Engaging with Robert Adolph, a former military officer with a wealth of experience, we explore the complexities of his life journey—from his upbringing in a large military family to his notable career in the U.S. Army and the United Nations.

His early years were marked by instability, having moved frequently and taken on a caretaker role in a bustling household. Despite these challenges, he found himself drawn to military life, initially spurred by the looming draft during the Vietnam War.

He candidly reflects on how his experiences shaped his understanding of duty, honor, and the moral weight of following orders, especially in the context of his service in Special Forces.

Throughout the conversation, we touch on pivotal moments that defined his career, such as his transition from a soldier to a lieutenant colonel and UN Chief Security Advisor. This transition brought its own challenges, especially when navigating the complexities of international politics and the often harsh realities of war-torn environments.

Robert's insights into the moral dilemmas faced by military personnel and the importance of maintaining one's integrity amidst chaos resonate deeply, as he shares lessons learned from both his triumphs and tribulations.

His narrative is not just about the battles fought on the field but also about the inner battles that define one's character and resolve in the face of adversity.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, Robert Adolph shares how his military experience shaped his perspective on leadership.
• Robert discusses his journey from military to UN security advisor, detailing the complexities of navigating bureaucracy and ethics.
• The conversation touches on how personal hardships can lead to greater wisdom and understanding in life.
• A key takeaway is the significance of compassion in leadership, especially within military contexts.
• Lastly, the episode illustrates the impact of personal experiences on one's worldview and the importance of resilience in the face of adversity.

You can connect with Robert on his website at: www.robertbruceadolph.com

or:

FB: https://facebook.com/robert.adolph

The music in this video is copyrighted and used with permission from Raquel & The Joshua 1:8 project © 2025 All Rights Reserved. All rights to the music are owned by Raquel & The Joshua 1:8 project © 2025 All Rights Reserved. You can contact Raquel at https://YourGPSForSuccess.Net

I've walked through fire with shadows on my heels Scars turn to stories that taught me to feel lost in the silence found in the flame now wear my battle cry without shame this isn't the end, it's where I begin A soul that remembers the fire within.

Welcome back to another episode of A Warrior Spirit, brought to you by Praxis33.

I'm your host, Darrell Snow.

Let's dive in.

Once in a while, a guest comes along that you just can't help but be honored to have here.

And today I have Robert Adolf.

Robert is a former infantry staff sergeant.

He's a retired US Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel, and he was a UN Chief security adviser, as well as a university lecturer on American history, U.S. government and world politics.

He's also the author of the well reviewed book Surviving the United Nations, A True Story of Violence, Corruption, Betrayal and Redemption, which is recently in its second edition.

And Robert holds graduate degrees in both international affairs, National Security Studies and strategy.

And his commentaries, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 50 newspapers, magazines and professional journals, as well as academic publications.

He also has additionally lived and worked in 17 different countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

And today he's joining us from Rome.

So, Robert, welcome to the show and thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Darrell.

I very much appreciate the invitation.

When a person has spent as much time in the military as you, I have to always give honor and reverence.

So again, thank you for your service, for doing that.

You've lived all over the world and you've done a lot of things.

Where did you actually grow up?

Where did you start your journey?

Well, my father was in the United States Navy.

He retired as a chief petty officer.

So the military was very much part of my upbringing.

I was the oldest of nine children and the history of my family works something like this.

My father would go to sea, come back home, impregnate my mother, and then go back to sea.

And that happened several times.

And the fact is they decided to call it quits when my brothers Peter and Paul were born, my twin brothers.

And shortly thereafter my mother decided that there were enough children to be fed.

She probably was not happy that he was coming home from sea.

After a while it's like, oh, here we go again, here we go again.

Here we go again.

So where did you grow up most of your if you were like many military, you grew up all over, but.

Very much a tumbleweed all over the United States.

Norfolk, Virginia.

My father was a submariner.

So we're talking about Connecticut, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Newburyport, Massachusetts was where my mother's family home based, a place called Plum island, just off the coast of Massachusetts at the mouth of the Merrimack River.

And that's where I finished high school.

So I kind of acknowledged that as home.

What was it like?

Obviously a large family, but with all your siblings.

But what was it like growing up bouncing around and then not really having a father figure in the household the entire time?

What was that like for you?

