978: Adam Gamal | My Top-Secret Fight Against Terrorism Part One

22:51So it's - Correct. It's got a little bit of a different flavor, maybe than some other places in Egypt. Absolutely. So Egypt, Alexandria, actually at that time, at the time I was growing up, we had more Greeks. We had Greeks, French, Italians. We had a few other nationalities. They were living there. So Egypt, because it's on the Mediterranean and Europeans loved it. And Egypt before the military regime took over in 1952 used to be actually a very nice place with good economy. It was like really booming. So a lot of Europeans moved there. And when they moved either, they went to Cairo because they were working in something government related, but the majority of them went to Alexandria.

23:27So when you go there, actually, you'll see a lot more Roman artifacts than you will see Islamic artifacts or Arab artifacts. It's more European style city. Or it used to be now it's like deteriorating just with the military not doing a good job. But yeah, you're absolutely right. So growing up there, you have the uniqueness of it's a port city. You see ships coming. You see Navy guys coming. Commercial Marines come in. They hang out in the city. So you end up seeing all of these foreigners are coming. And I think what I've read once, like people who live on ocean or sea, they are more attracted to travel because they always, they grow up, wanted to know what's on the other side of that.

24:08This big body of blue water, what's on the other side of it? So you always want to see. So the curiosity make a lot of people living in coastal cities, they travel, they leave. And I was one of those. So I ended up at age 20, I ended up leaving. How did you see Islam change in Egypt when you were younger? because I know it used to be this place, when you look at old photos of Egypt, it's like women in shorts and skirts dancing around. But I've been to Egypt, of course, much later than that in like the year 2000. There was no women walking around at all unless they were covered head to toe and often their face was covered.

24:41I mean, it was definitely not the black and white Egypt from photos. Absolutely. And as you see like pictures from before, like from the 20s and the 30s and the 40s, and even when you see movies from that time, you'll see like actresses, like, you know, how they dress, you know, wearing mini skirts and all this. So ironically, by the way, when you look at pictures from Afghanistan in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, all the way till the 70s, was the same thing like Egypt. You see like girls going to college, like dress Westerner style, if that's a better way of saying it. Then what happened is when the military regime took over in the 50s, they played this nasty game where Arabs and Egyptians in particular are emotional and religion plays a big, big role in their life.

25:24So when the military took over, at that time, the Muslim Brotherhood were like moving. They were like, they started in that 1928. That's when the movement actually started with the Muslim Brotherhood. So like fast forward, like, you know, 15, 16 years after the military is about to take over and the military wanted to get the general population around them. So what do you do? You go and you find a movement that actually has some popularity, which is the Muslim Brotherhood. And they had like a marriage of convenience for a bit. Then after that, the military realized, okay, the Muslim Brotherhood are actually more popular than us.

26:00They risk in our ruling. So they took a lot of them, put them in jail, executed their leader. And then they were basically banned from like 1956, 1957, all the way to the 70s, to like 74, 75. Then Sadat came, but Sadat came after Nasser. Sadat was the president who did the peace accord with Israel. When Sadat came, now he's fighting. He had another enemy, which is like, you know, the socialist party, which was Nasser's party. They were very loyal to Nasser. They were very socialists. And he wanted to counter that. So how does he counter that? He takes the Muslim brother out of jail. and he started beefing the Muslim Brotherhood message.

26:43And even Sadat, who is my hero, but he made a few mistakes like anybody else. They used to call him the president, the leader, the believer, the believer leader. So he actually made himself more conservative from a religious perspective, most likely than he was. But it was like a lot of leaders play those games. And so he did that and he took those guys out. And then we started seeing a lot more of that preaching of, hey, a woman should cover their hair, a woman should cover this. As a matter of fact, growing up, a woman wearing pants was not a good thing to do. Like they used to talk about this on like those people preaching.

27:23They used to talk about like, you know, if a woman is wearing pants, she's not conservative enough. She's not good. She's this, she's that. So we went from women wearing miniskirts and shorts to women wearing pants is wrong. And that kept going and going and going and kept the situation just kept getting worse and worse till when I was in college. And the Muslim Brotherhood started, they started the grassroots movement way before Obama did. These guys started at, in a way, where they started preaching and talking to kids. So when I was, you know, eight, nine years old, they used to, like, approach kids like my age and take us to the mosque and talk to us and, like, you know, saluting the flag is haram, is forbidden.

28:02Doing arts in school, doing music is forbidden. And when they teach you that, when you learn this at that early age, that becomes engraved. Fortunately, my father kept me away from all of this. But you had other people who actually just went that route. And when they ended up going that route, that's how we ended up having. So the Muslim Brotherhood was the foundation that Islamic Jihad was built on it. That was like a Jama 'at Islamiyah, was branched out of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then after that, you have Al-Qaeda started out of that. So Ayman Zawahiri was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before that.

28:37Then fast forward, there was like a Nusra front, which is basically was the beginning of ISIS. So it keeps getting like more radical and more radical and more radical. And then we don't know what's next. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, It's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at sixminutenetworking.com. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you.

29:14It is not cringy. It is very down to earth. It's not gonna have a bunch of awkward or cheesy strategies or tactics. This is just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in six minutes a day. That is really all it takes. And by the way, many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. Come on and join us. you'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Adam Gamal. What span of time was this? I mean, how fast did everything go downhill? Because it sounds like once they kind of opened up the Muslim Brotherhood can of worms, women started covering up.

