seen it where there's this one scene where they go out, and he's in the tank, and they're getting shot up, and one of the soldiers cannot handle it.
00:11:17.220He starts peeing in his pants, and they have this scene.
00:11:19.660It's a very good scene to show that some people, when it hits you all of a sudden, you don't know how you're going to react your first time.
00:11:24.580And, you know, Brad Pitt's trying to kind of calm the guy down and say, hey, it's going to be all right.
00:11:54.140I mean, if they knew beforehand that they were in the wrong line of work, or maybe they were more suited to the administrative side of the house or something like that, and they went to places where they were less likely to find themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan, I guess.
00:12:08.260But that would be the closest thing I can think of, just because that training that we go through is so intense, especially after people started coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and incorporating those lessons into the training.
00:12:20.120Then, for sure, it wasn't a surprise what you were coming in to do.
00:12:25.000So I never really experienced somebody having that type of a reaction downrange.
00:12:29.860But I'm sure it happened, but I just never experienced that.
00:12:32.740So for us, we flew from L.A. to Atlanta, and then we got in the Greyhound, and then it was like five of us from L.A., and we drove to South Carolina, Fort Jackson, and we're driving.
00:12:44.640Everybody's tough because everyone's from a gang, and everyone's, you know, this guy's from 18th Street, that guy's from this, this guy.
00:12:49.720So we're all bragging about who's tougher, and then you get to the unit, and drill sergeants come up, and they start hollering at you, and you're like, okay, I'm not used to this.
00:12:57.120You know what your girl is doing right now?
00:12:58.580She's with your best friend, hollering his name.
00:13:00.740She ain't even thinking about you right now.
00:13:02.120She's already over you, and just mentally messing with you.
00:13:05.100And then it got to one of the tests where you had to give the other guy IVs, okay?
00:13:26.940It was interesting seeing it, you know, as you're going through the process of how some of the things you were prepared to go through, some of the things you were not prepared to go through.
00:13:37.500But, again, in your world, it's a completely different level.
00:13:40.400You guys are seeing stuff that only a few people get a chance to see.
00:13:43.340So, out of curiosity, for us, we had a very initiating type of an environment where people were initiating new rookies that were coming here.
00:13:53.580The hazing concept, which was very normal back in the days.
00:13:56.900Nowadays, you know, the smallest joke you tell them, you may get ETS, Dishonorably discharged from the Navy because you did the wrong thing.
00:14:05.800Like, was the hazing thing going on back then when you were in?
00:14:12.720And, you know, I can see how it could get out of hand at some levels or some places.
00:14:17.440But for me, it was a very positive experience.
00:14:19.780I mean, I look back on those times with my new guys, with our E5 Mafia all together there and going through that hazing.
00:14:27.080And for whatever reason, the platoon that I was in as a new guy, they did a great job with it.
00:14:32.200And, of course, the part you look forward to, the hazing you look forward to, is getting your trident and pounding that thing into your chest.
00:15:26.440It's like getting your ear pierced probably or something like that.
00:15:28.240Especially when you're all yoked up from doing thousands of push-ups and pull-ups and buds.
00:15:32.020So there's a little more padding back there.
00:15:34.140A little more armor back then in the day.
00:15:36.420Do you think some of the stuff that happens with the military to toughen them up, do you think it's not?
00:15:45.220Because, you know, some people you talk to, you say, well, the method of war has changed so much that all of those things that rah, rah, you know, toughen people up.
00:15:51.540It's not necessary today, you know, because today it's more about, you know, maybe a gentler approach to toughen soldiers up.
00:16:27.580Well, yeah, that should tell everybody everything they need to know there.
00:16:32.140And the part of adapting, looking at what you do on the battlefield, we have 20 years of data right now incorporating those aspects into our training.
00:16:42.820But the other side is that when we're talking about adaptability, that cyber warfare piece, yeah, maybe those guys don't need to be doing what we're doing as SEALs because they're fighting a different battle space.
