979: Adam Gamal | My Top-Secret Fight Against Terrorism Part Two

24:25So let me just highlight this and explain it. The diversity I'm talking about, I'm not talking about I'm an Egyptian guy. Let me be part of the best unit in the military because you need to meet a kuda. No, I'm talking about when we have different ideas, different strength, different way of thinking, and you bring all of these things together, given that they all qualify to sit on the table. So you have to make it to the table. And how do you make it to the table? You go through selection process, you join the military, you do an IQ test, you do strength test, let's see how much weight you can lift.

25:03All of those right, whatever criteria they have set in place, you pass it. Well, if we have everybody fighting, look the same, think the same, we're missing out. So the diversity I'm talking about here is not, and again, I'm a minority guy. And when I got promoted to E9, which is the highest enlisted rank, and I got promoted in 16 years, which is very fat. Anybody in the military, they'll tell you that's extremely fast. One of the guys was talking with me. He's like, you know why you got promoted? Because of affirmative action. And I was like, okay, at that time I had one master's degree. I was working in my second master's degree.

25:40I had awards. I had the education. I was deploying more than anybody else. I had three bronze stars. So there was no affirmative action there. I don't need somebody to give me a hand across the street. I can cross the street on my own. I don't need a hand to get promoted. I can get promoted on my own. What I need is the same opportunity everybody else has given. Give me the same opportunity everybody else has given and I'll make it happen. So the diversity I'm talking about, it's not the bad word diversity. Let's just make sure if I have three people to choose from and I have a guy who's a unicorn and I'm missing unicorns and the unicorn doesn't know how to speak the language or anything.

26:18Let's just bring the unicorn. No, that's not the diversity I'm talking about. The diversity I'm talking about is the diversity that we were talking about before. Whenever the word became a bad word, I don't think it was ever a bad word before. It was more of the U.S. Army was the first U.S. government organization that ended the segregation. And we have the Indian Americans, Native Americans. We have the African Americans. We have units. We always looked at diversity as a strength. And that's the diversity I'm talking about in the book.

26:49You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. Hey, I know I tell you about six-minute networking all the time. I'm going to tell you one more time. It is free over at sixminutenetworking.com. It is about building a circle of people that you know, like, and trust. And I know a lot of people are like, I don't like networking, it's gross. I get it, it is gross. This is not a cheesy course that's gonna make you look like a wanker. It is super easy, non-cringy, very down to earth. It's great if you're retired. You can contact a bunch of old folks in your circle.

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27:45Now, back to Adam Gamal. Yeah, it seems obvious in an intelligence context that you want somebody who understands what's going on, even if that person is the same, or I should say, especially if that same person comes from the same culture as the people you currently are working against, right? Correct. I definitely want to be next to the person that went to college with Muslim Brotherhood, has personal experience with Muslim Brotherhood, speaks the same dialect as Muslim Brotherhood. The guy who was college roommates with somebody who went and became a terrorist, like that's the guy you want right next to you when you're dealing with these people.

28:18So it seems really obvious from that perspective. And that's what I used to tell people, like, okay, in a lot of my deployments, I was able to go and talk, like again, and we'll talk about Iraq because it's open. In Iraq, when I'm sitting down with some extremist guy in his internet cafe that he owns, I can carry a conversation with him to get the information I need from him, to make him feel comfortable, to let me take my equipment, put it on his table. Yeah. Right next to him as he's drinking his tea. Take anybody else who doesn't have the same characteristics and take him there. that they would have walked out of the base, he would have been shot.

28:54I had to get two, three levels of approvals to be able to leave the base. And they had to see me like, you know, higher command. And this was like, this mission was involved, not just military, it was military and two other agencies. And all of them have to say with me, okay, do you know what you're going to do? Do you know the risk you're taking? And when they saw me, they felt comfortable. This guy can go and do it because I can carry a conversation. I can, so that's the diversity we're talking about. But you're absolutely right. If I'm going to go, and I'll tell you something, I mean, when I was, my last job, I used to fly with my commander a lot.

29:25And going to certain airports in the US, I was like, man, I'm glad he's a white guy. Because guess what? When I'm going through TSA, I'm going with this, the commander, we're both in uniform, so nobody's looking at me. So it's using the strength, the strength that you have to accomplish a mission, not to give a free lunch. There are no free lunches. Well, you did mention, I think this is, I don't know if this is in the book or just something we talked about on the phone now that I think about it. but you mentioned coming back to the United States and getting detained by customs. And it's like, what were you doing overseas?