29:50You mentioned in the book there's like street imams that basically just preach super conservative Islam, regardless of how accurate it is. I'm asking because I feel like this stuff always happens much faster than people think. That authoritarian oppression comes at you pretty fast. Yeah, I agree with you. So I think that the whole thing, like you felt right, like I said, growing up in the beginning, we used to have, so as a kid, I lived right by a major road, which is like one block away from the beach. So we used to have like an Easter. We used to have like these parades and you would see like, you know, Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny and, you know, Santa Claus around Christmas.

30:27So I saw those things as a kid who was maybe eight, nine years old. When I was like, you know, 12, 13 years old, so in this time, like, you know, four or five years, then those things went away. And then they said, well, the economy is bad, but it wasn't because of the economy, because those things were not, they were like mainly by companies and by people. So within four or five years, just people went and they started saying, this is haram and this is haram and this is haram. So it goes a lot faster than a lot of people think. And then if you want to add to that too, during that time, right, a bit after that, it was the Soviet Union-Afghan war.

31:01So during that time, again, the U.S., Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, they played this game of like, let's just push people to go fight the Soviet Union, which when you look at it, it's a good cause. But again, the way they took it and the way they pushed people to go, they start pushing. So I grew up seeing Mujahideen going to Afghanistan, fighting for five, six months and coming back. And when they came back, some people held them as heroes. And some people looked at them as radical extremists that we don't want to deal with them. But all of these things were happening under the government's watch.

31:38Then how to motivate people to go fight in Afghanistan. You have these street imams that you're talking about. And they'll go on cassette tapes back then. and they'll preach and they'll say whatever. And these cassette tapes were like everywhere. I mean, like everywhere. They were giving them away for free. You don't have to buy them. They were like giving them away for free. And you can just, you ride a taxi, you can hear it in a taxi. You go visit a friend, you can hear them playing it in their house. And the government allowed that to happen because for whatever reason, either it suits their agenda or they were so, I don't think they were that ignorant.

32:11But these guys start talking about like everything was forbidden, everything was haram. So it became so suffocating to the people there. And you'll see a lot of people left Egypt in the 60s and the 70s. It almost sounds, it's weird because as a podcaster, it's like tapes making their way around and changing people's mind. It's like that's so grassroots. But it's really hard to stop that kind of stuff, right? It's hard to stop people from sharing a cassette tape with a crazy message. It's wild how popular that stuff was because clearly that stuff struck an underlying nerve or chord, I should say, with the population.

32:45if you could hear it at your friend's house and in a taxi. It's like Joe Rogan kind of only for terrorism. Really not ideal to have viral appeal like that. But it says something about the society. Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely. But here's the add to it too. How do you protect society from stuff like that? When you have a good education system that teaches you critical thinking and like how to analyze the information, how to actually take a piece of information and analyze it and critically think about it, then you can go and say, okay, a guy told me singing the national anthem is haram. I'm like, okay, he's an idiot.

33:19So you can go now, you can be the best podcaster and you can go and say, we should burn the US flag everywhere. Then people will be like, okay, man, Jordan went crazy. We're not going to listen to him anymore because people are educated enough to make this idea, right? Although we have people saying, let's burn the flag. Look, as somebody whose mission, the whole show is about critical thinking and helping people analyze information. Let me tell you, by the time the message of this show gets its shoes on, the crazy idea of burn the flag or become a terrorist has already made its way around the world a thousand times.

33:54Right. So like that's that's the problem is us inoculating the population against nonsense ideas is a much harder process than distributing a nonsense idea in the first place. My audience would be 100 times larger if all I did was distribute nonsense ideas because that stuff is so popular. Correcting misinformation, it's unfortunately much slower. So, yeah, so that's what I was saying. So at that time, so if you want to like combat this kind of thinking and people are educated enough, then they can actually listen. But in Egypt, the education system is like, you know, we tell you we it's built on given you receive information, you memorize the information.

34:34We ask you in the test, what was the information? And you spit it out. But we don't teach you how to think or how to critically analyze and how to digest and dissect, actually dissect information. It was very easy for these street imams to influence people. As a matter of fact, after the revolution in Egypt in 2011, there was an election, I think, in 2013. It was the Muslim Brotherhood and a former Air Force general. and the Muslim Brotherhood candidate went around mosques and he said, if you don't vote for me, you're going to hell. And some people actually believe the guy and voted for him. And they said, well, this guy represents God.

35:16Again, that's what I was like preaching a lot in the book. And I'm not preaching, like trying to explain in the book is like, hey, when we give people the proper education, we all live a better life. Whether it's formal or informal education, you then have to go to school to have education. I agree. This is a good message. There's a story in the book about you running for, I think it was like student council and the Muslim Brotherhood guys go in and they beat all you guys up and then they file police reports that say that you beat them up. The illustration of this story is perfect because you go up to the guy and you go, why'd you beat us all up?

35:50And then say that we beat you up. And he goes, it's okay to lie about things because we're at war. And it's like, oh, so you will literally just make stuff up, doesn't matter what it is, because you are right and everyone else is wrong. And you can't really fight an organization like that unless everybody's on the same page, because you have to know they're just going to lie. Everything they do is to take over power. There's no rules other than win. Correct. So basically by any means necessary, right? Right. So I tell the guy and And the guy is like, well, and he credited to the prophet and he said, well, the prophet said we have three occasions.

