 This week's episode is sponsored by Change. Change is an online mentoring program that teaches people with no experience how to create a real profitable online business and e-commerce. I have been working with Ryan at Change for a few years now and attended many events and got to meet the amazing community of like-minded people. These guys are the best of the best. The support these guys offer is personal, no bots or employees. There's no experience needed but like anything in life it takes time as it's a real business with real results. For more information go check out Ryan on Instagram at RyanGybe and he will guide you through the steps to help build a successful business. You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications bell so you are notified for when my next podcast goes live. And boom we're on. And today's guest we've got Robin Hosswell. Robin how are you? Nice to see you James. Good to see you brother. Unbelievable story. SES served all over the world. Offer, bodyguard, martial arts expert, a man of many talents, watched a few of your interviews, you've done the the Arraigning Embassy in 1980. 1980 yeah. One of the best rescue missions I believe. Rescued 19 hostages yeah. That's mad. I love this shit. We're going to have a good conversation today. But before we get into everything I always like to go back to the start of my guests. Get a bit of understanding about you. Where you grew up and how it all began. Ah well I was born in 1957 which is only 12 years after the end of the second world war. My mum was 17 years old and my father was in prison and so for the first seven years of my life I never had a father figure and I felt that that lack of something important for a long long time afterwards and she got divorced and married a guy called Geoffrey Horstfall who adopted me and gave me his name when I was seven eight years old not quite sure. But Geoffrey's way of dealing with children he had no experience of kids I had no experience of fathers was to beat me into silence and so I say that he stole my voice because when you're beaten into silence you lose your ability to communicate and negotiate to disagree with people to make friends to even laugh. And there's an awful lot of young people from my background who had similar experiences in their lives it can make you quite bitter. I mean adversity can make you a better person but it certainly creates that character can also make you a bad person. I was a bright kid I was doing well at school I got into grammar school when I was 11 but my parents my mother's second marriage started to fall to bark and so did my education and so when I was 14 I walked into the Army Careers Information Office in Aldershot and asked to join the Army and I asked to join the Royal Army Medical Corps and by the time when I was 15 I was old enough because school leaving age was 15 in 1972 the last year it was 15 and I joined the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion as a member of the parachute regiment so rather than patching people up I was more inclined to be trained to kill people and I was there for two and a quarter years and that was formative that was foundational it was my right to passage into adulthood and it gave me direction I had mentors I had guns and canoes and mountains and lots and lots of other young men of similar age to work towards the future and at that time there were 13,000 boy soldiers in the British Army and most of them became the middle class and the employers of the future they weren't just soldiers we had apprentice colleges we had technical colleges we had everything and it's sad that's not there as an opportunity for boys who were like me at that time today. Do you see the weakness and children now with iPads and computers and not enough outdoors? Back in the 80s when I was born it was football outside we were building big dens we were playing under fire hydrants we were doing bad shit but it was I believe it was a learning curve as well. A lot of bad boys grew up to be good men given an opportunity you can't blame them for the changes in technology and the changes in the world but what you can do is you can blame the government for the lack of opportunity that is there for less academic people for young people that have got a future but don't want to necessarily go to college that don't want to go to university that haven't been happy at school because those guys used to go out on the markets they became some of them became captains of industry like Alan Sugar they found their own way they the academic route isn't the only route in the world and I've walked both but there's no opportunity and people also live in fear so whereas your parents just said right see you when you get home be home for your tea and didn't worry about where you were and the trouble you got into and you were scrumping vimes and plums off her trees and so on they weren't worried off you went life was a risk they'd just gone through the second world war career was taking place you know it's it's a dangerous world but we've got into a situation now where everybody's so frightened frightened your kids get run over on the work on the roads frightened that they're going to get bullied in the playground and so everybody supervised I taught kids in London for 25 years from the age of four up to 15 I taught the martial arts and it was interesting to see some of the kids from very affluent homes that lacked a father because the father was always at work the nanny would bring up the kids the mother lived in absolute fear of allowing her children to be out of her sight for one minute and although they took part in lots of activities they were never unsupervised activities yeah did you what was the decision to join me was it to get away from the stepdad or no I don't think I realized how difficult my situation was at home although I lived in abject fear of him so getting out of the house and going fishing and camping with my mates by the pond every Friday night until Sunday evening was partly it about getting away from him but no I think I tried to join the army because I knew I was failing at school I wasn't happy at school and I was underachieving and I wasn't happy with that so I needed to run away from that and find something new and the army was what I made the choice there's a there's a scene in an officer and a gentleman with Richard gear an old film where he's fighting with the black sergeant major and the black sergeant major puts him on his arse and he's laying there and he says why don't you go home and gear looks him and says I've got nowhere else to go and I think that was me in my first year in the British army had nowhere else to go there's nothing to go back to and it it made me eventually a stronger kinder happier person but you're angry before you joined down me oh god yes um yeah I think I was angry because I was I was beaten I think I was angry because I was bullied bullied by my stepfather initially I struggled to make friends with my peers when I joined the army there I am in a room of 12 young men from all the all the worst and toughest cities in the UK and I didn't know how to negotiate and communicate and be a man I didn't know how to laugh at myself or Josh or um go yeah yeah yeah I'm a tosser I didn't know how to do that I took everything very very seriously and um that isolated me and it made it very very very difficult and um so the anger persisted um and I learned to fight but um I had to fight my way back that meant going through everybody and um in order to fight your way back through a series of people you have to be worse than them you have to be more violent than them more aggressive more capable more vicious but I had some very very good teachers and nearly all of them were Scottish what the Scottish in the SAS I know probably everybody says that but I'd love to put myself through the test I believe my mindset is different from a lot of people but you never truly knew that until you're through the test but I believe a lot of Scottish do pass SAS selection as well so there must be it could be a generation thing it could be a DNA thing but there's something not quite right in fact we're the UK the thing about I love about the UK first of all we don't we don't tolerate bullies there's a lot of bullies but we don't fuck around we don't look far I'd like to think I could handle myself to a certain degree but if I've ever seen somebody get bullied I'd be the first to fucking say listen I don't like bullies I never have and I think the UK we see through bullshit as well we're quite intelligent that way we can see through a lot of fish but with the training and the anger and everything you were learning from such a young age when did you realize that it was becoming too much you're becoming too vicious you were going in the opposite direction you're becoming your stepdad no I never I never I never became a bully I became the archetypal soldier my mother died when she was 37 of cancer and so that made me an army orphan so the army was my home the army was my family the parishate regiment the biggest toughest meanest sons of bitches on the street you know they they said it as it was you sorted your problems out with your fists and if you couldn't you shouldn't be there because the sole purpose of a paratrooper is to fight and and I eventually came to love that I came to love that honesty and I loved it because it gave me an outlet for my frustrations as well it didn't make me a lot of friends I was still that sort of odd person on the sidelines but I went from when I was 19 two guys two drunks came into a room late one night and nearly beat me to death they it took 10 days for my be able to open the bruising on my eyes to see my face in the mirror I had a dislocated jaw fractured jaw fractured fingers I had been attacked with a with a razor and it took me it took me it took me six weeks to get home from Cyprus and they didn't do it because it was me they just did it because they were drunk and wanted to beat somebody up and at that point I turned from being you know rob the uncomfortable person who didn't fit in to bad Bob the person who was going to be in a fight every night if someone was looking for it and old shop was an easy place to find a fight it was probably the most violent place I've ever lived in my life it was a garrison town it was owned by the airborne forces and I didn't go picking on people but as I said if someone was looking for it I was giving it to him first and the only thing that actually changed that was when I met my wife when I was on a CS selection when I was 21 and for the first time in my life I had somebody who saw through that facade and got into the cage with the lone wolf and tickled his ears and 40 43 44 years later we're still together congratulations it's funny that the biggest biggest and badest men that's all we want is a little back rub and a little tickle in the ear that came to cams the bear but do you see that now obviously with your experience the most violent the most ruthless are the ones who are hurting the most yeah I think an awful lot of aggression comes from fear an awful lot of aggression comes from the pain and fear of being intimidated humiliated is the big one and silenced by other people so you don't feel you've got a voice in society nobody's listening to you and the only way to be listened to is to stand up and shout and be prepared to fight for it but you can get people who are abused who become extraordinarily violent and they compensate or they don't know what else to do they see everybody as a threat I used to walk around the world when I was bodyguarding when I was in the sas and the first thing I would do when I saw a stranger was plan how I would take them out if they started something that was the first thing that went through my head and it took me a long time to realize that that's not normal that's weird I mean it was it was the circumstances I'd grown up in from the age of 15 I lived an extraordinarily violent world with violent people and it was normal when I got to herford to do sas selection for the first time I'd been in older shot for five six years as my main base and the girls in herford you say oh we can see the new guys from older shot that have arrived in herford because they