I was mother's little helper.

I was the eldest, so I fed more babies, bottle fed more babies, and changed more diapers by the time I was 15 years old than most mothers will in three lifetimes.

And so seeing what you saw and growing up in that type of world, what made you decide, yes, I want to be a military person, too?

Oh, that was easy.

I had an extraordinarily low draft number.

Point.

This was the tail end of the Vietnam era.

I was young and I was stupid.

Those two things may be generally synonymous, but I was definitely young and stupid.

But I had an extraordinarily low draft number.

If I didn't enlist, I was definitely going to be called up.

So I decided to enlist and try for something that was special.

And nothing is more special than Special Forces.

It's actually in the title.

It's in the title.

It's in the title.

So I wanted to try something that would actually be extraordinarily difficult, but something that would set me apart.

Being the oldest of nine children and moving from school to school to school and with the last name Adolf in the Post World War II period, and I was not a big kid and I didn't know how to fight, but every new school I went to, some kid, usually a head taller and 20 pounds heavier, would call me Hitler.

I generally responded by punching him, which was followed very quickly by a shattering ass kicking mine.

And I went home many, many, many times with a bloody lip or a black eye, but I kept on punching away.

I found as a small child, I was born in Minneapolis.

And then when my mom found my stepdad, we moved to a rural town in Iowa.

And the farm kids were very vastly bigger than I was.

And I always found myself in the same situation.

Someone would try to pick on me because I was littler.

And so every year from I can remember till I graduated college or went to college, I was in at least one fight per year because they would try to take this little kid out.

And what amazed me is that they never learned.

They never learned.

You can't fight Crazy because you're fighting to be a bully.

I'm fighting for survival.

There's a difference.

Right, exactly.

So when you went into the military, do you think you would have went into the military had it not been for the draft?

I may have ended up there, but the fact is back to young and stupid.

I graduated 313 out of 330.

The people that graduated lower than me had serious psychiatric issues.

And I may have been included in that bunch.

I hated school.

I disliked my teachers.

I hated the subject matter.

It seemed all so boring and so irrelevant to me.

The bottom line is I did very poorly in school.

And I grew up thinking that I wasn't particularly bright.

There was nobody in my family that had ever gone to college.

We were blue collar, blue collar, blue collar through and through.

So when I went down to take the test, the military test, the equivalent of an IQ test, When that was all done, the sergeant came out and told me that I had an extraordinarily high score.

This is the first time in my life I was probably 18, 19 years old.

First time in my life anyone told me that I had a brain, that I was not stupid, that I may have had capacities beyond what I thought.

He actually told me that they had an order standing at that time, that anyone with my scores was supposed to be offered to go to West Point Prep School and then to West Point, assuming I navigated West Point Prep.

But that was a bridge too far for me.

I could not at that time imagine that I could ever grow up to be an officer, an officer and a gentleman.

That I could be accepted into West Point.

It was just too far.

The fact was I could accept the possibility that I could reach for being a sergeant in Special Forces.

I could perhaps reach that high.

But at that time, no, nothing else.

It's interesting to me because as soon as you said that you were bored and hated school, I immediately said he was too bright for school.

Because as someone who background is in psychology, it has been my experience that people who are bored with school has very little to do with the fact that they're not intelligent.

It has to do with their brain is already beyond somewhere else.

And if they are given the right subject, they will excel at it at a very high level because their intrigue will keep them attached to it, not their boredom.

So when you said that, I was like, oh, yeah, he has to be a bright individual.

And so when did you.

So you set this lower goal for yourself?

Special Forces?

Yes.

When did you accept that you are brighter and could Go further because.

Because you don't get to.

Lieutenant Colonel and UN Chief Security Advisor.

Staying young and Dumb.

When I was a young sergeant, by this time I was assigned to 10 Special Forces Group.

And the people I lived and worked with on a daily basis, senior sergeants mostly, were extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily capable, and I wanted to emulate them in the worst possible way.

We also had some fine officers.

And after a couple of years serving on a Special Forces team, I came to realize that it might have been possible for me to take a next step.

So I applied.

Oh, I applied myself first.

In order to qualify for Officer Candidate School, I had to go to college.

So my Sergeant major helped me out.