36:30We are authorized to lie during those three occasions. And one of them is war. And I'm like, so who you are at war with? And he's like, what a war with everybody who does not believe what we believe. And these guys, they were so organized that they orchestrated the ass weapon during the day where there is a soccer game between the two major teams in Egypt. so nobody's in school because everybody watching the game. They give us a room to have a meeting on the fifth floor so you cannot jump out of the window unless you're planning on killing yourself. And they put us in the end of the hallway. So these guys planned it.

37:04So it wasn't a random, let's just go beat them up. It was like, okay, we're going to have a plan. So we cannot underestimate their sick mind and go and say, well, and we have a lot of those guys in the US, by the way, and they've been in the US since the 60s. and they have beliefs that they're not going to change unless, like I said this in the book, some grass, you can water it and you change the color and you make it really green grass if you start early on with that grass. Some grass already is long and is old or grown enough that you cannot change it. You just got to weed it out. And I'm not saying go kill people.

37:42I'm just saying that's how the G-O-O-T was. There are people who are hopeless cases and you cannot just try to convince them to change their minds. So we have to look at how these organizations, radical organizations, and not just Islamic radical organizations, honestly, any radical organizations, we have to look at how they recruit the people, they join them. And we go and we say, how can we fix this? But if we just watch and wait for them to change their mind, that's not going to happen. What made you want to come to the United States? Was it the idea that like, look, Egypt is full of these Muslim Brotherhood guys, the other side's a military dictatorship, there's no future here?

38:19Or was there something else going on? It's mainly all the above plus, right? So, okay, Muslim Brotherhood were like, you know, moving faster than a lot of people thought. Although as a kid, I was seeing that. I wasn't a kid anymore. I mean, I was in college. So I can see that. Government was military, military dictatorship. So based on what's your last name, what family you came from, how rich or poor you or you have no hope. What I was telling, I firmly believe this, I came to the U.S. to give me the right to dream. And what a lot of people don't, they take this for granted. The U.S. actually gives you the right to dream, that you can actually walk down the street and you say, you know, you see this house?

38:59One day I'm going to buy this house. I'm going to own a house like this. In Egypt, you don't have that option. You cannot go and say, well, here's a couple of million dollar house. I'm going to work my ass off till I buy it. So you don't have that option there. It's either you're poor or you're rich and where you were born and how you were born and what family. And you can have one of two exceptions, but even the exceptions of successful people in Egypt, they left Egypt. Like, you know, some of the best doctors in the world are Egyptians. They left Egypt. One of the best soccer players in the world, everybody knows him, Mo Salah in Liverpool.

39:32He left Egypt. Nobel prize winners who originally from Egypt, They won it when they were in the U.S. So it's seeking better opportunities and seeking a land where you have the right to dream. Speaking of dreams, tell me about your first night in New York City, because that was more of a nightmare, I think. That's a good way. I was going to tell you it's so isn't a dream. So I land in New York, but literally, I mean, I had a booklet. They give it to you as an international student. You have a booklet that has all the economic places to stay at. I had the addresses of all the YMCAs. Oh, yeah. One of them was in New York City, and I get off the plane in New York, and I try to talk to the bus driver, who I don't understand what he's saying.

40:16He was nice enough to like, okay, dude, just sit here. Took the booklet from me after asking him 10 times. And it was his way of like, dude, stop fucking asking me questions. When your stop comes, I'll lay out. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, like YMCA, YMCA. All right, just sit here. I'll tell you when to get on the bus. Exactly. Just stop talking and we'll be okay. Yeah. So I get on the subway. We get off. I had a friend. He was traveling with me. Me not speaking English. I knew English more than he did. So it was like in a clown show. Couldn't make it out of the subway station to go up. It was a Sunday.

40:49Finally, a police officer, after asking him a few times, took me by the hand and took me out. And he's like, here's the street. So it's raining. And I'm like, dude, it doesn't rain in Egypt in July. I mean, it's raining in the summer. We had the suitcase. I have my$500 hidden in my shoes. Well, I bought like, you know, the subway ticket. I think it was like$1.25 at that time. So I have whatever left from the$500. So I'm hiding the money in my shoes. I'm terrified. I see the police officer is like, he pointed the YMCA. We go there. And I had a phone number of a friend. He was in the Boy Scouts in Egypt with me.

41:23His mom gave me his phone number. And she's like, he's in the US. He's been in the US for, I want to say it was a year or two before me. I get coins and I'm dialing his number from a paid phone in the YMCA. There is a community bathroom in the YMCA, the paid phone by the community bathroom. So I go and I dial the number. And what his mom didn't do is she didn't put one plus one before the area code. Oh, she didn't dial one before the area code, right? Okay. She didn't write it. Or she didn't write the one. Right. I'm dialing without the one. It doesn't go through. I kept doing that till like about two o 'clock in the morning.

41:56Finally, there is a junkie standing by the bathroom. I think he got sick and tired again of seeing me. The guy when I smoke his joint and he's like this foreign kid coming. So he took the number, he took the quarter, put it there and dialed the number for me. Finally, my friend ends. I told him where I'm at. He's like, go back to your room, move your bunk bed behind the door so nobody can break into your room and don't leave. Don't get out of the room till I come and pick you up tomorrow. So my buddy's in the room. I go back to the room. We push the bunk bed behind the door. I take the$500. I put him under the insole of the shoes and I put my socks there.

