Welcome Back, Neil Bailey

Speaker 00 0:02

We talk about it all the time on the Peace Love Moto podcast. That one of the many beautiful things about riding a motorcycle is meeting other people. Because when you meet another motorcycle rider, whether it's at a gas station or a cafe or whatever, you pretty much got a brand new friend right then, right? And then if it goes on to the next steps, it turns into a conversation. Then if it turns into an interview, oh my goodness, have you got a lot to talk about? Our guest today is Neil Bailey. To be honest with you, Neil and I have been talking for the last hour and 15 minutes and have not recorded anything. We did that intentionally. I didn't forget to press the record button. We have just been talking about ideas, about life, about the future, about the past. And it's been wonderful. So, Neil, we are recording now. So, my friend, welcome back to the Peace Love Moto podcast.

Speaker 01 1:03

Thank you for having me on. It's been great to catch up and really it's been so nice to see the podcast evolving and the different types of guests you've been having. And I know what a buzz you get for this. And thanks for bringing this for us all to have a good listen. Oh, and now for me to have a chance.

Speaker 00 1:20

Well, it has been a it has been a pleasure. And again, having a follow-up conversation like we're having now is just all the all the more fun, although it begins with an hour and a half of not even recording. But it's been great. It's been great.

Peace, Love, and Moto Framework

Speaker 00 1:34

Neil, I just want to I want to catch up with you on so many things, on wellspring, on your not only your motorcycling and your bicycling adventures that you've been on, but still what we were talking about too, most importantly, is world events where you have been directly involved in support for the Ukraine and other places where you have been there, you have seen what's going on, and most importantly, you have directly interacted with heart and spirit with those impacted either directly or indirectly with tragedy. And uh having that's something that I just so admire about you. And I knew this from the very first time we met a year ago, that you're one of those guys who steps out, who recognizes there's a there is an issue here. Somebody's got to do something about it, somebody's got to help in some way, and you do that. And I just want to begin by thanking you for that.

Speaker 01 2:38

Well, thank you. So we were sitting there, you know, what you didn't tell the viewers it took us an hour to figure out what we're gonna talk about. It's sounding really cool, and like we're having some deep, meaningful conversation.

Speaker 00 2:54

Well, it's a lot of BS too, right?

Speaker 01 2:56

Specifically with the all you could eat dinner, we couldn't figure out the menu, but so we were talking a little bit about my work in Ukraine and the perception. I think I want to talk about Ukraine and my work in Ukraine, and there are three words that I want to use to describe what I'm talking about: peace, love, and motor. And I think it fits into what we were talking about. I want to talk about Ukraine from a perspective of peace, love, and motor. And I think when people think about Ukraine or see Ukraine in the media, they don't think peace, they don't think love, and they don't think motor, right? They see destruction, they see death, explosions, or they see a lot of political argument, a lot of ideology around different ideas, and it creates a lot of anger, it creates argument, and I I think there's a very, very, very distorted view of a lot of what is happening in Ukraine. And so for the viewers or listeners or somebody who doesn't didn't listen to our first podcast or doesn't know me, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, this is a very important statement to make when you talk to anybody in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine started in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea went into ambassador Luhansk. They've been fighting for a very long time. And it actually was February the 24th, 2022, at 5 a.m. in the morning. As the Ukrainians would say that when the rockets flew, that the full scale of invasion began.

First Trip: Processing Through Emotions

Speaker 01 4:49

And my first trip into Ukraine was on a motorcycle, and it was with award-winning journalist Kieran Ridley, and Ukraine was a tinderbox in 2022. Nobody knew what was going on. The country was full of military checkpoints, air alerts, uh maybe not as many missile strikes as are happening today, but you know, enough to be to be very, very unpleasant, oh nasty, uh horrendous, whatever you would like to say. And I also didn't have experience inside Ukraine. And the first trip that I was there, what I realized now looking back with hindsight, I had to process Ukraine through my own feelings. It didn't mean that I was not somewhat empathetic to people I was interviewing, it didn't mean that I couldn't have sympathy for the situation, and it didn't mean that I couldn't maybe be um objective about what was happening to people, but I had to process through how I felt, I think, to deal with that. And to that end, I went on to write a big feature story for Overland Journal, the magazine, and it was a story in a different kind of way than I'd done before because basically it was an intro to what we were doing in Ukraine, and then there were five emotions. And I did fear, shock, anger, joy, and love. And I took five moments in Ukraine, one was fear, one was shock, one was joy, and one was anger, and one was love. And I wrote about those moments, and so they're not congruent in a story, they're not, you know, there's five vignettes in a bigger story. And as I was writing, I didn't realize that this was what I was doing. I was processing Ukraine through my emotions. And I came out and I had made connections and I made friends, and I went back in in 2023. Well, when I went back in in 2023, I went in alone. I had a GS1250 adventure, camera gear, bulletproof vests, helmets, press pass, you know, stuff like this. And wow, now I now I already knew people. We had hired a fixer in 2022 called Andri. And in between going the first time and the second time, Andre and I worked on fundraising because I had been to the children's hospital, as you know, I've been raising money for kids since 2008. Yeah, and we went into coal mines because they obviously we wanted to look at the energy crises. We went down to the Black Sea and saw the blockades of grain trucks. Um we went to Vinitsa after a missile strike. Uh we dodged missiles and bombs, we were in Kiev. Um we did stories about the harvest. Uh, we went to a monastery that was sheltering refugees, and that was very interesting because that monastery had also hidden Jewish boys during the Holocaust.

Speaker 00 8:03

Oh, interesting.

Speaker 01 8:04

Wow. Now the the Sudite monks had shelved had hidden Jewish boys, shaved their heads and given them new names and hidden them amongst the kids. So we were doing these different types of stories in 2022. So I had some idea, I had a concept of the country, I knew people, I had a motorcycle friend in Odessa called Yuri, and I had made a motorcycle friend online um called Igor in Kiev, and I knew Andri in Lviv. So I went to Lviv and spent time with Andre. And he had at that time gone to the Superhuman Center. This is a rehabilitation facility, mostly funded by um Howard Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett.

unknown 8:48

Oh.

