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(upbeat music)
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- This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
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Let's get into it.
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All right guys, today I am insanely excited about this one.
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I just got off the horn with one of the best interviews
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that we've ever done on the show, frankly.
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I was so excited to do this interview
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and then we did it and it turned out very, very well.
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So I'm excited to share it with you.
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Is an interview with author, journalist,
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and humanitarian Holly McKay.
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So she is the now best selling author of the book,
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only cry for the living,
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memos from inside the ISIS battlefield.
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So a lot of you guys will likely have heard of her by now
0:50
because she was on the Jocko podcast.
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She's been on a lot of other podcasts
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that are kind of in that vein,
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those types of podcasts.
0:57
And her story is incredible and it's partially incredible
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because she doesn't really tell her story.
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She's telling the stories of the people
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that have had to live through one of the most horrific times
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in human history.
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One of the worst times of human suffering
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and that is what's been happening over in the Middle East
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with the rise and reign of ISIS.
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And so in terms of getting you comfortable with her
1:17
and I'll go into a little bit of the interview here
1:20
in just a second,
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I'm just gonna read the bio from her website.
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Okay, I don't normally do that.
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I like to kind of do my own thing with the bio,
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but I feel like this encapsulates a lot
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of what we're gonna get into
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and then we'll go from there.
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So I'll read it right here.
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Holly S. McKay is a foreign policy expert
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and war crimes investigator.
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She was an investigative and international affairs war
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journalist for Fox News Digital for over 14 years
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where she focused on warfare,
1:41
terrorism and crimes against humanity.
1:43
Holly has worked on the front lines of several major war zones
1:46
and covered humanitarian and diplomatic crises in Iraq,
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Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran,
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Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Russia, Africa,
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Latin America and other areas.
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Her global, her globally spanned coverage
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in the form of thousands of print articles and essays
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has included exclusive and detailed interviews
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with numerous captured terrorists
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as well as high ranking government,
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military and intelligence officials
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and leaders from all sides.
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She has spent considerable time embedded
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with US and foreign troops,
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conducted extensive interviews with survivors of torture,
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sex slavery and forced child jihadist training,
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refugees and internationally displaced people
2:23
to communicate the complexities
2:24
of such catastrophes and war crimes on local population.
2:29
So there's a good time to kind of do a little aside.
2:33
If you don't like hearing people read out loud,
2:35
you're going to hate this podcast
2:36
because I read out loud a bunch.
2:38
I was taking a lot of chunks from only cry for the living
2:42
because I really wanted to see her respond
2:44
to her own words in a context where we could all
2:47
maybe learn and glean some understanding from that.
2:49
And so if you don't want to hear me struggle reading out loud,
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I just asked for a little bit of grace.
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I'm not a professional readout louder guy.
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So just deal with me a little bit.
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But guys, I will say this as well from the very top.
2:59
If you have children that you normally listen to this
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'cause I know a lot of guys listen to this in the car
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or the truck while they're driving around with their kids,
3:04
this is probably not the episode to do that.
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There are some pretty horrific things that we go over
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and we basically go into the worst parts
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of what she described in her book.
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And I think it's incredibly important
3:16
'cause for me, I was shocked when I read her book.
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I was absolutely shocked as a guy that follows the news
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as a guy that follows what's happening in the Middle East
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fairly closely, what I would say.
3:25
And I've done a lot of reading on the subject.
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I was absolutely astonished by everything that I was reading.
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I just couldn't imagine how I could have missed
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out on some of these stories.
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And so guys, this was a tremendous interview.
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I was so glad that we got to spend some time with her.
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And one thing that we really couldn't control
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is there was a little bit of feedback on her end.
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There was a little bit of interference with her microphone,
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but guys, you can still listen to everything that she's saying,
3:46
but no, it's not gonna be complete studio quality
3:49
on both sides of this interview,
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but it doesn't matter because it's still awesome.
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I know you guys are absolutely going to love this.
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So without further ado, let's get into it.
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Holly McKay, welcome to Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
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- Thank you, it's great to be here.
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- We have been looking forward to this for a while now.
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And I say a while, even though you just came on my radar
4:09
recently 'cause you just released a new book,
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which you are gonna get a lot into here in just a second.
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But I don't wanna give too short a shrift
4:15
to the early part of your life
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because that's a good developmental thing for you.
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But just to kind of quickly bring
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the rest of the audience up to speed,
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you grew up in Australia, you're from Queensland,
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obviously people can't tell from the accent
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and you were big into ballet, especially early in your life,
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but you eventually found yourself in the United States,
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the good old United States, and you became a journalist.
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The interesting thing about your journalism journey
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is you went from kind of being a Hollywood celebrity
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beat journalist literally to the hell
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of the Middle East during wartime as a war correspondent.
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And you've said in previous interviews
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that you think your time in ballet taught you about toughness
4:51
and resilience and that your time covering Hollywood
4:53
and kind of the celebrity stuff
4:55
kind of taught you to have a really good BS detector.
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So would you say that those two things
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have kind of combined to come together
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to make you a successful war correspondent
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or war crimes investigator?
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- Absolutely, I think even though from the outset
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they seem sort of polar opposites,
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they are, definitely made me who I am
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and my years that I spent, I left home very young
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to sort of go and study dance and ballet
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and I had a lot of independence,
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so that definitely teaches you to really fend for yourself
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and it's a grueling profession.
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It is a grueling profession and still to this day
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I don't know that I've ever had to endure anything quite
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as physically demanding as ballet was for me
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and I, but I loved it, you do it with a deep love.
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And when that sort of career was over,
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I found myself sort of randomly with a journalist job
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and at that point they were building up the digital empire
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and they wanted people in Los Angeles
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and I was barely 21 I think
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and so they sort of said you can have your own column
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and pretty much do whatever you want.
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So you know, it was great, it was baptism by fire.
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Suddenly I was just having to put myself out there
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and meeting all these sort of fascinating people
6:08
and yeah, definitely you learned to detect
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the biggest detector.
6:12
I think for me, I always kind of felt like it was this straight,
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crazy circus and maybe that's a little bit like,
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well, sometimes too, you're in this,
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how would these people exist?
6:22
How are they real?
6:23
Like, you know, what is this?
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But I think for me, it actually,
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it made me more of a grounded person
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and that sort of I think what compelled me to wanna go overseas
6:35
and do other things because I just,
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as I said, I felt like I was on the outside
6:40
looking into the circus and I never fit in.
6:44
I didn't feel part of it.
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I didn't want to feel part of it.
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And so I knew that there had to be kind of more
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to the next trajectory of my career
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that I felt to be a little bit more fulfilling.
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So yeah, kind of went the other way.
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- Well, it seems like you definitely landed in something
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that could be called, you're calling
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if you kind of have that worldview
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and that's what led you to write the book,
7:05
"Only Cry for the Living."
7:06
Memos from inside the ISIS battlefield.
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And guys, you have to go buy this book.
7:11
Now, getting it right now might be a little bit hard to do
7:13
because it is now a bestseller.
7:15
It is sold out a lot of different places.
7:17
So congratulations on that.
7:18
And we have just this morning added it to our book list,
7:22
which we have a book list called 100 Books
7:24
that Every Modern Christian Man Should Read.
7:26
So that has been added to the history section.
7:28
So another congratulations on that.
7:30
But in terms of the book, it details the rise
7:33
and reign of ISIS in the Middle East.
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And it really kind of puts legs on a group of people
7:38
that we just got snippets of in the media
7:40
and maybe didn't quite understand
7:41
what was actually happening on the ground.
7:43
And the interesting thing about the book Holly
7:45
is the book is less narrative format
7:48
and more of kind of journal entries,
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journal entry type of format.
7:51
And you broke it down into sections that are separated
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by years going from 2014 through 2018.
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It's a unique way of doing it,
7:58
but I found it very enjoyable as a reader
8:01
'cause for me, I struggle with narrative.
8:02
It's hard for me to kind of keep stories straight
8:05
and keep these storylines going.
8:07
So why did you decide to set the book up in that way?
8:10
- You know, I started going in
8:12
to cover this particular conflict in 2014.
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And so after a couple of years,
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I found that I just had these piles of notebooks
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and there was sort of this scrawled handwriting
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of different people's stories that I would meet.
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And I would take notes when I went to places.
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I would take notes of what the food smelled like.
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I would take notes of the expression on somebody's face.
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And just kind of gather all these little details
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and just scroll them and I really wasn't sure
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what I wanted to do with it.
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And I think around to what the end of 2016,
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when I was covering a lot of the Mosul offensive,
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which was just starting at that point,
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I thought, you know, I want to put this together
8:48
in a way that's not a sanitized news article
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that we're also used to reading.
8:53
And I want to bring as many people into the more texts
8:57
as I can and really just explain these human stories.
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And I just felt that the best way to do that
9:02
was to drag the old notebooks out and try to put them together
9:06
and produce something that was a little bit more raw
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and a little less polished, a little less, you know,
9:13
as you would see as sort of an edited new story
9:15
or even an edited essay somewhere.
9:17
And just kind of put people into that moment
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and what it was like in that moment without, I guess,
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all the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of looking back
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and the benefit of that we can look at it now
9:28
and just kind of reflect what it was in that moment
9:31
and how that felt.
9:32
And so that just seemed sort of writing these memos
9:34
seemed to be the best way to form that.
9:37
And because there are a number of them,
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I know that everybody has something different.
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They're looking for when they're reading a book.
9:43
Some people are really interested
9:44
in the military components.
9:46
Some people are more interested in certain religious groups,
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certain different, you know, components of these conflicts.
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So I thought in a memo style, you can,
9:54
even though it is chronological,
9:56
you can kind of go back and forth
9:58
and read the things that speak to you at least initially
10:02
and then hopefully blend the gaps.