42:35And I'm like, okay, if somebody comes to the room, they wouldn't be able to find the money. So I was really terrified. I mean, because when I landed there too, I had just seen Pretty Woman, Julia Robert and Richard. I was like, dude, what happened to the Julia Roberts. I mean, what happened to all the pretty women that I'm going to see in the streets and the limos and, you know, like well-dressed men. And there was none of that, by the way, none of that. So I was like... Yeah, they're not at the YMCA in Harlem at four o 'clock in the morning. And I was like, did I land in the wrong country? So next morning, we ended up going to New Jersey and the journey started from there.

43:14That's so funny. My friend is also Egyptian and grew up and his whole family's in New Jersey. I don't know how big the Egyptian community is there, but there's a distinct possibility that you are either related to or know somebody from my friend's family, unless there's just a zillion Egyptian people in New Jersey, which is also possible. It's a huge Egyptian community and I have no idea. And when I came and everybody was like, hey man, when you go, there is a mosque in Jersey city. Just go there and you'll find people that you know and you'll meet them. And then they'll tell you where to go to school, where to live or to get a job.

43:48So I don't know why Jersey City, but everybody comes to Jersey City. The fortunate one, the lucky ones, they go there as a stop and they leave. I think the unfortunate ones are the unlucky ones. They ended up going and staying. I was lucky. I went there for a bit and I left. Trapped in New Jersey, the American nightmare. Yeah, no, it's probably not that bad. It's not. It's not. New Jersey is the butt of every joke, as you know. It's really not that bad of a place. I know. We need something to kick, I guess. I don't know. It's like, poor New Jersey. When I tell people like I was, I lived in New Jersey, like put your exit.

44:20I'm like 14A. So, but what I didn't tell you to like, who did I meet in the mosque? So I met the blind chief, the guy who was behind the World Trade Center. Oh, the bombing, you mean the blind chief. So tell us a little bit about who this guy was. So this guy was originally, most likely was one of the Muslim Brotherhood guy, advanced a bit to whatever came like Jama 'a Islamiyah, like came after the Muslim Brotherhood. And he was the guy who issued the fatwa for killing Sadat. The president of Egypt. The president of Egypt at that time. And he said because Sadat did the peace agreement with Israel, it's okay to kill him.

44:57Because whatever, he came up with some, like any of the other crazy imams. So he came up with this and he's like, so he ended up being prosecuted. And I don't know if he spent time in jail or he came out. But then after that, he was helping, pushing people to Afghanistan with the war against Soviet Union. And then according to public record, a few years after CIA helped him, issued him a visa from the U.S. embassy in Sudan. And he ended up in the U.S. He ended up in Jersey City in the mosque. So here I am. I walk there. And maybe my second or third month, I'm in the U.S. I walk there and I see him.

45:35And I hear people saying, you know, Sheikh Omar is here. Sheikh Omar is here. His name is Omar Abderrahman, and we called him the blind chair. He wasn't doing sermons or anything. I mean, he was just, he would go pray. I think he was married to an American Muslim lady to get his green card or whatever. But he would sit down, and after Friday prayer, he would sit down, and people would sit around him and ask him religious questions. Like, you want to ask a priest, like, is gambling okay or not in religion? So one time, I'm a curious kid, and I said, I'm like, I want to hear what these people are talking about.

46:08Those are the people who beat the fuck out of me in Egypt. And here I come to the U.S. and they are here still. I mean, what the fuck? Yeah. I sit down and I'm like, let me see what they're saying and what kind of crazy stuff they're talking about. I think the second question that somebody asked them was like, is oral sex allowed in Islam or not? So these guys who've been studying religion for God knows how long and, you know, they come into a Friday prayer and they sit down and they're going to talk about like, you know, how they're going to solve the world's problem. and what are you going to ask the guys?

46:41Is oral sex allowed or not? Yeah. Dudes be dudes at the end of the day, I think. So I'm like, okay, I'm standing in the wrong crowd and got up and left. If people are interested, what he said is, he said it's allowed. So if people are curious. Yeah, but it's like you think like, I'm going to ask this guy, why did God put us on earth? And it's like, hey, can I get BJs or what? Yeah. All right. Like I said, he was the guy with like, you know, the big thinker, the scholar, the guy's been studying religion forever. I'm going to ask him, like, how could I be a good human being? Or like, why God put us on earth?

47:15Or tell me the history of this religion or that religion. But I know that the question was literally that. And I was like, okay, fuck all of you guys. I'm leaving. Yeah. Well, it also shows you like the level of thought people put into. They're like, I'm going to die for my religion. What do you know about it? I just know that I'm allowed to, you know, get oral sex. and what's the history? I didn't ask any of those questions. I didn't ask any of the big, like those other questions. It's just like, this is the stuff that's important to guys who are in their early 20s or whatever, who are the ones that they're recruiting into this extreme version of religion.

47:50It's just, it's insane. It's literally insane and a waste of air. How was immigrant life though in the first few years? I mean, you talk about having dentistry done basically in some guy's house, people ripping you off at work, like playing chess in the park for money. I mean, that's quite a grind. So what a lot of people don't realize is like, you know, the majority of immigrants, legal immigrants, so I don't want people to get all bent out of shape. But immigrants, when they come, they come in because they are seeking a better life. And they'll do whatever it takes. They'll work hard. They'll study hard.