And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, I went to Mount Wachusett Community College in order to gain some college credit.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, write my papers, did my reading and prepared for the next week.

I achieved an associate's degree in fairly short order and qualified for Officer Candidate School.

Now, for anyone who's not familiar with the military, Special Forces, I was just watching a program yesterday, and the Special Forces person said that in his class of people who applied to be in Special Forces, it started off with 285 people, and only seven of those people finished the program to actually be in Special Forces, which was less than 3%.

So Special Forces, and I don't care what branch of the service you are in, Special Forces is the elite of the elite.

How many started in your class when you went through the program?

134 started phase one, Camp McCall.

And of that original group, 18 graduated.

So less than 10, well, about a little over 10%.

So that's still a very fraction of a fraction.

When you, when you, when you discovered that you were good at this, did your own perception of who you were change?

Did you finally leap that bridge that was presented to you all those years ago?

I don't want to take any special credit.

I define myself as a late bloomer.

Every key lesson I learned in life came late to me.

It seems like I have to beat my head against bricks first before I open my eyes and am able to see with greater degree of clarity.

That may be more of a psychological barrier, but it is very definitely me.

It was a very difficult thing to do.

Again, I take no particular credit, but once you set your feet on a path like that, then you overcome one challenge, then another and another, another and another.

And when you keep on putting challenges in your path, you'll grow a little bit.

A little bit.

A little bit.

And you don't even know you're changing.

It's just one day.

You wake up, you look at the path you've been on, and you've changed.

You're not the same person you were anymore.

Yeah, it's kind of like when you're growing up and your, you know, aunt who hasn't seen you in two years comes by and says, oh, you're so big.

And you're like, I didn't even realize I grew a foot in that two years.

You know, because you don't see the incremental growth, but they see this large transformation.

So what.

What got you to transform from Special Forces into, you know, the Lieutenant colonel and in the higher ranks in the.

In the military, what worked your way?

But what happened?

From Officer Candidate School, I was branched in military intelligence for no particular reason other than we were trained in operations and intelligence functions in Special Forces.

So my Special Forces background actually had applications within the military intelligence community.

So I was.

I went to the military intelligence course at Fort Wachuca, Arizona, the Tactical and strategic course, and after that, Counterintelligence Special Agent, which was fascinating.

Followed by the counterterrorist course in California, and Then assignment to 18th Airborne Corps and the 218th Military Intelligence Detachment, which is the deployable military intelligence unit that goes with the 18th Airborne Corps when deployed.

So now you're how old?

I'm still a kid.

I'm a young lieutenant.

And while I was a lieutenant, served in standard roles as an operations officer, as an executive officer in a company, and then had the opportunity to move over to 5th Special Forces Group and command a Special Forces Underwater Operations detachment.

When I was a young sergeant, I attended the Special Operations Combat Divers course in Key West, Florida.

So you've worked your way up through pretty good standards by this time.

As a young man, how old were you when you became a lieutenant colonel?

Oh, I don't even remember.

Probably.

Probably somewhere in my late 30s.

Okay.

But I.

As soon as I was.

I was.

I was a young major.

I was on the cusp of being promoted to lieutenant colonel, and I was the executive officer of a psychological operations battalion, and I just volunteered to go to Cambodia to serve with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, which was the organization that was most responsible for seeing Cambodia's transition from the Khmer Rouge to free and fair elections.

As a military person, especially someone who went in during the Vietnam era.

I mean, of all of the conflicts that the United States has been involved in, that is one that stands out with a lot of divisiveness in this country and in politics and abroad.

As a young man being drafted into that situation, how does.

This is a question that has fascinated me about military personnel.

How does a person in the military, and I'm sure you've experienced it growing up through the ranks of the military, how do they balance the duty of the military soldier with the personal thoughts and opinions of what the commander in chief, the president at the time, is leading the country towards?

How do you balance your own feelings with your military directive?

Okay, it's pretty straightforward.

Soldiers get to have all the opinions they want.

They can bitch, gripe and complain and often do.

However, when you're given a legal order, unless you make the determination that it's immoral, you must follow it.

That's the hardest part about being a soldier.

And it's not battlefield courage, in a sense.

It takes moral courage, which is more rare, to be honest.

It takes moral courage to follow those orders, even if you believe them to be wrong.

It's no easy thing.

And you said the.

