1051: Tu Lam | From Refugee to Real American Hero

1051: Tu Lam

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show.

[00:00:01] Tu Lam: So if you're on that boat and people are dying and other children are dying, your children are full of ulcers because their, their body hasn't even moved. They're starving and they're dying. How much longer are you gonna let 'em suffer?

[00:00:19] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Although sometimes we just tell amazing stories.

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He now trains those units as well as civilians when he is not playing a starring role in the Call of Duty franchise. Of course, his story is harrowing. It's incredible. He really went through hell the ringer, and ended up serving this country, of course, through hell. Once again, I know even if you're not into the military stuff, like some of you love the military stuff, some of you're like, ah, okay, you will be into the human side of his story, and he does an incredible job in telling it.

Also, as a bonus for many of you. I talk much less in this episode. For once he was really engaged, he was really doing his thing. I just sat back and enjoyed the experience. I was actually slightly under the weather at the time and I felt like my contributions were maybe dragging a little. So let me know what you think of the conversation balance here.

I think he did a great job. He had to carry me a little bit on this one and I think it went quite well. I really enjoyed it and I think you will as well. Here we go with Ula. Man, you got quite a story and I love profiling, if I can say immigrants who have achieved high levels of success because I really think it highlights great things about America, things that we should all be proud of about America.

So thanks for joining us today.

[00:02:18] Tu Lam: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

[00:02:20] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me a little bit how you grew up. 'cause I, I think it was quite different from your life now and from people who, who were born in the United States. It seems like you had a different kind of beginning.

[00:02:29] Tu Lam: Yeah, you know, I had a, a rough beginning and I.

Like you said, you know, it's the true American story, and I wanted to captivate that way. My grandfather, my grandfather, walked out of the tyranny of communist China when he was 12 years old in 1940, and when he walked out, if he would've got caught, he would've been sit back to de labor camp where he eventually die.

He swam to a piece of driftwood and he asked God, wherever that takes him, that's where he will settle. And he drifted to Vietnam and a family took him in and raised him and found that my grandfather was a hardworking young boy. Raise them to be a man. And back then in Vietnam you had to listen to the parents.

It was arranged marriages. So the parents offered my grandfather, their only daughter.

[00:03:19] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:03:20] Tu Lam: Yeah. And then, you know, he ended up having nine kids and my father was the oldest out of the nine kids I was born in at a very delicate state in the Vietnam War. American troops have left Vietnam during that time.

I was born December 17th, 1974. At that stage of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese, the communist regime, has surrounded the city of Saigon and they were shooting artillery into the city as gon for the last final charge. I was born in that morning to artillery, fire to war. We, you know, eventually lost our freedoms to the North Vietnamese communist regime, and we lived in the, the communist regime to eventually we escaped Vietnam by.

A fishing boat. My grandfather who, who walked outta communist China, funded that escape.

[00:04:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I want, I definitely wanna get that whole story. I'm curious though, and I, I don't know if I'm going backwards too far here, but we'll try it. Why did your grandfather suddenly decide to leave China and how old was he?

Because it seems strange that a kid would be sort of switched on enough to be like, well, this country's going nowhere, but still be young enough to need to be raised by people when he got to Vietnam. Does that make sense?

[00:04:33] Tu Lam: Yeah, absolutely. Any research on China, communist China? You know, during the early nineties it was slavery.

It was a lot of oppression. People were starving and dying. So I'm pretty sure my grandfather felt the depression from starvation and, you know, the hard labors and everything else. What happened to his parents? I don't know. And Jordan, I, I want to say this, you know, with my grandfather's side of family, after I wrote my book, I.

I was reunited with that side of family. So I was just reunited recently because, you know, when, when my parents divorced, I wasn't allowed to speak to that side of family.

[00:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, is that just like a tradition thing?

[00:05:12] Tu Lam: I think that's, uh, American divorce, a westernized divorce thing. Oh, really? Oh, so it's

[00:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: a drama.

Just Okay. Yeah. Old fashioned drama. I was like, oh, this is an unwritten rule. No, it's just drama. Okay, got it. Sorry about that. Well, okay, so you, you wrote that you were born on a cement floor with bombs dropping and you would paint a really detailed picture. Kids screaming as parents were murdered around them.

I mean, this is like soldiers in this city kind of situation, right? Mm-Hmm

[00:05:39] Tu Lam: mm-Hmm. It was the last push, right? Since the American soldiers left Vietnam. Right. So the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese were in their last final fight. The North Vietnamese were now invading the city of Saigon. So a few months after my birth, that's when the City of Saigon failed, which we lost our freedoms.

When I say that we were born in the basement, if they're shooting Artur fire into the city of Saigon, you're gonna look for the lowest areas with the most secure areas, and that was the basement for my family.

[00:06:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the soldiers are just overrunning the town at this point. Are they barging into houses?

Paint this picture for us for people who don't really understand this.

[00:06:22] Tu Lam: Okay. So a lot of my storyline was from my parents and also history. So if you look on the history and you read news clippings, then this confirms the story. After the fall of South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese came in and they put any Vietnamese that served alongside Americans were immediately put into the reeducation camps.

Any people who held position of political power or opposed the new communist regime were immediately executed. A lot of these executions were done in public during that initial invasion, you know, into South Vietnam. After that initial invasion, then it's the oppression years. So the oppression years is you're gonna pay your taxes and it's really high taxes.

Right? And then sack, they're gonna oppress you with curfews and what you can do in businesses in the government. So with my parents, you know, my mother, she worked in like a soup making Vietnamese soup, and what she told me was the North Vietnamese would come in and they'll demand money. First, the taxes.

But then the North Vietnamese soldiers would then, often their position of power would barge into their homes, ask for money, loot. There has been rape and there has been murder. All this information, like I said, could be found in these clippings and personal accounts from other Vietnamese refugees.

[00:07:46] Jordan Harbinger: When I went there, when I was like 20.

I remember going on tours and stuff and the tour guides would tell us how much they hated the United States. But they also said, by the way, I just, I also hate the North Vietnamese just as much, if not more. And I would say, oh, that's, you know why? And one of the tour guides who took us to those tunnels, he was saying, well, the United States screwed up our country, but the North Vietnamese killed my whole family.

I'm the only one left. I grew up on the streets. Now I give tours and the Americans are, are pretty nice when they come on the tours. So I don't know who, he couldn't decide who he hated more. I guess it was kind of a coin toss. Yeah. He told me some pretty horrible stories. The North Vietnamese version is we liberated South Vietnam from whatever, and the South Vietnamese story is they ruined our lives and killed everybody they could.

And kidnapped my sister and my mom and never saw 'em again. I mean, it's just, it's awful.

[00:08:37] Tu Lam: Yeah, absolutely. It's depends who you ask, right? My parents and my side of the family, they're all appreciative of Americans, you know, so who you ask.

[00:08:46] Jordan Harbinger: So are you. Part Chinese then, I guess your grandfather was Chinese, I guess, right?

So it Is that a common situation in Vietnam, or is it just, you know, your unique blend you got going?

[00:08:56] Tu Lam: No, in Vietnam, it's a high Chinese influence. Think about where the terrain is and the borders in history.

[00:09:02] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about escaping Vietnam. I know a lot of people tried to escapes, a lot of people were successful, of course.

Like yourself. How does that work?

[00:09:10] Tu Lam: Escaping Vietnam was very difficult. Some walked out to neighboring countries, and when I say walked out, you know, these jungles are riddled with landmines, where Americans have dropped landmines through rice patties and jungle floors. So some of these jungle areas are riddled with landmines.

Also, the North Vietnamese would patrol these areas for fleeing, you know, Vietnamese. Any Vietnamese that were caught were immediately brought out to the reeducation camps. These are labor camps where they would eventually die. Some escaped during the evacuation. When Americans left, they got on government planes.

I want you to think about modern day, like we saw in the news that Afghanistan withdrawal. Yeah. I want you to kind of think about the that because the news compared to Afghanistan, withdrawal to the Vietnam withdrawal, how Americans were from Vietnam. So very desperate situation. As for me, we escaped on a boat now in history.

There's over 400,000 refugees died at sea. First from the de pie tree from surrounding countries. You know, these criminals were forcely, stopped the boats. They would bo the boats, kill the man, rape the women, enslaved the children. Geez. You know, it was very lucrative. It was very easy. Refugees were fleeing with everything they had on them.

The pirates, these criminals knew, and it was easy to to stop. Like thousands of refugees were leaving at that time. So we had to pass the pie. We had to pass, even escaping Vietnam, trying to find a boat who would s smoke us outta country. And then the typhoon, you know, strength of the tropical storm has claimed the lives of thousands and people get lost at sea.

You know, for us, we made our way into Malaysia, which was a two day trip. I was three years old at this time. I want to paint this picture, like this wooden boat that we're on is a fishing boat. It's supposed to hold 60 people. It was holding 120 people.

[00:11:01] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:11:02] Tu Lam: Wow, wow, wow. That was a big boat. They took the food, they took water off of it to stuff more people into these boats.

So when we made our way into Malaysia and we were rejected, they were not accepting more refugees and they stopped us by gunpoint. I think they had enough of refugees fleeing into the country. They border our boats, they roped us, they pulled us back out into the South China Sea, cut the line, they shot the motor and they left us stair to die.

My mother, she said we drifted for nearly 30 days. When the supplies were taken off, the boats lack of food and water, it put us in a very desperate survival situation right off the bat. We are already two days into the journey, made it to Malaysia. Now we rope back out to the South China Sea with no engine.

Jesus. So my mother said, people are dying first. Dehydration, sickness. People turn on each other. They were fighting. The dead was thrown overboard. We drifted for nearly 30 days and my mother said, you know, she almost lost hope. Now, it was common practice amongst fleeing refugees to carry poison amongst them.

[00:12:08] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:12:09] Tu Lam: Yeah. Because they didn't want their children to die a miserable death. They didn't want their children to be sold into slavery if the boats were taken. I see. So this was the last attempt to give their children peace. So my mother held onto this poison, like, can you imagine seeing your children dying at sea?

People are getting thrown overboard. How long do you hold on? You know, she held on for nearly 30 days. How did they get

[00:12:35] Jordan Harbinger: water? From the rain?