29:55And you're like, well, I can't tell you that I was overseas on a mission to make America safer by assassinating terrorists. So I guess I'm just going to say vacation. And they're like, yeah, get into secondary screening, Egyptian guy with an accent. We don't trust you. Yeah, so I think we talked about this on the phone. So yeah, I used to get, I got pulled in the secondary a few times coming back from missions. And at some of those times, even I have an official passport, like a red official passport. it shows that you were in a US government official job. Wow. And when I came back, the immigration would ask me more questions and my passport would have said I was born in the US.

30:27And she's like, you know, how come you're born in the US and you have an accent? And I'm like, I was born but not raised. And we would go. And again, I had to get out of jail free card. I can make a phone call. But that's the last thing that you wanted as a guy who's in operations. Right. Yeah, so you would deal with these things. And I'm like, okay. But when I'm going overseas, guess what? I joke with the immigration guy. I say a couple of Arab jokes and the guy is like, do you want to come over to my house to have tea? I was in another country where, in Africa, where I had actually the security police officer in the airport driving me to my hotel.

31:04After joking with him for a bit. Yeah. And I said that and I mentioned a couple of other instances in the book where I said, I got guys who live across the street from a bad guy to invite me inside their house, to sit in their house, drink tea with them. and their family for hours. If I didn't look like them, I would have not been able to do that. That's the strength of the diversity I mentioned in the book. A hundred percent. It makes sense. I mean, I guess I shouldn't be, I'm not trying to throw shade on customs and immigration for doing their job. I mean, their job is to make America safer.

31:32And if they saw you suspicious and they're not like totally wrong about being a little suspicious, like you're an American with this, but you have an accent like that's, this doesn't add up. Let me just make a phone call. It's fine. But there's another anecdote. And again, I can't remember if this is the phone of the book, but you're in the chow hall after a mission and someone's like, yeah, we should just nuke all them Muslims. And it's like, I'm right behind you, first of all. And I was the one out there while you're on the ship looking at a computer screen. I'm the one who was out there driving around to find this guy that we just took out.

32:02It's got to be very frustrating to hear stuff like that. You know, it was more fulfilling than frustrating. Really? And frustrating as well, but it was a lot more fulfilling. And I'll tell you why. So So we just finished the mission and that's the mission that in the first chapter, just finished the mission. We go to a military base in the area. We get a base there for a few days till just everything calmed down before we go back to where we are based because we were based out of an embassy in the region. Again, a higher command was like, hey, we don't want, you know, like you were in somewhere and then all of a sudden you're coming back to the country.

32:34So we want you to stay for five days till things calm down a bit. So me and these two other guys, they were with me in the mission. The actual, actual mission, it was just one guy with me, but there was another guy, Marine, actually, was in the mission with us, but he was doing something slightly different. So we're sitting in the chow hall having breakfast, and it's all over the news that this guy got taken out. And initially, they were like thinking, did the French kill the guy? Did the Americans kill the guy? And then we had actually the U.S. spokesperson went out and said it was a targeted attack by U.S.

33:07military. obviously didn't say who or where, who did it or how they did it or anything. But as I'm sitting down and there's a young soldier sitting as he's having breakfast watching CNN and he's like, man, I wish we could fucking kill all of these fucking Muslim guys. This is like, the guy's like having a blast that we succeeded in a mission. And I wanted to tell him, by the way, like you can't kill all Muslim guys because if you killed all of them, I wouldn't be the guy who's doing this mission. Right. But at the same time, the fulfilling part was how we made everybody proud of our accomplishment, even though they didn't know how to stay.

33:42I suppose that's a good way to look at it, you know, because it would be really easy to just lose a little bit of morale. Yeah. Like, okay, I work with this guy and he still doesn't get it. But it speaks to your point, another point you make in the book of the danger of dehumanizing the enemy, especially when it comes to peacekeeping missions later on. I think you make the comparison in the book with World War II. rebuilding Germany. It was a bunch of French, Brits, United States, and others, of course, rebuilding a state, a country full of people that just looked pretty much the same, right? German, white people, right?

34:17So even though we, I'm sure, you know, you call them krauts or whatever, but it was like, the people still look like us, right? It's hard. You can't just sort of pick them out on sight. But now it's a little bit different, right? I mean, as to this guy's brainwashing in the chow hall, it's really easy to look at people and be like, oh, let's just kill all the Arabs, although they thought you were Mexican, which sort of goes against their point. But we're not talking about the smartest people here. Also, brainwashing is a hell of a drug, right? When you dehumanize the enemy, it's hard to switch that back off during your peacekeeping mission later on when you're rebuilding the country and be like, oh, I know we just got done calling these people rats for the last 10 years, but now they're our partners and we need to respect them and they're on par with us.