Speaker 01 8:48

With the ceremony from the Zelensky family and Richard Brant. And today in 2025, it is the most advanced

Superhumans: Life After Amputation

Speaker 01 8:55

state of the art center for prosthetics and amputation. But at the time it was just getting going. And so I spent a lot of that first week with the amputees. I saw what sort of people like New York Times, The Spiegel, The Guardian, Washington Post, these bigger publications would they were very much doing this sort of hero story with a beautiful photography of the soldier with his prosthesis and then the backstory. It was like hero process. So I sort of said, look, you know, I'm a I'm not one of these mainstream journalists. I can't, I don't want to do that. And I centered my time on one young man called Nazar, who was a low-leg amputee, and he was very articulate and incredibly descriptive. And I spent the week with him. I'd go to therapy and go to the pool with him, and he'd go to psychology, and we'd have coffee, and we over the course of the week. And he had endured about 30-something surgeries. Oh. And but I just learned everything from the moment the rockets began to fly, but when he made the decision to leave his engineering job to go sign up to protect his country. I learned about the crying, the fear, the smell of the dead bodies, how they would have to scrounge bodies to get bullets, how like the smell of the gunpowder, the smell of the bodies, the smell of the dirt. I mean, the fear, the crying, the I mean, it was just unbelievable. He was so articulate about describing the process of war and how often they were able to text their loved ones and without the signals and and what it was like watching civilians being blown up essentially. And and then finally losing his leg, having multiple surgeries, learning that the biggest problem these amputees deal with when they're actually when they've been hit by a mortar or a drone is the dirt that gets in the wound. Oh, right. So they deal with really, really bad infections. So they have constantly fighting infections, and then of course having limbs amputated. And then so it was really enlightening from a perspective of getting to really go inside the mind of a young man who had had to pick up a gun and go to battle and ends up being injured.

Speaker 00 11:27

And who gave up his career, right? For all of that. Gave up his career.

Speaker 01 11:32

They all had to. I mean, the country is under attack. I mean, they just picked up a gun and went to war. And it was really it was really enlightening to he was he just he's a great so message. I mean, he's he's a great, great, great man. And then finally, one day, the end of the week or the beginning of the next week before I got on the move, he had his prosthesis fitted, and I was there the first day he wore. Oh, wow. And we were whooping. I have a video of it. We were whooping and hollering and high-fiving, and you know, not kind of the behavior you would think about an amputee getting a prosthesis. That's the kind of attitude it's called superhuman. So he turns around to me, and I've written a story about it, and it's not published yet, but hopefully it'll get published one day as part of a bigger body of work. And I said, What are you gonna do this weekend? Or what are you gonna do? He goes, I'm going home to a Vino Frank. I'm gonna walk into town with my friends for a coffee and say my girlfriend gets to have sex with superhuman. It was just absolutely magic. And like I said, as we were talking earlier, when your perspective of the war is blown up buildings, tanks, stuff exploding, or political argument, because there's we have two we have two political parties in this country that argue about Ukraine constantly, right? So they're feeding all of this stuff into the media. Yeah. But what Nazar told me is never getting out.

Speaker 02 13:09

Yeah.

Speaker 01 13:09

Right? I mean, it's just who's telling that story. I mean, not to be rude to the New York Times, Washington Post, or these big magazines when they were telling stories, but they're shooting these glamour pictures of the guys with their prosthetics and their robotic arms and these stories. They're not, I mean, there must be some people that are doing what I did, but it was just so fantastic. So anyway, I finally left superhumans and I started working my way around Ukraine. And I really struggled in those early weeks, being alone. Um that wasn't really the problem. The the problem I struggled with, and maybe I'm looking back with hindsight, was I kept feeling like I needed to be telling the biggest story. That huge

Beyond Headlines: Daily War Realities

Speaker 01 13:50

explosion, the tank, the rocket, the plane, you know, like you know, like the breaking news, the headlining thing. Yeah. And when and I went and stayed with Igor and Anna in Kiev, and they had a dog called Kitty and a cat called Dog. And they were a couple. And Igor was a motorcyclist, so we we rode around Kiev and he took me to the Cossack settlements and back roads, and we did a whole lot of stuff. And Anna had been in the theater, and she had a job, and she had a hundred cord, and he had his turtle bike, and they'd just built a new house before the full-scale invasion that they hadn't quite finished yet, but it was nice. And they lived in a little village, and they were outside of Kiev. And they weren't getting hit by missiles out there. And on the surface of it, they hadn't lost anybody, they hadn't lost a limb, they hadn't been shot at. You would think that everything was absolutely normal, right? I mean, pulling in a house of a can, a dog, and a car, and a motorcycle, and a TV and all that stuff. But over the course of the week that I was there, starting to watch how the stress was affected. You know, you get air alerts all night and shahe kids coming in and anti-missile defenses going off, and people don't know where they're gonna land, and they don't sleep, and they get up. The uncertainty, not knowing what to do. Then they start telling the story about how they'd had to evacuate their parents at the beginning of the war, you know, hiding in shelters, you know, Igor had to send Anna with the parents across the border into Romania because the men couldn't leave and the women could. Yeah. Do you imagine waving goodbye to your wife, your mother-in-law, and your father-in-law, never knowing when you're going to see them again? And all of these things started to come out that we don't think about when we think about war, or we don't or what we see from this version. And then I realized, wow, there's more stories, but I still wasn't quite getting it. Then I found out Igor one day turned around and he just told me the story about at night when Anna was gone in the beginning, because the during the Battle of Kyiv, obviously the Russians were very close to Kiev. In those early days, they came up bootcha hostel up and they were trying to get into Kyiv. He would have to go and man a block post at night. They they built up you know concrete pillars and check hedgehogs to stop. And here's Egor, the last line of defense for his village, with a machine gun. And he depicted this idea of the sirens and the bombing as these otherworldly giants marching across his country, and here he is alone with this gun, this last line of defense before this monster comes and snatches children from their beds and takes women. And you know, what the Russians did to the civilians is just is is horrendous. I mean, you know, and but it again it took a week. So it really took a week to get the story because I had to burrow down into them. Does that I hope this is making some sort of coherent sense here?

Speaker 00 17:11

Yeah. So just to just to let you know, I think our network is a little bit glitchy. I lost you a few minutes ago just for a second and then it came back.

Speaker 01 17:20

So I'm not just gonna say low and then it's it's come back.

Speaker 00 17:23

Oh, okay. Do you you know what might be helpful? If we turn off our video, let's bandwidth, that might be helpful. Um if we both do that. Uh or I can do it on my site too. And and I don't know that I mean I learned that the hard way. One of the first interviews that I did, uh, there was there was a guy, he was um in, I'll turn mine off today. He was in LAX and I'm on the pay by the minute network or whatever. It was just awful. And it he was just saying the most wonderful things, and then it was getting glitchy, and then I lost him, then we're back, and then I lost him. So anyway, I'll I'll cut this part out, obviously, but uh let's see if it if it stays clear from from here.

