Okay, thank you Martin. It's my great pleasure to introduce Carl Marlanis and the reason I'm up here is because he and I served in the same infantry battalion in Vietnam in 1969 and that was 1st Battalion 4th Marines and we had the pleasure of operating in the very northwest corner of what was then the Republic of North, sorry, the Republic of Vietnam. Right along the Laotian border and what was laughingly referred to as the demilitarized zone. I'd also like to introduce two other of our colleagues, Jack Higgins and Tim Rabbit, who are also serving the Battalion at this time. Several years ago Carl asked me if I would review the manuscript for his novel, Matterhorn, and if I liked it, if I would write a blurb. So I was agreed and I was soon immersed in one of the truly great works of war fiction that I'd ever read. And here's what a part of what I wrote for the publisher. No other novel about Vietnam, including Jim Webb's Field of Fire, does a better job of capturing the essence of what it meant to be a grunt in Vietnam than Matterhorn. Matterhorn is a powerful work of literature and a tribute to those who fought and died at the end of the line. Now I have to confess that also I thought it was extremely powerful. I somehow didn't think that a novel about an unpopular war written in the midst of another popular war was going to be very, there's going to be much of a market for it. So Carl has to be very thankful that it wasn't his literary agent because of course it became a bestseller. Carl is a very remarkable fellow and something of an anomaly among Vietnam veterans.  For his actions in Vietnam he was awarded the Navy Cross, I like to call it the non-possimist Medal of Honor, and Two Purple Hearts. He became a successful businessman after the war but admits to having to deal with the demons that accompanied him home from Vietnam. And that's one of the reasons to Europe both Matterhorn and what it is like to go to war. You may remember that when Admiral McRaven was here last week, he spoke about something called hard combat and how long exposure to hard combat changes a person. This is the central theme of what it is like to go to war. In this book Carl describes quite candidly what it means to sojourn in what he calls the Temple of Mars, where he writes, I experienced a surprising love for those who entered with me. There I prayed for deliverance from horror, carnage, and death. He ends with a discussion of how it might be possible for citizens of a modern liberal society, such as the United States, to better relate to Mars. The underlying organizing power that creates and sustains those physical and terrible aspects of war that seem beyond the comprehensive comprehension of our small psyches. Carl suggests that one of the reasons for writing what it is like to go to war was to share the experience of hard combat with other veterans, so as to help them with their own quest for meeting and their efforts to integrate their combat experiences and their current lives, as well as to convey to those about to join the military what war is really like. As he remarks, the violence of combat assault psyches confuses ethics and tests souls. This is not only a result of the violence suffered, it is also the result of a violence inflicted. Along these lines, I should note that Carl is teamed up with writer and movie maker Sebastian Junger to press for the creation of a national commission to deal with the past 12 years of war in a way, as Carl puts it, a more sober and meaningful way than having another picnic on Memorial Day weekend. It's important to note that although Carl turns his own experiences in Vietnam, it is not per se about Vietnam, it is about war in general. For far too long, Vietnam has been singled out as somehow unique in the history of warfare. The fact is, however, that Vietnam was no more brutal than other wars, the war in the Pacific, and what many of you in this audience have basically experienced in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And that's what makes Carl, what Carl has to say, all the more important. Unfortunately for the utopians among us, barbarism exists in the world. Civilization can suppress barbarism and savagery, but cannot eradicate it. Thus war is not an aberration. Carl writes that as long as there are people who will kill for gain in power, the United States will need soldiers who will kill to stop them. But this requires honesty about war and its cost, especially in terms of the split that war creates in the soul of the soldier. In part of all, Wolfram von Essenbach captures the nature of the psychological split engendered by war. Shame and honor clash with the courage of the steadfast man is motley like the magpie, but such a man may yet make merry for heaven and hell have equal parts of him. Please join me in welcoming Carl Marlantus to the Naval War College. One last logistical announcement for those of you who have copies of either of Carl's books. If you'd like to get them signed, he'll go to the table out in the foyer at the conclusion of the session at three, so please feel free to do that. I first saw Carl on the Bill Warrior show on public television. It was an extraordinary interview. So as we talked about the format for this, after some discussion, he concluded he'd rather do something like that than to give a formal presentation. So to that end, I prepared some questions for him, and he's seen them advance, so we'd have an opportunity to think about them. It won't necessarily march through all of them. I want to make sure you have plenty of time to interact as well, but let me give, let's get it started. You begin your book talking a lot about something we all know that there's this great inhibition to talk about combat experience, both on the part of the returning combat veteran and often on the part of their civilian counterparts as well, who may want to thank you, but don't really want to hear the details. Can you say a little about where you think that comes from and what good and harm it does? Well, you know, there's, I only say it half a ceaselessly. I mean, in our culture, there's, there's a great amount of inhibition against two things. One is whining, and the other one is bragging. And my experience of combat is that it's 99% things to whine about and 1% things to brag about. So it doesn't, but doesn't leave you very much room to say anything if you have this, this cultural inhibition against those two things. I think on a more serious level, what happens is, is that you come back and, and you've done terrible things. Now you've done terrible things for hopefully the right reason, but that doesn't take away the fact that you've done terrible things. And you're the one that bears the burden.  And when is it appropriate to actually say something? I mean, if you say it, something about, well, you know, this is what happened to me in Fallujah at dinner. Well, I'm afraid the dinner party's dead, right?  And so there's a great deal of inhibition on the part of the returning veteran to talk about the real stuff, because you don't know how people are going to react to it. You don't know if you're going to really be judged and who likes to be judged. And so you throw that into complaining and whining, and there's a lot of inhibition on the part of the veteran to just even talk about it. On the other side, people of good will are, are reticent to ask because it's like, you know, I don't want to disturb him. I don't want to, I don't want to make him angry. I don't want to, you know, confront anything or, you know, I don't want to get into politics. And so everybody sort of clams up on the other side. And it's, it's damaging. And the reason it's damaging is because the fundamental issue of the returning veteran is to get back into the community. And, you know, what we used to call primitive societies had all kinds of rituals that, that brought warriors back into the community. And we don't have them anymore. We have to sort of figure out how to do it on our own.  And so we have, you know, the silence, which I wrote a whole chapter about called the Club of Silence. And we just have to start to break it down. I had a really interesting experience. I'm trying to do this commission and we had the launch and there were probably about 100 people in the room and Sebastian and I are up on the, on the stage doing, you know, Q&A and, and, and Colin Powell's chief of staff whose name went right out of my head, who I could never run for politics. The, and at the end of this sort toward the end of this, a, a Vietnam veteran clearly stood up and just unloaded, I mean, anger. And you could just see everybody in the room just, just recoiling. And he stomped out. And I said, I asked, I said, how many people have ever, ever talked to an angry veteran? None. None. And that's what's the, that's a problem, isn't it? It's like, it's like, well, they go over there and they do their thing, they come back, but they'll have to deal with that themselves. And so one of the ideas of this commission, if I can make a plug, is that it will go out to the community and, and in fact, have the community involved and actually have to start confronting that the republic's been at war, not just the military.  The veterans in this room come from a military that is, as we heard this morning, the most trusted institution in this society, but also from a war that's been fought kind of out of sight and out of mind of the American people. So how do you think their experience is going to be different from yours? Well, you know, I think that moving from hostility to indifference is an improvement. And but indifference is not exactly where we want to be. And I think that's where we are right now. I mean, certainly, I mean, there's small towns in America that welcome their, their returning veterans, but in general, I mean, you know, the vast majority of the population, I think that the returning veteran is, is, is feeling a sort of, I don't know what the right feel. We were just talking about last night. I mean, it's like when someone comes up to you at the airport and thank you for your service, it just for me, I don't know about you guys, but for me, it's just like, you know, that's what you do when you thank the waiter for bringing in your coffee, you know, thank you for your service. It's just, it's just, I mean, it just isn't there, is it? It's, it's, it's, and so the veterans are going to have to deal with that.  