34:57It's like, how do you do that? And the answer is, I think you can't. You can't unless you do it from the beginning. So you cannot dehumanize the enemy. But to go back to your example about World War II, Japanese Americans were treated worse than German POWs. This was like I said, I mean, these are American who are, they came from Japanese descent. They were treated a lot worse and they got taken and put in camps and all of these things. And don't get me wrong. When after 9-11 happened, Arab Americans were afraid of the same thing. They were like, are they going to do the same thing to us? But the brainwashing thing, part of it, when I was in Iraq, so a lot of the units I was part of, we don't wear unit patch.

35:36So everybody was in the military. They know every unit has a patch. We don't. We actually don't wear any name tags, no rank, no patch, nothing. But we had guys who had patches of 9-11. This is in Iraq. So I would chat with them and I'm like, you know, why do you have the World Trade Center? And he's That's why we're here, because the guys who did 9-11 were from here. And I was like, that was not one Iraqi guy involved in 9-11. Right. And I said this to a guy, actually, I said this on more than one occasion. I said, if we were going to attack a country because the guys who did 9-11 were from there, we would have been attacking Saudi Arabia.

36:10Right. Because 14 or 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia, but we didn't touch Saudi Arabia. So I'm like, so why are we, or we would have been attacking Yemen because a lot of them did training in Yemen and bin Laden was originally from Yemen. So the brainwashing and dehumanizing the enemy makes us go extreme. There is a really good book called On Killing. I did a study in World War I. A lot of U.S. soldiers, they were within shooting range from the enemy. They had the weapon. They couldn't squeeze the trigger and kill somebody because they looked like them. So it's easier to fight somebody who doesn't look like you if we tell you the person who doesn't look like you is less human than you.

36:50And ISIS is doing that. ISIS, they go and they say, well, this guy is not your religion. So he's not like you. So it's easier to kill him. So by dehumanizing the enemy, we go extreme. Again, the best battles are won without a fight. And this is coming from a lot of soldiers who've been through combat. They'll tell you, if we can win a battle without fighting, that's the best thing. That's the best situation. This is from the earth of war. This is, we have to fight that way. We have to think that way. And I'm not saying sometimes you have to go and you have to take the fight to the enemy. and you have to kick their ass.

37:21But you got to define the enemy before we go and we say, you know, every brown guy is a bad guy. And then we're going to go after that and say, hey, by the way, no, they're not bad guys. To your point, also just the idea of dehumanizing the enemy, you mentioned in the book, beating people, torturing them during interrogations, it doesn't work. And what does work is building rapport and connecting with people. I mean, you can really only sort of terrorize people to just tell you what you want to hear, not to get accurate information. And that seems to be a realization that we still aren't always coming to here.

38:00But every negotiator that I've had on this show has always come to that same conclusion. Like you really can only scare people to a certain extent. And as you mentioned as well in the book, you were surprised that some of the guys who wouldn't give you any information, you'd monitor a call with their family. They're basically saying goodbye to their family. And the wife's like, oh, sorry, you're going to die, but just try and kill as many Americans as you can on your way out. It's just like the level of fanaticism is truly next level. Yeah. So it's very amazing. Their mindset is like, whether they beat us in the war, they win or they die, they win.

38:33So if you go in to fight against somebody, his ideology telling him when he's dead, he's a winner. It's not that easy to beat that out of him. So if you're going to interrogate him and beat that out of him, he wanted to die, right? So what you got to do is you try to use reason with that guy and use the same reason he's coming from. So you got to speak his language. You got to speak. If he tells you a verse from the Quran, then you tell him another verse from the Quran. If he tells you like a story about the prophet's time, then you tell him something. So otherwise, you're talking to a guy who's not on the same page as you.

39:07It seems like we don't understand a lot of our enemies. You know, you mentioned also in the book how the Russians tend to think much more long term as opposed to the Americans. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. So we had, I think it was a situation was like, I don't remember exactly, maybe like seven, eight years ago where they start catching like Russian espionage cells in New York and California around the US. And then when they did the investigation, they looked at these guys. These guys were around for 10 years, 20 years, 25 years. They came to the U.S. in a younger age and stayed there forever.

39:43I've seen it in some of my deployments where Russians were speaking Arabic fluently that literally we did not know. We thought they were native Arab speakers, but they were Russians. So where for us, when we go in somewhere, whether it's CIA or military, you send in a guy to be working in a country for two years, three years, maybe four years max, that's CIA. For us as military, we go in for maximum a year. If you are working in an embassy, maybe you do a year, two years. But our system is not built for guys staying long. That's one thing. Then the other thing is we don't have the patience for that.

40:21We want to come back home. Can you blame them? Like a Russian guy has to go live in New York, all expenses paid. It's like, okay, that's pretty awesome. People are probably fighting for that job. But if you're like, hey, man, you got to go live in Russia and maybe you don't get to live in New York. Maybe you get to live in, I don't know, like a suburb of Chicago. That's fine. But if you have to live in a suburb, quote unquote, of Moscow for a long time, I mean, that could grate on you after a decade or so, right? Your life is on pause. Absolutely. Or imagine that if you have to go live in Mauritania or in Mali or in Niger or in Afghanistan.