10:04
- Right, absolutely.
10:05
And the chronology was helpful for me as the reader,
10:07
but also it kind of gave us a sense
10:08
as to what you were experiencing on the ground
10:11
because you didn't write this book.
10:13
It didn't feel like you were writing a biography
10:15
of the things that Holly McKay saw.
10:18
It was you trying to be a fly on the wall,
10:20
which I don't know if that was the intention or not,
10:22
but I felt like it allowed you to tell the stories
10:25
in a more accurate way.
10:27
The interesting thing about the book as well
10:29
is that it is published on Jocko Willing's publishing company,
10:32
Jocko Publishing and another publisher as well.
10:35
And he also wrote the foreword to your book.
10:37
So he is, you know, we're all big fans of him around here
10:39
and so is our audience.
10:40
So I guess what is the story of you getting connected
10:42
with Jocko and kind of making a connection
10:44
to get this book out there to us?
10:46
- So the book is done through Jocko Publishing
10:49
and also D'Angelo Publications as well.
10:51
And D'Angelo works a lot with Jocko in different things.
10:54
And so this sort of seemed a good fit, you know,
10:58
and Jocko was interested in doing that
11:01
under his umbrella as well.
11:02
So it just kind of was fairly serendipitous,
11:05
fairly smooth in that way.
11:06
And obviously Jocko has his very strong military background,
11:10
but he was interested in kind of being able
11:13
to convey something that also showed the human side
11:16
of this conflict and really what atrocities happened
11:19
on the ground.
11:20
- Yeah, and you certainly were able to do that.
11:22
And at the end of the foreword, Jocko says this,
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it is not a comfortable read, it is not a pleasant read,
11:28
it is an important read, but don't just remember it
11:31
or don't just read it, remember it.
11:33
And the thing for me is I can corroborate that,
11:36
but don't just read it, remember it
11:38
because it's a sticky book in that these concepts
11:41
and these people and these stories, they stick with you
11:43
and we'll get more into the specific stories
11:45
here in a second.
11:46
But these are not things that you can easily shake.
11:49
I don't see how you could be a person
11:50
that could read through the things that you've written down
11:52
in this book and just go on about ordering dinner
11:56
or going and getting groceries or mowing the lawn.
11:58
Like these are ideas that stick with you.
12:00
So I don't think you're gonna have a problem
12:01
with people remembering the book.
12:02
And to get into the book a little bit,
12:04
you obviously spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours
12:08
interviewing terrorists and government officials
12:11
and NGO representatives and victims, adults, children,
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you talk to so many people, but how concerned were you
12:18
that the people you were talking to were potentially lying
12:21
to you or are exaggerating or maybe holding back from you?
12:25
Is that kinda where you had to bring in
12:26
your Hollywood BS detector a little bit?
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- Sure, I think that's a natural extension
12:30
of any journalist is you need to be fairly discerning
12:35
when you give any sort of interview,
12:37
especially in the Middle East, you have to sort of know
12:40
how to get the right answers.
12:42
And I think there's a little bit of a technique to that too.
12:45
You have to build up a certain rapport
12:47
and sometimes you have to go back and readdress a question
12:50
if you feel that you're not getting the correct answer.
12:53
I always take a fairly conversational approach
12:55
to my interviews.
12:56
I'm not the person who's gonna go in there
12:57
and stick it to the man for 16 minutes at your piece.
13:01
I'm going in there to have a conversation with you
13:04
and to understand how you think.
13:06
So I think immediately there's a sense of people
13:09
wanting to open up to that because I'm not there to judge,
13:12
I'm not there to give you my opinion,
13:13
I'm giving you a chance to have your voice
13:16
and terrorists and other people.
13:19
They want their voice heard just as much as anybody else.
13:22
They want their perspective heard
13:23
and I mean, give someone a platform and trust me.
13:27
There's a lot of ego out there that wants to talk.
13:30
So for me, that was kind of the conversation that I took.
13:35
And a lot of the information I, you know,
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you can't always know if it's going to be 100% right.
13:42
And often, especially in a terrorist interview,
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I would then go and interview some of the guards
13:46
or some of the prison officials or some of the,
13:48
you know, other people that were higher ranking
13:50
in the intelligence to kind of get their sense
13:53
on what he told me, you know, they may say it's true,
13:57
they may have their own spin on a situation.
13:59
And I think at the end of the day
14:01
and what we miss so much in these conflicts,
14:04
I think is that the media really has a job to,
14:08
sometimes it's the only way that the other side
14:11
is going to understand the other side
14:13
because if nobody's talking to each other,
14:15
then they don't really know how the person
14:17
on the other side of that front line is thinking.
14:19
So I think, you know, true journalism to a degree
14:23
should be that sort of communication vortex.
14:26
And that should be a platform for people
14:28
to be able to kind of get an understanding,
14:30
whether you agree or you don't,
14:32
but at least get an understanding of where that other enemy
14:35
or where the other person is coming from.
14:37
And I think that's kind of what I tried to do,
14:40
you know, with my work and with the book.
14:42
- Yeah, you were very professional, obviously,
14:44
in your approach and you don't want to accidentally
14:46
propagandize, you know, with some crazy story from a terrorist
14:50
that maybe doesn't correspond with reality.
14:52
So that's an important thing to get down as well.
14:54
Now, as you read through the book,
14:56
you describe being sad several times in the book.
14:59
You don't spend a lot of time with your emotions,
15:01
but you do kind of let that be part of the narrative
15:03
that you get to the reader.
15:04
But you, I don't recall any admission
15:09
in the 400 plus pages of your book
15:11
where you said that you were scared.
15:12
Now, you're during this time and still,
15:16
you're a young Western female.
15:18
You know, I'm sitting here thinking like,
15:20
how is she not the next James Foley?
15:22
And then a few pages later, you know,
15:23
you mentioned James Foley and what happened to him,
15:26
kind of his unfortunate demise that he experienced
15:28
in the Middle East.
15:29
So I guess the simple question is,
15:30
were you scared while you're there?
15:32
Were we scared at any point?
15:34
- I don't want to say I wasn't scared
15:35
because I think you need to have a healthy sense of fear.
15:39
And there are certainly moments of feeling a little on edge.
15:43
But to be honest with you, I feel very calm
15:48
in those situations.
15:49
And that's probably why I think it's a calling for me
15:52
in some way to kind of be there and tell us stories
15:54
because I'm not the person to panic.
15:56
I'm not the person to kind of lose my mind
15:59
when things go crazy.
16:00
I'm usually the calmest one in the room.
16:02
So that for me, you know,
16:05
and I was always very accepting of my decision to be there,
16:09
whatever happens, you know, I knew that it was a choice.
16:11
I knew that I had made a choice
16:13
and I felt that that was really the only choice for me.
16:16
But I never want to take away
16:17
from the people that have to live through it.
16:19
So I kind of, I've struggled with this
16:22
as often people want to ask me about dangerous situations
16:25
and being in, you know, a bombing or being whatever.
16:28
And I guess for me, I'm always hesitant to talk about it
16:31
because I think what I've experienced
16:33
just pales in comparison to the people that live it day in
16:37
and day out and every single night they go to bed,
16:40
they're shelling and a sniper is pointing the gun
16:43
at their house and I just think,
16:44
and they don't have the luxury of leaving.
16:47
I have a luxury of leaving and they don't.
16:49
So for me, you know, I guess I've struggled with the idea
16:53
of ever trying to aggrandize my experiences in any way
16:57
because no matter what I've been through,
16:59
it'll be nothing compared to the people
17:01
that are living there and I really wrote this book
17:03
for the people that are living there.
17:05
So, you know, and it was a struggle for me
17:07
because especially if you saw sort of the first drafts
17:11
of the book, there really wasn't any of me in there
17:13
and then a friend of mine came back and said,
17:15
you really need to put more of you in there.
17:16
And so I did, but it was a struggle for me
17:19
because again, I really think the kiss of death
17:23
and journalism is sort of when people make themselves
17:26
a story, but I kind of also had to remember
17:28
that this wasn't exactly journalism.
17:31
It was a book and I needed to insert my thoughts
17:35
and feelings, you know, to a degree.
17:37
And yeah, it was a struggle because I really just wanted
17:41
this to be about the people and I wanted it
17:43
to be their experiences and more so than mine.
17:48
- Well, I think you did that well
17:50
because when you would talk so casually about,
17:54
oh, I'm gonna sleep on this ratty couch by this window
17:57
and but don't worry, like I can run down the hallway
17:59
if things really popped off at any point,
18:01
you brought us into the room with you.
18:03
And I think that that was something
18:04
that's important for us as a reader
18:06
is some people don't have that wild
18:08
of a creative imagination to where they can put themselves
18:11
there, but you're helping us understand
18:13
what it looks like, what it smelled like,
18:14
what it felt like.
18:16
It really gave us insight into your state of mind.
18:18
And also in the book, you give us insight
18:20
into the state of mind of the victims
18:22
of these ISIS atrocities and we're gonna get into
18:24
some actual quotes from the book now.
18:26
But this one specifically is from the people
18:28
in Mount Sinjar and so we're gonna go to the book here.
18:30
Women were throwing their children from the mountains
18:32
and then jumping themselves
18:33
because it was a faster way to die, Katune said.
18:36
We're calling the days after ISIS surrounded
18:38
the foot of the mountain.
18:39
Those who had nowhere to go but to the tops of the mountains
18:41
slowly died from starvation and heat stroke
18:44
deserted by the saviors of the world
18:46
and all it supposed modern technology.
18:48
And so guys, it's gonna be more of that coming.
18:52
So just this morning, this is not all peaches
18:55
and meadows at this point.
18:56
But when you're hearing stories like that from people,
19:01
how do you categorize that in your brain
19:04
because these are not just unfortunate happenings.