00:16:53.280They're right here, just like I have no idea how to fight in that space unless they said go to the location and destroy said physical location.
00:17:03.540We're getting in there and the different levels of the Internet.
00:17:05.900And because I'm doing all this research, my new novel that's coming out next year, and I'm looking at the cyber warfare piece and the quantum computing piece and the levels of the Internet and where these future battles might be fought.
00:17:15.720Well, they might be fought there, but there's also that chance of an electromagnetic pulse that shuts that stuff down.
00:17:23.140So fighting, there's always that primal.
00:17:25.280That's the one thing that hasn't changed since the beginning of time is that primal nature of combat, that visceral man-to-man, person-to-person in the trenches.
00:17:54.020So you can better translate, if you're a leader, some of the directives coming down from higher authorities so you can get the job done there at the tactical level.
00:18:02.000But it really comes down to you putting another human in the ground.
00:18:07.460Do you think we're tougher today with our training than we were 20 years ago?
00:18:11.460Or if we're not, what's the consequence of the direction we're going today?
00:18:15.940Yeah, so I got out right before all that stuff started to change.
00:18:21.700So I think by the time I got out in 2016, we were doing a very good job of incorporating lessons learned from downrange.
00:18:27.960A lot of the medical stuff had evolved quite a bit over the years because we just had so much learning, so much, we learned so much just on the ground in the battle space.
00:18:37.840So that part, we were doing a good job of incorporating that into the pipeline, into the training.
00:18:43.900But when you let off the gas a little bit to take a breath, which is fine to do just to make sure you're on the right path.
00:18:51.020But then if you want to just become more inclusive because of some sort of an equity of outcome type of that, that's still in the wrong direction, I think.
00:19:03.460And what's interesting in that last book that I wrote, I put myself in the enemy's shoes.
00:19:07.420So I spent about a year and a half looking at the United States through the eyes of Iran, of Russia, of North Korea, of China.
00:19:16.400And what was terrifying to me is that by the time I got done with that year, writing that book, looking at us from the enemy's side, I had to make some adjustments to my novel because I thought, you know what?
00:19:29.840If I was the enemy, we're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside right now.
00:19:53.700Yeah, they also work for political parties, and they work for galvanizing your base and getting support and raising money and that sort of a thing.
00:20:03.660So it was disheartening, I guess, to say the least, that if I was the enemy, I might just watch us for a little bit because we're doing a lot of their jobs for them, unfortunately.
00:20:14.040So you know the oath of enlistment, right?
00:20:16.380When you and I did that, it's, hey, I, Patrick B. David, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me according to regulations and Uniform Code of Military Justice.
00:20:41.060So, okay, this is in Title 10 U.S. Court Act of 5th of May of 1960, replacing the warding first adopted in 1789 with amendment effective 5th October of 1962.
00:20:56.480What do we do if the enemy to protect the Constitution is domestic and it has to do with the officers above you?
00:21:06.600So what is the right protocol if the people that are domestic, it says, you know, the Constitution protected, all enemies, foreign or domestic, what if it's domestic and it's your superiors?
00:21:19.520And that's one that I am, I guess, glad is the wrong word, but that I'm watching from the sidelines and I'm exploring the pages of my novels because it allows me time to think about it, to process, to do exactly what you just said.
00:21:33.660And try to figure that out the best I can because now there's no doubt there are segments of our society that want to destroy that very thing that you're bearing true faith and allegiance to, that Constitution that guarantees natural rights.
00:21:46.720Or if you're a God-fearing person, rights from God, either way, natural or God-given, that inherent right to self-defense, the right to keep and bear arms, that is something that if you were just to appear here out of nowhere with no background, and all of a sudden you just appeared on earth and someone tried to kill you, it would be a very natural thing to defend that gift of life.
00:22:10.640And as a husband, father, as a citizen, my responsibility is to defend that gift for me, for my family, for my community, and that's a very natural thing.
