493: Chris Cappy's Grunt Perspective From The Front Lines of Iraq and Ukraine.
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This is Jocko podcast number 493 with echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening. I come good evening Jonathan Andrew pebbly call sign mayhem was killed by a Russian drone strike while fighting in Ukraine according to a social media post from a military American military expert and vlogger Chris Capilouto I've just been informed mayhem is kia in Ukraine. He died trying to save two of his buddies said Capilouto and

who had interviewed Pebley earlier this year for his YouTube channel. From talking to him, he was a stand-up guy dedicated to the defense of Ukraine. He was very interested in the political side of the fight when I spoke to him, meaning he was steadfastly against Putin and his aggressive war. Pebley was a U.S. Marine Corps and Iraq War veteran and had served as a machine gunner with the Delta Knights Unit in the International Legion under Ukraine's main intelligence directorate.

After leaving the Marines, Pebley worked at various jobs in different countries before arriving in Ukraine in August 2024. In an interview with Capilouto earlier this year, Pebley said that he had found his purpose in Ukraine. Quote, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel at home again. Everything makes a lot more sense, even though I don't speak the language.

Somehow, life makes more sense here than it did any time since I got out in 2009. End quote. And that right there is an excerpt from an article from the Kiev Post from just a few days ago. Came out on 26 May 2025, reporting on yet another casualty in that vicious war.

and the quotes in the article are from an interview by chris capilouto who's better known as chris cappy who's a former national guard u.s army soldier an iraq war veteran who traveled to ukraine as a journalist to get or try and get some ground truth on the war there and he took the risk associated with being a war zone to do that and he reported on his experiences

and his lessons learned and what he saw. And it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to share all the lessons he's learned over the years, not only in Ukraine, but also in the Army National Guard, combat in Iraq, reintegration into civilian life, a little bit of activity in the corporate world, and then his journey from a video editor to the chief creator at his own channel, which is called Cappy Army.

Chris, thanks for joining us, man. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. Yeah. It was really, really heart wrenching to have watched your interviews with Mayhem and then see you posting that. It's also a good reminder of something that I was trying to remind people of that the people that are fighting are people. They're not just soldiers. They're not just numbers. They're human beings.

There's another one that is gone so

I suppose we'll get into all that stuff as we move through this podcast, but let's get a little bit of the background, a little bit of the background on Cappy, where you came from, what was going on. You're growing up. You and I are both East Coasters. You're from Long Island, right? That's right. Long Island. Yeah, I grew up on Long Island where I get coffee and bagels. What year were you born? 1989. Okay. Yeah. So you caught the last bit of that decade. What were your parents doing when you were growing up?

My dad was a conductor on the railroad. He punched tickets. Which one? The Long Island Railroad. Okay. So from out east to Long Island, he'd take all the commuters into New York City every morning. Yeah, I don't think I ever rode that because I don't think I ever had a reason to go out to Long Island from New York. But oh well, all right.

Yep. So he punched tickets for 35 years or so. Every day worked really, really hard. That was one of my earliest memories, actually, is growing up and he would take me on the train. I get to ride for free, which is pretty cool. Huge benefit. Get to go see the engine in the front. And we'd go to the city all the time. And yeah, I just remember how hard he worked and how he's supporting people.

My sister and my brother and me and yeah, really good guy. And what about your mom? My mom was a IRS agent for the government and she would always tell me not to tell people that. So I'm sorry, mom, that I'm telling people that you work for the IRS. She was in IT. She wasn't auditing you. Did you have any military veteran like background in your family? So my mom's father, my grandfather was in the Korean War. Okay. He was in the second ID as an artilleryman. Check. Okay.

How was this hearing?

Just completely shot. He would always yell at us until like just normal things that he was saying. Actually, he has a funny story about that. So when he was on the gun batteries and they would do fire missions all day, it got so bad that they couldn't hear the fire missions come in anymore. So what they would do is put their hand on the phone so that they could feel the vibrations of the phone ringing. Okay, there you go. All right, we got a fire mission.

That's how absolutely deaf they were. And the VA, you know, it's not service-connected. And so he was like 80. Then they were like, okay, fine. And you said you have an older brother and a younger sister? Yeah, my really huge age gaps. So my older brother is eight years older than me, and my younger sister is six years younger. That's a weird...

or lack of planning? One of those two. It's either an interesting, I have like a really tight shock group for my first three kids and then I have one like stray round. And how was that, but so that means your older brother was babysitting you and stuff, I'm assuming at some point. - Yeah, I think the thing about having a big age gap between your siblings is that there's, my understanding is there's like less rivalry usually because you're so far apart that it's more of sort of a mentor

Relationship that you'll have like my older brother and I we never really were competitive with each other like how a lot of siblings are especially guys I think at that age So I just looked up to him my whole life and always he was going through these milestones in life Like it's a way to kind of look into the future eight years and see okay This is the college is gonna happen and it's gonna be like this. So it really gave me

an opportunity to see what was coming and how to kind of navigate it. And he would always give me advice as well. So amazing, I think, having that, even though maybe you're not quite as close because he's,

Because he was so much older, like by the time I was 10 or 11, he's out the door. He's going to college and then living around the world. What did he do in college? He studied computer graphics. So he went straight into like the movie industry and working on different movies like Spider-Man and stuff in the computer effects world. Echo Charles is kind of getting curious over here. He's special effects curious. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah.

And then what, did you do the same thing for your little sister then? And yeah, so I tried my best to be a good older brother and to answer any questions that she had in the same way. And again, like we weren't super close because she's so much younger and I was out gone and off and traveling around the world as well. But we...

Now we live much closer to each other and we have a good relationship. She's like another, both of my siblings are just geniuses when it comes to like math and science. And I was like, I was such a screw up in school. And so she's a quantum physicist for Amazon working on quantum computings, quantum computer computings. There you go. That's how smart I am. So how did you end up being a screw up in school then? Oh my God.

God, I was a nightmare. They were so well behaved and I was just an absolute nightmare from like the get go. And I think part of it, like my, my parents split when I was pretty young when I was 11 and

And so like the divorce, I think when you're at that age, that formative age can, you know, you want any kind of attention, negative attention, any sort of attention. So I would act out and my teachers hated me. What does act out consist of? Act out consists of the point where they're like, we're going to, we're going to kick you out of school.

You need to get your act together. You need to misbehave a lot. You need to be the class clown. You need to get into fights, but not like win the fights, like get my ass kicked. And I was bullied a lot. And I like every time the principal would call, they'd be like, what'd you do, Chris?

Everyone in the class would say, what would you do this time? You're going to go to the principal's office again. And I think I wanted, it was a cry for help. But I was in all of the like special help classes, all the you need remedial training on this so bad. Like you're not, what aren't you getting? And was it just a public school? Yes. I went to public school throughout. Did you play any sports? Baseball, which was the saving grace. Baseball is all the friends that I had growing up.

Were a hundred percent through sports through baseball who also did karate? Shurin, Jeru Karate when I was growing up only made it to like green belt, but that Discipline it helped pull me back from the edge. So by the time I was like 16 17 I started pulling my act together and started Focusing more on school and not getting in trouble so much. Did you start coming up with a plan then for like a life plan? I

I always knew that I wanted to do video. That was about it. I knew I wanted to tell stories. When you say video, was that early enough to be like video is a thing? Or were you having a look at it and go, I want to make movies? Because when I was a kid, there was no such thing as video. I mean, there kind of was, but you wouldn't be going into video. You'd be going into like, I want to make a movie in Hollywood. There was nothing in between. Whereas now, you can do video. What?

As we all know, you can do video real easy. So did you have a, was there any like actual video path that you knew about? The video path that I knew about was I wanted to make movies. Like I was, I was, I was a kid that knew all the names of the actors for the Batman movies and the kids would like test me on it. They'd say, well, Chris, well, who was, uh, who played Batman in who played poison Ivy? And I didn't realize at the time they were kind of making fun of me, but

because I've always been a little bit like socially awkward and I was, I'm like, Oh yeah, I'll tell you. I'll list off all the names. Like, um, just a like obsessive knowledge on movies. And, um, I wanted so badly to be a director of films. And my dad, uh,

was really big into technology and video cameras. So he would get some of the earliest VHS giant tapes that you would load up in there. And we would video together. We would do little stop motion movies when I was growing up. And we'd edit it in camera. So we'd make it look like this old show Super Dave him and I would recreate. And he's the one that really got me into...

my love of video and video production and video editing. Like my dad would rip editing software off of LimeWire. We would pirate like, I don't know if I should say that, but yeah, it was illegal, but we would pirate this old, this editing software. And I would teach myself how to edit when I was as young as like 10. And that's what I would do when he would pick me up and bring me over to

Stay with my aunt and him and I would just edit all day and try to like how do I do a green screen? How do I do this? So that's real clear of something you're obsessed with and then you How do you follow that path? So what's your next move after high school film school and my dad begged me not to it's like learn something useful like don't and he was right he was good advice and

And so I did my first year of film school at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. And when I was there, it just was not fulfilling. It wasn't what I needed at that point in my life. It was a lot of drinking, partying, and it didn't feel fulfilling. Mm-hmm.

Were you drinking and partying and then you got to a point you're like, all right, this is not getting me anywhere. Yeah, because I felt like I wasn't really learning anything or developing or growing. And a lot of my life, like the time that I would spend with my father a lot of times was in the car. It was him driving me to karate. It was him driving me to baseball and maybe like a weekend I would get to spend with him.

And so a lot of the time that we would spend together, we'd be listening to like talk radio. We'd be listening to Rush Limbaugh. And we would talk a lot about like the Iraq war as I'm growing up. And these are some of my most, I would say impactful memories with my dad is talking about how,

The war in Iraq is a good thing, and what we're doing is good. And I remember getting to college and thinking like... Real quick, so you were what, 12 on 9-11? I would have been 12. 11 or 12, something like that? What do you remember about that? I'm in Long Island. That was... You could see the smoke, I'm sure. Yeah, you could... It was... Everyone knew somebody lost somebody because all of the...

families where I grew up on Long Island out east were commuters into the city. A lot of them worked in lower Manhattan and my dad would normally be commuting in on the railroad, but that day he didn't go to work. And I remember him telling me that Ronkonkoma train station, like where he would often go and start his day, there was just for weeks afterwards, there were cars left there.

From the people who never came back From the city and their cars are just in the parking lot and I remember that like image stuck with me the thought of There's like abandoned vehicles in all these train stations throughout long island of all these people that didn't make it and so 9 11 impacted me in the way by the time I was 18 I realized

I was like, this country has given me so much. I'm so fortunate. I'm so fortunate that I don't have to go and fight for the country. I can go to art school. I can screw off. And that, to me, felt wrong, especially because I, at the time, did very much believe in the fight. And I remember I had one of these moments where...

I had two 40s duct taped to my hands and I was just getting annihilated. Like literally duct taped to your hands? Oh yeah, they call it Edward 40 hands and I'm getting smashed. Also known as 80 ounces to freedom. You've heard of this? You've heard of this? I hear things. Yeah, so I'm getting obliterated in this dorm room in Manhattan and

And, you know, you start talking as one does with your art school buddies. And I'm like the only guy that is like, yeah, Iraq war is good. Everyone's like, if you think this, Chris, like, what are you doing here? Getting drunk and partying? Like, why don't you go and fight for your country if you really believe that? And I remember in that moment, you get super defensive. You're like, you don't know what you're talking about. Like, well,

What does it matter? I don't, it's not about that. But then I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror and think to myself, like, actually that guy's got a point. Like, what am I doing here? If I believe in this war and I think that this is a good thing and I'm able-bodied and like, you know, maybe I have something that I could offer to the military and

And it was that moment where I realized I'm like, I say a lot of things, but I don't actually believe the things that I say, right? Like, I must not if, you know, he has a point. And I'm thinking, like, do I want to live life aligned with what I say? Should my actions be in line with the things that I say? Because otherwise, I have to completely start saying different things. I got to start saying something else. Because otherwise, it's like...

The word is, I think, cognitive dissonance. I had this like really bad cognitive dissonance where I'm like, my actions are not in line with what I'm saying. And so I started looking up like, how could I serve? What are different ways to do it? Just going down the rabbit hole of like how do you join? What year is this? 2008. Okay. So...

Yeah, I mean, Iraq is still going off in 2008. And what did you find out? What did you end up choosing? How did you get to the National Guard? I got to the National Guard because there's an amazing historic unit in New York City, the 69th Infantry Division in New York City. They're the guys that responded to 9-11 on that day. They're the guys who then went to Baghdad and had a rough tour. I think it was 2004 or 2005.

And I just remember like reading their story, reading their book about their deployment and just like a historic unit, that whole division. And so I looked up on Google recruiters. They had a recruiter went down to the National Guard station because my thought was like, oh, I'm like, I'm probably going to hate this and I'm going to be terrible at it probably. So like, what's the least amount of commitment that I can do? Just to be completely honest, I was like, what's the least I can go in and

go to war and get out and like be done and feel like I did my part. And so the National Guard seemed like the least amount of commitment because I could go to boot camp as a 11. Oh, also the National Guard had infantry and no, the other reserves didn't. So I knew if I was going to do the army, I wanted to do the army thing. So I remember everyone was trying to talk me out. Like, don't do infantry, do like Intel, do something else.

But I had my heart set on being an infantryman. And the guard seemed like a way I could go over the summer and then go back to school if I wanted to. But I ended up after boot camp, I volunteered to deploy. Because in the guard, you can ask your captain to sign off on, hey...

let him transfer to the Pennsylvania national guard because the striker units going out. So kind of rambling, but bootcamp itself was a bit of a shock to me because I was in a unit that we had a murder in, in my, uh, in my during bootcamp. Yeah. What happened? It was like the only murder at Benning in over, I think decades. And there was an airborne holdover holdover, uh,

There was a guy who was injured and back at the bay and he's on bed rest. So he's away from the platoon. Then there's another guy who is on airborne holdover and he's going around and robbing all the barracks while people are training. He runs into the guy who's on bed rest. The guy's like, what are you doing here? Stop trying to get into these lockers.

confronts him and in that confrontation he pulls out a knife and stabs him. Which guy? So the airborne holdover thief pulls out a knife and stabs the just injured trainee like 40 times and I hear screams and my buddy hears screams in the barracks next door so we go to check because we're just cleaning our weapons and the first thing I see is

He's just a pool of blood in the barracks. This is like my third or fourth day of boot camp after 30th AG, like of actual boot camp. And I'm in shock because I have no real point of reference for that kind of violence or blood. And in that moment, I realized that blood and guts and things, other people's blood and guts don't really bother me that much. Like I didn't throw up, but I did...

have a moment of shock where I didn't know what to do. I didn't, I don't know anything about tourniquets or how to treat a wounded person. And so I just run to get a drill sergeant and the drill sergeant finds the murderer beats the hell out of him. He ends up going to prison, but I, um, yeah, just like right off the get go. I had the strangest military career. That's a, that's a freaking crazy way to kick off bootcamp. Um,

What'd they do with you guys after that? They gave us two days where they said, hey, you guys have been through something difficult. So we're going to go easy on you for two days. Get, you know, call your family. They gave us one phone call to call home and be like, we're okay. And then after that, they went back to normal. It was the strangest way to start the career. I'm like, what did I get myself into? Like, what am I doing?

