Surviving the Taliban with Lynne O’Donnell and Alexander Nazaryan on Lawfare’s Influence in Politics
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Our first guest today is Lynn O'Donnell, author, journalist, and broadcaster specializing in South and Central Asian affairs, war, and terrorism. You can follow her work on Substack at Lynn E. O'Donnell, 2Ns1E O'Donnell, and on X at Lynn K. O'Donnell.com.

She had an amazing piece coming out of Afghanistan, her journey to get out of the country and what has been happening there since the U.S. withdrawal that drew our attention. And we are thrilled to have her on the program. Lynn O'Donnell, welcome to Breaking Battlegrounds. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. So first, explain to our audience in 2022, the Taliban were frankly not letting you out of the country. Tell us a story.

Well, I've been a journalist covering Afghanistan and the war there for a long time. And very luckily with the timing, I was on the last commercial flight to leave Afghanistan before the Taliban arrived in the capital, Kabul, a couple of hours later. And of course, there was the awful evacuation and the chaos that followed and lots of reporters telling different stories and

I decided after a year that I should go back. I was declared a high value target by the Taliban anyway, but I thought it's best to go back and really see what the situation on the ground is for myself. And I was

planning to do a series of stories, when the Taliban caught up with me, I went to register as one's supposed to. I went by the book with the visas and the registering at the airport. Then I was supposed to register with the foreign ministry as a visiting foreign correspondent. And I did that. And the spokesman for the foreign ministry at the time was abusive and

And he told me that I would probably be deported because the intelligence agency didn't recognise me as a journalist. They caught up with me eventually and kept telling me to come and visit their office and confess my crimes. Wow.

I could see the writing on the wall and so I booked myself a ticket out to Pakistan and when they called me and demanded this again, I said, look, I know you don't want me here. I've booked a plane out tomorrow. Why don't we just leave it at that? And they said to me that if I didn't come,

to the Office of the General Directorate of Intelligence, which is the former NDS, National Directorate of Security, that I would not be able to leave the country because they would have my details and my photograph, passport and everything at every port of entry and exit in the country. So they basically detained me and sent

forced me to make false confessions and interrogated me and wouldn't let me go until I had been through that experience. I was essentially kidnapped and detained by the Taliban for a day while they made these demands of me. Well, you're a pretty courageous woman. Does your family wish you would cover soccer or the weather? No.

Oh, you know, years ago, my mother and father, I'm from Australia. My mum and dad, who are both gone now, they were living in Melbourne. And I went to visit them one year and my mother, apropos of nothing, said, we lie in bed at night.

about you. Sure. I do too. I had no idea up until then for me, I was just doing my job, you know, and I had no idea the impact I was having on them and

And then when I was planning to go back to Afghanistan 2022 for the trip I just described to you, friends also here in London where I live and in America and in Australia were all like, don't go. Yeah.

Well, understandable. People care about you. I mean, Sam and I are going to worry about you now because you're quite a courageous woman and we appreciate coming on. So you wrote a fantastic piece, which is we talked earlier, who I've shared with everybody I have an email with. And it's called The Cabal Syndrome. And you reported obviously you didn't go to Afghanistan for this. So you had to talk to other experts and so forth.

Could you please first explain to our audience what Stockholm Syndrome is and how that is applying now to the women under Taliban control?

Yeah, it's the first time that I really thought of what's happening to them in these terms. Stockholm syndrome is a way of describing what happens to people who are held hostage for long periods of time. They come to identify with the people who are holding them hostage.

Patty Hearst is a really good example of that. She was kidnapped by urban terrorists in the United States many decades ago, and then she joined them and became one of this terrorist bank robbing gang members.

And the reason I wrote this piece, I wrote it for Airmail and the website. And I met a woman called Batul Haidari, who is an Afghan psychologist.

And she came over to my house and she was explaining to me what the women that she is trying to help and counsel in Afghanistan and in other parts of the world as well are going through. And she said to me that they believe that the way they're being treated by the Taliban now is for the best, right?

it's good for them and and I said to her it sounds to me like it's Stockholm syndrome and she said that's exactly what it is and she went on to describe that um the way women are now competing with each other to be the most modest in their dress um uh the most um uh

pious in their adherence to the Taliban's religious strictures. And she said she went from treating and counselling more than 100 women and girls across the country to now only about 30. She said it's a really dire situation that will take a long time to reverse.

Lynne, can you explain to our audience what exactly is happening to these women under Taliban rule? What freedoms have been taken away? Well, all freedoms, if you think about it in terms of the way we live in Western democratic countries, developed countries, modern countries.

