#2543 - MrBallen

>> The Joe Rogan experience. >> Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. [MUSIC] >> Come on, this is crazy, I can't believe I'm here. >> I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here.

>> I do, this is like how I ground it. I've been watching you like they're us the world for years. I've seen so many clips of this space. Somebody references to Jamie and to be here right now is very cool. So I'm honored, thank you for having me.

>> Thank you, thank you, I'm glad you're here.

>> Yeah, it is always weird when you go someplace where you like,

first time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way.

“>> Like you're in the building like, what the fuck?”

This is the actual Howard Stern show that I used to listen to on the radio. Like, we've really freaked me out, I couldn't sleep the night before. >> I did yoga, my hotel room, try to calm down. >> When was this, when did you do this? >> Long time ago, 2,000, probably one or something like that.

Was this like prime fear factor days? >> You know what, I might have done it before I did fear factor. >> Great show, by the way, thank you. >> Great show, seriously. >> It was a good sign our society was about to crumble.

>> When his story ends, go back and look at the decline of society. They're like, man, when they start making people eat dick on TV, they start making people eat animal balls and animal dicks on TV. >> That might have been.

>> And then it was, that was Rogan's interview on that show, on what's his name again?

I did blacked out the guy you just said, you had an interview with. Howard Stern. >> Howard Stern. >> Well, it was like, we did fear factor. It started airing right after September 11th, literally right after.

>> Fear factor days. >> Yeah. >> And one of the narratives, one of the reporters asked me, and one of those stupid press

“junket things you have to do, was, is, do you think it's appropriate?”

To scare Americans right after what just happened at the level of what fuck he talks on me now? >> Like, what are you talking about? It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks. >> Okay. >> Very simple.

>> Shut the fuck up.

Watch it, or don't watch it, who cares?

But it's like, if you wanted to look at like, where's the society, so it used to be like, friends, sign-felt. >> Yeah. >> The good old days. >> It's a good old day.

>> It's Miami Vice. >> It's like, it was television shows that were like shows, and then it also had anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal. >> That's true. >> That was the threshold.

>> Yeah. Pretty good. It's weird because that kind of ushered in social media. It's very similar in a lot of ways. Like the people that were willing to go on these reality shows, especially stuff like

big brother, where you just live in a house with a bunch of people, like how fucking weird. You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation, and the producers are fucking, you know, my husband talking a lot of shit behind your back, you might want to get ahead of this. >> What?

>> My guy couldn't ever do that. >> Yeah. >> No, well, you're not stupid. >> Or you're not young, or you're not desperate. We had a lot of people that were just in like credit card debt, and they were like, look,

if I can win this fucking thing. Like normal people. They're like, look, it could be fun. I'll tell my kids about it. We've been watching this forever, and I can win $50,000 so I can pay off my credit card debt.

>> No, we'll do. Well, sometimes people have to do what they have to do, but there's also a lot of people that want attention in any way possible, and that's like, the people that are, you know, you see so many people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing to say, but they're just trying to find something where people pay attention to them.

It's running up to people and slapping them, throwing glasses of water in their face. Whatever they have to do, anything they have to do to get attention. And if you trace that back, it kind of started with reality shows, where people started to be able to get attention, just being a buffoon. There was a, I covered a store, so for those who don't know me, I tell a strange dark

and mysterious stories on the internet, and I covered a story that was like, the epitome of this. It's the idea of doing anything for clicks. I don't know the dates, but it was like within the past 10, 15 years, there was this group of, are there was this one Russian influence, this is, this is, I wanted to

search a 2010, and she wanted to do something really special for her birthday to document her birthday and get as many clicks as possible, and she filled this pool up with dry ice. Oh, Jesus. Water, plus dry ice, and she invited all her friends over, and they took, they documented themselves going into this pool.

“She is, I think, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers at the time.”

And so everyone's like, oh, it's the big start birthday celebration, I think it was live, and they go into the tub and they're using this plane, and then no one comes out of the tub, and it's just the silence, they all die, they all die from suffocation, I think it was. Not exactly sure how you die from dry ice, but it's, I think it eradicates the oxygen,

But it's like, how many people died, I'm going to say, it's like, yeah, three, there you go, three people. What? The first of all, like dry ice, you can't even get on your skin. Yeah, you only jump into a pool of it. I was thinking it was just tortured their skin.

Three died in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool. I wonder how much dry ice takes to kill three people.

“I think a better question is, what was the engagement like on that post?”

Because it's the one that's what it's all about. Look at the name, it got that Ena, the Denko. The popular Instagram influencer, there we go. Focusing on pharmaceutical products. What?

With more than a million followers.

Two people died of the scene, a third died in the hospital. Rusted is investigated from the city's head in the statement announced in the criminal probe into the incident. But you do not want to get arrested and go to jail in Russia. No, they don't fuck around. Generally not.

They do not fuck around. Ask Brittany Griner. They don't fuck around. She's out. Yeah, she's out.

But she did nine months. It's not. Was it nine or ten? I think she was sentenced for nine fucking years. And that was for marijuana possession at the end.

She just had a CBD vape pen. I mean, I guess it was probably marijuana. But it was a vape pen. And they jail, put her in jail. That's like hard court jail for nine fucking years.

Periodically, I'll see like images of Russian courtrooms. And I don't even know the stories.

But always it's like the accused is sitting inside of like a jail cell.

But in the middle of the courtroom, like iron bars. And you know, whatever they've done, they're facing the death penalty. They have to be worse. They pissed off Putin. Yeah, I don't know, man.

But it's a gnarly place over there. Yeah, you better be friends with the right people over there. You can't fuck around now, dude. You can't fuck around.

“That's why like, I mean, how many times have like political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned,”

or gotten murdered or not just him, but a bunch of other prominent figures that had other people running against them. It's a shady business over there, dude. Almost the shady is the shady is, man. Make sure for some very interesting people, though, Russian people are fascinating.

I've met a bunch of brilliant Russian people, you know. I found that they're very in my limited exposure guy. Yeah, here we go. And this guy tries to get out that little flip first. Yeah.

Oh, wow. He doesn't give up. He doesn't make it out. Oh, that's right. He goes through the roof.

He smart. I'm amazed that he was able to do that, though. What a fucking psycho. Look at him. He looks like a psycho, though.

He looks like you guys should be dead. Looks like a guy probably spent a lot of time in jail. Yeah. He was climbing through the bucket and pulling his pants off. They're going to daze him as nuts.

That's not okay. It's a rough spot on earth, tough people. How did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube? Yeah, well, I originally was in the military. I was a seal.

I did seven years in the teams. And then when I got out in 2017, I kind of drifted it a little bit, you know. I did some work with the charity, did some veteran charity work and I, I don't know. I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years. And I'm married, I got three kids, you know, some sort of like trying to figure it out.

I have this small pension coming in that's enough to sort of subsize, subsist on. But then I actually, I remember watching a lot of Gary V. And more specifically, I saw Gary V was just, every post he did. It was like, everybody, no matter how old you are, no matter what you're doing.

“You should be posting content online like everyone should be doing it.”

And when I was in the military, you're sort of in a bubble. I mean, you, you certainly have access to the internet and all the things that everybody else does in the civilian world. But especially in the SEAL teams, for my experience, you're so like tribal, you're all your time has spent really with your teammates or the team.

It's very isolated. And you don't even realize it. And so I was now, I didn't have social media when I got out. I wasn't up to date on modern stuff. And Gary V was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing.

This is what you do, you know, as a civilian, you post constantly. And I began, in addition to doing some charity work I was doing, just trying my hand at social media, you know, posting content, it's like so bad. It was, what was the intent? You know, honestly, there wasn't a clear intent other than, well, what the hell, like,

it doesn't cost, I'm already paying for the internet. I already own a phone that, effectively, the worst that'll happen is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about or maybe my friends and family will see. And it'll be embarrassing.

But my, I've always been someone that's been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing

I mean, if you think about seal training, a big part of it is you're raising your hand in a pretty public way, at least amongst your circle of friends and family, saying, I'm going to go see if I'm good enough. And a lot of people aren't. And so I went through that process and was, and I narrowly got through, but I sort of

had it in my mind that whatever they tried stuff. And so social media influenced heavily by Gary Vee. It was like, why not? I'll post content, maybe someone will be interested. Nothing worked.

Nothing worked. I mean, it wasn't even like, some was close, it was just nobody was paying attention. And it was like, okay, I'm not devastated, it is what it is. But then I, on a whim, I myself personally love strange, dark, and mysterious content. I used to love going to, there's a YouTube channel.

“I think it's still around now, it's called Dark Five.”

And all it is, it's just like crazy true mysteries around the world, you know, talking about how there's like, you know, potentially military bases hidden in Antarctica, and there's UFO sightings here. I thought it was fascinating.

And on a whim in 2020, when my social media career is basically non-existent, I was

at this water park in indoor water park with my wife and kids. A great wolf lodge in Pennsylvania, a great spot. And I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to try something. I haven't tried on on my social media attempt so far.