they watch everybody come through the door they've got their backs to the wall and then after a few weeks you start to calm down but um you just live in that world and it's the same as in some ways of being in battle you know when you're in battle you're on edge all the time you're on a knife edge you're every bang every flash every movement is is potentially a threat everything everything that's unexpected is a threat so you can see how people come back and have difficulties transitioning from that back into the civilian world what was the training like to get into the paras back then this episode is sponsored by fire away pizza the fastest grown pizza company in the uk with over 150 stores with their fresh quality ingredients and unique pizzas they will have you coming back for more use code james20 for 20 off that's james 20 for 20 off yeah the parachute regiment training is uh all about aggression and fierceness and soldiering and uh you are coerced you are brutalized to a degree um you're not beaten up um but you know you're expected to sort your problems out your fists not go whining to somebody um so it was that the change from boy soldiers to parachute regiment training was a step up in aggression more than anything else and um but the the physical side of it having been a boy soldier for two years wasn't that hard it was a step up to being a an airborne soldier that was the hard bit and um of the 48 that passed out of my platoon only three were not former junior soldiers from either the junior parachute company or infantry junior leaders and the sort of fitness the soldiering we already had that in spades but the aggression was a huge step up yeah my my sister's ex-partner his brother barry he was in the paras but he every time he came home he was just fucking causing trouble with everything i loved the pints great guy man funny bastard but he he was we but he could fucking scrap yeah he could scrap he was a tough bastard and nobody fucked with him man and yeah and i always remember telling me the stories about the paras because i tried i tried to join the marines and he's like they're full of fucking pussies man come on well if you weren't good enough for the marines you've never gone to paris he actually yeah he's just mad but see the training do you feel as if kids should go through some sort of i believe all kids should be taught combat not tough in the mud but it gives them every time i spar or do any sort of combat training i feel like a man i feel alive i'm scared doing it i'm admit that i get scared doing it but i know i've got the balls to still do it and after that it's like a release do you feel as if kids should be doing more combat or some sort of military training not to kill her with guns or about just a there's a right of passage that a lot of societies in the world have we should have national service for it as an example where you go through this right of passage and after you've been through it you're a man your class as an adult as far as combat's concerned an awful lot of healthy family environments involve dad wrestling on the floor with his sons and daughters you know and that physical wrestling and that physical contact creates confidence in yourself you know i can take this i can handle this i can deal with this and so that's the first place that people masculine boys should be encouraged to engage in because it builds their self confidence there are some boys that aren't masculine and so you know they shouldn't be forced to do it but they'll go in a different direction but i think for the majority of of masculine young men wrestling with your dad wrestling with your uncle wrestling with one another getting the fat getting a fat lip every now and then or learning that you can take a little bit of punishment without without crying your eyes out every single time and running off to mummy you know that's i think that's all part of the healthy process when i was teaching kids martial arts in southwest london i'm you know parents would come to me and say well little johnny he loves the the cat a part of the process but he doesn't want to do the sparring i said does he play football and i said yeah he plays football i says does he do the tackling and of course he does the tackling i said well he's got to do this as well because it's part of the process that's what it's about and it's not about beating people up it's making them mentally and physically comfortable with themselves and confident in themselves and strong because strong men are kind men vicious men are not strong the most dangerous person in a gang is the weakest one because he's the one likely to do something vindictive and malicious and violent whereas the stronger more capable ones don't need to prove themselves yeah i used when i used to drink a lot and the pub everybody was loud or full of drugs and drink we're all loud we follow our gangsters and tough men we're all fucking weak and then i started training in a place called the grip house in Glasgow it was MMA i used to train with a guy called sean right the old look like skateboarders all looked kind of long hair and you wouldn't think these guys are trained fucking killers but yeah they'll just sit in the peach a shop or go for a drink one or two beers but yeah all the arseholes like me and my friends were all loud and daft and just so insecure but the trained killers they were so pleasant so nice they didn't have to prove anything always felt as if try to prove something so you could fit in and people thought you were crazy because you know deep inside you were so sensitive so weak so afraid and it's scary to think you don't realize that to later on in life nobody ever really teaches you because i learned from my uncles and when they were drunk and it becomes normalized or the drink drugs and violence not realizing that's all a weakness everyone's pretending to be a hard man yeah everybody's everybody thinks they're on train spot and rob a car yeah i the one thing i loved about there's only two actors that i've ever seen on television in any film anywhere anytime who can portray the viciousness that i experienced during my time in the parishion it was carlyle and and billy connelly played the gangster yeah and you know why they could do it because they'd lived it they've seen it they'd seen it in people's eyes and carlyle when he's in train spotting has it he has it right down to a T or maybe even um who was it played the um it'll come to me if i don't think about it but one other american actor blond hair very handsome um it'll come to me caprio no he's a fucking no no no not the caprio he played the um he played the pikey fighter in um brad pat brad pit yes when he played that part and he leaps out of his chair and his eyes just whack and i just yes you got that brad you got it so good yeah so perfect you know somebody like that because that's the only way you can do it i mean i've watched all the movies about sas guys and the television series and they um you know the actors on that and no that none of them none of them know it none of them seen it none of them can act it seem you are going through the paris and like what was the procedures to go ss train and how long did you have to do it was a go there was a cock to cock a snooter authority i'd been in the vigilant platoon which was like the wild bunch of the parisic regiment the guided the special guided missile platoon if if if they're bad but if you're too much trouble for the battalion send him to vige and um and i loved vige it was all soldier in no bullshit no parades out on the ground all the time and um but a new missile came in called the malan and so we were disbanded and when we were disbanded we were told we could go back to our parent units and my parent unit was a second battalion the parisic regiment which was also 30 60 scottish and um and then they changed their minds they promised us something then they said no you can't go back you're gonna stay in one para and um and i thought well you promised me you've broken your promise i'm gonna do something you can't stop me doing and so i went to battalion clark's office and um i said i was 21 and i said i want the papers to join the special air service and there's always a York shaman at the back of the battalion clark's office every battalion has got a York shaman in the battalion clark's office and it's bloke at the back said i don't know why you're doing that awful he said you're far too young you were back with your tail between your legs your wanker and um and he was wrong but i just did it because they they broke a promise to me otherwise i wouldn't have gone there because i understood that you needed to be 27 to get in on average and i was 20 i was just coming up 22 do you think all the pain and all the torture you went through as i had made you who you were at the past election or did you always have that and you were through all the shit you went through i think i had a deep seated insecurity that um i needed to prove that i was as good as the next man always if you've been bullied um you and uh yeah and isolated and humiliated you you there's always a something subliminal inside you that makes you feel inadequate and so i always had this desire to prove that i was good not better than but as good as the others those that had criticized me and so um i had a deep seated insecurity that was driving me forwards but i also wanted to be one of the best and i wanted to wear that cat badge because there were only 250 badge soldiers in the british army and i still think the numbers pretty much the same even now and to get into the sas is nothing nothing like any of the tv nonsense that people watch any of it and it should be nameless but we know we're talking about there's no shouting at people there's no coercion there's no bullying there's no sickness it's just simply if they made a genuine television program about sas selection it would be so boring because on the first month the last week is test week test week is the equivalent of five marathons over five days of weight on your back alone over the mountains of the breccan beacons in wales if you make the time great if you don't make the time you go back to your unit the next day no questions asked um you just didn't pass um you go on then to do continuation training most of which is in the jungle and when you come back from that you'll reselect it again and a percentage fail and then you go on to combat survival training for another month and when you finish that you'll reselect it again and if you're already a paratrooper the year then given your cat badge but you're on probation for six months if you're not already a paratrooper you go and do your basic jumps in the next six months you have to learn a personal skill and you have to learn a troop skill my personal skill was qualified as a paramedic and my troop skill was mountain climbing and at the end of 12 months if the lads like you if you're doing well then you're allowed to stay in for another two years and you're qualified on paper as an SCS soldier so the selection is a year and it's as academic as it is as it is physical how many started that with you um i had to have two goes the first time i i didn't make it um but i um about the bag Yorkshireman who says you're going to have your yeah well that was another reason i i thought i'm going to go back and face him but could you fit could you do it again as well because there's can some selections i don't think you can reset they asked me um i it was on the mountain phase in the first month and um i'd um i hadn't put enough protection at the bottom of my back and so the bergen had eaten when it got to 55 pounds it was eating two great big ulcers in the back of me and so on day four of test week um i quit and went to went back and they said um okay horse we'll pack your kit you're going back tomorrow but i got called into the office the next morning i said look we think you uh you know we know about your back the medics have told us about your back and would you like to stay here for another four months and do it again in january so i stayed until january and january 79 i did selection again which was the coldest winter on record for the last 40 years how many people passed that uh eight see when you i'd like to think i'm