But even in spite of that, I was like, I need to deploy. I had it in my head. I was like, I have to deploy. So you make it through boot camp and then you go right to AIT after that? Yep, straight to AIT. And had you already made up your mind to volunteer for deployment or did you graduate first? Graduated and I was hoping that my New York unit would deploy soon. But when I got back there, they said our deployment to Afghanistan has been canceled.

we're probably not going to go for a couple of years, fortunately. And I was like, well, fortunately, I'm like, that sucks. And they're like, dude, we've been there before. You do not want to go. And I was like, no, no. Like,

I do. And they're trying to talk me out of it. But my captain signed off on the transfer because we, a couple of the guys from my bootcamp cycle had found out that the Pennsylvania 28th ID was deploying. So we all kind of were texting each other and find like, Hey, you know, this is how you can volunteer for it. They need bodies. So, and this is, is this still 2008? Yes.

So that's what unit did you go to in the 28th? The 56th Striker Brigade. Okay. The first of the 111th. Got it. Because I was in Ramadi for about, I don't know, a month with the 228 and they were just freaking outstanding. But that was one of those times where...

You know, when you were sitting there looking at your brochure of the National Guard thinking, well, you know, I can kind of, I won't maybe have to go if I don't want to and I can get out of it. But like the 228 was on the ground in Ramadi for 14 straight months and they lost almost 100 guys. It was gnarly for them. So you must have had some of those guys that had been there. Yeah. One of the guys in my squad was on the Ramadi tour. A couple of them were in other parts of Iraq, but one in particular was

Really great guy. He ended up... He ended up trying to suicide by cop. He had it really rough in Ramadi. And he was just a really good dude. Is a good dude. And...

Yeah. The 28th ID is an outstanding National Guard unit. Great guys. And if they had the, by the time 2009, when our deployment hit mobilization was 2008, the train up and then 2009 is when we left. How long is that train up then? Like, is it like six months? It's three months in Louisiana, Fort Polk. We went to in the box there and it's just learning like how the strikers work and, and

I was very excited to be part of a striker unit. It's like the first National Guard striker unit. What was your job? I was in the 4th Squad. I was in Weapon Squad. For the first half of the tour, I was a rifleman, just like kind of an AG for the 240. And then the second half of the tour, I got the 249. So when you show up at the striker, do you have...

Do you have jobs specific to the striker or no? Cause they already have guys like a gunner assigned and a driver assigned and the vehicle commander. And so you're like a rifleman in the back, get some, I was a dismount check, which is what I wanted. And I was learning all of that when I got there. I'm like, wait, who do infantrymen drive the vehicles or are there drivers for the vehicles? Like how does organization work? How does this unit, how does it act? How does it actually work in practice? Um,

And since I volunteered and like caught up with the unit, they had already had, they already knew each other for years. You know, they've been training and drilling. So I was kind of like the guy from New York, the backfill. And my whole squad was made up of like backfills and dudes that had been stop lost and pulled back in or reclassed from combat engineer. Or my squad leader was a, uh, a cab scout that they reclassed. They were, they were just needed. They needed people with a pulse. Yeah.

And you're what, 19 years old? I was the youngest guy in my company, 19. And how's it looking as you're getting ready to go on deployment? Like now it's 2009. What's the action looking like over there? It was a transition period from basically the very, it was the end of the surge. So all of the, basically the benefits of the guys who had gone before me, all of the people that were part of the surge,

I got to kind of reap the benefits of the hard work that all those soldiers did. Because by 2009, it's not like... So many dudes are dead. So many bad guys have just been stacked bodies. But it wasn't clear that it was going to be that way. As we're going in, they're showing us these videos of...

I'm sure you've done this before where you're in a briefing room and they're showing you a video of two guys getting sniped and then another like an IED going off and they use that to lure a soldier and then they snipe him and then his buddy tries to get him. They're showing me videos of this and I was terrified by it. I'd never seen something like that before. So I like lost my nerve completely and I

So I'm gonna tell the story. The reason I tell it is because I think it shows that people can overcome their fear. And fear in war is something that fascinates me and I've always, I ask people about because it affects me so much. And I am kind of the guy that's very afraid, but I do it anyway. When I saw those videos, I went to my chaplain and I said,

in a moment of weakness, I asked the chaplain, I said, you have to get me off of this deployment. I need to leave. I'm quitting. I'm done. And other guys have done this too. And I was like, send me home. Like I'm not going over there and getting shot in the head and, you know, used as bait for my buddies. And this chaplain, I'll never forget. He, there are people in your life who are like,

there, I think, at important moments. And he gave me outstanding advice. He said, go back to your unit, go back to your barracks, sleep on it. And if you still feel the same way tomorrow, I will get you off of this deployment and you will have no repercussions, no negative stain or anything. I have you. I'll take care of you. And I was like,

Okay, fine. I'll see you tomorrow. Like, great. Thanks. And I went back, hung out with the guys in my squad. Really, guys, like my friends. And I'm like, I can't leave these dudes. I can't do this. The next morning, I went to training, and I never thought about it again. He's like, the chaplain told me, he's like, I think you're going to do this deployment. You're going to do your commitment, and I think you're going to be okay. Mm-hmm.

And I believe that you can do this. And like, that was exactly what I needed to hear. Because if he'd been like, no, you can't leave. I would have just kept probably trying to leave. But him saying, you know, yeah, we can do this. I don't know. It let me come to the answer myself. Which is...

Always the best way, you know from from a leadership perspective when people can come to the conclusion on their own There's a thing called psychological reactance Which is like when I tell you to do something you don't want to do it Just just a normal human reaction is like yeah if I tell you hey Cappy pick up that drink right now There's a part of your psyche that goes I don't want to do that But as soon as you give someone the option of like hey, dude, you can have that if you want you go Oh, I'm kind of thirsty. I'll drink it. That's just totally different and that's my buddy Seth and

He was in the SEAL teams with me and he would get frustrated about the Navy or whatever and he'd say, you know, I'm gonna get out, you know? And I'd say, yeah, go ahead. I'll help you write your letter and you can get out. And then the next day he'd be like, no, I'm not getting out.

But it was just the exact same thing if I would have tried to negotiate with him like no you need to stay in and I know you got a kid on the way it's gonna be the same thing like when your kid is like five Imposing things on them is way harder in the long run then Getting them to understand the watch just like being a good leader. I'm like, hey, this is why we're good This is why we need to make this happen and is is way better and anytime

you can see freedom and you have a choice in it, it's just better. I mean, anytime your platoon leader says, we're doing it this way, as opposed to, hey, do you guys like this plan or this plan? Like just two options makes you feel infinitely better than just their option. So that's a good lesson from the chaplain. Outstanding chaplain. Really, really...

Like, I don't know what I would have done if it had, because I feel like there's a lot of chaplains who would not be that present of mind and that smart about it. And who'd be like, you know, like you said, try to force a thing or it just could have been a disaster if it wasn't for. That's why I'm so fortunate that just like I've gotten lucky in life to have that chaplain there at that moment. That is pure luck. Yeah.

So as you're heading over, do you know where you guys are going to be stationed in Iraq? Changes a couple of times. They're like, we're going to be here. We're going to be there. We start getting a little bit of intelligence of, okay, we're going to be just north of Baghdad. It's a place called Mushada, which is like 15 kilometers from Camtagi. And it's good. It's a little combat outpost, but they start calling it JSS by the time we're there, joint security station. We're going to be living there.

On like a football-sized field... A football field-sized base that's half Iraqi police and half American soldiers. And we're going to rotate through there. And another place that's a chicken coop that they just put T-walls around. So I'm like, okay, this is going to be not the four-star. Not the Camp Taji where you got the Domino's pizza. But I wanted to be in the suck. And...

It was basically the guys that we replaced, the 25th ID were there for 14 months and had gone like a little bit nuts. I think they'd been a part of the solder city operation and they'd had it rough and they'd kind of cleared the way for us. By the time we were there,

A lot of the bad guys are dead. And it's a lot of IEDs. It's a lot of responding to IEDs. Our main job is route clearance. We're responsible for that stretch of route Tampa between like Baghdad, like the outskirts of Baghdad and, you know, up to the next checkpoint, basically. So our AO extends out to, I forget if it's the Tigris or the Euphrates. How many clicks was it?

Like our AO? Yeah. No, like on how much of ramp route Tampa did you guys have to monitor? I think it was about like 30 kilometer stretch. It's a big chunk. Maybe it's a little less than that. Something like that. And then it stretches out down Tarmia to, I think it was called Camp...

JSS Tarmia, which is right on the river. So that was kind of like our AO and we would do foot patrols and raids and, um, route clearance through that kind of that AO. For route clearance, did you have like a, an MRAP or something or?

Just doing a route clearance with Humvees? What were you doing? Strikers. Oh, that's right. You were strikers. So we're doing route clearance with... Which strikers are perfect for that. That's like their jam. You don't have to worry about throwing track. You don't have to worry about... Although the maintenance did end up being a nightmare for the vehicle crew. Like blown tires all the time with the air system. The thing was finicky, but... And also had like no armor on the bottom. Yeah. And...

Yeah. So we're monitoring that route for IEDs. We lost one soldier in my company at the very beginning of the tour. He was shot in the head responding to an IED attack, an ambush. And after the beginning of the tour, they did a lot of IEDs on our routes and then towards the end as well.

And then in the beginning and in the middle, it's just some raids and like a blur of just boredom. How's your, how's your mentality? Like when you lose one of your guys and then what, 12 hours later, eight hours later, 24 hours later, you're getting your gear back on to go back out. You talked about being like a person that feels fear. How did you overcome that? I think that the way I dealt with fear when I was there was that I hoped that it would be quick. I just didn't want it to,

to be painful and maybe because about once a week or every other week they would kill an Iraqi police officer or an Iraqi army soldier. They mainly targeted the Iraqis and not us. And so every other week or so they would, we drag and my vehicle was the Kazabak vehicle. So a lot of times we got, we got Iraqis in our vehicle with gunshots to the head with, uh,

an IED that went off right outside our base and blew the brains out the back of this, wounded a couple of Iraqi police and killed, I think two of them. And so we're helping with these wounded and, uh,

At the time, we made jokes about it. We laughed about it because the dude's brains came out and we had two dogs on our base. So the dogs came up and started eating on the brains. So we were like, oh, it's a zombie dog. We thought that was hilarious. And later on, thinking back on it, I'm like, actually, that's pretty messed up. And I don't know. It's so much easier when you've got...

your buddies with you and you're 19 and you think it's not going to happen to you. You think like you've got, it's, it'll happen to someone else. And it always does happen to someone else. And I don't know. I would volunteer for like every mission. I heard other platoons were going on raids. I would volunteer. I guess I a little bit had like a death wish a little, I don't know. I don't know what was wrong with me. And did you maintain that through the entire deployment?

Yeah, the hardest part is just being away from home, missing home. And like I stayed, I, the hardest, it's, it also is frustrating when you feel like you can't do your job because they fight an asymmetric war and I would get frustrated that they would

Touch off IEDs and then run away and I would say to my buddy Colin really good friend of mine like one of my best friends from the tour I was like dude, they're cowards. They just are hitting us and running away Why don't they stand and fight and he said to me we drop bombs on them from 30,000 feet in the sky Like are we cowards we fight way that unfairly and they fight unfair too and

He's like, they're not cowards. You should have some respect for them and the way that they fight. And I always remember that moment because I was like, that's a good point. And what about from like, you know, obviously you do geopolitics now and, you know, you were raised on a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and pro-Iraq war. How was that getting sorted out in your brain during this deployment? I went into it very...

like this is the right thing what we're doing here we should be in iraq and then i left not the kind of guy that's like i'm gonna throw my medals over a fence somewhere and i hate my service but i think i had a bit of a reality check as far as it's not exactly what i thought it was and it's messier than i thought and so that led me to a place where at 19 years old i'm thinking okay if i was wrong about that

Then am I wrong about everything? And when I got back, I had an existential crisis of my belief system being challenged and not quite holding up to reality. So I had to make my way through that tunnel to the light at the end of it, which is I had to rebuild my belief system and find out what it is that I really truly believe in.

And I feel like the way to that was for me personally was learning as much as I could because and different perspectives and to be able to argue the different perspectives on both sides, because then I would feel like I understood a little bit better how the world works. And that to me was cathartic. Instead of just thinking one way, because growing up you get bombarded with

messages, it's like talking heads yelling at each other and they're just each saying the opposite of each other and it was frustrating for me for a long period of time some like Is the war in Iraq like a terrible thing? Was it awful what we did then thinking like no Saddam was a really bad person and it's good what we did and

going back and forth on it. And then at the end of the day, I'm like, I don't need to know the absolute truth of the matter. I need to just learn more about it. And that's been my goal with my YouTube channel is I want soldiers like me to have a resource that I didn't have when I was a soldier. I couldn't type into YouTube, like what's different perspectives on like the war, what are

what are Sunnis and Shias? I didn't know going over there. You see guys holding hands and you're like, oh, that's different. I didn't know that that's a thing here, but that's culturally, that's how they are. And it would have been nice, I think, if I had had a resource that had taught me a little bit about what to expect a little bit more about the geopolitics of it. Soldiers don't need to get marred down in the details of all that.

all the time. You don't need to be thinking about that when you're pulling triggers, but I do think that it would be beneficial for the next generation of soldiers to have a little bit more knowledge base about how the world works.

So when you come home from that deployment, like what's the reintegration? I've been using that word lately, reintegration, because I think the military started using it as well. But what's the reintegration like for you going back into the civilian life? It's a rejection. It's like how when your body rejects like your antigens, the antibodies fight it off. It's like a shock to the system, especially for National Guard soldiers.

We go from you're in the sandbox one day to quite literally, legitimately the next day you are in college again. And it is not a good way to transition. Like the active duty guys and the way that that active duty has so much more difficulties in a lot of ways. But that's one of the ways that like reserves and the guard are not set up for success is

And transition is difficult for everybody. But just a way that's kind of unique for the guard in some ways is that they don't go back to their unit with their guys in the barracks and you're with your dudes and you can kind of debrief on what you've been through and what you've seen. And my tour was by no means not crazy. It was largely boring. It's the occupation phase. It's a lot of handing out $100,000 grants and you got...

So yeah, the transition was even so just very difficult for, to go from you're in a combat zone worrying about getting killed one day to, but then I'm at NYU Tisch for a film school surrounded by people who are not, they are not, let's say this, they are not your military types. And so now you're, are you 20 yet?