40:52So, yeah, I see that. But then who would live in those places? Let me give you a good idea. If you actually have immigrants came from those countries, some of those guys were willing. Like we had immigrants came from Pakistan. They came in a young age. They joined the military. They went to college. They joined the military. And some of them, if you tell them, hey, we want to send you back to Pakistan and we're going to set up a business or whatever. I don't want to like reveal sources and methods. But those guys are willing to go. But when you have a guy who was born in North Carolina and you tell him, hey, hey, I need you to go live in Timbuktu.

41:26And he'll be like, where's Timbuktu? So strategically, if you want to fight that war, you got to fight it differently. You cannot have the traditional military or CIA assignments of like two, three years in one country. For CIA, you're going to hand your assets to another CIA officer. And then, and this is something, I mean, it's written by CIA retired officers in books where like, hey, I work this target and I worked with this guy and I recruited the source. And after my two, three years, I handed my source to another case officer. We're not there for the long term. Right, that makes a lot of sense.

42:01It is interesting, the Russians, I think they're called illegals, right? Because legal spies, if you will, have diplomatic cover. Correct. Oh, I work with the transportation, I'm the liaison for commerce and something like that. Like they work in the oil and gas industry. But if you're just here pretending to work at an insurance company, we had a guy on the show, Jack Barsky, who was an illegal in the United States for a long time. He just basically worked at an insurance company and they were gonna activate him at some point and they never really did. And then they told him to come home. And he was like, no thanks.

42:33You know, he stayed here because going back to Russia, he was from originally East Germany. So going back behind the Iron Curtain, no thanks. And he stayed here. He now lives near Atlanta, which is to my earlier point, he was like, this place is great. I love it here. There's all kinds of opportunity. You want me to go back there and be like the richest person in a non-free country that's basically the equivalent of going back to black and white TV? No, thank you. You've been to over 60 countries, yeah? That's a hell of a lot of places. How many languages do you speak? I speak four languages. Four, okay.

43:08Can you tell us which ones? Or you're not supposed to? No, you're not supposed to. Okay, got it. I want to ask which of the 60 countries. Obviously Arabic is one of the languages. Arabic and English. All right, so great. Right. I can't ask about the other two. All right. Fair enough. 50%. That's not bad. Yeah. I asked you what the sketchiest place was, and I think you hinted that it was adjacent to Somalia or possibly Somalia. On the other hand, though, what's a surprisingly awesome place that you just didn't expect to be so welcoming and beautiful and maybe even fun or interesting? So it was during a deployment, coming back from a deployment, and it was a deployment to the Middle East and it was me, another unit guy, and we were traveling back and we had to do a transit in Dubai for the first time.

43:52And we landed in Dubai and we spent like a night and we ended up going, walking around the beach. It was just amazing. And a lot of people say, well, it's the Middle East. Well, if you've never been to Dubai and somebody threw you out of an aircraft with a parachute and you land, you wouldn't know where you're at. Because we walked around the beach, we saw people on the beach in bikini and on burkini. Burkini is the parka that totally covered head-to-toe ladies. Both of them sitting next to each other. Neither one of them is bothered by the other. Both of them enjoying the beautiful... We came during the winter, so the weather was beautiful.

44:30Both of them enjoying... The winter in Dubai is like in the 70s. Weather is beautiful. Big buildings, very safe. The airport smelled really good. And every public bathroom we went to was like, smelled really good. And I was like, wow, there is something. And then you go to the hotel and people in the hotel taking your, and this is like a normal hotel. We did not stay in a fancy hotel. Normal hotels, people taking your luggage to your room and they welcoming you with a drink. And like, it was just very impressive. And then And we had the opportunity to visit like a mosque. And my buddy who was with me, he's a tall, white, blonde, Jewish American.

45:08And he was like, how is that going to work? I was like, dude, it seems like very, very open and very welcoming. And there was like a mosque, big mosque that it's in Abu Dhabi. So we drove like about 45 minutes. We walked there and we found like a group of monks walking there, getting a tour. So we had monks, Muslims, Christians, Jewish in the same place. and they all felt very comfortable. And again, it wasn't a surprise. I mean, I've heard about it, but it was my first time coming. It was extremely, extremely impressive. Another place I have to give credit to, like I traveled to Kenya one time and a lot of people think Africa is really, really bad.

