this is jocko podcast number 279 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening helicopter blades slashed through the hot sky the roar of engines deafening as the pilot twisted and turned on our final approach crammed into the back with my men i tried to keep my balance by tensing my legs and focusing my gaze on the machine gun in the helicopter’s door my kit was heavy on my shoulders and sweat poured into my eyes from under the rim of my helmet my palms were wet as they gripped the rifle i pulled it closer to my chest and prepared myself for what was to come the airman behind the machine gun turned to me his face was covered by a scarf and the dark visor of his helmet but i knew what he it meant when he held up his index finger i turned and shouted to my men one minute one minute to landing and whatever was waiting there for us looking into the eyes of my young soldiers i saw steely resolve the hardness of the paratrooper flying into battle i was closest to the rear door which was now winching fully open there was no doubt in my mind that i had to be the first one down the ramp i had waited years for this moment and now was my time i practiced it over and over again on grass fields in mock-up structures and on the real things during exercises all over the world but this was different for the first time in my life i was flying into war our mission was a simple one to kill or capture a taliban bomb maker a bomb maker called [ __ ] mohammed infamous for making the improvised bombs that were responsible for the deaths of dozens of british and allied soldiers we’d spent a week pouring over maps and aerial photographs of the village in which he was thought to live my platoon number eight platoon on attachment to a company of the third battalion of the parachute regiment was given the honor of landing first right in [ __ ] muhammad’s back garden and it was our task to surround his house it was a dangerous mission but as the seconds counted down and i looked out the rear of the door of the helicopter towards the dusty plains below i felt a tremendous sensation of both trepidation and sheer excitement it was a lot of responsibility to shoulder but i wanted to carry it the helicopter got closer to the ground whipping the afghan dust into the air until it was a thick cloud around us ten seconds shouted the airmen holding tightly to a rope the door was now fully open the ramp hit the floor with a clunk and a shutter went through the airframe as the wheels touched down everyone wobbled but kept their feet they knew how important it was to stay upright and get off the heel the heli quickly the taliban had spies everywhere scouts that reported the movement of helicopters every second that we delayed d-planing was a second for the enemy to train their weapons and kill those on the ramp go go go the airmen shouted myself and my men picking up the call so that it rippled through the aircraft and then we were running gritting our teeth as though that would stop the bullets that may await us my feet touched down on the afghan soil and i breathed in the dirt as i ran through the cloud that the helicopter’s blade stirred up all around us my rifle was up in eye level and i looked over my sights ready to snap shoot anyone that posed a threat to my men my soldiers followed me i felt like a giant leading them from a metal beast into the jaws of death except that when the helicopter lifted away and the dust settled we were quite alone nobody home [ __ ] i put some of my men into defensive positions and took others with me to search the house this was still a dangerous time as the taliban were not above booby-trapping their own homes other than a few sacks of opium the drug of choice in those parts we found nothing i walked back outside and was shrugging off the disappointment of another quiet mission when a whip-like sound echoed across the fields followed immediately by a crack it wasn’t the noise you hear in the films it was all together more visceral and unnerving incoming shouted my platoon sergeant i shouted at the men to jump into a nearby ditch and return fire they looked at me unbelieving it was like being on an exercise on salisbury plane except the noises were not the dull simulators we’d been accustomed to these were real and violent somebody was shooting with the evident intention of killing us 300 meters away i saw the enemy moving in a line of trees i took aim and fired it was the start of a very long day and that right there is an excerpt from a book called the art of exploration by a former british army officer named levison wood who served and led combat operations in afghanistan but who seem to have found an equivalent level of excitement and danger as a writer photographer filmmaker and explorer and we’re lucky enough to have him on the show tonight to share some of his experiences with us levison thanks for coming on man thanks for having me that’s a good way to start this thing off brings back some memories eh freaking good good way to kick it off um before we jump into your your career in the army let’s let’s start at the beginning let’s start about let’s talk about your child’s childhood and and you grow up in england sure yep um stoke-on-trent that’s it not many people have heard of it and that’s that’s where you actually grew up yeah so i i was born and raised in a small village um just outside of stoke on trent right in the middle of england sort of halfway between manchester and birmingham kind of place that not many people sort of travel to they just travel past it and i think it was it was for that reason that i was always from a very young age curious about the outside world i was very keen to get away from stoke on trent um it will always be home but but yeah from a from a very early age i was always excited by the prospect of of traveling out into the big wide world it was something that not many members of my family had done um but i always knew that there was there was more to life than the provincial sort of suburbs of my hometown and and that’s what inspired me and stoke on trent that’s a city where you’re in the i guess it was prior to the pits shutting down you were in the pits or there’s a a giant pottery factory right isn’t it famous for making pottery soak on trent is is the heart of the british ceramic industry it has been for for centuries and um sadly you know a lot of those um those industries the mines and the pottery industry died a bit of a death through the mid 20th century so there was a lot of unemployment there was a lot of poverty in stoke-on-trent in the 80s when i grew up and and so there weren’t that many opportunities not many people had the opportunity to sort of travel very much but i was very fortunate to be to be grown up in a family of teachers both my parents were teachers they encouraged this spirit of curiosity and um you know encouraged me to to read a lot so i read as a youngster all about history geography travels all those stories of exploration of um of those very hairy men in the 19th century that went to the polls you know livingston and shackleton and scott and uh you know those are my heroes so it was growing up my dad read me a lot of books about exploration lawrence of arabia people like that um so i think from about the age of seven or eight i was determined to somehow follow in their footsteps which wasn’t exactly a very realistic uh sort of thing to to go to my careers officer and say i want to be an explorer but that’s exactly what i did and he sort of laughed at me and said okay well let’s see well i’m kind of thinking you must have been even in a worse position than me so when i was a little kid you know i liked rock and roll music and so when i started playing guitar and thinking okay i’m going to write some riffs but it didn’t take me very long to figure out that hey all the you know if jimmy page already wrote that riff and tony aiomi already wrote those riffs so what am i going to do how am i going to write better riffs than those guys so you had to be even in a worse position because the world explored yeah actually you can make up new riffs that’s possible but you know the most the known world has been explored yeah yeah so you’re you’re in a worse spot than i was in well my you know i grew up with those stories but i was also encouraged by stories of my grandfather my grandad was a soldier in um in the british army he served in india and burma in the far east fighting against the japanese and he told me these stories which felt whilst it was still a long time ago actually to hear them firsthand somebody who’d been to the jungles of india who’d been to the mountains of of of east asia that was like mind-blowing for me as a kid who’d never really traveled beyond the the confines of the united kingdom so that’s what i wanted to do i want to go and see not necessarily go with my pith helmet and sort of khaki shorts and with a big union flag but but at the very least to go and see with my own eyes the the kind of places that very few people had had traveled to um within my own so a social circle really so it started pretty humbly and just going off backpacking and you know doing what a lot of youngsters do and um travel around the world on a tight budget and that was what i was determined to do from a from a very young age now what was your relationship with your grandfather how long was he still alive today no he’s not so he passed away when i was about 18 so you know but but growing up it was like i said it was those those really exciting stories and pretty gruesome stories like if you were in burma fighting the japanese good lord yeah and he was not only that he was on pretty much one of the first ships into japan he was part of the occupying force in japan he was based in hiroshima after they dropped the a-bomb so some of his stories were just like you know crazy yeah and what about your dad did your dad um wasn’t your dad in the army as well so my dad was in the he was a reservist so you know throughout the the 70s and 80s um you know his period it was it was the cold war so he you know he he likes to tell me he was off fighting the russians in germany you know it really you know realistically he was he was out there a lot of digging trenches on the plains of germany but obviously no no actual fighting but um but yeah he he always encouraged me to to take an interest in the military um and um it was things like you know he was a cadet instructor and so on so i remember growing up you know he’d sometimes bring bring his rifles back home and things like that and as a kid he’d he’d give me a uniform and if i was if i was a good good kid he’d uh give me an extra stripe and if i was naughty he’d rip one off my arm so that’s kind of that was how i grew up yeah and when you um were you a you’re saying that you’re reading all the time does that mean you were a good student i was i think i i i was always curious and and that helps i think that’s a good story you might be the first person on the podcast that was a good ever had any good students on here no everyone’s everyone’s just bad students myself included so so you were reading and you’re doing pretty good in school your parents were so both my parents were teachers as well yeah and one was history one was english and and people go oh that’s what and i was like no no i didn’t do it we i didn’t do any homework um were they teaching in your school no they weren’t was your dad teaching you no no no so that yeah i think that helped out i don’t think i would have liked having my teachers as my parents as my own teachers but they they got you on the reading path and i think there must be something boring like you just must have been more naturally curious than me i was like throwing rocks at my friends no i did that as well yeah i mean i think i i was definitely a bit of a rebel and i got into lots of trouble as a kid i think i was just naturally um inclined to to be curious about history particularly and that it was it was reading about you know the ancient greeks alexander the great the roman empire the vikings it was those sort of ex exciting quite you know quite masculine manly stories that that really inspired me to to sort of take an interest and and i did from from an early age um and of course it’s it’s those sort of things that you you read and then develop i mean one of the first books that my dad read to me uh was was a children’s version of the odyssey and i thought you know one day i’d love to go off on a ship and explore the world you know i mean hopefully not lose all my men in the process but uh you know but yeah i i definitely thank um those those those early years for my what i’m doing now so the weird thing about one of the big differences about england and america is the schooling system and kind of the way you test to get into certain levels and my wife’s a brit so i i have some idea of it but you so you went to what what uh painsley is that right painslee catholic school that’s where you went to yeah so it was a non-fee paying it was just an ordinary state school um but it was you know as a catholic school the you know catholic schools um were sometimes you know considered uh better in in some ways it had a real bent towards science um that wasn’t my bag at all but um but good teachers and um it was one of those schools that that you can you can flourish in with with the right attitude but but also you can get in a lot of trouble if you don’t have the right attitude and i i sort of did both what sports were you playing um so i wouldn’t say i was hugely into sports i i preferred i was into athletics so i was a good runner as a kid but i wasn’t it wasn’t really known for its team sports and that kind of frustrated me in in some ways because you know i knew that i was kind of sold on the idea of the army from probably the age of about 11 or 12 in fact so i knew that i should probably be doing rugby or something like that but it wasn’t really on offer in my school so i had to be creative with with what i was doing so i did a lot of personal fitness did a lot of running like i said um i was interested in boxing from a young age and that that’s something i i took up and and that followed me into my army career as well so what age did you start boxing at um i mean i was training from probably 15 16 um when i went to university at 18 i was in the university club and then like i said did it throughout the army as well so i know you you went on like a this is i don’t know if americans do this or not they go like traveling yeah that’s what you all call it right my wife did it traveling right and so and so you did that too like in america you graduate high school then you if you’re you’re going in the military you’re getting a job or you’re you’re going there’s no traveling there’s no traveling thing echo did you go traveling no sir no we’re not going traveling for a year but it’s real normal oh yeah it certainly is now you know when i when i left school at the age of 18 in 2001 um yeah i i knew that i wanted to join the army and i was sort of i really wanted to go to sandhurst and go in as an officer and um but because of my background i wasn’t at you know one of these posh private schools i hadn’t you know necessarily got the sports background so i knew i needed to do something that would give me a bit of an edge and it was it was just go drinking in australia exactly but it was actually a stroke of a fortune so when i was a kid i was i was doing every odd job going i worked in factories i was in shops i would even flip burgers at mcdonald’s just to try and get some cash together i flip burgers at wendy’s there we go here we go guaranteed character building stuff making of great military leadership flipping burgers get some 100 um so i was doing all of that to try and earn a bit of bit of cash before going to university and one of the jobs i was doing was working at a theme park a place called alton towers and i think you know i was basically i must have been on one of the rides upside down and lost my wallet fell out of my pocket and i was a bit upset because i had my entire week’s earnings of about five pounds [Music] so i was quite surprised a couple of days later when the wallet was returned in the post and not only was the the five pounds still in there but there was also a note from the person who had found the wallet and it was actually signed off there was there was a note saying don’t be such a you know i wouldn’t say the word if it’s an [ __ ] for um for losing your wallet keep keep uh better sort of care of your belongings it was signed off by a certain uh lieutenant dang um in the old in the royal artillery and i thought oh that’s a nice nice guy obviously not everyone who’d return a wallet and um so i you know i did the right thing and and wrote a thank you letter back i think my note would have said your lesson is costing you five pounds that’s mine so i said but because i was already interested in a career in the army said have you got any hints or tips on how to get into sandhurst and by return of post came back a six page essay with all of these really great tips it was like you know go and learn how to you know read a map and use a compass um this is how many press-ups you need to do to pass the fitness test all this really useful advice but the last sentence is something i’ll never forget but it said above all travel dot dot dot because at the end of the day you’ll have some great stories in the bar and the mess so i took that to heart so i decided based on that letter which was all the serendipitous result of me losing my wallet that i was going to go away and do what we call in england agapia which is exactly what you say go drink in australia so my i told my dad and he said what on earth is a gap year this wasn’t particularly popular you know at that time and i said you know i’m going to find myself on the beaches of thailand and he said well if you do that you can go get yourself a bloody job um so that’s when i had to go and start earning more cash and and but eventually i did i went away backpacking um and at the age of 18 you know to literally just disappear often the first place i went traveling was actually in south africa which is pretty pretty dodgy you know in that time i went to zimbabwe uh which at the age of 18 was the first time i’d had a gun pulled on me by a taxi driver who tried to rob me so it was all really quite um you know sort of it teaches you a lot about independence so what’d you learn about how to handle get a gun pulled on you by the taxi driver well you can’t just throw that out there and think we’re just gonna let it ride so so i bit it so you’re in zimbabwe so in zimbabwe i was traveling i’ve met this random dutch dude who was much older than me i was i was 18 this guy must have been 29 30 and he was backpacking as well and we were on the same same route and um we got off uh the train at a place called bulawayo and um we we sort of got into a taxi and asked the price to whatever the next bus station and he said it was going to be 40 dollars which zimbabwe has dollars so 40 zim dollars was equivalent of about two us dollars and we were like yeah no problem so we put our bags in the in the trunk of the car off we went and it was like two minutes around the corner we thought okay we got out and he said okay 40 dollars we got the zimbabwe dollars out and he said no no no us dollars 40 us dollars and we thought he was joking and laughed at him he said no no put his hand in his jacket pulls out a piston and said 40 us dollars and uh we’re like oh [ __ ] okay well i don’t have four us dollars i’m on a budget of about two dollars a day right so we said okay we’ll pay but let us get our bags out and it was quite a busy crowded sort of car park so um we got got our bags out of the boot and then this guy this dutch guy who’s quite a you know quite a hefty fella he said okay come over here and uh the taxi driver he put his pistol in in in the car he got out so he was unarmed at the time and this guy just sort of as he got his um as he got his bag on his back just head-butted this taxi driver right and then looked at me and said [ __ ] run so um i ran and we escaped but this guy then we jumped in another taxi and said drive so but the original guy was then chasing us through the streets of of bologna so i had my first not only my first sort of gun pulled on me but my first car checks at the age of 18 which was all pretty wild but it was those early travels that sort of encouraged me to sort of yeah be careful be independent-minded and and start to think about looking after myself what are the chances that you made it back through the first year of travels um well well after that experience it was all fairly tame i have to say but you know getting getting drunk in australia but it was no it was great and and it was probably that first year of travel really that motivated me to want to do more because you know apart from that that one sort of moment it was it was usual backpacking stuff but throughout my time at university i went to more and more challenging and interesting places i went to um in my second year at university i was studying history and my particular interest was the history of travel writing so i looked at marco polo and his travels i was reading about the hippie trail of the 1960s the great pilgrimages all the big overland journeys so i tried to make all my my my studies around that so in the my summer leave i would try and go to the places that i’ve been studying around so after one particular module bear in mind this was in 2001 just after 9 11 it happened so there’s a real focus on the middle east and that was a place that that i was fascinated by because of its the history but also what was going on in in the news at the time um so me and uh me and her buddy decided one summer that we were going to go and travel around the middle east this was in in 2003 so it was a second second year at university um the iraq war was happening and um we said okay we’re gonna go to egypt and just have a look around and we went to israel and then when we were in israel there was um a bomb went off in in jerusalem caused the borders to shut so what we’d plan to do was take a take a boat from the the coast from haifa to greece and then go backpacking through europe that was all now not on the cards um my parents thought thought me and my alex were actually on holiday in greece at the time anyway so they had no idea where we where we actually were the only board that was open was to the east to jordan so we went to jordan and then we were in jordan another bomb went off which meant that we were stuck in jordan the only border then was open was actually further east which was to iraq so we took a taxi from the capital jordan aman all the way to baghdad at a cost of 20 this is i was 21 at the time or 20 and i was met by a national guardsman on the border who said uh do you want to buy a gun he said you’re going to need it where you’re going this is 2003 this is 2003 and um we got to baghdad because it was the only route that was open when in 2003 august so the the wars it’s on it’s on yeah combat operations are just finished more or less but the you know it’s before the main insurgency had begun but yeah stuff was definitely exploding around us at the time and what part of this idea sounded smart to you well we didn’t have another option we couldn’t afford to fly home from israel because we had no money and we thought it would just be a bit a bit of an exciting adventure and so we made it to baghdad but then we stayed in the hotel palestine which was the goodness in the green zone oh i know where that is that’s freaking crazy we couldn’t afford a night there because it was 100 bucks which is a lot of money when you’re a student and so we thought okay this was just after somebody had just shot the top of the hotel because they thought there was an iraqi insurgent it was actually a camera crew um so we thought if we can sneak up the the fire escape up the ladders then we can just sleep amongst the rubble on the roof so we did that we got to the roof and then there happened to be a uk a british film crew filming a news piece on the roof and they said you know what are you idiots doing here and we explained that we were sort of