I would have been 20 going on, turning in 21, 21. And you're sitting in class all day. That's what's going on. And when you're going, you're studying film at NYU. So when you're studying film at NYU, are you like watching movies and critiquing the movies? Are you breaking down like, okay, here's the angle that they used. This is this kind of shot. This is why it was cool. It's like that what you do at film school. It's a lot of pretentious stuff. It's a lot of like,

yeah, why are they using this Dutch angle? And let's watch this old 1940s film that sucks, but we're going to pretend it's really cool and important. I went to Brooklyn College for a year and a half first, and then transferred into NYU. And at Brooklyn College, I studied English and studied a lot of

like history. And then when I went to NYU, it was largely focused on film and acting. And it was, um,

I feel like a place like NYU opens up a lot of doors, gives you opportunities that would be very difficult if I had stayed at Brooklyn College. And I was pretty much a diversity hire for NYU because they were like, oh, you went to Iraq? That's a little different. We don't got one of those. Okay, we'll let him in because they had rejected me before that. So, yeah. And it was a lot of... And it...

You don't know what it's like!

Losing that attitude is the best thing that ever happened to me to like not take myself so seriously and to not. To just stop flexing on your students with your combat experience. It's like the victim Olympics of like I had it tougher. And as you're sitting in class all day and at the same time you said it's like, well, what's the hardest part about that transition? Like what? Like, okay, you're in class. Okay. So watch the movie and write your critique on it. Why is that hard?

It doesn't feel as meaningful as being in Iraq and being in war. And so for the longest time, I just kind of would tell myself, like, nothing I do ever again will be as meaningful or as important as that. And that, like, I felt like I peaked. Like, okay, I don't necessarily want to go back to war, but, like, what else will ever...

Did you think about like going back full-time military? Yeah. Yeah. For a long time, me and my buddies, we would talk like, Oh, I want to, I look up to guys like you expect special forces, Navy seals. Like I wanted to, I was thinking about, maybe I'll do the, uh, green berets national guard. The, um, which group is that? Um, yeah. Yeah. Out of, uh, by the way, that's like the, that's like the best kept secret in the army. Um,

National Guard for sure. Like you can just become a full SF Green Beret and you're in the National Guard. That's a badass deal. I wanted to be that bad. I wanted to and I just didn't have it in me. I didn't have the commitment. It takes a lot of commitment. I think that's why people look up to guys who are SF and the SEALs. It's because it's like that's such a what an accomplishment.

And, but my, so my experience was very, I was an average infantryman, very, you know, I shot sharpshooter, not, not expert, if I'm being honest. My PT scores were passing, but not like I wasn't a PT stud. I was, I had an experience that I think

probably the vast majority of people that go into the military have because very sort of average guy wasn't the I was the dude pulling security for the high-speed cool guys and that was part of when I didn't you know created content was I wanted to tell that story I wanted to to

make content from the perspective of the average soldier. Yeah. And that just to make sure I make this perfectly clear, like the last guest I had on the podcast, Ryan Jackson, he was like a, he was in Ramadi with us and he was a infantry armored infantry guy. And they were doing eight hours patrolling into meme, which is like a,

horrific area of Ramadi. Eight hours patrolling, eight hours sitting QRF waiting for one of their other platoons to get blown up, and then eight hours to rest, refit, and be ready to go out again. And that's what they did every day for I don't know how many months, a year that they were there. And his company lost six guys. They had I don't know how many dozens of guys wounded, but it was just like absolutely an absolute grind of

of combat. And, you know, we're, you know, we're sitting across the table here talking and it's like, yeah, it's cool that there's the special operations guys do cool stuff and it looks cool, but that absolute grind of sustained combat. And one of the interesting things that I've talked about, which is kind of brushes up against something we already discussed is like that guy and his platoon, they were going out.

They were going out. It was on the schedule. You're going out tomorrow at this time. You know, at this time you're going out. You're going out the next day. You're going out the next day. You're going out the next day. Me and my guys, my guys went out when I wanted them to. You know what I mean? Like it was our choice when a target package came down, when a clearance operation was happening. I had a say and a pretty significant say on what we had to do or didn't have to do.

And of course, I mean, I'm bound by duty as an American fighting man, which is an extreme amount of pressure and which will you do the right thing. But, you know, there was times there was plenty of operations where, you know, I'd be talking on the platoon commanders and here's the here's what is being asked of us. And what do you think? And it's like, well, yeah.

super high risk, very low possibility for reward. Let's not do that. It's like, okay, fair enough. And we did that on a, you know, we did a lot of insanely risky things as well, but a lot of times it's like, eh, let's not do that one. And so you get that mentality, you know, that you had with your chaplain, where it's like, oh, well, if you don't want to go, you don't have to. And all of a sudden it's a lot easier to go.

The regular grunts don't have that choice. And special operations, oftentimes, we might not have a full choice, but we have a lot more influence over what we're gonna do and what we're gonna not do. And by the way, we're also gonna have an influence on how we're gonna do it. So that makes that type of combat stress a little bit easier. At the same time, the same exact double-edged sword here is that when we go, it's because I said so. So when guys get wounded, guys get killed,

I know it's because of that's the decision that I made. And so there's a little bit of a double-edged sword there and probably not one better than the other. It's just a different, you're gonna get cut a different way. So as you're going to school, do you have a plan now? Are you still gonna pursue this video? Do you still wanna make films? Are you still thinking like, I wanna go to Hollywood and make movies? Is that what the goal is?

Yeah, it's embarrassing to admit now, but I totally wanted so badly to be like a TV director or a film director. And I remember a studio asked me, because my thesis film ended up doing all right. And so they... What was the thesis film? It was about... It was actually about...

At the time, there was like this Park 51, a mosque that was being built in New York City at near ground zero in real life. And so I did a movie about a soldier who is trying to deal with what does that mean?

And I was trying to explore a little bit about how I felt about the war and about this major news that was happening at the time of like people are saying, oh, they're building like a victory mosque right on ground zero. And to me, I wanted to figure out how I felt about that.

through the film and some big executives at a giant movie studio saw it, really liked it. How long was it? 20 minutes. And so was it, was it a like live action or was it a documentary type? Yep. Live action scripted story about the soldier. Did you play yourself? No, I didn't. I got an actor and it's about him and, um, a Muslim man who is involved in the mosque and, and,

their relationship. And so the studio, we had liked it and reached out and we're like, Hey, do you have any other scripts? Like we're interested. And I thought for sure, dude, you're set. You're the next Scorsese. I'm like, I knew it. I knew it. Like I'm Hollywood. Here I come. Sent them the script.

And never heard from them again. What was the next script you sent them? I forget. It was something entirely different. Left a good impact, huh? Yeah. It was a script, bro. It was years ago. It was over 10 years ago. I forget what the script I sent them was about. And did you only take one shot? One crack at it? Oh, they only give you... It was like they wanted five pages from a script. So I wrote some five pages and sent it to them. Like that never happens. Uh-huh.

very rarely do people get, I forget what it's called. Like, so you, you, it was solicited me for material. God, it's like one in a million, especially from this place. And, um,

I thought there's no way they're not going to take it. This is meant to be. This is just destiny. God, you're so good. Yeah. How am I so good? I mean, of course. But it was heartbreaking. And did you say you didn't hear back from them? No. They just ghosted you? Oh, yeah. And that's what happens. Yeah. That's what happens the vast majority of the time. Oh, yeah. That is... I should have...

I should not have thought like this. I should have taken it more in terms of like, this is a cool opportunity to even be considered. But I had gotten my hopes up and that, cause I had nothing set up. I was like, I'm unemployed. I have nothing. You're like, why would I need to get a job when I'm going to be in Hollywood making, making films? Yeah. Yeah. And, uh,

But I ended up getting very lucky in a different way because when I was at NYU, I interned at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And so I got the opportunity to work full time as a production assistant at The Daily Show and just learn how they churn out television every day, how they make an episodic content like that.

It was an incredible experience being able to do that. - What did your job consist of as a production assistant? - Oh, I was cutting apples. I was going out grabbing props. I was basically a private again. - Oh, wait, this seems real familiar.

Moving I was moving things from one place to another which is like that's I can do that So a production assistant is like a gopher kind of yes. Did you ever edit a single video or anything? Oh, no, it was like the lowest of the low never never wrote anything did anyone like Talk to you about your future or anything like that. So Jon Stewart actually is extremely supportive of veterans runs like entire programs to help in

bring veterans into film and TV. It's like he never talks about it. He doesn't go out and tell people about the work that he does, but he visited visits like a lot of wounded guys at Walter Reed, just very supportive of the veteran community. And whatever I thought about, like his politics, whether agree or not disagree, um,

the guy as a leader and as a man outstanding lives his by his principles which to me I've always respected I don't care he's been real supportive of the of the 9-11 first responders as well yes seems like a good guy goes out and for but goes to Congress and like advocates for them yeah really lives by what he the way he says he does and really

His leadership style was incredible. Like he was the first one in, in the morning at like seven in the morning. And then he'd be the last one out like seven at night pulling long days. And he knew everybody's name, the lowest person there to just really that I've had a couple of great leaders in, in my life, my squad leader in Iraq, uh,

was very squared away. He had been there before and he was very hard on us, but he also kept us safe and was, I thought, a very good leader. And John, all of the people, it kind of filters down from the top. Like his, the way that he ran the production, all of his

the executive producers and the producers below them, it kind of filters down. And they all treat people with respect. And they all... They had this amazing system of they would promote from within. So if you... The executive producers were once interns, which is not usual to see an operation run that way. But they would always promote from within and just... I really...

a lot from the style that they had. So did you think about trying to make that climb yourself? Like go up the chain? I knew that my...

I had reached the ceiling there even as a PA because I just didn't have the same worldview as them. I just think pretty differently. And even though I have, they were like a family to me and we would have really great friends. I just knew I'm like, I could never write. I could never do anything creative for the show. It just wouldn't be authentic. When you, are you still in college when you're interning there or you're done with college? Yeah. So intern and then

After college production assistant, which was full time there. So you actually did do it. That job as a paid person. For two years. For two years. Okay. The very end of John's run and then into the beginning of Trevor Noah. And then as you're doing that job, you know that you're kind of like going to get capped out at some point.

And you start looking for a different job? Yep. So I started... Are you still writing screenplays or you still have like this creative thing in the back of your brain that wants to come out? Yeah. I'm still hoping that like I'll be able to maybe write a script or something, figure something out to get into... Because I really want to do something creative and be in control of it and tell stories and connect with people that way. And I figure I need to...

I've reached kind of the end of the road here because I saw where I would end up going, which is like I'd probably do maybe some kind of producing or something, but not really the career. I wouldn't ever run something like that show. And so I left to go work in the tech world and to run the online marketing campaigns for IBM. Yeah.

You landed that gig. So you had two years of that PA job for real. And then you got a real job at IBM. That's a pretty good step though, right? IBM research hired me to run their like YouTube channel, which I don't, I don't know how I talked myself into that job, but they gave me the opportunity to like, you know, at the time, especially YouTube's sort of new and they're like, Oh, maybe this kid from like, he was, he did what at the daily show. Like,

Okay. Maybe he could run our new media, like YouTube stuff. And my grandfather, the Korean War veteran, he'd also worked at IBM for his whole career. And I think they saw that. And they're very like legacy type of company. Yeah, for sure.

And so I got to like just go there and buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment and go out and interview all of their researchers. And there I really learned how to communicate ideas that I don't understand to a general viewership. Because I was doing videos about quantum computing at IBM and trying to...

explain how that works by talking to the top researchers there, interviewing them, and then condensing that message into something that I could think that I could sort of understand. And that was very beneficial for me. I didn't realize it at the time, but it would end up becoming very important. How was your fulfillment as a human being there?

I'm glad because you just shook your head. Okay, soul crushing. Because I am not a science type person. Numbers do not compute in my head. And so like hearing all this science robot stuff and AI, and I'm just like, I could not, I'm sorry, I could not care less about that tech stuff. And God bless people who love that stuff. It's just like I am interested in geopolitics and in war and things that go poof.

But that's like my ADD cannot focus unless something is exploding somewhere. So it was for me not a fulfilling job. I'm not telling stories about things that I'm passionate about and I feel like have the kind of impact on the world that I am passionate about. So what did you come up develop an escape plan? Essentially, my escape plan was

Hey, can I work remotely for you guys? And like, I'll go out to LA, I'll leave New York and I'll go live in California. And this is kind of my last chance to do this in my life. Cause I'm, if, if this doesn't work out, like I really gotta, I gotta start a family. I gotta pull it together. Um,

And maybe that dream, maybe I'll have to realize and recognize and accept that that dream is not going to happen for me. And I like it's I'm never really going to be successful in media. And maybe I have to accept that. And so I go out. Did you tell them that? No, I just told him I'm going to go to California because it's.

You made up some reason. I was like, can I work remotely? And they said, yeah, sure. Was this after? Was this COVID? No, it was before. Pre-COVID. Oh, that's pre. Yeah, because tech companies are very... And they have offices all over the country. They've got offices out in California. And I would eventually end up and go and working for the IBM Research in California. But for a period, I'm in LA and...

And this is your shot at the time. This is your note. This year going for it. I am going for broke. I'm out. I'm going to go out there. I'm going to do the networking. I'm going to do all of the networking. Like I'm going to, I'm going to go meet other screenwriters and I'm going to, it's Hollywood baby. I'm going to make it. Yeah.

I stay in this really crappy roach tiny apartment in Hollywood, West Hollywood. And I'm...

Like so in over my head culturally california is very different and I didn't really understand that In la specifically. Yes, because la is and hollywood inside of la even more is like it's craziness Yes, yes, and the people there are all like me just insanely think that they're going out there to make it like What is wrong with you? and what and so

I get the hell beat out of me. So when you say, so what are you doing? Like, what are you proactively doing to begin your film screenwriting career? There is a website called, I hope what was the name of it? It's like meet up, not meet up, but do some kind of meeting up. It's like, it's like, Hey, screenwriters come and meet at this church for, and share your, your script and read some pages and,

And there's like 12 or 15 people. And I go there every week and do that. And I'm also...

shooting a YouTube like a kid's YouTube channel at some studio off-lot studio somewhere in in Hollywood and I'm thinking like Okay, I'll like kids YouTube stuff like maybe I can Just get some experience and I'm trying to are you working for you doing that yourself? You're making your own kids YouTube stuff. No, are you just somebody there's a channel there's a channel that is making kids content and

are you getting paid yeah it's it's not some like freelance for that a couple of times and i'm also doing some editing for there's like some rich really rich people in beverly hills that are doing their like side projects documentaries like really terrible documentaries but they got all this money and i'm like editing it and i'm i'm terrible to work with i'm just like really awful at i i end up getting basically you know

you know, not called back for all of these things. And that's because you want, you're like, Oh, this kid's video, I could probably use this over here and add this soundtrack and you make it into your own thing. And it's a, turns into a freaking war movie. Yeah. I've, I'm terrible at working for other people sometimes in, in certain situations.

Ways and those were not good fits and I was not a good fit for those roles and it it went awful and it was just devastating did you not think about like Just doing your own stuff like I'm just gonna start making YouTube videos of the little war thing that I want to film or the thing whatever it is I want to film. Did you not think of doing that? I

I guess I had the... Like, didn't think I had the budget or that people would want to listen or where would I put it. And so I would do little short films and upload them on YouTube. But like, no, I wouldn't watch them. That's probably not the best place to start, Ben. Yeah, it was... What were your short films about? Are they still up there? Are you going to upload them to Cappy Army? I think we all want to see them. It's like...