45:44But Kenya was gorgeous, like the nature and the green everywhere. And so a lot of places are really nice, not as people just imagine. Yeah, I mean, Kenya is definitely, you only hear good things, mostly only hear good things about Kenya. Dubai, like Las Vegas of the Middle East. However, interesting underbelly of organized crime, trafficking, and it's essentially a police state. So you do have a quite a big trade off, I think, for some of the safety that's enjoyed there. But maybe that's what's required. Maybe you need a police state in order to keep a place like that from erupting into something that's unstable.

46:20I agree with you. And I did read about it and study about it, but you have a country that has over 170, 180 different nationalities. I think you have to be a police state. So they have cameras everywhere. I think they're competing with London, who has more cameras in the street, and they have facial recognitions of everything. But like I said, for us, traveling through was just extremely impressive, especially where we were coming from. I mean, we came from a place where, we came from a very nasty place. It was dust everywhere, no clean water. Women were covered head to toe, like literally head to toe.

46:56You didn't see any faces. You might see some eyes. And it was a police state as well. So you have a police state with some freedom and you have a police state with no freedom.

47:08This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. What do they do? They take a moment and they support our amazing sponsors. That's what they do, for one thing. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. A lot of you have been emailing me because you can't find a code or you're not sure if we have a certain kind of sponsor. Please do that. Email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

47:35I'm more than happy to surface that code for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. A lot of people buy stuff off podcasts. They don't look up our code. Actually, it takes a little bit of a ding after a while. So I appreciate it when you take the time to go to the deals page or even get the code from me. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Adam Gamal. So I'm curious your take on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I mean, we don't have to do a whole big spiel about this, but a lot of people will say, hey, look, Israel is just creating more terrorists by handling things the way they're doing it.

48:12I wonder if you agree with that, your take on that, and your take on Hamas as a terrorist organization. But I'll ask one question at a time. Is Israel just creating more terrorists by handling things this way? So I have a very good example for this, that when people ask me, I tell them that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pakistani slash Kuwaiti group in Kuwaiter, lived in Kuwait. He was the mastermind KSM. He was the mastermind of the World Trade Center, the 911. His nephew, Ramzi Yusuf, was the guy who, in 1993, drove a truck under the World Trade Center. And his plan was to have the truck in between the two towers and blow it up, make the two towers collapse against each other.

48:57So when KSM was interrogated, and even Ramzi Yusuf, when he was interrogated, and during interrogations, during our questioning, we're like, why did you do that? And he's like, because of Palestine. And every interrogation, they interrogated the guy even when he's in Guantanamo. He said that. When you read about him, this is nothing classified. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was 16 years old. We were talking about early on why the Muslim Brotherhood was the foundation for a lot of these extreme organizations. Did that, assisted his nephew in the First World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

49:33So he kept doing all of these things. He, his nephew, he has another nephew who was involved in 9-11. So it's like a family business. And all of this was because he heard some of the sermons by an Afghan, one of those like we talked about, like, you know, street imams, a guy who didn't really study. But he was talking about like, you know, fighting the Soviet Union, fighting the Israelis, fighting whoever supports the Israelis, fighting the Americans. So with everything that was going on, to take you to that is like the more aggression we try to do, the more terrorists we create, the more sympathizers.

50:08So you have a guy who came all the way from Pakistan, which is not even in the Middle East, so in the Far East. It's like, it's not even near Palestine or Israel or Jerusalem or not near any of these things. So those acts of aggression and like what I was saying earlier, the more you try to push people, whether in interrogation, whether in beating them up, guess what? You're just going to keep creating more enemies. You can call them terrorists. You can call them something else. But like I said, I was saying, even when we're in Iraq, we're creating more enemies and terrorists than we can handle.

50:39So the listener can definitely try to understand from that how somebody came, grew up in Pakistan, lived in Kuwait, by the way, most of his life. So he lived a luxurious life. KSM actually came studying in the U.S. He went to some university in North Carolina. So he came from a rich family. And why did he do that? Because he felt there was like injustice going on. With everything going on now, I do believe Israel is creating more terrorists and more enemies than anybody wanted. I wonder, though, if Israel were to just, we could turn it off like a light switch and it wasn't there tomorrow. You know, there's a lot of logistics that would be involved in something like that, but let's assume it didn't exist.

51:17Would these guys just find another reason to wage jihad against the West? Most likely. I mean, if people wanted to hate, they're going to hate. So when anybody was asking me before, like, What do I think a reasonable or a good solution for the whole thing is like you have to have two states. I mean, you have two groups of people. They have a hard time living with each other, but each one of them claiming the land. And some of them saying we own this land from 2000 years ago. Somebody say, no, we owned it 5000 years. And nobody knows. So having two states. But to yes, if you have a switch and you flip it and you go and say, you know what, Israel doesn't exist.