backpacking through the middle east and uh this guy’s i would never forget his name martin geisler who’s an itn correspondent said look um you must be the first tourist in iraq tell you what if we can do a news piece about you we’ll pay for your room so we ended up staying for a week because we couldn’t get we couldn’t get out of iraq at this point and eventually we managed to escape by hitching a ride with some former sas mercenary security guys who were doing the doing the route up to crete which was before saddam hussein had been captured so we were actually in to crete before saddam whilst he was still down his little hole so eventually long story short we we got out to turkey and then eventually did find it find our way back to europe major amount of survivor bias on this whole thing so anyone that’s listening you’re you have to overcome this survivor bias i’m gonna recommend not particularly following this extreme level of let’s just go for it what are you carrying in your backpack uh as little as possible you know a shmag just so we could kind of blend in we had to go to the local market to um to buy your sort of traditional how many liters is your backpack uh just just a day sack so you were talking about 25 liters you’ve got a 25 liter backpack yeah that’s it that’s it and we even put that you know those sort of um plastic big bags the sort of check check ones that people go to the market just so it didn’t just so we didn’t stand out and we bought those you know shiny shiny shirts and black shoes that they they were in the middle east so that we i’m you know i’m quite sort of fairly dark-skinned so we could blend in and and it worked and we were just sort of walking around the markets of baghdad and you know it was fine do not try this at home do not try this i didn’t tell my parents still about six months later so then you finally so then you finally get out how did you get back you just hitched a ride with someone we hit the rides contractors yeah right up to the turkish border and then hitched all the way home to the uk how hard is it to hitchhike these days um i actually i was i hitchhiked last week actually in the states and you got picked up pretty good yeah it’s fine um it depends where you are but i’ve you know i i used to love it because it was a great way of meeting interesting people and um in fact when i it’s also what my trips had taught me was you’ve got to have a bit of faith in human nature you know you have way more faith in human nature than i do i’ve done too many of these podcasts to be jumping into vehicles with random people it’s weird too because when i was a kid and i don’t know i guess i’m 10 years older than you maybe yeah something around 10 or 12 but when i was a kid hitchhiking was very normal yeah you’d see it all the time people you know you go get on the highway there’s people hitchhiking there’s no big deal if i miss the school bus we hitchhike school things like that yeah but nowadays people people are more scared it’s way more scared and i guess that’s part of that it’s just there’s more news is more prevalent like when someone gets kidnapped and freaking raped and murdered you you know about it whereas in 1978 it was just no factor no in your mind that didn’t happen to people you trusted human nature yeah yeah and all this is taking place while you’re going to college the university of nottingham that’s right yeah so i was studying history every summer we’d go off and do some crazy adventure and um but it all kind of built up really to when i graduated in the summer of 2004 um so i was still desperate to join the army but i’d got the travel bug at this stage so i wanted to sort of do something even even bigger and better and because i’ve been studying about these overland journeys i decided i should really do a bit do a really big one and um so i i thought why not actually hitchhike all the way to india following the ancient silk road and following the footsteps of sort of marco polo so so i did i i hitchhiked from i put my thumb up at nottingham service station uh and five months later somehow made it to uh to goa in india and and that was a that was a wild journey because it went through all of europe through russia um through the caucasus i was in chechnya uh i went through iran afghanistan and pakistan over the you know over the kaiba pass and then and all of that you know i i was fascinated by the stories of you know victorian exploration the great game particularly in central asia afghanistan was was very much on my radar then because um you know the british army had just sort of made deployments in kabul it hadn’t things hadn’t really kicked off in the south yet at this stage but so it was probably fairly you know safe as it gets in afghanistan to go traveling there um but that was a journey i really really wanted to do and so yeah off i went and um again very similar thing i just went with a small day sack um i had no money i had i had total of 500 pounds in my bank account that was all that was left from my student loan and i thought i’ll see how far i can get and it took five months so i was what are you eating well a lot 500 pounds feeds me for like a day and a half it does it does me now what the hell are you eating so not very much i was pretty skinny um so yeah i was i was just i kind of maybe i was a bit reckless but i was just really putting my faith in in human nature so on you know i hitchhiked the whole way um usually whoever i was hitchhiking with you know i was 21 right so people look at you and when you tell them what you’re doing they think you’re either mad or they feel sorry for you and um off the back of that i got invited into people’s homes you know i met a lot of girls that way and uh but but people would look after you and often they would stuff ten dollars into your pocket on the way out or fill you fill your bag with with with apples or whatever it might be so i think i actually came back with more than i started with okay so i’m starting to think i’m starting to feel like maybe things are different in life for you and me i’m just saying maybe you’re a sweet looking guy and i’m not the last time somebody tried to slip me ten dollars was never you think i get invited into people’s homes that doesn’t happen so you’re you’re living a charmed life i’m over here i feel like the world might have been against me this whole time if i put my thumb out as you did there’s no one’s going to pick me up zero the percentage of people that pick me up is zero yeah it wouldn’t happen these days for me i don’t think i think it’s definitely a thing when you’re younger it’s it’s far more likely to happen i don’t think i would how many pairs of pants are you bringing with you i went fully light scales i had yeah one pair of one pair of pants uh you know a couple of shirts that’s it really and uh it was it was great the freedom the liberal you know the liberation of it all it was it was it was brilliant i was just sleeping at the side of the road i had one poncho uh sorry i had a bivvy bag ground pound i didn’t even have a ground pot now and i was just you know if i if if somebody didn’t invite me into their home i would i would just sleep on it i mean in russia i remember sleeping in the middle of this roundabout because it was a busy city there was nowhere to stay i couldn’t speak a word of the language so i just found this roundabout in the centre of some really grey industrial areas like that’ll do so and it was quite cold so i had gone into this roundabout and i saw some uh what’d you call it todd pulling like plastic sheeting that’s perfect this is going to keep me dry because it was about to rain going under this um tarpaulin and then i heard some rustling i thought oh [ __ ] there’s some rats in there and i sort of looked underneath there’s actually two other like homeless people sleeping under this this blanket so i had to move on from there but um yeah it was it was sort of experiences like that that i you know i look back and think what was i doing but at the time it was it felt like yeah it was a it was a big grand adventure so so again what did you eat um whatever i can get my hands on i was usually i was you know one meal a day i i tried to budget so i had you know three dollars or whatever per day to to spend on food but in iran i remember i ran out of money um in iran and um the i mean literally i had i think i had five dollars left and i knew i needed to pay for a visa at the afghan border so not only was i had no money in iran but um i was going into afghanistan completely penniless i had like one traveller’s check but you can’t train change any sort of western travellers checks in iran because there was a big embargo on all that stuff so i remember staying i i went to this uh a small hotel in the middle of the desert and explained to this the iranians are lovely people and they they’re very very hospitable and everyone else had looked after me but in this particular place what about the russians that let you sleep in the free place what about them that restored my faith in russians because i’m like the russians didn’t help you come on no they did honestly i was i was like i mean it was it was tougher in russia than a lot of places um yeah it was it was definitely a you know going across the border into georgia was was great because there was there was a stark difference there so you so you roll into to where in iran i’m in a place called mashad which is a big holy city on the near the afghan border nowhere to stay and i found this this one hotel it’s like a motel thing and i explained to this guy i said look can i have a room i’ve got five dollars but i really need three dollars to get the afghan stamp because it was that’s how much cost he said look you can stay for free on my office floor and i said have you got any food he said no there’s no food but i noticed there was a wedding sort of party happening you said just go and help yourself to the leftovers so score you know there’s always a way there’s always a way but yeah i ended up in afghanistan um literally no money and but i knew i’d been told that the afghans were pretty hospitable and and they were i managed to sort of hitchhike across the whole country uh through herat i went through the central uh mountains through chad charan bamiyan and ended up in kabul harry was finally able to crash that traveler’s check how are you overcoming the language barrier um by hand signals hand signals i had a pretty good beard at that stage so the places that i was traveling to were ethnically tagic and because i was i’ve got a pretty good tan and a beard everyone thought i was a pashtun so they all they all sort of kept the distance because they thought it was a taliban but as a result they were quite you know they kind of looked after me and uh yeah it was fine and then where did that trip end uh that ended in india so made it through afghanistan all the way through pakistan and then finally made it to the beach in goa where i sort of shaved the beard off and finally had a beer and celebrated still being alive oh man once again i’m i’m over here look i got four kids and my opinion is don’t try this at home i’m glad you did it i’m glad you’re telling me about it i’m not encouraging people to necessarily do the same no actually you wrote an entire book telling people to do this stuff so i’m going to disagree with you it comes with it comes with a disclaimer all right um speaking of the book i’m going to go back to the book here for a second because at some point um well before i jump into that you you you you get into sandhurst so what’s the deal with sandhurst sandhurst is not like west point where you go there and you go to college for four years no sandhurst is 12 months pretty much um that’s 44 weeks spread over a year you it tends to be mainly graduates so people who’ve finished university but there is you know it is open to people who haven’t necessarily been to university and you spend 12 months there and then you commission into whichever regiment or core that you that you choose to join and how hard is it to get into sandhurst tough yeah very tough um i started my application process i think i was 17 when i went into the careers office with my dad um you then do the um what was then known as the regimental sorry the um rcb um basically the selection into san jose you have to go to a place called westbury where you do all these sort of command tasks lots of interviews mental arithmetic all this sort of stuff where you’re tested for your aptitude and your personality a lot of it’s about leadership it’s showing not necessarily having experience in leadership but the potential to develop your leadership is there any other ways to get your commission besides going like in america you can go to west point or the naval academy or whatever or you can go to rotc which is you go to college while you’re taking classes about whatever branch you’re going into or you can do offshore candidate school so there’s or you can be a prior enlisted guy and you can get commissioned how does it work in england so all officers have to go to sandhurst even if you’d done i was in otc whilst at university so i did three years there is it a different school for the army versus the navy yes so there’s three so sandhurst is for the army then you’ve got one um down in portsmouth for for the navy and then you’ve got crown wheel which is for the royal air force yeah but you’re going to go if you’re going to get a commission that’s what you’re doing i want yeah exactly you’ve got to go to sandhurst and so for me it was quite daunt i’d heard about it my dad had encouraged me he didn’t get into sandhurst um he wanted to to join as a reservist back in the back in the 70s didn’t work out for him so i felt like i was my grandfather was you know he was an enlisted private soldier so there was no history of officership within my family or although i think there were five generations of soldiers previously so we’d all served in one way or another um so to go to sanders was a real privilege but also a big challenge because there was it was quite a daunting prospect you know i was from a pretty normal background and then suddenly i was in the same platoon as prince harry um so i was you know surrounded by a totally different type of people that i hadn’t necessarily met before um lots of people who’d been big in sports who’d gone to a very prestigious universities but i can say it’s about leadership and demonstrating the potential to be an officer now let’s jump into the book um i passed the army’s commissioning board which meant i could join as an officer and command men something i found both exciting and daunting a young officer’s training takes place at the royal military academy sandhurst and when i arrived there age 23 i still wasn’t sure where i wanted to end up after visiting as many units as they want to see where they might fit in officer cadets can select two regiments to have interviews within their final term so before you go to sandhurst you go and meet with various units to see which ones you like yeah you do freaking cool is that you do these sort of familiarization visits and they can be as formal or informal as the regiment chooses so you know a lot of the cavalry units which are known to attract quite uh posh well-to-do officers they just go on a drinking binge for a weekend other units you know the engineers or the artillery do slightly more um you know craft focused exercises the paras i didn’t i wasn’t i didn’t look into the powers at this stage so i i’d gone to visit my local unit the the staffords i’d looked at the gurkhas and i went to look at the intelligence course so you go you basically go and have a look around see if it’s the right fit for you and and it’s a two-way thing they might not like you and say don’t come back so now you show up at sandhurst back to the book sandhurst was hard work and the late nights ironing my uniforms the parades and long academic essay academic essays were only part of it there was a lot of running marching and being shouted out along with field exercises rifle ranges and blowing things up as well as learning the more subtle arts of our officership fancy dinners the intricacies of letter writing and knowing the de brett’s guide to etiquette inside and out it was an interesting and varied education the de bretz guide to etiquette yeah i i didn’t even know what this was until i went i don’t know what it is right now so it’s basically a manual of how to behave like a proper gentleman yeah give us one example well it’s you know it’s i mean the basics of you know if you’re going to a seven-course meal it’s like which which knife and fork do you start with first yeah um it’s how to write you know if you’re writing a letter to a member of the royal family how do you address them so at when i went to officer candidate school and this is only 13 weeks long so you but you do get etiquette training i believe the only thing i remember this is a weird thing to remember echo charles take notes this could be important because it surprised me if you get a piece of food in your mouth that you didn’t want in there the proper way to get it out of your mouth is to put it back on the fork and put it down so in other words if you if you’re eating a piece of chicken and there’s a bone in there you don’t pull it out with your with your hand you you put it back on the fork and you put it down now i think it’s a lot more subtle to you know put the hand up by the face grab that thing you’re like no i’m never gonna know what i just did as opposed to spitting the food back on the fork right that’s kind of yeah but hey that’s the tradition they’re the rules but that so in regards to that mm-hmm uh what if so it has to be something like like a bone like hey a piece of gristle you’re eating a steak and there’s a piece of gristle that ain’t going down yeah what are we gonna do put the fork back next to your mouth this is a legend look i’m not i’m not even following this protocol because i think that’s a lot nastier i’ll clandestine move you won’t know what happened but that gristle’s coming into my hand it’s going to be somewhere on the ground makes sense but what if and this might go outside of the scope of even what you’re talking about what if you eat some chicken that’s like dry or like well you know some new food like escargot or something like this and you’re like oh first time i don’t like this at all do you spit the whole escargot on the fork or we have to go we’ll have to consult the depressed guys that’s a good direct guy i don’t know what to do i think you’re in a tough spot yeah i had that happen i was i don’t like seafood and i was with i was in sierra leone and i was there was stuff going on down there and i was with my commanding officer and there was like i said there was things going on we were trying to figure things out so we get invited and i was like his little sidekick guy was a prior enlisted guy but i was had been commissioned as an officer and he was just really taking care of me and showing me the ropes and so he gets invited to go see the charge affairs which is the number two underneath the ambassador in a country unless there’s no ambassador in which case they’re they’re the the lead and in this particular case there was no ambassador so this individual was the lead so we roll up and this is in sierra leone there’s a freaking war going on there the echo mog versus all that craziness is happening in liberia it’s just it’s just mayhem down in africa so we roll up to this like really nice house and every there’s servants in the whole nine yards and the first thing they put in front of me is some kind of crazy like like no it’s it’s like octopus shrimp and like raw fish all in one thing and i’m trying to do what i remembered from you know adequate which is you eat whatever you know they’re putting something in front of you they they went the distance and so i’m i i was just i sucked it up bro i did it for the good of the mission for the day all right a little detour there back to the book i also took up boxing everyone had to be part of a sports club at sandhurst and i wasn’t into rugby or rowing boxing seemed like a decent choice initially i hated the 4 30 a m starts but as fitness started to as the fitness started to impact on me and i felt myself improving i came to relish the early morning alarm calls plus there was the added carrot of the annual fight night in which the most dedicated committed boxers were chosen to fight watched by the whole academy as well as a string of generals politicians and vip guests i was incredibly proud to be chosen as one of those fighters and on 9 november 2005 i stood in the ring surrounded by over a thousand people face to face with officer candidate mortimer i won the fight by knocking my opponent to the ground but i’m not retelling the story to discuss the win i had a huge i had a huge respect for my opponent and the opportunity that came next arose simply from having stood in the arena after the fight all the boxers were invited to the sergeant’s mess a club of sorts where many of our training instructors lived this was a huge honor because it was because this particular mess was usually out of bounds and the sergeants themselves were only seen in their context in their context as authoritarian figures all muscles tattoos and shaved heads the fact that we privileged few were allowed into their private domain was viewed with absolute envy by the other cadets the sergeants crowded round the fighters and congratulated us all on our performance victors and defeated alike as i finished my second pint of beer i found another one thrust into my hand looking up i saw it it was captain truett the sandhurst representative of the parachute regiment congratulations wood which regiment are you joining he uh he said sternly i hesitated momentarily before replying i’m not sure sir i was looking at the staffords or the int corp intel saw that he said you should join the perez my look of surprise must have been quite apparent the peras were the most fearsome soldiers in the british army i’m not good enough to get in the pair as i thought you needed to be a muscle-bound machine to get in surely it wasn’t even on my radar sit down the captain barked i sat on one of the little stools by the bar beer still in hand first two rounds of interviews have already been done he told me we had over 100 applicants and now we’re down to 20 i don’t do this very often and i won’t ask you twice but do you want to interview i sobered up pretty quickly my entire future rested in the balance and all sorts of thoughts crossed my mind what about the staffords they seem like a nice enough bunch and the intelligence corp they did some interesting spy related work it could be a good start to my career which would allow me to travel too when it came to the peras there were a lot of unknowns as a regiment they are shrouded in mystery and are considered to be one of the countries if not the world’s most elite military units i didn’t know what to expect and i didn’t think i was capable of joining their ranks the temptation was to play it safe and stick with a more achievable goal i knew what i was getting in to with the staffords if i agreed to an interview with the paris i would automatically have to turn down one of the other options since you can only interview with two regiments and the perez had the toughest selection of all just peaking the intelligence corps if i turned down the staffords and failed the board for the others i ran the risk of not gaining any of my choices i could end up being a blanket stacker in the logistics corps for the rest of my career the captain was staring at me i’d like to interview sir i told him expecting that it would take place in the coming weeks nope captain truitt launched into a formal interview right there at the bar grilling me about my own motivations experiences education and skills another 15 after another 15 minutes he stood up shook my hand and told me to report to his office at 6am the next morning and that’s what i did hang over in all i was fast tracked to the final eight and then at the last interview with a panel headed by some of the most senior figures in the british army i was offered a place in the parachute