I think another issue is that of course, the vast majority of veterans from Vietnam were drafted and when they came back, they were done. The vast majority of people coming back from these wars are, are professionals and they're going back, they're still in. And that's a very big different thing too because you run into this, this issue of things like reintegration into the culture and society. Well, it's very easy to reintegrate back into your military culture, but, and the military culture is increasingly separated from the general culture because of the, there's no draft anymore. And so I think that is something that current returning veterans are going to have to deal with, that the Vietnam veterans didn't. So it's a, and then, then there are the fundamentals of all wars. I mean, if you read the Odyssey, I mean, Odysseus was clearly suffered with post-traumatic stress. I mean, you can just read it and, and Homer understood it. Those things will never go away. The tension and, and, and the killing. And those, those are the same. You know, one very strong theme throughout your book is this is a, for lack of a better word, the spirituality of war. You mentioned already the reintegration ceremonies for warriors and, and other cultures like you give some Native American examples. Part of your commission idea is to create a sort of modern secular version of those things for your veterans. Could you share some of the thoughts you have about what might be effective if, if it's not the Veterans Day picnic? Yeah, I think that, that for example, an idea of, of a solemnity. We have it wrong.  It ain't football. And we treat it like football. So when people come home, we've got to stop treating it like football and CNN and ABC have got to start, you know, day 17, the Iraq war.  This is some, we're killing people over there. You know, and I'm not saying that because of some kind of moral judgment. It's like, you know, the war, some are for it, some are against it. I mean, I happened to be for that one. Certainly. But the thing is, is that you can't treat it like football. So the first thing that I would do is I would like to see a change in the way that we mark the ends of war and the return of the, of the, of the warriors from war. And my image is that you solemnly have a parade where the rifles are turned upside down, where the sword is, sword is sheathed and that you're not cheering because these people have themselves been wounded. They've lost their friends. And let's face it, a lot of civilians have been killed and a lot of the enemy have been killed. And when you pull back from a war, you have to start to realize that the enemy that you killed were probably misguided people, mostly kids. And they end up blowing themselves up because some, some guy at the top decides that they should blow themselves up. So are you going to cheer about that? And then America cheers about it. And so I think that the beginning is to start us, is to get rid of that. You know, a question I've often pondered is whether the kinds of things you just expressed about the sort of tragic nature of war, the fact that combatants on both sides are probably young and not well informed and somewhat misguided. It's clearly true. And it's clearly a reflection that people our age find fairly easy to make. Is it can a 19 year old go to war with that attitude? Well, you know, I had a guy ask a question. He was he was he was a lot meaner than you are. I was at a reading and it was it was it was a clearly a retired military guy. He didn't identify which branch of the service. But anyway, he he he was like, Oh, I get it. He's being sarcastic. And he says he wrote this book and he says, you know, it's like when we're when we're in the sophomores in high school and people say that we're not going to teach you Shakespeare and Tolstoy.  But they always tell us that that someday when we grow up, we'll be able to understand it. That's what your books all about. And I looked at him and he said, Yes, 19 year olds are our best warriors. Absolutely.  Are you kidding me? You know, Oh, God, Lieutenant, let's think about this, you know.  But if you can, if you can plant the seeds, if someone had planted the seeds for me when I was that young, when I started doing crazy behavior at the age of 40, you know, 15, 20 years after the battle, I'd have gone. Oh, that's what they were talking about. And I might have gotten help faster. I might have healed faster. One of the things that I'm off on a tangent here, but think about the way that the human body protects itself. We don't have shells. We don't have, you know, insect, what are they called carapacees? We take the hit and we have an immensely active immune system that goes to work immediately to repair the damage. So there's no way that you're going to protect a 19 year old against taking the hits of war. You're not going to be able to do it. But if you can plant the seed so that when he comes back, that that immune system, that healing system, kicks in way faster. That's the strategy. You know, I found your reflections on the experience of killing in combat, both insightful and at least to those who haven't done it somewhat counterintuitive. You talk both about the pleasure and about the what you call the mystical quality of killing, even in those religious aspects. You said to Bill Moore's in this interview, our idea of religion in this culture is pretty much all sweetness and light. We like Christmas, we don't like Good Friday. Could you comment on that? Yeah, you know, how I got onto that thought was I've done a lot of reading and comparative religion and mythology and stuff. And virtually all the great religions have dark sides to them.  And I mean, there's darkness there. The Tibetans have, you know, demons guarding the gates to paradise. And you have to get through the demons and even in Christianity.  I mean, these are things that are actually already in the religion, but the culture would rather have pixie dust.  I mean, you know, and so what then, like that knowledge, combined with this observation, which is this, that all of the mystical traditions, and I don't care if they're Sufis or if they're Christian mystics or if they're Hindu mystics, there's certain things they have in common when they go through this mystical experience. The first one is they are always aware of death. They're always aware of death, that we are mortal. And death is, you know, Don Juan in the Carlos Castanada's book says death is right over our shoulder. And you can see death. The other thing is that they're always in the present. I mean, they do years of psychophysical exercises to be present, be present.  You know, don't think of the past, it's not in the future, you're here now, it's the only time that's real. So they're present. The other thing is that they try to sort of step away from their egos. In other words, they lose their egos and they lose their egos for a greater good, and for joining something larger. And they're all members of a group, generally a convent, a monastery, the ulam, the sangha. I mean, every religion is has these groups. And if you think about combat, absolutely every one of those things is present. Every one of them. And so I'm going like, well, is this a mystical experience then? It's certainly the equivalent of it. And when you think about, you know, St. John of the Cross, I mean, he didn't call it the lovely night of the soul. He called it the dark night of the soul. And there is this darkness that we just have to start to recognize that, I mean, the whole issue of evil.   Sorry, you know. One day I was in India. I spent a lot of time in India because I ran a corporation there. And I was getting off the train station in Calcutta and a little girl was begging and she had a cup hung around her neck because someone had cut off both of her hands so that she would get more money begging. And I mean, I was reeling with that. I mean, the sense of evil that just hit me. I mean, I just, I didn't know where to put it and what to do with it. And so going back to the war experience in everything, you, it's the equivalent of sort of coming back from it. And it'd be like, you know, St. John of the Cross comes out of the monastery. And we say, well, you can get a job at McDonald's. You know, I mean, it's just, I mean, we're talking about some kind of an experience that is just far beyond ordinary experience. And is it the other side of the same coin, yin yang, the dark, the light? Or is it just the equivalent? It doesn't make any difference in terms of its practicality. And the other thing that I talk about, and I think it's something we need to really own. There's a great thrill.     I remember hitting a guy once it right in the head. And I felt great. I got him right between the eyes. I mean, I just felt great. Now, should I be proud of that? I don't know where to put that. But the fact is, it was a feeling that I had. And and I've talked to other veterans and they, yeah, I kind of miss that. But it's like I tell people, it's like crack cocaine. Yeah, you can get high on crack. But boy, the costs, the costs of crack. And so that's what you always have to remember. But always bringing out this, this, the spiritual side and this and this, this excitement and high are truths that we have to speak about. You know, this is a point of privilege, but we were talking upstairs just before we came down about our sharp love of this Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, which we read in my Stocktoe course. But I think probably most American students are kind of surprised or have never heard of that book. But you incorporated pretty substantially into your book. Can you tell us what it is about the Gita you think that has a permanent message for people not of that culture of Western culture? Well, yeah, it's, it's the Bhagavad Gita. I think it means the song of God. And it's, it's part of the Mahabharata, which is a huge epic work of Indian literature. But this is a poem. It's a long, long poem. And what it is, it's about a warrior whose name is Arjuna. And he is about to go into battle. And because it's a civil war, his own, his own kin are on the opposite side. And he loses heart. He doesn't know what to do. He says, how can I kill? That's my cousin over there. How can I, how can I do this? And the charioteer is actually, is it Shiva? No, Krishna, Krishna, yeah, blue Krishna, Krishna is the charioteer and has taken the incarnated as its charioteer. And so the whole dialogue is between Arjuna and Krishna in the form of his charioteer, giving him all the reasons why he should do it.  