[00:12:36] Tu Lam: Yeah, so she, occasional tropical rain will put buckets out on the top deck and then they'll capture water. Any means possible. God, you know, my mother said that people did, you know, drink their own urine.

Sure, yeah. It was survival. So she said that we caught up in a huge tropical storm and it was a miracle that our boat t capsize. We were a small little fishing boat in the South China Sea. Yeah. These tropical storms are huge, massive, massive waves.

[00:13:02] Jordan Harbinger: The US Navy wasn't out there trying to find people who were escaping at all.

I mean, it's a massive sea, so I don't even know what you could do, but what was the hope? Like we just land somewhere. What was the idea at that point?

[00:13:14] Tu Lam: If they drag you out in the middle to see, cut your line and shoot your motor. What is, what is the idea?

[00:13:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:13:20] Tu Lam: it's to hold on as long as you can before death takes you.

Oh my God. This is horrible. When I say it, I'm painting the picture that there, my mother was holding on to hope when there was no hope. So we got caught up in a huge tropical storm. She said it was a miracle. We en capside and then somehow it, it ripped us out further into the South China Sea, that rain.

She said it kind of blessed us. We had a, a few more days together.

[00:13:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:13:47] Tu Lam: Before, you know, is another survival situation with water. But then on the last three days after the storm, when the, the rain water was gone, people were dying again and suffered from dehydration. She said that she saw a light came across the crevice of the boat because we were under deck of the boat.

[00:14:06] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:14:07] Tu Lam: I'll tell you, Jordan, I do have dreams of this even as an adult sometimes when I was growing up as a child, I had a dream of, there was a light shooting through a crevice of a boat, and my mother told me that that light was a search light. It was a beacon from a Russian supply boat. Now this Russian supply boat was leaving Vietnam.

Right. And I wanna say this man, because it was the Russian ideology is what, how I lost my freedom. That's why we were escaping. Right, right. But it was these, the same communist ideology or the same people. Man, they saved us. Huh. You know? And they saved us.

[00:14:45] Jordan Harbinger: Humanity won that round, I guess,

[00:14:48] Tu Lam: you know, I don't know if it's, you know, the lands of, because we do have rules and warfare.

You know, we have to protect the civilians. There are rules and war. But I also have seen the other side. You know, I've seen certain countries turn a blind eye to those laws. But the Russians, they picked us up. They brought us one by one onto their boat. They gave us medical attention. My mother said it took roughly three days, right, for them to give us medical aid.

And then they put us back on the boats. The engines couldn't be fixed. And they wrote this. And then he pulled us into Indonesia where. Paris and I, we, we lived in refugee camps for a year and a half before we were sponsored to get into America.

[00:15:30] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. That must have been, I mean, refugee camps are no picnic, but it must have been paradise compared to being on that boat.

[00:15:36] Tu Lam: Well, I mean, if you say paradise, you know, for me, I was a little boy. I use the

[00:15:40] Jordan Harbinger: term loosely. Yeah,

[00:15:41] Tu Lam: yeah. But there was a few hundreds of thousands of refugees in a plot of land. So I want you

[00:15:46] Jordan Harbinger: hundreds of thousands Yeah. Of refugees. Oh my

[00:15:49] Tu Lam: God. And you know, all this information, just YouTube it. You can YouTube it, you can do research on it.

They'll show you videos of when. National Geographic guys came over during post Vietnam warriors, and you'll see those living conditions.

[00:16:03] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

[00:16:03] Tu Lam: It was a grass hut in the middle of a jungle. It's, it's a plot of land and it is up to you how to live. So when I say this desperate survival situation, people were getting raped.

They were getting murdered. Oh, things were getting, you know, stolen. It's survival.

[00:16:18] Jordan Harbinger: I take my paradise comment back, obviously. That's horrible. So they, this is not like a well run operation in Indonesia with the refugees. It sounds like Mad Max in the jungle.

[00:16:28] Tu Lam: You know, I, I think there was order, you know, because we made it out and, you know, not everybody got murdered.

I, I think there was some kind of order, but within the order, there is also criminal activities, right? So people were drug out to the jungles. If you were caught out in the jungles at night, you disappear. Really?

[00:16:46] Jordan Harbinger: Is it criminals getting you at

[00:16:48] Tu Lam: night in the jungle? If the criminals that were in Vietnam and they escaped and made it to the refugee camps.

They're still criminals. Right. So you're in a, in a group of families, you know, at that time could be millionaires in Vietnam. Right? Very successful people is lumped up with people with criminals because they lost everything. You lost everything. You have no, you have no freedoms. You have no country. So you're roped in with the criminals and everybody else.

So when I said that people are disappearing. Yeah. If they see a young lady, you know, trying to gather water in the jungles and they're criminals, they're gonna do what criminals do.

[00:17:26] Jordan Harbinger: Oh man, it is so dark. How, how did you finance the escape? It must have been everybody trying to leave. Surely the people who were smuggling people out took a fee somehow.

[00:17:36] Tu Lam: So getting back to my grandfather who drifted on a piece of log when my grandfather married, my grandmother had his nine children. He became very successful. He was a hardworking man. He was a, you know, very smart man. So he worked in textile and he owned his own textile company, and he owned a chain of condos.

So very wealthy man. When the communists came over, he became oppressed. They came and took everything he had, so he was poor like everybody else. But the one thing my grandfather had was this amazing aquarium. This beautiful aquarium that he would put in his living room. My mother would talk about it, my grand, all my cousins would talk about this beautiful aquarium with these exotic fish.

And so many times the North Vietnamese soldiers would loot through his house, right? Trying to find gold, trying to find money, trying to find all this. But they always stop looking at this aquarium. Why I keep on saying the significance of this aquarium is because around a frame of that whole aquarium were lined with gold bars.

He hid his gold in this, and when he ripped it apart, that's what he used to finance our escape. It was three gold bars for a child and five gold bars. Five gold bars for a adult. Oh my God.

[00:18:58] Jordan Harbinger: And that's what you gave this. Wow. He, he had thought that far ahead.

[00:19:02] Tu Lam: I don't think he thought that far ahead. I think that he's just always a guy who thought contingencies plans like, yeah, right now, right.

If America, if we lose all of our banking system, you know, some people are vested in gold, some people are vested in silver. So he invested in other means of wealth besides just money.

[00:19:20] Jordan Harbinger: Keeping money in your aquarium is somehow the most, it's a very, it's a very Asian thing to do. Has money stashed somewhere in your house in a weird place.

It's just. I'm married to a woman, uh, whose family is from Taiwan and China, and I feel like there's always a story about, oh, they're moving, so they have to dig the backyard up because there's a box with his gold that they buried under the kids' playhouse or, and you know, it's like, are you kidding me?

It's 2024. You doing digging in your backyard for gold.

[00:19:52] Tu Lam: You know, my mother always told me that too. She said, once you use Spears war Yeah. And survival at that level, it changes you as a human being.

[00:19:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I believe this. Did your grandfather just stay in Vietnam and pass away in Vietnam,

[00:20:04] Tu Lam: he was the last one to escape.

So after all his children and all of us, all of us successfully escaped. So all his nine children had eventually escaped. Right. Wow. So he sent the first three. Hopefully they made it, and then he sent the next ones. And then we were the last of all my, my father, my biological father was the oldest, and he was the last one out when I say the last of the children.

And then once my grandfather knew all his children made it, then he made the journey with his wife.

[00:20:33] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. How did he get out? Because surely he didn't also go out on a boat and almost die. I mean, he was an old man.

[00:20:38] Tu Lam: Yeah. So when all his children made it to America, they were able to get him a plane. Oh, wow.

So he flew to California.

[00:20:46] Jordan Harbinger: That's an amazing story. It's a whole family of survivors. He must have been so worried about everybody. I can't even imagine. I have two kids, he had nine. I worry about them playing in the front yard because it's near the road. I worry about them playing in the backyard because I'm a parent.

I worry about stuff. He had real, real worries. And he still provided for everybody. That's incredible. What an amazing guy.

[00:21:09] Tu Lam: And that's why I wanted to bring that question to you, man. So, you know, you're a parent, you love your child, you just sin. Yeah. So if you're on that boat and you're at day 28 and people are dying and other children are dying, your children are full of ulcers because their, their body hasn't even moved.

Right. And they're stuck in the basement and they're starving and they're dying, how much longer are you gonna let 'em suffer?

[00:21:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't know.

[00:21:32] Tu Lam: So I give it to my mother, man. Like she had the escape for us poison, but she chose to hold on and because she did, we survived.

[00:21:40] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So, wow. This is so intense, man.

Okay. So you get to the United States from this refugee camp, is it because, how does that work actually? Because I assume it's like, oh, these are Vietnamese people that escaped. It's kind of our fault that we didn't pull through. In the end, let's let a certain number of these people come to the United States.

I, I went to law school with some Vietnamese folks and. She would tell me, my friend, NA, she would say, oh, we're boat people, which I had not heard, which sounds kind of racist now that I think about it, but since she said it, I think it's okay.

[00:22:08] Tu Lam: That's actually official name.

[00:22:09] Jordan Harbinger: It is. Okay. Okay. Because it sounds a little non-kosher in 2024.

But yeah, she said she would say we're boat people. She had a rough go of it too. I mean, there were stuff she wouldn't talk about from that experience.

[00:22:20] Tu Lam: So the, the refugee camps? Yeah. How we got outta refugee camps. You know, we were there for a year and a half and, you know, other countries accepted US country of Canada.

Uh, my mother told me New Zealand accepted US. Australia was another one, accepted us, but my mother held on to America and America. When, when we say this, America was hard to get in. It was a lot of rules. America was backlogged with refugee applicants and everything else. The only reason why we made it to America is because of my uncle.

See, during the Vietnam War, my aunt, my mother's older sister met a Special forces Green Beret officer. He was American and he was special forces. He was fighting North Vietnamese at his G base, a special forces camp, got overran by the North Vietnamese. He was stabbed by a BT in his back of his ribs. All his whole team was wiped out and he was left for dead.