It's like reading your diary from like 20 years ago. Such embarrassing content. So terrible. And I didn't realize like I don't have a, I don't have a knack for like fictional stories, like telling stories.

like writing character dialogue and things like that. I, I, it took me a long time to realize that I'm more interested in history and events and real life. And I so long wanted to, you know, like growing up, Indiana Jones was like my hero. I wanted to be Indiana Jones so badly. When I was six years old, I would have the fedora hat and like the whip and like, I'd be out in the forest, like swinging from the trees. And like, I wanted to,

go beat the Nazis in Europe and like go on the adventures so badly and like I wanted to tell stories like that but then I ended up kind of ultimately realizing like I want to live that life actually like I want to go to Ukraine and I want to report from the front lines and I want to live that life and tell those stories instead of like write a character. How long did you keep

pursuing the dream? It was a year and a half. Was there a final nail in the coffin?

Yeah, I realized... Like, I was struggling a lot with... I was, like, drinking a lot and doing a lot of drugs to fill this, like, emptiness in me. What drugs were you doing? I was doing a lot of MDMA, a lot of cocaine, a lot of ketamine, a lot of acid. Damn, you are kidding, bro. Oh, I was a mess. I was a mess. I was, like...

And I think it actually was the acid that made me realize like that I was being very narcissistic. Where are you hanging out? Like you make some friends in LA? Yeah. And other people that are like, you know, like me, like I'm just bozos. Like people who, and you can find them in Los Angeles without looking very hard. Okay.

And do you all sit around like in a, in like a struggle session kind of talking about, you know, like that I'm going to make it or I can't believe this didn't happen. Like what is the vibe in that crew besides just doing ketamine, cocaine and acid? Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of that for sure. A lot of people that are bitter about not being where they want to be and they

I was also very focused on just having fun. And like it was now I realize like such a dark and at the time too, like really awful point, probably the lowest point in my life. And I had like, I really, again, had to have one of those moments where I look in the mirror and realize that like, this is not who I want to be.

Do you think how much is this is like, hey, you got you were in the military, you had a mission, you had friends, you had purpose, and then all that's gone. Is this a huge is that the hole that's trying to fill up with not doing not having purpose is the most dangerous thing in life, especially if you have high ambitions. That's a dangerous cocktail. If you have high ambitions and you're like really passionate.

Have drive and you want to be doing something i'm the type of person like I work 80 hours a week I work every weekend. I just go really hard at work and If I don't have that outlet like I sort of have a very addictive personality So if I don't have something positive to put my energy into Like it's i'm going to put that into something very negative and

Having that addictive personality has been amazing for YouTube because I am like addicted to how do I how do I get? You know the figuring out the algorithm and making the best videos possible But like without that it I was very self-destructive. Mm-hmm

So you said, I think I cut you off, but you were about to say that there was like a looking in the mirror moment. You said perhaps it was the acid and you just decided this is not, I'm not moving forward. The acid made me realize I was a super narcissistic person. Like made me realize that I was very self-centered and selfish, extremely selfish person. And I guess because I've been so fortunate in my life to like,

be able to work remotely for IBM. Like I had a paycheck, like, but also that's such a bad, that was such a terrible thing for me at the time because it allowed me to like be this self-destructive person. And I, you know, I could still get my job done and edit a couple of videos for IBM. And they were happy with like, to them, it was worth my salary. This giant company, they're like, if he edits four videos a month, that's worth, you know, his like $60,000 salary.

But it really did make me realize that I'm like, oh, wait, things are terrible in my life and I'm not successful in Hollywood or doing anything I want to do because of me. And no matter how many times my mom tells me that she loves me and I'm her perfect baby boy, I'm actually not. I'm actually kind of a pretty bad person.

And like, I didn't even know where to start to start, like not being that person anymore. It was very, it was, but there was that realization, I think, where things in my life then started to become very positive. So did you, was it a real sharp turn? Were you like, I'm just, no? No, I re...

I realized it and that was a sharp moment, but changing as a human being is very, it's like pulling teeth and it takes a long time and it's like, okay, I'm going to go six months without like doing any drugs. Okay. I'm going to go a year and like a lot of setbacks and relapses and like not beating myself up for that. And just slowly like, okay, I'm going to, uh,

do this a little better. And I'm going to, it's, it took years and I left IBM, got a job at Cisco and was doing marketing videos for Cisco. And they gave me the opportunity to go back home, back home to New York. And that's what I needed so badly was to go back home. How did you feel when you left Hollywood and like the dream is dead?

I then in that moment had 100% acceptance. I said to myself, I said, okay, I tried. I did my best. I went out there. I really like I did for a period of time try and I came to accept that it would never happen for me and that I gave up completely. And it's ironic that like when you when I had that moment of giving up and I let it go, I

That was when it like happened for me. I really let it go. 100% had the acceptance of I'm going to make videos or really I, when I was at Cisco at the end, I was a program manager, which was mainly spreadsheets. Like I wasn't making videos anymore. And I, and I was like, okay, this is,

This is okay. And I can live with this. And so that was when I saw the job opening at Task and Purpose to do video production. And did you, how did you see it? Where was it? It was on LinkedIn or something? It wasn't LinkedIn. It was on ZipRecruiter. And then I reached out to, I looked on LinkedIn. I stalked all the like producers and... Excuse me.

There was a producer, Patrick Baker, who's a Marine, a rock veteran, and really amazing guy. And I reached out to him via LinkedIn, and I said, hey, can I come in for an interview? I thought it would be perfect. So I'm like, it's military stories and it's video. Like, maybe I could do this. And it was kind of... It also...

hindsight it feels I was like oh the name is task and purpose and I'm like this is the kind of purpose that I'm looking for in my life and went down there met with Zack Iskall incredible guy who was marine in Fallujah marine officer and felt immediately at home like these this is the community that I've been searching for that I've been kind of running from but like needed so badly to be back

in that community of veterans and people that I could relate to and feel like, ah, these are the people that get me. How big was Task and Purpose when you showed up there? What year was it? It was 2019, right before COVID. So six months before COVID. And there was maybe at the office in Manhattan, there was like five people. Okay. So it was like you were immediately a part of a small little group and you got to know everyone really quickly. Yeah. Yeah.

- Yeah. - And so it was relatively small. 'Cause I remember, I've kind of, you know, I mean obviously a name like Task and Purpose gets put right into my algorithm of a military guy. And so I've always kind of, you know, paid attention to it. I saw there'd be articles that would pop up or, you know, not just videos, but the articles as well.

And so I've, but I can't really track in my mind. I didn't know how big it was or how big it wasn't, you know, it was always just kind of a part of my algorithm. Yeah. And the writers, the article side, the dot com that you're talking about, the task and purpose dot com side, there was about, I want to say seven or eight articles

writers and they would write the articles and they were remote. There was one writer, Jared Keller, who was at the office there and the rest were kind of spread out around the country. So you get there, you start working and what kind of videos did they want you to make when you first showed up there? Originally, I don't know if you know, it's like the now this style where it's just kind of text on video B-roll. So originally it was just, they would send me, hey, put together a thing on YouTube

the aircraft carrier came into dock for the day, like put some text about how this Nimitz class carrier came in and just like a one minute long thing with text and a music and some B roll. And were they going to put it on like Instagram, Facebook, Facebook. So we'll, we'll upload it on onto Facebook and it'll sometimes it'll be like a video version of kind of an article or it was not on camera at all.

very quickly it became on camera and Patrick Baker just amazing guy that told me like be yourself don't try to be something or not be honest and He gave me the opportunity to upload anything I wanted which is very unusual at a place So I had to create a freedom of hey, we'll just try this what sticks goes on Facebook How many likes does it get how many views does it get?

And I'm learning slowly the content world, which is very alien to me. But it also is very... I think it's perfect for my sensibilities because it's instant. So you put it up and you get instant feedback from people right away. And that felt amazing. What was the first video that you made where you're like, oh, try this. I'm going to be in...

What made you decide to get in front of the camera and what was it about? Patrick encouraged me to get in front of the camera because I was very hesitant. I've always been behind the camera type of person and I was not a natural on camera at all.

It was really, I was terrible at, I had very terrible screen presence. I had to work really hard at it. People in the comments let me know it too. Every comment was like, you really suck at this. You're like, what are you doing here? And why do you talk weird? And you mispronounce every word. Who the hell is this guy? And, um,

My first reaction seeing those comments was these people don't know what they're talking about and they're wrong. And I and and then I had the realization that I'm like, actually, in between all the curses, there's something valuable there. They're trying to tell me something. Right.

They're trying to tell me how to improve. Cause I did, you want to know the first kind of video that I did, it was, I did a video about the striker and I was so jokey. It was very satirical. And it's like a minute of mostly just jokes about the striker. And I still have this comment saved to this day. There's a comment that this guy wrote Kevin and it's still on the video and

And he in it he writes he's like why don't you try telling us something valuable about the striker and back then 2019 He's like I know nothing about the Russian BTR Like why don't you tell us how the how it compares to the BTR and I'd never it never occurred to me that people would want to know that kind of thing and that People are interested in that never crossed my mind in a million years I thought people want to be entertained or jokey stuff and

And when he said that, something clicked in my brain. I was like, I'll try that. So I came back with another video where it was very informative. A couple of jokes, but like very informative about the striker and the BTR and just 10x the views. Over 100,000, 200,000 views. And I'll never forget, that guy saved me. That guy's advice was incredible. And it takes... I don't know what the right word is, but it takes...

like not acceptance, but... Humility? Yes. That's the one. Yeah, for sure. This is something that definitely like you can't... If you took all those comments 100% when people are telling you suck, then you'd just be like, okay, this isn't for me and not do it. If you took all those comments and just blew them off like, yeah, I'm not going to listen to them at all, then you don't make any improvement. So you have to have a balanced viewpoint of like, okay, well...

You know, there's going to be some outliers. There's going to be some people that are like, I love these jokes. You're hilarious. And there's going to be some outliers that you're an idiot. But somewhere in the middle, you're going to find some common ground. And probably that's pretty good. So I think it's kind of like I was at a soccer game the other day. San Diego Football Club. It was actually the opening season or the opening game ever there. And it came time for the national anthem. And what they did was they on the big screens, they just put the words up.

and the crowd sang with no accompanying music or singer, the crowd sang the national anthem. And what I realized is like, oh yeah, there's the person on my left is a terrible singer, the person on my right is a great singer, the person in the middle of me is like,

Medium. Yeah, medium. But what you end up with is the crowd prevailing the national anthem sounded good. In fact, it sounded really good. And so that's sort of to me, you know, people will hit the notes. You can't take like the person with the bad voice or the person about too high or too low. So it sounds like you got a couple of people that hit the notes and you listen to them. Yeah, that's what we call humility. And then where did it go from there? So now you're kind of like, okay, the interesting thing is,

You know, you looking at the feet, because I would once say one thing I would say we admit myself and Echo Charles have not been good at is like algorithm pursuit or, you know, anything like that. If I would have told somebody whatever almost 10 years ago when we started this, like, hey, what I'm going to do is I'm going to read out of print books for three hours at a time.

obscure military events that happened and a bunch of brutality on of people being killed and murdered and genocide and that's what we're gonna do and People will listen to it for three hours like no one would have said that sounds like a good call But we did it and you know, so that's what we started with and the only kind of track

that we've made. It's just like other things that we're interested in or whatever. So we haven't been really good at the algorithm. Probably the closest would be this is Echo Charles. He likes to play with computer graphics. Is that the right thing? Sure. So this guy's gone a little bit crazy with thumbnails. Experimental. Experimental. Yeah, yeah. You know, which is...

When I look at him, I'm like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And I've told him like nine times, like, bro, stop doing this. And he still does it. But we didn't we didn't ever look at the algorithm. We never think about like, well, how did this do compared to that? We just we just didn't do it. We just did what we were doing. So when you tuned in and you're like, oh, wait, this got more views than that. That's like a route that's steering you by the music of the crowd.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I would also say that it's a bit of a Venn diagram in that it's, and it has to be an overlap between what are, what are the viewers interested in, in seeing and watching? And also what am I interested in talking about and communicating? And then where there's overlap, that's the sweet spot because I'm not going to ever talk about or do something that I'm not interested in or doesn't excite me. I just can't. And, and,

So where there is that overlap between what resonates with them and what resonates with me. And more importantly, though, my true north has always been the more I double down on like, how am I creating value for people? What information am I or insights or open source intelligence analysis am I providing in some way that is valuable?

the more I create value for the viewers, the bigger this thing grows and the more successful it becomes. And if I just keep hitting that red button of like, how can I make this better for the viewer? And, and it's also something that I'm excited about talking about. It just, it's,

I see it get better and better from that. And gain momentum. Right. Which you clearly gained a lot of momentum at Task and Purpose. Because what? They went from something like 400 subscribers on YouTube to a couple million. Yes. When I started there, there was 800 subscribers on the YouTube channel. And it was... They weren't really using it or uploading to it. And I had...

into studying military strategy a lot. And I was like, at the time watching a ton of videos about Alexander the Great and Caesar and his campaigns and just like, how would, like, is there a way I can apply some of these strategic lessons to like my life? And I found it fascinating the way that people, like if,

you should expand into a place where there isn't already competition or there isn't already, like I'm not going to go and butt heads with people. If I go into this, try to grow this YouTube channel that they're not, no one's using or doing anything with anyway. And so instead of trying to like, cause if you try to grow into like where people are writing the articles and stuff, that's somebody's like domain and it's going to,

it's going to cause friction. But the YouTube channel, there was no, I could grow there. And so it was like a strategic decision of here's a place that I can go and not ruffle any feathers, like bother any leadership. And when I asked, I was like, Hey, can I upload stuff on there? No one was like, no, they were kind of like the YouTube channel. And that's never going to be literally verbatim. I was like, well, it's never going to be successful. Go ahead, do whatever you want.

So I was like, okay, I'll do that. And I uploaded some video about how I hate the M320 grenade launcher. And it did not get a lot of views. But it was an iterative process for me of each video, I'm going to do it a little bit better. I'm going to learn a little bit more. Are you shooting them yourself? Yep. Editing? Just doing a one-man show? One-man show. It was just me, a green screen, and just talking at the camera. And I would type in on like...

how do I get better at talking on camera? I would type that into Google. I am so sort of like socially awkward and at times. And so like, I would actually type, I typed that in. It was like a wiki how article came up and it was like,

read through your material a couple of times. And if you know your material well, you'll seem more natural and like give more inflection when you're talking. Cause sometimes I can be very monotone and when you're on camera, you have to be twice as big a lot of times. So like I'm learning these things that a lot of people, I feel like it's very natural for them, but I'm like really learning, learning everything the hard way. Was there like a smash hit that kind of broke out?

Was it the XM7? Yeah. The XM7 was the first thing that went viral and did a million views on YouTube. And I was like, Oh boy. What was the biggest video previous to that?