We have an ethos of egalitarianism. We're not there yet. We're a long way from it, but at least we push at it and we try. And there have been, you know, concerted and constitutionally recognised efforts to make sure that men and women and all people, no matter what,

how they identify or what color their skin is or where they're from are treated equally. Well, what the Taliban did as soon as they took power in August 2021 was start to take those freedoms away from women. They closed the schools first up. So girls over the age of 12 right up through university are not allowed to be educated.

They can go to madrasas, which are only for women and girls, but that's the only education they're now permitted. They've largely been forced out of work, even NGOs,

charities and UN agencies, some of them have cheekily tried to keep on employing women, either keeping them at home or just letting them come in and do their work. But they've just recently been told that they're not allowed to do that anymore. And if they do, their licenses to function in Afghanistan will be taken away from them.

Women aren't allowed to leave their homes unless they're accompanied by a male relative as an escort. They can't go to parks or public bathhouses. They can't sing or recite the Quran in public. They can't even stand by windows or look out of windows anymore. They are essentially... What is the reasoning by the Taliban to not be able to look outside your window?

What is a reasoning? Well, if you stand at the window, somebody might see you. So do they just close the blinds then? Is that what they have to do when they're in the house and they're cooking or playing with their children? Yeah.

Yeah, they can't be anywhere near a window where they might be seen or, yeah, from outside. And all new buildings have to comply with that and all existing buildings now have to be, basically, they're closing up windows. So women are being, you know, consigned to darkened corners of their homes, you know? And they are, women are unallowed to see a doctor of the opposite sex, correct? Yes.

Yeah, that's right. And so there had been some university courses teaching women radiology and dentistry and things like this so that they could treat other women. And those have been in December, they were closed down for women as well. So women are going to be dying in childbirth and suicides that we know of.

have gone through the roof. And domestic violence is also an extreme problem because the pressure to make women comply is put on the men. It's a really horrible situation that I think we, Jeremy, have a really difficult time getting our heads around, imagining, let alone understanding, just how awful it really is. Let me ask you this question as we're wrapping up with you here. We've got a couple of minutes.

How did you get into this specialty? I mean, you know, let's go pick. I want to be a journalist. I want to cover this part of the world that seems unable to change or adapt to

But you took a job that apparently kept your mom up at night and your dad, understandable because they love their daughter. What made you pick this field versus covering the police beat in London or Melbourne or something of that nature? Well, I did do all of that. And then I was a China correspondent. I was based in China for a number of news organizations for quite some time. And then 9-11 happened.

And China went from being the biggest story on the front page every day to where's China? Right, right. No.

Now, if you're a front page reporter, you go where the story is. So I got on a plane out of Beijing and I went to Tashkent and I drove down to the border and I went into Afghanistan and I was there for the October 7 arrival of the American military for what became a 20 year occupation. And I found that very exciting and interesting and

It was the start of a new career for me. And that's how it happened. First, it was war. And then it became when I was posted by an international organization I was working for to Kabul as their bureau chief. And that's what I have done since. About 30 seconds left. Did you ever feel a time, the 20 years reporting from there, that they were going to turn the corner? Or were you always pessimistic about it?

Oh, let me be honest. I was always pessimistic about it. I was there, you know, every day. I moved around the country with the military and with Afghans. And it was very, very obvious to me that the money that was going in, whether it was the UN or other charities or the military effort or the diplomats, they were all singing from the wrong hymn sheet.

We're going to have to get Lynn O'Donnell back on here in the future to talk about this. We need to get Netflix series on her. Yeah, absolutely. You can get Netflix series on her life. This is wonderful stuff. Lynn O'Donnell, thank you so much for joining us, folks. You can follow her on Substack at Lynn O'Donnell and on X at Lynn K. O'Donnell. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back. All right. Imagine this. You're running for president. Yes, president. What's your name?

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone.

And you're doing well for yourself and your family by doing good for others and helping students pay off their high-interest student loans early. So it's a fantastic opportunity. Again, check them out. Invest the letter Y, then refy.com. All right, continuing on right now, our next guest is Alexander Nazarian. He writes about politics, culture, and science.

You can follow him on X at Alex Nazarian. And he had a piece recently that we definitely wanted to talk about on Unheard, how lawfare destroyed liberalism. But then as we were looking this morning, it turns out he's a –

A soul in our own vein on sports, Chuck, because he retweeted a piece about a brewing potential scandal with Terry Rozier in the NBA with the Charlotte Hornets, potentially being investigated for gambling activities. That's a big deal, and he seems to agree with us that there is a growing problem in sports with gambling. So welcome to the program, Alexander Nazarian. We are thrilled to have you on.