48:23They'll grind. So first month, first three months, actually, I'm sleeping on the floor. I'm not like having a mattress on the floor. No, sleeping on the floor. I didn't have money. I barely got a job. I'm going taking English classes in the evening to learn English. I'm working in a factory that the guys were like Lebanese. Again, nothing against Lebanese people, but these guys decided not to pay me after like, you know, three, four months. And you're like, okay, now I don't have money. What am I going to do? Found a mattress in the trash, took a mattress from the trash, put it in the room. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to bring a blanket and just put it on and sleep on it.

48:57This is part of it. And you like, you know, you work in gas stations, you do whatever it takes. because whatever you have here at that time, still better than your home country. You still, you know, you went and you worked and now I can go to school. Now I can learn English. Now I can maybe learn more than English. Maybe I can get a college degree better than what I was going to have from there. And then I didn't even know how to drive. So I've learned how to drive with all of these different jobs. And then finally I found a job with a guy, his name is Jim and he's Jewish American Israeli, like originally from Israel.

49:31So he and I could not be any different. I'm from Egypt, Arab Muslim, he's Jewish, Israeli, American, but we both had the same common goal, like, you know, looking for a better life and looking for how to make America home. So it didn't take us a week to click to like, you know, we had the same ideas. We had the same common goals. We had the same opinions. You do that and you do that a bit and then you're like, okay, how do I make this home? How do I make this country really home? It's not cliche. I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army. but I was like here is a key actually can get you to be as American as anybody can argue with you and it was joining the military and I felt like it's a debt that I owed the country I'm gonna make home and I decided to join the military but during that time whether the things that people take for granted just the right to dream or even understanding the immigrant community like we were to save money if you come in from Egypt it was cheaper to buy a ticket from Egypt round trip so when we would go to Egypt we'll take one way ticket come back have a round trip ticket but then at that time the airline was the only phase that you see when you get in on a flight for an international flight like you came from Egypt I would buy your ticket from you and pay you you know some money and you give me your ticket and I'll fly to Egypt on a ticket that it says Jordan on it and nobody knew that so those are the things that I'm talking about like immigrants they knew the ins and outs of those things.

50:59They knew who's faking a driver's license somewhere in Brooklyn. Who's getting people to marry for green card. Immigrants knew those things. So it's a valuable resource for us to just ignore them and say, well, you just arrived two generations before you and my family came in Ellis Island and they took the keys with them and they locked the door and nobody else can come behind. No, it's still a country of immigrants. And if you don't bring them in and have them part of society, they're going to become part of, again, a society. And you don't want that. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal.

51:39We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, the discount codes, the ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, you're wondering if we even have that sponsor, just email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show.

52:07Now for the rest of part one with Adam Gamal. It's interesting, in the book you make a, you highlight the idea that the American dream is the right to dream, whereas in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, you don't have the right to dream. You're not supposed to do anything like that. It's not really a part of the culture, which is, it's hard to wrap your head around that as an American. Like, wait, you don't want upward mobility if it's not somebody who's in our organization that believes what we believe? I mean, that is such a toxic thing to grow up with because basically you're forcing all your best people to join this weird militant organization where they're focused on totally different things.

52:45So, of course, people leave if they have potential and the ability to do so and go literally anywhere else. Well, maybe not literally anywhere else, but certainly to a free country like the United States, a relatively free country like the United States. So you joined the military. How many Egyptian immigrants with shaky English are in basic training with you at that point? I would imagine it's a lonely journey in the beginning. I was the only guy. Yeah, I bet. I was totally the only guy. For people who know me in person, a lot of Egyptians look like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans. So everybody spoke to me in Spanish because everybody thought I was Perican because nobody even fathomed the idea of having an Egyptian guy in the army.

53:25So yeah, I was the only guy. In basic training, I was the only guy. In advanced training, I was the only guy. I'll tell you, actually, the first Egyptian I met, I met in Fort Hood, Texas, wasn't his way out of the army. It was an older guy, spent four years in the army, and he was leaving the army at that time. I think he was a tanker. But no, there wasn't that many Arabs in general. I think as a military, we were not doing a good job in recruiting in those immigrant communities. And then at the same time, the immigrant communities, the Arab American immigrant community, were not doing a good job adapting.

53:56Like some immigrants, whether Arabs or non-Arab, some immigrants, when they arrived to the U.S., they have achieved their goal. Their goal was to arrive and they stop there. And that's it. And I'm like, no, that's the beginning of the journey. You just arrive to the beginning of the journey. That's one point I'm trying to put a lot of emphasis on, on the book and in my interviews to speak to the immigrant community. Don't settle for the status quo. I mean, you came to this country to make it home, to make the best out of your life. So go to school, join the military, go work hard, start the business, do something other than just saying, I'm going to come and stay in this.

54:33So like you and I talked a few minutes ago, but it must be like a gazillion Egyptians in Jersey because they come and they stay. while you have like another 49 states, you can actually travel, go to a different state, buy a farm or like go farm somewhere or go cow tipping in Wisconsin or go do something else, like explore America. The peak of American life. Exactly. That's funny. I understand that. It's true though. People do, they stay and they get settled, but that's also like very much human nature. You know, like my grandparents were immigrants. One of my grandparents, I should say, was an immigrant.