a good judge a character especially now but some people do shock me and i think wow i never fought him did you did you see who was passing at the start of the year were you quite surprised who passed i was um i don't think i was surprised initially um but we had one person die on endurance the 40 mile march on the last last day of test week and nobody got the first checkpoint because the weather was so bad and when we got back from the jungle um there were still 22 of us and they only allowed 10 of us to carry on and i was quite surprised because i thought some of the ones they failed were extremely good i thought they were better than me um but i wasn't making the choices i was just glad to get through seven people went into the office before me and also the first six the first seven failed and i was the eighth one to go in the first one to come out who'd passed onto the next phase just onto the next phase um but ten of us went on and two others failed after that uh one collapsed because we had to do endurance again and um one um failed the interrogation process um uh which um Andy McNabb has written about in his book so it's safe enough to mention it but one failed that so there was um there was eight of us left at the end did you feel six were paratroopers these are mad bastards did you did you ever feel satisfied there was always something missing waf your Robin uh yeah i think as as time and qualifications um uh were accumulated and i mean i met my i met my wife while i was on selection i married her um in 1981 um and so i was building a family as well as a career and um the army was me the sas was me that was where i was going to be until i was 40 but unfortunately like is in a lot of institutions it only takes one person a rank higher than you to destroy your career and i had one person a rank two people actually a rank higher than me who set out to destroy my career and they stitched me up for something i hadn't done which is in my book fighting scared and um and so rather than allow them to return me to unit and send me back my tail between my legs um i purchased my discharge from the army when i was 27 and uh went on to different things what's the hardest part of scs selection for you i think the um for selection for me the hardest part was um the mountain part the physical part my map reading had to be absolutely spot on because my fitness wasn't going to compensate for it i mean five five marathons over five days is pretty awesome anyway um but um i couldn't afford to make a mistake so my map reading needed to be really really good and fortunately it was um but you know we were we were working in snows marches that would take you eight hours in the summer would take an 11 hours in the winter how did you manage to do it five marathons in five days is that part of selection well that is the test week after rocks acts as well yeah you you start off on day one test week is five days the first day is 18 miles the second day is 22 miles the third day is 27 miles the fourth day is 18 miles but with a with a sketch map so it's a drawing rather than a real map so it's far more than that and the fifth day is 40 miles so add all those together you're working alone on the mountains uh going from checkpoint to checkpoint and you have to make the times what about the the kid who died in the sr selection what the fuck happened to him well he was actually not on selection he was one of um he was a major who was coming out for a walk with us from the first from the start point to the first checkpoint we'd been up there for a month we knew what the weather was like um he was a marvellous he was a major he was a marvellous guy he was a hero um from the battler murbat um but um we got up on the first ridge the wind was hitting us at 40 miles an hour from the left the rain was hitting the snow and turning into ice um and um he started to go down with um hypothermia and um we opened up his um bergen and he didn't have wet weather and warm weather clothing in it or even a sleeping bag so the guys um gave him some of theirs dug a snow hole and one of the guys called simon stayed in the snow hole with him to try and keep him warm and um but nobody got to the first checkpoint the guys that went forward went down into a valley and broke into the water pumping station and sheltered for the night i turned around and went back to the start point and i got to the start point and looked at the sergeant major in the in the vehicle and said lofty somebody's gonna die up there today i didn't know that this snow hole had been dug at the time i didn't know what had happened to the major and um he said get in the back um it was warm in the valley you couldn't see through the cloud and they didn't realize how bad it was on the top the next day a squadron went out to do mountain rescue or g squadron i think was a squadron and um they rescued simon and the major but the major had died of hypothermia during the night um the rest of the guys um were rescued from the water pumping station so yeah it was um it's a pretty uh you cannot imagine that weather unless you've been on top of wet cold well sure scottish mountains um in the middle of january with um with that kind of just above zero wetness that goes with the cold it's uh it's pretty appalling so you pass the election you're in the sc s you're married to the women that you love life going pretty good then you enjoying life you've got kind of loving two lives a man who goes into operations that no one knows being that mad ruthless i'm a man i don't take no shit no more to them being the loving kind of husband and did you feel as if it was two lives as well when life going amazing well no it was part of it because i met my wife when i was on selection so she knew you're a mad bastard anyway so what she married she met when i was there um and um she's the most extraordinary human being um she saw through uh the facade to see who i really was she she gave my day she gave me back my humanity how was that at the start though with the bold and brass and i can fight any one mentality to someone seen straight through it because in Glasgow when you sometimes you look at someone and somebody will say what the fuck you're looking at that's just because you're scared to actually see through who they were if she's seen through who you were was it a nervous thing or were you put the blockers on it or did you drop your guards straight away i think some of it you'd have to ask her i mean that would be a wonderful interview um because she's so honest and direct and funny as well but she she already had two baby girls so she and she had big sisters and she loved children she she would say to me i know we'll never get married but if we ever did and she's persistent and persistent and persistent and um it took her two weeks to tell me she loved me it took me three years to say it back um and uh she taught me how to show my true feelings how to express my love for her and later for my children and to be proud of it and to enjoy it and it didn't make you soft or weak because that business of being able to deal with problem people was still there um it just needed it just meant that it wasn't something i had to prove anymore um i've between us we've had five children we've got ten grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and um they've all done very well and i'm proud of them all for different reasons um but i think that that tight united family unit and the balance between her femininity and my masculinity made a really strong and foundations for for a for a good family and good children you know she that's what it's such important to have a good woman in life it's such important to for someone to see your vulnerability and someone to see you're scared and that is men we don't show it often but i believe that's where the strength is i believe that's when you can have greatness when you can do both have the masculinity and the feminine it comes together where that's why there's nobody's got different chromosomes x x x y masculinity femininity it's there for a reason it's 50 50 but it's trying to get someone who it's easy to love somebody for their great points but you talk about the dark stuff my faults my insecurities my jealousy my controlling nature and somebody can go wait a minute you don't actually do that because i'm not going to hurt you that's fucking beautiful because you're not saying i love you for three years as a reasons because you're fucking scared i actually do love you but i don't want to see it because then if you do leave me i don't really love you so it's like a protection i don't think i knew yeah what love was no i really don't think i knew um from the age of like 17 onwards um and women were there for one purpose and one purpose purpose alone that was to give me personal and physical pleasure um and uh that's very shallow um but it goes with the history as well um young men need to develop into strong men before they can be kind men because otherwise they're going to get intimidated bullied and abused and get isolated you have to be in the game to be uh one of the boys and uh like it or not that is the natural way of men um if you're too gentle and too kind and only kind then it's very one-sided arrangement and um somebody's going to come along and just punch you in the nose and you're not going to know what to do and it's going to send you into shock so i'm very much a believer in um make yourself a strong person not a violent person a strong person and um there's there's some wonderful academic young men who live in safe cost-efficient environments uh finish their education go to university getting to politics getting to law getting to medicine and then the first time in their life they ever experienced true uh unreasonable violence they go into a state of shock because they've never experienced it before in their life and as you said somebody comes up to you and says what are you looking at from my world you knew that that meant there's going to be a fight because there's only one reason they ask you that because he's figuring out who you are whether you're a threat and whether he's going to get away with beating you up and so you go you say i'm looking at you and you give it in first and that's the world of young men um it's not a great thing it's not necessarily something to be proud of but being a strong confident man requires you to be able to stand up for yourself seeming your past selection did you feel as if you were becoming a man even though you're still only 21 22 well i thought i was i thought i thought i thought i was a man as soon as i joined the army at 15 i resent the idea of 15 16-year-olds being called kids they're not kids they're young adults and i never call young adults kids because they're not if you talk to them like kids and you call them kids they're going to behave like bloody kids and they're not bloody kids they're adults they're responsible and they want to be responsible and they want to be grown up and they want to be like their mentors and you know we we have this habit of training our children to remain children and we shouldn't be doing that we should be training them to be adults we should be sending them to the shops we should be trusting them with money we should be relying on them to do things for themselves um so i don't think that um there was a stage where i suddenly thought right now i've made it now i'm a man there was there's always something else to achieve there's always something else to do there's always something else to prove in my case anyway um and i'm still working hard at that but um physically you know um and a fit young 16 year old should be able to should be able to throw me around the room now um but the difference between me and a 16 year old is that i will fight and he doesn't know if he will um because it's not whether you can or not the first stage is whether you're whether you will and once you get past the stage of yes i will if i have to um you know that's a big step in the right direction then it helps to know how but it's no good knowing how if you won't do it in the first place you know so seeing you're in the scs what obviously some things you're not able to touch on but what can you talk about any missions i've read you went are most