19:07
These are literal atrocities.
19:08
This is a literal genocide.
19:10
So how do you process when people are telling you
19:13
these stories even though you weren't there physically
19:15
to see what was happening?
19:17
- I mean, it's a huge struggle.
19:18
I'm someone who's very much an empath
19:23
and I really try to identify with people's situations
19:26
and it's a struggle for me because I felt very helpless.
19:30
I felt there wasn't really anything
19:32
that I could do to comfort them or to make it better.
19:36
But I guess for me, what I really had to reconcile with
19:40
was that it wasn't my job to change a situation.
19:44
I'm not a lawmaker.
19:45
I'm not a policy person.
19:46
I don't work for the government.
19:48
And I had to take that weight off my shoulders
19:51
and realize that it was simply my job
19:53
to bring some awareness to it and to tell this story.
19:55
And these are people who will never see justice
19:58
for what was done to them.
19:59
No one is ever really, you know,
20:01
they might execute a few jihadists
20:03
but nothing really is ever going to bring back their mother
20:07
or there's thousands still missing.
20:09
So having their story told to a degree
20:12
is a semblance of justice for them.
20:15
At least they can then say that people, you know,
20:18
that their story just wasn't completely, you know,
20:21
off the edges of the earth.
20:22
So I had to accept that that was my job
20:25
and that that was all that I could do.
20:27
And it's very difficult.
20:28
And then when you're dealing in the Middle East,
20:30
I mean, even today, I have a thousand text messages
20:34
coming through or WhatsApp messages
20:36
about from people from other countries
20:37
who want me to get them visas and, you know,
20:39
their mothers in trouble and they send bombing pictures.
20:41
And I think there's this real unrealistic expectation
20:45
of many people that they have
20:47
and they meet a Western person that they can help
20:50
and they can send money and they can do this
20:51
and this and this and it's really hard for me
20:53
'cause at some point, sometimes I have to block them
20:55
because, you know, it becomes so relentless
20:57
and it's really hard to say no.
20:59
And they can't understand why you can't help them.
21:02
And that's something I struggle with too.
21:04
But, you know, I have to compartmentalize
21:06
and know that my life here is different to my life there.
21:09
And there's only so much that I can do
21:11
and there's only so much I can take on.
21:13
So yeah, I have to, I have to, I guess,
21:16
be kind to myself in that way too.
21:19
- It's an impossible place for any of us
21:20
to be sitting here on this side
21:22
to understand what you're going through.
21:23
But also it's hard for me as the reader
21:26
and I'm sure everyone else has read this book
21:27
to really understand the brutality of what ISIS was doing.
21:31
And for this next section,
21:32
this is an honest parental discretion
21:34
for the next several minutes
21:35
'cause we're gonna be getting into some of the more
21:37
brutal parts of your book
21:38
because you do describe murders and genocides and rapes
21:41
and kind of the worst kinds of things
21:43
that people can do to each other.
21:44
And so there were three stories
21:46
that I would like to kind of get your comments on
21:48
but just kind of to paint a picture
21:49
as to what you described.
21:50
And the first one is this,
21:51
"ISIS had abducted Yazidi girls as young as eight,
21:54
trading them at the market for a few dollars.
21:56
I learned of one young mother
21:57
who was pregnant at the time of the capture.
21:59
She had given birth in a back room of her overlord's house
22:02
but was not permitted to feed her newborn son.
22:05
The baby cried and cried,
22:06
Khattun said flatly, the Muslim militant beheaded him.
22:10
So let that sink in for a second
22:13
and go to the second story.
22:15
Differing accounts were a testament
22:16
to the mistrust and fear that pervaded the city.
22:19
Under ISIS control, Friday morning prayers
22:21
were followed by mass executions in the public square.
22:24
Sometimes people were locked in cages
22:26
with ravenous wild animals.
22:27
Sometimes they were blown up.
22:29
Sometimes they were set on fire.
22:30
And other times they were driven over by armored vehicles.
22:33
And before this last one that I read Holly
22:36
and then I'll kind of get to my question.
22:39
When I was preparing this yesterday,
22:41
I was kind of, I like to read my questions out loud
22:43
just kind of get the marbles out of the mouth a little bit.
22:45
And I couldn't get through this next section.
22:48
The first time I tried to read it,
22:50
I had to go take a break.
22:52
I had to go get something to eat,
22:53
go walk around and then come back
22:54
just because of how you described it
22:56
and kind of what it did to you.
22:58
And so I kind of had to do the,
22:59
I think George W. Bush had his father's funeral, George H.W.
23:03
He had read his speech, his eulogy over and over and over
23:06
just to kind of desensitize it a little bit in his brain.
23:08
So I kind of feel like I had to do that
23:10
just so I could get through that.
23:11
But I'm gonna go ahead and get into that section here.
23:13
To illustrate their loss,
23:14
Baba pulled out photographs of the dead.
23:17
Some were children, some had been deceased for days.
23:20
Their gray, distended bodies decaying.
23:22
Their faces buried in the dust,
23:23
insects nibbling, their rotting flesh.
23:26
Others had succumbed to heat exhaustion.
23:27
The life sucked from their limp little structures.
23:30
Look, Baba Chai was said to me monotonously
23:32
as if he were merely pointing out paintings in a gallery.
23:35
They cooked the children.
23:37
The rage he may have once felt bubbling
23:42
in his gut was now still born.
23:44
The incense had burned out.
23:46
Baba Chai was seemed to understand
23:47
there was no point in outwardly showing his anger.
23:49
It would bring back the burned babies.
23:51
Maybe someday he would forgive, but he would never forget.
23:54
I counted seven shriveled babies curled
23:56
into fetal positions in the photographs.
23:58
Tiny bodies still roasting beyond recognition
24:01
on what appeared to have been a slate of tin shed.
24:04
The silent tears, wetting my cheeks,
24:06
had turned into guttural sobs I was powerless to control.
24:09
I stared at the floor and sobbed.
24:11
No one knew what to say.
24:12
Those hushed seconds seemed to last forever.
24:14
Perhaps it was unprofessional to cry so voraciously,
24:17
but it was a flow I could not stop.
24:19
I often scold myself for not having thicker skin.
24:21
Of course, it is naive to think the world
24:24
and all his children can be kept harbored from evil.
24:27
But these babies, their broken bodies captured
24:29
in full gorge of the sun, could have been saved.
24:32
I am certain of that.
24:33
And I was almost certain these graceful people
24:35
would never see and even a little justice
24:38
for what had been done to them.
24:39
They knew it too.
24:40
Finally, someone passed a tissue and to wipe my tears,
24:44
I glanced up through the glaze
24:45
and saw the faces around me bereft of emotion.
24:48
This is nothing.
24:49
We don't react anymore.
24:50
Umer said nonchalantly by way of explanation.
24:53
There are far worse things that have happened.
24:55
I realized then that the Yazidis were beyond the point of pain.
24:58
Their grief had entered a place few in this world
25:01
could ever comprehend.
25:02
Their torment and desperation had dried up and dissolved.
25:04
They had no emotion left to give.
25:06
For them, there was no fog of war.
25:09
Everything was reconstructed with precise attention to detail,
25:12
the numbers of the missing and enslaved,
25:14
and where they were exactly when their world stopped turning.
25:17
Every abuse could be recited like a nebulous monologue,
25:20
but without the theatrical cues and vocals.
25:23
There was no need to dramatize what had happened to them.
25:27
And so, Holly, I guess my question is, is,
25:30
again, you describe sadness in the book.
25:32
You describe being there.
25:33
You describe these atrocities.
25:35
This is the first time, at least in this book,
25:37
where you describe where you could not
25:39
control the emotion anymore, right?
25:41
And those previous two quotes came in the book
25:44
prior to the one that I just read,
25:46
which is one of the most insanely grotesque things
25:49
that I think could even be put on paper.
25:52
Help me process all of that and help me process
25:54
what was going on for you in that moment
25:56
where you just couldn't control it any longer.
25:58
- I think at that point, it had been a couple of years
26:01
that I had been covering it.
26:02
And you hear awful stories and the sadness
26:06
and sort of the loss of hope.
26:07
And you take all those in.
26:10
And then, I think I remember that night
26:13
when I got to Lalesh, to meet with Robert Cowish.
26:16
And he's telling me this stuff.
26:18
And really, there was, I still remember it really vividly.
26:21
The three men sitting on the floor.
26:23
And I just looked at that picture.
26:26
And I just, it was a real turning point for me.
26:29
I just, I couldn't control it anymore.
26:32
I couldn't keep my composure.
26:34
I couldn't, yeah, I was, I was just bawling.
26:37
And I took me a minute.
26:39
And I looked up and there was, you know,
26:42
nobody else was crying.
26:43
Nobody else was kind of even flinching.
26:46
And I thought it was really the first time in my life
26:49
that I had seen such a sort of expressionless.
26:52
And I realized it was just that this had just become
26:57
a place for these people that I couldn't even begin
27:01
to understand that any tears, any kind of emotion or anger,
27:07
that just didn't matter to them.
27:09
They weren't even able to produce that anymore
27:11
because they were just so taken into sort of
27:15
another parallel universe of kind of a pain.
27:18
It almost a self-protective mechanism, I'm sure.
27:21
And that was just the first time I could really see that.
27:23
And I felt terrible that I was the one falling apart
27:26
when it was them and their families
27:29
who were experiencing these atrocities.
27:31
And yet they were sort of the ones comforting me.
27:34
- And I think that's a little bit of a disjointed ideal
27:37
because you are from Australia,
27:38
but you're now a US citizen as well.
27:40
And so you're very much a woman of the West.
27:43
But there is kind of an importance to this story
27:46
about America and the importance of America
27:48
to people in the Middle East.