I'm going to tell like a crazy mystery, a true mystery that I think is really interesting. Because I think it's cool. It's the first time I'm not trying to copy trends or like do Gary V. content. I'm just going to like tell a story I like. And I pull out my phone and I tell this 60 second rendition of this, this mystery called

the Deatlaw of Past Mystery, are you familiar with us? No. Oh, great. It's a great story.

“I post this 60 second version of this story, but I'll tell you the story in a minute.”

I leave my phone in the room because I'm going to the water park in the water park. I don't want to get wet. So I leave it there, come back to hours later, millions of views on this video.

And I've never gotten views on anything and it's millions of views.

There's like just a few hours and a few hours, like 5 million views on this video. Why? Was it TikTok? Was it TikTok? It's an amazing story.

You probably have heard of it because it's one of those stories that it's made its rounds on the internet. Remember, I told the 60 second version was gritty, but it had the pictures and stuff. So in 1959, there were these nine hikers, actually there was 10. These 10, young, like 20 something year old hikers in Russia.

And they were like the best mountaineers in Russia at the time and they were going for there, what's called their level three hiking test, which sounds sort of lame, but it's effectively at the time in Russia. This is like the top credential for mountaineers. If you have this credential, you are the best mountaineer in the land.

And the way the test worked is, effectively, you're in a class of your own at this level already.

“It's like being a PhD student where you create your own material, you have to do that”

for this test. Tap out a route that you'll take that effectively checks off all the boxes of difficulty. You put this map down, somebody approves, this is going to be hard enough that if you successfully navigate this course that you've mapped out an X amount of time, if you do that, you pass the test, you're a level three mountaineer.

And so these 10 hikers, eventually, actually only nine left, one had a dental issue. So, he's spared himself. One of these hikers, they step out, I think it was in January of 1959, to do this hike that's been planned out. They brought cameras along.

And they're like this young, they're beautiful, they're all like couples, they're all friends. And it sounds like an awesome opening to a harm movie. This gets wild. If you've not heard the story, you're in for a treat because the pictures are crazy. They step out.

And the year old mountains is rugged. It's like these huge wind swept icy mountains. There's like a couple sections of forest, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be. And so these hikers step off, and they start taking pictures. And even though it's 1959, the pictures they're taking could be taken today.

It's almost like selfie style. They're smiling, everyone's in such a good spirits. They know they're going to pass this test. This is nothing for them. This is a victory lap.

And so off they go into the year old mountains. It's going to be like a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out, or I guess finished with their route. I think on February 12th. So it's a several week long hike, February 12th, and they were supposed to send some message

to say they were complete with the hike. February 12th comes, and no message is sent. No one gets word that these nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains.

And at first, to be honest, no one was really that concerned because one, there's nine

of them. They are quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land. If anybody can, can withstand the elements, it's them. And so there wasn't this immediate call to action.

concerned. They're like, we haven't heard from them. Where are they? Like, the government needs to get involved. Somebody needs to go looking for them.

And so eventually, at the end of February, a search party is launched for these hikers.

And at first it was just a couple of volunteers, it was some students from university.

It was not that serious of a search. But they eventually come across their campsite, and pictures are taken of their campsite. So from a strategic perspective, not that I claim to be a mountaineer. But if you were going to be setting up a place, if you were going to set your tent up in a really rugged environment like the year old mountains, the worst place to put your tent

is the side of a wind swept mountain where there are no trees. You'll get no, it'll be relentless wind. Any weather is going to be worse up there. You're on a slope, avalanche risk. I mean, the worst place you could put your tent is the side of a mountain.

And so they're looking for these missing hikers, who are the best hikers, and they find their tent. They're one canvas tent.

“That's right in the middle of this past called that I believe it's called the Deatlov”

Pass, which is why the mystery has been named the Deatlov Pass. It's just one lone tent, and there's no trees, nothing. It's just, and so they go up to the tent. The hikers are not there, but the tent is collapsed, as you see in the picture there. And they look inside the tent, and there's clothes like cold weather gear, there's pots,

and there's a lot of equipment that you would imagine, they would have brought with them out here. It's still in the tent. The hikers are missing, and they discover through whatever testing they did that there was a cut made in the tent that apparently was made from the inside out.

Someone took a knife, and I believe it was a knife, and cut the tent open. The inside out, and so they have all this equipment, and they're thinking, this is, we're in the middle of the year all mountains, it's like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's the middle of winter, you need this equipment to survive, where are the hikers? They left all their equipment in their tent, where are they?

And so the search expanded exponentially at that point, because now these volunteers have

discovered this incredible site, they can't find the hikers, a bigger search party comes

out there, and they discover footprints that are about a hundred feet away from where the tent was found. It's a little bit further down the mountain, and the footsteps, some of them are two boots, you know, matching boots of someone's steps, there's eight or nine prints that couldn't be sure.

Eight or nine sets of prints, some have only one boot on, like barefoot and a boot, others are just barefoot. And remember, this is the middle of winter in Russia. But they're looking at these prints, and if you look at the tent, it's been cut from the inside, they've clearly abandoned their tent, something's happened.

But the cadence of the footprints, as it picks up where they found it near the tent going down the mountain away from the campsite, they're walking. There's no sense of urgency, someone analyzed the footprints, and they're walking. So they're walking down the mountain, some without boots on, some with one boot on, leaving most of their equipment behind.

And so these, the search party, they follow these prints down to the edge of this ominous looking forest. There's only so many forest out there, this is one of them, this relatively small, but fairly dense forest. And the prints sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest.

And so they go into the trees, they're looking around, and they eventually come across this big cedar tree. And at the base of the cedar tree is this little burned out fire, like a puny little fire, and then crouched around it is one of the hikers, who's deceased.

“And I believe there's a picture, I don't think you can show it in your channel, but yeah,”

so there's a picture of one of the hikers, who is sort of almost like he was trying to get warmth against this fire, I don't think it's that one. There are some right near the cedar tree, I'm sure you can find them. This episode is brought to you by the farmer's dog. Here's a fun fact.

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One is dead and then another one is sort of nearby as well.

So there's two hikers that are both deceased from the initial thought as exposure. Hypothermia exposure. But critically there's a couple really weird things about it.

“One, I think that's got to be the picture right there.”

And that does not show the bodies, but the bodies are near. I think that's one right there to the right of that. That could be one of them, but picture two bodies sort of laying scattered nearby. They look at the tree that was at the base of where the fire was. And there are signs that something was trying to climb the tree.

There's broken branches and the like and there's human tissue that sounds way more extreme than it's supposed to, but there's human tissue, pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. And then they examined the bodies and they found one of the men had his hand, part of his hand. He had bitten off him, was in his throat, or it might have been human tissue as well.

But it was clearly in his mouth, like he was eating his own flesh, or it at least arrived in his mouth. So they're dead. And so the search expands within this forest. And they find three more hikers sort of about 100 or 200 feet away from this tree.

They're in similar condition. They're all deceased. They're all sort of ragged. Some of them are only wearing, you know, a little bit of clothing. They're all dead.

But they can't find the remaining four hikers. They continue to search for the next several days, but the weather was pretty severe.

And so ultimately they decided that at this point it's a recovery mission.

We're not going to find them. They're going to be dead. So they waited until the thaw in May. And once the snow had thought of it, they came out there. And they found this look to be like the, they believe that a snow fort had been made.

Maybe 300 feet away from that cedar tree, which they wouldn't have seen it during the winter. It was barely, you wouldn't have seen it. But it had melted down enough. And the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave.

And the, the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries. They're all deceased. The woman, or one of them had a crush injury. His chest was, they compared the injury to his chest equivalent to being struck by a car at high speed.

However, he had no or limited lacerations, like there was no impact to his body. His chest was sort of just inexplicably caved in. And so he's, he's been crushed.

“One guy I think his skull was fractured in a piece of a skull was missing.”

But the one that stands out is there was one hiker, a woman, who her lips and her eyes were missing. And some accounts claim that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed. And at least there was, there was like a very tight lines of how her, it was predation, animal predation, you'd see tearing.

This was like relatively straight lines where her lips were removed. And then another hiker, his eyes were also missing. And so they're all dead. And they also noticed that the, the woman was wearing men's clothing, or some clothing that was clearly not hers, like, and then one of the men, or a couple of the men, were wearing

some of her clothing. They had exchanged clothing, and they found trace levels, albeit small. But trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing, and they're all dead. And so now all the hikers have been found. And by this point, this is in May of 1960, I believe it is at this point.

This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent to being super viral today. Everybody was talking about it. The families are very outspoken about it. People want answers.

They want to know what happened. And so the Russian government, they, they launched this investigation into what happened out there in the Diyatlov Pass. And quickly, they shut down this investigation, like very quickly, they shut it down. The only things people heard were, there were numerous reports from military personnel

and some civilians who apparently were in the area in the Urals that claimed to have seen glowing orbs, like fireballs, they described them as being balls of fire and light. Shooting up and down. It's hard to tell if it was in the same area where the hikers were. But they were all these independent reports of strange lights over the Ural Mountains

that could corroborate or could line up with when the hikers all died. And then also lastly, the Russian government came out and said, well, we've determined

“that the nine hikers died from an overwhelming, or I think they called it a compelling force.”