You do it because you want to be brave and you do it for all these reasons. And ultimately it comes down to the fact that you just have to do it with your own noble heart and you have to do it because you've been placed in this position and you had nothing to do with that.  And it's a really good piece of work because you see all the arguments and they all fade after a while until you finally realize that for some reason, and you don't exactly know why, the gods or God placed you in this position on this side. And you do have to remember that it is your kin on the other side that you're killing. But you have to just, you carry it out because you're a warrior and that's what you've chosen to do. And that's the basics of why I incorporated it. Decades after the events you went through in the war, you described in your book an experience of driving down the road at night and seeing the eyes of a Vietnamese soldier that you killed at close range. Can you talk a little about that experience and what that moment revealed to you about your mental and if you will spiritual state about having killed so long ago? Well, you know, I have to tell you that a couple of things to preface that particular vision that I had on I-5 at two in the morning. First of all, the way that we can kill people is that they're not people.   And my answer to that is there is no other way a decent guy can kill anybody except to dehumanize them because we've been taught all our lives thou shall not kill. And suddenly you're 19 and they're giving you all the messages that now we want you to go out there and kill. How do you do that? I use the word pseudo-speciating. You turn the enemy into an animal. You know, haji, towel head, gook, crowd. I mean, we have words for it that will go back millennium. And why?  If that animal is trying to kill your friends or if that animal is trying to kill you, you can pull the trigger way easier than if it's an actual human being. Well, what happened in this particular case is that we were on an assault and it was a very steep hill. And the NBA were entrenched in bunkers and in fighting holes up above us. And it was probably, I mean, it was really steep. And saw a couple of chai comms come flying down to us. And so we scrambled to get uphill so that they blow up down below us. But I was slow off the mark and it blew up right in front of me and knocked me out. And when I came to, there were two other guys with me and they'd thrown a couple of grenades. And then chai comm, a couple more come flying down. And we scrambled around to get out of the way and we throw our grenades back. A couple more come flying down. And finally the lieutenants' brain starts working and I go like, this is not, I'm going to be out of grenades on the next throw. So we got to change tactics. And so I told the guys, I said, look, I'm going to get around to the left of this fighting position, which I know is right up above us. We couldn't see them. And I said, I want you to throw the grenades. And when they pop up to throw them back, I'll get them with the M16. And just an aside, I always carried an M16. This thing about officers carrying 45s, I just thought that one went out the door the first day I got there. You know. And so I got myself up there in position and I was on the ground and I was probably closer to that hole than the front row here. It was close enough that I could see the kid's eyes. One of them had already been killed from one of our grenades connected. And he stood up and he had the grenade cocked. And I had him in my sights. I was laying on the ground and just had him at the end of the M16. And we locked eyes. That doesn't happen very often. He was suddenly human. He wasn't a gook. He was some 17-year-old kid scared to death. And I remember whispering. I was whispering out loud. I knew he couldn't hear me because there was just the battles going on. And I don't speak Vietnamese, but I can remember saying, don't throw it. If you don't throw it, I won't pull the trigger. If you don't throw it, I won't pull the trigger. Because see, if he was still an animal, I'd already killed him. But I had to hesitate it because he was human suddenly. And he snarled at me and threw it and I killed him. And it was about 20 years later, 1990, that I'm driving down I-5, which is the north-south freeway and, you know, country Western music on the radio and two o'clock in the morning. And I know a lot of veterans love that.  You have a goal, right? And all of a sudden, in the windshield, I saw his eyes. And what that was, I mean, I'm sophisticated enough to know that there's not the eyes that are there. What's happening is that my psyche is finally just saying, Marlannis, you've got to deal with this. You've got to deal with this. You killed a human being. Doesn't make any d- The feeling is not one of guilt. The feeling is one of, I carry the burden and I'm very sad. I was in a war and I was doing my bit and trying to be on my side just like he was. But he was human. And that's what started me really writing the second book, is how do you come to terms with all that? And what it was is this idea that pseudo-speciation drops sometimes and it's necessary to drop immediately after the fight. I mean, that's where I think atrocities come from because we stay in that mode. Well, you talk about the importance of being part of feeling a part of a team or even an organism as one of the moral armors that allows you to do this. And as you tell that story, it sounds to me like one of the things that's key about that moment for that moment, you're not part of your team anymore. You're face to face with another human being. I think that's absolutely that's a good insight because, you see, you have these, you could call them, you know, some psychologist who would psychologize it would say, well, you have these psychological protections about pseudo-speciation and being part of the group and not an individual. And I think that all those things are true. I think that that group feeling, though, is far beyond just trying to protect your psyche against the killing. That's what actually, that's where you lose your ego completely. And I can remember this feeling of being the group. I wasn't me anymore. And so in that sense, there was no sense of me dying. Now, I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't like this except for brief, brief moments of time in the middle of combat. The rest of the time, I'm sitting around being scared to death all the time. But at that moment, I lost that sense of who I was. I was just this marine unit. And we are invincible. I mean, I could die, but there's no way they're going to stop this marine unit. And if this marine unit dies, then by God, the whole core is going to show up. And there's just no way it's going to stop. So this sense of immortality that comes from the group that I think is extremely important and contributes to that mystical sense and that feeling that you come back from that to humdrum. And it's tough to reintegrate. Yeah, you brought it up at the end. But as you were speaking, I was thinking that's precisely a kind of description of mystical self-absorption, loss of self. Yeah. And mystics report that they rarely attain it and keep it for any length of time. But remember, it's very fleeting moments of their lives. And they can never explain it. Never explain. Yeah, it's ineffability. Yeah. I can't describe it to you. But yeah, I was there. But I was there for a brief moment. And I wish I could get it back. But I don't want to pay what I paid to get that one.  And he says, well, he says, I wouldn't trade it for $1 million. But I wouldn't pay a nickel to do it again. It's a good explanation. And one of the most dramatic scenes I found in the book is when you describe this moment when your soldiers, your Marines, started cutting off the ears of the enemy and sticking the ears in their helmet bands and presented you with a sort of leadership challenge of how you're going to deal with that. Can you say something about that? Yeah, we'd been fighting for several days. And the enemy had stacked up. I mean, that's an exaggeration. But there were dead bodies right below our fighting holes. And I'm walking the lines after we had a contact that night. And all of a sudden, I see a notice one of the kids. And I'm talking to kids, 18 years old. And he's got a couple ears in the rubber band that's around the helmet. And then I see another kid. And he's got a couple ears in there. And I just, I'd been there a long time by that time. And it didn't shock me.  But I realized that you just can't let this pass. Because this is desecration of the enemy. And what had happened is just what I was talking about earlier is that they were just dead animals. And these guys were just collecting antlers. I mean, that's what the letterman jacket trophies. I mean, that's where their heads were. They weren't trying to sort of, I know what the word is, desecrate the enemy to shame them or something like that. They were just collecting antlers. Just like they'd shot a deer that morning. And they put it on their helmets because they were proud of it.  They killed your friends.  And you killed them. And I said, you just can't do this.  And so I want you to go down there and bury them. Take the ears back and bury those bodies. Now, this was not trivial because we were still getting shot at. It was occasional sniper fire. So no one wanted to get out of their hole again. But anyway, they went down there and they started digging. And they both started crying. They just both started crying. And what hit me is that suddenly they were burying human beings. They had regained their humanity in the ritual of putting a body into the ground. And we don't do that. Had you not done that, what do you think the consequences would have been? Well, I think that if I had not done that, that would have been, hey, the lieutenant just winked. Or I guess it's OK. I mean, I think it's just that simple.  But if I didn't take an action on it, it would be quite clear that it's OK to cut ears. In fact, there were commanders in Vietnam that said, I'm going to see ears.  Come on.  