55:08The other ones were also already had been born in Detroit, but their parents had immigrated to Detroit. Then my parents stayed in Detroit. And then I moved. And then suddenly my cousins started moving. And I was like, oh, you know, it's funny that you ended up moving to California. My cousins, a bunch of my cousins told me, oh, I never would have left Michigan, but then you left. Yeah. And then I left. And then Christina left. And then Steve. And it's like, oh, you guys left because I left. And they're like, yeah, we saw you moved. And then you were living like a different life and you didn't move back home after five months.

55:39So we moved and we realized we like it better over here. You really do need to see somebody break the mold. It's tough though. And that's kind of like what you're doing, right? You broke the mold, joined the military, moved to a different place and you're showing other immigrants like, hey, you don't have to just stay in New Jersey or Dearborn, Michigan or Cupertino, California or wherever your family moves to Arcadia, I guess, for the Chinese, a lot of the Chinese, or Vancouver, right? There's a lot of places you can go. I would imagine though, if, man, if you're like the only Arab that you even knew in the military, surely you're dealing with some racism at that point in time, just because, you know, you're talking about joining a military full of people who are fighting other people that look like you, not necessarily being on the same team.

56:23Yeah, absolutely. So I want to go back to your point about people not moving. It's exactly what's in the book, Who Moved My Cheese. I was the first mice who just decided, you know what? I'm not going to say who moved my cheese. I'm going to go out and find more cheese. So I found a lot more cheese. But to go back to, yeah, so when you join the military and you're not white, you're not black, you're not Puerto Rican, or you're not Hispanic, you must be the enemy. That's just how the equation goes, right? You must be the enemy. and it was right after Desert Storm. So my second day of basic training, the drill sergeant, they set you on the floor.

57:00It's like a big hall. They set you on the floor. They're trying to break the ice. The drill sergeant goes around and he's like, you know, every one of you guys tell me your name, where are you from and why did you join the army? And you have the guy from Hawaii. He's like, you know, I'm from Hawaii. My name is John Smith. I joined the army because I want a better education or I joined the army because I want to serve my country. I want to pay for college. I have student loans. So you have all of these different reasons. I didn't get to tell the guy my reason. I said, you know, my name is Adam Gamal.

57:28I'm from Egypt. And the guy was like, what? Hold on, hold on. Before I even told them why I joined the army. And he's like, where are you from again? I said, I'm from Egypt. He's like, didn't we fucking kill all of you Arabs in Desert Storm? Oof. I said, as a matter of fact, no, you have one left. I was saying here. Oh my gosh. What a horrible thing to say though. I mean, so ignorant and gross. And let me add to this, that Gerald Sgt.'s last name, because it's a very common last name, was Vasquez. So you can imagine. Vasquez. Exactly. So I'm like, this is coming from a brown guy just like me. Yeah.

58:04My battle buddy was from Pennsylvania, a blonde kid with blue eyes, one of the nicest guys. Right after that, I mean, we walk back to our, like, as we walk into our bunk beds and the guy was like, hey, man, don't let something like that bother you. So I tell people, for every person that you meet who's either ignorant or, I didn't want to say the guy was racist because I don't think he was racist. I just think he was ignorant. But for every person that you meet who's ignorant, there are at least maybe 99 who are good-hearted, kind people who are willing to just show you the rope and take you with them and the way.

58:39And like I said, a lot of things I mentioned in the book about that guy is the last day in basic training when we'd spend time with his family. I go to Fort Hood, Texas. My first platoon sergeant is a great guy who is taking me under his wing, literally taking me under his arm. and he's like, and I'm short, so it's easy for him to take me under his arm. And he shows me, he teaches me those things. So for every, like, I don't want people to be scared, like, oh, the military is like full of racist people because it's not. But I did, I did encounter those. And I want this to be more positive and more encouraging and like inspiring.

59:13So this is not about me complaining about somebody being racist in the military because we have racist people in Egypt too. So we have them everywhere. That's true. I just thought it was, you know, you're the only guy there. Sure, that must have happened. Tell us what we can learn about the unit. I know it's tough because you can't even mention the name. And it's like, there's no other books about this unit. It started in 1981. No one other than you has really written about this, correct? It's basically still totally secret. So correct. So we have journalists who did like, you know, investigative journalism.

59:44And they got like, you know, they sat on a board, got some information from them. I'm the first actual operative or operator that was a member in the unit that wrote a book. about his life and about the unit. So it was a very hard balance to tell a story and at the same time protect national security. It's an organization made of, it's a mix of a special operation and intel. So imagine that you take Delta and CIA and you put them together and NSA and you put the three of them together and you come up with a guy who's capable of being one of the three. so that's the objective of the unit was created after the Iran hostage situation and that was like at that time okay we have door kickers and I'm not gonna say like it's easy to become a delta guy or a navy or like a SEAL team six guy it's still hard but it's a lot more physical so like you know go to the gym 20 hours a day get muscle memories and how to shoot you're gonna pick it up then the more you should the more calm you are when you shoot you can train what we call hard skills when you go to soft skills, how to blend in, how to be the gray guy, how to be the guy who's not going to sit and talk about, let me tell you how many times I jumped out of an aircraft.

1:00:53And let me tell you how cool I am. And let me, let me just show you how you want to go to the gun show. Let me show you the guns. But for us as an organization, we were a bit different, mentally different. We were more, I don't want to say we're more intellectual, but we were more like thinkers. We more want to solve problems. You give us a problem, we'll put our brain behind it and we'll sit and think about it and do it. And then it's made of, you know, like men and women. And I call them like, you know, shadow warriors who nobody knows anything about them. I wanted people to know, like there is an organization that we got approval from DOD.