And then they closed it. They, I believe they made it completely confidential, no, the families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down. And then in 2020, the reason I told it is because it sort of began making rounds, because

I believe some of the pictures had been verdacted. And you could see these pictures.

And so I said, the start of my video at the end of this 60-second clip, you're going to

Google two words, and it was Diyatlov Pass. And so I tease the story and said, Google it for yourself, and it's a whole rabbit hole

That's a crazy story, so compelling force is a very weird way to describe a bunch of people dying, compelling force. It might have been compelling natural force, but I, I, I, I, it was a sense, it was a death. Well, they, they, they could have come out and said that.

Right.

Then they basically said, oh, sure, it's not a translation issue.

There are several translations of how it came out, and it effectively amounts to some sort of compelling overwhelming force. Does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people die in autosary autopsy reports than we do, maybe? I'm not sure to be honest.

I'm not sure that. It might be like the way Russian language works and where they describe things, like they might have categories for deaths in compelling natural force, might just mean like, it could be not easing to deaths in the same category as like dying in the Mojave Desert.

“I think that that's, I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational”

happened. I mean, when, when you become hypothermic, you can have, it's called paradoxical undressing, where at your final stage of, when you're so cold, you actually get hot and you take your clothes off, and I would imagine if you're in the final stages of dying, you might do some funny things, and also you cut your lips off though.

Would you surgically remove your lips and where are the lips? Yeah, but then the question is like, is there an image of that, like, can we see it? Like, this is one of the things that people talk about all the time when it comes to crop circles, excuse me, a cattle mutilation, I put them on the same category, like certain folk knows what that is, but cattle mutilation, one of the weird things that they associate

with extraterrestrials or whatever they think it is, is that these cuts are very surgical, and it's not an animal, just tearing apart a cow that these cuts, they look like they're made with a scalpel, or perhaps some sort of a laser, and also these creatures are completely drained of blood. So, I'd like, I wouldn't, I've seen the cattle mutilation images, and you're like, wow,

that is strange. I'd like to see what their lips look like. They, I do know that actually, and it says nothing to do with the fact that I posted about it, because the de-out love pass gets posted about quite a bit, but I think it was in 2022, Russia actually re-examined the de-out love pass mystery now, and sort of said,

okay, we're going to look at it again, and they determined that an avalanche, like a slab of ice, broke loose, a huge slab, I can, this could be totally wrong.

I know it's an avalanche or a slab of ice that they basically said was responsible for

all of this. It led to them somehow becoming exposed hypothermia and the like, but it doesn't really answer a lot of the questions in my mind. It certainly could have happened, as I told you, for whatever, also, why did they stop in the middle of the wind slip side of the slope?

I mean, you're, they probably were trying to make their way across, and they couldn't do it, and they said we have to stop, but just stop right here. I can't go any further, and they all argued, and then they decided to put a tent right there. It's also, I mean, you know, that's better than anybody, when you get tired, you make poor

decisions.

“That's what they're trying to do to you and buds, right?”

They're trying to make you quit. They're trying to break you down, right? Yeah. When people get tired, they get very irrational, and they also have very little processing power.

They don't think about all the possibilities work to go wrong or go right, and they think they can't possibly keep going.

And the problem is if you have nine of you and one of you is a pussy, you know, you

got a real problem, like, do you let Bob die or do you stay here with Bob when you can keep going? And Bob is just like, we can't do this like Bob, like, that's the harm movie scene, right? This is always the sub one fucking guy. He's like, "Fuck this man, I'm fucking staying right here," he's like, "She's

but we can keep walking, keep walking." That, that real steps, and then take count, 10 steps more, and then just keep doing that. That, what you're describing is such a natural human thing, which is when someone, when the lowest common denominator in your group is struggling, even if you're frustrated a lot of times, people have an inclination to lowering what you're doing, to help that person

in, in still training, I mean what's made clear immediately is to some degree that's noble, to some degree, but a lot of times you're going to get more people killed that way. So those people that are going to hold you back in training have to be identified and kicked out now, right? And so it became clear that if you're the weakest, let's get properly getting left behind

in training. No, but then in real life, it's the reverse. Buds is a genius way of filtering out the posties. It's genius. Yes.

It's the best way.

“You have to, there's no, there's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able”

to handle extreme pressure and stress other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress. And there's some people through whatever, poor whatever reason at this stage of their life,

And maybe they will be in the future, maybe this is going to be a good experience for them,

“and they're going to toughen up and look, Gawkins talks about it all the time about one”

before you ever got into the seals, he was 300 pounds and he milkshakes and he was fat. He could run around the block, but he decided to become a different person and he did it. You can do that, but at that moment, you're going to quit. And so at that moment, we have to get ready. And maybe you can become someone in the future that won't quit, but right now, you're

quitting. Yeah, I sometimes get asked, not often, but I've been asked, you know, when you were going through selection, did you ever have a moment where you thought, or you thought about quitting and you suppressed it? And I only say this because I know this is, this is shared amongst a lot of the people

that I went through training with. I didn't. I did not have a moment where I thought, oh boy, I'm on the precipice of quitting. I better, I better hold on. Did I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions and questioning, can I even

do this, definitely? But there's something fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing to stop. And you learn that that is something that I believe is innate. Do you have the ability to keep going through failure and they put a lot of test gates into

buds to basically force it up on you, most notably the not even healthy, Kell week is the

most well known test of endurance where you're awake for five and a half days, basically. There's one that's even simpler that it's it's it's so easy if you're willing to do it. Easy to stretch. It's not that hard, but you really need to be committed to doing it and it's the 50

meter underwater swim. You do it day two of the first phase of training and everybody knows you're going to do it.

“All you have to do is okay get in the pool, swim one length and then swim back without surfacing”

until you're done. It is probably just beyond what's comfortable for someone who's a decent enough swimmer, but you have plenty of lead time for this. You know is going to happen.

People train for years before they go when you when I did it, the first leg it's stressful

but as soon as you've made the turn and you're on your way back, you realize that if you've committed to doing it, you're like, oh, this is this is really not bad. It's so quick. It's so short. It's all over.

People that would quit on that didn't quit at the end of the 50. They quit on the first leg. You're not physically done yet, you're mentally done. I mean, I'm generalizing, but if you see that type of phenomenon and training quite a bit where it's, are you prepared to keep going through adversity or are you just going to say

it's too much and I don't want to do it anymore? I wonder if they've ever sat down and tried to engineer a program to alter people's psychology. You know, you would think that the more people that you can get that would be able to figure out away through something very difficult, where your mind wants to quit your body, want to quit, the more people that you could figure out how to train to that position, the better.

Or is it like, I have friends that are MMA coaches that don't want to work with anybody who needs a mental coach. Interesting. They're like, you need a mental coach here in the wrong business. And they say that, like those two, those guys are too unreliable, they'll tell to you.

Like, you need a mental coach, like you two in your own head, you're not going to be able to perform. His guys are going to be able to lose, dust themselves off, figure it out and come back and be stronger. And then there's some guys that, like, every big moment is the moment overwhelms them.

And they're just, they're just cave to the pressure, they just can't handle it. And then they go through some sort of mental coaching session. But the core, their personality, whatever it is that's about them, what makes them them, it's just fragile for whatever reason, and the question is, a wonder if they've ever tried to engineer a program to strengthen people's psychology, just the same way you can

strengthen people by lifting weights or by running or whatever. I wonder if there's a, like, there was a concerted effort to say, like, we have so many people crashing out.

“What if we had 50% less people crashing out than we'd have 50% more elite operators?”

I know that when I went through training and I, I have no idea if it's still the case now, but I was in, I was in seal training in earnest in 2011 and 2012. And there were psychologists on, on staff that you didn't, you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch. But I remember there being parts of training, which were sort of funny, because they punctuated

the brutality of training, it would be, we'd be out, you know, doing the obstacle course for an hour, and then we, doing a formal run, then we're swimming, then we're doing this, we're getting beat up, and then like, "Now, go in the classroom, you go in the classroom, and you're, and you're talking to this woman, who's a psychologist, and she's teaching, and you had a, like, it's called a rousal control, you know, how to, how to take down your,

your mental state in the middle of high stress moments and all the instructors on the side,

So there was attempts made, but I, coming from coming from having done it, the, there's

“such a wide variety of people that are successful in training, that it's, I, I have seen”

and heard that it's hard to pinpoint what is, what is the appropriate indication you're going to be successful? Like, that's the thing they're trying to identify as, what are the, the pools of people that traditionally do well in seal training? Because they're, they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen, but the two things they

found, there's two, there's two places where the most mentally tough people, in terms

of success in seal training, one is wrestling, basically any level of wrestling, wrestlers

have an incredibly high-success rate in buds and water polo, those, the two that they have determined through their studies are the greatest, most resilient folks when it comes to seal training. Interesting. Yeah.