regiment that’s how i got into the paras freaking epic story yeah i mean it’s in hindsight it’s those little moments isn’t it that can change your entire the course of your life and it was that drunken moment in a bar that you know boxing is what got me in and that’s probably if i hadn’t have joined the paris there’s no way i would have been able to do half the stuff i’ve done since then let alone have the confidence to go and spend uh you know 10 years exploring the world so i’m glad i took it up and i’m glad i took the risk and you made that decision in the split you literally hadn’t thought about the pairs at all but i haven’t even been on my radar and you thought maybe you weren’t quite capable of doing it is that what kept it off your radar i think until that point you know i mentioned there the staffordshire regiment which was my local regiment and the intelligence corps which was was very difficult to get into more from an intellectual capability so i felt that in having the the ink call that was gonna you know that was quite a big risk the staffords was slightly more guaranteed in in many respects so the paris you know like i say i you know i’m not i’m not the sort of biggest muscle-bound guy in the world and and looking around at some of the other guys that had been in the paris there’s quite a there’s quite an aggressive mentality to get in there and like i said there was a hundred applicants for only six places in the end um so no it hadn’t been on my radar but i think the boxing which had encouraged me to just have a bit more confidence is what did it for me so and that and and then the the probably the drinks i’d had for the in the bar at the time if you just said no he handed you another shot probably got you to say yes do you keep in touch with this guy yeah this guy freaking changed your life he did yeah he actually he sent me a message on linkedin the other day which is quite a coincidence because i’ve not heard from him for uh for quite a number of years and i mentioned that he was going to go in my book and he said why i said well actually so you uh it was it was you that i can thank for all of all of what’s happened and then what about the guy that found your wallet nicest guy ever i’ve tried to track him down i can’t find him anywhere one day i’ll i’ll send him a nice letter back yeah it’s just a good reminder to people to everybody you know you have the opportunity to like completely change people’s lives and and just by doing something cool and nice and it’s freaking those those guys i mean first of all giving you your wallet back and your money that’s kind of crazy um but then just giving you all a six page essay on how to move forward and and and you know what’s look not everyone’s gonna take you up on your advice right cool and you give people advice all the time and you might get sick of doing it and you think well it’s not worth it but you change one person’s life and you’re a perfect example of that of of your world changing because these momentary decisions and momentary mentorship from people it’s unbelievable it’s awesome um let’s get to the paras a little bit going back to the book to join the parachute regiment candidates must undergo a tough selection process called pre-parachute selection run by pegasus company which is usually referred to as pico pea company yep based at the infantry training center in cataract north yorkshire after 21 weeks of training candidates are put through eight tests to designed to test their resilience and determination including a 20-mile endurance march laden with a 16 kilogram pack and a rifle in under 4 hours and 10 minutes an intimidating assault course which is what you guys call obstacle courses and maybe we do call them assault courses too let’s go with the salt sounds way cooler 17 meters above the ground called the transient is that right yeah and 60 seconds of milling milling arguably the flagship event of parachute selection is a boxing match between candidates of similar size and strength in which determination and aggression are awarded and dodging and blocking lose points in short it amounts to being punched hard in the head for a minute straight while trying to hit the other guy as much and as hard as possible if either combatant sheds blood or is knocked to the floor the clock is paused blood wiped off and the bout resumes it is forbidden to aim at any part of the opponent’s body besides the head and the winner is the most aggressive candidate milling is designed specifically to replicate quote the conditions of stress and personal qualities required in a combat situation and test quote determination and raw fighting spirit of the candidates it is this raw spirit of controlled aggression that sets peres apart from the rest of the army good times yeah i had to go to youtube on that one and watch some milling it’s pretty cool it’s freaking legit just go as hard as you can it’s pretty sick unadulterated aggression punching straight to the head you can’t back off you can’t turn away if you turn away that’s you you’ve you’ve screwed your entire career it’s all based on that where moments especially as an officer if you show any weakness if you if you cower away you you won’t get in the regiment so you could have spent months doing all the other training you could have passed all the interviews done the test i know guys that spent six months who were perfectly capable of doing everything else and then they were just a bit weak on the milling that was them done do they actually fail yeah and you’re not in and then you’re not in then you’ll get sent somewhere else did you have to like rearrange your brain from your boxing training to not you know parry and slip very different yeah yeah because i would think your instinct would be you’d be slipping you know and moving and head movement and everything that you’ve learned to be a good podcast you have to throw it out the window and there’s no training for milling the the only event that you do you don’t practice this at all the first time most of the blokes actually mill is is on their test so you you know you’re giving your gloves and you’re ex you’re told the rules and you just go in it’s a great spectator sport yeah this is definitely this should be a pay-per-view for sure it’s everything like that the ufc wants right just punch each other as much as you possibly freaking can yeah how often do you guys get knocked down a lot yeah like it’s every other one this guy’s going down i mean it’s it’s pretty full-on i mean especially as the officers because you’re in with the the enlisted guys as well so there’s probably let’s say 90 enlisted guys and like i say six officers and they always with the officers i mentioned in there that you’ll usually pull up against a person of your own size and weight officers that’s not true they put you up against the biggest guys out there so i was up against this this huge guy and it’s all you take your tops off it’s all done sort of you know so you can really get the full the full experience and um i was up against this huge guy and i was absolutely terrified probably because i’d already had my boxing match you know at sandhurst and which i’d won so i was quite proud of my sort of undefeated one win and then to go milling where you’re surrounded by not only your future brother officers but also you know dozens of men that you will go on to command they’re all watching you all their eyes are on you so you you know you’ve got to put on a bit of a an act a brave face of course but you don’t want to lose and thankfully i did win and it was only afterwards i mean i was i got a lucky puncher to knock the guy out but it was only it was only afterwards that he came up to me he had much taller than me much bigger than me and he was like good fight so he said i’ll be honest i was i was terrified i was like are you serious like i’m literally half your size he said you were the sanders well no he just said you’re a parachute rodriguez officer i was never going to win against that and i think that it’s the its mindset isn’t its mentality and so he was bizarrely it was nothing to do with physical presence it was it was far more against you know it’s just that what’s going on in your mind and for him it was to be up against an officer was was um was a big thing damn they play that game in the seals you give the young e-dogs a shot at the title against officer that officer better hang on because he’s gonna bring it the other cool thing is i was watching the videos it’s like uh basically the ring is formed from the crowd yeah and it’s small yeah what is it it’s probably it looks like you’re not moving you don’t move your feet you’re just stacy that’s taking a punch yeah good times how much did you wear um i was probably 80 75 killer 80 kilograms yeah yeah what are you challenging him i’ll leave now going back to the book nothing worth having comes easy and we will need to work hard to achieve things that we want most out of life whether this is learning a new skill or advancement in our professional careers we need to be prepared to stay the course and keep working toward our goals no matter which obstacles appear along the way when i was on my way into the parachute regiment i bust up to cataract for my pre-parachute selection at that point i had no idea what the next 20 or so weeks would look like for me all i knew was that they would be the most stressful demanding challenging of my life so far but i had a goal in mind i was determined to earn that purple beret at the end the recognition of my achievement and my initiation into one of the world’s elite fighting regiments that level of drive is absolutely crucial we can’t give our all to anything if we’re not motivated by the end result and if we’re not giving our all we’ve no chance of sticking things through when the going gets tough over the first few weeks of selection it was pretty clear that a lot of people didn’t have what it took some couldn’t handle the rigors of training and fell behind others decided that enough was enough and dropped out of their own accord midway through i had my own moment when i thought my time on selection was up i came down with a shin injury that sent me back behind the rest of my cohort for a few days unable to join in the rigorous drills and knowing that when i was back in action things would be exponentially tougher for the time i’d missed i’d wondered i wondered if this was worth it i started thinking about what my life would be like if i failed selection probably not all that bad i could probably go and reapply to one of the army’s other more sedate regiments then what have a fairly average military career perhaps go on some go to some interesting places and do some interesting things but nothing grabbed me about it even more so when i considered a life and career outside the army having just passed out of sandhurst i couldn’t for a moment contemplate the prospect of a civilian life all i wanted was that maroon beret it kept appearing in front of me every time i closed my eyes in a way it would have taken some motivation to present myself to one of the officers running selection and tell them that i wanted to drop out that i couldn’t do it but i had no desire to do anything besides recover get back to training and persevere through the rest of selection so that’s what i did i pushed myself harder than i previously thought possible quickly making up the ground i lost on the rest of the cadets i remember my fear of heights being pushed to the background when i tackled the transanium my 60 seconds of milling passed in such a blur i can’t remember them all besides an overwhelming need not to hurt the person i was paired with but to prove to him and everyone looking on that i wasn’t one for backing down whatever the circumstances perhaps i’m fortunate that i was born with this amount of grit and determination it’s not always a positive i’ve been told many times that i’m as stubborn as a mule but up there in the cold wet windy cataract these inner reserves of dry vision grit and resilience pulled me through and i got the beret i’ve been dreaming about it’s hard to think how different my life would have been without it one of the reasons i i wanted to read that little section was there’s a point where you’re you’re doing a little bit of rationalization like oh you know if i don’t make it you know like it will probably might not be that bad you know and i have to put up with this and i i hear people rationalizing stuff all day long as a matter of fact there’s a tv show echo trolls it’s called lost and they basically take these people out in the middle of nowhere and you’re by yourself i think it’s called lost no it’s called a loan sorry it’s called a loan and they go out and they put these people and my little daughter who’s 10 at the time she got really into it and we would watch it and so you can quit at any time you can key up your radio and sends out a transponder and they come and get you but you’d be listening to the people and you’d hear them start to rationalize you know and so i taught my daughter i said you know what they’re doing right they should be like oh he’s rationalizing because you know the guy says you know you know i like being out here and i love the nature but you know i really miss my family and i realize that my family’s more and i look at my little daughter and go what’s he doing right now rationalizing he’s about to quit so i like the fact that you started going a little bit down that path of rationalization and then you said you know what no it doesn’t work i think you know we’re all sort of prone to it just to to varying degrees and and when when when things get really tough you know those little elements of doubt do have a tendency to creep in and you just have to fight them you have to sort of try and look at your situation objectively and realize what you’re doing and that rationalization thankfully is is is uh is outrightly sort of castigated in the parachute regiment and you’re reminded stop rationalizing and the instructors it might sound like they’re shouting at you but what they’re doing is just reminding you not to give up so thankfully it’s it’s stamped out pretty quickly but a lot of it’s on your own shoulders you know nobody wants you to quit you know the the the unit needs officers that need soldiers they don’t want people to leave they’re not telling you to quit they’re telling you to to not quit but so it’s down to you and people do this with every freaking thing in everyday life all day long like that last rep or that doughnut that you’re like you know i did work out hard yesterday i did work out hard and it’s actually it’s really good to reward yourself right it’s good to reward yourself it’s good to have a positive feedback loop when i did work out hard yesterday and yeah i want to be i don’t want to be in a grind all the time you’ve got to enjoy life yeah right discipline because freedom how about the freedom part here’s the freedom part you can rationalize anything you can literally rationalize anything if you’re if you’re not freaking careful you will rationalize stuff that’s not good for you so you you get done with this train is milling like the last final thing uh close to the end it’s close to the end i think but the most important um event of all is something called the log race and basically there’s a big telegraph poll i can’t remember how much it weighs but it’s bloody heavy and there’s like eight eight people on each log and usually one or two officers on each log and it’s a race so you’ve got four logs or however many how many days does it take no no it’s just it’s one event um on i think it’s the second to last day or or the final day and it’s basically you are you’re sent off it’s it’s about i think it’s three miles or something like that um and it’s a race between the different groups but you’ve got to stay on the log if you come off the log as an officer that will stay with you for the rest of your career i know generals that who you know in the 70s are still reminded by their fellow officers that they came off the log in 1975 it happens so you you’re made aware of this so you you stand a couple of officers did come off the log i stayed on it um there was only two people left on the lock and this thing is bloody heavy there’s only two people left yeah and so you’re pretty much dragging this this log up hills so when you say off the log what do you mean like you fall off and people people just fall off and and they just pass out i mean it’s it’s it’s really heavy you start with eight you’ve got to do two you know like say two and a half or three miles uh on an off-road course it’s up these you know through through rivers and all this sort of stuff and uh usually by the end of it there’s only like top couple of people left oh really yeah but the other people still graduate uh they do but if you fail two events on p company out of the 20 or so events then you’re off the course so when i was i was later an instructor on p company usually with the soldiers at least for the recruits there’s only about 10 or 11 pass rate so we’d start off with a platoon of 90 or 100 recruits and we’d pass out 10 or 15 so that’s that’s how tough it is damn yeah and how long is the whole training 21 weeks uh yeah yeah so if we’re on a log and we’re going and i i’ve passed every event but i you know don’t carry the log i go to the side or whatever yeah i can still be a para only if you don’t come off one of the other events so if you fail let’s say the assault calls for the trinasium which is the aerial assault course where you’ve got to sort of jump across the high nets and things like that then you’ll be off the course so you can you can get all the way to the end of the the you know the course and if you come off if you fail two of these events that’s you off then you’ll get sent to another regiment is there a time limit on the log i imagine if there’s only two of you left like you take some time it takes it takes a while yeah it’s staying on is most important and not just giving up in the seal training you carry a log you spend a lot of time with a log but you also spend a lot of time with a boat like these little boats that used to be made out of rubberized canvas so they were really heavy they’re a lot lighter now than they were but what’s interesting so when i went through you know you’re carrying the boat on your head a lot and this is sort of what i thought you were saying you carry the boat on your head a lot and you know if we’re all in a boat crew and there’s eight of us in the boat crew it’s possible to sort of like shrink your head down a little bit and release your posture a little bit and not have your head carrying any weight which means that everyone else is carrying the weight so when i went through it was like a sort of um like it was happening and you’d see someone doing it and be like you’d hear people yelling like in another boat get your frickin head under the boat man well they didn’t have this but they have it now they have you can actually you get written up yeah for what they call duck boat so they’d be like charles your duck and boat and you can get like a demerit yeah they didn’t actually call it they didn’t have a name for it when i went through but now they have a freaking name for it because it’s like a it’s like you’re coming off your log bro like you’re not with the team and that’s not cool well we have the same thing i mean because we have there’s a stretch array so the same sort of thing where you’re carrying a stretcher for five miles that one um so you can get through to the as certainly as an officer it’s more apparent but if you can get through the whole course even if you stayed on all of the events you can get what’s called a stand-up fail which is basically you’re still standing up but you’ve failed on your attitude or personality so you can still get booted off if they don’t like you yeah that’s as it should be right because there’s some there’s some non-quantifiable leadership qualities that some people have or don’t have and if if someone you get someone that’s looking out for themselves and just you know trying to step on everyone’s back to get to the top we don’t want that guy on the team so you get done with that and now you show up you show up at the regiment more or less you’ve still got to do um the infantry battle school so there’s three months in brecken in wales where you then go and do um no apologies that was first p company and then yeah that was to the unit yeah so i joined the unit in 2006 just as they my three power getting back from afghanistan on the first tour so it was a pretty that was a pretty punchy tour as well and so you’re just missing new me straight in charge of 30 more veterans and that was quite a daunting challenge yeah what was your what was your what lessons did you learn from that um well i’ll never forget the day i was i took over my platoon i met the guys and you know you sort of taught at sandhurst that you’re going to have this sort of general montgomery moment where you’re sort of you know standing on a land rover sort of addressing your soldiers as they’re all on parade doesn’t really work like that i sort of walked into the barracks and they’re all in bed i was like uh could i speak to the guys so they all came together and there was a corporal corporal crabtree chris crabtree big guy and i said sir can i tell you a joke he said yeah go on he said how many um sangin veterans does it take to change a light bulb i was like i don’t know he says of course you don’t know sir because you weren’t [ __ ] there thanks welcome aboard welcome aboard but it was no it was daunting but you know i felt prepared you know sandhurst the infantry battle school p company it prepares you it gives you that confidence you know uh milling boxing all that stuff so whilst it was like quite something i’d already i’d hitchhiked through afghanistan you know a couple of couple years before so i think when when some of the guys started learning some of my stories they had a slightly more respect for me than they probably could have had um but it was still a big challenge you know you’ve got to prove to your man they’re not gonna they don’t they’re not just gonna follow you until they know you’re not you know not a dick basically yeah how long is it your um what’s the training like now the guys come home i’m sure they stand down for a little while and then let’s say we got to get ready to go back so i think the turnaround was about 14 months before the next deployment so there was a bit of down time there was there was plenty of opportunity for the guys to get some rest and do things like adventure training um and i mean there’s there’s a story in the book um where as a junior officer the commanding officer said this is the kayak go ahead go ahead tell us so basically the ceo said look all the all the new officers so the six guys that we’d all just come out straight out sanders you guys pick a sport each and um and then get all the guys to go and do something fun so i said okay well i was looking at sports and all my colleagues i would have pretty much chosen what their their their sort of chosen sports were so somebody did soccer football um somebody else did you know ran the rugby team my only sport of course at that time was boxing but three para already had a very well established boxing team so there’s no way i could go and join that so i was sort of scrambling around thought okay well i’ll just do kayaking um it sounds like fun you know i i’d done a bit when i was a kid so i’ll do that so i went to sort of you know asked for volunteers i got six or seven very unwilling volunteers from the soldiers because they were they’d rather be on leave but they’d all been told they had to join one of these clubs as well now that’s when things started getting competitive because the powers being the powers the commanding officer sort of then threw into the ring he said look you’ve all got to apply for whichever sport it is apply for a competition and you’ve got to win it because your powers so you were just thinking put together a kayak it was meant to be fun and we’ll go out in the river and we’ll have some fun and exactly it’ll be all good you can probably travel yeah you’re always trying