51:55This radical groups, they're going to end. I'll give you a good example. When the Soviet Union was fighting in Afghanistan, so all the Mujahideen and the Afghans and the Afghan fighters, they fought till the Soviet, the Russians actually left. What happened after that? They fought against each other. Exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like these groups exist to fight things. They're just going to end up. I mean, even Hamas and PLO were fighting each other before. That's part of the reason that we're in this mess. They're not designed to necessarily govern. They're just designed to take over and destroy things.

52:29I mean, they're militaries, essentially. They're still fighting against each other. And it was in a movie before. It was just one of the saying in a movie, like, my business is war and business is good. So it's a business to some people. Some people, that's how they, if you take ISIS off the face of the earth tomorrow, the leaders of ISIS, what are they going to do? They're like, okay, we have to find a reason. So this is, again, people are using religion. They have agendas to reach certain goals. they'll do whatever it takes to reach those. You have people take Israel out, that would be something else.

53:03And by the way, take Hamas out too, that would be something else. So if we say, you know what, Hamas ends tomorrow, there is no more Hamas. Well, Hamas didn't exist till the late 80s or the 90s. 83. 83. Yes, 83. So before that, there was no Hamas. But there was the PLO. And the PLO were declared the terrorist organization back before then. It was Fatah too. I mean, so there is always, Now you have Islam and Jihad. You have Quds forces. Hezbollah was not there, now Hezbollah. I mean, there is always those things. So unless we educate people the right way and to make sure that people are not easily influenced and going in the wrong direction, we're going to keep having those problems.

53:44That's an interesting segue to what I was going to ask you about the solution for terrorism, in your opinion. it sounds like you think the solution for terrorism is essentially education. And I know you do fund some education for girls in Egypt as well. Correct. I believe myself, even if my dad did not push me towards getting the right education, then maybe I would have went in the wrong direction. So education is going to help people prosper. They're going to help people actually at least critically analyze the information they are receiving. So when somebody's bullshitting them about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you going to hell.

54:20If you have an educated person going to look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I believe to educating women is crucial because they are reasonous. A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things. So if we have a population of educated women in the Middle East or in any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper. And it will be harder to convince these guys to become terrorists. Yeah. I mean, we spend a lot of money on weapons in these countries. Egypt, for example, your homeland, right?

54:54If we put a tiny fraction of that towards education, I feel like it would do a whole lot more. I agree with you 100%. However, I don't think any dictatorship in any of those countries would accept it. Because again, if we educate the people there after like, you know, 20, 30 years, the people are going to be like, hey, man, we have an idiot ruling us. So I know in Egypt, the US government was trying to fund education programs. And I think the Egyptian government was pushing back on that. But in Charles Wilson's war movie, it was very clear that we spent a lot of money on Afghanistan and arming them.

55:30And as soon as the war ended, we packed our shit and we left. And we didn't spend a dollar on education. Fast forward to 9-11, it bit us in the ass. So if we think we're saving money by not giving them money for education, we're not in the long term. We are not saving money. We're going to end up spending more. It seems like if people aren't being educated, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, whatever, some jihadist group, they just fill in the gap because we see this hopelessness, right? This ignorance. How are we going to rebuild this whole nation? Which I understand, right? You know, we can't really do that in the first place, rebuild the whole nation.

56:06Bad actors, they see that as an opportunity to recruit. I think we talked about it earlier in the show, one of the reasons that the blind Shek, for example, wanted to recruit in Africa was because they were so desperate that they were willing to die because their current life was so bad. There was absolutely no upward mobility. That's the best place to go get your ride or die suicide bomber type soldiers. And you know what? You're absolutely right. Let me even highlight this in Europe. So even in Europe, where ISIS was recruiting like in Belgium and in France, they were recruiting from the underprivileged immigrant population.

56:43They didn't really assimilate well because I give huge credit to the U.S. We have good system to help people assimilate with the U.S. system. We have more work to do, obviously. We're still not doing enough to assimilate the immigrant population. But in Europe, even in France, and a lot of people wouldn't do it. So France brought a lot of Africans after the independence of certain countries in Africa. The French brought a lot of Africans from North Africa, from Algeria. And when you go to Paris, you'll see those populations living in the best conditions. And as a matter of fact, they even built bridges between where these people live and the city.

57:19So they cannot walk to the city. They have to really walk on a bridge. And it's harder for them to get into the center of the city. So there is a void there. There is desperation. There is a void. Not the best education or some education, but they don't have the right opportunities and then it's easy for ISIS to go and recruit this French citizen who was born in France, who maybe finished high school or something, but didn't go to the best schools. And he sells drugs in the street. And all of a sudden, they're giving him a purpose. So purpose is very important, right? So they're giving him a purpose and they're like, hey, why didn't you come and fight with us?