Speaker 01 18:04

Okay, so it's uh you sounding great. I haven't lost a second or breakout.

Speaker 00 18:09

Yeah, okay, you sound fine now.

Speaker 01 18:11

Yeah. Ultimately, I had to end my time with uh Igor and Anna, and I had actually also run into a hospital and met a pastor by the name of Sega and he had probably one of those compelling speeches I'd ever heard. Excuse me, and I took notes on that. And I drove off down to Odessa, or rode off down to Odessa, I should say, and I

Odessa Encounters: Torture and Recovery

Speaker 01 18:39

was going to connect with Yuri, the motorcycle guy I'd met the year before. And he actually lives in a place called Ujni, it's a seaside town on the Black Sea. So he arranged for a hotel. It was pretty basic, so I didn't stay wrong, there was no amenities. But anyway, I I so I rode down to Odessa to Ushni hung out with Yuri, and then I moved into town to the hotel that we'd stayed in in 2022. I knew it was, it's right downtown Odessa. And Odessa changed a lot. There wasn't boarded up, people were back on the streets, and all of that sort of tinderbox, not knowing what was going on, you know, type of atmosphere that was in Ukraine in 2022 had changed. And Ukrainians were sort of now back trying to live their lives, shops were open, cafes were open. And being alone, it led me to this extraordinary series of people in interviews. And you know, rather than take up five hours in the podcast, I ended up interviewing uh a guy who's now a good friend called Rahman, who was captured and tortured in Kherson for 54 days. Oh and absolutely horrendous story. And he um he still receives psychological care, and and he will actually say he'll point at his head and say, Cuckoo. I mean, he's he'll never be, you know, he'll never be whole again. I mean, he does a great job, he's an amazing character. He actually still raises money for projects in Ukraine. And it led me to uh a lady called Kate, who is a dead body collector, and that was just an absolute shocker to me. Who thinks about dead body collectors? Well, what they do is they go to the front lines and they retrieve bodies that the military didn't have time to collect, or they're buried under the rubble, or they're fragments of bodies that they have to identify by DNA, and their sole purpose is so that the parents can have closure.

unknown 20:56

Yeah.

Speaker 01 20:57

This is absolutely something you don't think about in a war. That can you imagine your loved one goes after war and then no one hears anything about it? I'm sure there's people in this country have can relate to that missing in action, or they don't know whatever happened to a loved one. So they have this really, really important job identifying bits of bodies and and and bringing bodies back. And it's uh, you know, and of course, they're at a great danger to themselves being that close to the front line and mines. And it led me to other rotary people, it led me to a lady called Yulia who had lived under occupation in in Kherson. Um, the Russians had invaded the one side of Kherson, and and it wasn't until the Ukrainians kicked them out seven months into the war in 2022 that Kherson was liberated. And to listen to her stories of what it was like to live under Russian occupation, and they were actually probably the lucky ones because a lot of them they you know um Roman had been in prison and tortured. It was just it was just chilling, and you know, this lady had had to, she eventually was able to get out. And some of the stuff that she talked about, I it probably wouldn't want to bring with we want to talk about peace and love and motive, so they were very, very unpleasant things. But she immediately had gone to an organization called Windsor Change, and she spends her life helping other internally displaced people get settled. And one of the things that they do is they go out onto towards the Romanian border, and out on the Romanian border, there are small settlements of people called Roma people, R-O-M-A, and they are sort of descendant gypsies from Romania and Bulgaria. And they live in very they live in incredibly poor circumstances. And we went out to see this little lady that had about a dozen kids, and she was living alone with these kids

Victoria’s Drone Factory

Speaker 01 22:54

in this very strange, but spotlessly clean and organized house, nothing like we have in the West, the way she had it done. And they take diapers and formula and stuff. And I was like, these people have lost their homes, lost their family members, escaped occupation in a war, living as internally displaced people in temporary accommodation, and they are they're out helping marginalized people in their own country. Yeah, you want to talk about love. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And yeah, the people they help. So I was really getting this intense education into something that you I don't think I could have even imagined this during the first trip in 2022. And then I met a lady called Victoria, and Victoria is she has waist-long, waist-length hair, like a lot of Ukrainian girls or ladies. Absolutely beautiful, totally fashionable. And she had done the translation for Roman, my my friend who'd been tortured, and speaks obviously extremely good at she has a uh a merchant shipping crewing company. She provides sailors for merchant ships, it's called Marpo, and she's obviously a pretty well-to-do business lady. Well, during the interview, she keeps dropping all these little snippets of information about charity projects that she's doing, and she finishes up by telling me about she makes drones and small bombs. So at the end of the interview, she said, Would you like to see my drone factory? Well, so when a beautiful Ukrainian lady with waist-length hair and fashion clothes and her, you know, her luxury office apartment says, Would you like to see my drone factory? Of course, you know. I said, Well, of course I do. And so she following day, she whisps around, she picks me up in a white Jaguar SUV with leather seats. Right. I mean, she's a business lady, she does very well for herself. And her desk was a big, I mean, you know, Ukraine is a modern country with people that make plenty of money and and great infrastructure. And she has a friend with her ant on, and we go off, and we pull up outside this department store, and then there's a set of steps down below the department store, and then when we get down this huge big metal door, and it had it used to be an underground gun shop, and now it's where her team make these drones. And it was like doing it was like a James Bond movie where Q was in there designing something, and she had all these young guys in there, they're like mad scientists making these drones. They had a four-wheel drone, they showing me the bomb casings, and then they had a room with computers where they trained them on a simulator to fly the drones, and then they were showing me videos of how they trained them to drop um like a Pepsi bottle full of water initially. I guess they tried with bombs and had a few bad results. Yeah, you gotta get that right. Right, and then the young lad started showing me some of their you know their kid their kills, which I don't know, you can see it on the internet, but there's something quite graphic about some guy showing you one of his drones actually, you know, doing what it does to humans. And and I was just, you know, I was just in another world at this point. And then she says, Well, look, we're taking them into Kherson tomorrow. And and I said, Well, shall I join you? And she said, Yes. Well, if you're not familiar,