00:22:23.000Yet there are elements of our society that want to remove that right enshrined in the Constitution.
00:22:29.360Now the First Amendment, the First Amendment used to be something growing up in the 80s that we could all gather around.
00:22:34.460We could say, hey, no matter what, I disagree with what you're saying, but I will die for your right to say it.
00:22:59.460Here's what I'm asking you, because to have written all the books that you've written, you must have done a ton of research, right?
00:23:05.820I mean, like you're talking about right now, you've got a deadline to hit, and sometimes you feel God created kids for you to miss deadlines, which I understand.
00:23:17.500But when you do all this research, and we've got, what, 1776 until today.
00:23:29.620How many times have we had it to the point in the last 245 years where the people that are becoming enemies, some of them are domestic, and they're your superiors?
00:23:39.180And if we've had that in our history, how have we as the people won that fight, that battle?
00:23:46.180That is the one thing that gives me hope.
00:23:49.000And I try to be very hopeful in my outward projection, but internally, and when I sit down with my wife on the couch at the end of the day, and we have a glass of wine together and discuss things, I mean, sometimes that conversation is not as hopeful as what I project.
00:24:04.600Well, one of the things that does give me hope is thinking back to that Civil War period and that post-Civil War period and what was done to try to bring the country together and how Grant did that.
00:24:16.880Those parts of our history do give me hope because it was tough back then.
00:24:23.180But today, we have this new thing, and this new thing is these social platforms, is everybody has this voice, and everyone can be manipulated also by these different platforms.
00:24:37.160And it's just that part is what was missing back then.
00:24:40.520I try to think, hey, what if we had social media back then?
00:24:44.140What if you had an Instagram, a TikTok, a Facebook, a LinkedIn, you had YouTube, you had a couple companies controlling a lot of that information?
00:24:55.020What would that Civil War period and post-Civil War period have looked like with that element?
00:25:00.420And I don't know the answer to that, obviously, because they didn't exist back then.
00:25:04.000But that's the outlier that is a lot different from other times in our history.
00:25:08.780And that time that I'm talking about that gives me a little hope for going forward, well, they didn't have to deal with some of those things today.
00:25:15.200These multinational-type corporations where the wealth is up there at the very top, and there's a lot of control involved in data and information.
00:25:27.640It's about data and information and controlling that information and using it to control a populace.
00:25:32.800And there's no doubt that you can control how someone is thinking based off what you feed them on these channels.
00:25:40.100So it's a different environment, and it's a scary environment for our kids to grow up in, I think, because it's completely uncharted territory.
00:25:47.640And so I think about that quite a bit.
00:25:49.920Well, I mean, would you say gaslighting is a new thing?
00:25:53.140You think propagandas are a new thing?
00:25:55.160They've been around for a while, right?
00:25:56.620Both of them, gaslighting and propaganda.
00:26:09.040Where, you know, we can go to history books and go through them.
00:26:13.900But how much different is it versus today?
00:26:17.420You'll have a debate with somebody, and they'll say, look, the way the government is set up, you know, our system is set up with judicial, executive, legislative, you know,
00:26:26.420it is set up in such a way that you are protected.
00:26:37.660Well, up until about 20 years ago, you still had to operate in a way that was very similar how you would have to operate in, say, 1865, let's say,
00:26:45.740meaning that if you wanted to control or manipulate, you would have to buy a journalist, you would have to blackmail a journalist, you would have to blackmail a politician, buy a politician in the traditional sense of actually purchasing these people or getting information on these people to use to blackmail them.
00:27:10.360Now, so those things still existed, that propaganda, that manipulation, all that still existed, but you didn't have as many tools to use.
00:27:19.840And now you have so many different tools to use.
00:27:22.460A lot of them are much more subliminal than sending someone outside of a reporter's house to catch him leaving with someone who wasn't his wife or whatever it might be to use as blackmail.
00:27:33.660Now you have all this data that is—and every keystroke is—it's recorded.