57:55So this guy taxis Shedan, he goes from France to Turkey, Turkey to Syria, and he goes to that Islamic state of whatever at that time they wanted to be. They recruited from Belgium. They recruit from Africa. But again, you bring the Europeans. And some crazy Americans ended up there as well. So it's easier to recruit. It doesn't have to be only in Africa. If you put people in desperate situations, even in France and England and Belgium, they'll be easily recruited as well. Speaking of selling drugs in the street, what's this about your neighbor thinking you're a drug dealer? Maybe we keep it light.

58:31Maybe we end on a light note. So, yeah. That's the rumor around town is that your neighbors think you're a drug dealer. Hey, so I'll give you actually two good examples for that. So first, before I get to my neighbor, I'll tell you when I first was stationed in Texas. And for Texas, so I have this small, tiny hookup pipe. It's tiny. It's like you can hold it with like two fingers. Me being ignorant. So I got one of this and I put it in my room in the barracks in the military. And I have a big picture of when I was in basic training, I went and I got a book. and it was Malcolm X's life and it has a Malcolm X's poster with it.

59:06So I took that and I put it in my room. So I have a Malcolm X's poster in my room and I have a hookup hive in my room. Right. So basically you got your Malcolm X poster and your bong next to each other. Exactly. So me not knowing anything. And then I think it was like, you know, after four or five weeks, me being there stationed in Fort Hood, Texas, they do this, what's called health and welfare inspection. I didn't know that till like, you know, a few months after I've learned and I got smarter in the military system and what they do. So they came to my room and searched. Well, they searched, or they cannot search only my room.

59:40So they searched all the rooms. And they were like, oh, we know you don't have anything here. But they were literally, they were searching for drugs. And then fast forward, like 15, 16 years after, I'm a guy in the Joint Special Operation Command. I don't wear a military uniform because the unit I was in, we didn't wear uniforms. You have facial hair. You have weird hair. You travel. Well, I'm driving a nice BMW. I live in a nice house. And I had a hooker. But this time I was actually putting it in the back of my deck. And I got it from one of the deployments to the Middle East. And I'm sitting in the back of my deck and I'm smoking this hook and it's drive-thru to back.

1:00:14Every five years, the government does background check to update your records, to update everything for you to maintain your clearance. So my next door neighbor, a guy who was a retired Air Force major, who never said anything to me other than like, you know, I would wave at him. He was very introvert. He would wave from far away. But when they went to ask him about me, and he's like, why are you guys asking? And they're like, how are you doing his clearance? And the guy himself had the clearance. He was working for the government. And he was like, that guy seems like a junkie. Because I see him a lot in his back, in his back, back, smoking his hookah.

1:00:51at the end of your update of your security clearance, they do what's called subject interview. So they come and they talk to me and they were like, Hey, they chat and they chat. And they're like, Hey, by the way, your neighbor thought this. So you must be doing a really good job that your neighbor even didn't know you were in the military. Yeah. I was the guy who's deploying and I disappeared like every two, three months I would disappear for four or five months. So the guy is like, this guy must be like a mule. He disappears and he comes back and he lives in a nice house and he's driving a nice car and his wife driving a nice car.

1:01:21So he thought I was a junkie. And I looked Hispanic, brown guy, lives in a nice neighborhood. So you must be. That's so funny. You can imagine the FBI knocks on the door and like, we want to talk to you about your neighbor. And he's like, finally, I knew it. I knew it. And then they're like, yeah, we're renewing his top secret security clearance because he's in a super high level organization that we can't discuss. And he's like, wait, are we talking about the same guy? Not the junkie with the bong that drives a BMW and is only here half the year. Exactly. Yeah, that guy. And sometimes I would leave in the morning wearing shorts and flip-flops, and that guy is like, this guy cannot be working in any decent job that he goes to work dressed like this.

1:02:00Yeah, where do you go, in the swimming pool at the YMCA? Yeah, no thanks. Yeah. Man, this is such an interesting conversation, man. I know we went super, super long. I really appreciate that. And thank you for your service. And I think it's a really cool angle. I can tell how passionate you are about preserving, well, first of all, preserving your American way of life, which is also your Muslim way of life, assimilating into the United States, but also maintaining your own unique culture, doing it in the exact sort of right way. And I just think it's really incredible. Yeah, thank you once again for coming on the show.

1:02:35Jordan, thank you so much for inviting me to your show. I've heard tons of great things about you, so it's really an honor to be with you on the show. I say this all the time for anybody who tells me, thank you for your service. I tell them, thank you for allowing me to serve. America is a great country that does open the door for immigrants who don't speak English to learn some English and be able to join the military and make it to the highest positions in the military and you don't see that in any other country. So thank you. I do really appreciate it. And hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.