of them most of it um if something's secret then you don't talk about it what was the first mission you went on well the iranian well no i i joined my i joined my squadron in northern ireland um in december 79 and um so we did undercover work in northern ireland and then returned back to the uk uh early 1980 and went under counter-terrorist team who was it in northern ireland with um it wasn't as much fun as being in the parrots was it not because you're undercover you're not on the streets um you're not a target um you're not engaged with the public you're not taking the abuse you're not getting stones thrown at you you're not getting shot at really you're dealing with specific information and specific jobs and although you're at a very high level of risk it um it's not the same it's far more i felt far more scared and engaged as a young infantryman on the streets of the arduin the bali murphy and south amar than i ever did when i had sort of coverage across the whole province in plain clothes yeah you're just there following orders doing what you've got to do but how has that seen like the ireish men killing ireish men is that it's strange in a way as well that people are in conflict in their own country did you see that as well i've always been an avid reader and i led i read leon urus's trinity when i was um 18 and i was while i was serving in northern ireland it gave me a novel that was actually built on historical fact um and the historical the history of northern ireland is complicated um it goes back 500 years um the troubles that exist today even today uh go right the way back to the spanish invasion cromwell catholic protestant um elizabeth the first and so on it goes all the way back to there so battle of the boine um did cromwell wipe out cities in ireland well that seemed to be the standard practice at the time um and people believe the myths of history they don't read it enough um by the time i was i don't know coming up 19 i had enough knowledge about northern ireland to understand an awful lot more about it than just that the ira were the enemy and terrorists i understood that the uda and the unionists and many plate unionist extremists were also terrorists and an awful lot of the problems that developed in 1969 was about of republic and the catholic community in northern ireland having their civil rights taken away from them and they were marching for civil rights and the soldiers went there to protect the catholic community from the unionist community so very very complicated and um we went there to keep the peace and um we prevented a civil war from taking place between those two communities um the numbers that died over the 30 years are minimal compared to somewhere like um israel you know where and we're far far higher and those lives were saved by the fact that there were British soldiers on the ground yeah i love the Irish they've got something in their blood they're kind of i like i've got friends on both sides as well i'm not an enice i just i can understand both sides of the fight i get it it's just a Johnny Aderon he says if we grew up a mile down the road it'd be fine for another cause just says and that but again people think there's freedom fighters terrorists whatever it is i understand i don't know i'm not educated enough to understand the full politics of it but i can understand why people fight and stand up for what they believe in because of that community and at that time so see the Iranian rescue how is that you must have again young kid i want to add something about northern ireland because i don't want to give people the impression that i have a one-sided opinion about northern ireland when i went there as a young English soldier i knew nothing about the Protestant and Catholic divide of the troubles or the history and um i was quite happy to shoot somebody on behalf of my government and it didn't make a damn bit of difference to me what side they were on if they were a baddie with a gun about to shoot me or one of my friends or the member of the public then i was quite prepared to shoot them and it made absolutely no difference what their religion was at all that was standard really yeah i had a man on today and he says the same thing he says i joined the army because i thought it was the right thing to do for me at that time so any order i done no matter what it was i didn't question it i was doing a job yeah i can understand that i've got so many friends from all walks of life from criminals who've been in the army have served in the srs i've got all over and i respect every one of them because that was their life their decisions at that time no matter what your politics are or what you agree in life everybody's raised differently everybody sees the world differently and my grandparents fought in the world war two and i loved them to bits they killed people and i fucking used to love their war stories and three and four and i can remember sitting and they used to tell me and i was so i was thinking i'm going to join the army i'm going to join the army and i loved them to bits and they could have been killing whoever i don't know but i just that's what their life then they made out is and protecting us the bombs used to go over the Clyde side and Glasgow and bombs used to draw up with the Germans and they've done what they could and that's that's the beautiful finders heroes and whether you agree in it or not is there's loads of war heroes i think the important thing for if you listen to a lot of veterans the things that they'll tend to emphasise is how many lives they've saved not how many lives they've taken everybody can say oh i was there i shot this person i did that but um how many lives did you save how many people benefited from the fact that you were a soldier in the majesty's forces of course we had some we had some pretty appalling people in our units as well but they were very very strongly disciplined by at all levels all the way down from the officers right down to the Lance Corporals on the street so it was very very difficult to do something you shouldn't have done in the first place and if you did it was very very severely investigated so you know you were unlikely to get away with it as well the military police the special investigation branch and the r-u-c didn't turn a blind eye to most of the things that we did they investigated it and so if you if you take the 30 years of ott banner which was the operation in northern ireland and the fact that 300 thousand british soldiers served there there were two soldiers convicted of murder and one of man's one of um negligent manslaughter in all that time there were soldiers that went to cultures to prison for bad behavior for doing things wrong that they shouldn't have done and um you know that's that's not known but you think that tiny number uh of all those people that went there you know did something so severely important that they got convicted of murder and outside of that you know they the um politicians in northern ireland and and politicians at Downey street as well tend to come out with statements such as only 10 percent of the killings in northern ireland were carried out by the state but of that 10 percent almost 100 percent were in self defense or a defense of the general public they weren't killings whereas 100 percent of the other 90 percent that they talk about carried out by terrorists were all murders it gets lost in the in the dogma it really really does so the rescue mission you've probably spoke about hundreds of things but for my listeners and followers they're interesting stories people love these stories because it's it's like fairy tales even though you've lived that you probably think yeah but it's unbelievable to be doing rescue missions that everybody always kind of wants to be like a james bond or some sort of soldier i remember i used to play with soldiers when i was a kid in tanks and i just loved the thought of like guns and bombs and bazookas and all the madness but you actually loved that when you're going through like the embassy the rescue what's the procedure before that well the procedure when you arrive on the ground is to do an immediate action plan and the immediate action plan is if it all goes wrong now um you've got this area of responsibility you've got this area of responsibility you've got this one and we go through the doors with sledgehammers and we try to save as many as we possibly can so we got on the we got on the ground about 48 hours after it started we were next door in the royal college of general practitioners next door to the Iranian embassy at princess gate in Kensington and nobody knew we were there we sneaked in about one o'clock in the morning got all over the wall and in the back door and there we were we had an immediate action plan and there were a hot there was a whole squadron of us so a whole squadron's about 60 men and about 45 46 of us were assault qualified which means we were going to do the job and the rest were attached arms support arms and the officers in charge and we were each given a floor each group of eight men was given a floor each and if it goes wrong you're going to go into that floor you're going to go under that floor make the best of it and then over the next period of time you the officers start to develop a deliberate plan so they start to gather information on the building who's being held where what the doors are made of are there any security systems we've got to get through is there a basement is there a way through the roof is there a way through the attic can we get listening devices in can we hear what's going on what are the negotiators doing they're establishing a rapport with the terrorists trading people in trading people out giving food making promises and over the next four days we then developed a deliberate plan and Margaret Thatcher said there would be no military assault unless they kill somebody and the plan was that you know we would wear them down and eventually they would give up and they would be arrested and go home so we prepared we practiced we rehearsed we had different options and finally they murdered the charge aid affair a man called Lavazani and threw his body out the door on the Sunday afternoon Sunday evening and what was it a Monday I failed to remember and we were then given authority to mountain assault which we had ready and planned we left the building silently and the plan was to sneak up to six entry points and each eight man group would take out a floor each and they would plant their charges on their entry points and the officer in charge would give go go go and all those devices would be exploded at the same time we would enter with speed and surprise and the basic premise was the basic philosophy was if you kill the terrorists you've got more chance of rescuing the hostages but we were briefed very very thoroughly on the law as we were approaching the building things started to go wrong one of the guys up sailing down the back of the building to get onto the first floor balcony put his foot through a window and Salim the terrorist leader said he'd heard he was talking to Max Vernon the hostage negotiator and said I've heard a strange noise I'm going to investigate at that time the commanding officer knew that we'd been compromised and gave the go go go early so you see the famous footage on the front balcony of John McElise and Tom McDonald leaping over and sticking the frame charge on and initiating it when he's only a few feet away from it to blow out the windows and those eight guys go in there and there's the rescue of sim harris and the hostages are behind that window most of them whereas on the back door where this guy's put his foot through the window he's not only put his foot through the window he's got his glove caught in his abseil harness so he's stuck above the window and the other guys abseil past him throw their pyrotechnics through the window they go off set the curtains alight and now he's becoming a barbecue because the curtains are burning and he can't get down so he's kicking his way out from the windows trying to and he's got and on top of that he's managed to get his hand jammed against the pressel switch of his radio so all communications between everybody have been cut off and all we can