You said, if they find it morally.

Wrong, and there's two criteria, okay, you don't have to follow an order which is illegal, full stop.

Someone, a senior officer, orders me to shoot and kill unarmed child, that's an illegal order.

It happens to be immoral as well.

I would never do such a thing.

And is it common for military personnel to go against those orders, invoking those criteria?

No.

No.

The fact is that the American army is actually pretty well trained.

Every single year, I received legal training as a sergeant and as an officer.

We went over our duties and responsibilities every year as a reminder to ourselves and our chain of command, who we were and what our oaths meant to us as individuals and as a collective.

It's important.

I would think it's vital.

So you found yourself in a unique situation as the UN Chief Security Advisor.

And I'm going to pull up your book, Surviving the United nations.

And you are in this book talking about the violence and the corruption and the betrayal.

So at some point in your tenure as Chief Security Advisor, you had to see things that were not right.

So how did you.

How did you do.

How did you maintain all that?

Okay, we kind of switched tracks.

We went from talking about duties and responsibilities of being a soldier to the duties and responsibilities of being a United nations staff member and in particular, a Chief Security advisor in the un.

So I would say that I brought with me the moral compass that the army gave me because it seemed to make sense to me.

Yes, I have a boss.

It went all the way to The Secretary General of the United nations.

And then he had a subordinate, and then a subordinate had a subordinate.

And then me as the Chief security Advisor, for example, in Iraq, which is the final chapters of the book.

And perhaps the most important, the bottom line from my perspective is that I focused on doing the job.

And the job of a Chief security Advisor in the United nations boiled down to its essentials, is to protect human life, preserve human life.

I find it interesting that my former job in the military was essentially taking life.

What I found even more interesting was the skill sets necessary to perform both functions were roughly the same.

How so?

Well, first you have to be willing to risk yourself and you have to be able to risk not only your own life, which for many of us, particularly as a former soldier, was easier than dealing with the bureaucracy and standing up for what is right.

So for example, when we were told we were going into Baghdad, I took the position that was a bad idea.

And I told my bosses why it was a bad idea.

I don't need to go into specifics here, but I started that process and we were still ordered to go.

So we went.

I followed the orders I was given even though I disagreed with them.

But all along the way I continued doing what chief security advisors do and that is giving the best security advice to my bosses in Baghdad and New York that I could possibly muster.

I did so in writing, formally, I did so in oral briefings.

I did so on multiple different occasions and very often was accused of overstating the threat.

In other words, most of my bosses felt that we were under no great threat in Baghdad.

They were wrong.

Tragically, I was right.

The bombs or the explosive material used weighed over a ton according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Took a look at the incident site, killing 22 people and wounding another 150.

So an extraordinary event.

And I spent the whole of that day trying to save as many lives as I could.

Tragically.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Well, tragically, long story short, the Secretary General of the United nations was looking around for scapegoats and included me in that group.

That was.

I found that extraordinary.

I was the one guy in the chain of command that was saying, stop, reconsider.

We need to do these things.

If you're going to stay in Baghdad, these are the things you need to do in order to reduce risk.

In other words, I did my job.

So how does I was fired anyway?

Yeah, how do they justify?

Because obviously for as much paper trail as you had to have left with that because you're not just picking up a phone and saying, hey, I think this is a bad idea.

You're writing it down somewhere.

So with as much portrayal that is there, how can they possibly say you didn't do your job to do this?

Actually, they classified the report that was the detailed investigation into the event.

So that report, even today is still considered UN confidential.

It has never been released to the public.

That's crazy.

So how does your career then allow.

If it is still classified, how does your career allow you to write this type of book?

Interesting question.

I never cleared the book.

The UN rules.

The UN rule book says that for a former UN staff member writing a book, I'm supposed to send it in to the Secretary General in order to be cleared.

I was aware that given the nature of this book and given the nature of the truth of probably would never be cleared.

So I went ahead and published it anyway.

After its publication, I received a threatening letter from the UN and threatening the possibility of legal action against me.

My response, because I had all the evidence in hand was please, please.

I would love nothing better than to take my evidence into a court of law in any country you determine in order to put the facts to the light.

Of course, I never heard from the UN again.

When you have the facts behind you, that tends to be the case.

I'm intrigued by your title.