There was, I was talking about maybe the striker video got like a hundred thousand or talking about other topics that maybe would get 60,000 views. And on Facebook we had a couple of things that got millions of views on Facebook, but Facebook views are sort of not quite the same. And so like I would do some joke stuff on there where it would make people

do humorous stuff about like, oh, the knife guy in your platoon, the guy that, because everyone has a guy in their platoon who is the knife guy and he's got a lot of knives. And I was watching that video of yours and I was like, oh, this is definitely coming up.

As you can tell from looking at some of these, some of these knives are actually really cool. Like this is a World War I trench knife. That's a World War II knife from the Pacific. But the reason all these knives got started was Echo Charles, he made a video that he was using knives, prop knives. Was it that knife? No.

It was like fake knives. But he had them on the desk when we used to film in his living room. And so he had this knife out from this thing for whatever reason, just sitting there. And so then the next time I brought a bigger knife. And then we just escalated. Then people, once they saw that we had knives, they started sending us knives. So that's how we have all these knives. I'm not a true knife guy. I only carried one knife every day.

pretty much my whole career so yeah the knife guy he had a machete as well as three knives and the joke of it was that like you need the knife guy because when you need to open mre or you need to uh cut some 550 cord that's who's there for you the knife guy with with options which which one do you want sir and then there's also the like guy in the dripple tune that has a mustache

And you just riff on that. And those did all right. But like the XM7 video on YouTube.

really took off and I got so much wrong about it in that video and it's always just a learning process for me. It's like a communication with the viewers and they'll tell me 'cause there's experts out there who are like, actually the 6.8 is not in between the 5.56 and the 7.62. It's a full powered cartridge and these people are experts and I'm learning from them and they're learning from me 'cause I'll go and find some information that I dig up somewhere.

And it's just this back and forth with the viewers and trying to get better at this. And I love that topic because back when I would... We would do patrols and then raids and then guard tower duty. And the guard tower duty rotations...

we would sit there and shoot the shit and like, what would we talk about? We would talk about, Oh, did you hear that they're going to replace the five, five, six or it's not, it's kind of, they say that it's not powerful enough. What do you think? Oh, I don't know. You know, like you're just, these are the kinds of conversations I would have with the guys. So I'm like, okay, I'll have this conversation on YouTube. And I think that's part of the reason why it resonated. There's a lot of interest in that topic and it led to, uh,

surreal moment where sig reached out and invited me to go actually test fire it which was i think when i started realizing i'm like oh this is this is there's something here like if this company this corp this giant firearms company is asking me to go and test fire this thing i was like

This is unbelievable. That was one of the first just really rewarding experiences. - Is this during COVID or is this pre-COVID still? - Six months into Task and Purpose is when COVID hits. - When did the XM7 video come out? - Yeah, it was right around that time. It was like right before maybe, maybe a month before COVID hit and the office shut down and we all moved back home.

It's when I met my girlfriend, Caitlin, who's now my wife. We met right then. I met her right before Task and Purpose started. And so when COVID happens, we all have to go move back home, back to this tiny apartment in Queens. And I'm then shooting. I'm still doing the show, but I'm shooting it out of...

And like half the day I'm asking my, my girlfriend, I'm like, Hey, can I, like, I have to shoot this video. I'm putting up lights in this tiny apartment and she's putting up with it, which is amazing of her. And, um,

But she could tell that it meant everything to me. Because it was my connection to the community. It was my way of feeling like I'm a part of this community. In the comment section, talking with people and seeing them get excited about learning about these topics. Yeah, so throughout COVID, I'm shooting the stuff out of my place and editing it at home.

And it's growing and growing, just getting bigger and bigger. And eventually, fast forward a little bit, you decide you're going to go to Ukraine. Yes. Yeah. When the war in Ukraine kicked off, that's when the channel changed a lot. I become more... Our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I think, was when I first...

did a video that was about like a news or just about geopolitics and the politics in the world. And that video got a lot of views because my buddy Colin reached out to me during that withdrawal. And after our tour in Iraq, he deployed to Afghanistan. And during that withdrawal, he reached out and he kind of

was telling me how frustrated he was with what was going on and what he was seeing. A lot of veterans were. And I remember thinking, like, these guys don't have a way to communicate this. These lower enlisted people can't get their voice out there. And so I've made a video trying to give them a platform and a way to get those thoughts out.

That video did very well. And then when the Ukraine war happened, I started tracking that because I wanted to give a average soldiers ground-level perspective of kind of what I'm seeing whether what I'm whether I'm my Thoughts are end up being right or wrong It's just kind of what I'm looking at and what I'm seeing in this moment and I knew

Because it became very popular. I'm like, at some point, I know in my head, I'm going to have to go because I want to learn how this war is different from a coin operation, from a counterinsurgency mission. What are the difference of near-peer, high-intensity warfare at that scale? What does the logistics of it look like? So yeah, the decision to go, it took about three years before I ended up

because I didn't want to just go recklessly and like I'm going to go and like just run to the front or something. I carefully planned it out. And how was the trip? It was, I didn't know what to expect going into it. I thought maybe they wouldn't even let me go to the front and that was my expectation going into it. But when I got there, ended up,

having drinks with some guys that were in Ukrainian intelligence and they said, hey, what do you want to get out of this trip? And I was like, well, it'd be good if I could go to Kursk and go into the part of Russia that you have occupied. And he just so happened to know the public affairs officer who was in charge of Kursk. And he said, yeah, I can get you into Kursk. And it was a very surreal experience.

moment crossing the international border from Ukraine into Russia. I learned a lot about the logistics of the war. For me, it was kind of like, it felt like a fact-finding mission. Like how when the U.S. wants intelligence on a place, they'll send people like on a fact-finding mission, go find out, hey, what is the morale of the soldiers there? Get a

Finger on your pulse of what the morale is like what is it? What do they really feel and what do they really think and so I wanted to know if my Inkling about Ukraine was accurate. I wanted to know what was your inkling going into it I felt like these people are fighting for their survival for their sovereignty I felt like the Ukrainians are fighting for their way of life and their value system and

In other words, their home. Right. Like to me, it's like this is...

This is my home and this is where I live and this is where my family lives and this is where we've always lived and we're not going anywhere. But not everybody thinks that a lot of people think they're a puppet of the West and that they're like just forced into this. They're fighting because Washington wants them to fight like and so part of why I went was I wanted to know if that what's the truth.

Is the Russian propaganda true? Am I going to go there and it's going to be like Iraq again? And I'm going to be disillusioned by what I see? Or am I going to get there and is it going to turn out that these people really are who I think they are? Or is it something, is it going to be worst case scenario where it's some kind of gray area in between, like how Iraq was? And so I went all along the front to the worst parts of the front, to the most dangerous place in the world, which at the time was...

the part of Russia that Ukraine was occupying, that small sliver of territory. Like you cannot fake every soldier that I met. You cannot take me on a propaganda tour along the entire front from Zaporizhia to Kursk. Kherson was the only part I didn't go to, all the way up to Kiev as well. And I talked to...

100 dozens of different soldiers from intelligence officers down to your lowest level grunt went on drone missions nearly got killed got artillery fire from russians mortar fire from russians and airstrikes over us and i can say that my fact-finding mission when i walked away from that experience was that so i'll put it to you this way in this story

I spoke to a soldier who was, he did not want to be there. He was a Ukrainian soldier who had been fighting for like six years at that point. He had signed a three-year contract and he was forced into continuing to serve. This guy was exhausted and was talking about how he's like, I do not want to be here. I want to go home. What am I doing here? I signed up for three years. They're forcing me to be here. This is, he'd been exhausted.

Every night his job is to go infiltrate to the positions and run the gauntlet of FPV drones. And he's lost all like tons of his friends. If anyone has a reason to not, you know, to say, fuck Ukraine or something, he would be the person. But even these troops that are stretched to their absolute limit,

Even he was saying he's like we're fighting for our homeland We are doing this we doing this because we have to because the Russians are forcing us to so the morale that I saw Was yeah, the Ukrainians are they're getting torn apart. They're losing, you know, and they're Acknowledging that but at the same time they believed what they're they believe in the fight That was what I walked away from it from

I always say war is a test of wills, and I guess I'm not the person that made that up or anything, but war is a test of wills, right? And it's kind of like when you watch a sports match when something that you don't expect to happen happens, like the underdog wins. And, you know, I had a guy say to me the other day, well, there's some close sport. I think it was another soccer game. It was a close sporting event, and it was like, well, that didn't go the way I expected. And he said, that's why they play the game.

because you don't know what's going to happen. And for me, the will of the Ukrainians is going to be stronger than the will of the Russians. That being said, if the Russians have weaker will, but they have more of it, then we don't know what's going to happen. And so unfortunately, just like an MMA fight, well, who's going to win? Well, we think this person can win.

This other person can win. We don't know we have to play the game and that's why this that's why wars get fought Right if we already knew what the outcome was gonna be we wouldn't fight the wars But we don't know what the outcomes gonna be and no one knows what the outcomes gonna be But that is definitely some interesting feedback to get from you for having been there and having talked to scores of soldiers on the ground and their their will is still strong and

What about, so when you talk about like the propaganda that we see, or whether it's propaganda or not, when we see, let's just not call it propaganda, I'll just call it a video of, you know, we've all seen dozens of these videos of the Ukrainian recruiters, I don't know, recruiters going up and grabbing guys off the street, putting them in a van to take them up to the front lines. We see that as well. What is that all about? That is...

true. They're doing that.

And every couple of kilometers that I drove, as you go further east, you feel the war. From Kiev, you start to really feel it. And it starts to be checkpoints every couple of kilometers with SBU guys. And Kiev's like kind of normal, right? It's like a European city. Full on normal. Oh, yeah. We're grabbing drinks. I'm learning curse words in Ukrainian. I'm hanging out with these intel guys. And it feels like you're just chilling in Europe. Yeah. Clubs. Yeah. Nightclubs. People live in their normal lives. And then missiles, too.

Like a missile hit. Occasional missile. Yep. And so these SBU checkpoints are looking for deserters. And then you drive through a city and you see dudes getting rounded up. Like that's also true. And the reason for it is because they're in martial law. Like they're fighting for their existence. And yeah, there's certainly some people who are getting rounded up and don't want to fight. Absolutely. That's also happening. And...

I saw that as well. Yeah, it's the war there is a fight for their survival. So nobody under 65, if you're male, can even leave the country. No flights in. You got to take a 17-hour train ride in. I mean, the country is on lockdown. And the way I look at it, the way I think the reason for these extreme measures, if you're Ukraine and you're taken over by Russia, the...

The future of your family, your children, is not looking bright. Being under Russian control is not going... You're not going to have the same prosperity if you were under the EU system. There's just no way. I think a lot of people can agree to that. And I think that's what explains why you see... You couldn't have this war unless it was Ukraine... A vast...

some vast number of Ukrainians believing that fighting this war is for their children and for their future generations. Because you just don't get, you wouldn't be able to get hundreds of thousands of people willing to kill themselves, I don't think, or die in war unless something like that was at stake. The United States, our ability to influence wars, I think, is a lot lower than maybe we thought at one point. Like,

We pumped billions of dollars of weapons, equipment, and training into Afghanistan. And because the will wasn't there to fight against the Taliban, the country fell right away. The people felt like if they're under Taliban rule, they felt, from their perspective, I think, it sucks.

Wasn't gonna be a big difference on their lives. Mm-hmm, but you what I'm trying to say is that you cannot force I think Hundreds of thousands of people easily into a fight like that in a place like Ukraine maybe I'm not seeing some perspective there, but that's kind of what a Working concept of what I've been thinking you also got to see a

The weapon systems being used in different environments and what you saw in Iraq, including the strikers and strikers, Bradley's Abrams getting to getting to see those things in this different environment and how they're being used and what this new threat of these drones is like.

So I went on a drone mission with a Ukrainian vampire drone team. It's one of those, it's not a kamikaze FPV drone. It's a drone that drops mortars on the enemy, drops them, comes back, picks up another mortar, drops it on another Russian. And...

In that mission, I feel like this is what the U.S. Army envisions the future of warfare is going to look like. I study the U.S. Army transformation very closely, U.S. Army 2030, and the way they're reorganizing all of the brigades is they're creating platoons that have this capability that are essentially going to do this mission that I went on, where you're in an unarmored

and you drive up 10 kilometers to where the enemy is from, is the zero line, and you drop, you use your sensors to figure out where they're at, and you drop effects on them. And this right now is kind of the warfare meta. So I spent an entire night in a basement getting shelled and watching this drone unit drop mortars on Russian positions. And...

The way that EW, Electronic Warfare, plays into the war at the front is very different than the GWAT. And yep, I also went and met with the Bradley units and the Stryker units out in Kursk and the Abrams units. And what I learned was how difficult casualty evacuation is for all of these guys. It's when we were...

When we were in Iraq, if there was a casualty, we'd get them out within a matter of an hour or so. Get a helicopter, come in, get out. Now, these guys are sitting there for 17 hours with a tourniquet on before they can get out of there because the whole route from where they're staying at apartment buildings to the zero line, there's about a 10, 15-kilometer stretch at the very end, the last mile or so. That 10...

kilometer stretch is just lousy with drones. FPV drones are watching and they're striking, they're hitting everything on that route. So infiltrating to the positions is a nightmare and they're dropping mines all over those routes. And it was just so different than what I saw in Iraq on just a whole nother scale. And I

It's interesting to see how the U.S. military is trying to now apply those lessons. When you mention the way the U.S. Army is planning right now and the U.S. military at large, you think about...

the rapid change of technology. And, you know, I always, when I was, when I was in the military and I was coming up with plans, one of, and then when I was teaching people how to come up with plans, one of the most important things that I try to convey to people was come up with a plan that is flexible, like come up with a plan that if it's not, that it's not so rigid that like, this is what we're doing. And that, that makes me a little nervous with the military industrial complex in America, because it's,

programmatically to acquire a drone in 2030, they'll start doing that stuff now, which means that they'll be paying some company that's going to build this drone and that's going to be available in 2030. But by 2026, the technologies will be different and it might be totally different by that time. And so it makes me nervous that we're...

We're leaning so far forward that we're in the front leaning rest. This is something I used to tell people, which is echo Charles. That's the pushup position. So leaning so far forward that you're in the front leaning rest, which is not good. You want to be leaning forward a little bit. You know, one of the pieces of technology that we used was we, when we got Humvees, which we didn't train with Humvees at all prior to,

September 11th. And actually, it wasn't until we got to Iraq that we really started to just, okay, this is the new normal for us. In fact, it's funny, when I was in the 90s in the SEAL teams and we would train to go hit a target and we would take a vehicle to get there,

We would call it a helo truck because in no one's wildest imagination Would you drive a vehicle to a target like it just you just use helicopters, of course? And and so using vehicles was just something we didn't even think was real But then by the time we got to iraq and now we needed gps's and so we were buying commercial off-the-shelf gps's and marrying them up with our laptops and putting uh

I forget the name of the program but there was a Commercial off-the-shelf program that we could download our imagery and we put the GPS and it worked really well And then we were able to adapt very quickly meanwhile programmatically eventually Came the blue force trackers and we got him it's weird because that actually one of the things that went from conventionals to Special operations instead of a lot of things go from special operations to conventional This was kind of the opposite for us anyways, then we got these big systems and

But it worries me when we start talking about the future of warfare that we go so we lean so far forward that we're in the leaning rest and we're developing things that are going to be OBE, which is the old term overcome by events like it's not going to matter anymore. And right now, you know, you go from using radio waves to using fiber optics control air drones, but they might be using, you know, light messages or something else in the near future. And all of a sudden we've invested a bunch of money, but it doesn't matter anymore.