hear down the all we can hear down the radio is him screaming because he's getting burned alive and i'm looking up at him and three rounds come through the window above me because the guys have already gone in by now and i see three bullet holes appear in the window above me i'm thinking there's nothing i can do about that there's nothing i can do about this it's too late to lay the charges on the back door so big bob curry goes in with an eight pound sledgehammer takes out the back doors and in they go it's my job to stand on the back door with jinge and go to any place where there's an emergency so we're holding the back door there's screaming there's noise there's gas above me tommy palmer is um has come back out the window underneath the guy who's burning because his head's caught fire so he takes his gas mask off throws it away puts the flames out on his own head and then goes back into the gas and does his job and kills two terrorists without his gas mask on meanwhile above tom who's hanging on the rope the guys are trying to cut him down but it's a it's a rope under tension he's kicking himself out if they cut the rope when he's kicking outwards he's going to drop 30 feet onto solid concrete so they have to cut it and they eventually cut it and he drops down onto the balcony and goes in and carries on with his job with severely burned legs i'm on the ground floor as he drops the press or switch comes clear the radio stations open hector not knowing the commanding officer not knowing what the hell is going on uh suddenly goes reserves go in so me and jinge go through the door in the back door into the into the foyer and trevor lock is coming clear at the bottom of the stairs he's the policeman that's been held hostage so grab him throw him out to the next guy on the door then the hostages start to come and we're just throwing them down mostly females boom boom boom boom and they're scared to death so we're just keeping them scared and we're passing them out like a rugby ball bang bang bang out they go there's a chain things are organized you know there's screaming there's smoke there's fire as there's gunfire but it's organized and out they go out they go out they go and then up above on the stairway just above me somebody shouts um i hear i see somebody out the corner of my get butt swiped and somebody shouts he's a terrorist and as this guy comes clear at the bottom of the stairs there's a there's one of our troops standing within a few feet of him very very close to him who opens fire and i open fire as well and i fire three rounds and this guy puts 24 rounds in him from about 12 inches and the guy crumples to the floor and he's got a grenade in his hand and um that grenade uh that doesn't have the pin pulled out and so you know he crumples into a pile at the bottom of the stairs and then the rest of the hostages are out out out and we get them out on the grass outside and we handcuff everybody with plastic cups and one of the terrorists has managed to hide himself in amongst the hostages and outside the hostages quickly identify him and me and a guy called Tony pick him up and carry him away from the others and separate him and um you know that's pretty much the operation over in seven minutes and we killed five terrorists captured one and rescued 19 hostages one hostage was killed by the terrorists as we made our entry um it nobody had heard of the sas before that um we were fred carno's army in darkest herofiture and um after that um we became the myth that still exists today what's that feeling like doing something annoying is that why you mean the myth the myth of the feeling of something like sense of um getting through doors and people can kill you that adrenaline you i'd imagine you can't buy that anywhere like what's that feeling you train with fear you train on the edge of fear you know so let's give you an example if you if you're a formula one racing driver and you drive around corners at 200 kilometers per hour and understand the aerodynamics of the vehicle and it can do this and in you or me getting to that vehicle it's just scariest to death because we're not familiar with it special forces soldiers are trained on the edge of danger all the time so that when the real thing happens it's almost like an exercise you're prepared your heartbeat isn't going through the roof you can make minor cognitive decisions you can change according to the circumstances you can think clearly under pressure and you're extraordinarily fit so that keeps your heartbeat down there's a a famous writer called Malcolm Gladwell who wrote tipping point and blink and he did an investigation into why police officers with guns kill the wrong people sometimes and he said it's because um then once the heartbeat goes above 145 beats a minute you can't make minor cognitive minor cognitive decisions so you get there somebody sent you down into the London underground and you've got to chase a guy and you've got a full description of him by the time you get there all you can see is it all that's going through your brain is he's got dark skin he's got curly hair and he's got a bomb kill him you know nothing else matters and so you're going to make mistakes we were extraordinarily fit extraordinarily well trained and we were capable of dealing with fear and consequently we made we made the errors right during the operation and we felt that we'd done a highly professional successful job and that was where our our pride ended and we moved on and we got back to Ereford that night ready to do another one should it be required the next day did you get medals for that the medals were a bit of a fast because the government turned around and said here you can have these there's five given to who you want and that may one get one is that not a slap in the face well first we didn't expect medals because we up to that point in time we weren't allowed to accept them because medals are listed especially valo medals and so it would have identified members of the special air service so we didn't get medals um but they they said okay you can have these and so the the regiment had to decide who got them and that created an awful lot of animosity and bad feeling unfortunately because as you say it would have far met better just to give everybody a unit citation or a certificate or a little flash you could put on your uniform forever more and say I was that man yeah I was on that balcony why did they take the embassy hostage what was their plans um they were trained by iraq by Saddam Hussein's iraq and they were rabbistanis who um a lot of arab arabic arabic people in iran were being arrested under the islamic revolution and being imprisoned unfairly and these young men wanted to draw attention to their cause and they were stitched up by iraqi secret intelligence to go into london in the belief that if they did this that the iraqi diplomats would get them out and have them released and it'll be over in a couple of days but it would draw attention to their cause and um it didn't work out that way yeah it was never going to work out that way if they relieved that they deserved to be dead they were young you know they they they were made to feel special um most young terrorists are made to feel important is that brainwashing brainwashing um grooming kingdom yeah I don't know I'm not sure where you go from persuasion to brainwashing um if you find people that are emotionally motivated and feed that then you don't really need to brainwash them you just say yeah you're right yeah great yeah we we can help you with that yeah this is what you should do um strap this on go and get on a red bus in london you know and your your your people will revere you forever more and you'll go to heaven forever you know um you're starting with the with the recipe you're just making the cake you don't need to brainwash them did you what was the suicide mission you were on that was um we were this was in the folklens war 1982 and b squadron were um were um told that we were going to go into argentina we were going to land on the runways where the super atondard jets were flying from these jets were firing at cassette missiles that was sinking our capital ships and there was a danger of us losing the war down there because of that so our squadron was going to land in 2c 130 hercules aircraft we were going to destroy the jets on the runway and we were going to then get killed or captured because there was no way home there was no fuel to come back um my wife heather was eight months pregnant um i remember leaving the door with her and uh telling her what what name i wanted to give our son when he was born i knew the mission she obviously didn't and um we got on the plane and we left to carry out the mission and we got as far as ascension islands and it was delayed and it was delayed and then eventually it was cancelled and um half of us got down to the folklens just before the surrender i often say you know when half of b squadron the famous b squadron from the iran embassy arrived in the folklens the argentinians heard about it and surrendered yeah how is it for a soldier when you've got the family life then you've got the missus who you love the babies on the way and the kids how hard is it to then go on these sort of missions known that you could die anytime you leave the house you have to separate it how do you do that is that just um training with this is my job this is my cat badge i've worn it um i've had the glory for seven minutes in london now you're going to see if you're really worth it and um the second i left the house and got in the car with the duty driver that was in that was that was over now this is what i had to do and um until the mission was properly delayed i mean although i had the opportunity on ascension island the phone heather the mission was still on um and it was going to happen and we were going to do it and um we had very very good leadership at that time so negativity wasn't going to come into the frame this was the mission this was what you got trained for this was why you were the cat badge you're going to do the job and if you survive that's a bonus when we get you're most tested when did you think i fucked it here were you ever at that moment where you thought this is the moment i'm not going to be here anymore i was always like that not when i was in the british army um when i was in the mozan beacon army um there was a moment that's difficult to talk about um because it took me a long long time to write about it and um my wife said and it was 20 years later that i wrote fighting scared and my wife read it for the first time and she said oh shit now i know why you were as you were when you came back um and i put myself into a very very very dangerous situation out of bravado as much as anything else in a very very very dangerous war and afterwards i thought to myself what would i have to kill somebody and afterwards i thought i didn't need to be there i didn't need to do that what would heather have said about this um i came back with some huge anger management issues afterwards for a while and um my marriage suffered um but we put it back together um but it was um you know as that that that was probably the time where um i thought i'm a dead man i'm a dead man right now and um yeah it was very traumatic how is it killing someone um not difficult um providing the circumstances are justified so the people at the iranian embassy they were the bad guys we were the good guys we were rescuing people saving lives fine northern ireland they were the bad guys it's when you get the wrong guys by mistake that's very very difficult or when you see people die as collateral damage in a war that you're involved with um that's difficult as well you know i'm not talking about soldiers i'm talking about women and children um who have just been murdered or cut to pieces for no justifiable reason other than the fact that the enemy just decided to do it um uh you don't have to understand why they do it you just have to understand how to deal with it um so they're they're difficult but you imagine there's there's guys that talk about um oh after the second world war my grandfather never spoke about it and the chances are he never spoke about it because there's some things he wasn't proud