1:01:28We went through all the process. It sat with DOD for 13 months, the book. They took some stuff out. They changed some stuff to protect sources and methods. So the book went to DOD in August in 2021. So literally almost three years again. This is when it first went for review and it sat with them till 2022. Late 2022 is then when we got it and we talked about it. But the organization itself, I cannot obviously say the location, but when I was there, we had people deploying in over like 20 plus countries and war zones, non-war zones, working out of embassies, not working out of embassies. But we were going after like the real, real, real bad guys.

1:02:10And our main job was not to kill them. Our main job was to find them and fix them. Fix them is like I did like the story that we talked about in the first of the book is this guy has been tracking him for a few years. Now we know exactly where he's at. Fix him is like, okay, he's going to be in this location for a few days, a few weeks or whatever for us to be able to execute the target. That's the unit. Our selection process is not classified, but to maintain the integrity of it, I didn't talk about selection or training. Part of our training obviously is classified. Another part is like, you know, how to do land navigation, how to do defensive driving, how to shoot, how to jump out of an airplane.

1:02:49Those are common things like for special operation guys. I thought that was, I was like, wait a minute, this training, there's a lot of gaps, but it makes sense that they made, they had to remove a lot of that stuff. It is sort of clear though, that brain power is part of the focus. And I know people idolize SEALs because of their super impressive physical and mental training. But I always figured, and I wish I'd known this when I was younger, because I may have actually stayed and join the military instead of leaving the reserves. I figured there had to be room for people who can speak multiple languages, blend in with various cultures, develop relationships at a really expert level, but maybe can't, I don't know, like swim five miles in the ocean while carrying a cinder block or whatever.

1:03:32Like that stuff is amazing. But whenever I saw that, I was like, well, I can't do that. All I can do is learn languages to fluency very quickly and connect with people really easily and get them to tell me things that they don't normally talk about. I was like, ah, but there's no real use for that. The State Department was interested in that stuff, of course, and other organizations were interested in that stuff. But the military was like, we need nuclear engineers. And I was like, all right, this is not the crew for me. You either need to be able to swim five miles in the ocean without a wetsuit carrying a cinder block, or you need to be able to be a nuclear engineer.

1:04:03So I just, I left for that reason. So the thing is for us too, we were the guys who are swimming and they throw things in the bottom of the pool. We did some of these things, not, Absolutely not to the extent like the Navy SEALs do. I think a lot of people love the Navy SEALs because the Navy SEALs love to write books. People know them very well. Yeah, that's part of it. Sure. But guys, I have a lot of friends, like Navy SEALs, and I have a lot of friends from Delta. I have a lot of friends from CIA and NSA, and they are all great Americans. It's just everybody brings his own strength to the table.

1:04:34We couldn't do it by ourselves. We couldn't do it without having other guys with us. For them, it's the same thing. They couldn't do it without having other people around them. So it's a good ecosystem in the Joint Special Operations Command. And especially when we partnered a lot with the CIA and NSA, we were able to execute targets a lot better. But you're absolutely right. Having people with the language capability, the cultural capability, the people who are like, what you're doing now is like you get people to talk, right? And you get them to tell you stories that most likely they wouldn't say it somewhere else.

1:05:06Having that capability, being a good listener, being attentive to even in business now, like for me, understanding when to shake somebody's hand, understanding when, how to treat an older guy who's older than you. And I've seen it, like I've seen it in Iraq, I've seen it in Afghanistan, when you see like a young captain who's 23, 24 years old, Captain America, he feels he's better than everybody else in the world. And he sits with a 70-year-old tri-bar leader in Afghanistan, and he just sits and he crosses his legs and he has the bottom of his shoe in the face of the older man. Well, in a lot of cultures, that's not a good thing.

1:05:42So you do that, and then right there, you just lost an ally. You just lost the guy who could have been your ally. What I tell people, like understanding culture, it's like the commas and the periods of the English language. The commas and the periods are too small, but they change the meaning. It could be a question. It could be a sentence. It could be the end of a sentence. You not knowing the culture is basically you just have a sentence running without any commas, periods, question marks, just the sentences going. And then you're going with it. So I tell people just those small things in the culture have a lot of meaning and people should understand it.

1:06:17And I was promoting that when I was in the military, like, guys, we need to learn these things, not just the language, we need to learn those things because we can win hearts and minds a lot faster than just going talking down to an older man. You know, the punctuation analogy is really good. It makes a lot of sense. There's a saying in English that I'm sure you've heard, which is punctuation is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your Uncle Jack off a horse. Yep. And I'll let that one sit there for people who need a minute. I've heard that one. Hey, it's not mine, so feel free to go ahead and sprinkle that in your media tour.

1:06:52Yeah, I will. Let me take a note. Yes, yeah, write that down. Only the important stuff. What types of missions, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but what types of missions was the unit involved in? I mean, one, in the book, you mentioned finding kidnapped generals. Like, when I heard that, I was like, wow, how often does that happen? That seems like something that should probably never be allowed to happen. Yeah. So the unit is involved in missions where, so we were basically getting our tasks from, like, Secretary of Defense level. Three main missions, JSOC, Joint Special Operation Command in charge of three main missions.