That's one thing that I've watched the videos that you put out. One thing that struck me was the...

They're not committed to any piece of technology to a point where they're not gonna be able to pivot. And so when something's working, like for instance the EW, right? There's electronic warfare, they put up jammers. When the jammers are actually defeating the drones, okay, cool. We got this other technology we'll bring. If that would have been America, we'd have $10 billion worth of radio-controlled drones that would now be totally obsolete and we wouldn't be able to pivot quickly enough.

And that's one thing that impressed me about what's happening in that war on really on both sides is that they're both adapting very quickly, very rapidly, and they're able to make technological changes in a manner that they're keeping up with each other and trying to outspend each other. Is that what it looked like on the ground?

Yes, one of the big examples of that that sticks out to me is when I was there, every single car had a little like antenna piece on the top, every single one. They're all EW, all jammers. And I asked the interpreter that was with me to get my fixer, the guy who's like my guy the entire time. And he said like they weren't there four months ago.

And then suddenly they were everywhere. Every single car had them. And they're adapting with these off the shelf solutions instead of a long procurement, military industrial kerfuffle that lasts 10 years.

And that's what the Army's transformation in contact, the TIC program is all about. They're trying to copy that procurement process where they're hoping to, we're going to buy this off the shelf drone solution and we're going to use that for a bit and then maybe we'll use a different one. But yeah, they're, one of the things they talked about with UW was like, they have this giant problem where they're

Every infantry commander on the zero line has an EW system. And how do you get them to turn it off? How do you get, if someone radioed you and was like, turn off your EW so that we can fire a high Mars rocket at the enemy through your sector, but you're going to have to basically turn off your force field. Yep. You're going to suck it up for 18 minutes or something. And one of your guys might get killed, but it's for the greater good.

And so there's this debate about should we be able to turn it off for them? Do you want to take that power away from your commanders though? And then also...

Because I think in a structure that's more top-down, like in Russia, you might see something like that in their military. But the way that NATO and America fights, it kind of goes against our decentralized, give them the initiative. Don't be able to just turn off their EW, even though it means you can't do that HIMARS strike.

So these are things that they told me that they're working through. It's like, what is the right way to do that? There's also, they can't fly their drones over. Like when I first got to that drone mission, we couldn't launch the drone because Friendly EW was jamming our drone. And so they had to call up a bunch of different commanders in the area and be like, hey, can you turn it off? And they figured it out. But yeah, these are the...

What really interests me is the future of doctrine. What lessons are we taking from the war in Ukraine that is right and wrong? And to your point, I do think they're kind of in the front-leaning rest. And another way to put it would be that they're kind of like all chips in. They're doing a big gamble. And if it works, amazing. And if it doesn't work, it's a big, huge risk because they're

They're going back to what you're talking about, where they're getting rid of all the strikers and getting rid of all the Bradleys out of at least the infantry brigade combat teams. And they're pulling them to division. And all the guys now are going to have infantry squad vehicles, unarmored, you know, like recon vehicles. And...

Again, they're going to be going with like, you're not going to go to the objective in a vehicle. You're going to go on foot, but you're going to take that unarmored vehicle close to it. So yeah, I don't, you know, if that ends up not working out well, you just put a bunch of dudes in an unarmored vehicle who are going to get cooked. So like, I don't know what the right answer is. It's something that I'm tracking and it's interesting to see. It's the biggest transformation the army's gone through probably since the 80s. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. The, uh, the other thing that you can't predict the outcome of is you ever trained jujitsu before? Not ju I did karate, shurinjiru like judo. So in jujitsu, there's, there's, uh, you know, you're trying to break people's arms. You're trying to get them in submission holds. And generally speaking, especially in the nineties, it was all like arm locks, shoulder locks and chokes. Well, uh,

the early 2000s there was people Dean Lester who started attacking the legs and Like was really good at doing knee locks ankle locks and leg locks, right? and so all of a sudden it was like it was literally like a different game and then a group of people Don her death squad kind of caught on to this and they started really focusing on leg locks and and

For a while and I experienced this it would seem like oh the game has Changed like the game has changed and people were saying that people were saying the game has changed But I hadn't experienced a long time ago where I was good with my locks because I've been training with this guy Dean Lester for a long time and some other people that were another little node of leg lockers in the world they came and trained with us and

And I already knew leg locks. They only knew leg locks, kind of. Like that was their whole game. And so when they tried to leg lock me, you just defend and get on top and then beat them with the rest of the stuff. So eventually what I'm saying is eventually the leg locks became neutralized. And now leg locks didn't change the game. They're just part of the game.

So sure are there things that truly change the game? Of course there are but then it's hard to predict is this a game changer or is this just another part of the game that we're gonna learn how to play and all of a sudden we're gonna figure out that there's some system that we come up with you know some Command drone that goes up into the sky can you know goes up there and flies around shoots down all the other drones like who knows But we don't know and all of a sudden will become well, you got to have that it's kind of like in Iraq I mean

When when you were running jammers right on your vehicles We were running jammers and we had to do the same thing that we're gonna talk to the AC 130 Stop turn off the jammers make comms can turn jammers back on and there's things that they just become part of the game and it's hard to tell if something is gonna truly change the game or If it's gonna be something that we're gonna have to adapt to or we're gonna have to adapt to it once we've adapted to it now we're back to

Just what you said, we're going from armored vehicles and heavier and heavier, now we're going lighter and lighter again. It's the same thing that happened in hockey. In hockey, they started bringing these monster players in that were getting bigger and bigger and bigger and stronger, and they're six foot five and they're 240 pounds.

The whole league was dominated by these type of players for a few years and then all of a sudden they brought in like that little guy and the little guy was like oh he can move faster than these people and react quicker and so he could maneuver and Now you've got the team has to be mixed So the huge guys was a kind of a game changer for a minute But then it's like I know it's just part of the game and there's time for you gotta use the big guys time You can use the little guys. So it's it's gonna be interesting to see how all that unfolds and

and how quickly it unfolds. - It's a perfect analogy. And what you're talking about is,

Should we be preparing? Should we be setting up our entire army, all of our procurement, the way we organize our soldiers, the equipment that we everything is based now on that we're going to be fighting a contested environment. And if we end up going into this and like that could be a way to lose 100,000 guys is to build our whole force around. Hey, we're going to we're planning to fight in a contested environment. And so you're going to fight in a contested environment.

Or should we be building the force to, we're going to go in with bombers and just, we're going to never even have to deal with this bullshit that Ukrainian forces are dealing with. I mean, we're talking about a force that is way many times less well-funded, trained and equipped. So are we necessarily taking the right lessons from it? Maybe, maybe there's something that the US Army commanders are seeing on the ground that

a lot of other people aren't or they i know they have this whole unit whose job it is to take the data from ukraine and crunch it they whatever it is they seem convinced that it's not just a meta that it's not just a move that can be countered they believe that it's the future of warfare and that it's a fundamental shift

whereas like the machine gun changed warfare. It's a paradigm shift is the way they're treating it. They're treating it. You know, there's maybe been five or six paradigm shifts in all of history of warfare and they are treating this as if it is one. So it certainly looks like one from the outside that that's for sure. Um,

It looks like, you know, again, watching your videos and watching all the stuff that's going on in Ukraine is a, it's a total nightmare to, you know, and, and how much could it escalate? And, and again, maybe it's like, hopefully, you know, people will talk about the drone versus drone and the robot versus robot warfare. Like I'm all in for that. Like, let's, we'll see who can build better drones and better robots and let them fight and die and let them get blown up and mutilated. And we can,

Figure out who who's the better robot builders? Yeah, there's another like I was in the 90s and I was I got put in this project and this project was run by looks like Admiral McRaven Who's a great guy and he was he had this foresight of the military and of the SEAL teams where it's like, um, hey listen, I

our specialties are direct action and special reconnaissance. That's what the SEAL teams are supposed to do primarily. Well, we've got satellites and drones

Drones and UAVs were kind of starting to come out but you know He even saw the future of like hey in a few years doing a reconnaissance when we've got satellites and we've got drones We're not gonna be able to do those not they're not gonna need to do those and the other one is direct-action missions Why would we send a SEAL platoon in to do a direct-action mission somewhere where we can hit him with a T lamb? That's down to one meter accuracy so

we need to move on to the next generation of warfare. And so we started doing all these different types of things. They were all kind of low visibility operations and interfering with, you know, infrastructure. And so we did some really cool stuff. It was great. And that was in the nineties. And then fast forward, you know, I went on with my career and he went on with his career and fast forward a few years and I'm in Baghdad and we were literally doing like a direct action mission every night and

And he showed up and I was actually literally with my assault force in my compound getting ready to roll out to do my umpteenth freaking direct action mission and he wasn't down he wasn't down with the unit he was with and he came down to like see what we were doing and I saw him and I was like, hey, sir, how you doing? And he's like, oh good to see you, John.

Hey, you remember when you told us we'd never do a direct action investigation and we both laughed because, you know, it's just one of those things where clearly...

Neither one of us could have predicted the future that we were gonna all of us everyone in the US military was gonna be boots on the ground kicking indoors over and over and over again, so that's another one of those things where it's you know, it made such sense at the time and And then you look at it you go. Huh? Well, I guess we were just completely wrong the thing that I do not agree

envy or wish want to be in the position of is procurement they basically have to try to see the future their job is to try to predict what the future will be in 10 years and sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong they got it right with the i think the bradley turned out to be an outstanding piece of equipment the abrams killer the apache the

But then you look at some of their other guesses. The M10 Booker just got canceled. The light tank. It's like... And sometimes they kind of just have to put money into that system so that the system's there. It's like you have to create more of this equipment because if you let that assembly line die, it's very difficult to kick it back up again. So...

I personally feel like I don't know if they're going in the right direction or not. And sometimes you only tell in hindsight, like with the Gulf War, when they went through and they network-centric warfare and land-air battle turned out

in that case to be very effective. Yeah. And to me, this, this boils down to something that we talked about earlier is just humility and, and humility then allows you to be flexible because if you're, if you're not humble enough to say, Hey,

there's a decent chance that this could be the way, but there's also a decent chance that it's not. So let's, let's keep a flexible, open mind and take iterative steps in directions and try and cover as many bases as we can without over committing anywhere. But here's, I think what I, here's, here's what I think the army's perspective is, is that I think that they're gearing up for, they're like the greatest threat to us is China. And if we don't,

radically shift the way that we are organized, you know, okay, let's say we get it wrong and like it's, it turns out we need to be a counter terror. We need to go back to that. It'll be much easier to do that than it would be to really, uh,

organize ourselves in a way where we can deter China. And that's, they've, every system that they're procuring and setting up, it's all just based around how do we account for the fact that we're going to be outnumbered many times over in the Pacific and fighting from these little islands. They're, it seems to me that they're like,

doubling down on that. Also, in terms of the way our alliances are set up, they're like, we are going to let Europe have to invest more in their defense. And we're going to tell our allies that they need to step up to the plate in Africa and in Europe. And we're not going to be there anymore because, I mean, it seems to me that they're just saying we need to have everything in

ready to go for the Pacific. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the way that you would flush that out from a planning standpoint is to say that's like our worst case scenario. Right. And as long as we're prepared for the worst case scenario, we can adapt from there. So yeah, that's, I think, uh, as it should be, right. We need to be prepared for this worst case scenario over here. And meanwhile, the F that will give us the flexibility to do other things because if we're prepared for this worst case scenario, we have to do something less than that. We can manage. Yeah. Um,

How about the foreign Legion? I know you spent some time with the foreign Legion and, and I mentioned, um, uh, Jonathan mayhem Pebley at the beginning. How, how are those guys doing?

I'm glad that you brought that up because that's actually been the thing that's been weighing on me and been on my mind. And I know that that video meant a lot to him and he was very proud of being interviewed in that video and seen by, I think over 2 million people around that. And I, his father reached out to me and emailed me just last week and said, Oh, he was very proud of that video. And I,

I'm in contact with sending him the footage now. And I'm just glad that I got to highlight who he was, what he believed in, what he was fighting for, and the sacrifice that he made. John, Jonathan guy was, he's a character. He was a character. He was so animated. And when I immediately started talking to him, I could just tell that he's

a character and has a lot of personality and very forward with his thoughts and beliefs. He was willing to go on camera and speak with me, which meant a lot. And we stayed in touch on Instagram, actually. We would talk and I'd ask for like, hey, how you doing updates? He would tell me that he was volunteering for

More units that were in an assault position. He really wanted to be in the fight. He was doing what he wanted to do. And it shocked me when I found that out. And I saw it was going around on Russian channels. They were using photographs from our interview and saying like this American got killed. And he's only one of 40 American veterans killed.

who are veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan who have been killed in Ukraine. It's one of 40. He was a veteran of Fallujah. And I'm just happy that I can, I'm just happy that I can highlight him and that he, and that he liked, wanted that. I don't know. It's, it's been bothering me a bit because there was also the guy, the Bradley guys that I interviewed are also MIA. I heard. And it's,

It's sad for me, difficult, and I feel like I don't know why, because I only knew him very briefly. But I just, I don't know, he's something we clicked and got along well. And one of the things that he was saying that sort of was kind of heartbreaking was like he felt like, you know, what fighting in Iraq is,

Was maybe not justified not the right thing to do and he felt for lack of a better word I don't think he used this word but guilty felt like there was some kind of guilty conscience about what he had done in Iraq and now to sort of Sort out his karma in the world He was doing a good thing here by fighting in Ukraine which he believed was the right thing to do and was a just cause and

How'd that land with you and your experiences? When he said that, it crystallized things for me. I realized in a way, I was also trying to close a chapter of my life and get some closure on feelings that were sort of unclear for me about how I felt about the war in Iraq. And then

The war in Ukraine sort of was the fight that we, I think, kind of all wanted the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to be. He felt like he was protecting people that were being invaded against and in some way finding, what's the word? Finding a, he was looking for closure on that chapter. Yeah, it's difficult.

hearing from his father and his friends and his family and all the people that he's had a positive impact on in his life and the scale of the losses there is just, I guess it should, it shouldn't surprise me, but. I was watching another video from the, uh, from the Azov YouTube and there was a, another former Marine veteran, a guy, the call sign was Uno. And, um,

he had one eye and he lost his lost one of his eye in some kind of an uh some kind of an incident in the marine corps he didn't mention what it was but he he said something that landed pretty hard on me when you talk about the level of devastation and the number of casualties he said something along the lines of um the g watt veterans saw combat this is war