Into Kherson: Risk, Lattes, Resilience

Speaker 01 26:40

Khassan has been liberated seven months after the war, but it's still under a really heavy attack. It's one of the more dangerous cities in Ukraine. Um, Kharkiv is very dangerous as well because it's close to the border. And what I didn't realize was the press pass I'd had the year before didn't have any dates on it, but it was actually a date. I didn't think to renew it because we have press passes in America and you just use them every year. And so the first thing is we get to one of these checkpoints, and the soldier starts bitching because my credential was out there, because I was trying to use my press credentials to go in, and and of course, you don't you don't argue with Victoria, she sort of leaps out of the car and she's got a little cut-off shorts and her sandals and her hair, and she opens the trunk and shows this soldier boxes full of drones. And what had been really funny was when we actually took the boxes, the drones out of the drone factory. If you'd been going down the street that day, you'd have just seen an elegantly dressed woman and a couple of dudes loading boxes into the back of the car outside a department store. You'd have probably thought we were loading clothes and foot, you know, shoes shoes. Yeah. And so anyway, the guy wasn't going to be able to argue with Victoria about this, so they let us in. And then um, as we get into Kherson, the the towns on the road between have been the subject of a lot of really vicious fighting. So all the villages were blown up. There was just massive destruction going in, and you know, we were there was shit blowing up on the horizon. You see the black plumes of smoke where things were exploding. And we go into Kherson, and it was just like driving into this post-apocalyptic environment. And you know, two years, I mean over two years, it's probably even I can't even imagine how bad it is now. Yeah. And here's Victoria just you know piloting the jag in her little fashion clothes, and she's you know, chatting away and sort of whizzing around bomb holes. Wow. And getting us into all sorts of shit with the Ukrainian military. At one point, we're we're down by the museum, which has been freshly blown up, and we're walking across this open area, and Anton's just absolutely he's like, Look, there's Russians across the river, and we were just absolute sitting duck if they had any snipers. And he's Victoria. And the next thing, some Ukrainian military guy comes out and chases us out of there, and then we get chased out of somewhere else, and then we go across the river, and there's a block post, and the next thing is all these machine guns in the window, and Victoria is this somehow we get into there. Oh my goodness, and there's artillery going off, and there's missiles coming in. Absolutely the craziest, craziest day. And and two of her friends from the military came and took the drones, and we uh went into an underground restaurant, and I'm sitting in this underground restaurant, and I'm trying to process everything that's going on going on with all of this stuff, and the guy just brings me a latte with one of those little hearts on it.

Speaker 00 29:51

Oh my gosh, in the midst of all of that.

Speaker 01 29:54

Yeah, you just Anton had a coke, we had some soup, you know. There's some music playing on the radio. Just like yeah, it was just you know just so peaceful, really, to be sitting in this beautiful restaurant just having a nice meal. How does this work? Outside is destruction and artillery and missiles, and and here they are just you know carrying along. So she made a really, really great day. Great, I mean, great story. And and when we were going in, Anton had said, you know, put your cameras away. Um, because obviously I didn't have a journalistic pass to go in there. So I was kind of even though the guy let me in, I was kind of like a civilian or a volunteer. So on the way out, we get we get hustled at this checkpoint. And the guy goes, Are you a journalist? I'm like, Well, you know, not really. So he sees my camera bag and he wants to look at my camera, my my the stuff on my camera. And Anton told me, I think this would not have been pleasant to have got, you know, to have been essentially not obeying the rules. I mean, Ukrainians are pretty strict on this stuff. And so I grabbed the camera I hadn't used and I showed him some images in the back of Odessa and the kids. And I thought

The Gas Station Moment: Purpose Clarified

Speaker 01 31:15

maybe he'd be happy because now will you show me the other one?

unknown 31:18

This is it.

Speaker 01 31:20

So I grabbed the second camera, and with my back to him, I I turn it on and spin the playback wheel. Right? And I'm like, please land on a photo. There's not something that's close to the case. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Please don't land on the photo of a blown-up building or some you know military installation. And I show him the camera and I press the playback button, up pops a kid in Odessa, and he seems satisfied. Oh my goodness. You want to talk about you want to talk about sweating it out. I was thinking, oh my god, this is me in the Ukrainian jail. Oh, yes. So we get back in the car, and of course, Victoria and Anton, and we'd picked Roman up um Enkis on it. They were just laughing and laughing, and that of course was the big joke going home. Yeah. So there was so much kind of joy and laughter at periods during that day, and again, not what you would think that's going on in the middle of a war.

Speaker 00 32:20

Yeah.

Speaker 01 32:22

And this friendship and this bond, and I keep in touch with all of them. I see the Anton, I see Victoria. We all we all keep in touch. Roman, um, he's doing a lot of work with um actually he he did a lot of work to change the laws for civilians who've been um imprisoned and captured so that they don't have to join the military because of the laws inside Ukraine. Um, there was no provision to say, oh, a civilian who's been taught captured and tortured doesn't have to go to the military because of his mental problems. I mean, it was just yeah, there was a martial law, and civilians have to go to the military. So Roman has been instrumental in changing in changing that. And uh so, like I said, I mean, these are just amazing stories, amazing people, nothing that you would have imagined. And so when I left them, I headed I headed out to Hharkiv, and I wanted to go see some rotary people doing some really great things after having met Boris and some rotary people in Odessa. But I was still struggling, Ron, with this idea of needing the big story. And I wasn't doing, you know, what am I doing here? Is any of this valuable? It sounds quite valuable now, but at the time I wasn't feeling that. So I was out on a very lonely road, it's very agricultural country. And if you think of Lviv in the west, Kyiv, the capital city, and Odessa and Kharkiv, if you think of them as islands and they're connected by a long strip of road, which is like just farmers' fields, it's all crops, sunflower, you know, wheat, corn, barley, bits and pieces. So that so these cities almost feel like islands in a sea of crops with some small villages. So you spend quite a lot of time alone just out in the countryside. And I started to really question what my purpose was on that second trip. And as I said, the first trip I very much processed my emotions, and I was really in people's stories, but I wasn't quite putting it together. And I stopped at the gas station, and an old lady helped me find the loo and get a coffee. And then when I was outside having my coffee and sandwich, she came out and somehow we started communicating a little bit Google Translate. And I showed her a magazine story I'd done

Land Rovers for Life: Operation Freelander

Speaker 01 34:40

from the previous year. So she realized I was a journalist and I'd come from America and was writing stories about it, and she just lit up, and we just hugged and held hands, and it was just this amazing moment of peace and love and motto. I mean, I was on my bike, yeah, in a peaceful moment, having this loving moment with this lady, and that was when I realized that that was what I was supposed to be doing in Ukraine was telling the stories that I'm telling you today for your listeners.

Speaker 00 35:16

Yeah.