27:49
And so I'll read another short quote here from the book.
27:52
"Imagine if America didn't exist," said accountant,
27:54
Kurtu Amin Agar, whose home was outfitted with Israeli,
27:58
American and Kurdish flags,
27:59
and who wears a US Army t-shirt and a Navy Seal watch.
28:03
Without America, the world would be run by China or Iran.
28:06
With dewy eyes, he turned to me in earnest.
28:09
America represents freedom, he stressed.
28:11
Our dream is to be eternally allied to America.
28:15
And so I read a quote like that being a very patriotic
28:18
American and I'm like, okay, that gets me excited
28:21
that these people over there understand
28:22
the American dream and freedom.
28:23
But it kind of seems like we're currently
28:25
in a political climate where Americans are being taught
28:29
to hate America for her past sins
28:31
and some of the horrible things that have been propagated
28:34
in the name of America. But while at the same time,
28:37
America, people like me look at America
28:38
as a general and overall net good for humanity, right?
28:43
So to kind of talk a little bit about that
28:45
because you've experienced being in the West
28:47
and you live in the West,
28:48
but then you were over there in the Middle East.
28:49
So is America that important to people?
28:51
Is that a accountant's opinion of America
28:54
kind of common around the Middle East?
28:55
- Yeah, well, especially in the Kurdish areas,
28:58
which is the North of Iraq.
28:59
And I guess up until that point,
29:01
you hear so much about, I guess, the perception
29:04
of America in the Middle East being fairly negative.
29:07
And I always traveled in my sort of Australian passport
29:10
and I would notice the difference between
29:13
when I was with American friends in, you know,
29:15
not in that part, but in other parts of the Middle East
29:17
and how differently I was treated
29:18
when I pulled out my Australian passport compared to them.
29:20
And so I guess we tend to have a sort of
29:23
a stereotype idea that that's what everybody thinks.
29:25
But in the Kurdish areas, it was just, it was mind blowing.
29:30
I mean, you walk into a store and there's American flags
29:32
everywhere you go into a cab
29:33
and they've got the bald eagle as a seat cover.
29:36
And it just sort of, and everyone says,
29:38
make sure you use your American passport.
29:40
So it was a sort of complete counter to everything else.
29:43
And I really think the Kurdish people
29:46
kind of look to America.
29:47
Well, first of all, they were very brutalized
29:52
under Saddam Hussein, Halabja, the chemical attacks.
29:55
They, you know, it was a terrible
29:57
during the Iraq-Iran war.
29:58
So when, you know, the US was able to take out Saddam
30:03
to then that was a huge caveat.
30:06
That was a massive thing that, you know,
30:08
didn't, you know, didn't have the same celebratory aspect.
30:12
Even if we look back on it now
30:13
when people are very debatable about Iraq,
30:15
the Kurds obviously really stand by that.
30:17
So they have a love for America in this very pure sense.
30:20
I wouldn't say the rest of the Middle East shares that.
30:23
I wouldn't say outside of Iraq border share that.
30:26
But what I do notice in my travels
30:28
and this is, you know, in Syria and a lot of other places
30:32
is that the locals tend to sort of see the US
30:37
as this sort of superhero
30:38
that's going to protect them in some way.
30:40
So there is this sort of respect
30:42
that people have for the United States in these places.
30:45
And they, you know, very firmly believe that, you know,
30:49
the US is the really the only ones capable
30:52
of, I guess, saving the day.
30:53
So even for ones that may be out as outwardly patriotic
30:57
to the US, I found that there wasn't, you know,
31:00
as strong as anti-American sentiment
31:03
as often the media or other people lead us to believe.
31:06
Of course, there are groups that are very anti-American,
31:08
but the general population,
31:10
I don't always think has that perception.
31:14
- Well, it's good to know
31:15
and that's good to get a little perspective on that.
31:16
I do want to go back to something
31:18
'cause you triggered something in my brain from earlier
31:20
when you were talking about how really at any moment
31:22
you could leave, right?
31:24
You could leave the situation that you were in
31:25
and you were kind of smiting yourself
31:27
for getting so emotional
31:28
when these people were living a day in and day out.
31:30
So whether there was another quote from the book here
31:32
that kind of goes into that,
31:33
despite the reality slap accompanying all the horror,
31:36
carnage and devastation,
31:37
there was something that still felt unreal
31:39
about war and terrorism.
31:40
Something an outsider could never really make sense of.
31:43
That made it hard to imagine stability.
31:45
As outsiders, we had the luxury to walk away,
31:49
record the suffering of another, analyze it, share it.
31:52
And then escape it.
31:53
And then just a few pages later, you say this,
31:56
how easy it was for me to wander into their lives
31:58
and then with the honk of a horn from an awaiting car,
32:02
wander out.
32:03
And so to me, when I read that,
32:05
it seems like you feel guilt over having
32:09
that type of access to these people
32:11
to where you can kind of pop in and pop out.
32:12
And it's kind of like people are sometimes critical
32:15
of affluent individuals going to third world countries,
32:18
almost like they're being voyeuristic at the same time.
32:21
But did you feel like guilt,
32:23
always knowing that you could just come home at any moment?
32:26
- Yeah, to a degree I did.
32:28
And I often never wanted to come home
32:30
and that was also the other thing.
32:31
But yeah, I always, I never wanted to be that vulture.
32:35
I never wanted, I felt so honored that people let me come in
32:39
and would share with me the most intimate
32:42
and horrific experiences that they'd been through.
32:44
And I was a stranger and yet they would sort of welcome me
32:47
with open arms and I felt extremely honored by that.
32:50
And so I never wanted to be, never wanted to be the vulture.
32:53
I never wanted to just go into a situation
32:56
and sort of take someone's story
32:58
and then, you know, run away and disappear.
33:00
And to a degree, you know, I had to do that.
33:03
That was part of my job.
33:04
But I struggled with that too
33:07
because I thought again,
33:09
what is telling this story going to do?
33:11
What impact does this story going to have?
33:13
And I remember one of the women,
33:15
the Yazidi sex slaves women who opened up to me
33:19
and I would meet with her on several trips.
33:21
And one time she sort of said to me,
33:25
do you think this is going to make any difference?
33:28
And I felt like I had to lie to her and say, yes.
33:32
But I still can't say with, you know, full conviction
33:35
that her story is going to make any difference
33:38
and that we are going to really change an approach
33:41
to ending sexual violence in wartime.
33:43
But it's those stories like that that stick with me.
33:45
And I do, I still feel a sense of guilt.
33:49
And I have to just try to remember that, you know,
33:52
I almost have to kind of lead to two different lives.
33:55
But I just, I want those, the people who share with me
33:58
and welcome me into their lives
33:59
to kind of know, I guess how important that is
34:02
and how on that I feel to, you know,
34:04
it's an extreme privilege.
34:06
- Well, that makes sense.
34:06
And I got to say for me personally,
34:08
I'm typically not a big fan of awareness campaigns
34:12
'cause a lot of times it's like, okay,
34:14
you're making me aware of this great.
34:15
Now, what am I supposed to do?
34:16
But I do think that, again, I mentioned from the top
34:19
of the podcast that we didn't really know
34:22
this stuff was happening, right?
34:23
'Cause even if you follow conservative media
34:25
or pro-military media or something like that,
34:27
you weren't hearing these stories.
34:28
I was absolutely shocked 'cause I consider myself
34:31
to be a very in-tuned person and I follow the news
34:34
to not know any of these stories.
34:36
Some of these atrocities that were decades old even
34:39
that you mentioned in the book, I had no idea about.
34:41
So I think to a degree, I would have said the same thing
34:43
to that woman without any hint of irony that yes,
34:46
those stories do make sense because the book that you wrote
34:49
isn't a lot of ways the story of brutality
34:51
and human suffering, but I kept thinking about resilience
34:54
the entire time you were describing this book.
34:56
I mean, everyone has the breaking point.
34:58
They teach you that when they take you through a training
35:00
if you ever get caught behind enemy lines.
35:02
Everybody breaks at some point, but there was a quote
35:04
from the book that I think elucidated this very perfectly
35:06
and it was this, despite the morbidity
35:08
of what the Yazidis were enduring,
35:10
resilience seemed to envelop their whole beings.
35:12
They may have grown fatigued with the idea
35:14
of living and dying, yet giving up was not an option.
35:17
They had started to accept what had happened
35:19
to their community, the way it had been slashed
35:21
so savagely, but they were not giving up.
35:24
In the face of all the awful, there were many inspiring
35:27
moments too, reminders of the resilience
35:29
of the human body and mind.
35:31
And so we teach resilience here with undaunted life.
35:35
We teach them to forge spiritual, mental,
35:37
and physical resilience, the ability to bounce back.
35:39
But I'm usually talking about that in the context of,
35:41
you know, finishing that book that's really hard
35:43
to get through or are finishing a really brutal workout
35:46
or getting through some sort of family struggle,
35:48
not even anything comparable to what you're describing.
35:51
So I'm gonna lean on you.
35:53
I'm the guy that teaches guys how to be resilient.
35:55
I need you to teach me about resilience
35:57
'cause you got to experience something a little bit different.
35:59
How can you imagine that these people were able
36:01
to be so resilient considering what they were going through?
36:03
- You know, and this is actually a topic
36:05
that I'm going to probably be exploring in my next book
36:07
and go a lot more deeper into sort of that psychology
36:10
of survival and resilience in these particular situations.
36:14
But you know, it's baffling to me
36:17
because you just meet these people
36:19
and maybe it's multiple times in their lives
36:22
that they've had to flee their home.
36:23
Maybe they fled during the Orana Rock War.
36:25
Maybe they fled again after the 2003 invasion
36:29
and then they fled again when ISIS came.