And I think that right there and then, if I had not acted on it, the next step would be peeing on the bodies.  And even though I wasn't angry at them, I don't judge them morally. Because like I said, I just knew where they were coming from. They were collecting deer antlers, but that had to stop. And when it did stop, I think they felt bad about it. You know, when we first talked on the phone, you mentioned that you had just given a talk at the Naval Academy. And you were surprised where the midshipman put their focus in your book onto the story of P-dog and his little marijuana cigarette. And I actually thought a lot about that, both the conversation of why that was. I said, I think I can explain to you why the midshipman upset about that. Let me hear that, yeah. Because they've been trained in a very simplistic moral code that tells them it's always wrong to lie. And yet in the story that you give, it seems to me anybody of even moderate moral maturity would say absolutely lie about the cigarette. So I wonder if you could tell the story. And then it's, yeah. P-dog is a made-up name for, I'll tell this group, is a kid named Warner, who was just one of the great machine gunners. And he was, I think he was just out of high school and went to boot camp and came over there. So he must have been 19 or late 18. And he'd been there for a long time. And he did what is called a 12 and 20. In other words, he only had less than 10 days in country. And so we usually let him off of ops if they only had 10 days ago. Because they were pretty much useless anyway. They were wearing three flak jackets and hiding and 30 feet under their foot. So it's like, might as well send them back. And I had been just transferred back to the rear. I took over the S1 job. And I was called the S1 Zulu. But the S1 was an alcoholic that spent all of his time reading porn magazines. And so I took over the job, basically, and got a call one night. And it's like, we got three kids from your battalion down here, they've been caught with smoking marijuana. Back in those days, smoking marijuana was a dishonorable discharge. And it was like three strikes you're out. There was no well mitigating circumstances. It was like you were smoking dope, dishonorable discharge. And P-dog had been a great marine. And he was just hanging out. Well, so I go over to another. There wasn't another battalion. And they got them all spread eagle with their hands on a bench so that they couldn't reach their pockets or anything. And the duty NCO over there said, well, these three guys are yours. They're not mine. So I said, OK. And I said, well, let's get in the Jeep. So I put him in the Jeep. And I was with one of the sergeants, a clerk. And halfway over back to where the battalion lurch I said, you know, sort of like, I have to go take a pee. And you do, too, don't you, sergeant? And so we stopped the Jeep. And we just turned our backs on him. And we could hear all this fumbling and throwing. And people going through their pockets like mad trying to get rid of the joints. And we got back in it. And I thought, well, let's problem solved. So I got back to the battalion, which in it goes 24-7. And there was probably about, I don't know, eight or 10 clerks there and a gunnery sergeant. And so I line him up. And I say, OK, we're going to search your pockets.  Well, Warner had been wounded. And he still had a bandage on him. He fumbled. And out of it, he had put a marijuana cigarette. He told me later. I met him just about a month ago and talked about it. Didn't come out of his pocket. Like I said in the book, he said it came out of the bandage in his arm. But anyway, popped right out on the floor in front of everybody a joint. And if you ever want to see a black kid turn white, it was when his joint hit the ground. And I told the other two, because they were clean, I said, you get out of here. And they just, they're gone. Now here I am. I've got a career staff NCO and eight witnesses that just saw a guy pop a joint on the floor, dishonorable discharge. And so I said to the gunnery sergeant, I said, Gunny, I know this kid. He was in my platoon. He's a good Marine. I think that's tobacco. And this gun, he looked at me. And he looked at it. He says, I don't know.  And it's just like back in boot camp. He marches around and sticks it under. Everybody knows, one by one, is this a marijuana or is this tobacco? It's tobacco, Gunny. Is this marijuana? It's tobacco, Gunny. And he comes back to me, says, well, Lieutenant, I guess it's tobacco. And Warner just got out of there like that. And the midshipman couldn't get around that. You lied. And I was surprised. Every class, that was one of the questions. They were really struggling with it. And I'm really struggling with it. And I tried to explain it to him. I said, look, I said, we all know that the helmsman has to do with the captain says, right? And if you give him a course, like 360, that's what he's supposed to do. He doesn't make up his own mind to suddenly go 270, right? That's 360. But I said, if he sees rocks, the reason for the rule is to get to your destination, right? Well, then he has to go around. He has to break the rule, doesn't he, in order to achieve what the rule is trying to accomplish? You can see the wheels turning. And I said, what are rules about? It's about how an organization functions. The marijuana rule was about functioning. You don't want people high on dope if they're supposed to be doing their jobs. But on the other hand, this guy wasn't doing anything that was wrong. I said, and the reason you have rules is also it's about fairness. It's about justice. And I said, if we sent him to a Portsmouth Naval prison and gave him a dishonorable discharge after all he had done, is that justice? Yeah, but you lied. And he broke the rule. I mean, to me, that argument is dead simple. But it wasn't to them. Well, no. And having taught it in an academy with perhaps even a more rigid honor code at the Air Force Academy than the Naval Academy, I know what the party line would be. Well, I mean, the sense of the non-toleration rule is there. But you get these downright rabbinic trying to parse these cases about what's a lie, what's not a lie. And maybe at the level of an 18 or 20 old where you're trying to get them to think at least straight about moral questions, maybe oversimplification is necessary. But at some point, the kind of more mature moral reasoning you engaged in on the spot is something every mature adult in that room immediately recognizes an appropriate force of action. So any thoughts about when we let it be complicated? Well, gosh, that wasn't on your list. Yeah, I think that the higher in rank you go, the more complicated you can handle as a maturing individual, and the more complex the issues become. In other words, if somebody is 18, maybe the best way to do it is to just say give them some rules. But then I think that it's quite clear by the time you're a field grade officer or whatever you call a field grade in the Navy that it ain't black and white. Everything's got this sort of shades of gray. And so the higher rank, the higher your maturity, I think you have to let it in. But I wouldn't hesitate to try and move that kind of thinking down to a 19-year-old. I think that quite frankly, they're capable if somebody takes the time. The easy thing to do is to say thou shalt not, right? Thou shalt not smoke marijuana cigarettes. And then they'll go off and do it on a weekend. And then people will say, well, then your friends are doing it. And then if your friends are doing it, how come it's not favorite? You can tell a 19-year-old that kind of stuff. So I'm kind of on the side of educating.  Another one, someone honked at you with a stoplight, both of which revealed your PTSD to you. Can you describe those events? One of the things that a lot of people, most people in this room, I mean, maybe somebody in this room doesn't know this, but a lot of people might. PTSD is a physiological issue. I mean, people tend to psychologize it. It certainly has psychological issues. And there certainly are moral spiritual issues to it.  If you hear a sound, the input, whether it's taste smell or whatever, goes through the cerebral cortex if you're in normal civilian mode. And it's like, I wonder what that is. I wonder, could it be the wind? Or maybe it's a leaf falling or a bird or something? Oh, maybe it's an NBA soldier. And by that time, well, you're dead, all right? So what happens is that the brain rewires. And the statistics are pretty clear that it's early in someone's tour that they get it. The odds of making it through the tour increase the longer you're there.  And so the wiring goes directly to the amygdala. The amygdala is the fight, flight, freeze, reptilian response. There's a sound, and you shoot it. There is no thought. You just wheel around and pull the trigger and blast it. Full automatic. And then you figure out what it is. That's when the thinking comes back and starts kicking in again. Well, what happened is I was in the kitchen and I bumped my head on a cupboard that had been left open, probably by me, because my wife's always shutting the cupboards. And it surprised me.  I mean, there was cans and broken crockery and cups and glasses. I mean, the floor was in splinters. I mean, my hands were bleeding before I finally started thinking again. And then my kids come in and it's like talking about frightening to a little family. It's like, gosh, Dad just took out the kitchen cabinets with his fists. What's going on? And the same thing happened at this intersection. I was a little slow off the mark because I didn't quite know where I was going. And I had my little girl Sophie with me and a guy blasts the horn behind me. Again, I don't remember anything between the horn blast and becoming aware that I was trying to kick his windshield and I was on the hood of his car. And when I come to my senses, in other words, the cortex comes in again. I look back and there in the middle of the intersection is my car with the door open and my five-year-old girl sort of, you know, what's Dad doing on this other guy's car? And this other guy, luckily, he didn't have an oozy or something with him.  