to find some scam to travel exactly yeah but then he says hey i want competition so and i was based in a place called colchester in essex now there’s no there’s no sort of particular venue to go and learn kayaking in colchester apart from the local canal system now this was winter so i basically managed to get hold of a bunch of these boats and we were out paddling in the frozen you know dirty waters of of essex canals now there’s like shopping trolleys floating around the water there was like you know the homeless guys sort of taking a leak off the bridge as we were going under it i mean it was that kind of it was pretty grim and so the guys were not particularly inspired by this by this whole project and and i was trying to find a suitable competition to enter and that the main kayaking competition in the uk is um is basically a race it’s a 100 mile race along the thames um from a place called henley to to westminster it’s called the divisors to westminster race but that wasn’t until may which was we were meant to be back in the training cycle but then so the only other thing i could think of or find was over the easter weekend which was the army uh canoe polo championships which was in a swimming pool a pool in a town called aldershot which is the the home of the paris and so i applied for this um this competition they were like yeah we don’t normally get powers applied but fine turn up so after we you know we’ve done like several weeks training the guys were just about competent in staying in the boats without falling out but no you know by all means none of them could do a proper eskimo role at this stage so we turned up on on easter weekend and the guys were all really annoyed because it was easter weekend they wanted to be at home with their families and we found the the swimming pool attendant the guy who’s running the competition he said oh you didn’t expect you to turn up and um we got in our boats he said right get in the pool where’s all the other teams there’s meant to be like six other teams entering he said well it’s easter obviously nobody’s bothered you’re the only people here so we said well what does that mean he said well you’ve got the gold medal so out of all the teams that in the paris to do all these sports we were the only ones to actually win our competition um obviously we didn’t need to tell anyone that nobody else had turned up and we’d won by default but it goes to show you know if you if you uh you’ve got to be in it to win it so to speak now you guys are going do you know that you’re preparing to go to afghanistan yeah we knew we knew that so in the deployment was in the spring of 2008 um especially off the back of the first tour that they’d been involved with the powers were the first of the whole british army to to go into southern afghanistan into hellmann and it was like i said it was a um it was a very kinetic tour there was a lot of stories coming out of it so there was there’s a lot of things to live up to so yeah so we deployed to to helmand and um kandahar and um we were on something called the regional command group south so we were basically the rapid response unit to go and fly in in helicopters to wherever they needed us and it was a pretty varied role it was it was interesting because we weren’t in one of the ford operating bases like two para who were stuck in in in one of these fobs for the whole six months we were bouncing around all over the place um which meant that we would you know one day we’d be doing a raid on a taliban commander another day would be helping the local police build a police station another time we’d be going out clearing the opium you know so it was a really interesting varied role but it did mean that we all had to get our heads into this you know 360 degree battle space hybrid warfare no two days were the same and so it was it was quite a complicated environment in which to operate well who did you turn over with did you get a turnover from somebody when you showed up there yeah we did um i think it was the royal marines who were in there before us um but the the role itself of rc south was pretty undefined so it was pretty much whatever the brigade commander said we’d go and do so it might be the first job that we did was in a place called maywand and we had to go and um clear this this this town of any any taliban taliban elements i’d read about may 1 from my days doing history and this was a place that the british army had been in in 1842 and it turns out we were stationed in the same fort as the british army 150 years previously so that was pretty you know interesting from from somebody who’d studied the region you go into some of your um some of the operations in here and some of the leadership really lessons that you learned which are great lessons i’m going to the book here once on operations in zabul province in southern afghanistan my platoon was given the mission to search a village for a known terrorist recruiter for the most part this involved being invited by friendly women for tea scanning their kitchens and gardens with metal detectors and then being cursed and told the house belonged to an absent uncle as we dug up room and removed caches of weapon after walking around all day we were low on water and needed to get back to the helicopter pickup point which was five miles away across the desert as we were leaving the village i noticed a group of men huddled under huddled around under the shade of a mulberry tree they looked shifty and stared at us as we walked past one of them wore a white turban and had coal around his eyes looking like a taliban leader i got the translator to say hello and ask their names which he duly noted i reported the names by radio to our intelligence cell and they said they were all clear so we left the men and trekked back across the desert to where my boss was waiting by now the whole platoon was exhausted and thirsty we had not had time to eat all day and the temperature was over 50 degrees celsius which is like 120 degrees fahrenheit one of the soldiers was beginning to wobble and and i expected it might be heat exhaustion then to make matters worse my boss came over lev you know that group of men in the village yes well the one in the white turbine the incel now says they want him in for questioning what the hell i reported his name on the radio and they said he was clear i know they screwed up so what now well we’ve got two hours before your helicopter comes go and get him i shook my head i had two hours and it was 10 miles a 16 kilometer round trip in the perez we have a well-known physical stamina test known as the 10 miler which is a punishing speed march while carrying kit they can be hard work at home in the rain but out here in the desert low on water i knew it might be deadly i looked at my men and could tell that half of them weren’t up to it they were exhausted but orders were orders i figured that i could do the job with 10 or 12 men so half the men could stay behind i knew that in order to do so i had to get them to buy into the vision and feel ownership so instead of barking out an order i gathered my section commanders around i told them the situation and asked them what they thought were the best options a lesson i learned early on is that even if you already know the answer ask the question it makes people feel valued and part of the team and decision making process it doesn’t matter who gets the credit for the decision and when you take your own ego out of the equation it’s amazing what happens sir i have an idea said the youngest corporal why don’t we leave half the men behind and take some of their water i’m sure we can do the job with 10 or 12 men men that’s a great idea i said patting him on the back he grinned from ear to ear and i made him the point man i need 12 volunteers to come with me i said the rest of you can stay here the men looked at each other they knew it would be one of the hardest tabs of their life and that it would be dangerous because the taliban now knew our strength and would have time to prepare an attack as they saw us walking back across the desert private foster one of the new soldiers put his hand up i’ll come sir i need the exercise he joked sylvester was next then another and another because we had a strong team bonded with trust i had no shortage of volunteers even some of the men who i knew stood no chance of making it started to put their hands up because they felt ashamed but i already had enough we redistributed the water gridded our teeth and marched back across the desert to the village where we found the man in the white turban arrested him and marched all the way back again being chased by an angry mob of afghans it was a hard slog but one of the most determined team efforts i’d seen in my career to top it off we later found out that the man in the white turban was at the top of the regional most wanted list that victory and a shared hardship cemented the bonds of the platoon even stronger there was nothing that my men didn’t think they could accomplish legit i get it um often i’ll get asked you know how can i get my team to buy into the plan and i always say let them come up with a plan simple isn’t it let them come up with a plan that’s what you do um and that’s something you know you say you learned it where where do you think you picked that up was it something that you saw the instructors doing at sandhurst is it what your sergeant the way your sergeants ran thing ran things i’ll give you the honest answer i was actually i watched a series called shop i don’t know if you’ve ever seen it it was about um i think so it’s uh it was it was basically basically about the um the war um at the peninsula war in in the 19th century um but it’s uh yeah chomping in it it was basically a military drama series and um it’s often referred to in military circles because it’s it’s um it’s a it was a fun war in the sense that it was it was in her what’s the name of this place called sharp yeah richard sharp as in s-h-a-r-p p-e so in america we’d say sharp what you’re saying here right now sounds like shop but it’s all good i’m married to a brit i kind of understood it so so sharp is a military officer he’s a commander in the rifles and basically um often cited as a sort of uh figurehead in in leadership but i remember watching that as a kid and thinking ah he does exactly the same when did the series come out oh it was back in the 90s yes it’s an old series but i grew up watching shop so i think that was probably where i first saw that that style of leadership but again of course it was drilled into us at sandhurst and in training to to you know bring your team into the plan yeah you know if you if you’ve got a vision that’s great but you’ve got to get people to buy into it and i think empowering people letting them take ownership of those ideas is the best way of doing that yeah i totally totally agree um yeah a lot of times even if you think you have the answer and you ask the team what they think they’re going to come up with a better answer than you had in the first place exactly so it’s like why not just ask them yeah and i think ego is often the downfall of a lot of leaders in in some ways because it’s when you when you sort of uh when you think that oh because i’m the leader i have to have the answer that’s when things go wrong especially in the military context yeah 100 100 that’s a that’s a killer um leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield also pays to be lucky sometimes another little section back to the book one day we were setting up a temporary encampment on the outskirts of a lush valley i got the call from my commanding officer that a vehicle had been blown up a couple miles away and i was to take my platoon out on a rescue mission our armored cars had special tracks they could go over any kind of terrain we drove them across the desert and up to the top of an escarpment where the location of the explosion had been reported as we got closer i looked through the front windscreen and could see the remains of a land rover blown to smithereens i was expecting the worst as there should have been four soldiers inside i called the team medic and told them to get ready to treat any surviving casualties we stopped short by 50 meters in case there were any other bombs nearby and when i got out of my vehicle to my absolute surprise and joy i saw that all the men were fine when the land mine had exploded it had sent a shockwave through the car sending everyone in it flying out onto the ground they were all alive and seemingly unharmed i asked them if they were okay and apart from being dizzy and shaken they nodded and walked over to where i was standing there was space in one of our three vehicles so i put the men in the back of the car at the front telling the lead vehicle that we should reverse back out of the danger area because we might be in a minefield it seemed like a sensible option so that’s what we did making sure that we stayed exactly in our own tracks until we were well clear of the flat plateau at that point my three vehicles needed to turn around so that we didn’t get stuck in a bottleneck between two large cliffs so the front vehicle did a three-point turn and pushed around the other two so that it was now facing forward again in the lead we all did the same and drove off down a track back towards the encampment and by now i was in vehicle number two where the commander should always be then just as we left the scraggy boulder field there was an enormous explosion and i felt the shock waves hit my own car after a second of deafness and ringing in my ears i looked through my windscreen to see a massive cloud of dust as it cleared i realized what had happened the point vehicle had driven over another mine and to make matters worse it was the same four soldiers who had been in the first explosion i shouted down the radio telling everyone to stop exactly where they were whilst i considered the situation i could see bodies lying in the dirt next to the car which had the front end ripped off of it now i knew i had to show some real leadership and there was only one thing for it the metal detectors were in the car at the back and it would take them a good 10 minutes to clear the path between the cars let alone get to the front where we might have heavy casualties i got out of the car pulled out my bayonet and began to crawl forward stabbing the sand in front of me to check for mines luckily the car in front wasn’t too far and i was able to cover the distance quickly i reached the car and to my relief found that yet again by some miracle everyone was alive and what’s more uninjured one of the soldiers stood up dusted himself off and looked at me stabbing around in the dirt what are you doing sir he laughed you won’t find any taliban down there it was a lucky day made even luckier as i was filling out the daily report back at camp when i found out that my team and the remaining vehicle had been tasked with denying the half blown up cars that meant going back to the site and blowing them up properly with explosives so the taliban couldn’t make use of them in the future it was a simple task and i was told that i should remain behind with the other platoon commanders so that we could receive our orders for the next day as the team were driving back they too hit a landmine and the empty commander’s seat where i normally would have been sitting was completely destroyed by the explosion you can’t be a leader unless you’re willing to put your team ahead of yourself when circumstances call for it this requires moral courage and integrity the building blocks not only of great leadership but of a fulfilled purposeful life just out there digging for minds it was a lucky day a very lucky day and no one got in your seat no one got in your vehicle commander’s seat yep i was uh yeah i look back now and thank my lucky stars that um yeah that was a very lucky day what was the op tempo so like how often were you guys running out going out on missions well because of the nature of the job we were like i said doing different things so we’d we’d go out and clear a valley one day we might be out for a week then we’d come back to kandahar we were based in kandahar air base alongside the canadians for the most part um most of the brits were either in bastion or in um you know one of the fobs so it was quite i mean kandahar air base you know had a timmy horton’s coffee it had a pizza hut it had a burger king i mean it was a bizarre sort of experience so you’re you’re out there getting blown at one minute and then you’re in you’re in with the with the ramps as we we like to call them another and it’s such a bizarre thing to get your head around um but we weren’t in there for long we’d stay for a few days we’d regroup we’d clean ourselves up and then we’d get back out there and we did some really fascinating you know operations we did according to um the news report at least we did one of the biggest airborne assaults of the entire of the entire war we flew um to into zabol with um i don’t know how many chinooks it was like ten chinooks with apache support to do a full battalion level assault and um stuff like that when you’ve got um when you’ve got ride of the valkyries blaring out of the speakers it it sort of it was pretty um you know it was pretty energizing to say the least um equally you know we’d be out there helping rebuild a school painter paint a police station the next so it was it was quite it was it was challenging on different levels it wasn’t that we were getting in as many fights because actually the guys in the fobs were getting attacked every day they were immorted every day um we’d often go for it for a week without firing a shot in anger so it wasn’t necessarily the the the intensity of the fighting certainly for my tour it was more of the the variety and the scale of what we were trying to achieve how long was the deployment in total normally there’s six months i needed four months because um i was at the end of my tour as a platoon commander so my replacement was sort of brought in and then i i had to move on to another job so that’s when i went to be a an infantry uh at the recruitment center i was then a directing staff sort of recruiting and uh training recruits back where i’d done my training before and for that’s a historical um deployment for for the paras down there i know i was i was doing just some reading about it um you had a corporal brian budd who was posthumously awarded the victoria cross sounds like he just you know led a flanking maneuver against enemy taliban fighters ended up being killed but you know was able to suppress enough fire that the rest of his team could maneuver there’s another guy named um corporal mark wright award the uh the the george cross um pretty i mean did you read the story it’s like unbelievable story heartbreaking story but they’re in a minefield there’s guys wounded um he’s as he’s trying to get his guys out of this minefield like he’s singing happy birthday to one of his friends that’s you know in a really bad way and he he ends up dying of wounds but i mean just a just of incredible um bravery and and upholding that tradition of the paras you know to this day awesome stuff um when you get back i i know you mentioned in the book that you were you were considering um going a selection for for the special special forces and then and then well that was the net that was the natural progression like i say after after the tour um it’s it’s considered the the next step is is mostly officers then go to back to catrick to then train the next uh bows of recruits i mean it wasn’t my first choice i didn’t really want to go and be in the wind and the rain training recruits i would have loved to have spent more time in afghanistan but um but that’s that’s the way it goes you know in in the army so i was up in katric i i’d say that my morale was sort of flagging a little bit because i i was actually i wouldn’t say i necessarily enjoyed i’ve kind of stopped well i i i did quite enjoy some of it um but but that’s why i joined the army and so i was there i thought okay well you know go for special forces selection that will be the next thing so um passed all the initial tests and it was meant i was meant to be going on the full selection in january 2009 and i was at my peak fitness i was good to go and then i made the the the error of um of going to see my girlfriend in mexico um who had a ranch and um in a bout of uh silliness i i decided to get on a horse and do some rodeo on her ranch the horse threw me over a six-foot wall and i broke my leg uh a week before i was meant to be on selection so um i had to sort of limp in back to the barracks and obviously i was told i couldn’t do selection um needless to say and what was worse was all of the jobs for the next deployment which was going to be happening in a few more months had already been taken so it was it was a crux point in my career and i was like well okay do i stay and then do a job that i don’t enjoy for for two years or do i look at this as an opportunity and um it was it was quite a pretty depressing time because i i you know i was desperate to get back out there and do what i loved the most but but equally i didn’t really fancy spending two years doing a desk job that wasn’t why i joined the military at all so i i rang up my high school they don’t tell you about those desk jobs when you join the military that’s not even a thing right exactly there’s no recruiting poster that shows if officers sitting at a desk making a powerpoint exactly yeah excel is not what i signed up for so i after sort of really you know going through from some heart-wrenching decision-making i thought you know what i think now is the time to to do something else and actually in hindsight it was because i left hungary it was because i left still hankering for a bit of adventure and um i didn’t feel as though i’d done everything i wanted to do in in on that side of things that i probably it gave me the impetus to to do what came next so i i left and by by sort of by twist of luck i suppose when i because you have to usually give 12 months notice when you leave the military but when i rang up the um army personnel somebody hadn’t filled out the paperwork properly so um i meant that i could actually leave in four months and my boss at the time said look just take the time off get yourself together so i was on full pay and off i went so as soon as my leg was fixed that was me onto whatever came next i didn’t really have a plan other than linking to that other than thinking actually now is probably the time i can go back to that school schoolboy dream of of somehow becoming an explorer at what point did you climb merra peak yeah so that was in that was again that was just before i broke my leg it was in october that yeah so i was again a bit of down time um i was given the opportunity to do what you know as affection you know as adventure training in the army which usually involves doing some hill walking in wales i wanted to do something a bit more exciting so i decided to organize a proper mountaineering expedition to the nepal himalayas um so i got together a bunch of the junior ncos um at catrick who were you know my training staff and said let’s go and climb a mountain none of them had climbed a mountain before um but being paras they all sort of said this sounds like fun it’s three weeks off work so off we go and that was my introduction to proper um civilian style leadership in many ways because it was you know we were not in uniform we were doing learning a new skill um in a new environment so um off we went and we went to climb mira peak which is not a technical mountain but it’s six and a half thousand meters which is what’s that that’s like i think it’s about twenty one thousand for 247 um so it’s it’s a pretty high mountain and the airs they’re not there and you know you can suffer from altitude sickness so often it’s a three-week expedition um and it was it was actually pretty demanding especially for some of the guys who’d never been to that altitude before and i’d been backpacking in nepal and i’d done that sort of thing but i’d never never ever been to that sort of height so it was it was a really interesting lesson in motivating