The story of violence, corruption, betrayal.

That part's easy to balance and comprehend.

But the and redemption part, explain that, can you?

Sure.

Essentially, I felt betrayed by my own chain of command, ultimately by the Secretary General of the United nations who fired me on the front pages of the New York Times.

He no doubt thought that that was a good way to avoid people looking at him.

The fact is, the Secretary General of the United nations is the senior most security official in the United Nations.

He's the one that actually made the decision for us to go into Baghdad when we did.

And against my advice.

If they had just taken my advice.

Even the Security in Iraq Accountability Panel report said that far fewer people would have ended up dead.

And that's a fact.

So where does the redemption is?

The fact that that was proven, is that the redemption?

I thought I was in Ethiopia at the time, in a place called Gambella down near the Sudanese border, conducting a security risk assessment.

I was called from my boss in New York and told to return to New York in order to face my relief.

I was relieved of duty.

I refused that relief and I said I wanted to fight.

That fight lasted Seven months.

And after seven months, I won full exoneration, reinstatement to my former rank and position, and then reassigned as the Security Advisor for Egypt for the United Nations.

Essentially, I'd been utterly, completely exonerated by the people, looked at my evidence, which was substantial.

That's the revision part.

Yeah.

And that's a huge.

It has not been my outer experience, and obviously I'm not as deep into the military as you are, you know, just from the family that I've had in the military.

But it has never been my experience that military nor politicians ever say, we were wrong or I'm sorry.

So the fact that you were reinstated and exonerated, you know, is certainly a huge anomaly, but also great relief on you.

But during the time before then, how did that.

Because you're.

Is.

Were you with your current wife at the time, or.

Okay, so how did.

How did it affect your relationship?

Because that is a hard.

It's hard enough being in a military family.

It's then to go drag your name through that mud, and then the fight of resolving it, how did that affect you and your wife?

It was probably harder on her than it was on me.

I took it hard.

I took it very hard.

I spent almost 26 years in the American army, and in all that time, I trusted my superiors, all of them.

The generals, the colonels that I worked for, all of them.

I trusted them.

I trusted the sergeants that I worked with.

We shared values together.

What I found out is not everyone, certainly not everyone globally, shares the same values.

And because of that, they were able to do what they did.

And that was something that I consider to be despicable, and that is firing an innocent man, knowing he was innocent, and fired him on the front pages of the New York Times knowing he was innocent.

And your wife, did she ever encourage you to just step back and walk away, or did she say fight?

No.

The good news is that we ended up being of one mind.

It would be in my nature, particularly all my years in Special Forces, that fighting was in my nature.

I often thought about walking away, but my wife would remind me over and over again that's exactly what they wanted me to do.

They wanted me to walk away and end the story.

She and I hung in there, and ultimately to exoneration.

I didn't actually expect to win.

The win came as a huge relief and an enormous surprise.

So you fought this battle with not much expectation of winning it, but just because it was the right thing to do.

It was the right thing to do.

So how.

How Long have you been married?

We've been together for 25 years now.

So for most of this entire process that you.

That you've given your life, how did you meet your wife?

I met her in Yemen.

Okay.

Yet you don't meet many wives in Yemen.

No.

My first assignment with the United nations was as a chief security officer for the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

These are the same people that cut off a thousand people's hands a year earlier during the first invasion of Freetown.

After that was successful, we successfully got everybody, all the civilian staff out.

Everybody survived.

That's how you know you've been successful.

Everybody that you're responsible for got to go home.

I was subsequently assigned to Yemen as the United nations security advisor there.

And that's where I met my wife.

She was a PhD doctor then working as a chief technical advisor on a project then that was benefiting rural women in small villages all around Yemen.

It is not easy being married to a military person, let alone a Special Forces individual.

It takes a certain type of mental resolve and somewhat compartmentalizing emotional resolve to be in that elite group of soldiers.

So I'm curious, how does someone with this hardened.

Now, I've only known you for 30 minutes, so I'm going to go out on a broad limb here for you.

But in these 30 minutes, I have sensed a softer, compassionate, caring, loving individual who just happens to be in the framework of this elite soldier.

So how does.

How does someone with that exterior balance a marriage and a wife?

And how does she go?

You know, a Special Forces person is the right person for me.

A military person is the right person for me.