Water polo. So in water polo, how deep is the water? I think it's more that they tread water, the whole fucking time.

“Yeah, that's what I'm getting at, like, does the water so deep that they can't touch the”

ground? No, no, you're treading the entire time. There was a plan again. Dude, there was a guy's crazy. There was a guy in my class, so the, the way it works is you have your enlisted guys and

there's, you know, upwards of a hundred dudes in a class that are enlisted and then you have, I think, maybe eight to ten that are officer candidates, it's, yeah, we're all seal candidates, that's true, but the difference between an officer candidate and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous. The guys over here, the enlisted guys are just, like, salt to the earth, just like, I don't

give a fuck. Where is he who happens? The officer candidates, they have some of the most impressive resumes that you can have as, like, a twenty-something-year-old kid. You have dudes that are, I was a road scholar, I played, I walked on to the Stanford

football team, that level of prestige, and also, I'm, my family's friends with George Bush, and, and I'm also, like, a world class swimmer, and I'm, like, an expert marksman. But those are the dudes that become your officer candidates, because there's so few slots on any given year for these spots, so they're, they're, they're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed.

It's so rare that an officer candidate does not pass. Like an officer who's in Buds, you might as well just call him a seal at that point, because the vetting is crazy for, not on the enlisted side, we're still figuring that out, but the officer side, they're highly vetted. And one of the guys that was one of my officers, in one of the classes that I was in, was

a water polo player from the University of Tennessee, and he's this big, big, strong guy. He's an awesome dude, and there's this part of training, half-way through training. It's second phase. It's broken into three phases, and it's, it's, it's the water phase, and it's, it's really

statistically, everybody who gets to second phase mostly makes it through, but it's because

you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase, like hell week in the 50 meter underwater swim, that this is already the pool of people that's just going to push through the misery and past stuff. So it's misleading. The second phase of training, I would argue, is exponentially more challenging than first

phase, but the only people who do it are through first phase, and it's all 90% of people pass second phase, but it's really hard, and there's two tests in particular within second phase that are notoriously just brutal. One of them is called pool competency, which is a 20-minute exam of your ability to fix problems with your scuba tanks underwater, where basically you go to the bottom of the pool with

your tanks on, and when your test begins, you're in the section of this huge pool called the combat training tank. There's like the six-foot section, then it slopes down to the nine-foot section, and then it slopes down to the 15-foot section, and your test takes place in the nine-foot section, and you just crawl along the lane marker, as if you're doing lap swimming, there's a lane

on the bottom of the pool, there's like eight or nine lane markers, and you crawl back and forth, only in the nine-foot section, and two instructors per student come down and turn your air off, tie knots, and your hoses, and as soon as you're being touched, you've got to go into the fetal position and wait for like the attack to stop. It takes like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, you're out air, and this is the 20-minute test.

You're building up hyper-catany as you go, and then you've got to fix your problems, and the problems get progressively harder to solve, but the procedures they teach you are the same procedures for every problem. If you go to step one, it doesn't work, you go to step two, if that doesn't work, you go to step three, until you go all the way through your steps, but it teaches you come.

So even though you're on the last problem, you're going to solve at minute 18, and you're

“about to pass out, you have to show them that you'll do step one, step two, all the”

way through. What's about being caught, I was horrible at this test, by the way, I passed, by the skin

of my teeth, this dude passed the test first try, but that's not where the story comes

in. This water pull-up player, he blazes through that test, no problem. The other test is just the tread, it's all it's called, the tread. You spend five minutes in the pool with your 2080 tanks on, which are neutral in the water.

You've got no fins, you've got to wait belt on, hands up out of the water. Yeah, it's five pounds or something, and you tread for five minutes, and that's the whole test. Hands out of the water. So you only tread with your legs.

“In no fins, tanks on, the only way to do it, realistically, is imagine hopping on like”

a bike, like in the gym, and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue, hold it for like three, four minutes, and don't even, you don't even need to go that fast, but it's constant, that's the only way to do it. Unless you're an exceptionally talented water pull-up player who's mastered the art of the egg-beater, where they basically found a way to move their legs, that's like the most

efficient way to tread water, and this dude, I kid you not, who blazes through pull-comp first try, no problems whatsoever, was like joking around after his test, he gets him for the tread, and he could hold himself almost to his belly button, probably like nipple to belly button line, fully out of the water, just no problem, just no, like practically smiling, because he knows this is my domain, I can do this all day long.

It was the most incredible thing I'd ever said, that's crazy, I would have never thought

of that. First of all, I didn't know the water pull-up players had it tread the entire time, which is insanely impressive. Like how long is it game?

“Well, I don't know if they can go to the edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch”

water pull them, most of the time it's just treading. I know water pull-up player, but my understanding is that the game is played while treading. Yeah, I never would have imagined, but now that you described it that way, like, that might be the hardest sport on earth, oh dude, that makes baseball look so easy. I remember like David Wells, the Yankees, the huge faggot smoke and cigarettes in between

it. Hey, dude, it's crazy. He's eating hot dogs, big ol' bellies. Oh, that's crazy. I remember in boot camps.

This was not even before you even get to Buds.

It's funny, when you go in, I went in as a civilian, so I saw in this contract where basically

you say, okay, I'm going to go to boot camp, become a sailor, and then I'll have my shot at going to Buds. It's called the Seal Challenge Contract, and the way I looked at it is I'm like, okay, I've prepared for Buds.

“That's what I've, as a civilian, that's what I was training for.”

I didn't think at all about boot camp, like what's what's two months of Navy boot camp going to be? Because what my head is focused on is Buds, that comes after. So when I shipped out to boot camp, I had put virtually no thought into what those two months were going to be like in Great Lakes, Illinois.

I figured it was like, oh, whatever, like March around, like fold some clothes, you know, whatever, and then I'll go do the real stuff out in San Diego, and so I get to Chicago, and it was like a reality check because you quickly realized that first of all, if you're trying to be a seal, and you're on the Seal Challenge Contract, when you get to Great Lakes, you're segregated into a separate group.

They're called the 800 Division. I don't know if this still exists now, but it did in 2010. And there are really aren't any seals or spec ops that are at Great Lakes, that, I mean, there's a few, but for the most part, you're, you're working with ordinary sailors that are putting you through training, but imagine you're, you're an ordinary sailor, and

God love them. I worked with amazing sailors across the Navy, and here comes the seal recruits

in the 800 Division. They're civilians. They're not even sailors yet. There is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show up like, yeah, I'm going to buddves. Like, there's just an attitude of like the instructors, they, they want you to understand that like you don't have a clue what you're getting yourself into. And so in boot camp, those two months, your, your instructors are not seals, but they just like torture you because

they're like, this is nothing compared to what you're going to have in Buds. And, and one of the things we would do is, is there was all sorts of stupid stuff like pushups and whatever, but there was this treading thing that we had to do, where we'd go in the pool at like five in the morning, and like it's so cold, and they would line us up. So we're all face like, if you were, I'd be right behind you looking at the back of your head,

you'd be looking at the next guy's back and he said, and they'd give us bricks, and you're just treading, and you got to pass the brick up and down the line and periodically they'd give you two bricks. And so if anybody doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, quickly the bricks get handed off to like one person and no one wants the brick. You know, a fence on or anything, and guys are like sinking into the water, like, truly about to pass out and black

out, but the level of oversight, not great, because it's sort of like, you don't know what you're getting into, trying to hold those bricks. And it's just Matt and they would leave us in there, treading with bricks for so long that you're like, I'm going to drown. I'm literally going to drown if I keep this up. And then suddenly it'd be over and you're like, on the pole deck, like vomit and you're thinking of yourself, holy shit, like is

this, this is not even as bad as buds, and you get to buds and you're like, no, that was worse. That's probably good then. It was nice. Yeah, that's funny. You had those guys

your turtle decks. So we'd like put on all our stupid, like knee-up-green turtle decks,

“like seven of them, because you have all the stupid clothing in your rack, and like march”

around the compartment, the room you're in. And we would just like spend hours like marching around the compartment of sweating our ass off in our like turtle decks. It's stuff like that, or we do bird watching where they would have us just face a wall and be at attention for like two, three hours just staring at paint, but it's just arbitrary. It's like, you don't know what you're doing to buds. It's going to be so much worse. And like, you don't

know what you're talking about. We're weird people want to do that to people. There was a lot of like, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. I know more than

you. I've done real stuff for the Navy, but like, they have this moment where we're still

civilians, and we have it gone to training, and they know that virtually all of us are going to quit. So this is a safe group to sort of flex around, you know? Wow. So it was, I hated boot camp. And when I got out of boot camp, in boot camp, I was drinking their