But that's that instantaneous reaction and no longer thinking. And it's very hard to turn around. There's medicine and the most important thing is awareness. I saw a lot of VA therapists and I had some good ones. I was really very happy with them. And now, if a guy comes up behind me and he blasts the horn, I still go into like this. I mean, it's amazing. It's just like my whole body just goes like that and I start to shake. But I've been trained. I go 10, 9, take a deep breath, 8. He's just some assholes had a bad day at work. 7, 6, 5.  And then I just drive on. I mean, I'm shaking for a half an hour. But I don't make a fool of myself. Nor do I endanger everybody in the intersection. And I had never heard of PTSD. Never heard of it. And my family thought I was going crazy. So that's those three instances that I began to go like, something's wrong here. One of the, I guess, and I had to put this, honest, most difficult to assimilate, strangest, but very authentic things in your book because it's a description of this presence of evil in your house. And your need to deal with that through various kind of ritual means. I think that's probably outside the experience of many people in the room, but totally very real for you. Very real. So I know it's difficult. No, it's fine. I mean, I wrote it in a book. I'm not going to be coy and say nothing to talk about it. What happened was, I was doing a lot more crazy things than that. I mean, I could hear a sound outside and I'd find myself outside naked in the neighborhood trying to see where the sound was coming from. This is not normal behavior. And so my wife said to me, she was reading in the papers that there's a local workshop put on by the county psychologists. And they're sort of talking about job stress. I think you've got some job stress to deal with. We didn't know it, but so I went to this guy and he started asking questions about the symptoms and stuff. And I'm in the school cafeteria with about 80 people there. And I described it to him. He looks at me. He says, were you ever in a war? And I break down sobbing, just not coming out of my nose. And I mean, I cried for about 20 minutes. And he said to me, he says, you got PTSD. Have you ever heard of it? No. He says, I want you to go down and see this guy. And I wrote down the name Larry Decker, who is a VA psychologist who was at the Veterans Outreach Center down Santa Barbara. And I went down and I started that process. And during the course of that process, Decker had said to me, he says, I've never seen anybody come to terms with PTSD without a spiritual component. He says, I don't care if it's Buddhist or if it's artwork. He says, or Lutheran, I don't care. But he says, I have never seen anybody get through it without a spiritual component. So I said, OK. So I went, if you believe this, went to the Yellow Pages. And I went under religion, our church, or something. And I went to see who the closest one was to my house. And it was an Episcopal Church night. So I knock on the door. And he's in his office, the priest. And he says, what can I do for you? And I said, well, I'm trying to cure PTSD. And I need a spiritual component.  So anyway, he says, well, you know, that's not my line. But there's a capuchin monk who's in a monastery up the valley here who has been dealing with veterans. And so I said to him, I said, well, OK. So I go up there. And his name is Brother David. And he starts to talk to me about spirituality. And we start to deal with the spiritual side. And one day he says to me, he says, there's an old ritual in the church that we don't use anymore. It's called the Mass for the Dead. But he says, it's where you actually talk to the dead people. And I'm kind of going, uh-huh, right. And I says, no. He says, you've got to take it seriously. He says, if you want to do this, I'll do this with you. And I said, OK.  So I prepared for that. And that night, we had that ritual, just Brother David myself in the old Mission San Andes in a dark and stormy night. And it was incredible because we went down and opened these giant doors about two in the morning. And I could feel spirits coming in. And you're going like, yeah, right, my experience. I could feel spirits coming in. And I went up to the front of the church. I could see guys from Vietnam. And I'm going like, OK, you know they're not there, but they're there. You know they're not there, but they're there. And you're in this sort of in-between, hypnagogic sort of state. And then I saw my grandparents walk in. Now I did not expect that. And they sat in the front row. And so we went through that whole ritual. And I had talked to these people. I talked to people I hated. I had some evil I really hated. And I just realized that they were in over their heads sort of like I was. And I talked to guys I killed. I talked to guys that I thought had died because I made mistakes. When we get through all that, we go back to this point. I had to bilge up the story. The night after that ritual, I'm in my bedroom all by myself. And there was this presence that came into the room. And I cannot explain how dark and evil that presence was. It just terrified me. And it was filling the room. And I'm a pretty rational guy, actually, in spite of all this crazy stuff I write about. And I'm going like, is this really happening? And it was like, this is really happening. And I grabbed a crucifix. And I started praying to every saint I could think of. And Jesus and Mary. And it was amazing. And finally, this presence leaves the room. And I hustle down to see Brother David about six in the morning. And Brother David, we got trouble. And he's going like, you know, he says, I don't know. He said, we may have just uncorked something that we don't know what to deal with.  And what the guy said is he says, when evil starts to lose its hold, it'll fight very hard not to lose its hold. And what you've done is you've started that process. And so Brother David came over and he sprinkled holy water around that sort of thing. And the next night, the same thing happened. Well, I was pretty shaken up. But by this time, I was in this PTSD group in Santa Barbara. And this goes back to what we were talking about way earlier than what we were talking about. There was a guy in that group whose name was Bear. And he was a Chumash Indian. And he was a long range, a Lerp, long range, a reconnaissance patrol guy in Vietnam. And he's after the group meeting, he comes over, he says, this guy, you didn't say a thing.  And I said, yeah, and I told him about this.  He says, that's evil spirits. He said, we know how to deal with that. I said, great. He said, no, no, no, you wait right here. I was at a coffee shop. He was wait right here. He said, I'm gonna go talk to my uncle. He says, I'll be back, maybe an hour or so. So I'm sitting there waiting for my company. And Bear comes back with a cassette tape that his uncle had made for me and a bowl of white sage and green sage. And he says, okay. And he says, now, my uncle's gonna be Channy.  And I want you to light these on fire. And I want you to go around all the corners and the four winds and stuff like this. And then try and channel along with my uncle. And it'll be all right. We do evil spirits. And I did that. And he never came back. And the funniest thing about, I said, well, I think I joined the Catholic church after that because it seemed to be a home for me. And then I think it was Higgins over here. He said, jeez, Marlanas, you should have become a Chumash. All right, I have one last question. So please prepare your own. We've got some time off. So my last question is this. Toward the ending of the book you write, and I'm quoting, I'm constantly told, usually by people who have never been to war and who apply varying degrees of simplistic reasoning, that all is fair in love and war, that having rules of war is total nonsense. This is simply not true. To sink through the position that fair play and the impulses of good character have no place in modern war, taking some sort of tough guy, real or politic stance is something the ethical warrior must never do. As we wrap up this Ethics Symposium today, I'd like you to elaborate on that thought. Yeah.  If you're fighting for money or for power, I don't think you're ethical. And the very thing that this nation thinks is worth fighting for are ideas like fair play, mercy, justice. So if you don't exhibit this yourself when you're fighting for those ideals, you're putting yourself into a terribly hypocritical position and one that's very, very difficult for you to argue your way out of. It's like, oh yeah, I really believe in these things, but right now I don't. So the first thing is that your actions have to line up with what you should be fighting for, which are those kinds of ethical ideals. The second thing is on a very practical level. Well, it's both practical and moral. I mean, there's the golden rule that every religion has due unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you were in the situation of, well, the example I use is in World War II, Von Look, who was a German armored reconnaissance guy, was out in the desert and they got caught flat footed and it looked like RAF, but he said he thought it was a Canadian aircraft though, it was a Spitfire. And it came rolling in and hit him hard and they scattered and one of the soldiers had to go back because the radio was there, he needed to retrieve the radio. And the Spitfire rolled in again. Now, the man was totally defenseless. He was on top of one of these armored recon things and all these things had been hit hard. I mean, they were going nowhere. And that Canadian pilot just tipped his wing and just went right by the guy and let him live. That's an image that has stayed with me a long time. If you were that guy, would you have wanted the pilot to say, well, the guy will come back to fight again, you know, so kill him now. You know, I mean, that's that tough guy stuff. Well, the fact is that that armored reconnaissance patrol was defunct, it was done, its mission was aborted. It could not go anywhere further.  So just on a practical and also a philosophical thing, if you were in that situation, you would want your enemy to behave the same way. And then finally, you're gonna have to make peace with these people. The war is gonna be over at some point.  So there's an ethical, moral reason for behaving that way. And there's also a very practical reason for behaving that way, for keeping rules of warfare and keeping to them. Thanks very much. Okay, thanks so much, Carl, that's been wonderful. I do...