00:27:39.680I mean, there's a lot of data out there on all of us, and it's controlled by a very few people at the very top.
00:27:50.540So that propaganda and manipulation, all that was around, but the tools were different back then.
00:27:55.820And those tools that existed back then still do exist, but now there's a lot more out there to use.
00:28:00.960So once again, it's adapting to that battle space.
00:28:03.900As you're writing and your creative imagination is coming up with stories, what is your creative imagination thinking about to get somebody to flip?
00:28:11.300Or let's just say a person for the longest time has been a law-abiding citizen, card-carrying, loving American, patriot, capitalist, constitution protector, and all of a sudden they flip.
00:28:23.100But, you know, what is the strategy to get somebody to flip?
00:28:28.360Is it information on what they did against their wife that they don't want to be public because their legacy is going to be tainted?
00:28:35.080Is it something that they—again, I'm asking purely from your creative side, what are some methods you would add to say,
00:28:43.060here's a proud citizen that loves America, all of a sudden he starts giving in to China, all of a sudden he starts making, you know, certain compromises because there's something behind him?
00:28:53.080What would your creative imagination say, here's five ways to get somebody to flip?
00:28:58.620Yeah, so all those traditional ones still certainly exist.
00:29:02.700There's just being more ways to get where you want to go with those.
00:29:08.140But what's even more dangerous, I think, today is something—is a moral vanity where you don't even know that you have been, quote-unquote, flipped,
00:29:17.500but that you are willing to destroy the bedrock of a nation that gave you all the options and opportunities.
00:29:23.140All these—from the inception of this country up until today, all these people died to give you the freedom of choice,
00:29:30.300to be able to make your own decisions, not have it dictated to you by a monarchy, by a federal government that was going to put you in a certain category.
00:29:40.660No, you can break out wherever you appear on this planet in this country.
00:29:45.180You have the option and opportunity to make your own decisions going forward to build the life you want, to make the life you want.
00:29:51.220Now we have this moral vanity that has slipped in that allows us, and a lot of us, at these highest levels that have been afforded all this opportunity that allowed us to build great wealth.
00:30:04.240And now we want to undermine that for the next generation coming up because of this moral vanity so that we can—maybe it's going to these cocktail parties so that you're on the same page as Good Morning America in the morning
00:30:22.240or MSNBC in the evening or whoever you watch and you feel good about it because this peer group that is larger than it would have been in the past because of quote-unquote friends on social channels and followings and all the rest of it
00:30:38.280make you—empower you to feel this moral vanity that makes you want to undercut exactly what allowed you to create the life that you wanted.
00:30:49.160So it's an amazing thing, and psychologists are going to have a field day with it today and looking back on it because you're destroying the very foundation of the thing that allowed you to succeed.
00:31:00.600Jack, you're a 20-year vet, a sniper, an enlisted sniper, Navy SEAL.
00:31:07.040You've been all over. You've been deployed everywhere. You've written New York Times bestsellers.
00:31:10.680You're a citizen that takes care of your family, father, married, and you have a lot of experiences.
00:31:16.780At the same time, you know, the conversations you have with your wife at night, with your family, with your peers.
00:31:20.840Now that you write these books, you're going to be in different circles, so you're having conversations that are high-level type of conversations.
00:34:02.540How about President of the United States?
00:34:07.380That's a tough one, because it's fairly obvious we're dealing with something that we haven't really dealt with before, which is cognitive decline in a head of state in this country.
00:34:18.960So I'm going to go ahead and put that at a 2 or 3.
00:38:00.060If these politicians question somebody like me who's a scientist, I'm the guy that represents science, and we know what we're doing, and here's what we're going to be doing.
00:38:07.880And it was just very concerning on the way he took the approach, you know, on the angle he took.
00:38:15.660So, you know how we've all seen the data when China puts out the data, and they say, our unemployment rate in China right now is 2%.