Thank you so much. Greetings from rainy Washington, D.C. And, you know, we're going to start with sports, which is one of the things I don't actually cover all that much, but happy to talk about it. Well, it's just one of those things. Chuck and I are big basketball fans here, and so he's a big fan of both the Utah Jazz and the Phoenix Suns, me, the Phoenix Suns here. But we are both kind of dismayed by the growth of gambling and the implications for gambling in sports here.

And this case could highlight something that, frankly, might be a much bigger issue than people think, which is...

there's a lot of money out there right now floating around that may be affecting the outcome of games. There was a lot of money floating around before gambling, right? We had the referee scandal in the NBA. Obviously, Pete Rose in Major League Baseball. And those should have been cautionary tales that we have to have checks because ultimately, there's

There should be some purity to the game. I hope I don't sound like a Boy Scout when I say that. You're our kind of Boy Scout. Yeah.

When I go to an NBA game, even if it's just a Wizards game, you're seeing athletes compete at the very, very top. You don't want to think that they're also thinking about, oh, what's my line, what's my spread going to be? That's just so unseemly. I want to believe that our athletics, our professional leagues are better than that.

So you had a great piece out this week, which we were just fascinated with. And we thank you for joining our show about it, about how Democrats, how Democrats use lawfare this the past four years. And what is explained to our audience what your premise is for the article and how it did affect the Democrats in the campaign?

Look, I don't vote. I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. But I believe we need two healthy parties in this country because we are a two-party system. And right now, I think what the Democrats have become

he's not really helpful to the Democratic Party, which is a party that wages lawfare, which is sort of legal battles to win their case, mostly against Trump. And we've seen that throughout the last four years, whether it's the hush money case in New York, whether it's the documents case out of Mar-a-Lago, January 6th case. You know, we've seen...

We've seen the Democrats focus on legal questions that may be legitimate, and I think some of them are. You may disagree, but regardless, politically, was it expedient to do that? I would argue it turns out not to have been. Well, and I would add, and Chuck and I have talked about this on the program, that of all the cases that were brought against him, the case in Georgia...

was probably the most legitimate one. And when you add in some of the cases that were, you know, the New York case, the hush money case, but also the case surrounding his real estate and business dealings and a bank loan that was paid off, that actually takes away

from the impact of the case that was legitimate or cases that were legitimate, depending on your view. I couldn't agree with you more on that. I think, you know, the records is a little bit tricky because he is the president. He may conclude that some of those records, even if they're sensitive, classified, do belong in his possession.

I wouldn't argue that. Then again, I probably wouldn't have taken the records, but he did. And I think he had more ground there than he did in Georgia. Now, that Rico case was always going to be tough to try. And to her credit, I think Fannie Willis is a smart and dedicated prosecutor. But this Nathan Wade thing, just hiring her boyfriend...

who doesn't have trial experience, just totally unraveled her own case. It was just brutal self-sabotage. And after that...

There really wasn't much in Atlanta after that in Fulton County, and the Jack Smith cases obviously didn't move forward as quickly as he and the Justice Department wanted them to. Alexander, you've covered politics a long time, and I want to talk about Fannie Willis for a minute here. So she's a smart person. I don't think you get those jobs unless you have some intelligence. It doesn't matter if you're a conservative or not. Capability.

You've covered a long time. Why do smart people make bad decisions like this? In this case, her boyfriend. Didn't she just sit back and think, this is not going to look good. Somehow this is going to blow up in my face. I mean, you've covered politics a long time. Is it arrogance? Are they so much in a bubble they don't realize what could blow up in their face? What is your theory on that?

You know, that's a really good question. It's hubris, plain and simple, arrogance. And this town runs on it. It's this conviction that you won't get caught, or if you do, you will somehow wriggle out of it. Again, you see it here every single day, and you wonder, how could this person think that they're going to get away with X, Y, Z? And yet, that is what they think, incredibly.

Alexander, I want to turn back a little bit to your article because I think I actually kind of read through it twice. And as I read through it the second time, I had sort of more questions, which I think is generally an indication of a good piece. One of the issues that I think you highlight in it is that the Democrat Party has been relying on this lawfare and has abandoned having a strong platform that appeals to a broad range of people.

While we only have about a minute left in this segment, we're going to be coming back with another segment here coming up. But how do Democrats start moving beyond the lawfare and reestablishing a broad-based platform? Well, I think that's a very good question with a very simple answer. Stop relying on lawyers as your candidates, as your speakers. Lawyers have a place.