36:31
And so, you know, how you just be able to pick back up
36:35
and start back over again.
36:36
And there's always this sense of distrust
36:38
I think that people often have.
36:40
It's how do you know that you're going to start again
36:43
and that someone's not going to come
36:44
and rip that away from you again?
36:46
And I just think it's almost a sad acceptance
36:49
that a lot of people have had to have
36:50
or to forge within themselves
36:52
that this is just their life
36:54
and this is the geopolitics of their life
36:57
and that doesn't stop them from wanting to rebuild.
37:00
And I think there are those basic core human instincts
37:03
that we all have and that is to basically to survive
37:07
and to care for our family and to fight for what we believe in.
37:11
And I see that in people
37:12
and I see just that resilience of the human spirit
37:16
and I see the depth of what they're sort of willing to endure.
37:20
And it's baffling to me
37:23
because most of us here obviously could never imagine
37:26
what that kind of life would have to be like.
37:29
But for them, sadly enough,
37:31
it's often the only life that they know
37:32
and it's a certain acceptance to their situation
37:35
and to know that the only way they can really get through it
37:38
is to get through it.
37:39
These are people that aren't trained in any, you know,
37:42
special craft to forge that resilience.
37:45
It's a simple knowing of,
37:47
this is the only choice I have.
37:49
The choice is just to do it.
37:51
And to me, that is just, it's a remarkable thing.
37:55
- Yeah, I think baffling is the exact perfect word
37:57
to describe it as you mentioned.
37:58
And I do want to go into something else from the book here
38:01
because I thought that this was a very poignant moment
38:03
in your book.
38:04
So I think it's important to go through, but it's his.
38:07
A few days earlier, a six year old girl lost a leg
38:10
to a landmine, he said.
38:11
And a few days before her young woman had
38:15
her left foot blown off.
38:16
I examined the wincing photographs of the victims
38:19
Akif kept on his phone.
38:20
I studied the anguish that crossed their blood freckle faces,
38:23
a synthesis of shock, pain, regret, and fear.
38:27
For the first time, I did not flinch.
38:30
I felt nothing.
38:31
I had always told myself that I would never get to that point.
38:34
I would never become so jaded by the pain of others
38:37
that my first reaction was no reaction.
38:41
And so, Holly, essentially there, you were describing
38:44
in real time, becoming desensitized to violence.
38:48
And a lot of people like to talk about this, you know,
38:51
when they're looking at stories of young child soldiers
38:54
or kids playing video games that they're becoming desensitized
38:57
to violence, but you were experiencing it
38:59
and you're describing to us what was going on.
39:01
So take us through that a little bit further.
39:04
I think once you sort of start to see the same kind
39:07
of deep sadness over and over again,
39:10
and people are sort of all sharing the same stories.
39:12
And in fact, one of the guys sort of said to me,
39:15
you know, why are you asking these questions?
39:17
We all have the same story.
39:19
And that was just this sort of story of extreme loss
39:22
and pain and unknowing.
39:24
And after a while, you know, I did start to just feel,
39:30
I guess, the helplessness and you start to just feel
39:34
like the world is kind of crashing in on you.
39:36
And at that point, that's what I was feeling
39:39
because stories would just become more horrific
39:42
and more horrific, or I'd be in a hospital with victims
39:45
or on the front line and see, you know, it just,
39:47
it became kind of into a vortex of just sadness.
39:51
And that was something I had to sort of eventually pull myself
39:56
out of and realize that there was a light.
39:59
And there was a lot of light in these people too.
40:01
And, you know, that's, people in dark situations
40:03
can often really find the lightness to it.
40:05
And I just, at that point, couldn't see it.
40:08
So, yeah, I had to really struggle with that.
40:11
And then I think in that particular trip,
40:13
I was able to bounce back really fairly quickly.
40:16
And because I always promised myself
40:18
that I would never get to that point in that way.
40:22
And I think I was able to pretty much bounce back.
40:25
It wasn't really until the summer of 2018.
40:30
I was working in Africa.
40:32
And I was interviewing a remarkable woman.
40:34
And she had babies out of rape.
40:36
And it was just atrocities.
40:38
And I remember feeling, and I'm sitting there with my notebook.
40:41
And I didn't have that sort of same familiar vult of empathy,
40:46
I think that I've always had since I was a child.
40:49
And I just thought, you need to take a break from this.
40:51
Like, this isn't a normal reaction.
40:56
Yeah, that's a struggle for me.
40:57
So even when I'm crying or I'm upset about something
41:01
that's happened in conflict, that feels pretty healthy to me.
41:05
It's just the times that I really don't feel that,
41:09
or I feel that I can't connect or something on that level
41:12
that I know it's time to take a break.
41:16
Well, I was going to ask you-- and I'm glad you mentioned
41:18
that you did bounce back fairly quickly,
41:20
because I was going to ask you, did you bounce back?
41:22
Do you feel like you kind of bounced back from that?
41:24
Because a lot of these things are going
41:25
to permeate a lot of different areas of your life.
41:28
It's not just what you're experiencing in that moment.
41:30
And so that's why, as I was reading your book,
41:31
I was still trying to read through the lines as to, OK,
41:34
why are you bringing up this story?
41:35
Because this doesn't maybe fit with what I've
41:37
read in the past 15 or 20 pages.
41:40
And so at Undaunted Life, we exist to equip men
41:43
to push back darkness.
41:44
That's why we're here.
41:45
And we do that, like I said earlier,
41:47
by providing content that helps men forge spiritual,
41:49
mental, and physical resilience.
41:51
So it's safe to say, from my perspective,
41:53
that you saw the absolute worst parts about masculinity
41:56
in your time overseas.
41:58
And I'm assuming you also saw the works of good men
42:01
pushing back against the darkness
42:02
that I described as well.
42:04
So I just want to read this short story from the book,
42:06
while you were interacting with some Yazidi women and girls
42:09
after they had been freed from sex slavery.
42:11
So back to the book here.
42:12
Through the gap in the door flag,
42:14
I noticed that scores of men and boys
42:15
had lined up outside maintaining a respectful distance
42:18
from the distraught women, but with curiosity
42:20
etched into their faces.
42:22
They clearly wanted to be involved somehow,
42:24
to be part of the healing process,
42:26
to remind us that men weren't the enemy.
42:28
Bad men were the enemy.
42:30
These were the fathers and brothers and sons,
42:32
the nephews and neighbors.
42:34
Just as the ladies in their lives were wounded,
42:36
they too were hurting over what had happened.
42:38
These were the men and boys who longed to protect
42:41
their female counterparts.
42:42
But when ISIS came, their innate duty was torn from them.
42:46
In those lurid days under attack,
42:47
they had been rendered helpless.
42:49
That would be something they would carry
42:51
for the rest of their lives.
42:53
So my question to you, Holly, is what are your views
42:57
on masculinity in light of everything that you've seen
43:01
with your own eyes while you were overseas?
43:03
- Right, so, I mean, I'm a big believer in,
43:08
and I think this is something that gets overlooked a lot,
43:11
especially in the Middle East.
43:12
And there's this incredible and amazing push
43:14
that there has been in recent years
43:16
and the education of girls and helping girls
43:19
to kind of go to school and have that forge of independence.
43:24
And I think it's really great.
43:25
But I think what's lost a lot in the shuffle
43:28
is boys as well.
43:30
And I found that a lot of these young boys,
43:33
especially when ISIS came,
43:35
if the father was out fighting or the father was killed
43:37
or injured, then you had these eight-year-olds
43:39
who were suddenly the breadwinners at the house
43:41
and they were out high going on the street
43:43
and they're never gonna go back to school.
43:45
And they're never gonna see much of a better life
43:48
than probably spend the next 30 years
43:50
of their lives haggling in the street also.
43:52
So, to me, I think what's been lost a lot
43:55
is sort of the education of boys.
43:56
And I also think if we really wanna change
43:59
a lot of the, say, sexual violence
44:01
or domestic violence in the Middle East,
44:03
which is very prominent,
44:04
a lot of the change has to come from,
44:08
we have to empower and educate.
44:12
And from a young age, you know,
44:15
help men or boys to want to protect their wives
44:20
and protect their mothers and their sisters and their daughters
44:22
and kind of see that as the empowering thing
44:25
as opposed to, you know, resorting to violence
44:28
or any other thing that are really common
44:31
in that particular part of the world.
44:32
So, I'm a really big believer
44:33
that I think the boys in their education
44:36
and that kind of empowerment is lost a little bit.
44:39
And I think it's so important in these,
44:42
I guess more patriarchal societies
44:43
that if you want to instill real change
44:46
as crucial is that that is for girls
44:49
to really make a huge dent, you know,
44:52
within the next 10 to 20 years
44:54
on the way that these things have you,
44:56
you've really got to focus on the boys.
44:58
And that is kind of a reality that in the West
45:01
often, you know, do gooders
45:02
and people that have great intentions
45:04
always don't wanna reckon.
45:05
- I certainly agree with that.
45:07
We get questions all the time
45:08
about how to raise sons and what do we do?
45:10
You know, we're fighting against what's being taught,
45:12
maybe in public schools
45:13
or maybe what's being taught in certain churches.
45:15
And that's again, one of the main reasons why we're here
45:18
is because these boys will become men
45:19
and if they're learning these lessons at such a young age,
45:21
it will affect them as they go through.
45:23
And a lot of it has to do with worldview,
45:25
which kind of leads to the next side
45:27
of what I wanna talk about,
45:28
which is, you know, while you were in the Middle East,
45:30
you were surrounded by people
45:31
from a plethora of different worldviews.
45:33
I mean, Christians, Muslims, Yazidis,
45:35
sure there were some atheists here there,
45:37
or maybe most of them were atheists and Satanists,
45:40
you know, people like ISIS,
45:41
I can't imagine that those people
45:42
had a realistic worldview behind what they were doing.