00:38:23.260We're like, wow, what an amazing and noble job they're doing to keep the unemployment only at 2%, right?
00:38:29.680And I feel bad for the people that believe that it's only 2%, with 1.5 billion people living there and some of the stuff that leaks out sometimes.
00:38:38.960When it comes down to data in America, and the data that's put out to us, how much of the data do you trust, and who do you trust it from?
00:38:49.560Like, you know, for example, the reason why I'm asking this question from you is, if you and I were to go buy a house today, and you want to buy a million-dollar house, whatever.
00:39:01.780You want to put $200,000 down, the bank is going to say, yeah, no problem, let's run a credit score, okay?
00:39:08.200And they go to Experian, you know, TransUnion, Equifax, your score comes up, 728, 745, 738, you're fine, you've had one late in the last three years, and you fixed it because it was a car payment, you had a wrong checking account, you're good, we'll finance you for this million dollars, 20%, now you're good to go.
00:39:38.180This trust has been eroded so much between big tech and the citizen, between big government and the citizen.
00:39:45.900And each opportunity that both big tech, big government, media has to build some trust, they do the opposite.
00:39:53.540They continue to use their platforms, their data to support a certain ideology that marginalizes almost half the country and continues to divide the country, which does what?
00:40:05.680Well, it galvanizes bases for politicians, it gets more clicks on things for social media, it gets more advertisers in front, but, you know, that's just the base level.
00:40:14.220That's just the base level stuff, that's fine, that makes them extremely wealthy.
00:40:18.720But what it really does is give them data and gives them information on how to manipulate in the future, not just to make you buy a set of steak knives, but to get you to vote a certain way, to get you to think a certain way.
00:40:35.320That is where we have lost all this trust, and that's really the power that these tech giants have.
00:40:41.300And going back to that, let's go back to the military part real quick, because I don't want to say six or seven trusts in the military.
00:40:46.020And when we look at that exit from Afghanistan, though, that we had 20 years to prepare for that moment, 20 years, we had 20 years of our own experience, we could have gone back to the Soviet experience, their 10 years from 79 to 89, we could have gone back to three British incursions in the 1800s and early 1900s.
00:41:07.780We didn't have to go back to Alexander the Great, we didn't have to go back to Genghis Khan, we had our own, we could have just took any one of those years that we have been in Afghanistan.
00:41:15.560Let's say from March of 2002, let's say, let's give us a few months where we had a culminating point of victory in those early days that we went past a culminating point of victory and turned that success into failure.
00:41:27.200So we had all those years to prepare and we rushed to failure, we ran to failure, and we have civilian control of the military, but we also have a military that had 20 years to prepare for this as well, for these contingencies.
00:41:43.660And it didn't come as a shock to me or to most people that I know that it ended the way it did.
00:41:50.740So that's that trust in military, that took a hit right there.
00:41:54.600You have a company that has 20 years to prepare for something, they know it's coming, they know exactly what's happening, and they screw it up that bad.
00:42:02.360They couldn't have done it worse, and they've been actively trying to do it, the worst job that they possibly could.
00:42:08.000So I'm lowering my score for military, I'm going back to three or four.
00:42:11.320How much of that responsibility goes on the leaders of the different branches that we have versus the president?
00:42:17.520I mean, we know Commander-in-Chief is President Biden, that's who it is today, right?
00:42:31.180And the meeting, you know, where, because you're in meetings where sometimes maybe you're reporting to somebody that's above you, you're superior, and you've got to say, boss, I'm telling you, we have to take a different route.
00:42:41.580This is not going to work out well for us.
00:42:44.860How much of it is them not giving enough pushback rather than just saying, okay, let's just go ahead and do this, costing us $83 billion of equipment we left behind to the Taliban?
00:42:55.080I mean, it's easy for the military to say politicians lost the war.
00:42:58.940You know, it's a very common thing to say in Vietnam after Vietnam.
00:43:03.140But we can see general after general after general going in front of Congress from 2001 all the way up to just a few months ago saying the exact same things.