But they do not need to be the leaders, the spokespeople of the party. Let others, let people who have real life experience outside of New York and D.C. for once lead the party. The party would be better off with John Fetterman talking more for them than lawyers. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Except not everybody feels that way. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, in allowing maybe more diversity of voices, we'll get into that in just a moment here. We're going to be coming back with more from Alex Nazarian here in just a minute, folks. So stay tuned. You can follow him on X at Alexander Nazarian. And be sure if you're not already, go to BreakingBattlegrounds.vote and sign up for all of our podcasts and extra content. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, in a world of increasing digital insecurity, you need to go to 4FreedomMobile. That's the number 4FreedomMobile.com and get yourself a phone that actually protects your identity, protects your bank account, and protects your secure information. So check them out, 4FreedomMobile.com. And when you use code BATTLEGROUND at checkout, you get a 10% discount. Fantastic opportunity there. All right, we're continuing on with Alexander Nazarian.

It covers politics, culture, and science. You can follow him on X at Alex Nazarian. When we went to break, we were talking a little bit about the Democrat Party needing to re-expand its platform and specifically, Chuck, you brought up John Fetterman in these voices. Alex, how do –

How does the Democrat Party get past this sort of stonewalling that they have on differing voices within the party where people like Fetterman, who may step out of line, are just getting beat down every time they do?

Well, I think November is going to help or has helped in that regard. It was a real wake-up call to not only lose the White House but not win back or win either chamber of Congress. Clearly, that should have been and I think has been a recognition that the way the party has been doing things isn't working.

Meanwhile, you're right. Fetterman has been maligned not just because of his stance on Israel, but his stance on immigration, his willingness to meet nominees like Pete Hegseth, his willingness to go meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. These things seem alien to many Democrats, and they shouldn't be. And the fact that his progressive bona fides are being questioned is...

sort of ridiculous to me. He's, John Fetterman, as he has said, is a progressive, and his values, as far as I can tell, his values, his principles, haven't really changed all that much. And

The fact that he's become a controversial figure in the first place, I think, speaks to a real crisis in the party. And to your point, sort of an inability to have a bigger tent. Right now, the tent is very, very small. And, you know, it's zipped closed. And that's...

That doesn't win elections. You know, you talk about John Fetterman, so we're Republicans, we don't hide that, but I'm literally going to donate to John Fetterman and hope he wins because I think we need about 10 people in the Senate from Republican and Democrat side who just speak their mind and are willing to sit down. And 30 in the House. Yeah, I mean, we just need those people, right? I mean, John Fetterman, I'm not going to agree on 85 out of 100 things, but I appreciate him just being blunt. I appreciate him going to meet with the president. I appreciate...

You know, I thought something was really interesting, which goes to your point. You know, they did this big video of J.D. Vance seeing the Oval Office the first time. How in the hell is every new senator not invited to the Oval Office? Doesn't matter what party they're from. I mean, how has he not seen the Oval Office and sat down with Biden? It's weird.

You know, one of the things that's really dispiriting about being in Washington is that you talk to people in either party and they all realize how broken the systems here are, how we do things here is not effective. Everybody knows that.

but it's so hard to change and it's so expensive politically to change these things that very few people have the courage to speak up. Fenneman is one of them. I would argue there's, you know, Trump has sort of done that very big picture, um,

in a in a sense just being a complete iconoclast uh... in not treating anything here sacred uh... but most the vast majority of people here whether they're republican or democrat just sort of go along with the way things have been even if

they aren't especially productive. And how do we, so one facet of that, and I'm guilty of this as well, is that social media broadcasts often the worst instincts and voices on each side, right? And then the debate moves away from a collegial one into combat. And with election cycles, you never get out of it. How do we start moving past that?

I think if someone could answer that question, they should be president. I don't know, because, you know, you go to a hearing on Capitol Hill and you can see members clearly on their phones, you know, most likely checking their mentions to see if somebody picked up their exchange with, you know, Anthony Fauci or I don't know. I don't know. Whoever. Yeah. You know. Right.

Right. It's just everybody, every member of Congress now has a social media person who curates their feed and also tries to get them out there to make them the next AOC candidate.

And it's just that dynamic is crushing because, like you said, it's just it actually makes this place look worse than it is. And there are really good people in Washington. Again, both sides trying to do good things. And you never hear about them and you never hear their ideas. And they're trapped in a social media spin cycle. Alexander Nazarian, thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.

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We're continuing on now with a very good friend of mine, a very old friend of mine, Travis North. He is a captain with the Tucson Fire Department.

And, Travis, thank you so much for joining us. We wanted to bring you on. Obviously, the national news talking a lot about what happened in D.C. with the collision between the helicopter and plane there in a mass casualty event where recovery is still going on, trying to locate the rest of the bodies from that wreckage. How long has it been that you have been a fireman now?