Speaker 01 35:17

The lady at the gas station, Victoria, Roman, Kate with the Dead Body Collectors, Julia, who goes and takes care of marginalized people, even though there's a war on. And it just the light went on for me. And and and it was that small, that small moment with that lady actually was the biggest moment because it was just so powerful and made me realize what I was doing. And that so that that kind of fixed it for me that I was there to tell their stories.

Speaker 00 35:49

Yeah. Neil Yes. I'm sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off. Oh, sorry, I just said Neil. Oh, yeah, yeah. What I was gonna say is that, and I'll edit this part too, but a little bit. What I what I pick up from this is that from where I sit, you know, I have a day job and I travel more often than I'd like sometimes, and have a long commute and have corporate audits, and we have in difficult situations sometimes. And I'm so good at falling into my own feeling of despair of why is this world so difficult for me right now? I've got to go hop on my bike, I gotta go feel better, and all that stuff. And it's just those little bitty pity pity things that I can so easily find myself falling into. And I think all of us could say that, so many of us. But then these stories that you're sharing of people who are in real life-threatening, real life-threatening situations all around them, seeing destruction, despair, death all around them. Yet they go from day to day, they get out of the car, they go and make the difference, they go and and and and start constructing things such as these drones that are for a purpose, for the greater good. And then you you have the people who are there too, the locals there, again, surrounded with all these terrible, terrible situations, and they make you a latte with a heart in it. Wow, what kind of person can do that? That's just that's just what has hit me through this conversation, through these stories, is that what kind of person can persevere when it just makes me lift realize I need to lift myself up out of my own little pity party, you know, oftentimes.

Speaker 01 37:42

Well, and and the lady at the gas station, um, you know, she had bricklayers' hands, and she was obviously not a young lady, and and she's scrubbing the toilets and scrubbing the toilet floors. Why? There's a war on right? Why does that toilet need to be spotlessly clean? Why do the floors need to be mopped? Yeah, I mean, there's a sense of dignity and pride, and you're right, and I think you know, part of why it is is my admiration. I mean, why have I been back six times? Why have I raised the money I've raised? Why do I advocate for Ukrainian people every day? Is that this such incredible people, they're so polite, they are so they're not, you know, it takes a little minute to to break them down. I mean, they're quite stoic on the exterior, but you know, once you get to know them, they're they're very, very kind people. But they're just really polite, they're really meaningful people. I mean, sure, I mean they have criminals, I mean, they have corruption, I mean they they're government system. They're gonna yeah, their government system is is only 30 years away from being Russian Soviet system. It's not perfect, no system is, but it's getting better. And I think that that lady just she changed everything for me, understanding that that's what I needed to do is tell their stories, and it really changed my my perspective as I went on then to Kharkiv and Dinepro City and back again. Was okay, I know what I'm doing now, I'm telling their stories. And you know, I've done four more trips since, and uh obviously um some of the when I was in Dnepro City, sorry, when I was in Kharkiv, I ran across a guy called Gordon Jackson Hopps, and I'm sitting in the sitting in the hotel, and Kharkiv gets horribly hit. Um you know, there was some strikes when we were there. Um they weren't super close. I mean, more sound like thunder in the distance, but you know, somebody's getting smacked, and I look out the window and I see this

Frontline Delivery and Perspective

Speaker 01 40:00

this uh lander of a freelander, camouflaged, beautifully done, prepared, and all the stuff. And I see this sort of very tidy gentleman with sunglasses. And short story it's Gordon Jackson Hops. And Gordon had become incensed when the war broke out, and he started uh he started running medical supplies to Poland, and one thing led to the other, and the next thing he's in Ukraine, and he'd started a foundation called Operation Freelander. And what he was doing is with um a couple called Sue and Norba to have Freelander specialists, they only work on Land Rover Freelanders. They they they source these Land Rover Freelanders, they restore them, put new wheels, tyres, engines if they need them, and then Gordon they drive them down to Ukraine and give them to the military, and they fill them full of whatever they can give them. And I witnessed this and I made contact with Gordon, and he started to tell me he told his Rolex to finance one of them, and he takes his vacations and his sick days, and and he's just he's just moved heaven and earth over the time that the war had been going on to get as many of these freelanders into Ukraine as possible. And right now we have one en route to the front lines um as we speak. Wow. Being actually dealing, I think I've I've raised I've raised the money in driven or sent seven since I met Gordon. So as I was meeting Gordon in the hotel and listening to the story of the Land Rovers, my whole life connected, and I realized I was looking at my childhood through the window of this hotel with this Land Rover. And as Gordon said, Putin's alarm clock was going, the air raid sirens were going, and we weren't sleeping terribly well. And I realized this was my childhood. And as a kid growing up in England in a single-parent household on welfare with no money and a pretty hard scrabble existence, every Tuesday and Thursday we would turn the television on and we would watch a children's TV show called Blue Peter. And it was a couple of couple of guys, John and Peter, and uh originally a girl called Val and another girl, then another girl Leslie. And every week they would go on an adventure, bake a cake, bring a baby elephant into the studio, you know, test drive a monkey bike, um, go on a holiday. You know, I remember Peter had to go learn to ride a speedway bike one time. And you know, they would just do all these different adventures and things. But once a year, they would go to Africa and they would identify projects of need, usually in Ethiopia, current-day Eritrea, and they would come back to the studio and say, you know, okay, we need that, and we want you kids to go out and run around the neighborhood and collect as many knives, forks, and spoons as you can and send them into us, and we'll melt them down and turn them into money. Well, uh so as kids, they'd put a thermometer. Well, guess what? They used to buy Land Rovers and tools and grain and stuff that went with it. And so all summer long, as kids, we'd be running around the neighborhood pestering and badgering all the neighbors, because in those days you could your children could go out and knock on the neighbor's door.