Somehow he survived that attack and then they evacuated him to the city of Saigon in the hospital where he recovered from his wounds where he met my aunt, he made it back to America, married her, and that he's the one who sponsored the sponsorship. Wow. So that's how we made it to America.

[00:23:37] Jordan Harbinger: There's so many dice rolls and luck involved and circumstance involved in the fact that you are sitting in front of me right now.

I'm sure you think about that often. Mm-Hmm.

[00:23:48] Tu Lam: So when we first made it to America, we ended up in California. That's where, you know, my side of the, the lamb side. Right. My cousins are now, my, my uncle settled. My mother and father went to Fayville, North Carolina. They moved on and went to the East Coast. So North Carolina.

The reason why is because my mother wanted to be reunited with her sister. And since my uncle, the Special Forces American, that's the, uh, headquarters of the Special Forces Green Brace, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. So that's how we ended up in Fayetteville. Right outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina with the headquarters of Special Horses.

[00:24:28] Jordan Harbinger: What was your life like living in the United States at that time?

[00:24:32] Tu Lam: When we first came to America, I didn't know any different, but I was segregated right away. I. Segregated as a child, like six years old, I, I was spit on by older adults. Oh, when I say that, you think about it. It's post-Vietnam War. A lot of these veterans that fought in the Vietnam War, now they're coming back to their home station, which is Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, around that area.

A lot of military prisons, a lot of 'em were suffering. And America didn't acknowledge mental health at that time. So they didn't have any program sort of, so we were scrutinized, we were called by many racist names. My parents, they had to start over. They, they couldn't speak the language, you know, so they had to start all over again.

And my father and mother, they couldn't hold a job, couldn't speak the language, and it was racist times in America. We didn't fit in. And we were very poor in the beginning. And eventually my parents divorce and my mother got remarried to American Special Forces Green Beret, and that's how I got indoctrinated.

Into a military life upbringing. And that's how I eventually Yeah. You know, went into service.

[00:25:41] Jordan Harbinger: It's crazy to me that the servicemen would be, didn't servicemen work alongside Vietnamese troops? I mean, why would they? Uh, I, I guess I'm asking a stupid question. Racism is sort of inherently stupid. It just seems like they would, if worked alongside those people and so they would know better.

But I guess racists aren't exactly, we can't really hold them to a high standard of intelligence most of the time.

[00:26:00] Tu Lam: I mean, countless case reports of Vietnam, of American troops raping Vietnamese women, beating up Vietnamese men, countless accounts of it. So when I say that, yeah, you serve, okay. So if an American goes and serve in Afghanistan and he's working around Afghanis, is he sympathetic to that race of people?

It depends on your upbringing. It depends on your, your values, right?

[00:26:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Were you getting along at school? I mean, if the adults were racist, I'm guessing the kids weren't much better.

[00:26:29] Tu Lam: So in the eighties war movies were really popular, especially Vietnam war movies. So a lot of like. Racist gestures. Racist comments in these movies, right?

They're using racist names towards the Vietnamese.

[00:26:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:26:43] Tu Lam: The kids would watch these movies and they thought it was okay to call me all these sorts of racist names that I saw on the movies. Unfortunately, their parents supported them because they were racist too. Up in my upbringing, I would say I faced racism daily.

It was a daily thing for me, and plus, before my mother got remarried, we were poor, we were refugees, you know? So my clothes, it smelled, I smelled, I ate indigenous food, so I smelled compared to a westerner, and I was beat up. I was segregated, and I was a ramee every day of what they thought I was. Man.

[00:27:23] Jordan Harbinger: I will say, I was reading this book, listening to it, and some of your stories are really horrible.

You know, you end up tearing up at Chipotle. And by the way, if you buy the book, please use our show notes, links. If you wanna cry at Chipotle, use the links of the show notes to help support the show. Um, but it, it's horrible thinking about a kid growing up like that, especially after everything that you went through.

Your mom must have been working so hard to make a life for you guys in the United States. I cannot imagine going to Vietnam or China and being like, alright, I don't speak Vietnamese or Chinese, whatever. I gotta figure out how to get a job. Where do I work? Oh, by the way, I got kids. I guess I gotta send them to school.

Like, she doesn't have time to worry about your personal life, if that makes sense. Right. I don't even know if I would tell her at that point, like, what, what's she gonna do? Worry about one more thing. You know? What's the point?

[00:28:12] Tu Lam: Yeah. That's the thing is, you know, all of my abuse, everything that I had to endure, I held, I held it in.

What am I gonna do? Ask my mother who's already dealing with everything. She lost everything. Yeah. I had a lot of empathy for my mother.

[00:28:26] Jordan Harbinger: How did you get the idea to join the military? It seems like the, almost like that would be the opposite thing. You know, if everyone's treating you like crap, why serve the country?

Would you get that idea?

[00:28:36] Tu Lam: So I want to put this, so my brother and I were raised in the same upbringing, right? Strict military upbringing. We got up at four o'clock and me at our bed, we had physical training, morning, we had inspections. I mean, it was a military upbringing, truly.

[00:28:50] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:28:50] Tu Lam: My brother eventually became a doctor.

The reason why I chose the military is because my mother had me go out to these and visit these refugees, right? So we would load up the car, she'll cook for them, and we'll drive hours, man, to deliver these things to these refugees. We used to bend those refugees. So I get it. But when I became a teenager, I just didn't care to spend my whole day with a bunch of refugees during the process of going every weekend, you know, and help the refugees out.

I realized that that's where I came from. I came from oppression. You know, I came from the oppressed. I was born outta the insurgency. The Special Forces Deto is oppress Libre to free d Oppress translated in Latin. It means from a oppressed man to free. Man. I knew this at a young age because my stepfather was Special forces.

My uncle was special forces. The neighbors around me were special forces. So I knew the Special Forces suspicion was to go back at these third war countries and to fight for the oppressed, and these warriors had some skill, so. Back when I was a teenager, all I wanted to be was a ninja. Mm-Hmm. Right. So back then it was a ninja kick.

The samurai kick was huge, right. In the eighties. It was huge. My father's elastic partying gift to me at seven years old, where my mother eventually gave to me because I couldn't speak to my father, were four VHS tapes and they were written in Vietnamese. And I randomly picked out a VHS tape and I threw it into VCR.

It was the Art of Buddo to be Samurai, the code, the ethics of Boto. I first saw that when I was nine years old, the BOTO Code, and it changed my life forever. The Warrior, maybe you could, Jordan, maybe I could say I, maybe I was holding onto the last memory of my father.

[00:30:46] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:30:46] Tu Lam: But I was surrounded by Warriors Special Forces.

So I knew at a young age that you know, going to these refugees and helping them and realizing the oppressed and where I came from, I realized. Man, if I became this warrior, I could go back to those countries. I could fight, I could fight for those people serving the refugees. I realized that at a young age.

So at 13, I knew I was gonna be a green beret. 16 years old, I started my training, more cardiovascular training. I utilized sports to build agility and training. I was into martial arts. By that time I was reading Lazu and, uh, thal. I was very roped into philosophy and uh, uh, zu the art of war. So a lot of that, you know, a lot of study in that When I was in high school, in fact, my high school thesis was on the Art of War by Zu.

And then, uh, 18, I joined the Army. I started off with the 82nd Airborne as a paratrooper. Then I went to the long range of ous, reconnaissance teams, tried out for the Special Forces. And at 21 years old, I was in Okinawa, Japan as a special forces of Green Bay.

[00:31:57] Jordan Harbinger: You'll probably never become a trained killer, but you can get the T-shirt now for a break from our sponsors.

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[00:34:17] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it is because of my network. It's the circle of people I know, like and trust. I know it sounds a little smarmy. A lot of your like, uh, networking's gross. This is something you build for your mental health, your sanity for the health of your business.

Even if you're retired, it's great for your social life. This course is about improving your relationship, building skills, building systems around it, and it's non cringey. It's very down to earth. There's no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics that are gonna make you embarrassed or embarrassed the people you're talking to, and it takes a few minutes a day.

That's the whole point. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com because five minute networking was taken. Now back to Tula, some of the stuff you had to do to become a Green Beret, or you talked about Ranger training actually.

Marches where you're punching yourself in the face to keep going. Burning 5,000 calories per day and barely eating for months, which by the way, that is so bad for your body. But I guess that's not the point, right? They figure they'll rebuild that later. They're trying to test your mind. That's right. Is that the idea?

[00:35:22] Tu Lam: Yeah. So Ranger school is about leadership. They wanna see your leadership capabilities on producting, these type of raids, ambushes, these tactics in that type of verse environment. They wanna see your leadership skill. While being deprived of sleep and food.

[00:35:39] Jordan Harbinger: This is probably a stupid question, but that's because you what are going to be under so much stress that usually all that stuff breaks down.

Is that the idea?

[00:35:49] Tu Lam: Yeah, in in war, in combat, you're gonna have to deal with a lot of physical stress, mental stress, and you're gonna have to perform in especially a special operation, you have to perform at that national level even though you're dealing with these stresses.

[00:36:03] Jordan Harbinger: You wrote in the book that lots of combat tactics come from Native Americans.

I actually did not know that. Let's talk about that a little bit. I think that's interesting. Native Americans don't get enough screen time, so to speak, so I'm curious where those tactics come from. How, how did those even make their way into the military?

[00:36:18] Tu Lam: Yeah, so during the French and Indian War, when George Washington came over, uh, when he was still a lieutenant with the British, he started seeing the tactics that the Native Americans, native Americans would do more of hit and run tactics.

At that time, the British would get on open fields and do volley of fire on each other, right? So Native Americans were more hunter gatherers hit and runs. If you think about, okay, so then the Revolutionary War happened. It was because our abilities to wage unconventional warfare by using native tactics.

So, you know, by beating a superior military force, like the British was the most powerful military force of its time in the world. As Americans, we were just 13 colonies rebels. We are not even a military force. How did we win against them? And we win 'em against them because we use native tactics. Native tactics that we use during special operations is when to attack.

So if I have indigenous forces that doesn't have night vision, when would I attack that enemy? You know, the natives, the attack during the moments of darkness and light. When your eyes have developed, you know, that ability to see into the darkness, but there's just enough loom under breaking of the day that you know which buildings are what and where's the enemies at.