of there were some things he was engaged in out of necessity that caused the deaths of innocent people and so no why would you want to pick over those old scabs over and over again let it go it's in the past um i had to learn to let certain things go and put them in the past as well yeah i interviewed a sniper amazing man amazing very damaged here though he knows this he speaks about it but he i think he was like 88 people he was a sniper the world's longest sniper kill craig but he had to make decisions when there was women and children walking towards him didn't know if there were suicide bombers he made the correct decision there were suicide bombers but there was another man i think he was a navy seal he had the decision or they were trying to stop the women the women and daughter from coming but they had the signs but they couldn't read english and they had to make that decision and take their life and they got the decision they just couldn't read english or something but you see the pain in their eyes but again they're there to do a job and that's the destruction of wars and all that but something needs to do it where it's just that decision being in that position yeah you're a dilemma there's no right um you just have to make you choose between the devil and the deep blue sea and um sometimes you get it wrong um i'm fortunate that i um i've never never been personally responsible for the death of an innocent um and so that's easier to live with do you see people struggle when they do so there are some people that genuinely struggle there are some people that recover there are people that there are small number of people that can't cope and need an awful lot of help and then there's another group who actually feed on the fact of you know i've got this problem and i'm a hero and uh i want to be damaged and i want to tell you i've got PTSD and i want you to think that i'm a i'm a superman that's lived in some terribly dangerous places and um it's lovely that you know i get paid benefits for feeling this way yeah it's the sas ones i've got to be honest he's a f***ing tapped he's a mad antiviral peter macules he's f***ing crazy he's sitting in the old folks home just telling all his old stories and i say to him how do you feel he says i don't give a f*** and i'm f***ing good on you peter like because the depression is there less than PTSD everybody's got different levels of depression but genuinely the ones i think it don't give a f*** it does not affect maybe it's an act maybe it is but it gets them through whatever they're going through i think um in the modern world we've been picking the wrong type of people to become soldiers if you want good soldiers you need naughty boys you need my period it was the kids off the back streets of Leeds and Glasgow and Edinburgh and Belfast and you know the boys that weren't going anywhere at school but had something about them and uh you made you made good competent fighting soldiers out of them um if you pick the nice kids to be in the army then you shouldn't be surprised that they struggled to cope with the adversity that they come across because they haven't had adversity in their life to begin with so i mean i'm very much for having having an increase in the numbers of soldiers in the british army and making it available to troubled difficult tough young people predominantly men because men make better soldiers than women do because if you want any evidence of that put the england male rugby team up against the england female rugby team and see what the result is you know nothing against women being soldiers but men make better soldiers than women on average yeah you've got a bit hard as the other for the war it's men any catastrophe it's men you want at the forefront well they're more aggressive and they're bigger and stronger of course it's science it's they can carry more weight it's common knowledge it's listen if a woman's strong and fat and she can keep up with the men then she deserves there are exceptional women yeah of course but they're rare yeah that's what i'm just saying men are the strongest and even serena williams i think says that her venus williams she was saying are you going to play and the muddy and she said it's only tennis and she says of course not he's faster he's sharper he's quicker yeah he says it would beat me six no six no six no she was i'm not going to embarrass myself but like you say there is exceptions where somebody shows up and they've got that and there's something to prove i'm better than you but i think even think the usa football team played an under or a under 15s or under 16s team and they beat them do you know what i mean it's all a sequel paying that and this is you can ground all that politics route but the is for the football side of things in the way come pay comes from the public yeah of course the water comes from the media yeah but so bollion seven bollion the world cup generated for men for the women only generated one thirty one first day it's viewing figures that you know wages yeah not gender yeah it's viewing figures but if you if you go you make a you make a fantastic podcast and you get a million people looking at you then you're going to get far more money than if i make one and fifty thousand do it you know it's course it's not getting nothing to do with whether i'm what my orientation is you know it doesn't make any difference what makes a good soldier what makes a good soldier wow that's a that's a big big question leaders make good soldiers so it's having a history and a carder and a system that perpetuates through the years and traditions and expectations um because you can take a dog and you can train it to do anything and you can take a young man and you can train most of them to be soldiers not all of them most of them to be soldiers of a reasonable quality but you have to have that carder that history that that group of people that know what they want to get out of these young men they can break them down and rebuild them into something that's going to be creditable in that particular world do you think leaders are born or do you think they can be created no i don't think leaders can be created i think that there's something in some people that generates um maybe you can call it charisma i mean you can you can create managers don't get me wrong you can create sergeants and staff sergeants and sergeant majors and officers and you can teach them how to manage men that's fine but leading men is very very different from managing them leading you lead people with inspiration you inspire people with your example i call it ice inspiration example and courage inspiration courage an example i can spell to inspiration courage an example ice and if you inspire people and you've got the courage to lead them and take chances and set that damn good example then that's a very good place to begin if you want to actually see a see an experience a leader i think avalodomir Zelensky is a classic example of that you know um he's led his people from the front from the very darkest days at the beginning of the ukraine war um he's taken the risks he's been in the front line he's worn the uniform he refused to run away um he's always there he's always with his men um and i i think right now in the in the contemporary world if somebody wanted an example of what it is to be a true leader you don't have to look any further than him you talk about frequently about russian ukraine war like how does it how does it these wars come about especially in this day and age obviously i don't know too much about it but i know when wars happen in other countries affects things here look at the pricing on fuel and everything's risen here how do these how does these things still happen in 2023 russia and ukraine and if it could kick off listen you're russia are a powerful country we know this as 140 million and and puttons a fucking nutcase so how does it do you see things like that with ukraine before it happens with the politics and i i i was warning um the reason i started my um almost daily blog on linkedin is because first i wanted to write secondly i didn't want to be accused of having a vested interest on behalf of somebody there's no monetization on linkedin and thirdly i wanted to engage people that could actually read and think and and engage with the conversation rather than just you know sound bites so um i started to write about it before russia um invaded and i was frustrated because everybody in britain was talking about boris's bloody tea party everyone in australia was talking about jokovic game you know kicked out of the country for not having the right visa everybody in america was talking about number 45 the orange monster and um nobody was talking about 100 000 people 100 000 soldiers uh concentrating on the border of ukraine i was screaming you know they are going to invade and all the really wise people in government in europe were going no no they wouldn't do that we buy too much of their oil and gas you know no no it's not in their best interest what was in their interest the fact that we'd become weak nato had become weak we were weak we had got fat we had got flabby we reduced our spending on um defense um nobody in our government was a former soldier nobody in our governments had experienced war anymore and they believed the lies that vladimir putin and his government were telling them and they knew nothing about the um psychology and the mentality of bullies and we'd become weak and as soon as you become weak people start to push and putin believed with donald trump's help he could walk straight into ukraine and melt a military coup and nobody would do a damn thing and he was right except he didn't take the u kranians and vladimir zelensky into the equation and they fought and that was where he got it wrong what about if russia and china came together could they take over the world or is that too too far fetched russian china will never come together china does what's right for china um well because because the media loved to frighten us i mean you look at msn msn every every single day the whole front page is full of stories designed to frighten you will they have a new will they mount a nuclear attack will they do this it has been alleged you know what if the worst the most terrible thing happens well what's the alternative the alternative is let vladimir putin take over the world is it because we're too scared to stand up to him no we have to be strong now because we weren't strong before we have to be stronger now because we weren't strong before uh the british army is now regular army is 68 000 men now that's 68 000 all arms okay that means armor artillery and infantry probably total less than 30 000 30 000 men who could capable of actually being the point of the spear they're not that's not enough to defend over and that's where we are when i joined the army there was 160 000 men in the british army alone and the air force and the navy are the same you know we got weak and because we got weak autocrats tyrants dictator dictators start to push and if you're not strong enough to stand up to him it's your own bloody fault is britain a target potentially to get invaded no it's not a target to be invaded um putin got it wrong he thought he was going to do another checkerslovakia on ukraine he thought he was going to walk in replace silinski's government uh have a put put a puppet government in charge and that was going to be the end of it marching me a tank's everybody's scared nobody'll do anything we've got too much oil to sell and that'll be the end of it they got it wrong now he's got to find a way out i mean the latest figures the latest conservative figures say that over 250 000 russian soldiers have been killed so far they're running out of money their wealth fund is 30 percent of what it was two years ago they're running out of material you know it's they're buying ammunition off of north korea the only friends they've got left in the world are north korea and iran because china's not really their friend china's just saying well what can we get out of this at the moment that's convenient to us and now they're stepping away from it and other people are stepping away from it including victor or bann in hungary because now he knows and and