“coffee. And I was convinced it was, it was caffeinated coffee. It wasn't, I think I told”

myself it was. I'm a big coffee drinker. And when I got out of boot camp, I went to dinner with my family. And I didn't need anything. I just drank like nine cups of coffee. And got so jacked up on caffeine and just told stories about boot camp. They don't give you caffeinated coffee. Well, there was like, it was, it was coffee. But I mean, it was like, you pushed a button in this brown shit came out. And it was like, it said cafe, something

on it. I, I was the best coffee. I'm not going to question it because I don't want to, I don't want to suck myself out. And I was drinking the shitty coffee. Yeah, I have some coffee. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, well, I mean, what we were talking about before, that there's no other process to figure out whether someone's going to be able to handle pressure,

“then to put them through it and see what happens. If you're passing bricks, maybe that's”

not the best example of because it seems like those guys were being a little sadistic. Yeah, probably, at least you would imagine that what they're doing in Buds is tried and proven. They know what they're doing. These guys, it seems like they were just getting off on the fact that could tell you what to do. This episode is brought to you by Fox Nation Real American freestyle wrestling is exclusively on Fox Nation. Every month, you get every

feud, every match and every belt. If you love the UFC, this is where it all began. And now, one year after launching in Cleveland, our AF returns Saturday, August 22nd for its biggest event ever, our AF12 UFC champions Olympic gold medalist, world champions. And one of the strongest men on the planet, all on one card. Jordan Burrows, who's been on the podcast before, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, takes on UFC standout, Sean Brady. Bow nickel meets

Wyatt McCannelly in the showdown between two of the sports brightest stars. Plus, it's a main event rematch with Henry Sohudo getting another shot at the machine, Marab Dovich Willy, no cage, no gloves, no excuses, our AF12 live from Cleveland, Saturday, August 22nd, streaming exclusively on Fox Nation, go to FoxNation.com and sign up today. I, so when I, so I got hurt in Afghanistan in 2014, and after I got hurt, I'll tell you

in a minute what happened. I got debriefed essentially by the senior commander of the group that I was a part of. And it was just like, hey, tell us what happened, what went wrong, what would you have done differently? And truthfully, and I wasn't kissing anybody's ass, I wasn't trying to be, you know, have followed the rules kind of guy, I just said, you know what, the training works. Like, on the training is unbelievable, I saw it for myself firsthand. So we were in Afghanistan in 2014,

and this was the tail end of, this is my only combat tour I did as my first deployment, this is

2013, 2014, and we had been going into this town called Zargenshar, which is this fairly urban Afghan town that was literally on the other side of the one paved road route Utah, they're called it that ran through Afghanistan, got ID'd constantly. We were on one side of the road behind some Esco barriers, and Zargenshar is like the sprawling, pretty large urban village. And historically, I don't know how long it had been going on for, but there had just been nonstop fighting in Zargenshar

between NATO forces and loads of different factions of fighters, the Taliban, Pakistani fighters, you name it. And so when we got in country in 2013, we turned over with Sealtime eight, and they said, basically, you know, your job here is to try to quail the flow of suicide bombers into a couple

if you want some action, you just go to Zargenshar, because they're so battle hardened in there, the people that are still there, that if you go in there, they're going to fight you, you know,

“if you want to find weapon caches, they're going to be in there. And so over the course of the deployment,”

this is like five months in, we had gone into Zargenshar a great deal, and truthfully, it wasn't like we walked in, and it was crazy every time, but we definitely got engaged. There was definitely more context there than anywhere else. But on this one day, this is like five months into the deployment, this is in April, so it was the fighting season it started, so the warmer weather would come in, and we sort of put ourselves in a terrible position, a little bit by accident, so the city,

it's not really a city, it's a village, but it's bigger than a village, it's somewhere between a city and a village, for Afghanistan, so it's like mud huts, but like tight together, and it's really like well-defined, you know, it's almost like the edge of Zargenshar just becomes vacant desert on the outside, it's like this really isolated spot. We entered the city with our vehicles, and then began infilling into the city, I forget exactly what our purpose was,

I think there was like a bomb maker or something we were going after, but the rules of engagement that we were operating under effectively said, you can't engage, you can't offensively engage

“anyone. And there's a couple of factors that could allow you to, for the most part, you need to get”

shot at first to then shoot back, that's sort of the gist. And the people we would get into skirmishes

with knew that a lot of times, and they'd be tactical about how they would go about shooting at us. And so we start making our infill from the edge of, you know, the city, and we get into this little narrow area where we knew we'd have to enter into this courtyard, and we start hearing chatter over the radios. So we had the ability to listen to just the open source radio that the fighters would use in the village, and we heard them talking to each other, and it was clear they

had spotted us, where it's a broad daylight, this is not a shock, but they were clearly talking to each other and making plans to wait until we, and it was only 20 or 30 of us plus our partner force, wait until we got into that courtyard before you open up on them. And I don't know if this was said explicitly, but the idea was they're not going to do anything due to the rules of engagement, we can let them come into the courtyard and then open up on them. And there's a

couple two story buildings that overlook the courtyard. So it's pretty gnarly. Our team lead, who was freaking awesome, is freaking awesome. He stopped us, and he's like, hold on a minute, we took cover behind this bridge, that was right behind us, and he's like, wait, let's figure this out.

But we realized that now that we know where they are, we know they're in those second story buildings

overlooking that courtyard, they're now, they can see us. If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We can't like call in an air strike. We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So it's basically walking into an ambush. That's a, that's a bad idea. But if we go the other way, if we retreat, I told you that the edge of Zargensharr, it's, there's no cover. It's just open desert, if you will. And so there wasn't really a good way to ex-fill back to our vehicles

without getting shot in the back. They don't have rules of engagement, they should have at any time they want. And so we realized, because of where they're positioned, we either had to go forward into a effectively unknown ambush or retreat. And hope they don't get the drop on us and shoot one of us. And it's a pretty high chance someone was going to get shot if we ex-filled. And so we sat

there. We were thinking about it. And we ultimately made the decision like, hey, we're Navy Seals.

Let's just go forward and process the threat. And so into the courtyard we go, it's on body cam. And you know, it was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard again. Broad daylight, it's quiet. We had seen women and children run out of the villages. We approached. So we knew only people here are going to be fighters. And just machine guns opened up on us in this courtyard. And I say this without, I don't mean this in a sort of crass way. But thankfully, the only people

“who were hit in the opening volley were our dog. And I believe two of the Afghan partner for us”

guys that they got shot. Because if, if you want, if you're going to survive this, you need the seals. You don't need, you don't need anybody else. You need the seals to get out of this. And so we all took up our positions. Sort of we expected this to happen. And it became like this crazy, disjointed like one Z2Z breaking off, clearing buildings, sometimes by yourself, just madness. For like the next six hours, it slowed down. It was not constant. But it was like six hours of urban

sketchy roof to roof, building to building shooting. And we were sort of getting our asses kicked. I mean, we just we kept, we kept seeing people that would open up on us around like a corner. We'd go after them and they'd be gone. And we knew there were tunnels dug into the ground all over the place for people to escape. And it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would vanish.

No one's been killed on our side. The dogs find. And we were sort of like, man, I guess we just got to go. You know, we didn't really accomplish anything. We just kind of got beat up today and we'll come back another time. You know, it didn't go well. And as we're getting ready to leave, and remember at this point, our group of 20 somewhat seals, there's Afghan partner forces well, but the seals that were on the ground, we had broken up into different fire teams,

little groups of dudes. And I was with a fire team that was close to the exit we were going to be

“taking. And one of the the drones overhead, I think it was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas,”

they called out that they had seen what appeared to be militaryagemen, so moms, as they're called, sort of in the vicinity of where we would be exfilling out of the city. And they weren't saying you better go over there and like shoot them because rules of engagement say you can't you can't do that. It was just sort of a hey, be aware. As you exit, they might be setting up on you as you're leaving the city. And so our fire team happened to be closest and we decided we would just go over

there and take a look. Our understanding is now it's nighttime, our on-night vision, we we believed based on what was being passed us that we could go down this alleyway that would come to a tea intersection. And when we reach the end of this alleyway, there'd be this low wall like six foot tall wall and we could peer over the wall into this field where these moms are, and they didn't know if they didn't even know who they were, could have been kids, could have been nothing.