Speaker 00 43:43

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 01 43:44

Um, and we would collect as much of this what is now recyclable materials. It wasn't called recycling in those days, and we and I think the post office must have had a deal to send it for free because I know my mother couldn't have afforded the postage because she was we had no car, and you know, life was pretty hard to travel. But we would eagerly tune in every week to watch the thermometer going up, and then the great day would come when they would drive all the Land Rovers into the studio, and of course, it was filmed in you know, the way filming would suddenly they'd be off in Africa. And and this was the greatest joy of my childhood was watching it, you know,

Trains, Loss, and Listening

Speaker 01 44:25

and sometimes I think back on what we collected, we probably really didn't buy as much as a spare tire or a few lug nuts, but you couldn't tell a kid that we would that was our donations that we sent those to landowners, we sent the grain, we sent the tools. And I'm sitting, and it's three o'clock in the morning, and you know, there's missile strikes, and you're in a war, and and and it the light goes on. I'm looking at my childhood. Gordon Jackson Hops embodies everything that was joy in my childhood. He's rolling up his sleeves, he's mucking in, he's raising money, and he's bringing Land Rovers into a place of need because those freelancers get used for evacuation. Yeah. Because what I had learned as superhumans, that when the boys get hit, and it's getting worse and worse, obviously, with the drones, the difference between losing a limb or dying is a lot in the time it takes to get them to medical care. Oh, yeah. So if the tunicate's on too long, bang, the limbs gone. So what I realized is that these Land Rovers uh are vital to life-saving stuff, they're vital for supplies. But like I said, more importantly, I was now seeing this was my childhood right in front of me. And I said to Gordon, I said, mate, I'm gonna help you. I've got to be involved. And since the summer of 2023, there's two years now, I've actually raised the money for seven. Oh taken in and I've driven, personally driven three times to the front lines to deliver the ones I've raised with others.

Speaker 00 46:04

Yeah.

Speaker 01 46:05

And um, we've been in some pretty hairy situations down on the front.

Speaker 00 46:10

Oh, I can't imagine.

Speaker 01 46:12

You know, with um it's pretty dodgy down there, and but we take them to the military, we drop them off. We know I saw a couple of the ones we delivered. Um, I'd I've only been back a couple of months, and and you know, they're so useful to the to the guys and what they can do. So, anyway, just a little aside. So, yeah, that was just absolutely really beautiful part of being there. This this, you know, I I get to be, I get to do what was the joy of my childhood.

Speaker 00 46:42

Yeah. So that's beautiful. And and even as a kid, did you understand that what you were doing wasn't for yourself, it was for this other, different, greater purpose?

Speaker 01 47:00

No, I don't think I did. I mean, I think one of the things it sort of taught me was without really realizing it, was we never thought of ourselves as poor. Um, you know, we were the we were the kids that had to have school lunches, and my mother had to serve passionate on our clothes. So we used to get kind of a bit bullied and picked on when I look back on it, but somehow I managed to shrug that off, I think. And um so it wasn't, but but I think knowing that there were people in the world that were so much worse off than us. And of course, you know, we grew up as kids, oh finish your dinner, kids, just kids starving in Africa. Oh God, we're just on the thing. I mean, that didn't that never wore well as kids. Yeah, and but no, I just think that it it allowed me to think that we weren't so badly off. There were people worse than us, and you know, it just it it just there's so much joy in that, and I realize that that's been and I'm not saying that you know raising the money to Ukraine and Purer has been a joy because sometimes it's not, but it does give a lot of joy, and there's just some wonderful moments, and obviously I wanted to talk about peace and love and motto, and I'm gonna have to preface this because I love Gordon. Um he's a Geordie, which means he's from Newcastle, and traveling together in May of 2024 with these the first two landrobes that we took in, we really began to get to know each other. And I gotta tell you, Ron, yeah, I don't mind telling you. If you put Gordon and I together and we talked about what we were like as kids and teenagers, if you could think of something bad a kid could be doing, between the two of us we did it. And and mercifully we didn't end up in jail, mercifully we didn't end up getting shot, and mercifully we don't have criminal records because we were a pair of little bastards, and we were sort of sat there, so we were sort of having this revelation, and I said, you know, I'd love to write this story about this one day, God, but he still works for the council, and and probably it wouldn't be the greatest thing for his job for them to find out his ferry check had passed. And of course

Humanity of Ukrainian Soldiers

Speaker 01 49:15

he's turned it all around, and hopefully so have I. Yeah, um so we we're in the city of Lyman, um, which is down on the front lines, down there it's uh down near Konstantka, um, it's down near Kremator Slavians, and it's right on the front, and everything around us is destroyed. Literally the only thing left living is dogs and rats. And we're standing in front of this blown-up building, we've come across bridges that were blown up. It's just a it's not an unstressful place to be, and the artillery is just the sound of the artillery is just booming, you know, small arms fire, stuff's exploding, and we're just standing there, and Gordon turns around and he goes, This shit's not for wallflowers. I just love that guy. That's great. It was just absolutely amazing, and you just had to laugh, you know. Yeah, so so yeah, so this sort of transformation through these trips coming out of um that there was the there's one thing that really w I wanted to speak on. Um Gordon's friends Macar and Roman had a stay in a house, and then they they sort of you know they took us around because our train didn't leave till four o'clock the following afternoon, and we had an 18-hour train ride back to Lviv. It's a lot big country, so it's an overnight train, of course. We messed up and didn't take any food or drink. And we get on the train, and there's this lovely young lady on the train, and she spoke really good English, and she heard us talking, we're like, God, you know, because we we messed up somehow. We ended up going to the wrong train station. But and I just sent to Gordon, I said, Gordon, I said, we're on here for 18 hours. We don't have anything to drink, we don't have anything to eat. I said, We're kind of a bit, we might be in trouble here. And Irina, the little girl, goes, Oh, don't worry, there's a um there's a like a train attendant, and he has a he has a small store, you'll be able to get some water and some stuff, and let me help you. So she takes us down there, and I get some pot noodles and a couple of bottles of water and a coffee. And so anyway, with a couple of couple of bottles of water and a pot noodle and a coffee, we're ready for our 18-hour train ride. Oh my well, we're in this old Soviet-era train, and it leaves at a Krematovsk at about 4:40, 4:20 in the afternoon, and Gordon climbs up into his bunk, and I'm sitting down with Irina, and she's chatting and she speaks really good English. And I said, You know, Irina, have you suffered during the war? And oh my goodness, she tells me the story of evacuation, being a refugee, her husband going to war, he went missing. It took five months before they identified his body, leaving her. And this little girl, and and you know, and as we were talking, the light was fading, and Gordon was upstairs listening to his music and his headphones. It was just me and her, and there was another soldier there, but he was asleep with his headphones. And and I just, you know, we were just kind of sitting there, and and I think our legs were touching, we were quite close, and that thing. And I just reached out and I held her hand, and there was this times run where she would stare in his face and just vibrate, and she would just be like, Why are they killing us? Why are they killing us? And and I think that moved me to another level inside this progression of journey that I've been taking inside Ukraine of really beginning to understand how I need to be a better listener, be a better interviewer, be more empathetic, and allow people like Irina to share these really, really tragic things with me that I'm not used to dealing with or not used to listening to. And so that was a big, big moment, I think. And yeah, when we were finished, she said, I don't know, she said, I just haven't been able to tell that story to anybody, and I couldn't tell it in Ukrainian. And I said, Well, I hope you don't