soldiers who soldiers love to complain at the best of times um especially when this is their vacation time so um it was all fun and games until we got to sort of 5 000 meters 15 000 feet and that’s when things get really tough and cold yeah you you break it down really well um i’ll go to the book here after more than 10 days of hard trekking we finally reached the snow line where the temperatures plummeted to minus 27 degrees and with gale force winds making the setup of camp a dreadful prospect at least three of the others and i were suffering severe headaches dehydration and very cold feet as we tried unsuccessfully to sleep at 5 000 meters on the summit day we agree we were greeted with clear conditions but two of the local sherpas decided to remain with the tents in camp rather than ascend to the top i led the way with jordi yeah i led the way with jordy and our mountain guide jason we plotted through the thick snow tied together in case a crevasse opened up it was punishing slow going and every step was hard earned with short gasping breaths the summit came into view a few hundred meters ahead but there was no time to celebrate as we stopped for a short break one of the soldiers approached me complaining that he couldn’t feel his feet anymore his boots had been on the tight side and as a result his toes were right up against the edge of the boot as we’d been trained i ordered him to remove his boots and socks and i placed his bare toe inside my jacket right up in my armpit where it would be able to warm up to body temperature naturally as we waited i saw another soldier shifting about he told me his feet too were numb and so after a while i offered the same service to him but before long my feet were also getting so cold they were excruciating we needed to move so once we’d taken a rest we pushed on another 100 meters to a crack by then just before the final push to the summit disaster struck a howling wind flared up the valley followed immediately by a white blanket of cloud i knew instantly that even if it was short-lived they would add time on to our exposure which might mean the difference between someone keeping or losing their toes to frostbite we had trekked for days and planned for months no one wanted to give up boss one of the soldiers shouted shouted we can make it it’s not far to go 200 meters more i looked up into the murky abyss of frozen air and then back at the faces of the two shivering soldiers i was torn from the looks around me it was clear the overwhelming urge of the group was to continue these were all paratroopers men proud of their own heartiness and expecting it above all from me their leader but i knew that if i decided to continue i was putting all our safety in danger and the fault would be mine alone for any consequences we turn back i shouted now i hauled the youngest of the crew to his feet and pointed down the slope back to where the camp back to the camp where the shirt was waited for us the most headstrong of the soldiers muttered and shook his head i didn’t say anything or blame him i was just as disappointed as he was we all knew that our chance of conquering the mountain was gone at least for this expedition months of anticipation and weeks of physical training had gone to waste as we got back to the tents and packed up the camp we were all silent it wasn’t until hours later when we descended beyond the snow line and to a sheltered gully where the sun had warmed up the rocks that one of the senior soldiers approached me you made the right call there boss otherwise we might have died or at the very least we’d be we’d all be missing a few toes as we carried on down the trail the disappointment that we felt at not achieving our aim seemed to dissipate and we were glad to have come down unscathed having lived to fight another day i had not wanted to make the decision to turn back it felt like failure and i was worried about the impact it would have on my soldiers estimation of me but as i discovered afterwards even those who had wanted to continue at the time had a lot of respect for the decision in hindsight moreover that defeat instilled a wonderful attitude in those eight soldiers after the expected banter and complaining that all sages soldiers are good at every single one of them said that the trip was one of the highlights of their military career what’s more many of them later became serious climbers and mountaineers and went back to summit mirror peak if i had made the popular decision that day rather than the right one it could have been a very different story just another and look i i usually say this in the beginning of these things i’m obviously reading only like tiny sections of the book you got to get the book there’s all kinds of lessons learned throughout this book about leadership about discovery about exploration just it’s full of them so get the book um but that’s that’s a good highlight a good lesson learned and this is now and so that’s sort of your intro to well maybe i can do maybe i can do something like this in the civilian world yeah it was and so when i left when i managed to get out of the um out of the army like i said broke my leg i was disappointed at not being able to do special forces selection but i was still hungry and that was that was the key ingredient because i was desperate to do something that i felt was was worthwhile um most most of my fellow officers who were who left the military um at the sort of rank of captain or junior major they were sort of at the process of getting married settling down and wanting something slightly more stable you were just understandable and i was just getting warmed up so a lot of them went to work in london in finance or uh consultancy something with a bit of cash at that stage i wasn’t motivated by buy cash at all i just wanted to go and have adventures and approve things you said we’re gonna go have adventures some of it was fun so i thought there’s got to be there’s got to be something in this and so while i was kind of planning i wanted to bring together my passions of writing of i sort of had an amateur interest in photography and of course travel was kind of at the heart of everything that i did so i was planning and i was chatting to a friend of mine tom bobkin who was um at that stage also in the process of of leaving the military and we we came with this idea um of setting up some sort of a travel company taking people on adventures expeditions he saw a few months left to to before he left the military so in the meantime i volunteered for a for a charity a friend of mine had set up a charity in africa in malawi and what they really needed more than anything else was vehicles they needed a couple of ambulances and so she was like is there any way you can you know somehow while you’re sitting around plotting your next trip why don’t you send me some ambulances raise some money or something like that so i said okay but we’re gonna do this the fun way so i i basically got together a bunch of my friends um told them to take two months leave whatever they were doing and we were going to buy the ambulances on ebay and drive them to malawi 10 000 miles away and that’s what we did i managed to raise probably at 50 grand not a massive amount of money but bought a couple of 20-year-old land cruisers off the internet painted them white taught myself basic mechanics stuck a flashing light on the top and off we went and we drove all the way through europe through the middle east went through syria you know all these crazy places and two months later went to you know finally delivered these ambulances to to this little clinic in in malawi and it was such a rewarding experience i mean it was a heck of a road trip but it was it you know it’s for a good cause and these ambulances are still being used today to save lives and and there was something about that that really i found really rewarding and i thought well maybe if there’s a way of commercializing this i can turn this into a lifestyle and and that’s what i did so when tom finally did leave the army we ended up setting up a company called secret compass which basically offered military-style expeditions in some of the most remote places in the world to civilian clients but with a very military ethos we’re going from a to b it’s going to be tough everyone needs to get stuck in everyone needs to wash their own dishes this is not a package tour let’s go so the first trip the flagship trip we did was horse riding in northern afghanistan which um in 2011 i think that was up in a place called the wakan corridor which is completely unaffected by war and the taliban um but it was you know it sold out i couldn’t believe it so how many people it was only about 12 or so people so small group trips the next one we did was um mountain climbing on the iraq iran border up in kurdistan and that was pretty special too we then went across the sahara desert in sudan with camels we we rafted down the nile in south sudan walked across madagascar all these sorts of insane trips but it was so popular it wasn’t long before we started getting the likes of discovery channel and national geographic calling us up saying look we’ve seen these kind of trips you can do can you take our journalists and our film crews so that was a bit of a segue into the world of media and before we knew it we were taking these highly respected film crews and journalists and directors into syria iraq wherever you wanted to go and um we met all sorts of people i mean i ended up doing the sort of security for george clooney at one point it was it was wild but um that was how it sort of led on to is he an actor or something or a politician george clooney yeah yeah i want to know he’s a bit of both isn’t he at some point i think it was 2010 you you started writing your first book yes and um you you write about it in this book you write about writing your first book and one of the one of the things you say you’re like talking about the challenge of writing a book and the quote that i that i liked was you said are you really going to feel more inspired tomorrow or do you just need to be firm with yourself and get started once again it’s rationalization well i really don’t feel like writing to today maybe i can wait until tomorrow you so you started writing this book and you go through your methods you know with some you know about how you lay it out and you’re you’re very methodical about your writing um how’d that book you know what the publishers just jumped all over that one huh sadly not so this was when i was trying to set up a business i was trying to have fun i was trying to get over the fact that i’d left the army and wasn’t i hadn’t quite achieved what i wanted to do so i thought okay what i’m going to do is going to write about that trip that we discussed before when i hitchhiked to india because i thought it was interesting um whether or not anyone else did was another matter i i wrote this book hundred thousand words um pitched it to agents publishers and basically got told to piss off at every every turn nobody was interested they said you know nobody cares about your holidays so um it was quite disappointing but i’d written a hundred thousand words it was on my laptop and i thought okay maybe this book’s not good enough but it’s been a really useful learning curve it’s it’s given me an introduction to writing and the process and that inspired me to to carry on and but i knew i needed to do something that was more impressive something that would get picked up and and that’s how it led on to the sort of the bigger expeditions later on so you were thinking i’ve got to do cooler stuff if i’m going to write a book about it and people are actually going to be interested exactly yeah what was the first step towards that what was the trip that you said all right this is this is worth writing about so like i said i was looking at freaking horse riding in afghanistan well no they none of those were big or bold enough they were all cool trips but they were two they were still two week you know trips oh you said two weeks two weeks yeah these were all like short trips that the paying clients could come on and whilst it was fun guiding trips for paying clients it wasn’t the kind of stuff that i could write about but it was it was all it was all leading in the in the directions were you guys profitable uh quite the opposite so i was i was i was homeless i spent three years bro you’ve been homeless since you were like 14 no but this this was proper homeless i was i had uh i basically whatever money i’d saved up from the army i’d invested into this company with my buddy which meant i didn’t have any money for rent so i was basically staying on friends floors um for three years but i also had a rule that i’d learnt in india i’d stayed at a gurdwara at the uh the the golden temple in india and it’s part of the sikh religion to offer hospitality but only for three days and three nights after that you can move on so i’d adopted this this i i quite like that because you don’t want to like you know sort of burn your bridges or or outstay your welcome so i’d adopted this mentality and i was pretty rigid with it so for three years i never spent more than three nights in one place so i’d stay with friends and even if they insisted i stay longer i said no i’m gonna i’m gonna move on so i kind of did this big rotation throughout all my friends in london but it did mean that there was a few occasions where there was gaps and i i slept on benches i’ll be honest i slept outside and whatever it took and it was it was a pretty tough experience because i you know i was kind of living on one or two meals a day maximum because that’s all i could afford especially in london it’s not cheap and then you know i was surviving by going away on these short expeditions where at least my expenses were paid for you’re stoked to go to afghanistan so you can get a meal just so i could get fed yeah for sure and then but whenever i was back in london for like a week or two weeks i was i was poor i had no money what was the up tempo of these trips how often were you going on those a lot you know it would be i’d be away for two or three weeks then back for a couple of weeks then away from you so it was basically nine or ten months of the year i was away why wasn’t the company profitable i mean i would imagine your clientele must have been people with a lot of money and for them the difference between how much would it cost if you wanted if i wanted to go horseback riding in afghanistan what were you gonna charge me well it’s probably about two or three thousand pounds so five thousand dollars okay so not super money i mean we were aiming at that high-end clientele but at that stage we just didn’t have the contacts we didn’t know those circles of people so we were trying aimer at the more mid-range budgets people who were adventurous who had a bit of cash but not we’re not talking billionaires here we’re talking you know people that work in the city i mean we had all sorts of people teachers i mean people who just saved up all year to do that one particular trip what about your buddy todd tom tom what about him where’s he living well he was married so he he sort of you know he’d already sort of managed to get himself sorted uh so he had a he had someone to live unlike me um so we were in slightly different places but um but but for me it was like you know i was using all of these trips as an opportunity to to learn the craft of writing to do more photography so i’d go away and do this horse riding in afghanistan take some photographs and i’d try and sell them to you know lonely planet guidebooks or the newspapers whatever it might be so i was trying to build a position will you get any bites on that yeah i was it took a while i mean i was doing my fair share of weddings and baby photos but it was all building up and um but it was on one of these trips i was out in south sudan doing it making a film out there um it was a fishing fishing show about a guy that was um fishing for nile perch in the middle of a war zone and the only problem was he he was didn’t really catch any fish which doesn’t make for a particularly good fishing show um and and when we were back in juba which i don’t know if you’ve been to juba but it’s it’s it’s there’s nothing there i mean it’s the world’s newest country at the time south sudan um it had about three miles of paved road in the entire country i mean even in the city centre it was just like dirt huts so pretty rudimentary place we were out there trying to make a show about fishing but hadn’t not caught any fish the whole thing was a bit of a disaster turns out that george clooney was in town doing some of his humanitarian work and um he he’d landed we tried to get him on the show we thought at least if we got george clooney in the film it’s gonna sell just for the sake that he’s in it um the only problem is that the cameraman who who was supposed to be filming george clooney because he was so starstruck turns out halfway through the interview forgotten to press record so that was a disaster as well but we were out there we were kind of as a reputation with it within the film crew um we thought this this whole thing’s a complete mess there’s shambles and we’re going to go back to channel 4 who commissioned this thing with our reputation in tatters at this point so they commissioned your company to film this it wasn’t my company i was just a freelance health and safety guy i was part of secret compass but we you know we basically saw something you got contracted out yeah so so channel four is paying someone else to make this show to make the show and you’re just a helper i was a helper doing all the behind the scenes logistics safety keeping people fed and watching and you recognize that this isn’t going well this guy hasn’t gotten a freaking fish yet he hasn’t got a fish george we’ve only got show up yeah exactly i ended up having to be george clooney’s hand double because they screwed up the first start of the interview i mean it was like it was pretty bad but that’s how i met a guy called neil he was the the second um he was the producer director on the show a second cameraman and he said look lev you know we could do this ourselves why don’t you get why don’t we film one of your expeditions you know cut the crap let’s go and do something cool he said have you got any ideas and we were in south sudan on the banks of the night and i sort of looked left and right so i was whopping great big river and i said well i wonder if anyone’s ever walked the length of the river nile and he said well i’d highly doubt it because it’s four and a half thousand miles long and i’m full of war zones so i said well let’s do it and so that’s where the idea was born um i decided i wanted to be the first person to walk the entire length of the river nile and i thought that’s that’s big enough and bold enough to write a book about and get published so that was the plan and that was the plan that was back in 2012 and it took me about almost two years certainly 18 months of planning fundraising trying to get tv interest trying to get a publisher all that sort of stuff but i was determined that come on may without even even if we don’t get the support of tv or or a book i’m gonna go and do this and just by committing mentally i think that’s what did it it was the confidence of then just walking into these meetings saying screw you even if you don’t give me any money i’m doing it and i think people saw that and then the sort of the i guess the credibility of having been a paratrooper that that got people bought into this vision and and somehow i managed to get the tv commission uh but publishing deal and everything else and got the whole thing fully funded and so off i went took nine months walk for four and a half thousand miles from rwanda through tanzania um through uganda south sudan all the way to the mediterranean in egypt and that was a that was a rough one i mean i i know um in reading through this you had one of the guys that was with you a guy matt matthew power yeah matthew he was a journalist and yeah he he yeah he he came out to write about me for uh for a magazine um and and sadly passed away from heat stroke on the way and that that was a real kick at the ass because you know it brought it home that this was real this wasn’t just some some trip away um you know stuff stuff can go wrong and sadly does go wrong sometimes but but it really brought it home and it made me really question the validity of this you know what was what i was doing right you know um but you know it happened and i thought i’ve got to carry on i’ve got to finish this um for his legacy as much as anything else to to make if if i give up now then what was the whole point in any of it so so this was so a tv crew is with you and they’re filming not the whole time no i mean the journey at the time when i set off i didn’t know how long this would take i’d anticipated about a year and you know you can’t afford to pay a crew for 12 months to follow me around so they came out four or five times for anywhere between three or four days and a week so they were only on the ground probably a total of about a month out of the nine months that i was i was on my own all with local guides you know i always try and have a local person with me as an accompaniment but places like sudan they couldn’t even get in because they weren’t issuing journalist visas so i was on my own for like two months in sudan how many miles were you doing a day um so i started doing probably you know 10 miles a day in in places like rwanda where it’s quite hilly um but when i was really into my stride in in the desert in sudan i mean it was hot it was sort of august september time with with 120 degrees in the desert but probably averaging 45 to 50 kilometers so 30 miles a day and then this tv show this is a tv show that eventually a four-part series walking the nile which then aired in the uk and in in the states and globally and it was a huge success far more than i’d ever anticipated um book became a best seller and yeah it changed my life you know i suddenly wasn’t homeless anymore when uh is it like on netflix where do you watch it uh it was on discovery channel in the us it was on channel 4 in the uk but you know you can still find it find it online yeah it’s still out there did you feel like these bastards that filmed it only came on this thing for like three weeks and i was out there for nine months well we all became friends and actually to this day like neil who’s the the guy who originally inspired me to do this for tv um we’re still you know best buddies and we still you know i’ve now set up my own production company so i make shows for other people and for myself as well and he’s on the team so um so yeah we all became very close i mean you tend to when you’re in those sorts of circumstances i mean we were in south sudan in the middle of a war zone you know it was uh i mean they weren’t there at this time it was just it was just me but um i was gonna say because you become close and then they’re like hey i’m out going back to england for two months all the exciting things happened where they weren’t there i mean we were in a place called boar this was during the um just the uh the sort of uh there’s a big big civil war happening in south sudan it was um they just got a new country but there’s still a lot of tribal fighting i turned up in this town called boar uh the same morning that 60 members of a tribe had been murdered inside uh inside the united nations refugee camp um the whole thing was kicking off i found myself on top of a you know this bombed out hotel with the rebels approaching on one side you know tracer fire going over heads there was mortars landing nearby and the only alternative apart from watching the fireworks display was climbing down the the ladder into the river now which was filled with crocodiles so it was it was a pretty hairy time and lots of things you know like i said can do go wrong but turns out that makes for good tv then you so you get done with that you you got a place to live now you’re kind of going in a different direction as far as financially uh but now you got to start plotting on things like are you thinking yourself all