So when the enemy is opening her eyes, I don't know, at four o'clock in the morning when the sun's coming up, that's the best time to tap because you have surprise speed and violence. We learned that from the natives. We learned how to work in deep terrain. We learned hit run operations. We learned ambushes.

We learned how to patrol off of the native tactics. So if you want to see some of the tactics, look at that movie. Lasso Mohicans. Yeah, yeah,

[00:38:02] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:38:03] Tu Lam: Right. So those were the very first Rangers tactics that was indoctrinated into the military.

[00:38:10] Jordan Harbinger: It just seems, it's really incredible that they learned all of that.

I mean, native Americans are, it's a whole kind of amazing culture. Their combat tactics are second to nones. Really incredible. I, I didn't know that we adopted those into the military. I just remember reading about it as a kid and hearing about it as a kid. Your training in the military sounds quite unconventional, aside from you punching yourself in the face to stay awake or whatever it was you wrote about having, I'm gonna bungle this, but it was like an entire village somewhere where everybody spoke a foreign language.

I assume, is this happening overseas in a friendly allied country, or are they actually packing some sort of US village with foreign language? How does it work?

[00:38:47] Tu Lam: Okay. So without going into much classification with this, because this is a special forces training, okay. There is a town on the East coast that the military pays to speak a foreign language to act like a different country.

So when the Special forces students go into their final phase of unconventional warfare phase, they have to parachute into this country and liberate this country from the oppressed. There are crooked cops in there. There's rebels in this country and they all speak different languages. So it kind of mimics our operational environment

[00:39:23] Jordan Harbinger: and they just notify the whole town like, Hey, this week we're all foreigners and there's a hostile presence parachuting in, so have it.

And what do they do? Fence the place in and say like, this is the boundary of the act. I mean, this is crazy. It's so interesting.

[00:39:36] Tu Lam: I wouldn't say they fence to them, but you know, the boundary lines. There's borders and towns. We know where to go. There's certain, um, Sierra school training, so escape evasion type of training.

You know, where they treat you like a prisoner war and where you have to evade, you're running across some of these towns. If these locals catch you, they're known to call in, you know who they need to call into special forces structures to locate you. Right? So all these locals are part of the game.

[00:40:01] Jordan Harbinger: Are there kids in this town just going to school, living their life and they see you crawling through the bushes and they're like, ah, call, call, call in the special forces.

It's one of the Americans or whatever. I mean, yeah. Is that kind of how it works?

[00:40:12] Tu Lam: Yeah. There's kids in that town. It's a full blown town.

[00:40:14] Jordan Harbinger: Wow, that's incredible. And the point is to what? Get to a specific objective or you're just evading these people.

[00:40:20] Tu Lam: So if I was to ask you to go into a country and you have a crooked government and you have a ban of rebels, they are fighting for their freedom and their family, and you were to do this border crossing, link it with this indigenous force and overthrow this country, how would you do it?

[00:40:36] Jordan Harbinger: Me as a podcaster, I would, I would not, I would not be successful in this mission. I do not have the, uh, the background on this, but I don't know. I'm guessing you walk through a swamp so you don't get caught and then you look for the right pickup truck full of dudes. I have no clue, man.

[00:40:51] Tu Lam: Yeah, I mean, it's bigger than that.

Right? So it's you, you're taken down to political government. You're taking down Yeah. The military force, the crooked law enforcement. Oh my God. Right. You're taking that all down, doing military, hit and run tactics, propaganda, you know, you're engaging in all intelligence, gathering, direct action to, you know, indigenous training to force.

Multiplying is all, it's part of the whole, you know, training.

[00:41:17] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. How long are you in this town then doing this, this thing, this is not a two day thing. It sounds like a long, like an extended mission where they're, and they're observing you the whole time, I assume, or reporting on how you're doing.

[00:41:29] Tu Lam: Yeah, roughly around a month.

[00:41:31] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Wow. What an interesting setup that is. That's really fascinating. I don't know how to transition to this next topic, so I'm just gonna ask, how did you start doing underground fights for money in Okinawa? Because first of all, it sounds like you're probably not allowed to do that in the military, but I'm no expert as you know.

[00:41:50] Tu Lam: So when I was stationed at Okinawa Chaff Japan, I felt it was, I felt it was my destiny. Mm-Hmm. To be there, right. I am a samurai. No. So seriously. When I went to Japan, I wanted to learn Busto Uhhuh. I dove into Buddo, busto, it led me into Japanese. Juujitsu led me into these formal fights. When I went to, there was a, a marine base called Camp Foster in the field house.

It was a tough man match. It was just big old gloves and you know, you're going at it. But during that time, the UFC was starting to get popular in 98. You're starting to see that popularity flux over to Okinawa, but there was still a lot of striking going on, right? No ground fighting. Where I'm going with this is they had these, uh, valley, valley to-do gloves, so it was no more boxing glove.

It was the open hand gloves. So when I enter into the field house, you had to get a letter of approval from your commander. I'm on a special forces a team, and I have a captain as my friend, right. That can approve that letter. So he approved the first one, the first fight I fought at the, um, marine field house.

It wasn't really a fight. Maybe I landed a, a good blow on him, but a lot of the Marines, they were trained in the system called line fighting. At that time, I was trained in ground fighting. So ground and pound, what you see in UFC.

[00:43:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I

[00:43:16] Tu Lam: was starting to getting down and a lot of that knowledge hasn't fluxed over Japan.

So, you know, my Juujitsu game was a lot better than them and I won a lot of matches. How I started getting into the underground matches is because every week I would ask my captain to sign another letter of approval. Well, at that time, with the popularity of UFC, a lot of team guys, when I say team guys, Navy Seals, green Berets, they were getting banged up in these cage matches, right?

Because they're trying to fight like UOC. So I knew like that my gig was up at that point in the game, I met a fight promoter named Donato, and Sato owned a dojo in Nha. Was this, you know, the capital Okinawa, he was sent out fights. There was a fight night across from Camp Foster and I would fight at the OK Canal and fight nights and that's where I made my money.

And because I fought the OK Canal and fight nights, I wouldn't have to get approval from the commander. Now I'll caveat that with, that's a career ender.

[00:44:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:44:21] Tu Lam: If I get caught totally career under, it's done. I'm, my whole career is over. So not a lot of people knew about that, and that's why I said it was an underground match.

The only time that the command caught wind was my last fight where they sent in a mainland guy from Japan to shut me down because I was winning these Okinawa vhe and they didn't want to afford or to win. And we said they flew him in. It was, uh, Budokan fight night. He shut me down. I would caveat that with we were doing a counter-terrorist mission and I just rotated back to the island after kicking in doors and shooting stuff in the jungles, and I was sick, but I still fought three days after I rotated back.

And I tell you, man, his skills were so good. Even in my best days, he was just a better fighter than me. Right. He, that's the way he dedicated his life to. Yeah. That was my underground matches. I did it on the side because I was just full of fire. I was full of hate. I just didn't know why. I was always full of hate.

Now I know why, right? But back then I was just, I felt like I had something to prove, man, you know, in my twenties,

[00:45:29] Jordan Harbinger: well, I suppose a lot of us did, but we didn't necessarily run off and fight in underground fights. So why is it a, why is it a career ender? Because it's against the military's rules to do the, to fight for money, or what exactly is the problem?

I mean, it seems obvious that it should be a grave offense, but I'm just not a hundred percent sure why.

[00:45:47] Tu Lam: Because a two star general Special Operations Command put out a memo saying that no team guys would be engaging in any activity.

[00:45:56] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. So it was expressly forbidden, not just generally sort of known that you shouldn't be fighting people for money.

I guess it is a bad look, right? If you, I mean, this is a special forces guy that goes around getting beat up or beating up other people. It's like when you win an American Special Forces guy beating people up for money, and when you lose, you're an American Special Forces guy getting beat up. It's, it's a bad, it's bad for the brand either way.

[00:46:18] Tu Lam: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But you know what, man, I, I didn't fight, I didn't fight for the money I fought because I, I was a, uh, a hateful person and I was a damned child. I fought on the side. So when I say that is the team life alone, you're free falling, you're doing explosive breaching, you're doing close quarters train, you're shooting.

I mean, your life is intense. And I was still bowing into the dojos at night to fight, man. I felt like I had something to prove, but now I know, you know, I just felt like I was chasing that fire. Eventually that fire came in war, so I had three years on the teams. Um, when I say the teams special forces, a teams, I was deploying around the world as part of a counter-terrorist team.

A company, uh, when I say that is, uh, your a Chrysler response force for the continent of Southeast Asia. Anything that happens in Southeast Asia related, you are pushed out. So I was at that stage, and then nine 11 happened. I was stationed in Okinawa, Japan. My wife and I were dating at that time. She was actually scheduled to fly to see me in Japan that day.

She was trying to fly out on nine 11. Back then it was no cell phones. Right. So right. Lost communication with her for 24 hours. It was the worst time in life. I loved my wife and she's used everything to me. But back then, when we were dating, nine 11 happened and um, that kind of changed the rest of my life.

So I was three years on the A teams. I was about seven years in the Army and I fought the rest of my career. After that, for the rest of my career, I fought wars. So, you know, after nine 11, the twin towers went down. President Bush declared war on terrorism. The special forces divided into groups. Each group serves their individual areas.

So like fifth group, they could go into the Middle East. Seventh group is south in Central America. First group is Southeast Asia. You get it right. Each group. Yeah. I was stationed Okinawa, Japan. So I was first group, I was, any crisis in this continent, Southeast Asia. President Bush declared war on terrorism.

It was a global war. So my team, we pushed out into the southern Philippines, into the country of Basilion ba, Brazilian island. It was ran by half Catholics and has Muslims in that area. Where is this again? What country

[00:48:40] Jordan Harbinger: is

[00:48:40] Tu Lam: this in? Southern

[00:48:41] Jordan Harbinger: Philippines. I see, okay. Mm-Hmm. Is this like where Abu is operating?

[00:48:45] Tu Lam: Absolutely. You nailed it. Okay. So that was our target, right? So Abu was who we're bringing the fight to for the viewers. Anybody don't know who Abu is? They're, uh, AAA affiliated. They're part of, uh, Muslim extremist group that want an independent Muslim state on the southern islands of the Philippines, and they're willing to do that by kidnappings, bombings, beheadings, raping.