00:43:15.820Just need a little more time, a little more funding, more troops.
00:43:19.560And that's not a president telling them to say that.
00:43:21.740That is them going in front of Congress and giving their honest, quote-unquote, honest assessment to congressional leadership and to the American people and by default to their troops who are watching them give these speeches and give this testimony.
00:43:34.200And you can pick out any time, 2004, 2008, 2012.
00:44:02.820He was replaced a few months later, and that hadn't happened since MacArthur in Korea.
00:44:08.680And he did that because he raised concerns about how much progress we were actually making, and that's what happens.
00:44:15.940And that sent a message to the rest of our flag-level officers.
00:44:19.060Hey, this is what happens when you tell the truth.
00:44:20.820This is what happens when you give your actual honest assessment.
00:44:23.380You're not around much longer, and off you go to pastor.
00:44:26.300So that was probably one of the most devastating things that happened over the last 20 years is for senior-level leaders to see what happened to the one person who said the truth, and he got fired.
00:44:35.320Yeah, but I think even with that, man, I think if 20 people get fired, no one got fired.
00:44:43.940If one person got fired, yeah, one person got fired.
00:44:46.520But if 50 people get fired, America cannot afford to have 50 people to fire.
00:44:50.920I don't know if that makes sense or not.
00:44:52.320So, you know, you're running a company, and, you know, you got, your name is Ford, and 50% of your employees come to you and they say, look, we can't work 66 hours a week in these kind of conditions.
00:45:06.900You've got to give us a retirement plan.
00:45:08.180You've got to give us health insurance.
00:45:09.760You've got to give us a bit of a raise.
00:45:11.240This is just not going to work out, right?
00:45:12.680Ford can't say, ah, whatever, guys, go ahead.
00:45:16.000No, you can't afford to do that, right?
00:45:18.100But if one person does that and two people do that, a small percentage complain, fine.
00:45:22.000You're always going to have that, and you're never going to please everybody.
00:45:25.180I think if more people would have stood up, the hell are you going to say if the four people, if the four generals, the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy is all on the same page saying, president, this is a terrible idea.
00:45:48.240And again, look, I'm not in that position for me to put all the responsibility on them.
00:45:51.680I don't know where it is to put the responsibility on them.
00:45:53.980I know what it is to have lived in Iran for 10 years and a decision Carter made on the human rights hoping to help out Iran with the 3,000 political prisoners under the Shah or the political refugees or the Muriel Bolt lift in Cuba.
00:46:09.720Next thing you know, it backfired on America, and it backfired on Iran, and we know what happened with Iraq.
00:46:15.400Half a million people got killed because of a bad decision.
00:46:17.500We don't yet know the repercussions of the decisions that we made.
00:46:20.620We may not even see the side effects of this for the next five to 10 years.
00:46:23.140That's why I wonder, like, how do you not just look at your leader and say, this is a bad idea.
00:46:31.480We're going to be united on this against you.
00:46:43.120You ever had, how many instances like that did you have to tell the person you report to, this is not a good idea?
00:46:47.780Usually, they're coming down from above that person and they're parroting something that comes above and even higher.
00:46:53.260I was at such a low tactical level, so I didn't have those sort of strategic level meetings.
00:46:59.720So, they were more like, why is this person just parroting what has been, this person is useless.
00:47:05.440They're just saying what's coming down the pike here.
00:47:07.740I didn't need them to sit in that seat and just parrot.
00:47:10.280What we need to do is figure out how to make this work, make this new policy, this new directive, this new guidance, whatever it might be.
00:47:17.120Now, we have to do the on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground problem solvers, aggressive problem solvers, and maybe turn a good idea around and make it work for us.
00:47:27.180And then be able to explain it to the guys that are going to be even one level below us in a way that makes sense.
00:47:34.380Because if you lose that trust, if you just parrot what comes down the pike, the E5 on the couch, waiting in the platoon space, he noticed.