right i gotta one-up myself well it came pretty quickly you know the the show was successful um i was then asked you know literally a couple of months later where’s next and of course people want bigger and better i thought when i’ve just walked the entire length of the river nile i mean what’s bigger and better than that so i thought well what i’m going to do is i don’t want to be a one-hit wonder or a sort of flash in the pan i need to think the long game so i i sort of squared it away in my own mind the kind of journeys that i wanted to do the kind of places that i wanted to visit and i wrote down sort of my values the the things that i will not move away from and it was actually going back to my degree doing my degree at university i said i’m gonna i’m gonna visit places that hold a genuine interest um because at this stage i was getting all sorts of offers to go and build you know sort of log cabins in in the woods in alaska and do fishing shows and do cooking shows all of which are great and interesting but if i was to actually see this as a long-term career i need to sort of call my own niche and so i thought by doing journeys either on foot or certainly at the slowest pace into places that have got a bit of a bad reputation there’s a there’s an interesting way of shining a spotlight on places that really need it so i thought why not pick a geographical feature i the himalayas seem the next obvious choice the biggest mountain range in the world mount everest and walk the length of that so i thought i’m going to start at the place that placed very close to my heart afghanistan in the pamia mountains and walk all the way to the tibetan plateau and that was another journey of two and a half 3 000 miles and that took about six months as well so that was the next big journey which happened 12 months later and then ever since then i’ve been doing one big journey pretty much every year since then are you going so were you solo when you walked the nile uh well i said i always have a a local guide they would they would change over depending on which country i was in so i was anyone to do the entire what about the himalayas solo uh and the crew would fly out and meet me along the way to film what they thought were the bankers and then but you know it’s always the way that the most interesting stuff happens when you’re either on your own or or in a very small crew because the moment you’ve got a car with a with a crew there things are not quite the same people sort of close a bit and they’re not as open so a lot of the interesting stuff happens um you know when when you’re unaccompanied um which is what happened when i was in nepal and my car was i was the one time is the the irony of a walking expedition is the one time um that i decided to get a taxi because i was told i couldn’t camp in in this particular village and i had to move on to the next um that was when i had a pretty big accident yeah tacos that you write about in the book talk us through that one so it was um i’ll never forget it it was the 19th of august 2015 um i was i was in a town called mussy cot with my local guide bin odd and actually my brother who’d flown out to meet me a day before to join me for a week of what was his annual holiday um i know the story so i can just imagine your brother yeah cool you’re going to vacation yeah so so we’re in the mountains and it was just it was almost nighttime uh it’s getting dark and most of the time you know i’d already been walking for three months here um we’d just camp in the villages or stay in locals houses whatever it whatever it took but there was a maoist interaction in this part of nepal so the communists were were taken over villages and they didn’t take kindly to to foreigners because you know they just said and they weren’t aggressive they just said look you can’t stay here go to the town and then you can come back tomorrow and carry on your walk but you’re not you can’t stay in this village because we’re having an internal dispute so we said fine so we got a local taxi got in it drove over the mountain pass and just as we were going over the crest of the cliff the brakes failed so the car goes careering down this this this this road and unable to slow down hits the side of the wall and bounces straight off this this cliff top and um when i say cliff top it was uh it was a huge fall straight into the forest below um about 150 meters which is what’s that 450 feet to the bottom of the gorge and somehow you know again thank you my lucky stars did you ever see belton uh there were no seat belts in this car i mean it’s uh it’s i guess the airbags weren’t popular what kind of car was it it was a mahindra jeep so it was a metal frame thankfully not some not some cheap stuff but it was yeah it was a straight off the edge and and that was me i thought how long how long were you no break rolling down the hill difficult to tell i think probably 10 seconds i mean the driver was trying to bounce it against the wall to slow it down but you can imagine these roads it’s just a dirt track sheer sheer sort of rock face on the one hand and then a drop off no no barriers nothing like that and it was just a completely pitch of pitch black middle of the night uh and that was it i thought it was i thought i was a goner and um it was almost comedic in the sense that it it didn’t it literally flew off the edge and we were airborne for what felt like an eternity it was probably just a few seconds but it was the only part of the uh the roadside where there were no trees because it was forested this this bank um but we went off the bit where there was obviously a river running through so it just kept on going and when we finally did hit the deck it bounced and rolled and probably rolled 10 times all the way to the bottom of the valley and somehow i stayed in the vehicle the driver and this random other um guy that he’d picked up a local had been thrown through the windscreen somewhere up on the mountain we stayed in the car and yeah made it all the way to the bottom at which point i thought i’d lost my arm because i couldn’t feel it or see it um i managed to when the car settles yeah when it finally settles are you conscious consciousness conscious the whole time yeah what do you say to your brother besides bro i’m sorry well you’re out here it was i can thank my brother because when i when i sort of figured out where i was i crawled out the car thought i’d lost my arm my first instinct was to go find my arm you know it’s seen on the beach him saving private ryan where he’s looking hold his arm looking slightly dazed and confused that was me in this car i went i couldn’t find it then i realized it was still attached but i couldn’t feel it it was pointing the wrong way it was completely i mean you can see the score there um i had to sort of snap it back into place that’s when the pain started and i think it was me screaming that woke my brother up and he was relatively uninjured i mean he’d been bashed around but he hadn’t got anything broken so i couldn’t move i was in such pain binod guide he was pretty much unconscious and pete my brother he he came over and um you know he he’s done if he’d done a few trips but nothing like this you know he he was working in finance you know he sort of he’s back in finance yeah well no it’s the interesting thing was pete rescued us he went and shouted for help luckily the sound of the car crashing had woken up some local villages a mile away and they’d come to investigate probably took about an hour maybe for enough locals to come to carriers out but then they had to carry us a mile through the jungle to the local village were you you weren’t bleeding uh i mean you might i wasn’t bleeding you weren’t like bleeding bleed like you weren’t life-threatening blood no it was just my arm was just completely mangled um the the driver sadly was in a very different position he’d broken everything his body his neck as you know he was somewhere in the mountains instead to go and find him we were taken to a very small clinic in the local village and when i say small i mean there’s like chickens running around the water this was basic stuff um but luckily there yes that qualifies as basically when you roll into the hospital and there’s chickens they um but they had morphine thankfully so that that you know took away some of the pain but yeah my brother he he coordinated the rescue it took three days though because it was a rainy season we couldn’t get a helicopter in the roads were all washed away um so it took three days for helicopters to come so it was a it was a trying time to say the least and i think my brother was possibly regretting his uh his holiday distinction but um but yeah he he was a real trooper throughout the whole experience and um yeah so that that that really disrupted the trip a little bit but i had to fly back to the uk for surgery because they couldn’t do it in kathmandu because it was just after the 2015 earthquake which had screwed all the hospitals so i went back to the uk had surgery they fixed my arm but then i couldn’t give up this was my i chosen this this was my career i wasn’t going to give up so i uh whatever it was 45 days later i flew back out to nepal went back to the car still there in the jungle rusting over and carried on walking for another three months the tv show came out yeah they came out they enjoyed that bit they like they film me in hospital getting surgery and all the rest of it and and then this becomes another tv show and did you write another book about this yeah wrote a book yeah called walking the himalayas keep it simple and um and then they of course they said what’s next so i had to come up with another one you’re paying yourself into a corner man yeah absolutely so what was the next one walking the americas um so i wanted to do something in central america i’d had this girlfriend this mexican girlfriend who so i knew mexico quite well uh but i was fascinated by the ancient mayan civilization i wanted to go to see places like honduras and um guatemala and in colombia because i knew that would have a bit of edge and so i decided to walk from where the spanish first landed um in the yucatan peninsula give it a bit of historical context all the way to south america across the darian gap which um is probably one of the most remote and fearsome stretches of jungle anywhere in the world so that was another six months another 2000 miles of walking um again lots of scrapes there as well and this is the same thing tv crews coming out joining you for four or five days here and there wherever they think there’s gonna be the most mayhem is when they’re showing up you’re carrying a freaking backpack with like a water bottle yeah and 50 bucks yeah yeah and off we went and um and that that was a really that was actually a really enjoyable journey because the guy that came with me my guide for that one was actually a guy who had known for a number of years called alberto who was the guy that got me into photography in the first place and he’d lived in mexico he’d never walked anywhere in his life anywhere and he certainly wasn’t a professional guide he was a studio photographer he was far more at home sitting on yachts with supermodels but he had just got divorced and was looking for an adventure so i said look mate come with me we’re going to go and have some fun and off we went and we walked for um yeah for six months through all these random countries and we went through the ganglands in honduras met um you know the sort of the cartels along the way we we’ve sort of had meetings with all sorts of gangsters it was that was a wild trip as well what about a gopro i so i had this little flip camera the interesting thing is actually you’d think sometimes that it’d be tricky to film in these places but actually having a camera does open up conversations people are like hang on i want my photograph taken or i want you i want to tell you my story and particularly in places that don’t get many tourists because if you go to touristy places people aren’t they’re not that interested in getting the photos taken or or telling you their story but if you go to honduras i mean there’s one one story from there we were in um a town called san pedro sula which other than sierra dwaras i think was the murder capital of the world this is where the two main cartels you’ve got ms-13 and barrio 18 these two rival gangs that do pretty bad things to each other um are based they they’ve got their own you know neighborhoods and we wanted to walk straight through the city and the only way to do so was to cross between these two gang lands but of course the police and the army were like look we don’t go in there you can’t rely on us for backing so we asked around and alberto was sort of doing all the translation and we eventually found this street pastor who said look i know the gang leaders are both of these guys i can probably get you in if you want so okay well ask the question so he got his he got two phones out actually and he called the leaders of both gangs and had them on speakerphone next to each other which is bizarre both of these leaders were both in jail right because they were and he got them if they were and he got them both on speakerphone and said look i’ve got these two two gringos i mean he wasn’t melbourne who’s a mexican but he called us both grigor he said look they want to walk through your through your turf um you know will you let them and um to my surprise these both these leaders like yeah absolutely no problem you know as long as you give a fair and honest representation of of of our story we want to tell you our story and why we have these gangs but he said just give us 24 hours because we’re just going to clean up the graffiti and pick up the trash from the streets they wanted to show the best side of their gang wars and it was the most bizarre experience but we went through these these areas escorted by these kids 10 12 year olds we’re covered in tattoos with with pistols down their jeans and they showed us the casa lokas the crazy house where they torture each other and they should the idea this is where we killed you know this person this is where we hung it was like tragic stuff but in the most surreal setting and it was it was a very bizarre experience to go and see that and we saw a guy shot at the side of the street you know just in just yeah from these gang wars so and and i’m not into voyeurism i don’t go there to sort of glamorize any of this it’s trying to show what you know what the struggle is like for a lot of people living in these circumstances and and not shy away from some of those really difficult but compelling stories now did you did you have a film crew there when you did that section they they had come out and and we had a real struggle with the channel to to sort of allow us to go into these places because you can imagine the lawyers back home it’s like oh this is this is too sketchy we’re not sure about this plus people with brains back home bro but you know i think a lot of it was down to the fact that we got we found this guy who he wasn’t a cowboy he was like i live i’ve lived in these in in on this on in these neighborhoods all my life and so did the camera come crew come through or not so they cut yeah they did yeah so all that footage and so what’s that what’s that show called walker walking the americas walking the americas and how many hours is one of these series each one’s i mean the nile was four episodes four hours himalayas was five i think walking in america was five as well yeah okay so now you get back from that and you got to step it up again right okay so the next one basically this is what you’re getting into going back to my sort of original point of going back to places that i’d studied my studies at university have mainly been about um you know the middle east about places where the old british empire had a legacy or places in you know in the news now current affairs and obviously um russia iran were both pretty high up on the agenda this was back in 2017 putin’s sort of just getting reelected all this sort of stuff so i wanted to go and explore that region more the caucasus as a historical region is fascinating so i thought why not do a journey from europe into asia over the caucasus mountains from russia into iran we called that one crossing the wild frontier so we started on the black sea finished on the caspian sea and going through places like chechnya dagestan azerbaijan georgia and then finished in iran getting travel permits to go into those places was was actually quite tricky but you know we had to apply to russia and the first thing they ask on your visa application is have you or have you ever served in a foreign military so they dig deep into your background but thankfully they you know they let me in the same with iran i mean getting into iran was a tricky one because initially they were like no way we don’t let you know especially from from the uk we’re not friends right now um eventually through a contact i was told that i could meet a person from the iranian embassy but not at the embassy it was just very mysterious lady who wouldn’t give me her name with sunglasses met me in a cafe in in south kensington and london and said what do you want i said there’s a link to all my shows go and see for yourself i gave her a copy of my books and she said okay i’ll go ahead and read them and the next day i it was on the president on you know the president’s or prime minister’s desk of around and i got approved of visa and i think what they liked is the fact that i’m i’m not there to deal on propaganda but i’m not shying away from the hard stories either but i’m not i’m certainly not there to do investigative journalism to with an agenda-based sort of approach i’m there to show what life is like for normal people and and they let me in and so i did this amazing trip through places that you would you just don’t get a fair understanding of especially places like chechnya and and that was a really really fascinating journey thankfully nothing went particularly wrong on that one i just got a really great understanding of what what the region was like yeah and i think um you know a lot of times when people ask me you know i was just asked this i was getting interviewed the other day and you know people started asking about well the war in iraq should we have been there and all this was it is it the moral right thing to do and a lot of times what i try and do in those situations is i try and bring things down to a very granular level of what it was like on the ground and what i what i like about what you’re what you’re doing is you’re going be i guess the word is beneath the politics i don’t know if that’s going to sound right but you’re going beneath the political atmosphere to the actual other human beings that are living their lives that are you know trying to earn a living trying to raise their family trying to build their future and there’s so much commonality that gets missed and that’s that’s often what i also say about iraq you know it’s like i would kick in the door to a building and there’d be you know a family in there and they dad’s trying to build a business of selling whatever dates and the mom’s you know trying to sell stuff that she can sell in the neighborhood and the kids are wanting to play soccer and they’re just normal people and yet you can never you can never see that when you when it’s all screened out by the political viewpoint so what i what’s is clicking for me now and i’m starting to understand is that you’re going beneath that level and talking to the people on the ground and getting a real look and probably i’m assuming exposing all these commonalities that we have as human beings with other human beings yeah and i mean that was never an outright intention i it’s just sort of happened throughout these journeys is is trying to find out what what does unite us and actually trying to find those human stories and actually there’s a lot of positivity and what i’ve found is the sense of hospitality you know has been overwhelming throughout and and that i’ve seen that in in some of the places that you wouldn’t expect it yeah and even even you know i started off joking in the early part of this you know no one would ever invite me in their house and then as i’m sitting here listening to you talk and i’ve been to i mean obviously i’ve been all over the world and been to all kinds of different countries and it’s the same thing when you actually when you actually get past that get underneath that political um vision that we have of a place there’s you know i’ve had people treat me unbelievably well all over the world and that’s why you have to get you have to you have to make those human connections with other people and you’ll realize oh yeah they’ll help you out i mean like you said most people they’ll give you some water if you need some water they’ll pull over the side of the road and help you if you need it that’s ab absolutely so that’s that’s uh very enlightening i’ll never forget when i was on the nile this was back in 2014 i was in sudan and it was this was a bit with there’s no crew there it was it was me with with a local guy called moes and it was getting very hot we couldn’t carry enough water just to survive so we had to go and buy some camels from the local market now i don’t know how to keep a camel you know keep a camel going so we thought we’d better employ a couple of bedouin camel handlers to come with us so for two months we trekked across the entire sahara following the river nile there was one bit of the nile where um we had to go sort of slightly into the desert because there was some security issues by the um by the nile so we were going through these villages and everyone was so hospitable people were saying come in have a you know have some of our water and it was almost it was so overwhelming we were getting slowed down because we needed to reach the egyptian border um before ramadan because that was that was the basis for which these two camel handles said that we’ll come with you but only for 50 days because we’re going to get back to our families so we that was the deadline that was the hard stop so off we went and we were getting further and further behind schedule because of the hospitality because people say oh come and teach my kids english and this and the other so we my two camel handlers were on the verge of revolt at this stage today we’re gonna we’re going home if you’re gonna you know mess around doing your silly filming and this stuff so we came to an agreement we said okay what we’ll do is day on day off we’ll one day we’ll go through the villages where we’ll meet people and talk and film and this you know all that and then we’ll do another day walking in the desert avoiding the villages and camping out in the desert and thereby we can cover more ground but there was one occasion where we’d done this we’re in the middle of the desert about a mile away from the nearest village we set up our our camp made a little fire and the local villages a mile away must have seen the flickering of the flames in the desert and it wasn’t long before a crowd of men came and came out to investigate they said what are you doing and we said well we explained that we were trying to avoid their hospitality in the most polite terms possible and they said they were getting really upset by this i know you must come and we said no one guy stormed off and he came back half an hour later he carried his bed on his head and he said if you’re not going to come into my house my home is coming to you and that i think really demonstrates the the incredible hospitality i can’t remember i can’t ever imagine that happening back in london if a sudanese man was sort of passing down the street but it’s it’s moments like that that really do kind of restore your faith in humankind but you still have to step it up a little bit it seems like we’re just getting we’re just getting more and more hostile environments and so now it’s like 2017 2018 the freaking war in iraq and syria with isis is just flaring up flaring up so of course you’re like a moth drawn to the fire so that’s the next one right so i’d always been fascinated by the middle east like i mentioned before i in 2003 