I've been up on 19 years. So when this midair collision happened the next morning, Sam and I talked early, and I said, we need to get somebody on the show. He recommended you. So they've recovered almost half of these deceased people. They're still trying to find 30 more or so. What goes into helping the first responders recover?

deal with these visuals after the event's gone? Do they go through therapy? This is a tough thing for people to come across. I mean, it's been two days now and they're still trying to find 30 more bodies. I mean, it's just, I can't imagine how horrific that is. How do they deal with this type of mental anguish and what they see?

The culture has shifted over the years. It used to be there used to be what we used to call CISM or critical incident stress management, which was taken from the military. Luckily, that's kind of gone away. That was the old process of get everybody in a room, sit everybody around a table, and everybody was kind of forced to talk about what they were feeling. And what happens is a lot of guys and gals at that particular moment aren't ready to talk about it or deal with it.

So luckily that model has gone away. A lot of what we do in the fire department, we benefit over the cops. The cops are running around by themselves in their own squad units and might get to see each other in the morning at lineup or finding out what's going on during the day. But we're lucky enough that we get to come back to the fire station and we kind of decompress and unload with each other if we're ready. Over the last couple years, they have noticed changes

and started treating PTSD and bad calls a little differently. Um,

We have – we've got a team on the fire department for us particularly that will come out if we want them to. You can talk to a person if you want to. You don't have to talk to that person if you don't want to. Like I said, one of the best things for us is that we get to sit around the table and you can start noticing if one of our people is avoiding contact with people or hiding out in their room. So we get a good chance of –

just kind of decompressing initially. Um, in addition to that Tucson fire over the last couple of years has slowly started adding more and more resources. Um,

We've got Cigna, we get our healthcare through. They've got a line that anybody can call 24 hours a day. You don't need to go through your chain of command, you can just call the number. We've also got a similar thing set up with the Jewish Community Center down here. They offer counseling services to the firefighters as well as their family members. Same kind of thing, you can self-refer.

We've also recently partnered with a clinical psychologist who works through the military, who is kind of contracted to the fire department. And the great thing about that is we're starting to get counselors that...

that are basically what we, you know, they're culturally competent. They understand what we go through. They understand the kind of personalities we have. You're not going to a generic psychologist that, you know, just got done counseling a couple over their struggles over a bankruptcy and then seeing you 10 minutes later and trying to relate. A lot of these counselors we have are very specific to fire, emergency response systems,

PTSD. One of the new programs that I just went through recently that's been a great help, there was a program through Boulder Crest up in Boulder Crest Foundation in Colorado that started with the military looking at this idea of post-traumatic stress and that it was just a diagnosis and that was it. That was about as much as you got. You got a diagnosis of PTSD, hey, you're broken. Good luck, right? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And it wasn't, it was just the model had been broken for so long. The culture had been for years, you know, hey, yeah, you're on a horrible car accident. It's a dead kid. Get over it. Right. Luckily, and that was the old school mentality. And it's, I think the fire department and the police department started realizing that we've got so many men and women that are struggling with alcoholism.

alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, gambling, just a lot of self-destructive behaviors that they're trying to self-medicate with. And so they started looking for other avenues. Boulder Crest, they started with the military with a program called Warrior Path, and

And Warrior Path was designed, focused around this post-traumatic growth instead of just a diagnosis of PTSD. They quickly realized that there was a need for it in first responders, and they have now branched out to police and fire. And so that's another great thing that the police department here in Tucson has wholeheartedly adopted over the last five years to the point they're teaching it in their academies now to give people tools how to basically struggle well

instead of making poor choices and dealing with their struggles and the horrible stuff we see. So, yeah, it's hard when we're out there, you know, you're searching. Unfortunately, some of those people, they're probably never going to find, depending on how bad the fire was, or they're going to find only remnants. Right.

I'll never forget a conversation I had, oh, it's a decade ago. I had an Uber driver, and I asked, you know, I always ask the Uber drivers, you know, most of them have a good story. You know, how did he get into it? He goes, well, I was a fireman for 17 years. And I said, well, why didn't you finish it? I know there's retirement benefits at certain, you know, I don't know what they are, but there's certain retirement benefits. And he just said, I can't have one more summer where I get a drowned kid out of a pool.

Yeah. And that just really hit me. Yeah. I mean, I mentally can't do it anymore. Well, and Travis, I remember when you were first starting with the fire department, you would call me all the time pretty early in the morning. I think it was always on your way home from shift. Yeah.

and sort of unload some of the stuff you had been seeing. And at first, I kind of, you know, I mean, hey, I'm a guy. Those sort of grossly morbid stories are not turning my stomach at all. But part of that and part of what you're talking about with your fellow firefighters is just being able to not take that home with you, right? I mean, how do you avoid not taking those experiences and tragedies home to your wife and kids? Yeah.