What, how did you kind of like break that hold of that idea?  I think, I don't think I ever was really in the running to join the normal human race. There was not like a, it was not like I dabbled in it and you know, wore a tie for a while and did the right thing. Then one day he said, you know what?  Yeah. By the way, is this video as well? Yeah. Oh wow, isn't the future amazing? It's incredible. Oh yeah. I'm so born in the 70s. So, yeah, I mean, I was always a bit of an outsider, I guess. And at first that wasn't something that really helped me. You know, I was into singing opera. I was a guy who was into Eastern philosophy into, I don't know, for a lot of, like all sorts of stuff that wasn't being an Australian kid who played football and drank beer and was destined for a career in, you know, somewhere in the suburbs and any of that. So I was always doing different stuff. I think the point was that at some point I learned how to make that work.  And I wasn't doing that out of an act of like rebellion particularly. It's just that it didn't suit me at all. Sure. I wanted to do different things. And I realized pretty early that, well, first that was for me, that was music. You know, I was a musician for a long time but I realized that that wasn't gonna make me money. It wasn't gonna make a lifestyle for me. And so I started looking more intelligently at how I could, I guess, unplug from society's constraints and then learn how to jump from society to society and take the best pieces out of it without being trapped by any single one of them. And that's been, I guess, the main focus of myself over the last, say, five years. Yeah, so really what the initial step out for me was going to China and studying martial arts in Shaolin Temple and deciding to be a full-time musician even if that meant living on lentils and sleeping on people's couches which I certainly did a lot of. Yeah, I guess I wasn't afraid to live rough or to not have any security which nobody has anyway. There is no security, it's just it's total illusion but people are very addicted to that illusion of security. I just never was. Well, you know, this is interesting because you talk about this idea of, I'm gonna word it as somewhat of a social misfit, you know? And I know for myself just nothing, nothing felt normal to me and I just didn't make the right choices in life. And a lot of times, or the right choices in life, what I mean by that, not necessarily what is right. But to follow who you are and to do what you want, you know, there's this huge relationship with experience and you know, cause and effect and all the sort of stuff that happens that it was not always good and there was like a lot of pain and confusion and whatnot from that. It's so interesting because when you talk about like, man, I just, you know, wasn't set out to be a, you know, I forget what you said, normal Ozzy kid or normal, you know, human on this earth in that sort of pursuit of finding that happiness and confidence within that, you know, what took you through those times of confusion? Because I know for myself and I know for everybody else that I talked to who's had this sort of lifestyle, I mean, there's times of heavy doubt where nothing is on your side. You know, what carried you through that? Yeah, I think when you decide to live an extreme life, you have to hit both ends of it. So you're going to have extreme highs, you're going to have extreme breakthroughs and you're going to have extreme breakdowns as well. I mean, when we first met, when was that 2011? 2011, yeah. Yeah, I mean, despite the fact that I was in many people's eyes, you know, a seduction hero and I was living my life and whatever, I was going through a really, you know, horrific time in my life and that was, that was a really interesting wake up call for me because I think I thought that I'd finally gotten through all that, you know, that that was part of being a young man and being in Boston having those doubts and I realized that no, it's not. It's something that cyclically reappears in your life. In terms of no matter how high you go, things will get stripped away from you and shattered periodically and you have to learn to embrace that and you have to learn to understand that that is part of the cycle. And I think the thing that really gets, has gotten me through those times is, well, firstly, it's been having a very strong brotherhood of men and women, of the sisterhood, of people who are truly, deeply your friends and collaborators and I think I've learned over the years, the true value of loyalty and real friendship, which is rare and those people, you know, they're there to support you through those times. And the other thing is that it's, that I've never associated my success, my status, my money with being, like with being happy. So it's that my internal spiritual pursuits have always been primary. And so when I've had periods where things, when the shit's fallen apart, it's been okay because I can always sit down and meditate. I can always go, you know, step out on the journey again. I know that I'm resourceful and resilient and that I'm charming and I know how to seduce people, men and women and you know, I know how to do all those things and I'll be fine. So I think when I, especially when I see clients who are very, very rich, for example, it's really interesting to see the way that they're so fixatedly attached to that, that that defines them and that there's shit scared of losing it. Yeah. So I think part of it is like going through a process where you have had everything stripped away from you because most people don't face that. They're really scared of it. So they always avoid that no matter what. And particularly, you know, like going to, doing things like going into the jungle and taking insane psychedelics for a month or yeah, living off no money or any of those things take you to a point where you know that, yeah, you can survive the worst and therefore you can enjoy the best.


What's happening in society and what does our Dean tell us? Because the way that we should approach any new question, any new situation, should be, it's not always easy to do, but it should be what? What does Allah say about this? What did the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam teach us about this? Because that's going to give us the foundation. It may not be popular and depending on which schools you go to, it may not feel cool to start there. But I promise you, just like, I'm sorry, this is a Star Wars analogy, just like the Jedi. Do you guys remember a new hope, the one where Luke Skywalker is a young man to the six people who raise their hand? He's a young man and then there's this crazy man in the mountains named Obi-Wan Kenobi. You don't realize who Obi-Wan Kenobi used to be. That's where we are. We're in a time where what was great has been forgotten and the low people are in charge and they're more than in their dominating society.