i was in iraq um i like the way you kicked these stories off with like i’ve always been fascinated with you know how sharp a shark’s teeth could be all right so you got this fascination with the middle east so i’ve been there in 2003 which is when i hitchhiked through baghdad and all this you know so i wanted to return to to iraq and wanted to see more of the region ever since and i actually in fact after the nile i pitched the idea of doing a trip around the arabian peninsula to the powers that be within tv and sadly they said no they said one it’s probably too dangerous and two they didn’t feel as though there was sufficient interest they said in fact the word the exact words were that’s just the realm of current affairs and news nobody nobody’s interested in the middle east as a destination it was a place to find out more about i thought that was just a disappointing answer so euron i’d pitch this you know after the himalayas i pitched it again they said no let’s do the americas after that i pitched it again they said no again and that just wound me up so after the rush into iran expedition i was like i am doing the middle east i want to go to arabia come on may we’re the way out you so i pretty much you know got told no we’re not doing it by by the tv company by the tv guys and um i said well i’m doing it which didn’t didn’t go down well in tv land in the uk but i decided that was that problem so i set up my own production company to facilitate this would you say tv people these are this is the channel this is the channel this is the channel and and you’re pitching that is it multiple channels that you’re pitching to as well no this is just like straight up it wasn’t the bbc it was it was channel four yeah um they but you know it then got syndicated out to discovery channel and whoever else wants to buy it internationally so you’re pitching to the people that have made your other shows hey let me do this one and they’re like look no no not happening and you just say all right cool i’m doing it anyways yeah so i wouldn’t say i got sacked but i kind of they said okay well you’re not working with us if that’s the case so i said okay that’s fine i’m gonna go and do it so i set up my own production company and basically self-financed this expedition with a couple of mates my friend dave and simon who chipped in and going back to that thing about empowering people and bringing people on the team i said look if we all chip in the same amount of cash we’ll take the same amount of profit at the end of the day and they said okay and these are guys who’d help me before on shows doing the health and safety and i got neil my god my mate who’s the director to come on board so we basically just clubbed together and off we went and actually it freed up so many things because i was getting more and more frustrated with more and more restrictions and limitations on how things were produced and actually i felt like my creative sort of my personal creative spirit was being somewhat suppressed a little bit so i said okay i’m gonna give this a go what’s the worst that can happen so we decided to go and just do this and and the idea was to go and look at the arabian peninsula and all the countries that that make that up um in the same way not necessarily walking the whole route this time because there’s a lot of empty empty stretches of desert where not much goes on but but certainly hitchhiking and and traveling with locals so the plan was to start up on the turkish border with with syria up in java and the kurdish region and basically walk travel hitchhike whatever all the way around the entire gulf and then finish up at lebanon in the historic city of biblos which is the oldest city in the world and revisit some of these places i’d been to on my earlier travels including baghdad and to create mosul now of course this was in the in the height of the war against isis they still weren’t defeated in syria and iraq um so it was a pretty big challenge um but doing it very light footprint it was only there’s only other three of us traveling at once we it meant that we could actually go and achieve something that had never been done before which is actually travel through all these multiple countries so going through places like syria were embedded with the the kurdish militia um in iraq we managed to join a group called the hashid um the the pmf the popular mobilization forces who are sometimes the bad guys but these are the guys fighting against isis on this occasion but they’re also iranian-backed militias i was embedded with them on the final hawija offensive which is the final battle against isis in iraq um on the front line i mean that was that was something else i mean it was it was an entire afghan tour in three days i mean it was it was intense um so now you guys are now you guys are the camera crew just three of us yeah so now you got cameras rolling all the time and i watched some of your some of the stuff that’s on youtube i watch you rolling up to that offensive and the guy’s like all right lunch break and there’s some you know having worked with the iraqi soldiers a bunch i was like i know what’s going on there i know what that feels like yeah um uh but but like what was what was the proximity to the fighting there were you getting right in it yeah i mean it was it was a it was kind of a bizarre experience because we managed to hitch a lift to the front line where these sort of uh that you know the the iraqi volunteers these weren’t the iraqi army these were literally the guys too old or too young to join the to join the military and they were fighting on their home turf they were fighting their neighbors so these were mainly sheer militiamen fighters who’d volunteered mainly to come out of retirement to basically go you know kick isis off the off the off the land so we were rolling up not i mean they had about 12 main battle tanks but mostly these guys were in flip-flops and toyota pickups you know with a 50 car mounted on the on on the back and driving in a straight line no no tactics no strategy literally a taxi to the front line so we got a taxi to the front line said we’ll drop us off here hitch to ride on a tank just jumped on a tank and just drove the main the point vehicle was a bulldozer with this iraqi dude with a cowboy hat i mean it was absolutely crazy yes smoking a cigar as the bullets were pinging off the front of this bulldozer and it was just a straight line waiting to get ambushed and we got ambushed and you know you could see the black flags of isis in these villages and we just drive up to them spread out bond the [ __ ] out of it and then go in there and we were in the mix you know right on the front line filming everything and um liberating these villagers and them capturing ice we caught three isis commanders i mean i’ve still got i’ve still got one of the flags at home actually that i took with me um but it was it was quite it was it felt a very important and historical moment you know these when when the villagers were liberated and they caught the command the isis uh fighters the women would come out they’d rip their burqas off and they were thanking these iraqi volunteers for rescuing them some of these women hadn’t been outside of their own compound for three years so it was it was it was a very powerful thing to to be witness to yeah we had a another gaston and covered another book on here holly who whose book only cry for the living and she interviewed a lot of those women and what they went through so you know liberation was the the understatement of the year for what was happening to the people inside those villages that were you know and cities that were were run by isis um did you what are you you’re not i know that you don’t carry a weapon when you do this stuff um were you just wearing body armor we we managed to pick up some body armor from her bill you know just bought some from the local shop and and on off you go but um yeah going through the sort of the urban fighting in place like shark at i mean we were in mosul this was a week or two after it had been liberated from isis i mean you know there’s there was still a lot of clear operations going on um you’ve obviously got to be careful but you know i’ve been doing this for long enough to know what to do and what not to do but at the same time we wanted to we wanted to see what was going on because nobody was filming this you know the only news reports that were coming out were coming out from baghdad or building very few people getting onto the front line and actually seeing what life is like on both sides you know and we we we met these isis fighters we got a camera in their face and um that that was quite rare so it was it was fascinating to to see what was going on and to see the the reality of life and and these guys the the volunteers who were fighting they’d been fighting solidly for three years so you mentioned the lunch break i mean literally in the middle of the battle the the the truck turned up with with the chicken sandwiches on on the back and and people just stopped they’re like well this the fight’s not going anywhere and everyone just sat down and and had the chicken sandwich and then carried on and it was it was quite a bizarre experience but it’s no different than being on exercise and saws will be playing with the british army really uh as you as you wrap up um getting like how did you how did you decide it’s time to move on was it when was it like missoula was now pretty much done was it what what made you decide all right we can we can move on now so on the last day i mean we’d been attached with these guys we’d seen mosul we’d been attached to the to the to the to the frontline fighting units for for a couple of days there was one guy i mean it kind of it it all sunk in i mean one we we kind of got enough fighting footage and we didn’t want this show to be entirely about the fighting but but two i meant this one guy um we’ve been told we must meet him his name was abu tassin now abu tassin his nickname was the hawkeye he was iraq’s most feared sniper he’d been fighting he was 65 years old he’d fought in every war since 1973 against the israelis he’d fought in bosnia and chechnya he’d fought in 91 and in the gulf against you know the americans he’d fought in 2003 against the british in basra he’d fought in 2007 against you probably in in in iraq um in fallujah rather and um and he come out of retirement to fight against isis because he is she a guy he’s a sheer guy yeah and he was literally iraq’s most feared warrior i mean they’ve been books written about him and he was there fighting on his motorbike with his big you know six-foot sniper rifle and he he agreed to speak to me he didn’t normally do journalist interviews particularly with with brits that’s for sure um but he agreed to speak to me sort of soldiers or soldier when i sort of told him i was in the in the paris and he said well i’ve you know probably killed some of your friends as long as you don’t mind that and it was a big decision to go and sit with this guy who had been not my personal enemy but enemy against my colleagues and friends but you kind of have to take that emotion out of it and ultimately i was in his country listening to his story um and by the way now he was fighting against an enemy yeah so he was the british and of humanity sure so we were sat around the campfire and he told me a story he killed 400 odd people um he was quite open about the fact that he was against you know us the coalition invading his country but we were on the the right side of history this time around and he he thought that what he was doing was the right thing which was to rid his land of isis which he was convinced was a creation of the the the chaos of of you know ten years of war and i think it was that moment i thought okay enough enough i’ve heard i’ve heard the story we should move on and it was probably about time actually because sadly seven days later he was himself killed by isis on that same battle on the last day of the war against isis so there was some sad poetry in that but um we left we left that behind and carried on the journey and continued around the gulf and um and like i said i didn’t want this journey to be just about the conflict because that’s what we associate so much with with the region um but to then jump out of iraq and then be in in southern iraq actually we were in in amongst the the marshes around nasseria and basra you know this is the birthplace of civilization garden of eden and so on and to be in amongst the the marsh arabs i don’t know if you serve down there with with these these these very traditional tribes um who literally you know live amongst the marshes in these in these ancient um ways of living in the huts and they’re called the mud heath and uh you know fishing and farming buffalos i mean it’s like going back to biblical times and it was that stark contrast you know um which was to me really really interesting and i wanted to give that balance and then to go from there into q8 and then to the to to dubai where you suddenly got these skyscrapers and um friday boozy brunches i wanted to show that whole spectrum of what life is like in in this region and it was some really stark contrast and to get your head into that and around that was was often quite difficult i mean dubai is just crazy it’s crazy like especially when you talk about that contrast yeah between mosul completely destroyed and just a living hell for everyone that’s up there and then you go to dubai which is just i mean it’s sodom and gomorrah yeah the entire city’s been built for like 20 years or something like that and it’s just everything is brand new and to the highest standards of luxury in everything it’s like of it’s you can’t get more of a start contract it was a huge one i mean i actually quite enjoyed going and and it was a nice break having been in on this war zone for the for the yeah you probably got confused when you saw like a bed um but that’s what i wanted to show i wanted to show these these really stark differences and this traditional way of life the bedouin you know i i studied all about lawrence of arabia and the old sort of arabist explorers people like wolf wood thessider who crossed the empty quarter and um so to then go from there into oman which is a beautiful country you’ve got these amazing endless sand dunes and very traditional way of life there and then into yemen again a country that um was incredibly difficult to get into but we somehow managed it um it was yeah shown a fair representation you get done with this trip and then you go back so how long does it take when you get done with the trip how long does it take for the production to have happen and then what did you do in this particular case did you now have to sell what you made exactly yeah so with this one you know i’ve got my own team on the case so we were editing on the go i mean we’re kind of sending the rushes back and then we got it you know got an edit suite and we were doing on on the go so i think it ended up being i think we got back from the trip in february march and it was it was on tv sort of two or three months later who did you did you go back to channel four they would say no they they wouldn’t take it though they said principles but we sold it to discovery channel in the uk oh and then like what and then it got it got shortlisted for a broadcast award so yeah that was that was a real sense of uh not just vindication but you know it was it was a very very good documentary and for me it took it back to the the organic authentic roots of of what my journeys ultimately are is that one also like four or five hours four or five shows yeah that one’s five episodes as well were you profitable did you make money we it washed its face just about we didn’t make that much money on it but it was worth it just because it set the ball very very high so you get done with that one how do you measure success on those in terms of i mean is it view like hey uh a youtube video gets whatever a million views how are you judging success or if it’s hitting the people right or is it just feedback from people telling you hey that was outstanding i never understood the middle east like that now i do thank you is it how are you getting your your gratification so for me the validation it’s not just about ratings because obviously that’s a lot to do with the the media landscape and the current politics of what’s going on it’s changed enormously just in in the seven or eight years that i’ve been doing this you know in terms of tv wise um you know it’s changed enormously with with you know the amount of streaming platforms out there the sheer you know just difference in demographics so people aren’t watching tv live anymore they’re watching on their laptops they’re watching on their mobiles so and there’s so many new new s faults out there anyway so it’s very difficult to sort of gauge in terms of ratings a lot of the streaming platforms don’t even publish their viewing figures so i don’t think from and that for me was never really uh as important as just doing what felt authentic um and true to my own belief really and if there’s a bit of feedback that’s good and positive then great i mean i’ve you know of course when you go to controversial places you’re going to get a bit of flack from different groups you know you didn’t show my tribe and what we do or especially if you go to like the whole israel-palestine question or if you’re traveling in somewhere like iran you know it’s difficult it’s difficult to tell everyone’s story you’re never going to succeed in that but for me it was actually the the slightly um indirect feedback when when you get the head of a charity saying thank you you know we’ve been trying to put our country on the map for the last 20 years and just one of your episodes has doubled our revenue or something like that or you get individuals who call you and say you inspired me to quit my job in finance and and and you know go and build a clinic in nepal or whatever it might be and as a result you know i’ve personally been asked to to be an ambassador for probably hundreds of hundreds of charities i’m i’m currently ambassador for about 20 or so charities and and it’s things like that that make it all worthwhile for me so i’m not really that bothered about the ratings obviously it’s nice to get good feedback and it’s nice to keep getting asked to do these journeys but it’s hard now to do bigger and better when i feel as i’ve kind of done most of the journeys that i’ve really wanted to so i’m just trying to think about i’ve like how do i diversify or stay true to my true to my sort of core beliefs um but also still enjoy what i’m doing and still have fun and and and uh yeah try and find something that’s that’s appropriate and and useful did the so the next one was walking with the elephants is that right sure did that come after that came after yeah so eventually they came back they came back with us sort of saying oh can you make another one for so you kind of won strategically so i won in the end i guess in that way so um yeah they came back and said we want to we want to do something else and i’ve always been fascinated by conservation once again there he goes again i’ve always been fascinated by conservation so i was wondering um elephants have always been my thing um when i was 10 years old i sort of um i don’t been begging my parents to take me to kenya to go and see elephants and they couldn’t afford it because they were teachers but eventually they did when i was i think i was 14 and it was mind-blowing you know seeing africa the big skies the savannahs the wildlife so i had always wanted to try and incorporate a sort of an element of of giving back in all my expedition so i always pair with a charity or raise an issue i’m a high net worth what’s called a high a high profile supporter for unicef so i do i do a bit of work with sort of children’s charities along the way um but conservation is is something that i think is really important not just for the sake of the animals but but habitat um keeping wilderness areas wild and so i thought by going back to africa particularly botswana in this case um there’s a real opportunity here to to showcase what’s happening in the natural world and by doing one of my sort of walks through a country but this time following a heard of elephants on the ancient migration route there’s a new way of telling this story so i was walking with a heard of elephants for 650 miles across botswana all the way to the okavango delta um how many elephants well there’s 120 000 in botswana how many were you walking with i mean it just depended on the day really but we were getting pretty close to some pretty big groups like 10 or like a hundred no it could be 30 50 yeah it’s probably 50 was the maximum we saw at any one did you get to know some of them you get to know the some of the personalities yeah especially when they’re flapping their ears and chasing after you yeah but i mean it was a really really intense experience because you’re when you’re in an alien environment on the one hand that you know you’re on you’re on your guard the whole time you’ve got to watch out because at any time not just from the elephants but you know a snake might when you’re when you’re sort of out taking a dump of a snake might come and bite you on the ass or whatever it might be you’ve got to be really careful we were camping the whole time staying inside the national parks we got a very we we were sort of greeted with them by the botswana government with with the utmost respect because they said look you know not only encouraging tourism but showcasing the botswana such a tourism a conservation success actually and and so we were able to camp inside these national parks and and really get to know the wildlife but i’d say that as human beings coming from africa that’s what we’re designing we’re meant to be you know in that natural environment so it did feel like a very natural journey as well and that was that was the last big trip that you took that brings us up the current date pretty much that was in the summer of 2019 last year doesn’t count because it covered so so yeah that kind of brings us up today on on the sort of big journeys really so that’s probably probably a pretty good place to stop other than to say so what your latest book that’s about to come out is the book that i’ve been referring back to some somewhat today the art of exploration so what what what made you decide you need to get another because this is like what we what did we say was your ninth book this is my this is number nine um for the last 12 months having been somewhat locked up has given me plenty of opportunity to reflect on some of the stories that i didn’t put in my other books and i wanted to sort of i guess give some of the lessons that i’ve learned personally but not just that it lessens from other explorers from other key leaders and and reflect back on my time in in the army as well so it really it’s it’s a bit of a summing up uh for me of the last sort of 10 15 years really of of the lessons that i’ve learned and i’ve tried to put them into relevant themes and make them applicable and relevant to people in their daily life so it’s not just me telling telling my war stories this is some of the stories hopefully will will inspire people to to to hopefully you know integrate them into their own lives yeah i don’t think i did a great job of what i selected to read in terms of the fact that you you’re you you’re kind of given your philosophy much throughout much of the book and you’re explaining you know what lesson you learned but you know here’s how i learned the lesson then you explain well this is what the lesson was and this is how you can apply it so it’s a it’s a philosophical book as well not just like you said a book i read stories i read a lot of stories i like to read stories but and you know some of them i said here’s some of the leadership lessons that you learned and i pointed out the the way that you lay those out so that people can and you it’s not just about leadership though it’s about decision making you’ve got a whole section in there about how you sort of lay out decision making based on your military education and