Unfortunately, we take them home, every one of us. Whether you're married, have a partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever it is, we

you end up taking that stuff home and you don't, as much as your spouse or your significant other says, oh, hey, I want you to share your day with me. Initially, I struggled with that because, I mean, I was fortunate enough, my wife, her family's all fire, retired chiefs and captains, and so she kind of grew up in the culture, hearing the stories. But even with her, I would realize a certain point where they

they kind of like glaze over like I'm traumatizing them now, just giving them the details and it's helping me, but now I'm traumatizing my family. And what happens, especially for me and a lot of others is we just internalize it. We find other ways to cope or not cope. We can end up,

A lot of us for a long time were like, oh, we don't have PTSD. That's nonsense. And it's the craziest thing. You can run 10 child deaths in a row that don't hit you, and then you run a horrific code of an 85-year-old person that reminds you of a grandparent or something, and you're just overwhelmed. So for me, it was a big balance of learning to share just enough with my wife. It took a lot, a struggle in our marriage and marriage,

with my kids and me realizing, hey, I'm snapping at my kids over dumb stuff that, you know, it's just kids being kids. And going to counseling and realizing, hey, I've got to find a more healthy, creative way to express this and non-destructive. So I learned to share just enough with my wife, basically, hey, I'll talk. When you get uncomfortable or you don't want to hear anymore, you have full stop to stop me.

you have permission to say okay I've heard enough or hey I don't want to talk about that um it's been helpful to know to include them up to a point so that they know you're struggling with something they don't necessarily need to know all the details I've kind of learned that over the years of my wife doesn't need all the details of the horrific you know this kid died or this person did this to this person because unfortunately human beings are absolutely horrible to each other um

The crazier thing is my kids and their friends, they want to hear every detail. And I'm like, no, I'm not sharing that with you. I know you guys think this sounds cool, but I'm really not going to share all that with you. You don't need to know that. But my kids have learned to recognize that they know when I'm kind of struggling and I need my space. Like I said, the biggest thing is realizing there's other guys on this job and other gals on this job that I can open up to and be like –

Hey, this call really bothered me. I'm a real big proponent of, especially with all my new guys as I'm training them, I don't care how small or insignificant they are. This is my thousandth code arrest of the year or whatever. If it may not bother me, I start to recognize, hey, this may bother him or her.

Let's go ahead and get stuff in place right now. Here's some numbers you can call. You can call me 24 hours a day and kind of remove that stigma of, you

you know, PTSD is a made up thing or, Hey, this is our job. You signed up for that. Um, one member, I feel like if we can teach our newer people sooner how to cope with stuff, they'll have better, longer careers. We're not going to have the firefighter that's burning out his career and, you know, making this horrible decision after horrible decision till the department's forced to fire them. So the more of those people I can find ways to help them, the, the,

the better. Well, I guess the only ray of hope on these tragedies that they face is that it does affect them because that means they're still human, that they still have tender hearts, right? I guess we'd be more concerned with the person who's super callous about like, eh, it is what it is, you know? And I think for all of us, because you folks are on the front lines,

Having people who care, they have tender hearts still. It's really important. And the culture shift, too, that, Travis, you're talking about in terms of being able to seek help and not have it be seen as a weakness within the department, which when you started, how different was that?

It was really different. I distinctly remember early on in my career as a paramedic running a call on a pediatric call and a captain looking at the new firefighter saying, what are you crying for? This is just a dead kid. Get over it. Yeah, that's not happening in 2025.

No, that's definitely, you know, with all the changes in the political atmosphere in the world, that's probably one of the better changes is the destigmatization of mental health and like, hey, we need to deal with this stuff because we're really good on the scene of, you know, no matter what it is, showing up and kind of disassociating, for lack of a better term, and saying, okay, no matter what I'm looking at right now, how horrific it is, I've got a job to do and be able to focus on a task.

And firefighters across the nation, I'm sure we're all pretty much the same. We get through it. We power through it. We do our thing. And then it doesn't hit us until we get back and we have a moment of quiet. Or a couple days later, you drive by a building or something, something that triggers a memory. So, yeah, the de-stimulation of the virus.

The mental health stuff has been great because I think it's been helpful, especially this newer generation. They're more in touch with their feelings. They're not old and cranky like me. You're aging Sam by saying that comment. We got just a minute and a half left, Travis. I want to switch to a little bit of a lighter moment before we go because this still blows my mind 19 years later.

When you first described as a new boot coming into the fire department, having to cook breakfast for the station house, the sheer amount, sheer volume of food that you produced every day for those firefighters still blows my mind. Is that still the case? And how much tell folks how much we're talking about? It depends on the station. But, yeah, we put we put down a lot of food. And the biggest misnomer out there is we still get people mad at us at the grocery store that they think they're buying our food.