We're going to talk about three ways that stuff can get in and out of the capillaries.  We're going to make the assumption that all of this, all three of my in and out strategies are happening in a continuous capillary, like I'm just going to visualize a continuous capillary. Knowing that in a leaky capillary, all three methods of exchange still happen. They just happen differently, faster, different characteristics, but these three methods are doable in all kinds of capillaries. So let's remind ourselves of the fact that capillaries have cells lining like they're made of simple squamous epithelial cells. So don't forget that because that could get confusing if you forget that, yeah, we actually have cells here. You're made of cells. What? I know that's shocking. Okay, strategy number one. Strategy number one is diffusion. Remember, our goal, diffusion. Our goal is just to get stuff in and out. But what? Some things can just move out of the blood or back in. Give me an example. Who would that be? Carbon dioxide and oxygen. These guys, I mean, we don't have to mess around. We don't have to play games. We don't have to have different tools. They're just going to zip in and out based on their, essentially, on their concentration gradient, on their partial pressure gradient. So that's easy. Okay, one, okay, move on. Strategy number two is something called transcytosis. Transcytosis. And what does that kind of sound like? Barfing and yumtializing. Transcytosis is barfing on one end and yumtializing on the other end and you move things through cell membranes. Okay, okay. So, transcytosis, hmm, maybe blue. Transcytosis is in reference to my endothelial cell and it involves endocytosis, okay, see this, on one edge of the cell membrane, on the luminal edge of the cell and then exocytosis on the basolateral edge. So, a substance comes in. I made this so freaking tiny because I wanted the rest of the space for the next one. But I think transcytosis is really logical and intuitive. You endocytose something from the lumen of the blood vessel. That something is now inside the endothelial cell and then you exocytose it on the basolateral side and that literally transfers stuff from the blood into the intracellular, I mean the extracellular fluid or the interstitial fluid. That's transcytosis. The third technique, the third strategy is called bulk flow and this one is by far the most complex but all the mechanics of this you already know. Really it's just about putting together pieces of what you would expect to happen. Bulk flow relies on two pressures. And again, all it is is stuff is going to move in and or out of the blood vessel and bulk flow we can assume that we're talking about bulk flow of fluids. So I think it's helpful if you think of it that way. First of all, let's remind ourselves what is going on here. Dude, this is a capillary and blood is flowing through it. We actually have a net pressure that is pushing fluid out. It's actually, there's a net pressure that is, perhaps I shall repeat that, pushing fluid out. So what is that pressure? Like what would be a pressure? What would generate a pressure that would push fluid out of a capillary? Capillaries are thin even though we have differing degrees of leakiness, even a continuous capillary is leaky. Who's responsible for that? You know this? Aw, your heart. Blood pressure is pushing fluid out. It's generating a literal pressure called hydrostatic pressure in the capillaries that pushes fluid out. Now the interesting thing is that hydrostatic pressure changes over the length of the capillary, it gets smaller. Why? Look, I'm going to do one more over here. Why does hydrostatic pressure decrease over the length of the capillary? It's because of friction. Remember the like sliding down the shag carpet slide? Friction, you have a higher pressure in the arteries than you do in the veins because that pressure is lost due to friction as you move through the vessels. Does that work? I mean that's logical, right? So you can imagine that you're going to end up changing hydrostatic pressure. Nonetheless, that hydrostatic pressure is pushing fluid out. If hydrostatic pressure was the only pressure involved in this whole crazy scene, then you wouldn't have any blood and you wouldn't have any volume in your blood because all the fluid would get pushed out into the interstitial spaces because of the heart pressure. So something has to be pulling back in. This process that I just illustrated right here is called filtration. And I'm going to, I don't know, you'll see why this is important, filtration. Filtration is the process of taking fluid and filtering it out of the blood vessel somewhere else. Where actually blood pressure generates a net filtration in your capillaries. Now, thankfully, you got somebody else, you got somebody else doing some work in here. Get out your yellow pens, doggies, because we got to have some yellow people in the blood. They're not people. You might want them to be people. They're not. They're proteins. These are my plasma proteins. They're PPs. Are plasma proteins the only things in there? No, no, no, no, no. Look, that's a red blood cell. We got our white blood cells. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to make it look huge and gigantic. We got all sorts of stuff happening inside blood. We're good with that. The plasma proteins are significant. Plasma proteins are only in blood plasma. They're not in the interstitial fluid. So you tell me, what is water going to want to do? We just pushed out a whole bunch of fluid. What's the pressure that the plasma proteins are going to apply? They're going to be like, fluid, come back, dog. Come on back. Now, fluid's going to be pulled back in because of the osmotic pressure generated by the plasma proteins. Is that going to change over time? Like, the way that blood pressure decreased over the length of the capillary is this other pressure going to change? No, it doesn't change. It stays exactly the same, but thankfully it's pulling stuff back in. And guess what that pressure is? This is osmotic pressure. I got to say that's not my favorite color of yellow. Can you guys even see it? It's kind of faint and not very pretty. It's my favorite color. Osmotic pressure is pulling back in. Hydrostatic pressure is pulling, pushing out. What is the net... Oh, osmotic pressure is responsible for reabsorption of the fluid. Does that work? If you want to just call it absorption of fluid, my brain thinks of it as, dude, I just squished it out and now I want to get it back in. So I want to reabsorb what I just squished out. In your capillaries, all three of these things allow us to move stuff back and forth. In your capillaries, there is a net filtration of about, oh, is it three liters? Three liters. That's a lot. One and a half, two liter pop bottles. That's a lot of fluid that is filtered out net every single day. So do you think, like, what would happen?  Now, three liters of fluid hanging out in your interstitial fluid. Dude, you're going to start looking like, oh shoot, who's the blueberry girl and Willy Wonka, Veronica.  Her last name starts with an S, I think. Salt. We have a net filtration of fluid coming out of the three liters and we better do something with that. So we're going to dump it into the lymphatic system and guess what we're going to talk about next? The lymphatic system and Veronica something.


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Lorenzo was only 6 years old when his parents, Augusto and Michela Odone, took him to the hospital because he was stumbling, becoming bad tempered and not feeling well. After a few tests, the doctors diagnosed him with a rare disease called angiolucidistrophy. And according to the doctors, there was no cure for the disease, so this meant that little Lorenzo was going to continue to lose his balance, go blind and death gradually until he would finally die of aspiration. Little Lorenzo only had only 2 more years to live. After consultations with several doctors and specialists, Augusto and Michela were left with the same devastating answer that always echoed, no cure for the disease, so it meant little Lorenzo was going to die. At that point, Augusto knew that he wasn't ready to take no for an answer. He was determined to fight for the life of his son no matter what it took. He finally embarked on a journey to research everything he could about the disease so that he could come up with a treatment for his little Lorenzo before his 2 years' timeline expired. However, there was a challenge. Augusto only had a high school level understanding of science and medicine, which means he had to begin his research from scratch and bring it to an end before the end of the 2 years if he wanted his son to leave. What do you think? Would he or would he not be able to achieve the one thing professionals had spent years researching with no possible solution as at the time of the incident? Hold on, you're about to find out. Let's go back to you. Have you ever heard someone tell you that what you want to achieve is impossible? Well, in this video, I'll share with you how to prove people wrong and do the impossible. If you're new here, consider subscribing so that you won't miss other exciting videos like this. Let me say this first. Virtually nothing is impossible as long as you put your mind to it. Perhaps we should define impossibility. According to lexical definition of the word impossible, it means not able to occur, exist or be done. To say something is impossible is to say that it can never exist. Imagine you were present in the era of Wright brothers, the man who created the first airplane. Before that time, would you have thought that anything or anyone can be transported from location to location via air? I bet you wouldn't. If anyone had dared to mention it, you would have laughed at them because to you, it was impossible. But Shula, an American pastor, motivational speaker and author said that the only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking. Also, according to Vince Lombardi, an American football player and coach, we would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible. So the first thing to do when people tell you that your dreams are impossible to achieve is to get rid of the mentality and accept that you can accomplish anything you want as long as you believe that you can. Christopher Reeve, an American actor, writer and director, said, So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. Peter Lorenzo's dad, Augusto, had the task of learning science and medicine from the scratch and also coming up with a cure for Lorenzo's disease in less than two years. Meanwhile, researchers and other specialists said it was impossible because they had been researching for years and still hadn't come up with a reasonable solution. They thought, how can a complete amateur in medicine develop a cure to a complex neurological disease that expert has been studying for decades. Against all the odds, however, Augusto pushed hard. During the day, he worked at World Bank and at night, he scored research papers and medical journals from the National Institute of Health. After months of long research, he finally got an insight from an unlikely source. Augusto figured out that the oils he used to make spaghetti carbonara can soak up the harmful acids before it hurts Lorenzo's nervous system. Of course, once again, the medical researchers thought it was a crazy idea, but guess what? It worked. Although he didn't cure Lorenzo, it halted the process enough to provide him another additional 20 years until his death, which was as a result of an accident, not the disease. However, it took the doctors another 21 years to finally prove that the treatment works. Today, Lorenzo's oil named after little Lorenzo has saved a lot of people all over the world. What if Augusto accepted what people said and didn't fight for the life of his boy? You see, the best response to people saying that your dreams can't be achieved is to prove them wrong and show them that impossibility is not a word that exists in your world. Once you've changed your mind and accept that nothing is impossible to achieve, as long as you put your mind to eat, what should you do next? Commit to it. Commitment as defined as lexical dictionary is the state or quality of being dedicated to a cost, activity, etc. Commitment is more than just trying to do something. It is a burning desire or drive that keeps you moving even when failure is evident. Commitment is what pushes you to achieve a particular cause because living without it seems pointless. According to Kenneth Blankard, an American auto, there is a difference between interest and commitment. When you are interested in doing something, you do it only when it's convenient. When you are committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results. Vince Lombardi also said that, the quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. To achieve the impossible and prove people wrong, you have to be willing to commit to doing something, not commit to trying. When you commit to trying something, it means that you will give it your best, but if your best doesn't work out, perhaps it wasn't supposed to be. It's okay to be scared at first because it is something that you've never done and you don't know how to achieve it. You don't know what it will cost to do it and you're also scared of failure. However, when you commit to doing a thing, yes obstacles and doubts will arise, but because you don't see the point of living without it, you will eventually achieve your dreams. So, when people tell you your dreams are impossible, 1. Change the impossibility mindset to the possibility mindset. 2. Commit yourself to do it. 3. Use them as a motivation to achieve your goals every time you get stuck. Good luck friends. Thank you very much for watching our videos. If you liked this video, watch more videos on our channel and subscribe. We love you.