00:47:46.460And everything you do in the military or in life, I think, is an opportunity to build trust, both up and down the chain of command, side to side with your peers.
00:47:55.480And what we're doing in this country right now is we're losing trust at every opportunity, it seems, which is, once again, just disheartening.
00:48:03.480What percentage of the guys that executed the plan on leaving Afghanistan knew was a bad idea?
00:49:50.480But that's what it looks like from the outside.
00:49:53.280And what we saw happen at Abbey Gate when we saw all those deaths and a lot more people that are wounded that we don't even hear about, that's the result.
00:50:03.660Jack, I got two other questions for you before we wrap up.
00:50:05.760One of them is, you know, when you're, like I interviewed the former director of Mossad.
00:50:14.760Him and I were sitting down, I think Shabbat was his name.
00:50:48.840China's intelligence right now is maybe the best, and no one's even recognizing them.
00:50:54.280You know, they're top two, top three, but nobody knows how they're training themselves, right?
00:50:58.720So, the question I would have for you is, when it comes down to us training our allies, what is the protocol that we follow in training our allies where you don't train them too much to know everything?
00:51:12.480You know that one day they won't flip on you, like what's been happening lately with some countries that used to be allies, now they're enemies.
00:51:20.460Even before September 11th, this was a conversation that we had because we did JSTATs.
00:51:25.140We did training exercises around the world with partner nations, with host nation forces, and we always say, hey, let's be a little bit careful.
00:51:39.280It's not saying, hey, make sure you don't teach this, this, this, or this.
00:51:41.920It's us on the ground having that common sense, again, saying, eh, but it's tough also when you're doing combat foreign internal defense, meaning you're going out there into the streets of Ramadi with a partner force.
00:51:54.800Or you're in Afghanistan, you're training up a partner force, and you're going out and executing these missions.
00:51:59.640Because your life, the lives of your guys to the right and left, they're right there and depending on this host nation force.
00:52:07.120So you do want them to be as trained up as they possibly can be.
00:53:11.540Anyway, you could point to all these different missteps from that point on.
00:53:16.720But from December 2001, we handled that situation fairly poorly.
00:53:20.860But our senior level leaders, it's their responsibility to understand the nature of the conflict to which they're engaging, committing U.S. forces.
00:53:32.300And they failed over that entire 20-year period.
00:53:35.960So, yeah, I do look at them with a critical eye.
00:53:41.360But I guess the good part today is that it gives me a lot of material to work with in the novels.
00:53:46.660Yeah, that's a part of it where I sometimes wonder.
00:53:50.960I'm like, I understand training your own self with people that are going to be with us long term where you're, again, domestic or, you know, foreign or domestic.
00:54:00.340You know, you want to train the people that are here, but sometimes we're, Phil, we're building our enemies even bigger.
00:54:05.320We're experiencing that with China right now.
00:54:06.660Everything we do with capitalism, China duplicated.
00:54:08.520Now, China's, everybody's relying so much on China with the chips, with everything that they're doing, that we have no choice.
00:54:56.400But what do you say to Navy SEAL that's now, you know, somebody came out a couple of years ago talking about the fact that they're transgender, former Navy SEAL.
00:55:06.180I don't know if you saw that story or not, if you followed it.
00:55:10.180Kristen Beck, I think it's the name of the individual that now is transgender.
00:55:14.180Do you think, how do you think the SEAL, cream of the crop at that level, special ops type of guys, Delta, you know, Navy SEAL, how do you think they should treat training women as well as transgender in regards to their units?
00:55:30.860Well, the women one I thought a lot more about than the transgender one, because it's a transgender one.
00:55:36.880I'm just not quite sure what means what and how we, anyway, I'm not, I'm not quite prepared to think that through from, because women coming in wanting to be men, men coming in wanting to be women.
00:55:47.420I've just, there's a lot to unpack there.