I think I'll jump on this ship.

Like, how does that merge?

Well.

Okay.

However, the question is still valid.

Security personnel in the United Nations.

By this time, I had been trained by Scotland Yard as a hostage negotiator.

So I actually helped to resolve a double kidnapping in West Africa when I was there.

And then I consulted on a dozen kidnappings in Yemen.

Yemen, being tribal in nature and kidnapping in that context is quite different from what you would normally expect.

But it's also high pressure, high stress.

And there was a.

For example, there was a.

There was a gunfight in my apartment building between two different tribal groups.

There was the bombing of the British Embassy the day after the cold bombing that took place down in Aden.

So my job as a security advisor required me to do similar sorts of things that soldiers have to do insofar as endangering their lives in order to preserve the lives of others.

So the question you ask is still valid.

I don't know the answer.

However.

However, I think my wife likes me, at least most of the time.

And I think she found something in me that was worth hanging on to.

And as I said, we've been together for 25 years now, and she's still hanging around.

In my experience, women generally don't hang around if they don't like where they are.

Yeah.

And that's why I asked the question, because it is hard.

It's a hard life regardless.

And then to choose it, you know, some.

Some are already connected to their spouse or significant other as they're beginning that journey.

But you'd already, you know, been through it.

Because of your journey, you've been able to live in 17 different countries and.

And travel the world.

Where's your favorite?

I like Asia.

I really do.

I like Asia.

However, in this part of the world, meaning the west, my wife much prefers Italy, and we've spent a lot of time in Italy in recent memory.

So I think of all the places we've been, and we've been many, Italy stand out time and time again as one of our favorite places on the globe.

And any possibility of ever residing back in the US.

Under current circumstances, unlikely.

My wife, who's originally born in Egypt, our grandchildren are actually in this part of the world.

So as grandparents, we tend to want to see our grandkids on a regular, recurring basis.

And so long as the grandkids are in this part of the world, we'll probably stay over here.

I'm always amused by how many grandparents migrate to wherever their grandchildren happen to be.

You know, it.

It's kind of amusing to me.

Now, you're still a prolific writer.

You.

You write massive amounts of articles and blogs.

Do you still teach?

On occasion.

For example, my teaching now comes in the form of presentation speeches.

The example is last year I got a call from London, from England, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, which, as you probably already know, is one of the premier educational institutions on this planet, offered me the opportunity to make the keynote address at their conference on the future of technology.

And I couldn't possibly turn that down.

So I ended up doing a presentation on artificial intelligence, humanity and unfettered capitalism that was well received by the group that was all PhDs and all postdocs and what I would consider to be extraordinarily smart people, mathematicians, for the most part, it was the London Mathematical Society and computer experts.

So as a person who has done all the extraordinary things you've done and been through all the hardships you've been through, where do you see AI taking us and how do you see its effect on humanity?

Because it is another hot topic that people, people you know are on one side or the other on.

Where's your stance?

What's required in terms of AI is something we have extraordinarily diff.

It's very, very difficult to do, and that is attempting to maintain a balance.

AI right now is not in the hands of people who I would care to trust, meaning that the tech billionaires, in large measure the ones who are in charge of where AI is going.

Now, the tech billionaires are interested in one major thing and that is enhancing profit.

AI is now being used in order to enhance profit across the board in everywhere it can be used.

The algorithms that are being used by Meta are extraordinary in terms of getting people to spend money where the rich, the wealthy, what I call the new nobility, want them to spend their money.

And I consider this to be exploitation.

And that kind of exploitation, particularly made worse when you're talking about capitalist societies, were.

Now it's important.

I'm not against capitalism.

Capitalism has created more wealth than any other economic system in the history of humankind.

That's not the issue.

The issue is unfettered capitalism, unregulated capitalism.

And the only possible counterweight, two the tech billionaires, is honest government.

That's a.

Those aren't two words I usually throw together, honest and government.

I understand.

So is there probability that humanity can survive this?

AI residents with the discourse of governments.

This seems to be the question that everybody's chewing on.

The problem is, is that those people who are in charge of, say, the mega corporations in many cases got to be where they are.

Not because of the most empathic people in the room.

In fact, they might be the least empathic people in the room.