Listen, if you're tired of making the same old, same old every week, I got something for you. Today, we're making shepherd pie, let's get it. Okay, so look, I'm gonna let the camera go ahead and pan over these ingredients right here. Don't forget, the full ingredient list is now printable on my website, smokingandgrillingwithab.com, that's W-I-T-A-B.com, right? Now listen, you guys can see, look, this is what I did. I made mashed potatoes, right? Peeled, cut, seasoned, added a little bit of liquid to it. You know what I mean, but if you guys want the full recipe, you guys can go to my website again and you guys can get it from there. And if you know how to make your own and those are your favorite, go ahead and go from there, right? So first thing I'm getting ready to do is, I'm gonna take my cast iron, I'm gonna go ahead and put some fire in the new deck because we gotta have some heat, right? First thing we're gonna do is folks, we're gonna start browning our, you know, this is 80, 20 ground beef. Now, let me go ahead and address this part. This is for like the people overseas and it's like true to being called, you know it being called shepherd pie. This is normally made, listen, it's normally made with ground lamb. This is America, you know, we guys have to do, we have to do some type of substitution and ground beef is readily available. Finding ground lamb is like a little bit of a chore. I can get it, but I gotta have it ground. They say it's frozen, it's a three or four day process and blah, blah, blah. So ground beef work just fine.  Everything inside there and that right there, is what y'all saw me making in the very beginning. All right, so we got enough heat in this pan, you can see, right? Look at that right there, starting to smoke. That's good enough for me. All right, so if you guys don't have one of these right here, look, this is my little meat master. These are especially good for those of you guys that are using those non-stick pans. They got that teflon in them. You know what I mean? We gotta quit using them though, folks. But if you have those, you can use these in here. They won't let nothing, you know, scrape or nothing like that, they'll protect it and that way you want to ingest it. Now, I got it like that, that's good. Now I'm gonna give this just two generous pinches of salt. All right, so I'm just breaking it down. We want it to be small. We don't want no big chunks. You want to treat this like as if this was a chili. Now, okay, earlier I stated that I used 80-20, right?  If you guys pay attention, come here and look at this out of there. I'm gonna go ahead and take this and I'm gonna move this around. You can see it right here. Now for those of you guys that usually buy that 90-10, some of y'all even buy that 93-7 or whatever. You know, that means that it's a little bit on the lean side, right? So if you do that, now would be the time to add just a little bit more oil to it. You know what I mean? You know all of your choice, right? Now, I'm getting ready to take my onions and we're gonna add those in. All right, we're gonna continue cooking them. For me, I cook my beef until I don't see no more pink and then I start, you know, I always give my onion the head start and I move this around. So now I'm gonna take my celery, add that. See that? And then we're gonna come with, now look, this was just a package of frozen veggies. You know what I mean? So you can see I got this medley, right? This would be my peas, my corn and my carrot. I don't put it all in here like that. I like to just look at it and see how much is in there. So when you start mixing it up, you can see. If it needs more, you can go buy visually how it looks. You know what I mean? Cause your eyes will tell you. What we're gonna do is just cook this just till it get a little soft. That's it. Okay, so after I got that in there and it's the heat, it's starting to defrost, you know, my veggies. Look, I got my, this is my garlic cloves. I'm gonna set these here and I'm gonna bring my herbs and I'm gonna put these here cause these are the next things that's gonna go in here. So I'm gonna grab my press, put these three garlic cloves in here. Take it like this. Look at this right here folks. Man, that just amazes me every time. All right. And then our herbs. So look at this right here. Let me check my fire. I'm like on super low. I'm getting back to medium. You're probably hear it kick up just a little bit more. But look at the color. That tell me my mixture is right. Right? So we leave that there. Now I'm getting ready to bring my tomato paste into the, you know, to in fact. All right. Now once you got that, that paste, you know, mixed in that heat to help it, you know, dissolve and spread, right? So look, now we wanna take, check this out. We're gonna take our flour, all right? You guys got it now. You've been cooking with me long enough to know when you start using flour, you know what I mean? You know that I'm the guy that like to do the rules or if I start adding cornstarch, we doing a little thickener, right? But just follow with me and stay with me folks. Now we wanna move this around. We wanna let everything, you know, get nice and, what's the word for me? Mixed and married. After you got everything cooked in and you feel like, I'm gonna say after about a couple of minutes of moving this around and letting that flour marinate with the food and it touching this, you know, cast iron, right? It's getting cooked. Now we gonna come with our beef broth. We boiling, we finna set this down, lower this temp, set it down to a simmer. Right now we gonna cook this for about 30 minutes, right? We gonna stay on top of it.  Cause if you get a little too dry, we wanna like stir it about every 15 minutes, right? So I'm gonna put my top over here like that and we cool. For those of you guys that don't have a top for it, what you can do is get a piece of aluminum foil, put it over here, just leave one little vent. You know what I mean? We do it like that. That's old school, that's granny's way. But I don't have to do that right now. Cause if you look right here, this is part of my hex clad tops. You see that right there? And that's some of that evaporation, some of that heat and steam come out the top. After we come back, we gonna preheat our oven to 375 degrees and we finna make something magical. Okay, so look, this is what we did. Just give it a recap. 30 minutes, I really didn't even have to go 30 minutes, you know what I mean? Cause I like what I was seeing. It's nice and firm. I'll do it like this. We'll look at it like this. Look at that. You see that right there? That's what you wanna have. Now I put my cheese right here so we can go ahead and discuss this. When you're making your mashed potatoes, you can put your cheese in here. You know what I mean? You can leave it like that and then kinda like melt it that way. But I'm gonna do it a little different for me folks. Look, I almost reached down and grabbed it like that.  Now we gonna come back to this right here and what we gonna do is we just finna put the icing on the cake. Y'all like that? Well look, you know what? These last minute thoughts, right? We finna go ahead and do a little level up. 375, we go in the oven, put it right there, close them up. Now I'm getting ready to set myself a timer for about 20 minutes or we gonna take a look. Usually takes about 30 minutes but 20 minutes I wanna know what's going on. So check it out folks. Now you guys just see how easy it is and when you think, you should be able to come up with some of these recipes that I have and like combine them and make your own creations, right? It's really about making great tasting food. But as I always say, I'm not finna over-talk it. It's time for me to get in here and get me something to eat. Here we go folks. There it is. Cheers y'all. Now I don't let this cool. I'm still telling you it's fire, folks. Again, I just wanna recap that part about like it's in the seasoning. You know, it's ground beef. Normally I told you when they make it originally it's made with ground lamb. If you guys got the ground lamb, that's even better if you ask me. It's nice, tender, juicier. It holds on to your seasoning and does all of that. But look, this is, I'ma say it like this, man. This is American folks. You know what I mean? Hey, we get down and we doctor of everything and we make it just right, right? So with that being said, I want you guys to let me know down in the comment section below. What else would you have put inside of this right here? Well, if you got a better way of doing it, please talk to me in the comment section below. And don't forget, the full recipe is on my website, smokingandgrillingwithab.com. Now, if you're new to my channel, let me take this time to say thank you for watching this video. Don't forget to like, smash that subscribe button and tell everybody out there. Listen, there's a channel out here to simplify these recipes and taking the mystery out of cooking. You guys don't know it. If you're new to my channel, but listen, I love that great Kool-Aid. I'm about to grab me some of that and guess what, we about to sit down and eat. And you know what? I'm out.