So very violent group of people. We went down in the southern Philippines, we linked up with their LRC, so their. Tier one counterterrorist unit that we stood up and trained. I personally stood up and trained with two years prior to nine 11. We were a part of that initial push into the Philippines to stand up their counterterrorist capabilities because we knew the war was coming just because it's terrorist activities.

You know, the intel that we're starting to see develop into Southeast Asia. North Korea was a big push too, you know, with there are no don missiles that can launch into, uh, and hit us in the United States with unstable dictator at that time. So those were the two primary. My team, we pushed into Southern Philippines to combat a bus iev.

I was there for on and off for roughly three years in and outta the jungles of the Philippines working with their host nation. If you guys don't know the Burnhams, they were a missionary group. They were out in Ohio. They were a missionary group working in the Southern Philippines, and they were captured, they were kidnapped by Busay, brought into the jungles for over a year.

They were in jungles and America was trying to negotiate their release. We were working with the counter terrorists and Filipino host Nation and President Royal at the time to go into the Southern Philippines to help find, fix, and locate and rescue the burnhams. Unfortunately, the, uh, the Burnhams were, um, the Filipino foot patrol, just a normal, not special operations.

A normal Filipino army was patrolling through the area, made contact, and Mr. Burnham got shot and he died. And Miss Burnham, she's back in the States, but I did three years there. We lost a whole team there from a suicide bomber, a motorcycle bomb. We lost some teams from helicopter crashes on Philip, so we lost some teammates in the Philippines.

I did three years there and then. I was offered a job by a tier one unit in the Army, which is the unit. I was asked to go there and become their unit combative instructor. Now I wanna say this because at that time I was fighting in Japan on those underground matches. But when I would deploy in Malaysia, or I'll go to Thailand to to train with their commandos, I would fight mu tie matches.

I'll fight in the jungles and slot matches In Indonesia, I was just that guy. I was a student to the martial arts. So I was learning, you know, sticks and impact weapons, edge weapons and knives from the Filipinos when I was deployed there for eight months in the jungles. And when I would go to Indonesia to train with their commandos, I was learning knife fighting, ot, you know, so all these type of martial arts, it was like I was incorporating all into my own technique.

At that time I was fighting in Thailand and there was a unit, when I say a unit, they were top tier counter tute in the army. He, uh, gave me basically a letter of acceptance. I applied for it. I tried out for their tryouts, I made it and I ended up being the unit's hand-to-hand combat instructor. In between me teaching, I will rotate overseas, do combat rotations, I'll rotate around the United States and train with fighters like Hoy, greasy.

I train, you know, with Illinois in Hawaii, with just going around United States and training, bringing that knowledge back to the units, deploying overseas and, um, doing combat rotations. After a year of that, I rotated out and I started doing special reconnaissance within the unit. A very high top secret at SEI level I.

But I could say, you know, we were traveling around the world in and outside of war zones, fighting, fixing, and killing some of the world, almost one. And men,

[00:53:02] Jordan Harbinger: I know you can't talk about much of that, but I'm curious about the Hostage Rescue mission in Iraq with the foreign fighters. Can you talk about that?

[00:53:11] Tu Lam: When I was in Iraq, so Syrian rebels, right? So after Saddam was captured and handed over to the Iraqi government, his two brother were killed. That handed over to government, to this new government system that we are trying to work with, right over in Iraq. But then there was Syrian Rebels that started moving across the border and was led by, uh, Sarka A MZ.

He became the number two most wanted man. Bin Laden at that time was the number one most wanted men. He was operating in Iraq, so he became our primary target. So we hunted down Sarka, right? So with this hostas rescue that we did was. The Syrian rebels captured local Iraqis and they wanted to use them at ransom, and if their mees are not met by midnight, they were going to behead 'em.

[00:54:04] Jordan Harbinger: Geez.

[00:54:04] Tu Lam: On video like they always do. Right?

[00:54:06] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:54:07] Tu Lam: At that time, our war capabilities were on point. Our intelligence were on point. We had host nation agents, Iraqi agents that we train. We were working at that national level that came out. The terrorist organization made their threats. We triangulated where they're at based on their technology.

We able to get bird's eye view and we knew where they were at, and we came in undercover doctors. We walked in eight clicks, said, here are helicopters. We were working with the rangers. They contained an isolate and we came in, killed the bad guys and rescued hostages. How many hostages were there? If I can recall right.

I have the picture, but I, I would say there was eight hostages. Okay.

[00:54:53] Jordan Harbinger: Man, they must have been glad to see you. Do they understand what's going, like, what is that like? Do they understand what's going on?

[00:54:58] Tu Lam: Oh yeah. They understand. Anytime, you know, Haas Rescue Mission when DC Daryl Presser dropping in front of them and Americans coming to rescue them with our American flags on R chest, they know what it means.

You can see on their face,

[00:55:15] Jordan Harbinger: oh man, it's so, it's is inspiring the word. I don't, I'm not sure you've got this level of intensity and I can put myself in this situation of a hostage just being like, I. It must be so cathartic to see somebody who has beaten you up, starved you, told you that they're gonna kill you, God knows what else they've done to you or the people around you, and you just see their head explode like a watermelon and somebody comes and grabs you up and says, everything's fine now.

It must just be the biggest relief in the world.

[00:55:42] Tu Lam: Yeah. You know, before they can even process, because our, our raids, our training, you know, we're fast, we're, we're good at what we do and we've been doing it for a very long time. And a raid can last 15 seconds. Yeah. You know, we could take a room within seconds and eliminate the threat.

So before they can even process, it's already done. And we're bagging them and we're moving them, we're strike them outta that area. So it's very fast, it's very intense. But in the end journey, like you said, man, it's that emotion. You, you see it, it's that appreciation. Like for me, you know, me being who I came from, I was oppressed.

Right. I, I came from oppression. So me being who I came, I could see the people. I could truly feel their pain, their oppression, because I've been there and multiply that around the world. Not war zones in Ajas Rescue Mission. Yeah, it was, uh, foreign fighters came in, they capture, you know, local Iraqis and they were trying to use 'em as ransom after I did my war gear.

So at a certain point, the high value individuals were not in war zones. The guys who were making the play, and we needed to kill those guys and we needed to find, fix and kill 'em no matter where they're at in the world. Orders came down that a special capability was gonna come out and we were gonna flux outta war zones and find, fix and locate 'em wherever we're at in the world, either kill or capture 'em.

That level of the game kind of changed everything, and I was part of that level. So it wasn't just the war zones for me, it was outside of war zones. I want to tell you the difference between the two and why it's so complex is that. Outside of the war zones, you don't have bird's eye view, you don't have satellite imagery, you don't have helicopters, you don't have bombs that you can drop.

You don't have fast moving jets. You don't have any of that. Sometimes you only have a pistol and that's it. Maybe, and you're in some country like Yemen or Libya where every foreign fighter wants to kill you, you know? And I'm a 205 pound Asian at the time, tattooed out trying to find some, the world almost wanted men.

Like how do you live in those environments, you know? And I have, I lived in those, I live with the people. I live in those environments. Eight months at a shot, sometimes I was living in and out of CI safe houses. I would work outta embassies and we would, we'll find them.

[00:57:59] Jordan Harbinger: You must look like an alien to somebody from Yemen.

[00:58:05] Tu Lam: I do. I do. Yeah,

[00:58:06] Jordan Harbinger: they've probably seen a couple white people. They watch movies, but then you come in and they're like, I don't know what to do with this. Tattoo's an Asian guy, but he's also like a lethal weapon. Like what video game did this guy walk out of? Oh. And into our village. Like I've, what is happening?

Call of Duty. Yeah. Literally. Literally. Yeah. We'll get to that.

[00:58:24] Tu Lam: No, no. But I want, I wanna talk about that because you know, your posture is everything, right? Your posture is everything. And I can come across, I can come across intimidating.

[00:58:32] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:58:32] Tu Lam: Or I can be kind. Right. And I can come across. So when we had to go through training, as you know, some of our training was in DC and I had to lower my posture.

I. I can't come across like that commando, even if I'm trying to work intelligence and work with locals. Right? So your posture has to change, your background story has to change. Who you are has to change and all that, you know is a part of the plan for us coming in.

[00:58:56] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned in the book that when you do raids, like the Hostage Rescue Mission, someone's job is to fingerprint the dead guys and scan their eyes, and that's fascinating.

First of all, that's like straight out of an action movie. Somebody's job is to scan these guys' eyes if they still have them, find out who these people are. Is there like a big database with all the terrorists or something? Or foreign fighter? I mean like what is the data used for?

[00:59:21] Tu Lam: Plain and simple. How do we know if we killed you or not?

Uhhuh, if there's a big database and you know, there's multiple war fronts going on. So conflicts in Yemen, Libya, then you got Afghanistan, you have Iraq, then you got places in Syria, you know, all these places and these terrorists are floating around everywhere. If you're hunting for this guy in Afghanistan and we killed him in Syria and there was no database, you're hunting down the same guy that we were ready to kill years ago.

Got it. Word of mouth wasn't good enough and picture is not good enough. 'cause sometimes they're, they don't have a face.

[00:59:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:59:52] Tu Lam: right. So we had to do biometrics on 'em. And then these biometric machines came out. HRT, hospice, rescue, FBI. Was a part of that initial process of logging that data and maintaining that database because at a certain point, how do we know who we are killing?

Because we're working with different organics units too. There's Seal Team six, there's the unit, there's Green Berets, there's Rangers, there's all these other units that, how do you keep track of who you killed?

[01:00:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah. We had a guest from the unit. It's funny that you call it that too. Was that like an army?

I forget already. It's like an army unit that does intelligence and special operations, which it sounds like is every unit, but it's doesn't have a public name, I guess, and he didn't mention this database. We had a slightly different topic of conversation, but he was also, now that I think about it, an immigrant from Egypt and he had moved to the United States when he was like 20 and was like, I'm enjoying the military.