Why Motorcyclists Connect

Speaker 01 53:35

mind. And she was just holding my hand and said, No, thank you, thank you. I really needed to tell somebody, and it was so emotional. And again, you want to talk about love. I mean, this feeling, it was just such a loving feeling to be sitting with this little girl, and I hope it aren't brute, she's in her 30s and got a couple of kids, but to me, she's a little girl, and just knowing that she was able to share this pain and this suffering, but then feeling like there was I don't know, it was it was like a loving moment, if that makes sense. It was yeah, yeah, it was good, it was really good for her, and and it yeah, it it didn't was didn't leave her crying and not wanting to talk, or I mean she actually felt really good about it. So yeah, so anyway, I think I I hope this sort of describes my process of my journey in Ukraine and and brings something to the listeners about Ukraine that you don't see when you see that picture of the lady with a shopping bag going by the blown-up building, or the picture of the blown-up factory, or the bridge blown out, or the tanks firing, yeah, or you know, people crying, you know, dead bodies in the street. I mean, all of that does exist. I'm not taking anything away from that. But this Ukraine is so much more.

Speaker 00 54:48

There's yeah, there there's individuals, there obviously, there's families, there's emotions, there's there's young people, old people, people just like you and me, who are just in this situation that's just so unreal. And it's just um I so admire you who uh have taken the literally the physical risk and the emotional risk and all that to step out and just like like you did, just sit next to someone and hold their hand when that hand needs to be held right now. And um, I don't know if this is if this brings us full circle or not. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does. I don't know. We I feel like that we as motorcycle riders, we're a little bit different breed, maybe. Those of us who ride for pleasure, those who ride for work, maybe it's different. But those of us who ride for pleasure, we know what the risks are. We go out and ride because taking that risk into account. We enjoy ourselves, we enjoy nature, many of us enjoy the camaraderie and things. So that makes us a little bit different. And I think the the key part there too, I hope, is that most of us that are motorcycle riders love that connection with a stranger. At the gas station, at the coffee shop, someone comes up and asks you about your bike, or you ask them better yet, and you've got a relationship that started there, and all of a sudden that person that you just visited with is not someone just in the helmet and the leather jacket. All of a sudden you have met someone who has a real life and has been through maybe things that you haven't been able to comprehend. You would not know unless you talked to them and took the time to invest in them and to ask. So I know that's just hitting on the very, very top surface of done, but seems like there's a correlation there.

Speaker 01 56:47

No, and I think to your point, I think, you know, not saying this to say we're better than anybody

How We Can Help and Hope

Speaker 01 56:55

else, but I think because I can't speak to other groups, but I think as a as a group, most cyclists, most cyclists are a very giving group. There's a lot of motorcycle-based charities, toys for tarts and poker runs and and stuff of that nature that's definitely geared to giving back and doing some good. I think most cyclists are a pretty generous um group of people. Yeah, yeah. Um, I yeah, I can't speak to the car world and what they do, but I know that most you know, generally there's always quite a lot of that type of stuff. And yeah, there was a couple of things I wanted to share on the uh, you know, in this space that I'm at down near the front lines with with Gordon and coming back on the train, and and there's two things that really stand out in my mind. We you know, we watch movies and we see news items, and you know, you if if someone had to build an identicate of an idea of a soldier, you know, you we've all got this kind of Rambo idea about this, you know, very macho, very you know, aggressive uh human and with guns and fighting and stuff. And we were in a restaurant in Slavian and it was full of soldiers. And you know, you're very close to the front, and and potentially they're not they've not come from battle. I mean, maybe they're more supply line stuff, but maybe some of them have. I I can't speak to that. And behind the counter of the the buffet thing, beautiful food, I mean lovely food, beautiful ladies, some young girls that are very attractive, middle-aged women that are really nicely dressed, and everybody, all the soldiers are just standing there in a line, totally polite, no one's heckling, no one's bothering the ladies, no one's doing not saying a soldier from this country would necessarily do that, but there was just this sense of respect and kindness, and then the one lad held the door open for me to go to the bathroom, and I'm like, you're the one fighting the war, dude. Get in there and get your business taken care of, and yeah, it's just it was really quite I don't know, just to see how peaceful and respectful and and calm and and everything that they were was really, really interesting. And the second time that I had to ride the train back on one of the deliveries, I had met a guy, okay, Roman, a very popular name. And I mean, this guy was a warrior. I mean, he was a few sizes bigger than me. I mean, he was a pretty powerful and imposing looking guy, he had a very big, thick Ukrainian beard. And when he found out, obviously, I was some American, you know, here doing aid and stuff. We were using translate, he went and put his military stuff on, and he drives the Troop transport into battle. And at that time it was in in uh in Belgrade or Pursk. And you know, he was saying that it's just it's making him go gray. It's just so stressful. And you know, he's telling me stories that just you know kind of make your hair go gray listening to them. And and there was a young boy there, and he was about 15 years of our age, and he had glasses, and

Closing Gratitude and Future Plans

Speaker 01 1:00:25

and he was quite frail and slight, but he spoke pretty good English, and he was translating for Roman for me. And we were going back and forth, and all of a sudden, the the young boy, and excuse me for forgetting his name, he reached out and he took, offered his hand to Roman, and he thanked him in English for what he was doing, and he thanked him in Ukraine and Roman. And I just I felt it just seemed like this really brave act for a very small, scrawny young lad to reach out to this this warrior who's just come out of the battle.

unknown 1:01:05

Yeah.

Speaker 01 1:01:09

And this big beard, this big muscular guy. I mean, the guy was a warrior. And this it must have taken a great act of the bravery for the kid to kind of shake his hand and do this. And and I just saw the way that Roman interacted with him, shook his hand, and I said, you know, and I wrote about this afterwards, and Roman has lost for all he's seen and all he's gone through, he has not lost his humanity.

Speaker 00 1:01:37

Yeah. Humanity, that's the word that was coming to me too.

Speaker 01 1:01:41

And he's going home to see his daughter, he's on leave, and he's gonna stop by and see his sister, and he knows what he's fighting for. He's got something to go home to, and in that moment, I'm like, what are the Russians fighting for? Right? Roman knows why he's fighting, he knows why he might die. And I just saw the humanity in that man with the way that he treated that young lad. And I just thought, that is such a strength of Ukrainian people. They know what they're fighting for. Yeah. They're fighting for their wives, they're fighting for their children, they're fighting for their mothers, they're fighting for their home, they're fighting for their ideology. And it was just so powerful, Ron, you know, to be standing there and sort of these moments that are kind of like they're real-time moments happening, and they're just they're very, very emotional.