And they're generally focused on those things that are important to them, which, generally speaking, almost always is what serves them, their egos and their vanity, but because I call some of them borderline sociopaths.

They don't really care about human feelings.

That's not what drives them.

What drives them is the profit motive or their own egos or their vanity.

And that's not a good recipe for a positive outcome for AI or Humanity.

I am always intrigued how these tech billionaires and.

And these other individuals want to lean towards making humans less necessary.

But then I'm like, well, where do you think the money is going to come from?

Like, who's going to do the work to generate the money that you're so craving to run your, you know, your empire?

It's.

It's hard for me to understand how they think weeding out humans necessity to contributing to the world balances their ledger.

I don't understand them.

Actually, I wrote an article about this.

The fact is, and this is why I call them the new nobility, because they're very much like the old nobility when I used to call them princes and earls.

What's interesting about it from my perspective, is that many of the tech billionaires now are residing in mansions that were built by the old nobility because they're great big mansions and they fit their egos.

And since these people are extraordinarily vain.

Come on.

We're looking at a circumstance whereby human beings are being reduced to being serfs.

You remember when you studied, what was it, the Middle Ages?

The history of the Middle Ages, okay, there were serfs and there was a nobility.

What's happening now is we are all being turned into serfs.

And it's happening by squeezing the middle class and disenfranchising the poor.

So the rich are getting much, much richer, the middle class is getting squeezed more and more, and the poor are ending up with less and less and less again.

AI is being exploited in order to turn more of us into serfs.

I wish there was a way to reverse that.

And I know you're a prolific writer.

You write tons of things.

Did you say you have a second book coming out?

The second book, not out yet.

I'm just in the process of writing it.

One of the things that I think I know, one of the things that I think I discovered is I had been writing and publishing for over 40 years, almost half a century, and when I looked back at the path that I had taken, yes, there was all these great things, these wonderful experiences, but there was a thread that kind of kept it all together and that I was a writer.

And good writers are curious, and I am curious.

And good writers want clarity, clarity of thought, clarity of mind, and clarity on the page.

The Canadian public intellectual, Jordan Peterson.

I once heard him say that writing is the most rigorous form of thought.

It.

He may not be the first one to say this, but as soon as he said it, it clicked with me.

Of course it is.

I have written Two graduate theses, and I've probably written several thousand pages of narrative.

I've written over 300 published articles and over 50 different types of media.

And each process is an attempt to answer a question for me.

I wanted to understand what was going on with AI and humanity and unfettered capitalism.

I wanted to better understand monopolies, how they work or how they don't work and why they're bad for society in general.

One of the things that concerns me is that I have a very large group of people who read my stuff.

And some of them back in the United States have asked me to stop sending what I've been writing because some of it is highly critical of the current presidential administration.

And they're afraid.

They're afraid.

They're absolutely afraid that someone somewhere will get hold of this and that the United States may soon become a police state.

I find this extraordinary, but I certainly understand why.

You see some of the same things happening, and I can certainly understand why people would be frightened about it.

What's interesting, and I've read some of those things because you've sent them to me, and I appreciate it.

And I'm always.

I'm always of open mind to hear every opinion, as long as it's not open rhetoric, as long as it's thoughtful and thought provoking.

But what's interesting to me is that, and you very well know how divided this country is.

I do.

Prior to those that said that to you, there was another administration where another side was saying that.

So it depends on who's in there, who's telling it.

But it's the same thought and narrative about it.

And that's because politics is corrupt.

They're not here for us, they're here for them.

And when people think that the government in its current state over the last, I don't know, my dad said, ever since Kennedy was killed.

But if.

If people think that the government was there to make their lives better, then they haven't been paying attention.

Because if it was, this is just my humble opinion, they would have the same insurance that we have, they would have the same retirement that they make laws for us.

They would follow the same rules and regulations that they legislate for us.

But they have a system that's different that they operate in and their whole job.

You can't tell me that you come in as a $200,000 a year earner and you leave at $50 million, that that was not some Corruption somewhere along the way.

Okay.

I've written extensively on this particular topic and trying to write with clarity on this topic is extraordinarily difficult.

You're taking extreme, extraordinary, very complex ideas and trying to boil them down to something simple enough that even that I could understand it and that you can subsequently convey to other people.

And then you're working through the political haze of right or left and blue and red.