45:45
But I'm sure that you would say that you saw
45:47
the best and worst from people out of all those groups.
45:51
But I wanted to know mainly how all these interactions
45:54
affected your personal faith.
45:56
And so a quote from the book is this,
45:57
"On July 26, ISIS, ISIS, the Salons had attacked churchgoers
46:01
in the sleepy town of Normandy in the north of France.
46:04
They stormed the 16th century church
46:06
of Saint Etienne de Ruvre
46:07
and slit the throat of 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamill
46:10
in broad morning light.
46:13
I found myself deeply impacted by the priest's death.
46:16
It kept me awake for nights on end
46:17
as I envisioned his pain, his fear, his bravery.
46:21
It had triggered something in me,
46:22
a staunch defensiveness to protect my Christian roots,
46:25
even though I had not considered myself religious
46:27
or practicing in a theological sense.
46:29
But it had made me want to stand up for something
46:32
that had been a small part of my childhood,
46:34
something that was now not only under attack,
46:37
but under the umbrella of genocide.
46:39
And so you very briefly mentioned, Holly,
46:42
your personal worldview and maybe a little bit
46:46
of your childhood.
46:47
So as our listeners would like to know,
46:49
kind of what is your worldview
46:50
when it comes to those types of things?
46:52
And then specifically, how did your faith change
46:55
due to your time spent over there and what you saw?
46:58
- Sure, so I grew up in Australia.
47:01
I went to, I was in the angry pan church of England.
47:05
And as a child, I went to Sunday school
47:08
and I was a little bit rebellious,
47:10
I guess you could say a bit wild.
47:11
And so I ended up not wanting to wake up
47:13
on a Sunday morning anymore.
47:14
So yeah, but I always, it was always something
47:19
I carried with me, but yeah, never practiced it.
47:21
Never really, it wasn't sort of part of my life
47:24
in especially my 20s.
47:26
But I think there's something about Iraq,
47:31
I guess, specifically in sort of this idea
47:34
of a criminal civilization.
47:36
It's very hard to describe.
47:38
There's a sense of intuition that I have when I'm there,
47:42
that I just, I don't have anywhere else in the world
47:44
and I don't have here.
47:45
There's just, you feel the weight of the beginning of time.
47:50
It's just something very,
47:54
something, second I get off a plane,
47:55
there's just something very out of this world about it.
48:00
And my sense of intuition, I mean, it saves my life,
48:04
my intuition saves my life.
48:05
And I wish I had that intuition everywhere I am,
48:09
but there's just something about being in Iraq
48:10
and being in that war zone that just,
48:13
it just, I can't describe it.
48:16
And for me, it was always very overwhelming
48:18
that there was always sort of something
48:20
that I could never put my finger on.
48:22
And then a lot of the work that I was doing as well,
48:25
on top of that was with a lot of the Christian communities,
48:28
which have obviously been really persecuted over time there.
48:30
So I think pre-2003, there was something like
48:33
2 million Christians in Iraq,
48:36
and that really has gone down to probably somewhere
48:38
between 100,000 and 200,000 now.
48:41
And a lot of them don't wanna be there, many have fled,
48:44
many will never go back.
48:45
And life for the ones that are there
48:47
that I talk to every day, it's really tough.
48:50
It's really difficult.
48:51
And I just, I felt saddened by that.
48:55
I felt saddened by sort of these people not being able
48:58
to be free in their land.
49:00
And as one of my good friends who's a priest
49:03
in a church just outside of Mosul,
49:06
always says, we're the original people here
49:09
and now nobody's protecting us.
49:11
We don't have the government protecting us.
49:13
We have militias that are manning our checkpoints.
49:16
And I just felt kind of sad for them
49:18
in the sense that they were being persecuted
49:22
or nothing but their faith.
49:24
And that's something I really wanted to highlight
49:26
in the book as well is the trials and tribulations
49:29
that the community has gone through.
49:31
And again, they're resilient for the ones
49:34
that are still there and still trying to stick it out.
49:38
- Well, Holly, it's interesting that you bring this up
49:40
and I don't exactly know what to do with this information,
49:42
but you talked about intuition
49:44
about how you had some different feeling
49:45
while you were over there.
49:47
I've listened to a lot of folks like Nabil Kureshi
49:50
and there's some church planners
49:51
and like Iran and different places.
49:53
And these people talk about how there's this constant difference
49:56
about how people in those areas come to faith in Jesus.
50:00
And it's not usually the Hellfire and Brimstone pastor
50:04
like you would see maybe in Missouri
50:06
and over here in the United States
50:07
or someone that's on tour in Australia.
50:09
It's God is working through dreams.
50:12
He's working through feelings.
50:14
He's working through such a different thing.
50:16
And so I don't know actually what to do with that
50:19
because when you say the word intuition,
50:20
it seems like it fits into that category,
50:23
but so you're saying,
50:25
so I guess just to even go a little bit further
50:26
because I'm not just trying to understand.
50:28
So when you come back home,
50:29
it's not just a feeling of coming back home.
50:31
Does it feel like almost like something's been unplugged
50:34
a little bit?
50:36
- I just feel like almost,
50:38
I feel like when I'm in Iraq or in Syria
50:41
and these was, I feel very protected.
50:43
It's a strange feeling.
50:44
And I feel, I guess that I'm maybe more in tune
50:48
with myself in those situations than just day to day life.
50:51
Or maybe that's just because of the surroundings
50:53
and you're sort of in this chamber
50:56
where a lot of the external things
50:58
that we worry about in our daily lives here,
51:01
I don't worry about when I'm there.
51:02
You sort of focus on survival.
51:04
- But I do, I always felt, yeah, incredibly protected.
51:08
And I'll give you a couple examples of that.
51:12
It's, I remember one particular situation
51:14
where I really wanted to go to to offer
51:18
and I was begging everybody that,
51:20
whoever came by, I wanted to go, I wanted to go.
51:23
And for weeks, and everyone said it was too dangerous
51:26
and the road was too dangerous and I shouldn't go.
51:28
And then eventually a car came to the house I was at
51:30
and said, we're going to it's a lot for if you want to come.
51:33
And I had all my bags and I was ready to go
51:36
and I'd been bugging everyone about it.
51:37
And I just didn't go.
51:39
I just looked at it and I thought I'm,
51:41
I'm not gonna do this now.
51:42
I don't know why.
51:44
And I felt, I was beating myself up
51:45
and I felt really like, you know, what are you doing?
51:49
You know, you're being weak kind of thing.
51:51
Anyway, that car ended up being ambushed
51:53
and nobody ever saw those people again.
51:55
So in a strange way, I felt extremely protected.
51:59
And also, you know, in another case,
52:00
and I read about a little bit in the book was,
52:03
I just sort of these reoccurring nightmares in my book.
52:07
And I guess that was from being in, again,
52:09
in that vortex of sadness.
52:11
And in the dreams, you know, I kept having these horrific
52:15
and very real dreams of my mother dying
52:19
and my sister telling me and it just, you know,
52:20
this being overwhelmed with grief.
52:22
And, and then, you know, I talked to a friend about it
52:26
and who's, you know, great with these things at home.
52:29
And I saw, and she said, you know,
52:30
that was sort of a protection for me in a way
52:33
because what ended up happening was a few days later,
52:36
I was by myself and I was just doing washing on a mountain.
52:40
And I went to take this stuff out of the dryer
52:43
and I could just be, you know,
52:45
I couldn't open the dryer door.
52:47
And no one was around and I just,
52:50
I thought of these reoccurring dreams
52:51
that I'd been having of my mother.
52:53
And I thought, I just thought of that dream randomly
52:55
in the middle of it.
52:57
And as I kind of went to pull the stuff out,
52:59
I used the back of my hand
53:00
and ended up getting blown completely black
53:02
and my, you know, the whole power grew melted down.
53:05
And I thought, you know, if I hadn't thought of that dream,
53:07
if I hadn't flicked my hand around,
53:09
I would have been completely sucked into that machine.
53:11
So it's little things like that that I'm, you know,
53:14
I'm very aware of and I feel, yeah,
53:17
almost a sense of protection
53:19
that I hadn't experienced really up until that point
53:23
in such a, I would say literal way.
53:28
- Well, to be honest, as you're describing it,
53:31
I can't think of really a time that even
53:34
computes with that to where I kind of felt that same thing,
53:37
but I've heard that type of story a lot.
53:39
And that story is typically in the context of
53:42
someone feeling like God was protecting them
53:44
in that moment.
53:45
So, and I've told this to people that don't believe in God,
53:47
that do believe in God and everything in between,
53:49
that even if you don't believe God's taken care of you,
53:51
it doesn't, it's not gonna stop him from taking care of you.
53:53
And so in those moments, there's no logic
53:55
that can be applied to why you didn't get in that car.
53:57
Because if someone had been following your life,
53:59
Holly, up into that moment,
54:00
the only logical conclusion was that you were gonna hop
54:03
in the backseat, let's go, let's get after it.
54:05
And then we don't hear this story, Holly.
54:07
Like we don't get to read through the stories
54:09
that you've been able to share.
54:10
Your notebooks might just be lost to history
54:13
or just have been set ablaze
54:14
in another ISIS fire or something like that.
54:16
So, I really appreciate you sharing that with us
54:19
because I think that that's an important thing.
54:21
As we kind of wrap up the book a little bit,
54:23
I was going to ask you about why you decided
54:26
to title the book Only Cry for the Living
54:28
'cause it's a very unique title.
54:30
But I've since decided against it.
54:31
And the reason is this is because fellas
54:33
and everyone else listening to this,
54:35
that is your payoff for buying and reading this book, okay?