00:55:49.020But when it comes to females in combat ground forces, particularly special operations, so they've been on the front lines with us from the beginning of the war on, so they've been right there.
00:56:00.180They haven't been entering rooms and getting shot in the face, that sort of a thing, but they've been right there with us in these supporting roles, and supporting roles sounds, you know, like, it's not the right word, because they are right there.
00:56:11.380And for me, like, I grew up, as a lot of people did, opening doors, you're taught to open a door for a female, you're taught to stand up, offer your seat to a lady that gets on a bus or a train or something like that, stand up when a woman enters the room, treat them with disrespect.
00:56:29.520But almost, you know, you're putting them on this, it's disrespect and putting them on this pedestal type thing.
00:56:36.720So, for me, there's no possible way that as a combat leader, I would be able to treat a female exactly the same as I would one of the guys.
00:56:45.680I just, it's not, I'm not programmed that way.
00:56:47.960For whatever reason, I'm programmed to protect females.
00:56:50.620That's how I was raised, and that's in my DNA.
00:56:52.900I don't think I need to be raised that way.
00:56:54.140I think it's just innate in us as humans to protect those who are going to carry on and make sure that our bloodlines and our species continue to move forward after we're dead.
00:57:05.480And that's why we go forward and get cut up and killed in combat all the time, protecting them.
00:57:11.720So, for me, it would be very difficult to treat them exactly the same way as I would a guy who's a dude.
00:57:21.240Now, the other side of that is, you know, you have daughters and you want them to have the same opportunities and freedoms that their male counterparts have.
00:57:29.980So, there is definitely a discongruence there in that line of thought.
00:57:36.100But, once again, it's just very natural to protect the females and the species, whether they want it to be or not.
00:58:13.160And for most of human history, you had to be good at a couple of things.
00:58:16.160You had to be a good hunter and you had to be a good fighter.
00:58:19.020And only very, very recently have we been able to outsource both of those things by calling 911 and going down to the local grocery store to get food.
00:58:28.500That is the smallest portion of human history.
00:58:30.780So I think in all of us, there is that natural tendency to still be a protector, to still be a provider.
00:58:39.060It's getting bred out of us, though, by once again, by every single input that we have.
00:58:44.440Almost, almost every single input that we have from big tech, big government, big media, legacy media.
00:58:50.740They're all preaching something different.
00:58:53.460And, hey, I don't know if the lights go out tomorrow and all of a sudden we're back to what we've been for most of human history, having to be good at those things.
00:58:59.900Maybe that dynamic changes a little bit.
00:59:01.600Maybe we're not so concerned about equality of equity and outcomes and all those sorts of things that are really just undermining the very foundations of this country.
01:01:48.860So for me, it doesn't really come down to a quality and equity and making sure everybody, but no, it comes down to does this make us a more effective and efficient fighting force?
01:02:05.860Maybe it's just maybe I'm the I'm the Neanderthal and and and yeah, and maybe maybe having a female in the platoon space is a good thing for all the guys in there.
01:02:39.200You know, it totally changes the dynamic.
01:02:42.060I mean, you know, I interviewed a lot of comedians.
01:02:47.760And the one thing I can tell you about comedians is most comedians, I'm not saying all of them, but most comedians lived a very tough life.
01:02:56.280They had a dad who has a temper, used to drink, hit him or mom left or some shitty situation that they had, right, where they become comedians.
01:03:24.200You know, when you're in that kind of a pressure type of an environment, I mean, sarcasm, jokes, laughter, shots, you know, not shots like shots like taking shots at each other, condescending, witty.
01:03:37.060It almost seemed like that was the medicine to overcome the whatever situation you're in.
01:03:47.940They'll say, well, that's not the right way to deal with people.
01:03:52.760And that's just not how you're supposed to treat people.
01:03:55.520And Michael Jordan said in his documentary, The Last Dance, there's a scene in The Last Dance where he says, I remember when I was a kid and my brother, I think his name is Adrian.