erdoğan in turkey because they can see who's going to win and it's ukraine that's going to win thanks so what about when putin's saying it's because nato was becoming closer how true is that say again when putin says nato was becoming closer to russia and i told him to stay back is that it wasn't nato that nato has always been a defensive organization it wasn't nato that um putin was scared of it was democracy and free and open elections it was the ideology of western democracy that was a threat to putin not nato um what does that i'll i'll get my information sometimes from what i see online or whatever but that's what ad says that putin went mad because nato was coming closer to russia than they should that's just that's just his political excuse to invade ukraine um putin's not mad putin is a manipulative devious product of the kgb and the fsb would you like someone someone like putin to run the uk oh my god no is he a strong character though oh god yeah he's a little at a fifth dan or sixth dan in martial arts as well was that a lot of judo but he says um but who cares um you know um you know he's so what i mean he's he's a strong dictator in an autocratic society where you know he controls the police and the army so he can he can do pretty much as he pleases how much is he what phenomenal amount someone says he won bet coin i don't know how true that is but yeah i mean but the thing is um he can't spend it now can he yeah it's no good having money if no if you've got if nobody'll sell you anything what about the americans how are they strong are they weak at the moment the americans are the strongest military power in the world and still are um and they still good friends with britain yeah yeah i mean they're they're a western democracy and um the most dangerous thing in america is maga maga is the most dangerous thing to western democracy that's ever existed since the second world war um they're right-wing extremists most of them have been incorporated from the klu Klux Klan they're dangerous and their leaders extremely dangerous and there's um you know anybody that can't see that they tried to create an american dictatorship by overthrowing their own government isn't looking at the real world you know it's wrong and so you know um that's that's the problem that america have got to deal with and they are dealing with it fairly successfully but it goes back to as you did you showed me the telephone the screen social media and people not thinking not reading not believing and being kept in their ignorance and then having the right to vote you've got to give everybody the information and teach them what they're voting for um you want to vote so you can carry a gun you want to vote so you can have an assault rifle you've got organ um was it i mean fascism is actually the incorporation of um is the amalgamation of corporations with the government that's what fascism actually is it's not necessarily nazis it's it's corporations and government controlling everything that happens controlling the media controlling people controlling money controlling decisions made in politics and there's a huge danger very much in america but also in great in britain today that that's the case that our government's being controlled by vested interests and huge money makers and um you know it's it's at risk could there be a world war three it could always be a word there'll always be another war because it was over 20 30 wars and the world just starting a war if you're a the leader of a huge nation uh with nuclear weapons for example it's not what you've got to gain what you've got to lose and no i mean the perfect the thing about nuclear weapons is they're a deterrent the second you lose them they've lost their deterrent value and you're going to get crushed no matter what you do mutually assured destruction so there's nothing in nuclear weapons except the threat of using them you know new um Putin blew the zapper it's your damn now it's no longer a threat it's been done it's no longer a risk is it it's everybody everyone in the media was oh my god what if they do it well they did it and we're still here and the war's still going on and the floods have gone and now yesterday the Ukrainians crossed the river the Daneepro river and built another bridgehead across the water so you know media especially the media have to produce something every day and they do what's called clickbait so they frighten you they get you you know there's always something up about the weather oh there's going to be terrible snow in England you know do you click on that what was this about snow well of course there's not it's going to get you to click it's advertising the selling product and if everybody's selling product where are you going to find the truth you're not damn well going to find it on national news media outlets anymore do you think there will be peace in the world there seems to be a lot of destruction everywhere just by certain men do you think there would be peace all around the world was that too far-fetched well i think it's part of human nature to to um fight challenge one another to vie for resources um even chimpanzees do it and you know it's part of our nature to if if somebody's weak you push only it's civilized and trained people don't do that they start thinking this is wrong but the majority of people go oh nobody's looking can i steal it um can i take it from them what can they do if i do it back you know what's why do most people obey the law because they're frightened of the consequences if there are no consequences then there's no law because i know you're a war expert i know you do a lot of reading and stuff how close was hitler from taking over the world was that ever a possibility or that was it just always destined to fail no he was um there was a danger of him taking over the whole of europe but um he miscalculated when it came to invading no before that he miscalculated when it came to invading britain and so they needed air superiority to take over britain and gearing had promised it to him and uh he failed to achieve that so when he turned around and went back to his main mission which was to destroy communism um and invade russia he left britain behind him on the back door ready to create a second front and then he declared war on america when the japanese uh bom pearl harbour he didn't have to but he had this agreement the tripartite agreement with italy and um with japan and he declared war on america so hitler brought america into the war but he thought that america would concentrate on the pacific which was their main area of influence and they didn't work out that way is that petro harbour well the main american american is you know divided by the pacific and the atlantic and they thought because they had hawaii and they had the philippines that they would concentrate their armed forces over in that part of the world against japan well they put they put germany first i think with an awful lot of persuasion from winston churchill and uh all of a sudden he's got a second front building behind him while he's trying to invade russia uh the american the huge american economic machine machine starts to produce weapons at their phenomenal rate and starts to supply them to russia as well as to the uk and um and all of a sudden hitler's being hit on two fronts and although his soldiers were phenomenal and is um the russians just simply swamped him with men and material and then um i like to think that um uh the russians saved us from the germans and the americans saved us from the russians how big was churchill's role and when in world war two enormous uh churchill's role was enormous because he refused to um negotiate peace with hitler and um against the advice of lord halifax and um he said you know we will fight them on the beaches and um he gave he made the resolve that would do that and britain was still you know a great naval power too at that time so it had an awful lot of strength that didn't exist on the land didn't have a again they'd reduced their army to such a small level that it wasn't a great deal of help when it went to help the french um because we were too small and when we only had 250 000 then well now we've only got 68 000 you know so we're you know a hollow force and that's sad and not only sad because of the lack of defense but the military was a skills engine it produced engineers plumbers medics leaders managers accountants paymasters cooks it created all these skills for the civilian world when those guys left and that's no longer there either what did you do after the sas oh my goodness there's loads of things i mean my military life was my british military life was 12 years long i left the sas i was a bodyguard i was a mercenary um i was in lebanon i was in shrill anchor i was bodyguard to the prime minister of lebanon um while he was making a run for the prime ministership um i started a small security company in london i learned a lot about business how to lose money um i learned how to write letters how to negotiate how to keep accounts how to um do all sorts of things but finally i ended up teaching kids martial arts um and i did that for 25 years um in southwest london i had over a thousand kids between the age of four and 15 and about 50 adults as well and my son alex runs that organization now it's called london karate limited and uh i broke my neck when i was 54 training with my son doing karate with my son it's not as exciting as it sounds but um i um couldn't do martial arts anymore so um a couple years later i went to uni as a 56 year old undergrad um to do english shit with creative writing and graduated when i was 59 and the first thing i learned was that nobody wants to sit next to their grandpa at school and 95 percent of my course were young females which was an absolute nightmare and the english faculty at surrey was at that time dominated by radical feminists who pigeonholed me into being a um a right-wing skinhead who you know would have been homophobic and they mean absolutely nothing about me at all and it took them two years to figure out that i was essentially the opposite um but i enjoyed it i learned a lot from it and um i'd written fighting scared before that and i've written four books since i left who the fuck did you break your back my neck yeah i was um i was hitting an impact pad and talking to the class at the same time and i whipped my body into the punch and i hit the pad but i was still looking at the class and my neck was in the wrong position and i uh i fractured uh i think it was c five up here um just with a torque injury so it's that could that be wear and tear just through the years what it's been a little bit weaker than the yeah i think well no i think i think i think partly the punches are taken to the head but um i think predominantly um when you practice a technique for 20 30 years you know the technique is so refined and strong that you're putting maybe one and a half tons of power and impact kinetic energy into those two knuckles there and the bones have aged so they they contribute and because my neck wasn't in the right position looking at the target instead it was looking at the class as i hit it um there was a weakness there and um that power had to be released somewhere and um it's it's it applied physics really you bodyguards for alfaya does that correct yeah for the first 15 months out of the army um it was more alfayr's security team rather than bodyguarding um it was prestige bodyguarding there wasn't really a threat to his life um but i did look after dodie occasionally when he came to london and again it was that man over there is my bodyguard you know we were the same age he's got a harry's bar and sit in the corner with a glass of perrier and watch him with coup stark and michelle fifa and people like that you know um after 15 months it was good money but i was bored do you miss it miss what the fucking madness the thrill of the shootings and the bombs and the gone through windows and is there an element of no or do you feel as if i'm just tired of it now i wasn't i wasn't tired of it i just always moving on to the next thing i love that about you where you've never just stopped you've always done something what's it like me do you ever just sit yourself and just