I get it.

My clarity of thought, or where I've come down is that America is now less about blue and red, although that's what everybody talks about.

But it's all red herrings.

The fact is, is that the greater threat to America is in the new nobility.

Those who control the overwhelming 1% of of the nation controls over 90% of the wealth.

That's a nobility.

Now what does this mean for justice?

Justice is supposed to be the same for us all, and yet everybody knows the truth.

The truth is, is that the more money you have, the more justice you can buy for yourself.

That's a fact.

How did Epstein get that sweetheart deal down in Florida?

A known pedophile walks away.

How did that happen?

The more money you have, the greater your celebrity, the less chance you are of ever facing accountability for your actions.

Now the wealthy, now the new nobility is in large measure control of the United States.

They control both sides of the aisle.

There are those on the left and those on the right and they feed money into both, but they feed money into their both to serve their own interests.

You, me, and everyone else you know always acts in your own self interest.

Less than 1% of humanity will act against self interest and will call that honorable and principled behavior.

But if there's no benefit to honorable or principled behavior, it goes out of fashion.

So we end up with a dog eat dog world.

It's a tough, tough, tough world out there.

Everybody grow more bark.

We're going to have to learn to live with it.

And the people that succeed in this system are the people that best serve the interests of the new nobility.

That's my take on it and I appreciate that.

You know, you've, you have a insight.

So I'm going to ask you a couple things as we kind of wind this up because we could talk hours.

You're, you've got an extensive life that, that could be talked about.

What do you want your legacy to be?

What do you want Robert Adolf to, to be known for?

The reason why I wrote this book was because I was angry and I was hurt and I ended up writing four different versions of it.

And each time I had to remove more names from it because I didn't want it to seem like it was something that a product of an angry mind.

We all live with stories and I wanted mine to be a positive one.

This book ended on a positive note and there's a number of lessons that can be taken away from it.

At the very end of the book there's something called Bob's Laws.

It's satirical.

I meant it to be funny.

I didn't want anybody thinking I was taking myself too seriously.

But I came up with 28 Bob's laws.

And these are things I think that take knowledge and transmutes to wisdom.

How we take knowledge and transmute it to wisdom, we put it in a human context.

That's how we know it's wise.

Now, nobody is ultimately wise.

However, I have had some absolutely unique experiences, as you pointed out.

And I've had been to a lot of places and met a lot of people and done a lot of things.

And my legacy, I think can be encapsulated in Bob's Laws at the end of the book.

And if you take a look at the laws, you may find some things in there to agree with.

And if you do, know that they came to me the hard way.

Wisdom does not come easily, it doesn't come quickly, and it usually involves considerable hardship.

And not to forget, I had to do a lot of stupid things before and survive in order to gain any, even a small degree of wisdom.

A lot of wisdom comes from the stupid things we've survived.

One final question that I do want to ask you, and I ask it to all my guests.

What does a warrior spirit or having a warrior spirit mean to Robert Adolf?

Compassion people talk about, particularly now the current Secretary of Defense in the United States talks about warriors.

Warriors in my mind have to be compassionate.

You have to feel without feeling, without sentience, without knowledge of yourself.

And how you impact others without some degree of self awareness, you're just a bull in the China shop.

Yes, you can make a difference, but it's not about killing.

It's about knowing what you do and how you feel about it impacts others.

The greatest warriors I think I ever met were the most compassionate people I ever met.

I can certainly see and feel the compassion in your heart.

And that's why I recognized even the humbleness in you from what you've been through and who you are just is appreciated that that part is still part of your humanity.

And I thank you for sharing that with my audience and for coming on the show to do this, so I'm very grateful and thank you for your time for doing all this.

Thank you for the invitation, Darrell.

And if you'd like to connect with Robert, you can do so on his website, robert bruce adolph.com or on Facebook.

And don't forget to check out his book, Surviving the United Nations.

It's pretty powerful and pretty impactful.

Thank you for joining us on this edition of A Warrior Spirit.

We're now on all the major platforms as well as Roku via the Prospera TV app, so be sure to like or subscribe to catch all the episode.

And as always, the journey is sacred.

The warrior is you.

So remember to be inspired, be empowered, and embrace the spirit of the warrior within.

It's not just about the fight, it's how we rise from it.

Sam.