Every firefighter, every fire station across the country buys their own food out of their own pocket, and we split it up at the end of each day. So the public doesn't pay for our food. We pay for it out of our paycheck. Yeah, a typical Sunday morning breakfast would be dozens of eggs,

hash browns, bacon, sausage, five, six pounds of bacon, several pounds of sausage, hash browns, you name it. We get pretty creative. So our meals, we eat pretty well over here. All right. Fantastic. Travis North, thank you so much. Tucson firefighter and fire captain and my longtime very good friend. We love you and appreciate you, man.

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No murder and mayhem on the agenda, Kylie? Well, you know, it's kind of been a sad week. It has been. There's been a lot of tragedy for this week. So instead, we've got some fun and good stuff from you. Well, just maybe. We just have to wait and see. What the hell are you doing here today? Yeah.

Well, I did want to talk about a murder and mayhem update that I had discussed from last year. And it was because it's a little bit timely because the Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl, which do you guys care if? Oh, you got the guy that froze to death? Yeah, not the guy. There's three of them. That's right. Right, right, right. So I looked this up because I'm ready to give my listeners who are tuning in to Kylie's Corner an update about this case a year later. And it is still a cold case.

And no one has been charged. There has never been an official like autopsy that was released. Apparently the unofficial autopsy that was released was like there was cocaine and fentanyl and marijuana found in their bodies. But there's been no official thing. It's still open. It's still active. Are the families suing him? Is there a civil suit? Yeah. I don't know if there's an active one, but they're still actively like trying to go to the media and still trying to get public. We've all forgot about it because there's been thousands.

5,000 weirder things have come up since then. And to remind our listeners, what was the original? Because I kind of remember, but even I'm kind of like, I remember there's fans and they froze in the snow. Yeah, so five... I feel bad laughing. I take that back. We're in Phoenix. You kind of have to laugh at that. So there was five friends that were watching a Chiefs game. One of them went home during the middle of the game, so he claims he was not the last person to see them all alive.

One friend apparently passed out and was sleeping for two days on the couch, and three were found dead in the backyard of the friend who was sleeping on the couch. This was all Sunday night football. And the fiancé, come Monday, the friend's not answering, or her fiancé's not answering, the friend of the home's not answering, no one's answering. So finally, Tuesday rolls around and she breaks into the home and through the back gate saw her fiancé frozen.

to death but it was ruled that they died because of the drugs originally right okay but no one has been charged and the the lawyer for the guy who owned the house where this all occurred because that guy was still alive and he was the one that was supposedly just sleeping for two days and didn't know there was three dead bodies in his backyard yeah um he says that he's confident that there'll be no charges ever brought to him do you know anybody's ever slept two days

No. Could you possibly ever do it? No. I can't get past seven. I tell this story all the time. I can't sleep a normal night. You know, from when – and this gets a little personal, I guess. But back when I was married, my ex developed a habit after an accident of pills. And so one day, my back goes out occasionally, and she gave me a half of one of her Oxycontins.

And I could not move for 12 hours, and it was the most terrifying experience. I literally could not make my arms and limbs move. It was a terrifying experience in that regard. I've never gone near the stuff. Even if a doctor tries to prescribe it, since I won't take a Percocet from that experience. But –

I spent the last five hours of that desperate to get up and be able to just move. I can't imagine sleeping for two days under any circumstances. There's just something wrong there. So that brings me to my actual story of the day. So do you guys care who wins the Super Bowl? Are you guys indifferent? My daughter loves the Eagles. Oh, yeah. And I think the Eagles are pretty good crew guys. I like them. I'm rooting for Saquon Barkley. Yeah, I love Saquon, so I'll be happy. He is having a good year.

But there's something cool about a three-peat with a quarterback that has ice in his veins and a head coach that's probably top three NFL coaches of all time.

I'm going to have a hard time not placing him now right there at the top. This team's not very good. This is a coaching job. This is absolutely coaching. And Mahomes, just simply being a guy at the last two minutes you want. He's like Brady. You want him to ball the last two minutes. Just some people have that.

In every single place that Andy Reid has gone, his teams win, regardless of the team, the talent. Does he have 100 wins of both Eagles and the Chiefs franchises? I think so, yeah. Wow. Well, I wanted to talk about the three-peat.

Because I think that would be really cool. Three Peets are cool. One has not happened since. Now we're going to have to pay Pat Riley now. That's what I wanted to discuss. I didn't know that. You didn't know that? He trademarked it? No. Do all these listeners know this apparently? Besides a dapper man, he has a cagey old dog.