1:07:29Counter-narcotic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue. Those are the three main missions. Counter-insurgency is something that came up after, and I'm still trying to understand what the fuck is counter-insurgency. But it's something like some general came up with it and it sounded cool. But those are the three main things. So whether it's a counter-narcotic, like killing Pablo Escobar. Counter-terrorism, the bin Laden's and the guys I talked about and Abu Musab Zarqawi and you name it. and all the way from, I'm from Egypt, so I can say this, all the way from Bonfak, Egypt to the other Bonfak, Egypt.

1:08:05Right, right. So from anywhere, I deployed to places. So I'll say the name of this city just because it sounds really cool and it's not classified that people were there, but the name of the city is Ouagadougou. So for your listeners, they can Google it and figure out where the fuck is Ouagadougou. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've heard of it before, but now I'm like, where is Ouagadougou again? Is it Ghana? No, it's Burkina Faso. Is it Burkina Faso? Yeah, Burkina Faso. Someplace with a military dictatorship. Yeah, Burkina Faso. And then you can be, maybe you'll end up in Tumbuktu or you end up in Bonfakigi.

1:08:41In Mali. So you can be - Which also has a military dictatorship right now, which aligned with Burkina Faso, I guess coincidentally. And the one thing with a lot of these places that has a military dictatorship, while they have military dictatorship, the environment is ripe. for extremist groups. Because those extremist groups, sometimes they partner with the military, they don't partner with the military, they go against the military. And then yet there is a lot in the Sahara region, in West Africa going all the way, the sub-Sahara, there is a lot of smugglers. So they smuggle weapons, they smuggle.

1:09:11And if you are a smuggler, you can smuggle terrorists as well. And then the smugglers are just, their main goal in life is to make money. The unit or other joint special operation units, they go to these areas to track down bad guys who are being smuggled through. And you never know, like the underwear bomber was from Nigeria. And then they make it all the way to East Africa, to Somalia. From Somalia, they can cross the Babin-Mandeb Strait to make it to the Arabian Gulf and they can make it up. So it's not, it's connected and they can travel around. So General McChrystal, one of the greatest generals in our recent time is like he used to tell us all the time, it takes a network to defeat the network.

1:09:52If we're not operating as a network, So basically, you have to, if your enemy speaks Chinese, you need to understand Chinese. If your enemy speaks network, you need to understand network. So that's why we were everywhere. So we were deployed to a lot of different locations. I traveled. I deployed more than 12 times in the 10 years I was there. After that, I left and I went to another organization, was doing something else. And then I retired in 2016. But the unit itself, so those three things, the counter-narcolic, hostage rescue, and counter-terrorism. That's why that, okay, there is a general who got kidnapped.

1:10:25Or when I was in Iraq, I was leaving Iraq, coming back to the US. I made it to Qatar. The unit commander contacted me like, hey, there is a hostage situation and a kidnapped soldier in Iraq. We need you to go back. So I had to call my wife and say, hey, I'm sorry, I'm not coming. I have to go back. And those are the things that a lot of people don't realize how hard on any family those things are. So people are like, oh, military guys are really cool and they're deploying and like special operation guys and they get paid more and they jump out of aircraft. No, but to call your wife the day you're supposed to arrive back home and you tell her you're not coming, dude, they need some balls.

1:11:04You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the go-to person to help negotiate a hostage situation in Syria when no other intelligence agency would help. When you have a hostage negotiation, especially in a war zone, the hardest thing to do is to actually figure out who the hostage takers are. And the rumors are off the charts. Proof of life is getting that authentication, that you're talking with the people who actually have the person. And you want to know, of course, that the person's still alive. You ask him for some question or some nickname, something that no one would be able to know.

1:11:34And if they can't come back with that answer, you walk away. The person I had to flag down and find who held this Westerner hostage was probably the biggest Captagon dealer in the country. And they often use the same distribution routes for the Captagon as they do for human trafficking. So the same people who take little girls from villages and send them to the Gulf, to Dubai, to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, to other places there, they fill also stomachs of the girls with drugs and use them as couriers while also shipping them as the product itself. The first thing you have to do is tell the parents to stop doing something that they want to do and that every schmuck under the sun is telling them to do, which is to seek public support, right?

1:12:17To get public statements, to do Facebook campaigns. The Secretary of State say how we're not going to leave a stone unturned until this awful act is being brought to justice. What just happens with that is your price went up before you even started a negotiation. You do not want to drive up the perceived value of the hostage. Sometimes people are taken hostage just for the shock value of executing them. What you're going to do with the campaign that you're doing right now is going to get your child or your spouse killed? How is pissing off the people who hold that person's life in their hands helping you?

1:12:48By the time I get involved, it's usually too late. To learn all about the nuances of negotiating with criminals and human traffickers, check out episode 617 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, that's it for part one. Part two coming soon might already be out, depending on when you hear this. All things Adam Gamal will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. I got to admit, there's not a whole lot. It's not even really his name. You can also ask the AI chatbot on the website, transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

1:13:20Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got our newsletter where every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of highlights, takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter's a great place to do just that. Gabriel and I are refreshing the format as well. Looking forward to hearing your feedback on that. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well. It's over at sixminutenetworking.com.

1:13:47I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's into this like military stuff, the intelligence stuff, special forces stuff, definitely share this episode with them. Maybe you want to share it with somebody who's recently moved to the United States and is feeling a little bit foreign.

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