Yeah. His name was Adam Gamal. Does that ring a bell? I mean, sure. His author, pen name episode 9 78 for people that are interested. Yeah. He moved here from Egypt and was just like, you know. I wanna do something for this place. It's a incredible story, much like yours. In the book you mentioned you have this internal monster voice that puts doubt and self-worth issues into your mind.

Tell me about that.

[01:01:11] Tu Lam: So, you know, now that I, I work on myself and, you know, I'm in this spiritual journey and, and healing, you know, I just realized that, okay, so our subconscious, right, our program is from zero to seven, right? Anybody in neuroscience, anybody education and mental health will understand. Zero to seven is your program.

So that's buried into your subconscious because your analytical and your conscious mind wasn't even developed into your, you're around eight or nine. Well, from zero to seven, it was a war. I was born in a basement. My uncles were ripped apart from me and sent to reeducation camps. I, I saw people thrown overboard from dying.

I saw a lot of survival going on back here. A lot of survival when I was growing up. A lot of self-doubt. You know, that's why I fought in Okinawa. I had so much self-doubt of who I was. I never fit in, you know, I was rejected from, in my childhood, I was spit on, pushed to the ground. I was told I I was a dog because I smelled like an indigenous person.

So what I'm saying is I never fit in. So I always had a lot of self-doubt, even though I was a green beret, even though I fought, even though I was the top tier of the army, it was me. I oppressed myself. I had a lot of self-doubt. And, you know, I had to come to terms with that towards the end, after I got out the military, because after I got outta the military, you know, you, you're, you're suffering from, uh, post-traumatic stress.

Right? You're, you see a lot of trauma and for us, back during my time, which is 2016, when I got out, mental health wasn't really recognized in the military.

[01:02:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:02:49] Tu Lam: There was no program for it. It was starting to surface with a lot of, uh, drug addictions that we saw suicides from my peers, special operations because they fought, they did a lot of heavy lifting during the war.

So we started seeing a lot of the traumas started surfacing, and it comes out and it plays out in drugs, alcohol, womanizing, abusing yourself. So I saw the two sides and I heard the voices inside my own head. So I knew the battle was real. And I wanna say this man, you know, for the viewers is it's not just voices.

'cause the voices is attached to thoughts, right? And each thought is tied to emotion. If I, if, if you even think of a thought, it's tied to some kind of emotion or belief, right? If, if, if you tell me something that was painful to happen in your life, some emotion is there. So imagine subconsciously you have these negative thoughts just playing out in your mind 24 7.

You have no control over it because that's your program. You can't control your subconscious and 95% of your day, 95% of your life is ran off your subconscious. So how do you control something that you can't even reach? And I saw a lot of the veterans that were losing this war, they were really losing it.

And you know, at that point in my life, I was at 23 years in the Army, 15 years of war in 27 countries. And I was a drug addict. I was numbing all my emotions with painkillers. I caught it, IED, that roadside bomb in 2005 during the Iraq war. And it really tore my neck up and they gave me a Percocet. And I tell you, man, I was immediately hooked Jordan, because dude, up until then, it was like, I just felt war.

I felt regret, I felt hate and anything, man. Anything that could take me out of that I used, you know, and I used it. I used it, and I've abused it and. By the time, the end of my career and I was a drug addict and I was lost, I had no place. You know what I mean? Like no purpose, like where do you go? Like if you had a career for 23 years, you had to reinvent yourself.

There's a moment of death and rebirth somehow, right?

[01:05:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:05:04] Tu Lam: So yeah, when I got out, I had to die to that guy, you know, that warrior. I wouldn't say that warrior died. I would, I had to die to that hate that I used as a weapon. 'cause I did. I used, I used hate as a weapon.

[01:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like this monster just built and built and built.

What, what was going on? You said you'd already been dating your wife. Were you married by then?

[01:05:24] Tu Lam: We're married for 23 years, you know, and she dealt with my whole military career. You know, my life is really secretive. Special operations is really secretive. She didn't know half of my career, you know, I don't talk about my warriors to her.

But now she's seen this guy that she's to see as the symbol of strength. Now he's not that I wasn't down anymore. It took a little bit for her to readjust, you know, to give me that healing space that I needed. And she did. You know, I wanted to also tell you, Jordan, at that same time I was building a company, I realized all my trauma, zero to seven.

I started realizing that, and then I started listening podcasts. I started to get smart about mental health. I started understanding how trauma, how we hold trauma and energy, and I started studying that for years. I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning, I would run on, run and listen to some podcasts between two doctors talking about neuroscience.

And I did that for years. I was arming myself with intelligence and then at, at one point I was ready to bring the fight, and that came into form of meditation, spirituality, just being a better human.

[01:06:34] Jordan Harbinger: I. You'll probably never be an American hero, like two Lamb, but you'll be a hero to me if you support the amazing sponsors that support this show.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Two Lamb. It must have been really hard on your wife, although I do feel like Ruthie is low key, super tough and probably tells you what's what behind the scenes. Yes, and I, I can tell from our communications that she's very switched on.

My wife Jen said the same thing. Like, wow. She responds right away. She's like super on top of it, she's, you know, really. And so that must have been tough for her, but also you had, when you were recovering, it must have felt pretty good because you definitely had a, an ally in her through this.

[01:09:55] Tu Lam: Yeah, I definitely had an ally and she definitely gave me my space I needed, but it was also a journey for her, you know, because at a certain point my traumas were so severe that simple meditation was not gonna get me there.

You know? I realized that, and at this point I was cold plunging meditation. I would do, uh, breathing control exercises. I. But man, that takes years to develop.

[01:10:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:10:18] Tu Lam: Years. Right. So then one of my friends, he was ex Navy Seal. He went down to Mexico and he did psychedelics. Just telling you that's a culture thing.

Within special operations. A lot of us go to Mexico to heal in psychedelics because our trauma is just so severe. You know, he went down to Mexico and he did Iboga. Iboga is a root from the Tree of Knowledge from Africa. They brought in, uh, healers from Africa and then brought in Mexico. Doctors are here, you know, you're hooked up to EKG.

I mean, it's legit stuff, right? You have to even be vetted through this program. And the program is ran by this X SEAL team six guy, you know. So he's there to set up this program to heal guys at my level of trauma. So my friend came back, changed from that treatment. So that started my interest in psychedelics.

So I would say about two years ago, I started my psychedelic journey own man. You know, like some people are believing in, some people don't. And I believe you have a right to believe in what you believe in. But each person has their own healing journey. And I tell you what psychedelics did for me. It allowed me to access a certain portion of my brain, my subconscious, it allowed me to go to my 3-year-old.

I met my 3-year-old self. It allowed me to go to my 7-year-old self and heal that portion, I wanna say. So I went down to Mexico and I took that, you know, iboga route and 15 hours I was under, man. It was the worst experience of my life, you know, it was just a lot of anxieties, you know, the darkness, the shadows, you know, man, it was hard.

It was very hard for me. And then the next day they had me smoke this five mil, DMT, which is told Venom, right? It was one of the most poisonous veto in the world. They find these toes in, uh, Arizona, these indigenous toes, and they'll piss the toad off and they'll shoot this poison to a piece of glass and they'll dry the glass in the sun.

They'll fla it into a crack pipe and you smoke it.

[01:12:23] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

[01:12:24] Tu Lam: It's called Eagle Death.

[01:12:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:12:26] Tu Lam: And Jordan, you will know what it means to die. You will know. There's no doubt in my mind you DMTs only produce at this amount on am moment of birth and a moment of death. Your body inside is convinced. There's no doubt about it.

You are dying in your mind. When darkness engulfed me and my ego died, I shot through this light. Man. I just never felt love like that ever before, and I knew it was God. I never felt this sort of love for man. Even my wife who loves me for everything. She has this forgiving, pure energy and I knew it was God.

And, and I'll tell you, it changed me, man. It really did. It changed me and it made me want to be. A better human being. You know, it makes me value my words and what I say to our youth and what I say to the communities and my actions as a human being. Right? So it really changed me. And after Mexico, I've been working on myself and going into company, and I do sit with wachuma, which is cactus.

It grounds me, and, and it teaches me, right? So I sit with that once a year.

[01:13:37] Jordan Harbinger: What does that mean? Is sit with that, like, is that you're ingesting a cactus or am I missing the point?

[01:13:42] Tu Lam: Yeah. So when I sit as, uh, you have a Charmin, right? You sit with a group, you open up that space for us, we open up that space through, uh, sage, right?

So we open up the space, we cleanse the space. We invite God, Jesus love and healing. Uh, consumed a cactus, which is in a form of a tea, a brew, which they brewed is a cactus underneath a full moon. I drink a cactus, and that cactus man is really bitter and it, it stirs up your stomach and it brings up a lot of emotions that we trap within our lower, uh, domino region.

And then with a Hindu long G breathing control technique, I'm able to find what we call the still point and release energy. So when I say and I sit with cactus is I sit with the medicine for 12 hours.

[01:14:33] Jordan Harbinger: I know back in the day, monks, their job was to heal warriors when they came back from combat. I guess maybe they, I don't know if they had psychedelic plants in all of these kinds of rituals that they did, but it sounds kind of similar.

It's like an ancient spiritual PTSD treatment that monks were in charge of. Does this ring any bells for you at all? Have you heard about this at all?

[01:14:52] Tu Lam: I would tell you this, no matter where I travel, the monks were drawn to warriors. They didn't ask to help us. They didn't even offer to help us. But if we asked, they're right there.

Always. Monks and priests are drawn to warriors everywhere. I go from Europe all the way to Asia. Middle East is always, the monks are drawn to warriors. Even during my healing journey, the monks came out to help me. You know, I became a, um, a face right in the veteran space. So I help a lot of veterans these days and I go to these galas to educate other veterans, educate sponsors, and you see 'em.

There always monks are, are right there. I feel that they understand. Maybe we need, maybe it's us that need more help or maybe, you know, but a monk has told me it is a warrior that suffers the most for others. Jordan Killing takes your soul, man. You know, in war, you know, you kill for what? You kill for the safety of our country, right?

You're killing for. The liberation of what we feel is good people. It hurts your soul, right? So the warrior buries that burden because of our dharma in this lifetime. The monks, I feel like they're drawn to heal us because they understand the dharma that we have to live in.