And you know again when you see what it's like over there and especially the pictures of the front line and this this kind of reminded me of Part of the piece that you did reminded me of some of the guys that I've had on that were in Vietnam, but they were Vietnamese they were Vietnamese, you know South Vietnamese army special operations guys and

they would go and hit a target at, you know, two o'clock in the afternoon, kill a bunch of Viet Cong or kill a bunch of North Vietnamese, come home, clean up or go back to base, clean up and then go have dinner with their wife. And they did this for 10 years. And so that's what, that's another thing that I saw, you know, from, from the Ukrainians, it's like, you're going to fight. So it's almost like the American world war two, which is,

You know when you're gonna go home? When we win. There's no other way. And this is something I've kind of had a project in the back of my mind for a long time of why we've lost wars and how we've lost wars. 'Cause we won World War I, World War II. What do you give Korea? Maybe a draw. But you go to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and in my mind,

One of the big biggest if not the biggest reason why we lost those wars is Because we didn't need to win and when you don't need to win at the end of the day you look around and you go Wait a second. Why why why are we here now? the Ukrainians are in a position where they need to win and I Quite frankly feel that the Russians are in a position where they don't need to win they can settle so

that aspect seems, I think will come into play. - Absolutely. What you set the goal to be for your win and loss, in those instances, we didn't achieve our objectives and it wasn't clear what our objectives kind of were. And I think that for me with Iraq,

the gray area is kind of like, we just, it wasn't clear what the objective was. And then we went back and we beat ISIS later on. It was pretty clear what the objective was. We accomplished it. We did it. Wham, bam, thank you, man. But if you have an objective like in, that's not achievable, uh,

people say we won all the battles and that's true. But if you don't achieve your political objectives, then what was like, that's the point of using force in war kind of anyway. So yeah, I would agree with that. Um,

What's uh, are you think you'll go back to Ukraine? No, no I especially not I found out that I was gonna be a father though I had already made it booked all the travel made all the plans and then that's right when I found out I was gonna be a father and That was weighing on me the entire time. I was there. It's like this I hope I'm not doing something that's really awful and selfish by going here and

I, but part of me was like, I want to do this to show my family that you can be courageous and stand up for what is right. And, um,

So I won't be going back to Ukraine. I do plan on doing more on the ground reporting, potentially in the border, talking with police that are fighting the cartel throughout the country, possibly going to Mexico. But my days of frontline reporting are probably...

How many days were you there for? For two weeks. And we went there. We did not stop. We stayed up like 36 hours, many days so that we could travel the entire front and go on those missions in each place. And it was, it, it felt like a day. So when you got done with that, at what point did you start to look at branching out from task and purpose?

When I got back from that experience and put all those videos together and I knew that my contract was up, like I had signed a three-year contract with them and I knew, I'm like, my contract is ending three months after I get back home.

And I knew I was going to have to make a decision. And I think the time in Ukraine crystallized and made it clear what the decision had to be, especially once I saw what their offer was. And then I was like, okay, I know what I need to do. You thought your ass was worth a lot more than whatever they offered you? And more than that. Because money...

I've never, I didn't get into video for money. I didn't want to be a TV director or do any of that for money. Like it's just, I have always felt like I don't have a choice. It's the only thing I want to do or know how to do. And leaving task and purpose was like, I don't have a choice. I have to leave for a number of reasons. One being, I can't keep pumping out two videos every week for the rest of my life. Especially I have a child on the way. I'm like, I'm not...

I felt like I wasn't gonna be able to be there for my kid. If I'm doing, I was in the world that I was in there, that I had created for myself really. But that was the agreement, like two videos a week. And I'm like, if I want to creatively be able to do what I wanna do with this and what I know could potentially be the future of this thing,

I'm going to need full control over it. I'm going to need to incentivize my team the way that I see fit. And I knew I'm like this, doing it this way is going to be a race to the bottom. And it felt like I'm just going to be chasing growth for the sake of growth. And I don't care how many subscribers I have. I just want to talk to the people that, you know, this group of people, and I don't want to

open it up to this group of people just so that there's more people. And so that's kind of what walked me to the decision ultimately of like, I have to leave. And a bunch of guys left with you, a bunch of like your team. Once they heard that I was leaving, they reached out to me and asked if they could join me at Cappy Army. And which just was really...

blew me away because I can't do it without, I could not do it without my team. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do without these guys. Cause they, the, the people that I work with have made me so much better over the years. And the relationship that I have with them is so key and important to the success of the channel. My creative producer, head creative producer, Michael, Mike, Michael ladies. It's just, um,

wizard with video editing and producing and Diego Aceituno, outstanding researcher, and Armando Duarte Galan, another just these guys helped me take in hundreds and hundreds of pages of boring documents. And then we look at it together and

bounce ideas off each other and turn it into something that's entertaining and easy to digest. And I just, I'm very grateful for my team. Yeah. Really like what you guys are doing right now. It seems to be a good, it seems like you're doing an outstanding job of distilling down information in a balanced way that is easy to understand. You could do it in 15 or 20 minutes and you get a pretty good, you know, picture of

You probably get you know, it's one of those things when I went to college I tell you about a college. Yeah when I went to college like I was I was already in the military So I was like a 28 year old man. And so to me it was like oh I need to get I need to be like the best right and so I'm in there and to get like a 90 or a 93 on a test would take two hours of studying maybe three but to get a hundred

would take me like eight hours or 10 hours. And I was an idiot and did the 10 hours. But the vast majority of the information, you know, you could get pretty quickly. And so I think that anybody that dives into your videos and watches them, you're going to get a really like 90% of the pertinent information that's going to be there. And you're going to get that in 20 minutes where you guys are going to spend 100 hours putting that stuff together. So yeah.

Some of the videos that you put out you Invasion evidence About China invading Taiwan again. This is a huge debate on when this is gonna happen and You presented you know evidence I've been asked that question a bunch of times of but I don't know if my viewpoint is changing very much It's definitely not solid But one of the things the last time I got asked this I was like well if I was China I wouldn't I

do anything right now. I would just wait to watch America continue to crumble. That was with the last administration where it looked like, you know, America was, we had all this and now the new administration is in America is not quite sitting back and allowing things to happen as much. So maybe their attitude is going to change. Maybe China's attitude will change. I don't know. But certainly from a, like the weapons systems and those giant freaking landing systems,

What do you even call those? Invasion barges? Invasion barges, bridges, like Death Stars. I don't know, but they're savage. Yeah, so you guys, you did that one. I think you did the one on the Chinese command center, which is what, five times bigger than the Pentagon? Yep, 10 times bigger than the Pentagon. 10 times bigger than the Pentagon. And it's also a giant underground part of it to avoid nuclear blasts.

Yeah, China is a thousand percent preparing, but we don't know if they're doing it as, you know, you never know. Are they deterring us? And that's what I love about the news channels. I have time to like interview. I spoke with a former CIA officer and just pick his brain on like, how does the U.S. assess it? Because that's the multi-billion dollar question is what is China's intention? And anyone who says they know,

doesn't really know and it's a flip of the coin and they may or may they have a 50% chance of being right, but it's a fascinating question. And of course the drama with the XM7 continues. Yes, the the it came out that so I had gotten I put out a video a while ago talking about all this great soldier feedback and that's what was in all these publications and then I got there was somebody posted and they were like,

Chris cut out all of my negative feedback and I was like, I didn't see any of that. I didn't, if, if I had seen that I would have reported on it, but no one reported. So it turned out somewhere along the line between the PAO and the publications, who knows what happened, but these soldiers positive feedback was delivered, but their negative feedback on the rifle was lost in the sauce, shall we say? And, uh, so, uh,

I could understand the frustration that that soldier probably felt, and that's very understandable. And so I wanted to give a voice to those troops who were sounding the other side of the argument, which was that the rifle is giant, heavy recoil, big recoil, and not what they want.

Guns is right up there with like religion, diet working out and martial arts, by the way. Martial arts seems to be settling down a little bit now because like there's not too many people that are just like committed to, you know, ninjutsu or something. Everyone's like, yeah, it's MMA and MMA is basically...

Wrestling boxing Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu. That's basically what it is But man back in the day man people were crazy about that guns is the same thing and what's what's interesting? So you did a piece on the scar, right? Yes a piece on the scar So I was actually around for the process I never deployed with the scar the guys maybe like right after I retired or actually right before I retired guys were deploying with this car but it was so

to watch them coming up with that thing and like reciprocating charging handle. Like no one ever talked about that and that all of a sudden was like this big deal and I...

Was you know I was as into guns as any normal seal which is a pretty high level of being into guns But wasn't like the full-fledged. I wasn't a sniper. I wasn't like a full-fledged gun nut I wasn't Building guns on my own or anything like that, but you know look I that was my primary tool for my adult life was a Rifle a battle rifle, but to watch and what was funny about it was so not funny It's actually sad

is it's almost like the story of the Pontiac Aztec. Do you know the story of the Pontiac Aztec? Well, the story of the Pontiac Aztec, it was designed by committee and it was like, well, we should have this kind of hatchback and we should put this kind of, and you end up with this thing that just doesn't look right.

And that kind of, you could see that not completely happening with that weapon system. And from all I know, the guys that use the SCAR, they really liked the SCAR. And especially once they got rid of the reciprocating charging handle.

then everyone was kind of really into it. And then I guess the program, which you explained in the video, why it kind of went away, but you have that weapon, you have the H and K 416, which everybody loves. Like there's no one that doesn't love the H and K 416. And I'm sure someone in America could have done something very similar to the 416 if we didn't want to just straight up use the H and K one or something like that. And then you have this new XM7, which is, seems to be

It's a real radical departure, you know, different ammunition. It's huge. We had this weapon and we got issued. It was an H and K. And I, by the way, H and K, I was an, I'm an old guy and we actually use the MP5 like a

lot in the 90s before we realized that you have to fight people on the way to the building because once you're in the building the mp5 school relatively speaking I guess maybe not as cool as an M for it at this juncture but at the time it seemed like man that mp5 could kill paper targets as good as Anything right and it was quiet and it was small and it everyone shot like dude you have an mp5 Everyone is a sniper at you know 20 or 30 yards. It is just an awesome weapon and

so I love H and K, but then they came out with, I think it was actually called the SOCOM. It was this pistol and it, you know, it had all these requirements to it. It had to be suppressed. It had to have this, had this caliber. And you know, there's, there's guys in the SEAL teams that like nine millimeter, nine millimeter versus 45, uh,

Is like, you know, religion, like depending on which side you're on, like what kind of pussy are you carrying a nine mil or whatever? Just that that attitude. But SOCOM made this or H&K made this SOCOM pistol. And it was freaking huge. It was absolutely huge. And so like we got issued it. I don't think I ever saw anyone actually carry one.

And so when people like, oh, it's a little bit bigger, you'll get used to it. Or it's a little bit heavier, it's a little bit longer. Like, I don't know. Now, all that being said, when I got to the teams, carrying an M14 was 100% like insane.

acceptable slash a little bit encouraged like an m14 and I had guys in Ramadi that carried an m14 what they Modified it to be called an EBR. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah. Yep the m14 with like those skeletons Yeah, so guys carried that and loved it and so it's but watching we know watching what's happening around right now with the XM 7 and you're reporting on it I got to see some of the behind the scenes on that with with a scar and

It's one of those minefields where everybody has an opinion. And generally speaking, they're right. Because if you're getting in this kind of fight in this kind of terrain, yeah, that XM7, I'd take that thing all day. But if you're getting this other kind of fight in this other kind of terrain, there's no way I'm bringing that thing with me. And they're all valid points. So I kind of go back to what I was saying earlier. It's like, what can you come up with for a system that's flexible and efficient?

and can be adapted to many different missions. This comes a little bit back to the point of the army is preparing for the worst case scenario and their argument to steel men, their argument about why they're, and they're going full steam ahead on even in, despite the captain Trent's, um, like,

white paper about how it's garbage trash and this and that the army i think just last week they removed the x from the nomenclature of it's now the m7 and it's i believe you know it's coming yeah whether you like it or not it's coming but those m4s those m16s i think they're always going to be in the arsenal it's not as though they can't switch back to them if god forbid they

Really, really, we botched it and we want to go backwards. The HK416, that's essentially what the Marines use now with the M27 IAR. That's essentially a HK416. There's going to be plenty of those in the inventory. The...

of what the army is seeing is that they believe that to have overmatch in a case where they're outnumbered, that they're going to need the M7s range to defeat China, I think is what they're looking at. It's like, how do we account for this vast gulf in us being outnumbered? We're going to have way less soldiers. Okay, we need something that can hit them before they can even

Range us and the way we're gonna do that is now in the past the biggest Downside to the full battle rifle was that we didn't have sensors that could see the enemy out that far now the argument is well We'll have drones that can see them at that distance. So you'll be able to pick those targets up at 700 meters with your drone and then shoot them with the m7 before they can even see you and with a round that can go through their body armor and

They're going to have a what's called the SRSS grenade launcher, which is essentially a grenade launching rifle that shoots a 30 mil grenade. It's very similar to the XM25 Punisher. It's a program that I'm sure you've seen. They've been trying to do this for 30 years. So they're claiming that...

You'll have one of those in each squad, and that will reduce the amount of ammo that you need to spend suppressing the enemy because now you'll airburst rounds over, blow up that bunker, that trench with the grenade launcher and its airbursting ammo, programmable airbursting ammo. So it's part, it's a holistic approach that the army is betting on. But again, it's a big risky bet. Some of this, these...

complaints about the weapon system could come down to like, well, is it what you want to take to the range? And is it perfect for home defense? No. But does it fit into this system of systems that the army is aiming to have? They're hoping that these weapon systems complement each other, the M250, the M7, and that they hit, because China, they fire a round that's very similar to the 556.

And militaries often end up copying what the U.S. military does. So when the U.S. military switched to a round similar to the 556, we saw a lot of forces copied them and even copied kind of the way the AR ergonomics of it for the rail system. So...

Are they going to get it right again? I don't know. And also, think about the M4 compared to the M16. There are so many small iterative modifications. And the guys from... A lot of guys. I won't say all guys because I have friends that were in Vietnam that loved the M16 and the Car 15 that used that. And...

in the mid 90s people didn't like the M16 anymore and then we had what I think we had the M16A2 and then there was like I had something else and before the M4 there was some one more that I'm forgetting right now anyways but by the time we got to like

The m4 and we were using it all the time like that there have been enough little changes to that weapon that that's a freaking solid weapon now and Like like I said Vietnam guys didn't like that weapon a lot of guys a lot of Vietnam guys because it would malfunction all the time you had to be super delicate with it and all these things and it was So I guess we're gonna find out All right, all man, uh, what what's next what's next for you?

What's next is I'm hoping to do more on the ground reporting. I want to meet with SWAT teams. I want to meet with security forces in the United States, maybe talk to the soldiers who have been stationed on the southern border.