“But we we believed we'd be able to look over the wall and look out somewhere on the other side of”

this field. We'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment of what to do. So we super sneaky make our way down this alleyway, being as quiet as we can. We get to that low wall and immediately we start hearing someone talking. It's not our guys. We start hearing Pashtoon being spoken on the other side of the wall. And we realize that there's been a mistake the lost entrance, some things were miscommunicated to us. We are now closer than you and I are

right. The second two what actually was, military age men. There was at least two I've heard as many as five. I actually don't know the exact number, but there were fighters hiding on the other side of that wall, intentions unclear, but they're right there and they haven't heard us yet and they're nervous. We can tell they're nervous. They're right on the other side of the wall and we are in a tough spot here because there's seven of us. We're so close to them that if someone even so much

just like farts right now, they're going to hear us. And so our team leader, who was incredible,

he went on to go to Team 6. He's one of the best dudes I've ever met. He had to make it on the ground decision. We got engaged these guys. We can see they have weapons. One guy looked over and said they have weapons. This is all nonverbal. We're like making hand signals and stuff on night vision. And so one of our team leader gets down on a knee and he tells one of the guys next to me to stand on his leg and start shooting. And so over the wall he starts shooting and there was at

least two guys over there that already had grenades. They had pulled the pins out on. So this is the moment they've had this. They're holding the grenades for this. So soon as the shooting started, grenades come over the wall and this is there's a video of this. If the grenade comes or you can't really tell. But it literally hit my shoulder. One of the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell

to the ground and detonated. But in the second that this happened, it's we were under a drone that

had a targeting strobe down on us. It was a flashing infrared strobe on us. Imagine if like God had a flashlight and he was turning it off and on rapidly. And you can only see the light on night vision. It's this cone of light that you're in and this this super intimate fight is happening. And I'm watching this grenade time really slowed down. I see it for a second because the lights on,

“the light comes off. It disappears. I see it for a second. And I remember feeling it hit my shoulder.”

I'm not shooting. I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the wall as little as it's happening. And the thought I had was like fuck, it's gonna blow my head off. I know I'm dead. We're all probably gonna die here in a second. But my mom won't be able to see me again. Like there will be no open

casket. That's the first thought that goes through my head. My head's gonna be blown the fuck off.

Hit's my shoulder. And this is again in a fraction of a second. The light comes on. Goes off. It falls down lower and it's like halfway down. Now it's like halfway to the ground and I'm thinking, oh shit. I'm definitely gonna die. But maybe my face will be intact in my my mom can see me again. Like goes off on off on it lands in the ground. And I turn slightly and I'm like, oh shit, I might just lose my legs. Like this is great. Like I might live. And so all of us are in the lethal

range. Assuming this is a frag grenade, which I don't think couldn't have been. It had to be an old school pineapple grenade. We're all all of us are in this horrible lethal zone. And two grenades go off. I tell people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my backside.

And my memory of what happened versus what actually happened or couldn't have been more different.

“It would take me years before I actually sat down and debrief this with the guy who ultimately”

saved my life. But my memory is I go down and I couldn't get my gun. My gun had been the strap, the little strap had been blown off. My helmet had been blown off. So I'm not on night vision. I'm just, there's pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark. And it's just fucking chaos. Their, the thing is is the fighters in that town, they didn't give a fuck about killing each each other. If they could kill me, they'd kill their teammates as well. And so RPGs are just being

arbitrarily fired from all across the city, but from other locations, just in the vicinity of where this is happening, because there was a law before this. So it's just fucking madness. And I couldn't stand up. I can't move. And I got dragged by one of my teammates. So this is my memory. I got, I got dragged from, I'm at the head of the tea there. They brought me down the stem of the tea, if you will. And I just got placed up against a wall. And I'm sitting there

and I have these turnicates that are on my chest that we rubber band them to our chest, specifically. So they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in your limbs. And I was so weak and fucked up from this blast that I had literally couldn't pull the turnicates off.

And there's, I don't even know if anyone's alive. Basically at this point. I don't know

if you know what's happening down in the context zone, which is like 20 feet away from me. All I hear is gunfire. It's madness. And at any point, I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking kill me. Like, I'm dead. I'm dead no matter what here. And so I had this this true in my mind, like near death experience where I sat there. It's relatively well-alumed. And I suddenly lost my hearing. Like it's gone. Completely gone. And there's good illuminations.

So I can see this small alleyway. I can see this flashes of light as rounds are coming in. And I just so I'm like, I'm in my head. I'm so aware that I'm alive. But I'm dying. And then my vision goes completely blind. Like, can't see. I can't hear anything. But I was so lucid

in my mind. So aware that I was alive. And I tell people that on a day-to-day basis, you live.

And you don't think about it. You don't wake up and actively live. You don't think, "Today I'm gonna breathe. Today my heart's gonna be." You just do it. Because that's your entire experience is being alive. And your body knows how to do that. Your brain knows how to be alive. You also know how to die. You just haven't done it yet. And I had this really distinct feeling of, like, oh shit. This is what it feels like when you shut down. It didn't hurt. It wasn't sad.

It was just couldn't have been more matter of fact. And all I was thinking about at two thoughts, I had, what will my obituary say? Nothing in terms of substance. But will it say Jonathan Allen was killed in action? Or John Allen? So I was hung up on that. And I was also thinking about my wife and how she'd be notified at home. And I was thinking, I wish we'd had kids. Because now I don't have a legacy. And so I had this feeling of, like, letting go. I don't know,

“it's that's so cliche. But it physically felt like I had to let go. And I remember feeling the impact”

of the ground as I sort of killed over. And I thought that was it. Like, I'm about to die. This is the end, you know. But then out of fucking nowhere, the legend that he is, his name is Kyle. He's a seal. Fucking comes out of nowhere. And he grabbed me and he put turnicates on my legs. I'm still like in my blacked-out zone here. But I slowly regain sight and hearing. And the scene we're in is still terrible. There's still chaos happening everywhere in Kyle. He's a sniper. He's a medic. He's

the calmest dude under pressure. He's like, hey, that's going to be okay, buddy. It's all good. Stop the bleed. Like, just stay here. Like, you know, put your gun up if you can. I'll be right back. Like, literally in hell all around us couldn't have been more calm. He just runs down back to the contact zone. It comes back up. He brings another guy out who's long and collapsed. He's patching him up smiling. I mean, it's fine. Meanwhile, so I'm starting to see now as I'm regaining consciousness

if you will. I'm seeing my teammates who have also been fucked up from the grenade. But only me and one other guy were so affected by the grenade that we couldn't function. It was me and this guy who's long had collapsed. He was like barely able to breathe. So we're down, but the other like five dudes, it's like, it's your job to get us out of here now. Because we're fucked. We are pinned down in fucked here. One guy, the team lead, in one ear, he was working with multiple air assets over

hit, calling in what's called a danger-close air strike, which is you're effectively calling in

“an air strike on yourself. You need special, uh, initialing from your higher officer. I think”

I think you're commanding officer. Like, one more senior than you has to approve the drop because in essence, you could kill yourself doing it. So he was calling in an air strike

ear, he's communicating with the rest of our, our disparate teams, which are broken up across the

city, trying to tell them where we are. It's got two comms happening, and he's physically pulling people out of the context zone with Kyle to get them to cover. Andy's engaging the enemy, and we're getting shot at. Holy, he's, he's, he's a team six that dude. Everybody went into like flow state. I don't even know how to describe it. And, and I'm fucking worthless. I'm not in flow state. I'm fucking dead state. Uh, they hoisted me up and we ran like a mile because there

was no way to extract us because of how densely populated it was or the buildings were so tightly together, could you move your legs? They were like fucking pillars. I was supported on shoulders hobbling. I was not able to run. No. In the turnicates, they cut off circulation to your limbs

because I was bleeding profusely from my legs, so they were cinched off, which kills the circulation

at a minimum. You got very dead legs, but they ran me to a hot extract where there's a fucking healer that came in coming in guns blazing. They throw us in the healer. Now get this, me and the other do with the long we get thrown on the healer. And we just leave with the medical team. Those fucking dudes, those five dudes, still on the ground, had to fight their way back into the city to go reconnect with the rest of the element. Who again, he's calling the air strike. He called

“him was with it was perfect. He got I think out in the word for it. He hit exactly in the right”

spot. He called in the exact right spot. Like under the most direct you could imagine. But like so my mental image of what happened is under truly like I witnessed life in death. Like I was in a life in death scenario and I got to be fully an audience for it. Every mother fucker was fucking perfect at their job. Like literally rounds flying everywhere. Hey, what's going on? Got your legs all dead tied off here. Hey, what's going on? Call in this air strike. It couldn't be common. That was it.

Like, and on some of my debrief point was it fucking works. The training works. Wow. What a fucking story. Holy shit dude. There's an attempt. What was I want to hear the denim? Yeah, so after we got metavacked. So I'm in the helicopter and at this point I don't know I don't know the state of my injury. All I know is a few minutes ago. I thought I died. You know like

I don't really I'm I'm happy to be here now. But we get in the helicopter and that crew is amazing.