54:39
The answer to why this book is called Only Cry for the Living
54:42
is revealed on the last page at the very bottom
54:45
right before the epilogue.
54:46
So, read the book, earn the right to know why.
54:49
So I do wanna transition out from there
54:51
and wanna get into a subject matter that I feel like
54:53
you're in a unique place to give me some perspective
54:55
just sitting here in my studio here in Oklahoma.
54:58
And it's that many times in the book,
55:00
but also I've heard this many times other places,
55:03
it's been said that groups like ISIS
55:05
and groups like them, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram
55:07
and the Taliban, whatever, that they're Islamic extremists
55:11
or not true Islam.
55:13
I think not true Islam was a direct quote
55:15
from somebody in your book.
55:16
And the issue with people saying that
55:18
is that the ninth Surah of the Quran actually exists, okay?
55:23
And it's the last Surah that Muhammad gave
55:25
to his people before he died.
55:27
It's the least abrogated and it was intended
55:29
to be the marching orders for Muslims after Muhammad died.
55:33
And it is the most vicious and bloody Surah
55:36
of the entire Quran.
55:37
And the verses specifically in the ninth Surah
55:40
command Muslims to fight and kill non-Muslims,
55:43
infidels, saying that Allah created Islam
55:46
to prevail over all other religions
55:48
and that Muslims are required to kill in battle,
55:50
that it's not just a polite suggestion.
55:52
And there are people Muslims included
55:54
that claim that Islam is a religion of peace, right?
55:57
We hear that a lot and that the,
55:58
but the thing is is the followers and proponents
56:01
of that ideology are following the writings
56:04
that are much earlier in Muhammad's life.
56:06
And those writings were abrogated, basically,
56:09
the congregation means, yeah, all that stuff I said
56:11
in the past, don't listen to that stuff,
56:12
listen to what I'm saying now.
56:14
So kind of a long way to set up a short question,
56:16
but in light of that, would it be fair to say
56:19
that groups like ISIS aren't extremists at all?
56:23
Instead, that they're fundamentalists
56:25
when it comes to teachings and dictates
56:27
of Muhammad or the Quran?
56:29
- I think there was just so many branches of Islam.
56:32
You've got the diabanis, you've got the Sunis,
56:34
you've got the Shia.
56:35
So you've got all these sort of different ideas
56:37
and there's a lot of, you know, with internal conflict
56:40
within the religion itself
56:42
in trying to create absolutes of who's right.
56:45
So you could definitely look at it
56:47
and say that some are extreme fundamentalists
56:49
and others aren't.
56:50
And again, things come down to interpretation,
56:53
literal interpretation versus theoretical interpretation
56:57
versus just the passage of time
56:59
and how, you know, we sort of change the ideas.
57:02
So you could look at it as, I would say,
57:05
a combination of fundamentalism and extremism.
57:08
But yeah, you know, I obviously wanna stress
57:11
that it's only a small, you know, portion.
57:14
And I obviously, you know, Muslims protects me day in
57:18
and day out when I'm in these places.
57:20
And, you know, they're the biggest victims
57:22
of these conflicts, much more than we are.
57:25
But I definitely think that you can't disregard
57:28
the religious aspect.
57:29
I would say, you know, oftentimes with the reasons
57:32
for joining, I wouldn't always say it's the factor
57:34
of joining, I would often say it's a factor of joining.
57:37
And I think there is quite a discrepancy often between,
57:41
so when we have a sort of a lone wolf attack
57:43
or something in the West, it's usually driven
57:45
by that sort of extremism or fundamentalism.
57:49
But, you know, and I think this sort of creates this idea
57:52
that everything has to be then about religion.
57:54
And I beg to differ on the ground.
57:56
I think a lot of people pledge allegiance
57:59
because just pure survival reasons,
58:02
a group comes in, takes over your village,
58:04
you're working in a hospital, you're making 50 bucks a month.
58:08
And you've got to keep making that 50 bucks a month
58:10
to put money on the table.
58:11
And so there are just general social factors
58:13
and a lot of the terrorist that interview didn't seem
58:15
to be sort of religious one way or another whatsoever.
58:19
And then you have, you know, the others that are complete.
58:23
So I think the nuances are difficult
58:26
and hard to wrap our heads around.
58:29
And there isn't really a black and white answer to it all.
58:33
But I think you can't disregard that aspect by any means,
58:36
but it's not, it's not the only sort of motivator
58:39
for a lot of the fighters.
58:41
- Right, I think that's a fair way of putting it.
58:43
And one thing to kind of transition,
58:45
we're kind of getting towards the end here,
58:47
but there seem to be kind of these warring parties
58:50
within your book of these interventionalist thoughts
58:54
and isolationist thoughts.
58:56
There's this concept like, okay,
58:58
how involved should America and her allies be
59:01
in what's going on, what should be our continuing
59:04
and ongoing involvement in these types of things?
59:06
And it does come down to are you an interventionalist
59:08
or are you an isolationist?
59:10
And so from your perspective, I know it's impossible
59:12
to say one way or the other
59:13
because there's so many good arguments for both sides.
59:16
But what is the best side to be on?
59:18
Because I find myself in both camps
59:20
and I don't really like that.
59:21
- Sure, no, I'm with you on that.
59:22
And I've definitely vacillated and it's been something
59:24
that has really torn me up because, you know,
59:27
I think I know where I stand and then something happens
59:30
and I go, oh my goodness, but how can we let this happen
59:32
and not do anything?
59:33
So it's definitely something that I struggle with.
59:36
I guess I sort of look at a lot of it now
59:40
and I look at a lot of the mismanagement.
59:42
I look at the money spent and obviously the lives
59:44
that have been wasted on it.
59:45
And do I think it was, you know,
59:48
it's hard for me to say that any of these places
59:51
are better off, you know, with American intervention.
59:55
So from just that point of view,
59:57
I don't think we need a military presence
1:00:00
in a lot of these places anymore.
1:00:01
I think if you are going to take a military presence,
1:00:03
it needs to be a very small footprint
1:00:05
and it's gonna be the locals doing the work.
1:00:07
So I think the Syria model that we had during ISIS,
1:00:10
where you had 2000 troops kind of on the ground,
1:00:12
but they were in the background.
1:00:15
It was the Syrians that were doing the fighting.
1:00:17
The US was there to sort of do the advise and assist
1:00:20
and really act as a very, what I think to be effective deterrent.
1:00:24
So the people that were there knew the US was there,
1:00:29
even if they never saw any of the soldiers.
1:00:31
And they knew that while the US was there,
1:00:35
they weren't going to have to deal
1:00:36
with the Assad regime coming in,
1:00:38
or the Russians coming in, or the Turks coming in.
1:00:40
So I think that there was a relief for them in that respect.
1:00:45
That would be a potential model in other places going forward.
1:00:48
Do I think these sort of sweeping military presence
1:00:52
are effective?
1:00:53
I think we can look at the last 20 years
1:00:54
and probably all come to a conclusion
1:00:57
that probably isn't going to work going forward.
1:01:00
But I do think that there is, we do have USAID, we have NGOs.
1:01:05
I mean, for a small portion that could be removed
1:01:07
from a DOD budget, instead of having soldiers
1:01:11
sort of try to do these hearts and minds projects,
1:01:13
how can that money be a little bit more reorientated
1:01:16
to have the locals doing that,
1:01:18
or kind of take the military component out of that
1:01:21
so that you can offer some assistance to people,
1:01:23
because obviously we want to see these,
1:01:27
protect these people to a degree,
1:01:28
but I don't know that the sweeping military presence
1:01:31
is the answer anymore.
1:01:32
And I think that we can definitely look
1:01:34
at the ramifications of that to see.
1:01:37
And I think there's this argument that people give,
1:01:41
well, the US only wants to be involved in something
1:01:43
when it impacts the US.
1:01:44
And I think the US should only be involved
1:01:47
in something that impacts the US.
1:01:49
And it's very hard to, because just so much
1:01:51
of the world has problems, and it's heartbreaking.
1:01:53
And again, I do think that the US can lead the way
1:01:56
in terms of humanitarian efforts and empowering NGOs
1:02:00
to kind of get the access and help.
1:02:02
But as far as military goes, we can't just expect to send
1:02:07
our very good men and women out there to fight something
1:02:11
that isn't going to have a clear goal,
1:02:13
or a goal that's of interest to the American people.
1:02:16
- I appreciate your perspective on that,
1:02:18
because again, as an American,
1:02:19
it's hard for me to know what to do,
1:02:20
because I want to support the truth,
1:02:22
but that's not always kind of a unilateral way of thinking.
1:02:25
But I promised myself that if we had some time
1:02:27
that we would get to two of my favorite groups
1:02:29
that you described in this book,
1:02:31
and I don't want to give you too small of a time
1:02:33
to describe that, but I do want to kind of at least
1:02:35
give a primer to our audience,
1:02:36
and that's the black devils and the sun ladies, okay?
1:02:39
And I was absolutely enamored with the story
1:02:42
of these two people groups.
1:02:43
So give our listeners a little bit of a primer
1:02:46
as to who the black devils are and who the sun ladies are,
1:02:49
and what your experience was with them.
1:02:51
- So the sun ladies, I first encountered them,
1:02:53
it was the beginning,
1:02:55
gosh, is that the end of 2015, beginning of 2016?
1:02:58
And so my friend has sort of introduced it,
1:03:01
made an offhand comment,
1:03:02
well, there are these Yazidi women
1:03:03
who've just formed their own fighting unit
1:03:05
if you want to go meet them,
1:03:06
and I thought, oh my goodness, this is amazing.
1:03:09
So I drove up to Duhook to kind of go to their base,
1:03:12
and there were all these Yazidi women
1:03:14
who many of them still had their family members missing,
1:03:17
many of them had their sisters and mothers
1:03:20
all taken by ISIS.