Yeah. Well, so nothing has happened since 2002, no three-peats. Right, right, right. And so really over his time, he's made, it's estimated no one actually knows, he's made between two and five million. But if the Chiefs win, his royalties are supposed to be essentially more than that. Oh, I bet they'd be huge. Just based on the Chiefs winning. Yeah. I wanted to discuss that, but you guys went and killed the vibe for me. Yeah.

You're just grumpy here today. Because you got up early with a dog, you're just grumpy in the studio today. It's in the whole week. By the way, so this D.C. tragedy with the helicopter and plane –

One thing I've disliked is people jumping on quickly blaming XYZ. I was not appreciative of Trump's – I mean, I just – you just don't do that. I'm not appreciative of the people blaming Trump for – 100 percent. And I'm not appreciative – So what it is, Democrats jumped on it first, and you should just know once you do that, Trump's coming back punching you in the face. I want to say – All the time. A comment about this is before – when this happened, this was a shift in social media kind of – I felt like back to 2016 of the –

the infighting where I felt like the last two weeks it was kind of a little bit more. Well, they just they're so desperate. They're so like it's sort of like the Colombian thing, you know. So you had the Colombian president. Trump's into terrorists because they denied our flights.

And then all of a sudden you had the Democrat influencers. You had Harry Sisson. Is it Sisson? Sisson? Sisson? I don't know. He's this idiot college-age kid. Trump just announced huge penalties on Columbia. Everything just got more expensive for you and your family. There are diplomatic ways to work with countries, but instead Trump does crap like this. Then Ana Navarro, who's a complete utter moron.

Most of the flowers that poured into the U.S. come from Colombia. Happy Valentine's Day, America, which within 30 minutes of those tweets, Colombia totally backed down. He sent his own plane. Right.

Right. And his way to get back at Trump is he sent a poem. Which all good Marxists do. They love a good poem. And thank you because now we're not paying for the plane or the gas. But one thing about this that I think has long-term ramifications, I think Pete Buttigieg, this may be a knife into his heart if he wants to run for president again. Because, you know, for example, he claims Trump's line about air traffic problems is

But there's an article out now that says between May and November 2024, quote, the FAA recorded 1,115 runway incursions. Over 180 operational incidents were recorded that could be traced back to air traffic controller decisions.

There's so much out on this about it now. I'm telling you, Pete's going to be the loser on this. And we have hundreds of unfilled air traffic controller positions, and that's one of those things. There's like a thousand were denied because of DDI. There's a lawsuit going. It's in the New York Post. But to the point there, how do you allow it to get to that place? How do you start with the premise that our diversity goal is more important than filling the seats for the city?

Well, exactly. So here it is. FAA embroiled in a lawsuit alleging it turned away 1,000 advocates based on race that contributed to staffing woes. 1,000. 1,000.

And this is the other thing the Democrats did because it's like you said. You made a good point. You felt like it was fairly – it was antagonistic, but it was fairly – it was more than passable. They immediately blamed it because Trump frees hiring that this happened because of hiring. Like yesterday. Do these people not understand how long it takes to train an air traffic controller? Right. I mean they just – their hatred from the – this is a good lesson for all of us. When you hate something so much, it utterly blinds you to reason and logic. Right.

It does. And, you know, frankly, going back to the conversation we had with Alexander Nazarian, this is another symptom of the overall problem where everyone understands that our system is broken and it's not being fixed. We'll see what happens with Trump and with Doge and with all of this.

But, man, it's endemic at every level of government at this point from your local schools, which have crises all over the country where kids can't read. They can't do math. And all the way up to air traffic controllers where we're not hiring hugely qualified people while having hundreds of open positions that are putting staffing strains on. I mean –

This is nonsense. Well, in this lawsuit, I just looked it up. The gentleman's named Pegida. He is white. He graduated from Arizona State University Collegiate Training Initiative in 2013 and was turned down for a job even though he scored 100 percent on his training exam. Yeah.

So we're 1,000 short and you're turning on a guy that – Scored 100 percent. Aced it. Aced it. And I'm sorry. Democrats can say whatever they want. This is 100 race-based hiring. Yes. There's no other way. Well, look at the idiot that was ahead of that. His hearing – And that doesn't have to have anything to do with this crash to be a problem. No, no. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

Well, it was a great show today, guys. I loved our guests today. On behalf of Jeremy, our engineer, Kylie, who's going to be happier next week. Are you not? Always. That was a very half-hearted smile behind that one. For folks who are seeing it. She's giving lip service right now. Don't believe that one. Sam and myself. Visit us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote. Please subscribe to our sub stack. And...

and share our shows and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Have a great weekend.