“I think there are PJs Air Force PJs which are like spec ops Air Force. I think”

they were fucking great, but they're like, hey, do you want? What's the what's the drug? Oh my god. It's the one the painkiller drug more Fox more morphing and I said no. I didn't have any pain but I was like I'm worried I might die and I want to be lucid for it and they're like, okay, now I think you're going to be okay, but I was like in my head that I might die. I don't know. And so we get metavacked out of Zargensharr and they fly us right to this nearby base, very close by called Shank. And when we get there,

there's obviously doctors and nurses that are there specifically for this. And so even that was the middle of the night, they had been told, hey, you have two casualties, you know, the guy with a collapsed lung and myself. To be honest, I don't really know exactly what they were told, but I would imagine they were told get ready for some some type of surgery for both of them. And so we fly to Fob Shank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher. I'm a close have been fucking

cut off of me like my dex hanging out like I'm I'm in disarray like I'm all fucked up. And I really

“I don't even know I think I'm going to be okay because at this point I've made it here and no one's”

acting like I'm I'm literally about to die but I don't know. I don't really know how bad it is and they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy and it's so bright. Like, like so bright inside of there barely open your eyes and it's just a sea of all these doctors and nurses that are ready to perform whatever needs to happen because they don't know. I don't know what what's needs to be done. But as soon as I get in there, I see in the back corner of this

relatively small medical tent with a shanty medical tent is maybe like 15 seals that we're not on the mission with me. There are other guys in country that are other Navy seals. It's the middle of the night and they've put on the equivalent the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms, these are like their BDUs, these are these are not nice but in Afghanistan on on a deployment. This is the best shit they had. They clearly had been

tracking because you can track missions in real time when you're overseas. They saw the call signs come across that seals had been wounded and were being brought here for treatment. I have no sense of what exactly they knew but clearly whatever was passed indicated that one of us or both of us could die and so these dudes were in the tent in case we died. They're my friends. I know the more personally and so I'm being wheeled in and the gravity of what's happening was like a

fucking ton of bricks because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been going on and I see that the looks on these guys is faces and they're wearing these uniforms and they're all standing

going to my own funeral and so I'm put on the they swarmed me, not them, the doctor swarmed me

and they get me ready for debris movement which is just to pull the shot and a lot of my hips

“in my leg and the guy was like, "I'm gonna give you, I think it's ketamine." He's like, "You're”

not gonna, this is it, could talk to you and he gave me ketamine and I passed out or whatever he gave me, I completely passed out." And then it's like I have no memory and I fucking wake up in Germany. I'm fucking Germany and I'm just up. Yeah, you're fine. Yeah, your legs are all fucked up. You're gonna live, keeping your limbs and then I think with seven days after that, I'm back home in Virginia hobbling down the home depot, fucking aisle, just no transition, just I was just killing

people over season now. Holy shit. Yeah. What was the extent of the injuries? Honestly, I was so fortunate. It was a big, big hole in my ass, like, I think three or four inch chunk. The big issue with it is it was so deep into into my ass that they had to keep opening it so that it would not heal in reverse. Do you know it? Because it can fuck at them. And then just inside of my leg,

“I mean, basically I was spared. It was just a massive flesh wound from underneath my knee all the way”

up to my back. And then I also, this, the part that was the worst to be honest, legs fine. I have a little bit of residual sornus. At this point, there's a little bit of shrapnel on my leg, but they're like pieces of sand. They only, I'm not a hot day, I might notice it. But I, from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders. I truthly don't know if this actually happened, but he said as much. And I tore both of my

labrums, a slap tear, a relatively common injury. And I had the, I had a total of biceps tendinesis surgery done on my right. Basically, it was so painful. I couldn't really use it. But it's the surgery where they remove, abortion in your bicep and they restaple it. But it's sort of a bandaid, it doesn't really fix the problem. And the shelf life of a biceps tendinesis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading. And I'm, I'm now at the point where my shoulder fucking sucks.

And I, I can the gym, I have to do all these, I have to avoid pressing, I have to avoid overhead stuff. And it's just where the bicep tendin is. It's, you know, it's, so what happens is that the

labrum tear itself never got fixed. They just remove some of the tension on one side of the tear,

but still over time, it continues to tear down the labrum. So effectively, my labrum just over time has continued to tear and I'm getting some additional pain. I just had a number I done and they're like, man, you know, you had the bicep tendinesis done. There's not a whole lot more you can do. You can do stuff to fix it, but a lot of it is just going to do more damage than good. And so I'm probably staring down, not chronic fucking pain or whatever, but something like that.

Have you done in these times, else? No. No. Okay. How long in town for? Tonight? That's it? No, I can come back. I want to bring you into ways to well. See what they could do for whatever I can do. It's a fucking huge picture. Why you're here? We should try to get you in. Maybe I can get you in right after we're done. You could just drive right over there. This is not far from here. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's a huge issue.

Guarantee you can help you. If you fucked around with peptides at all? No, I've seen them all over

“the place. Yeah. You should. There's a lot of things that they can do that can radically help you.”

Yeah. One of the things they can do, it'll definitely decrease a lot of the inflammation and help heal. And, you know, there's some evidence. How old are you? 37. Yeah, you're still young, man. There's a lot of evidence that labram tears can be healed with stem cells and without having to go through surgery, depending on the extent of the tear. Yeah. I'm open to it. I did. I'm a big believer. It's fixed me. It's I've had a lot of problems where I was like,

I need surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon told me, for sure, you need shoulder surgery.

And I never got it done. He's like, you could rehab it. This was more than 10 years ago.

He's like, you could rehab it. And, but you're going to need surgery. It's a hundred percent now. Did you? Oh, your shoulder's good now? A hundred percent. Oh, damn. I do all my kettlebell work with 70 pound kettlebells. I don't have any problems. When mills, cleans, presses, renegade rows, gorilla cleans, no problems. How much are you cleaning? 50s. You just gorilla cleans? I do it for reps. Do you do barbell clean? No. No. I don't lift anything heavy. When I do gorilla cleans, I do 50s or 70s.

My whole kettlebell work out as either 50s or 70s. And sometimes I work out with 35s just for the warm-up. Like I'll do like warm-up stuff. Like I'll do like rotation exercises or with 35s. Things where I'm like, like big halos where I'm just really opening up my back and

gorilla belt. Yeah, those are the 70s. Those in the shit. Those are, I've really got into

“farmer's carries. That's what I'm using. The gorillas are like my best friends lately. I just do these.”

I have this big long driveway with a hill and I do these gorilla carries. It's like a 200-yard driveway. And I do these gorilla carries where you take, well, you know, with those farmers, farmer's carries with those gorilla kettlebells. And I'm 70s. Yeah, and I take them up the hill and down the hill. My grip is gotten so much better. And on top of it, it's like my legs have gotten better. And it feels like my whole body is like more connected if that makes any sense. Because

when you're walking, you know that guy Tom have a land, you know, he knows fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, everybody has that guy. Through the beast. One of the things that I got from him is he's talked about the importance of picking up everything and walking with them. He's like, if you really want to get strong, he's like strength is not just lifting heavy stuff, like stationary, like carry things. And so he does a lot of weird like his zirchers like fucking 500 pounds. And say, but he does a lot of

weird like off-weight stuff. Whereas more weight on one side than the other and switches me as a chain behind him and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing farmer's carries with two hands. He does a lot of crazy stuff like that. And obviously the guys are fucking freakishly strong person. So I'm like, okay, but let me see if there's anything to this. So a few bones back are really got into farmer's carries. And I first just would do it, this is him. Fucking freak. The trademark

shirt he's got always that shirt. And he always he has back and he's like six, eight, almost 400 pounds.

He's a fucking giant human being. I love his page. Yeah, he's a real freak. But this this thing that he really believes in is carrying things and walking around with them. And now I really get it. I really get it because I've been doing it now for at least three maybe almost it's going on four months. And it's completely transformed my legs. My legs are way thicker. They're stronger. My back feels better. My connection between like my my entire core and my back is better.

Like everything feels stronger. I'm stronger in every other workout that I do. I feel way stronger when I do like cleans and presses and doing and windmills and everything else. Because when you're carrying stuff like that, it's like your whole body, your core has to stay tight, your back has to stay tight. Everything's dealing. And then when you're up at the top of the hill, you're like more their fucker. And your forearms are literally on fire. You try to hold on to these things.

And you know, I got a chalk ball in my pocket and I reached in there and powdered my hands back up and that's all. As soon as I get my hands back going, I do it again. And that has changed everything. That's changed everything. But one of the things that I've noticed is I very rarely get injured

“as opposed to my friends who do like traditional weight lifting stuff. Like power lifting?”

Yes. Like benching heavy squatting heavy deadlift heavy. Those dudes are all my friends who

do that are always getting hurt. They're always getting hurt. I'm guilty of that to some degree.