1:03:21
Many of them had been held as sex slaves themselves,
1:03:24
and they had been rescued or escaped,
1:03:27
and they wanted to create their own fighting unit
1:03:29
ahead of the liberation of Sinjar,
1:03:32
which is their ancestral homeland,
1:03:33
where most of the Yazidis tend to live on the mountain
1:03:36
or in the villages around the mountain,
1:03:38
and they wanted to be part of that liberation,
1:03:41
and that was a deeply personal issue for them,
1:03:43
and so it was one woman by the name of Captain Khartoon,
1:03:46
and she had no military experience.
1:03:48
She was an opera singer,
1:03:49
and she just kind of bugged and begged to a Peshmerga,
1:03:53
which is the Kurdish militia,
1:03:55
begged and begged to get the resources
1:03:57
to open her own kind of wing,
1:03:59
and immediately dozens of girls ended up signing up,
1:04:03
and they got training and learned how to use weapons,
1:04:06
and really went to the front line and to be part of that,
1:04:09
being that was a deeply cathartic experience, I think,
1:04:12
for them, and it was obviously,
1:04:15
there was a part of that that wanted to be able to fight back,
1:04:18
but it was really a sense of dignity for them,
1:04:22
and one of them said that was the,
1:04:24
I guess, a model she wanted to use
1:04:26
for other groups who prosecuted women around the world
1:04:29
to empower, and to, if they're women,
1:04:33
we're gonna be freed from a city they wanted to be,
1:04:36
they wanted to be on the front lines and in doing that,
1:04:38
so yeah, it was, they were just incredible,
1:04:41
and often in many of my trips,
1:04:43
I'd go back to see them,
1:04:44
and the last time I saw them there were just thousands
1:04:47
of women wanting to volunteer,
1:04:50
and it was just, it was remarkable.
1:04:52
- That's incredible, and then you had the Black Devils,
1:04:54
so give us a little bit of an idea as to those guys.
1:04:57
- Yeah, the Black Devils were a really cool
1:05:00
sort of special forces group,
1:05:02
and they were based in Teleskoff when I met them,
1:05:05
which was a Christian town that had been taken by ISIS,
1:05:08
and they'd just taken it back,
1:05:10
but the town was obviously empty,
1:05:11
and it was still very dirty with landmines,
1:05:15
and so they'd just taken over a couple of the houses
1:05:17
as kind of a base for them,
1:05:19
and that was a very heated frontline at that time.
1:05:22
But they were really remarkable,
1:05:24
they were kind of the group that would be called upon
1:05:28
for urgent missions, and they were holding this town,
1:05:32
and every night we're out there fighting back,
1:05:34
and they just, I had a great time with them,
1:05:36
and they took me around,
1:05:38
and they showed me all the different places,
1:05:40
and then just the funny little things that we learned,
1:05:44
all the code words that were used in the fight with ISIS,
1:05:47
and they had special names for things,
1:05:49
and one of them would go out to the battlefield
1:05:54
and put up the Peshmerga flag,
1:05:55
and then the next day you'd sort of wake up,
1:05:57
and the ISIS flag would be put instead of the Peshmerga,
1:06:01
so it was, they were back and forth,
1:06:02
kind of very symbolic debate,
1:06:05
but they were really extraordinary,
1:06:06
and they'd sort of just given up there
1:06:08
as many of the soldiers had,
1:06:10
and given up their entire lives
1:06:12
to be part of this specialized unit,
1:06:15
and they were working often,
1:06:17
they were often on a frontline 16 hours a day,
1:06:19
maybe they'd sleep for three and four,
1:06:21
maybe they'd get two days off every couple of weeks,
1:06:24
but really that was their life,
1:06:25
and you often found that they were fathers and sons,
1:06:28
and it was a multi-generational group,
1:06:31
and it was just something I really wanted to highlight
1:06:34
was the work that they were doing in the fight.
1:06:37
I feel like you could have literally written a book
1:06:38
on each one of those two groups,
1:06:40
and maybe one day if we can convince you
1:06:42
to keep going back over there,
1:06:43
we'll actually get that book,
1:06:44
but we are gonna start to bring the podcast
1:06:46
to a close here,
1:06:47
and I do wanna ask really this last question,
1:06:50
because it's fairly seminal to the work that you did.
1:06:52
You broke up your entries in this book several dozen times
1:06:56
throughout the book to ask this simple question,
1:06:58
which is, what is war?
1:07:00
And there were so many different responses,
1:07:02
some of them were, what is war?
1:07:04
It is turning the only thing no terrorists can take,
1:07:06
or it is turning to the only thing no terrorists can take,
1:07:09
faith, what is war?
1:07:11
With the Iraqis, there was never a discussion
1:07:13
of medals of honor.
1:07:14
Only endless videos and photos of soldiers killing ISIS
1:07:17
and dragging the dead bodies into the backs of pickup trucks
1:07:20
or capturing them alive and letting them sob
1:07:22
like helpless children begging to be spared.
1:07:24
That was their medal of honor,
1:07:26
and another one here, what is war?
1:07:28
War does not rest until the dead are dead,
1:07:30
and the living are like the dead.
1:07:32
So last question of the day, Holly McKay, what is war?
1:07:37
I think war is the epitome together of the best
1:07:42
in the West of humankind.
1:07:46
I think that is a great and powerful place to put it.
1:07:50
I don't think there is another way to say that,
1:07:52
but we really appreciate you letting us go
1:07:54
into all of these subject matters.
1:07:55
I know it's hard to keep going back over the stories
1:07:59
that you've lived, but it's important for people like me,
1:08:01
it's important for our listeners to get a deeper sense
1:08:03
of what you went through, but that is all for me.
1:08:05
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:08:07
No, thank you for having me
1:08:09
and for really for highlighting these people's stories,
1:08:11
and I think it's an honor to be able to share it,
1:08:16
and I just hope that it gives people a deeper sense
1:08:18
of the impacts of war in both the lightness and the dark.
1:08:23
Holly McKay, thanks for coming on Undaunted Life
1:08:25
on Man's Podcast.
1:08:27
Thank you.
1:08:27
There you go, guys.
1:08:33
I tried to tell you, this was an amazing conversation.
1:08:36
I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
1:08:38
I mean, I was just overwhelmed throughout that conversation,
1:08:43
and I was overwhelmed most of the time
1:08:44
while I was reading that book,
1:08:45
so I'm glad we were able to get her on
1:08:47
to talk a little bit more about that.
1:08:48
I'm sure we'll have her on at some point in the future as well
1:08:50
to talk about some other projects at hers.
1:08:52
But before we let you guys go,
1:08:53
we are gonna do a quick resilience boost, as you know by now.
1:08:56
We are a men's ministry, and our mission is cultivating
1:08:59
mainly resilience, and specifically we do that
1:09:01
by providing you content like this podcast that helps you
1:09:03
for spiritual mental and physical toughness.
1:09:05
So I'm gonna go through the links that we have for you today.
1:09:07
I've got a link to Holly McKay's website,
1:09:09
so you can get a lot of information about her there.
1:09:11
Then I've also got a link to the book.
1:09:12
So I've got it on Amazon and D'Angelo Publishing,
1:09:15
'cause here's the thing.
1:09:16
Amazon does some kind of weird things with orders,
1:09:19
because this book sold out almost immediately.
1:09:22
And so, and we kind of talked off air about that.
1:09:25
Amazon's being a little bit funny
1:09:26
with how they're listing books
1:09:27
and how they're selling them and all that.
1:09:28
So I've also got the link to D'Angelo Publishing,
1:09:30
which was one of the ones that they published
1:09:32
with Jocko Publishing.
1:09:33
So you can order the book directly from their website,
1:09:35
but I will just let you know.
1:09:36
If you're not ordering it on Kindle or something like that,
1:09:38
it may be a bit before you can get that.
1:09:40
I think it's May, if you're listening to this on time,
1:09:42
it might be May before those are put into protection,
1:09:44
because again, they were just absolutely sold out.
1:09:47
You couldn't find a copy, but guys,
1:09:49
it is absolutely worth it if you want to wait.
1:09:51
I've also got a YouTube link to the Jocko podcast
1:09:53
that she did, that's Jocko Podcast 271.
1:09:55
And then I've got a link to her Instagram account,
1:09:57
so you can follow her there.
1:09:58
All right guys, thanks so much for listening to this podcast.
1:10:00
We really do appreciate it.
1:10:01
If you would, please subscribe wherever you're listening
1:10:03
to this.
1:10:04
If we deserve a five-star review,
1:10:05
please leave us one and let us know why you like the content.
1:10:07
I'm currently booking speaking engagements
1:10:09
for their May, 2021.
1:10:10
So if you want to come speak on your podcast
1:10:12
at your men's event, at your team, whatever,
1:10:14
hit me up info@undaunted.life.
1:10:16
The email is iNFO@undaunted.life.
1:10:19
The website is www.undaunted.life.
1:10:22
You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter
1:10:23
@undauntedlife or Facebook.com/undauntedlife.
1:10:27
Check out our free devotionals on the YouVersion Bible app.
1:10:29
Just search "undaunted life" under plans.
1:10:31
And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns Red
1:10:34
for allowing us to use their entire music library
1:10:36
for our content.
1:10:37
The Interaltro track on this podcast is our song Defender,
1:10:39
which is off their latest record entitled Guardians.
1:10:42
The links are in the description.
1:10:43
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:10:45
Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
1:10:48
keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical toughness.
1:10:52
Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:10:56
I need to defend you.
1:10:59
My voice mistakes that you'll have to quack.
1:11:04
I need to defend you.
1:11:08
Open and quack me.
1:11:11
My face.