Speaker 00 1:02:36

Yeah. So well, that's beautiful, Neil. And you know, and it and it comes back to again a hats off and a virtual handshake to you because you you're taking that step out at high risk to both your physical, mental, and financial wellness, and um stepping out to to tell those stories and again to take that hand that needed to be held at the moment, and you've done that in so many different different ways. So I'm just proud to not only uh be able to call you my friend now, even though we have not yet met in person, but that's gonna happen as soon as possible.

Speaker 01 1:03:22

I think you know, thank you for such a kind compliment. But you know, hopefully what you've seen or what this chat has been about is you know, I didn't come to this immediately. I mean, I had to slog my way through this with multiple visits and mistakes and and learning and figuring it out. I mean, it's taken, you know, maybe maybe someone smarter or brighter than I would have figured it out real quick and be doing the job right away. I mean, it's taken me all of these different trips and all of these different experiences to get to here.

Speaker 02 1:03:53

Yeah.

Speaker 01 1:03:54

So it was definitely an evolution. And I think that's why when I started this and I said, this is about you know, peace, love, and motto. The motorcycle was the vehicle that took me in. The peace that I found there is not peace in a sense of no war, it's the peace that I found in the moments with people. And the love is this the love that I have for Ukraine, the love I have for the people I've met there. And these moments that you can only really describe as love. And I think it's such a juxtaposition to what people are being fed on mainstream media about the war. Yeah. You know, this is not what somebody sees on the news or reads in the newspaper, or you know, these these moments, these small moments that to me they're the biggest moments. Because they there's to me they're so powerful. And and and I don't know that you know somebody working for a publication or a journalist or TV person, maybe they're not allowed to do that, or they don't get involved at that level, or maybe there's something you shouldn't do, but hey, that's what I do. You know, I'm there fundraising and doing what I can, and and this is how it's impacted me. And you know, I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you and share this with you know with the listeners and um yourself tonight, because hopefully maybe someone can hear what we've talked about tonight and can think a little bit differently about.

Speaker 00 1:05:28

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to as we begin to wrap up, Neil, specifically, what can you tell our me and our listeners how can we help?

Speaker 01 1:05:42

I think there are a thousand ways that you can help. And I think even if it's simply listening to the podcast and thinking in your mind the people in Ukraine are just like you and I. They they want to go to work, they want to ride their motorcycle, they want to have their children, and they are under horrendous oppression. And just thinking and understanding that maybe that creates an energy in the world that's not a negative thought towards them. It could be um going onto my Facebook page and just clicking a like button or posting a message when I post about a Ukrainian person saying, you know, stay strong. Um and it could be finding a charity um that you know and trust and feel comfortable with is doing something to help Ukraine. Um there's I I just think there's so many different ways, and maybe just even if you you think positively about this beautiful country and these beautiful people that are under this horrible oppression, and even if the thing the one thing you feel that you take from this is feeling better about your life, yeah, understanding what we've got, that would that to me would be even that would be something really super helpful, you know. Yeah, because uh you know it's it's it's just tragic what they have to go through every day.

Speaker 00 1:07:21

It is. There is hope. There is hope, and there's hope because there's people uh like you and the people that you have mentioned who have a positive spirit, who have uh a heart for a future that will be uh healed and wonderful again.

Speaker 01 1:07:37

And um yeah, and maybe even you know, share this podcast with a friend who might benefit from this listening. Because at the end of the day, we want to feel good about what we do in our life. If what we do in our life is helping someone else and that makes us feel good, well, if that's selfish, let's just be selfish.

Speaker 00 1:08:00

Yeah. You know, for those for those listening, again, we we started this conversation uh for an hour plus, and before we started recording, and the the topic was various things, but one of them is why am I here? What is my purpose? Do I have a purpose-driven life? I think that was uh that was a booker's. I think that was uh I mean, and I feel, you know, I feel extremely grateful.

Speaker 01 1:08:26

I mean, Andre, my very, very dear friend, he was our fixer in 2022. And he was just amazing, and he still is amazing. And now he's the press agent for superhumans, and he goes to that for those young lads, those young amputes every single day. I mean, he's the hardest working lad. And he said it best, you know, he said you processed Ukraine through your heart. Yeah. And I think that that's why I've been so you know attached and and and keep going back. And and I think it's a great privilege um to be to to hear the stories I hear and to be told the stories I have and to be handed such a precious um commodity, you know, to handle. And you know, get obviously my hope is that you know, I wish I had the type of audience that um that some of these big mainstream media outlets have so that we could be sharing the stories because I feel inside of these stories there's so much inspiration for people.

Speaker 00 1:09:31

Yeah.

Speaker 01 1:09:33

I mean, be inspired. I mean, I'm inspired. I mean, it it should inspire us hopefully to do better things. So yeah, we'll just keep trying and um we'll probably head back to Ukraine, I think, in next year.

unknown 1:09:47

Uh-huh.

Speaker 01 1:09:48

Well, these sorts of challenges going on. Um, if you know, obviously Wellspring My Foundation, we're supporting an orphanage in Alexandria, and we support the children's hospital in Lviv, and then we support a little lad called Roman who was blown up in Vinitsa. Um, actually, the missile strike that we went to um in 2022, we stopped to photograph some combine harvesters, and if we hadn't stopped to photograph them, we would have been right there. So that was the day we dodged uh the proverbial bullet, and then yeah. So uh I really appreciate you having me on, Ron. Thanks for the uh opportunity to share. I hope I hope some of that made sense.

Speaker 00 1:10:28

Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Neil. As you were speaking just now, and I don't know if it came over the microphone at all, but a helicopter flew over, flew over really low, and I know where that helicopter was going. It was going from east to west from the local hospital here in uh I feel certain. From the local hospital here in England, it was going up into the mountains to do a rescue. I feel certain. So just another timely reminder that there are people who step out into the void and take that risk, hopping on that, whether it's hopping under the helicopter, jumping out into the mountains to find someone who's lost, or stepping out, like in the case you have. And again, stepping out into the void where somebody's got to make a difference, and maybe it's got to be me. And I appreciate Neil that you have been that guy. So thank you, buddy.

Speaker 01 1:11:15

Well, thank you very much. Uh let me just uh turn the video on so we can say goodnight.

Speaker 00 1:11:20

Yeah, I'll stop recording here.