[01:16:13] Jordan Harbinger: Do you think one of the reasons you join the military was to prove to yourself one, that you could, you mentioned liberating oppressed people, but also is there any sort of idea that you would prove to yourself or maybe to even to others, that you were just as American as some of the racist people that you came across, or the people that didn't think you were gonna make anything out of yourself?

I mean, you're almost did it to prove to the monster that it was wrong in a way. Am I off here?

[01:16:41] Tu Lam: No, you're not off. I, I had to prove myself to everybody because I never fit in, you know, even on the A teams, I. I don't fit in. Even now. I don't fit. So

[01:16:51] Jordan Harbinger: why don't you fit in on the, on the A teams? That part doesn't make sense to me.

[01:16:54] Tu Lam: Yeah. Well, I mean, on the A teams, you have different backgrounds to different people on certain groups. I could tell you I was one of the very few Asians. Asians are not very populated within special operations. We make up 0.001% of special operations. So I guess a minority, sure. They never treated me wrong to team guys.

I mean, I'm, they're my brothers, you know, and they'll die for me. It's all here. It was me all along because I never accepted myself and I, that's why I always seek the approval from others.

[01:17:29] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about transitioning to Hollywood. I know when you left the teams, you just sort of threw your uniform off and let it sit in the corner for six months and then went to bed.

That wasn't exactly a smooth transition. Now you find yourself in Hollywood. I mean, it seems like you certainly, surely you did not see that coming by the way. I think it's funny that of all the things that you've been through, that the tight clothes they made you wear in Hollywood got special mentioned in your book, like punching yourself in the face during a march, and can you believe they made me wear spandex?

It's unbelievable. Yes. It's not right.

[01:18:03] Tu Lam: Well, so, okay, so Hollywood didn't happen right away. It was three years, right? Three years of me traveling around America. There was a certain stage, a certain point where I took the teachings of Boto and the way the Warrior and I wanted to be an instructor. So I started traveling around America.

I started teaching from New York all the way to la. I taught and we were busy. I taught law body citizens. I taught military, and I taught law enforcement. Now we're just booked with law enforcement training to book us out for years. Literally, our training's very popular. During that time, my wife was filming me teaching classes through my reconnaissance, special forces background.

I knew how to do post editing and video editing and photography and all that. We had to learn all that. I post edit and I throw it on YouTube. And after three years of that, the History Channel talent team emailed us. I'm known for knife fighting. I'm known for my knife fighting and my sticks in the impact weapons because my time in the Philippines training with those guys, they called us.

They asked me if I would be interested. Ruthie thought it would be a, a great change of pace for me. So life is about trying new things. I tried out for it and I found myself in Hollywood next to Bill Goldberg co-hosting, forging fire, knife, or death. It was crazy. We did it for three seasons, man. You know, people ask me, they're like two.

How was it like being in Hollywood? It gave me anxieties, like, because everybody's up in your face, you know? Yeah. Putting makeup, like literally you put makeup in your face, they tell you how to dress, right? Because they know what sells. You're always doing these offshoot locations where they're taking photos.

It's just a lot of attention that I never received in special operations. Right? Because everything's secret. So total, like if you pulled a fish outta water, you threw 'em on land. It was, that's me flopping around. That's what I felt. I was hyperventilating, I was, but man, it allowed me to understand that side of myself and it had to calm the monster, right?

So the monster was about survival. It was about war. It was about this. But then I was throwing in Hollywood and it would, I had 15 cameras on me and I had to be this right. So, man, it really made me reevaluate the monster. But man, it was a great experience. Right. And uh, I did three years. Bill Goldberg and I are still friends to this day.

It opened up that doorway to me, so now I'm known in the knife world, we have our own line of knives and it's amazing spirits.

[01:20:40] Jordan Harbinger: How did you end up in Call of Duty? This is for someone like me, far more impressive than a TV show or any movie is called J. In fact, I think, isn't the video game industry bigger than the movie industry these days?

It might even be bigger than the music and movie industry entirely. I'm not sure. Combined. Combined, really Combined, yeah. Yeah.

[01:21:02] Tu Lam: I'll say a number. It's more than that. It's just one of the franchise I work with. They just sold it Microsoft when I was filming for Call of Duty, season two, and they sold it for 39 billion.

[01:21:18] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Wow. Just that, Fran. So this is like being in a Marvel movie. But more, it's bigger than being in a Marvel movie

[01:21:26] Tu Lam: because they capture my movements. Like the company Infinity Award, they changed their name now, but they emailed us and then they wanted to capture my martial art movements, my knife and impact weapons specifically.

They loved my gun fighting skills, but they wanted more of my martial arts. They emailed us, they were interested. We were negotiating at that point. And then I was teaching out in San Francisco. I was teaching close quarters battle out in San Francisco with the San Francisco Police Department. And then they follow us on social media and they asked us to fly from there to Hollywood.

So we did. We flew from Esca, go to Hollywood. I had guns all over. I had my kit on me, I had swords, I had all my stuff right. And um, they flew us out and they introduced themselves. They took me around Jordan. This place is more top secret than the unit. Like seriously, their security level was impressive, very impressive.

And I worked at the top secret level. Some of these agencies in uh, DC I have seen some of their security protocol. Man, this is up there.

[01:22:30] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I guess they're super concerned about any of the stuff leaking and whatever. Mm-Hmm. Wow.

[01:22:35] Tu Lam: So then, uh, I met the vice president and him and I hit it off, man. We hit it off about, you know, samurai and philosophy, you know, life.

And then he stopped me in the hallway and he asked me, how does he get me onto the game? And my wife said, what do you mean you want Ronan? And then he goes, yeah, I want Ronan. Wow. How do I get him onto the game? And then that's when I would say 15 lawyers got involved and got our trademark, my looks, my tattoos, like they stripped me down to my underwear and scanned me into the game.

They scanned all my movements, my speed. The skin in my knife fighting. All my movements were captured. The emotion captured. Wow. The skin in my face, they had these dots on my face. So every expression, you know, like this, they'll capture every movement.

[01:23:24] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. It's

[01:23:25] Tu Lam: very

[01:23:25] Jordan Harbinger: impressive. How do they do that with your face?

Is it lasers or are they actually sticking things to your face?

[01:23:30] Tu Lam: So they had a makeup artist put these dots all over my face. Oh yeah. And then the computer would scan it. They'll put these dots as movement points right on the computer. As I move my face, you could see that portion of the, the screen moving.

Wow. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's cool. With expression. So very latest in technology. I, I have never, a lot of things I can't talk about just because, uh, letter nondisclosure and, and Sure. And the level of technology I saw, they are the cutting edge.

[01:23:58] Jordan Harbinger: That's amazing. I, I know even, and I, I think this is public 'cause it's in the game.

Right. But your own weapons and your own gear that you design and all that stuff is in the game. Along with you and your expressions and everything. I mean, that's in swords and stuff like that. How do they do that? They just take photos and videos of you using it and are the dot, they paint dots on the guns and stuff.

Like, I'm so curious how that works. Or is that something you can't share?

[01:24:20] Tu Lam: No, no, no. I could share that. My guns and weapons and swords and knives were with me. I gave it to 'em. They scanned it all in to the game. So basically have this scanner, they scanned it. So they literally had my watch, they had my bracelet.

Oh, wow. They scan everything into the game when I was doing motion capture. So the two washi swords, they were handmade by Kiku, which from Japan. Right. So those are my personal swords that were handmade in Japan for Ron and me. And they scanned those into the game. So when I was in motion capture, they had these PCC pipes.

[01:24:55] Jordan Harbinger: Like PVC, the white plastic kind of, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[01:24:58] Tu Lam: And they would tape and they had sensors on 'em. Right. And those became my swords. So I would do the Cali stick movements, and then they had these blades that to put the sensors on, they'll balance it so the blade moves like a normal blade. So I would tape it so the balance of the blade would move like a normal blade, huh?

I would do all my movements with a blade sort. I would draw the guns, I would show my foot movements in the house, how it would, you know, sweep a room and, and they capture it all. And we worked with them on and off for about two years on development of a modern warfare two. And then season two is when I came on to the cover of Call of Duty, and they built me as a main character around a hole.

War Zone said he built the whole world around my character.

[01:25:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:25:46] Tu Lam: In season two,

[01:25:47] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's like being Superman in a movie, right? It's just for people who don't play video games, it really is like, oh, we picked Two Lamb to be Thor. So he, that's who that is now. Right? Like, that's pretty damn cool. And it, but it's you.

I mean, they gave him a name, Daniel Shenoda or something like that. They turned him into a Japanese guy. I don't know how you feel about that.

[01:26:07] Tu Lam: Oh, we agree. Yeah, we agree with that. They, they actually wanted my name on there. I, I didn't want that. You didn't want your name on there? Mm-Hmm. Why? You know, I don't know what they're gonna do with that character and, you know, and I didn't want, but Ronan, everybody knows me as Ronan, you know, and it's me.

That's true. For them to call him Ronan, it's close enough. Yeah, that's close enough. It's all my swords and, and everything. So it was great. You know, we couldn't dedicate time to do the voice, you know, just 'cause I, I travel and I, I run a company. We're entrepreneurs, so we have a company. I was acting at that time and then also I was traveling.

And I was writing a book, so, uh, a lot going on at that time.

[01:26:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Voice acting. People think it's just talking into a microphone, but it's not, it's actually acting. It's really hard. It's hard on your voice. It takes a ton of time. I. There's a lot of retakes. It's not as glamorous as doing all your moves and drawing your guns and getting hooked up to motion capture.

Probably you got the peak experience. Maybe you bat out at the right time with the voiceover. I like the voiceover, but it's because I can't act for shit and I have no got no karate moves. I got no moves. So

[01:27:09] Tu Lam: no, I want to talk about motion captures. They put you in this really tight suit and they put these balls on you, you know?

And did you gotta, yeah. Stand in front of the computer and you gotta move your arms like this. And it's calibrating your avatar on the computer. Yeah. So when you step out to the dome, you'll see this floor and it's taped, it's grid squares, so it's taped and grid squares. And you look up and these huge TV monitors are all over, right, with these thousands of cameras all over you.