1:03:09I've got some thoughts on this one as usual, But before I get into that, here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, on the greatest threats to the United States. Here's a preview. War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. Do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, Jordan, they are.

1:03:45And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans. I think it's time to really demand real reforms. And if teachers unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't strike reform anymore. And we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information based on your predictions.

1:04:19The fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network. If somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one. You're creating two different realities. We're doing this to ourselves, Jordan. We got to stop. You know, we got to stop it. So let's think about, let's work together to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy. For more, including General H.R. McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change, check out episode 410 on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:04:57Man, there was so much we left out. Adam went to Bosnia, talks about the differences between Muslims there, how sort of secular they were until the genocide and the conflict and then Saudi radical Islam starts filling the gap. In fact, our Amon Dean episode, episode 383, he talks about going as part of Al-Qaeda to Bosnia and the extreme Islam and how that sort of disillusioned him. He talked about nice, sweet kids chainsawing people in the head and just, he's like, what happened to us? What's going on? The Muslim Brotherhood, all this stuff is just authoritarian nonsense with a religious veneer is a very interesting overlap between criminal groups, Muslim extremist groups, or any sort of extremist group.

1:05:40These people really only clearly care about money. I'm not talking about Muslims in general. I mean extremist groups. This whole thing with a religious veneer, maybe ISIS is a bunch of true believers-ish, but really the people who smuggle terrorists, they smuggle women, they smuggled guns and drugs before that. The line between straight up organized crime and jihadism and militant extremism is pretty blurred. To that point, the unit also, before Adam's time, of course, found Pablo Escobar. They hunted Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, in hiding. They've done a lot of this kind of thing.

1:06:15And I think, frankly, if we're looking at the war on drugs, the war against these extremist groups, we really do need badasses who can blend in, know the culture, and know how to operate on the ground. We're just never going to get anywhere. And we've also shot ourselves in the foot a few times. There was at least a critical shortage of Arabic and Farsi linguists at the time, especially after September 11th, because they kicked out all the gay people. Don't ask, don't tell. Remember that? That was very problematic, especially for fighting terrorism. And, you know, no matter what you think about homosexuality, I kind of think we need everybody rowing in the same direction here.

1:06:50Do we not? This book, it really was positive about America while speaking some interesting truth about the American dream and the military. And I know a lot of Muslims don't wanna join the military. Adam is living proof that Muslims can assimilate into Western culture. And I thought that was an interesting note about all this because right when I was talking with Adam on the phone prior to the show, I said to him, man, a lot of people think Muslims can't really assimilate. The culture is incompatible. And he's like, yeah, there's a reason for that, but it's just not true. A lot of us are quite secular and values of Islam when they're not extreme, mesh great with Judeo-Christian values of the United States.

1:07:29It's really not a bad fit if you're not a kook. And that should be eye-opening for a lot of us, I think. And I think Adam's just a really good example of a true American in just every single way because of where he came from, the way he assimilated and the way he's helped the country. I just think it's an awesome story. Of course, now he does security consulting in the Middle East, Africa, et cetera, and we can't show his face or give any other details about him, even if he's not active in the unit because, well, terrorists be wily as well. And they'll link him to current operations. And that, of course, would be no bueno.

1:08:00All things Adam Gamal will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Don't forget our newsletter. Gabriel and I are revamped in the format. We put a little weekly wisdom tidbit in there, something that we've been thinking about some stuff you can think about or even do to improve your week, weekend, or whole life, jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking over there for free at 6minutenetworking.com.

1:08:31I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And 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 that 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 would be interested in this particular type of thing, maybe they're thinking of joining the military, maybe they need a little inspiration, maybe they just like these military type tales and episodes, definitely share this one with them.

1:09:01In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Everything Everywhere Daily. You've heard the phrase learn something new every day. Sounds nice, but do you actively do it? That's where Everything Everywhere Daily comes in. This podcast makes it effortless. Just 10 minutes a day, you'll walk away with a fascinating fact, a slice of history, a science gem. It's no wonder the show has climbed up to the top as the number one history podcast. It covers history, science, technology, geography, and stories of remarkable people, always in a way that keeps you hooked.

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1:09:59Check out Something You Should Know with my friend Mike Carruthers. Every episode is packed with fascinating insights that you can actually use. Mike interviews top experts on topics that shape your life, like how to optimize your brain chemistry, the best and worst ways to apologize. probably could use that recently why couples hate to talk about money no matter the topic mike asks the questions you'd want to ask getting straight to the good stuff and the conversations are always engaging always insightful guaranteed to leave you a little smarter than before they've got thousands of five-star reviews but do you even need that i'm recommending it and you don't need other people's opinion right at this point i would hope anyway give it a listen just search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening to something you should know so don't break up.

1:10:38Let's go.