I'm hoping to, because for me that's always the most rewarding is because then I kind of really I see with my own eyes and reporting from a desk is also rewarding. But yeah, I'm hoping to do more of that in the future. That's what Cappy Army is pushing towards. Awesome. Does that get us up to speed? Sure does. Get us up to present day.

Where can people find you? So you got, you got Patreon, right? And that's patreon.com slash Chris Cappy. And then thankfully you have YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, which are all at Cappy Army. And then there's one more thing that I'm not too familiar with, but it is... Pepperbox. Pepperbox. All right. So what's the deal with Pepperbox? How do people get there? Pepperbox is some of the content that I'm actually most proud of, but I can't put it on YouTube because if you were to show this kind of...

nasty war footage on there. And I understand it's totally reasonable that you don't want advertising on that kind of content, but there should be a place, I think, where you can go and see the realities of war for what it is and see why this is something that we need to avoid. If we can avoid war, then seeing, I think, more people who see that, because when you watch the History Channel, you watch a lot of YouTube, it gets sanitized and it almost becomes turned into...

It gets rid of basically the teeth of it. And then so on Pepperbox, we're able to show the actual horrors of war. Echo Charles, do you have any questions? Do you have...

Have you thought about like the in the future whatever doing going back to like movies or kind of narrative stuff like that? I've thought about it and I've had a couple of some directors of movies reach out to me and ask like to work on scripts with them and stuff and I kind of just I feel like that would maybe maybe be like taking a step backwards and chasing after something that maybe I didn't really want all along.

Feel like well everybody's different or whatever, but you know how okay? I think let me offer this as like a thought thing So you know how in the beginning and I forget what outfit it was with where you said it just wasn't a fit because of like a lot of the time like when you Create something or whatever it comes from like your personality So if let's say a kid show wanted you to produce something for them, and then it'll come from your personality deep down

So sometimes it won't be a fit because your personality, the way you express yourself and what you express yourself with isn't in line with kids stuff, we'll say. But the more experience you have, you know, with this like real stuff and the more ingrained this stuff becomes like in you and in your kind of your core or whatever, it'll formulate like a more authentic, more kind of in a way structured expression for any creative stuff in the future, you know? So it could actually add to that

Because a lot of times I think I'm not alone with or you're not alone with like a lot of these, especially when it comes to video, like, oh, I want to make a movie or a show or, you know, my own creative thing, you know. And a lot of time it could be the reason that it's not successful is because you don't have enough experience in life. You know, you're like, oh, I've seen this show and that show and that I can do that. And you go in there and you're like, oh, I can't because you don't have the experience, you know. And I'm not necessarily talking about movie making experience. I'm saying like life experience, you know.

So it might even be like an asset. This part of it isn't necessarily a step forward versus a step back necessarily, as far as like how you said, like it's a step backwards or whatever. It might be just part of one big process. You see what I'm saying? It would be amazing if it was something, if I could, there are opportunities there. And I think under the right conditions, like you're saying, it could be really cool. It could be fun. There is opportunities there.

I, what, what I, what I know I don't want to do is like give up what I'm creating on YouTube right now. And that, that weekly format that we're now doing, if I can find a way to keep that. And then also maybe there's some other opportunities that would be, that'd be awesome. Yeah.

Ronald, good to meet you. Council from Echo Charles. Hey, man, I'm just saying these are all things to think about as a creative person, especially with video, because video is not like one thing, especially nowadays. And I think that it'll just continue with that. There's so many forms of it. Like you ever watch like...

The stuff that kids watch on YouTube. Yes. You're kind of like, bro, what even is this? It barely makes even sense. Meanwhile, they're just like, this is my jam. I want more of this. You know, watch one episode of skibbity toilet and you will be entrenched in like, wait, is this irony? Are they watching this ironically or are they watching this?

uh, sincerely and we're both, both probably. Yeah. And then even just some thing like we probably have like, how old are you? Like 35 ish. We probably have these things given just what we're used to. So we probably have these blinders on that. We can't see certain things.

Like it's like a filter. We filter out certain things because we think it's kind of irrelevant to the entertainment, you know, process or whatever for us and kids or just we'll say new eyeballs and stuff. They don't have it. So they appreciate it for everything that it's worth. And then they, they formulate through time their own filters. You see what I'm saying? So it's like, probably you just never know, bro. And, and you add in your experience with it. Who knows what kind of video you can come up with, you know? Yeah. You, it's interesting now that you mentioned this, uh,

So a little while ago, again, my kids are young adults, right? So they're not quite like pure meme culture like a 14-year-old right now. But like if you've got a 15-year-old or a 20-year-old or whatever, they're in the game for sure. They're on the grid. They're on the grid. But now that you mentioned this, like –

If I were to see a meme or... What's the difference between a meme and like a TikTok video? I don't know. Like a short video, right? A short video. Okay. So if I was to see a real... If I was to see a real...

like a year ago that I would have just like that my one of my kids sent me and I would just like look at it and just be literally no understanding just why did you send this to me like they might as well sent me you know Chinese characters on a page and I would have just looked at it the same way and now

Once you kind of get a little bit in the game and now they'll send something I'll be like, oh, it's funny Like it's actually sometimes like a laugh out loud funny something that I literally would not have come comprehended almost like another language Yes, two years ago. Yeah, cuz I had to kind of you know get in the game myself. You're correct So it's a pretty good point. You got there echo Charles might be some things to bring to the table. I

Jack, any other questions, Echo? No. Cappy, you got anything, any closing comments? That's all I've got. I had a blast. Thank you so much for inviting me to do this. Well, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for joining us. It's great stories. And of course, thanks for serving your country.

Stepping out and and holding the line when the country needed you to do it and and thanks for what you're doing today You know trying to provide people with a better understanding of the world the world's a complex place And I think you're doing a great job Helping people understand what's going on. So thanks for what you did. Thanks for what you're doing Appreciate it and with that Chris Cappy has left the building

And Chris has been getting after it, getting after all kinds of things over the years. And now he's in a stable position, stepping up his game, taking risks, making things happen. So good to sit down and talk with him. And look, we get a step-up our game too. Am I wrong? You were correct, actually. So we're training, jujitsu. We're lifting. We're reading. We're studying. We're learning.

We're resting. We are resting. So a little thing happened. I got mandatory rest or involuntary rest. Okay. Involuntary rest. So look, I've had a little bit of a... Look, I don't like to talk about things. I like to give weaknesses away. Sure. But I had an elbow issue. Yeah. Like tendonitis in my elbow for a couple months. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I do. And every time I would train the jujitsu or do pull-ups...

Pull-ups would just inflame it. Like it would hurt way worse. And then jujitsu would not help at all. Yeah. We'll say, but I went on a road trip, road trip. Um, and there was no pull-up bar. And I thought normally I would normally I'd bring rings with me. So I'd be like, all right, cool. No pull-up bar, no factor. Hang the rings up somewhere and we'll get them done. But I was like, you know what? I'm not going to.

Because I knew that I was hurting myself. So I went on a trip. I was gone for four days. No pull-ups. And the previous, I'd done pull-ups two days prior to leaving. So I actually went like, I believe it was six straight days with no pull-ups, which is, I haven't done that in a long time. Holy crap.

Arms good to go. Healed. Kind of. Look, I can feel a little bit, but it's pretty much healed. So dare I say it, it recovered. Yep. So rest is part of the program. Look, and look, do I got to admit something right now? This is not my area of expertise. Rest is not. But that's why I have you, man. That's why I have you. You're here to help me get rested properly. If it helps you, don't call it rest.

Call it recovery. Okay. Okay. Well, I've been recovered. Yeah. And another thing. So that's what we're doing. We're lifting. We're running. We're sprinting. We're doing road work. We're training. We're resting when needed. Yeah. Hopefully at an appropriate level. But we also need fuel. Oh, yeah. It's part of the trifecta. Yeah. Exercise. Exercise.

recovery fuel that let me look you helping me with my rest yeah let me help you with your fuel okay jocofuel.com go check it out hey go check out jocofuel.com get the real goods again I know it sounds crazy there's counterfeit jocofuel out there which is crazy to think about and we're on it we're tracking people down we're

We're going to war. Look, we got, do you think we don't have friends in law enforcement? Oh, we got friends in law enforcement. We got friends at all levels of law enforcement and things are getting handled. But jocofuel.com, you don't have to worry about that. We also have deals there on jocofuel.com. Free shipping over 99 bucks. We got everything that you want. It's all in stock. So check that out. And we got subscriptions. So like up to 20% off when you subscribe to something and then you're not going to miss it because you don't want to miss out on your joint warfare.

You don't want to miss out on your time war you don't want to miss out on your super grill and you definitely don't want to get done with a ribeye steak and Then realize that you don't have any milk for dessert. Don't let that happen So go to Jocko fuel calm and subscribe and if you don't do that if you want to get it just down at the shop Down the street cool. Go to Walmart. Go to Wawa. Go to vitamin shop. Go to GNC military commissars if you're in the military we got you covered and

Hannaford, Dash Stores in Maryland, Wakefurn, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas, building Jocko Fuel walls. Meyer up in the Midwest, building Jocko Fuel aisles. Wegmans, Jocko Fuel pallets. Harris Teeter, getting after it. Publix down in Florida. Hey, everyone in Florida, thank you for taking care of yourself and getting some Jocko Fuel.

We're there. Also, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and small gyms everywhere. If there's not Jocko Fuel in your gym where you train or where you go to do yoga or where you go to do jujitsu or where you go to do Pilates or where you go to do biking. What's that biking called? Soul cycle. Cycle. Cycling. Look, if you don't have Jocko Fuel there, email jfcales at jockofuel.com and we'll get you covered. Also, originusa.com. This is where you can get t-shirts, hoodies,

Boots flip-flops are being experimented with right and slippers. We call you know, I good I have a pair that's being delivered today for the T&E process test and evaluation We'll see you know what I could wear them for a little bit then I can turn them over to you Yeah, please look good because you do bring a level of expertise in the slippers region. I love Anything that you want and listen this stuff isn't made in China by slave labor. It's not made in a sweatshop. I

In fact, it's made by Americans here in America with 100% American-made materials. Oh, what about the tariff? We don't care about the tariff. Good. Tariff those people that are trying to sell communist-made gear. Tariff them. But you can't tariff OriginUSA because we're 100% made in America. Check that out, OriginUSA.com. Yep, it's true. Also, if you've noticed me, Jocko, other people wearing shirts that say good on them, right? Big letters, right?

Or discipline equals freedom, which is another one. Maybe even on TV, on the news sometimes. I've seen it on the news before. Anyway, see these people wearing these shirts that say this. Discipline equals freedom. Good. Get after it. Stand by to get some. And you're wondering where you can get it. This is where you can get it. Don't worry. I got you. JockoStore.com. There's also hoodies on there if you want some hoodies for, you know,

For colder weather or whatever. Some hats on there. Socks on there. I'm going to flex on them at the airport. I don't know what those look like, by the way. Go to jocostore.com. Click on accessories. You see them right there. Two types, by the way. You want the long ones? The ones that go up to your knee? Right, got you. You want the, what do you call the other one? Six inch? Crew?

Okay, crew socks. You want those ones got you to write good one. They say discipline equals freedom discipline equals freedom You know, it's true. You want to flex on them at the airport? Oh, yeah Oh, but yeah, everything is on there also the shirt locker subscription scenario, you know, you ever seen these guys rolling around with a shirt that says a sugar-coated lies actually looks like a Krispy Kreme shirt and

But you look close and it says, wait a second, it says sugar-coated lies on it. It's from the shirt locker, by the way. Last year, one of the favorites on there. Anyway, there's a lot of different designs that do represent the same deal. This one equals freedom in a way, one way or another, but just a little bit more creative design. It's called the shirt locker. You get a new one every month. It's a subscription scenario. I like it. That, too, is on Jocko's store.

Hey, I mentioned ribeyes. You want to get your ribeyes. You want to get your ribeye and whatever other steak cut you like. Personally, I'm a ribeye guy. PrimalBeef.com, ColoradoCraftBeef.com. These are the steaks from good people, great companies, amazing steaks. Now-

Protocol wise I've been using the Shawn glass technique for the ribeye three three two two Three minutes one side three minutes the other side two minutes back two minutes back and you're good pull it right off medium heat high heat like a medium meeting Leaning towards a little bit warmer a little bit hotter so we won't I like that little bit of a little bit of a And by the way salt pepper, that's it. No barbecue sauce. No uncle

Phil's barbecue or anything like this and look I'm a fan of Phil's barbecue but not gonna take corn syrup because you ever look at a barbecue sauce it's just corn syrup it's like corn syrup pepper and paprika and that's a barbecue sauce no you don't need it salt pepper three three two two get your steak on primal beef calm Colorado craft beef calm the best also subscribe to the podcast also Jocko underground calm

Also YouTube channel. We got a bunch of them check those out psychological warfare if you don't have that yet Check that out. Yeah for a while. Yeah, that's a fundamental one at their psychological warfare. You need that little boost. Mm-hmm Yes, good. I used to say was a hundred percent guaranteed. It's still got a hundred percent guarantee rate 200% guarantee now went up they went up boys books

Need to lead. You heard of that book? Yep. Who's it written by? Good deal, Dave Burke. Good deal. Good deal, Dave. Okay. Dave Burke, check that one out. You can pre-order it right now. It comes out October 21st. Final Spin, Discipline Equals Freedom, Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid books. Check those out. And then, of course, you've got Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy, Leadership books that I wrote with my brother, Leif Babin, who I also have a leadership consultancy with.

We solve problems through leadership. It is called Echelon Front. If you need help inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. If you want to come to one of our events, go to echelonfront.com. If you need to square away your team, go to echelonfront.com. You can come to one of our events. We can come to you. Or if necessary, we have extremeownership.com, which is an online leadership training academy. And we can help teach you the skills of leadership.

the skills of leadership that you need in every interaction that you have with people, it will make you better. So go to extremelownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

She's got an amazing charity organization that helps so many of our veterans and their families. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also check out HeroesAndHorses.org, Micah Fink, helping our veterans up there in the mountains find their soul and be reborn. And then you got Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org, helping SEALs get reintegrated into the civilian world.

And if you want to connect with us for Chris Cappy, check him out on Patreon, patreon.com slash chriscappy. He's also YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter at CappyArmy. And then for us, you can check me out at jaco.com. And on social media, I'm at jacowillink. Echoes at Echo Charles. Just be careful of that algorithm.

It'll get you. Thanks once again to Chris Capilouto, Chris Cappy, for joining us, for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service in the Army, and thanks for what you're doing today to continue to help people to better understand the world. Thanks to all of our military personnel around the world right now fighting to protect their homeland, fighting to protect freedom, and standing in the breach against tyranny.

Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for protecting us here at home and to everyone else out there. You know, nothing's going to be given to you. Nothing's going to just be given to you. It's not going to happen. It might happen rarely, but don't count on it. No one is going to make things happen for you. Like Chris Cappy, you have to make things happen. And when you do these things, there's going to be risk. But without risk...

There's no reward. So don't wait any longer. Instead, get up and go get after it. And that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.