Yeah. And based on when you look up in a tv, you see your avatar and the grid squares now turn into a city or a room or a hallway, whatever. Right? So then you could see the layout of the hallway, which rooms off these grid squares by looking at the screen. It had this time bar behind me. So my avatar, I had to perform these movements right through a room, clear a room, and then come back in the hallway.

But the time bar speeds up by the end of it, man, you're sprinting through this. And at that time I was 45. Right. And, you know, post-military. So man, it was like, I, I had to really worked on, you know, restructuring, you know, my mobility, you know, my agility again. 'cause a lot of the, some movements required that.

So it was a great experience.

[01:28:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, man. Have you played the game or is that sort of a bridge too far?

[01:28:21] Tu Lam: You know, I just have so much going on in my life that I So you

[01:28:23] Jordan Harbinger: haven't played it? I know. Yeah. I, I,

[01:28:25] Tu Lam: I can't justify sitting down. I can't even justify sitting down and watching tv. It's just got too much going on.

[01:28:31] Jordan Harbinger: I know the feeling, although there's a part of me that's like, if I was in Call of Duty, I would make sure that I beat that shit for sure. At least. At least once. Yeah, man.

[01:28:41] Tu Lam: Maybe that that'd be on my bucket list.

[01:28:43] Jordan Harbinger: There you go. Yeah, there you go. If you ever get like. God forbid, you know you have find yourself with a bunch of downtime.

Maybe you take a vacation, maybe pick up a copy. I. Give it a shot. It's gonna be, it'll be kind of ironic if, if that's the one thing that you never sort of conquer is your own call of duty from 2020 or whatever it came up.

[01:29:01] Tu Lam: Well, what I wanna say about Call of Duty man, that's global. You know, that's, oh yeah.

International, that's global. That's around the world. So when I travel, it's crazy because they scan my character to, to t. You know, it's really weird when people play my character for a long time to go to one of my classes or to meet me. They're just kind of taken back. Yeah. You know, because it's so. So close, you know?

[01:29:22] Jordan Harbinger: Do people recognize you from that? Or is that Not really because 2020 graphics, it's, it would be kind of weird to be like, are you the Asian guy from that one video game?

[01:29:30] Tu Lam: So a lot of people recognize me, really? But a lot of people, what I know is they're afraid to come up to me. Yeah. 'cause they don't wanna be that guy that says, are you this?

And you know, they don't want to, you know, say all Asians look alike. Right. So, right. They don't wanna be that guy.

[01:29:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yep, that's true. 'cause I was gonna say, people come up to me all the time, but nobody says all white people look alike. So it's not, they're not gonna run into that when you're like, no, why would you think I'm that?

Oh, I get it. All Asian people look alike and now they're in trouble with you is tattooed out 205 pound Asian dude. And it's like, you know what, maybe I'll just take a photo on my phone and send it to my friends and. Say that. I think that might be the guy. Yeah. It's amazing man. You've come full circle, right?

'cause you grew up loving storm shadow from GI Joe. Yes. I think you mentioned that earlier. I love GI Joe growing up as well. Yeah. And I actually liked Cobra Commander. I know he is a bad guy, but whatever. I don't care. And I like shockwave, but you know what my favorite was actually your nemesis snake eyes.

That was my favorite.

[01:30:27] Tu Lam: Yeah. Anything ninja? Anything ninja back then? Anything Ninja or Green Beret? I was all about, you know, so it's crazy, right? Because the ninjas were formed out of frugal pure Japan, or were standing period of Japan. And Shoguns, like Tuck Gallo were employed or covert agents, which were Chino's ninjas.

And these ninjas will conduct reconnaissance and they'll do direct action in hospice rescue. They have done those type of missions, assassinations. It's just crazy. The special forces, their mission kind of mirrored that.

[01:30:58] Jordan Harbinger: Is there a specific mission that you went on? That stays with you in a positive way.

Like maybe that hostage rescue, for example, there's another mission you mentioned in the book where you were working in Chad. I don't know if that's something that stuck with you or if it's just something you could talk about because it's declassified. I'm curious,

[01:31:15] Tu Lam: you know, any type of mission that I can get out to the locals and indigenous people where I can provide aid, where I can help.

And you know, that's where I, I was kind of bringing to the point because now that I work on myself, I just realized this is, this is God's journey, man. I came from oppression because I needed to feel what that meant, right? Because that gave me the strength and the fortitude I needed, right? The courage I needed to fight for the people that I didn't even know, you know?

So in Chad, when I see those children getting kidnapped and sold into slavery, the pirates that boarded our boats, they sold their kids into slavery. It's full circle once around the world. And I, I was just glad that in this lifetime, the God gave me his strength so I could fight back. So before the war, we, you know, I was 21 years old and we pushed into the country in Laos, during Laos.

So bordering, you know, Vietnam, Cambodia, during that area of Vietnam war. You know, Americans have dropped hundreds and thousands of landmines in these countries. You know, fast forward that 1998, these kids were getting their legs and limbs blown up playing in these jungles and rice patties. So the special forces, we went in these remote villages to link up with indigenous people to find these landmines, to locate 'em, to mark the fields, to show 'em how to properly find mark and dispose of these landmines.

And at that same time we were, there was no school for the children in the village. So our engineer built a school for the children and we explicitly rerouted nearby river so they could have running water. Those type of missions where I could help people supersedes any direct action killing. Any mission that harms others.

That was one of my favorite missions. Healthy.

[01:33:05] Jordan Harbinger: What's next for you? You could join the Peace Corps if you really enjoy that kind of thing.

[01:33:08] Tu Lam: Uh, I think what's next for me? I'm, I'm more into Warrior's path. So what's next for me is in November we're going to Thailand. We're linking out with the special forces in Thailand.

We're doing meet and greets with their federal agents 'cause of the book release. So we're traveling, uh, training counter narcotics teams in Baton Rouge. We're running with the SWAT guys, you know, in Atlanta. So, yeah, that's more my path these days. And also in between, I, I'm a public speaker these days. I public speak at high schools to try to install discipline, some kind of moral code to our youth because I could reach out to 'em because I'm a Call of Duty character, right?

So they wanna listen to me. But if I can have their attention for maybe that 15 minutes because I'm a Call of Duty character. Then maybe I can tell 'em about their insecurities and how to solve their insecurities or face the struggles and live by a set of moral values in life.

[01:34:04] Jordan Harbinger: I hope you get to speak for more than 15 minutes.

I hope they give you more than 15 minutes. I think your whole story is just fascinating and thank you by the way, for doing this on the 4th of July. Man, it's the most American thing ever. I've been honored to talk with you today and had to have you back in a second. Man. You have so many stories we didn't get to many of which are in the book, which we'll link up in the show notes.

And I just wanna say thanks again to you and thanks to Ruthie for getting this all squared away. 'cause I know she's got her work cut out for you, planning all this stuff and making sure that you still have time for yourself.

[01:34:34] Tu Lam: Will do. I appreciate you, Jordan. Thank you.

[01:34:38] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with North Korean defector, Yomi Park.

In

[01:34:43] Clip: North Korea, birds and mice can hear your whisper. It's the only place that modern hasn't touched 90, 70% North Korean wounds are not paved in the hospital. They use one needle to inject everybody. It's very common to have a surgery without painkiller. The worst torture is being starved, and before you die from starvation, you halluc.

You lose your mind. So some mothers eat their children 'cause they thought their children were dogs. 'cause they go crazy and you don't eat. And then they wake up and they're like, what happened to my child? If somebody challenging the party ideology, they don't just go after killing you or your son or grandma, they really go after age generation, like get rid of entire clan.

That's how they prevent the revolution. And that's how they became like Almighty god. Every front newspaper in North Korea is a Kim's photo. So sometimes you do not see the. One page and then you rip it. That's how you get executed.

[01:35:41] Jordan Harbinger: How do they prepare you to escape?

[01:35:43] Clip: Pray and fasting? You need a miracle to do it because you are gonna go across the Goby Desert, into Mongolia from China in the minus four degrees.

That's why they make you pray. They just give you a compass. Why don't you walk? Follow the north and the west and then cross eight wire fences and hopefully that's gonna be Mongolia. Very unique thing with the North Korean scene. Whenever you ask them in their dream is always North Korea. You never escape in your subconscious.

You are there forever. Every night. Every night. And there like nobody escapes in your dream

[01:36:17] Jordan Harbinger: to hear more about the bizarre mind games that generations of North Koreans have had to endure under the current regime. Check out episode 5 78 and 5 79 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Man, there was so much in his books too.

They, the way he escaped Vietnam, how they were dragging people in the streets and murdering them, including members of his own family. And then when he was working is a Green beret. Green Berets. It, it's such an interesting sort of difference. You know, Navy Seals are kind of like run in, kick doors down, blow stuff up, whatever, and then get out of there.

Green Berets are embedded in local populations, so they learn languages and culture. My Green Beret friends are, are very worldly and educated. It's fascinating. It's so appealing to me other than the fact that I am a complete wimp and would never have made it through the training. I'm sure. Uh, it's just incredible what you get to do.

Also, working in Chad against Rebels who kidnapped kids and sold them. I mean, this stuff is, some of the stuff too confronted is straight up evil. It's your worst nightmare as a parent. You'd rather your child be dead than enslaved in being abused by somebody and he gets to rescue these kids and kill the people that are taking him and selling him.

It's just some stuff. Yes, violence's bad, but like, you know, some of this has to be just damn satisfying. Although two is just built different man. He cut off a cast 'cause he had an injury, obviously he cut it off so he would be ready for training. Not the doctor cut it off 'cause it was ready to go. He was just like, well I'm gonna cut this thing off so I can go train.

I mean, he's tough to what sounds like a borderline insane level. And oh man, there were some anecdotes in in the book and other things that I've heard him say. For example, if you are in combat and you kill a bunch of, let's say ISIS guys, someone's job is to go scan all the dead people's irises and then fingerprint them so that you know who you've got and who is still maybe out there and create a database.

Imagine your job is to scan dead people's fingerprints and irises. I mean, that is just some hardcore stuff that I would imagine requires maybe a couple rounds of therapy after you're outta the service. So thank you to two for his service and thanks of course for coming on the show. All things Two Lamb will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

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