gather your thoughts or is it just to wailed up there you need to keep busy well my next screwed up i had cancer five years ago and had my bladder removed um so i um physically i um i'm quite weak you know some days i can walk three or four miles another days i can't walk up the stairs today's a good day yes that's cause you're coming to meet me yeah um so what can you do um i have to watch my weight because i can't exercise so i quite a strict dietary regime what can i do i can speak and i can write i do corporate speaking i write every day uh the more i write the better i get at it um i'm halfway through a novel that i want to finish as it's a dark who done it um i'm putting together a collation of my blogs on ukraine going back 16 months 18 months now and there's a hundred thousand words on the paper and you can see where i was right and where i was wrong and i would say 80 right and i want to put that out when this conflict starts to come to a conclusion um i um met the new commissioner for the legacy agreement in um whitehall today um talking about the um new investigation process to create rest to create reconciliation in northern island and so i'm considering applying to be a non-executive commissioner on that to give the veterans a voice um at the table um i've been at it for eight years me and not i'm not me alone but me and about half a dozen other really really good people um and so yeah i've got lots and lots to do still i love that that you've never gave up though you broke your neck you've got the bag in as well were you drinking i um when i was a young soldier these called me two-point bob because two points and i was pissed um i realized at the age of 19 that after i had that serious beating that i would always have an advantage in a fight if i wasn't drinking so um i've always been a quite a mild drinker but now i can't touch alcohol at all because um since i had the operation if i had half a pint of lager now i'd have a pounding headache within half an hour and my eyes would go bloodshot um so i don't touch alcohol at all i don't miss it um i enjoy myself with people regardless of that but uh as the evening goes on you find yourself being left out of the conversation because it's too mad and insane and you're not there um but um i've got nothing against people drinking alcohol within reason um but um i don't what's the saddest moment of being a soldier losing close friends um i had uh i've lost a lot of friends over the years um some to conflict one very very close one because his parachute didn't open when he was day after his eight 19th birthday um others because they committed suicide for various different reasons i don't think they were down to their military service i think they were down to their circumstances in life one because he was a paranoid schizophrenic who i loved intensely um you know um life's shit sometimes and um you know you can't spend your whole life being happy you've got to have the ship bits in order to like in order to appreciate the good bits and uh you know we're all we're all going to die one day and hopefully we can get as much out of it as we can um i like the american t-shirt shit happens and i like never let the bastards get you down yeah what's your happiest moment being a soldier oh being a soldier that's different um i think one of my happiest moments was getting into the special air service one of my other happiest moments was getting into the parachute regiment because they were huge moments of achievement but they don't compare at all to the happiness of having having my children born to growing up with them to going up the mountains camping with them to teaching them to swim to dealing with their problems to seeing them having children um you know those are the real joys in life what's that meoson that i i was a mercenary in in uh Sri Lanka and Lebanon and Mozambique what is that you do there basically you're a contract soldier most of the time you go there to um to train foreign troops rather than to actually be engaged in combat but once you're there especially in Mozambique you the combat came to you Sri Lanka it came to us as well in Sri Lanka i realized i was fighting for the wrong side after three months and so i resigned terrible genocide committed by the singleese people against the Tamils and um i was powerless to do more than resign and go home um Mozambique i was definitely on the right side i was a major in Frolimo and um i fought for them for 15 months um and saw an awful lot or i saw more combat in Mozambique than i saw in all my military career combined up to that point um so that was very different nowhere support no heavy artillery a pure infantry war against an extremely desperate and violent enemy so yeah do you feel as if there should be more support for people in the military i do a lot of homeless work in Glasgow and the majority ex soldiers on the streets it's hard to see but do you feel as if there should be enough things in place or do you feel as if there is things in place i don't know if there's enough i do know there's more support now than has ever been in the past there's more available and there's more people trying to do things and there are um you know a lot of charities and support structures there there are some people you can you can only manage you can't fix um i think that the homeless problems of the former soldiers are the same problems that exist in the general population homelessness should be dealt with in this country in general not just for one group as a special group um and we could do it the fins have done it they got a home home home's first policy where everybody gets housed and then they deal with the social problems what we do is we we make um criteria for people to get housing and so they stay on the street and when they stay on the street they get sick they commit crime they die they fester in their own problems and they get when things get worse um we've taken away an awful lot of our social systems um and our civic systems in this country um they're being taken away for vested interest for money socialism has a great deal of value if it's if it's balanced uh they took away council housing they took away social housing and called it affordable housing if you've got nothing how can anything be affordable that's ridiculous process to go through um there's so many things that i get frustrated and annoyed about um i was the leader of the veterans and people's party for a period of time but i got too sick to carry on um so um so many things wrong in this country so i write about it i write about it um i try to get engaged with it but i'm getting old and i'm getting sick and there's only so many battles you can fight at the same time i wish more people would speak up i really do how was it rating your first book well i wrote my first book before i had any training took me six years to write it and i wrote the first few chapters and heather my wife picked up and she looked at the first few chapters and she came back to me and said this is shit and i said well what's wrong you know that's why she said it's like a report like a military report it's like a memorandum you know people don't want to read that you should you know what did the room look like when you left home you know what was your mother doing how did you feel and so then i sat down and started writing fighting scared and she edited it and she helped me bring that part of me out and there were times when i can i was writing stuff and crying on the paper um because all those pent up emotions were in there all that frustration and sadness and loss and it was there and i put it into the story and it came out um as it should have come out you know because people don't want to read facts and figures and reports they want to read about your how you felt you know why did you screw up not just you know gas embassies and smash them but um you know what was what what did you struggle with how did you genuinely feel were you scared and honestly how did you deal with that you know were you a real person or just some mythological figure with a cap badge on your head you know where can people buy your books robin they can only get them online um uh they can get them signed from me at robinhorseful.com there's no e in horseful and just put the name in google or if they don't want to pay for the signed copies they just need to put my name into amazon and they come up get this anybody watching i'll leave the links in the description where do you go forward for the future robin keep writing keep blogging keep fighting for the northern irish veterans the northern island veterans and um and see where life takes me it's an extraordinary life you've lived and i love these stories and obviously you've suffered a lot of pain in your life but you've not let it defeat you and that's what it's all about i had a woman on earlier who was trafficked from yugoslavia the serbians took her away trafficked her they were going to sell her but she was abused for six months straight she escaped this is the one thing i love about the uk as well the uk had then brought her over to the uk they gave her free health support they fixed her up and now she's thriving in life and i don't think we get enough credit listen uk can be on its ass sometimes we get it there's a lot of bad shit there's also a lot of good stuff that we do and i don't think a lot of people touch on that enough and but what an extraordinary woman she released a book called unbroken and yeah just strong strong and what kept her alive was her love for her parents because they didn't know where she was took and they would be a life sentence with the worry so she ended up escaping and phenomenal story but would you like to finish up on anything well the the muslims teach you that all civilized behaviour is built on a family and doesn't matter what you do in life the toughest thing you'll ever do is build and stick to a family that's the strongest thing and the toughest thing you'll ever do in your life it's funny because she was muslim she was muslim it's mad because family has everything and it took me many years like i said earlier just to realize okay that's that's my people that's me i don't need to be anybody else i can still have a bad ego and still be trying to always win and sometimes i'll be harder myself but that's what keeps me going and i know i'm doing good things i just sometimes it's scary this fucking life is scary do you ever feel scared with all the shit you've been through or do you just kind of deal with it yeah i've had times when i've been scared um you know but um you learn to cope with fear courage is not being uh courage bravery is not being it's not about not being frightened it's about controlling your fear so mad people who aren't scared psychopaths not scared they're not brave they're just they're just they're just crazy um and they they're functional as well they tend to operate in battlefields and in governments but they're not brave the brave people are the ones that are genuinely scared and still go forward and take risks for their friends for their family for their countries for their comrades you know for anybody watching robin who's maybe on a leaf a struggle right now it doesn't really know how to get out what advice would you have for them talk to people ask for help listen to people that want to help you and start to deal with the little things first jordan b peterson says clean up your own room and um he's right you know find make a list of little things that you can achieve between today and tomorrow and um tick off the ones you achieve and then make a new list tomorrow and tick off the next ones and then after that and after that and when you start to achieve tiny things in life you become self-satisfied and you start to build a pyramid of success um it's taking those little steps um whether it be drugs whether it be disease or illness or um psychological problems or just some of the shit that happens to you in life start again and talk to people yeah robin listen extraordinary man extraordinary life i wish you nothing but the success you set out to be more books more adventures and listen fair play for kicking on and still do what you're doing i wish you all the best god luck thanks jim yeah thank you appreciate you