what so there’s all kinds of things that you can pull from this book and they’re all rooted in what you’ve been through which is again that’s what my all my books are just hey this is what i’ve been through and here’s what i took away from it so you did this exact same thing and and anybody that’s listening you’re gonna you’re gonna pull a lot of lessons out of this book um i scratched the surface i read less than five percent of this book on the air today so uh pick up the book it’s freaking yeah i mean it’s just just chalk as you would say in england it’s chock full of lessons learned um where can people find you i know you got levisonwood com what’s levison it’s it’s a family name right it’s my that was my dad’s name and his dad’s name like it’s just stuck with me i’m the fifth yeah but yeah i know people can find out more about it on my instagram page uh levison wood i’ve got twitter um and yeah the new book is coming out in june in the uk and hopefully it will be out in the us shortly after yeah we need to get the pre-order on amazon yeah by the way yeah like you got about two weeks from today to make that happen okay uh echo charles yes any questions from anything else uh remember when you lost your wallet remember do you think if you didn’t lose your wallet you would not have gone into the military when you think about it i think that you know the when i lost my wallet the inspiration you know the main lesson that i learned there was kind of told by this young lieutenant who found it was go and travel and and perhaps if i hadn’t have traveled if i hadn’t have got those expert early experiences if i hadn’t have had the gun pulled on me by the guy in the taxi in zimbabwe then maybe i wouldn’t have enough stories to get me through the interviews that got me into the army so who knows i mean hindsight is obviously a great thing but but yeah i think you know take opportunities when when they come come along um say thank you to to people you know you never know be courteous and it’s it’s it’s you know writing back to that guy and just saying thank you for handing all it back you know got me all those tips in the form of that six page essay so it’s just little things like that it’s just it’s never passed by an opportunity and never passed by an opportunity to to be thankful and grateful and no matter how bad things get there’s always an opportunity in that and so like when i broke my leg and couldn’t get in the special forces i now look back and join the dots and think actually it was that it was that what i thought was a low point actually was a real opportunity to go and do something different yeah yeah that’s crazy huh because on the surface you’re like dang i lost my wallet because that sucks confirm you lose your wallet oh man brutal and then yeah man it opens up this whole thing and it’s like dang i’m kind of glad i did lose my wife yeah of course and he’s having a bit of faith that in every situation now whenever i’m feeling oh you know dammit that that’s gone really badly i remind myself of all the times that the bad situations if you just view them right and have the right attitude then then you can turn defeat into victory and i think that’s what you’ve got to remind yourself so whenever things go really badly i try and just convince myself even if it’s slightly delusional that this is a great opportunity absolutely true man absolutely true well like i said probably a good place to wrap we’re approaching three hours right now uh thanks for joining us absolutely and and more important thanks for your service thanks for your service to uh great britain one of our maybe our most maybe our strongest ally um not only for your service but your your fathers and your grandfathers i know i watched a video about your grandfather and man was just awesome that that he was out there like you holding the line against tyranny and evil and thanks for sharing some of your stories thank you like i said there’s 10 books i always try and prepare i couldn’t read 10 books getting ready for this thing um a ton of great stories and and the lessons that you you share and the experiences allow all of us to learn through your vicariously through your explorations of the world which you’ve made the best of i don’t recommend them but i’m glad you did them and i’m glad we can take away those lessons man it’s awesome awesome to meet you man thank you thank you so much thank you and with that levison wood has left the building he left the building he wasn’t he didn’t have anything with him so he may be going i don’t know he’s going somewhere we don’t know where he came in we don’t know where he came from we don’t know where he’s going but he is out there on the continual exploration yeah with a pocket full of like uh you know two paper clips and his wallet a wallet that he found and we’re good so awesome to have him on here for sure we were talking about exploration that’s the name of his new book the art of exploration echo seems like exploration topic of the day can you recommend some ways we can explore getting better yeah as humans for sure what do you got so i think keeping ourselves capable good call really you know look we have a path the path is hard not all the time but it can be hard it’s what i’m saying every once in a while we can deviate from that path but the best way to deviate from the path is when we explore if we explore as long as it’s in the right direction don’t slip off the path don’t go backwards keep moving forward anyway so while we’re doing that we are improving ourselves we are working out there’s certain fundamentals to the path we’ll see for sure working out physical uh improvement capability strength the more i’d learn about strength and strength training resistance training you know this kind of stuff the more benefits start to reveal themselves yep did you know strength training resistance training is the best thing for your cognitive capacity as you grow older yes yeah i did did i say that last night you did i remembered it why because i work out and for your immune system so you either like i think you hold vitamin d more efficiently or yes something with vitamin d where you can check you know anyway so cute so stay on the path in that way anyway through this path you might need supplementation yes all right chocolate supplements only the best kind by the way yeah you probably need unless you are just dedicating 24 hours a day for meal prep and you have you’re you’re out shopping you’re out harvesting your own meat you’re out you’re out in the garden pulling up carrots you know if that’s what you’re doing you can probably get away without supplementation look we know that we want to eat clean right if you’re eating clean you don’t need it the chances of that are pretty small yeah they’re pretty small and again and there’s a bigger picture going on as well and i am a huge advocate of garden i have a small little miniature garden not many things in there we got some tomatoes in there either way it’s not about my garden all right it’s about efficiency apparently it is about kind of a little bit little humble brat just some tomatoes nonetheless uh you know if you if gardening is your thing then cool but for a lot of us if you dedicate all these hours daily weekly whatever meal prep or whatever it might become a little inefficient so supplementation might be kind of the jam as far as efficiency goes so good we’ve got some supplementation for you very good news so what do we got stuff for your joints stuff for protein stuff for cognitive health stuff for general health vitamin d3 joint warfare super clear oil we’ve got some mole conditional protein cold war cold war immunity immunity immunity sure all these things aren’t choco fuel did you say punk yeah protein in the form of a dessert i authorized the next flavor of milk what is that one it’s gonna be that banana cream oh yeah yeah no name yet no name yet look and it’s hard to take banana cream and turn that into something tactical right so if anybody’s got some ideas on banana cream like my my ears are open yeah i’m ready for something cool you know about banana cream let us know what you got that’s interesting because that’s not like an obvious flavor but once you say you’re like oh yeah that’s a legitimate flavor yeah even okay so the pumpkin spice in my opinion this is just my opinion because kind of an obvious flavor an obvious flavor yes but and i’m like not that into it it’s fine if that’s my last flavor when we do not drink it no probably not but if when it comes to banana because i don’t like pumpkin pie you know certain people like really love pumpkin pie and that’s it nope nope no anybody like that yeah i know a couple people really yes but are you sure bro are you exaggerating you know someone that old eats pumpkin pie if it’s not for pumpkin pie you they won’t eat any pie put it that’s where you’re at right now okay so if i’m not mistaken i exaggerated a little bit but you know what i mean it’s fine say that exaggerated a little bit but you know what i’m saying because there’s not one single person on the planet that only eats just pumpkin by 100 and the other pies are zero yes yes there are pilgrims pilgrims eat pumpkin pie that’s all oh wait i think they eat apple pies yeah they do anyway all right so cool the point is banana cream pie that is a legitimate one where it’s like hey banana cream pie and then there’s like everything else i’m one of those people my dad’s one of those people there you go bc’s in the game in the game fully so banana cream milk like that’s that’s that’s good yeah it’s a good flavor uh we also got the drinks i’m drinking one right now i drink a lot of these drinks as a matter of fact discipline go in a can you can get it you can get it at wawa if you’re on the east coast and for a little while they were there was a little break pumping going on because the logistics train look logistics wins wars it took me a little bit of time to get that logistics train straight down they said hey can you pump the brakes a little bit guess what logistics train is a moving down the tracks roll into wawa roll into wawa clear out the shelves they didn’t want me saying that for a little while yeah i’m back saying it going to wawa clear off the shelves also vitamin shop and by the way all this stuff all this supplementation if you want to subscribe to it if you want to get that krill oil showing up once a month you want to get that joint warfare showing up once a month if you want to go on subscription shipping is free at originusa com at jockofuel com subscribe get it forever and you know what we used to say on this podcast support the podcast as you support yourself by the way you are supporting the podcast when you support yourself with some supplementation no yeah 100 and energy drinks that are healthy that’s kind of a thing you know well not really it’s a thing with us that’s what i’m saying it’s not a thing with anybody else i’m saying actually there’s no one else that said you know what oh we want our we want our our energy drink to be healthy so we are going to go to the nth degree and pasteurize it so we don’t have to put any chemicals in it yeah that’s where we went who else is with us there oh look around you know who i see nobody yeah so it’s not a thing it’s a thing for us that’s what i’m saying it is now so what and you’re talking even from like a banking standpoint where it’s like yeah we’re not gonna do that we’re not gonna do it which is obviously good but as a human being i don’t now i don’t have to go hey i need some energy hey i’m gonna pay the price a little bit but i need that energy right now say hey let’s pay that price you know there’s no sacrifice no sacrifice spell pound of energy drink i don’t i don’t even need energy right now i just want to drink that energy drink and guess what i’m going to be more healthy afterwards when it comes down to it i’m going to be more healthy and i got my energy drink you’re done good you made up for your pumpkin pie statement there you go that’s what we’re dealing with also at origin usa you can get american-made stuff when i say stuff i mean jeans american-made dedham kind of a big deal that’s a real big deal because you’re probably thinking oh you know i’m supporting america i got these iconic american genes and then you find out that your iconic american genes are made in china yeah which is bad yeah get your american get your iconic american genes made in america yeah it’s kind of alone in america sewn in america you ever ate like a food or something and it says all natural then you find out wait it’s not all natural though like i guess it’s like they play all natural cheese puffs right come on bro it’s like they play you you know where it’s like it’s all natural given the fact that it’s not all natural you see insane it’s almost like that where it’s like yeah these iconic american genes oh yeah right and yeah maybe they’re like so it just depends on what you mean by all it depends on what you mean by natural it depends on what you mean by iconic and it depends on what you mean by american bro you’re not playing that game over here no origin usa or usa is in the name there’s no play on words there’s nothing like that no trickery made in america without compromising yep jeans boots rash guards t-shirts what what else do you want yeah we got it yeah these did i say geez i think he said rash guards but yeah all good it’s all included you said we want to be inclusive yes inclusive we’re with you very much so we support both also giaco has a store it’s called jacko’s store this is where you can get discipline equals freedom stuff t-shirts hats hoodies lightweight and heavyweight hoodies a bunch of cool stuff on there in my opinion so yeah go there see if you like something get something we also have a subscription situation going on with the shirts additional shirts additional designs so recently one of the many designs that have been released so people have been calling me personally calling me phone call not text phone call hey uh is that design still available uh are you gonna sell that design it seemed like people really liked the design it’s true the answer is maybe but to avoid having to call me or whatever just jump on that jump on that it’s called the shirt locker yeah there’s a new design every month that reminds me of the muster so we have the monster they always sell out and three weeks out from the muster like someone i know will send me an email hey i realized i didn’t sign up for the muster you know i it looks like it’s sold out but you know i just need three seats it’s three and i’m like hey um i i wish i could i wish i could help you this is an actual limitation like the fire marshal says this is how many people can be in there and we have it full filled don’t put yourself in that situation yeah at least don’t put yourself in that situation yeah it’s true maintain control yeah invest up front so you can relax later that’s why you leave a little bit early you leave a little bit early like you’re like i was supposed to meet you here today yeah right i left a little bit early why did i do that so i wasn’t stressing i was just driving oh there’s a you know a little old lady crossing the street she’s taking a while am i honking no i’m just take your time ma’am no problem there’s a construction guy he’s got the little sign flipping you know stop there’s some road construction going on am i mad at that guy no i’m not mad at him i got plenty of time to get to the gym because you got on it early because i got on it i invested early now other people in this situation didn’t invest i get a text once i’m here that says yeah you’re going to be late echo charles is going to be late yeah did you how do you feel about that uh well you know i was not stressing but hey that’s just me i guess okay maybe you need to add some stress in your life then bro well in this particular situation now that you brought it up i didn’t you did and that’s fine so you know while i was executing my sequence to uh come down here and record okay all right i got tasked with the last minute thing and i had to do that i had to do that thing so yeah okay are you talking about a task that came from me yes sir okay are you talking about a task that came for me at seven o’clock in the morning or such uh well you know my my sequence um is very complex your wake up procedure all right either way get on the the shirt it’s called the shirt locker new shirt every month sean jockowstore com that’s where you can get it go there get on it early you don’t have to worry about missing any any designs or anything like that you can subscribe to this podcast there’s a bunch of different places where it’s hosted we also have jocko unraveling which i’ve been recording with daryl cooper we’re going deep into some crazy subjects unraveling history and seeing where how we got where we’re at we have the grounded pondcast we have the warrior kid podcast we also have the the underground jockowunderground com we’re doing we’re recording a little podcast there the reason that we’re doing that is so that we don’t have to have sponsors because why because we don’t want sponsors because then they dictate what we can and can’t do which we don’t like we also don’t want to have the platforms themselves be able to dictate what we can and cannot do now look we the platform’s been good to us so far everyone’s been okay with what we’re doing that’s fine what happens when they’re not what happens when they decide they’re just going to take and start injecting advertisements onto our podcast and when i say all right i mean everyone all of us what do we do then we don’t have control so we made we made the jocko underground podcast jockowunderground com it cost eight dollars and 18 cents a month great way to support what we’re doing if you can’t look if you can’t afford it where look we are a podcast of the people that’s why this podcast is free that’s why this podcast doesn’t have advertising other than what we’re doing right now which you could have turned off 48 minutes ago before echo even started talking but if you can’t afford it that’s cool email assistants jockowunderground com we’ll still hook you up that’s what we’re here for we have a youtube channel where echo posts videos and you can subscribe to that one also origin usa has uh uh oh what is it youtube channel is that what it’s called origin usa has a youtube channel yes technically at the end of the day but it’s like a series you know like you have a youtube channel but a super general it’s a general thing but there’s like a c it’s like a series you know that’s origin hd right that’s a series yeah that’s that’s what you’re talking about right yeah because origin hd is on the youtube channel of origin origin usa yeah boom okay well and echo makes a lot of those videos and the ones that are really good are usually the ones i’m the assistant director all right psychological warfare yeah it’s an album tracks you know you need jocko to help you get past the moment of weakness you’re kind of like a therapist in a way or what do you call like a life coach yeah it’s a life coach you’re a life coach because you know how to coach with a baseball bat essentially no the life you know like the life coaches the the what do you call the classic or the stereotypical situation is like hey i’m about to you know i just quit smoking and it’s like hey i feel like i really feel like smoking it’s really like you know on my mind so you call your life coach and they tell you gently like why you shouldn’t smoke you’re gonna get cancer so far and all this stuff so jocko has his own version of that which is called psychological warfare so it’s recorded what you do is you get it’s an album with tracks so jocko tells you hey don’t skip that workout you’ve come this far you can do it um need to make one of these i was very motivated by that [Music] in his way we’ll just say also we got flipside canvas flipsidecampus com dakota meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall we got a bunch of books look all the books i talked about today by levison wood the latest one that should be available for pre-order right now it’s called the art of exploration that’s the one i was reading out of today we got final spin which is a look it’s a novel because it’s not specifically true but it’s also not a book it’s like a it’s just a whole different gig final spin if you want it’s new art form that’s what echo charles just whispered in the background he might have nailed it you might have nailed it is a new art form of writing and it’s in a book called final spin which is coming out if you want to get the first a dish better order it now leadership strategy and tactics the code the evaluation the protocol this one was freedom field manual way of the warrior kid one two three and four mikey and the dragons about face i wrote the forward on the new one and of course extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership i have a leadership consultancy called echelon front we solve problems through leadership you can go to echelonfront com if you want me and my team to come and work with your company that’s what we do we have ef online online training leadership you can get it anywhere you can get on your phone we’re on there all the time we’re doing live q and a’s we got a bunch of courses to take it’s freaking awesome we got the muster 2021 we are executing last time we didn’t execute because i got miss rona this time so i’m good now we’re ha it’s happening orlando may 25th and 26th phoenix august 17th and 18th las vegas october 28th and 29th everything that we’ve done has sold out go to extremeownership com if you want to come don’t be emailing me six days out saying you need three hey sorry i didn’t get to you but i just need three seats i can’t i can’t help you sometimes in the seal teams i would tell guys like hey if this if you do if you make this mistake i can’t help you right you want to do something like look you do some dumb stuff i got you if you do something at this level of stupidity i can’t there’s literally nothing i can do don’t be doing dumb [ __ ] yes sir battlefield uh this is learning lessons as as we walk historical battlefields just did recently did gettysburg we’re planting others in the future again go do go to echelonfront com look for events on there if you want to come and and meet us you won’t have dinner you want to walk the battlefield you want to do q and a face to face we look forward to seeing you at those if you want to help service members active and retire their families gold star families check out mark lee’s mom mama lee she has a charity organization helping out all these groups all over the place if you want to donate or get involved to go to america’s mighty warriors and if you want more of my perpetual pronouncements or you need more of echo’s convoluted conversations you can find us on the interwebs on twitter instagram which echo only calls the gram and facebook echoes that equal charles i am at jockowink and for levison check out levisonwood com his twitter is levisonwood his instagram is levison org and also he’s on facebook at levesonwood and thanks once again to levison for for joining us again sharing some of the stories with us you could you could crack open any one of those stories and find a gem and and thanks to levison for your service and thanks to your father and your grandfather and to the fierce island nation of the united kingdom thanks for standing beside us for so long in the fight against evil and thanks to all the service men and women and veterans around the world that put on the uniform and shoulder the weight of freedom with your service and sacrifice and to people here at home in service police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all the first responders out there you don’t get thanked enough for what you do so thank you for doing it and everybody else out there you already know what you know you already know what you know you’ve been there you’ve done that you’ve seen what you’ve seen don’t stay in the same spot do like leveson wood does literally and metaphorically go out go go see go do go live go explore and until next time this is echo and jocko
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