Everybody is. It says, but you think that's the only way to get strong. And I don't think that's correct. I don't think it's correct. I think the most important thing is volume with reasonably heavy things where you're not hurting yourself. Like 70 pounds is, you know, I do. I could probably do 20 reps of cleans and presses, but I only do 10. And then I rest for like five. I do the Pauval Tatsolene method. Was that? Pauval Tatsolene is the guy who really brought

kettlebells over to America. And he's a famous kettlebell coach for a strong first, which is his company. And he's this philosophy that strength is a skill. And you shouldn't practice skills when you're exhausted. And his whole idea of working to failure. I mean, obviously if you want to be a bodybuilder or even a professional power lifter, that's a different thing. But

“if you want to get strong, the most important thing is the amount of work that you do, not”

exhausting the muscle with one set. And so what he has you do is, if you can do 20 reps, do 10. And then wait five minutes and do another 10. You got the same volume of work,

but you're never exhausted while you're doing it. Your form is always perfect. And you're still

getting the same amount of work. So my workouts, like I have to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettlebell workout. Yeah, I know, but it works. Do that. It works. And again, I'm fucking never injured. But if I'm injured, it's like a little tendonitis here or something bothering me and my lower back a little, but it's never significant. My trainer John Finx, we've been working together a couple years now in Jersey. He's the man. He's a big believer in that what you were talking about,

I could do 20, but I do 10 instead. He's like all about not form till you die because there are times where it's like time to throw some English and get some volume in. But he keeps me from

problems, especially my can help. The one time I hurt my back really bad, it was deadlifting like

450 with the traditional grip. No, the track. Yeah, the track bar. What is it? Hex bar. What do you call that thing? Yeah, track bar. So I love those things. It's great. But I was like, it's good big. And then I felt, you know, that and luckily it was muscle, not like spinal, not a disc issue. It was lower back, left, lower back. If fuck with me for like a six month period. I bet. Oh, so I was like, that I'm not doing that anymore. And from that moment on, I got really into just

doing kettlebells. And I'm stronger than I've ever been. I don't think you need the lift really, depending upon what you're trying to do, you know, and if you're trying to become a power

“lift, or sure, you need to live heavy. But if you just want to be strong and functional,”

I don't think you need to lift heavy. I don't believe it. No, I did. I right now I'm on like a pretty

big cut. Like I do a summer cut each. Well, this is my second summer. I've done just a little

good on the beach. Do shamelessly. There's nothing else to it. But what I found in my own life is that I do really well when I have not a goal like a lofty goal, even. But just some fucking thing that you got to suffer to achieve it. I do well with goals like that. Yeah, goals are important. Yeah, and I and I right now, I'm on my like, I count calories. I'm I'm I'm I'm into my macros, like you wouldn't believe. But what I was doing before this, I was doing none of that. And I was

fucking obsessed with hand cleans, just like barbell hand cleans. I dude, I'm so fucking I've got up the 225. Very proud of that. But I, it's like the one exercise, no matter. And we do so many actors and fuck with your shoulder. Actually, no, it doesn't. It's pressing. It's this most interest. It's the press. I need to do it. If I press like a fucking 50 pound dumbbell. So yeah, I'll offer it. But I can do a clean. That's part of the reason I discovered it is it didn't

fuck with my shoulder. But I have been on a quest to like find the right way to train for cleans because one of the issues with doing cleans with a barbell. And maybe I'll do kettlebells. Is I have a scar right here that I brought my collarbone when I was seven in my collarbone juts out because it healed slightly in the wrong direction. And so every fucking time I'm in a

block of of doing cleans, I always have this just like recurrent infected wound on my

fucking low. And then like in the comments of every video, they're like, too, what's wrong with that stuff. Dude. And so, but anyways, the kettlebell shaved down. The other fucking. But it sounds like you do cleans and shit with with with kettlebells. Yeah, that's probably something to consider. Yeah. And it's not easy to do. You know, like 70 pounds is when you're doing like 10, 10 reps. And I'm doing like three sets of 10 reps. It's fucking brutal. But it's also the

clean and press from the ground up, right? It's all one motion. And this continuum of motion you know, over the course of 10 repetitions, it's a good solid minute plus a work. So you're working really hard for a minute. So you're getting like a little bit of a cardio benefit from it. But if I'm real consistent with it, you know, I'm 59 now. I just turned 59. So it's just about staying strong. That's all I'm concerned with. Not losing any of my strength, not losing any

of my mobility or flexibility or any of them constantly stretching, constantly just,

“I've really even maintaining. And I think most people don't do that. That's why we have a very”

distorted perception of what's possible. I think we think that people deteriorate with age, like so radically that it's just a, it's just a, it is what it is. It's fact. It's going to happen to you. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that most people just don't have the willpower to keep maintaining correctly. And they're not supplementing their hormones and technique peptides and also optimizing their nutrition. I think if you do all of those things,

you're pretty, I'm personally shocked at what I can still do. When I was a kid, I can jacked it. Oh, yeah, thank you. When I was a kid and I thought of a 59 year old, oh my god, I got dead. That's a dead man. He's probably barely, barely dead. Barely open to jar of pickles. Barely fucking make it down a flat stairs. And I have just a fucking zero problems. You know, I have one fucked up knee from my martial arts days where I had my

meniscus movement removed in a pick chunk of it. And it still fucks with me. But it doesn't fuck with me in terms of function. It only fucks with me in terms of like, I'm worried it's going to become arthritic over time. Because there's nothing between the cartilage, the cartilage is banging against each other. Yeah. And I broke it, skiing once, that right where the cartilage meets the bone. But I think that with the, the improvements and all these biological therapies,

“like stem cells and peptides, I can maintain it. And that's what I'm doing. So it keeps me”

out of jiu-jitsu because that's the one thing that really really wraps on your joints,

do anything like my friend Matt's hero. He had a knee replacement and he's younger than me.

“And I'm like, yeah, but it's jiu-jitsu. It's just like your constantly in weird positions and”

pushing it. Someone's fucking trying to heal hook you and you're defending. It's like, everything is getting yanked around and then it's sore, but you still go back the next day because you want to train because you were doing it. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I found that when I, when I was in the teams, I was in good shape. It's sort of by default. And then I got out and I sort of hovered around like, I'm still relatively young and fine. And then this whole, Mr. Ballon, YouTube thing

happened. And I, in a way, adopted the same mindset that made me successful in getting through training, which is like this obsessive got to make more videos. You know, I've had my viral moment like gross, but all of my health went out the window. I would, I would take me about, I don't know, like, 26 hours if to do. I'm going to make a video hitting post on YouTube. And then even all I wanted to do a sleep. My immediate reaction at like three in the morning would be just slam

like four, five, six drinks and then go right to that. Like, I don't even feel it. I just would drink a rate of a drink just to go to sleep. I didn't even, it was almost like, here's your reward sucked out of these fucking drinks. Oh, I get it. And then, but, but I got so grossly out of shape. Because I do, I was like 200 pounds of just fat. And I had this huge ponytail that I grew. I don't look really good. If you can pull it up, did I look so fat, gross? But then, uh,

I'd finally occurred to me that, like, wow, you're, you're, you're entering like true dad, but territory and there's just no excuse since this sometime in like 23, 24, I was like,

all right, I got to be like, on adult again and, and train. And it dude, it's revolutionary.

That, that's crazy. There's a, there's a, there's a good shot of my disgusting,

“let's see, Mr. Ballon, look at Mr. Ballon fat. I think that'll probably do it.”

That's right to be. That's, that's a decent one. That, that one's recent. Which one? That one's sort of recent. The second one in there. That's, that's not even that bad. Well, the, the first picture you pulled up, you get it. Oh, you see there in that image. You can see a little, little ragged going on there. Yeah, but, yeah, just, well, you got to do what you got to do when something starts happening and, you know, you realize, like,

oh my god, like, it's like starting a fire in the woods. Oh, yeah, you got to blow on it, you got to put some, to fucking little twigs on it. You got to get that fucker going, like, once, and then you've, congratulations, because you've had amazing success. Like, what do you have,

like, 11 million YouTube subscribers? Yeah, that's incredible, man. That's really cool.

Dude, it's, it's, I can only imagine what you've been through, but the thing that I now, this started in 2020 and it's 2026, I have had some incredible highs. The early days of, after the viral moment and I'm like posting stuff that, I, I like upload a video and literally the next day, it's like, you made $20,000 from yesterday to now. And like, I've never in my life made any real money, ever. It's almost overnight, and it grew and grew. And then it's like, I signed a deal with Amazon,

like, 10 months after starting a podcast. I actually, I remember when you got your first deal

“with Spotify, I remember that was like, I didn't even know it was possible for a podcast or anything”

to sign like the equivalent of a professional sports level contract. And then it's like, less than a year after the, the start of the Mr. Ballon podcast, I'm partnering up with with Amazon, it was a 62 million dollar deal. And I, I say that because dude, my life got so much better and so much fucking worse at the same time. It was the worst. Oh, God. So there's like a little stuff, you know, actually, I just had a lawsuit close. They played guilty to theft and a bunch. So I,

I started a house renovation project when I, I was living in a house in Pennsylvania, when this thing kicked off. And I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money. I was, I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house. Before long, I'm like adding fucking crazy shit to my house. They ended up gutting the house to the studs because they're going to remodel it, but they didn't do any work. And now they kind of had me. My house is

just wrecked. I'm living in a rental. They're stringing me along. And so they stole hundreds of

thousands of dollars and never did any work. And so I see them. That, that's a little thing.

And then over the course of the next several years, dude, I've had, I've had people take advantage of me in just the most personal deep-cutting ways, the ways that, if, if you were to like write a movie, you know, here's the scene is somebody who suddenly comes into money and like the bad,

happened to me with with with with with some family and with some close friends and with, you know,

“business partners is just like, "What are you fucking kidding me?" Like, this was all just an angle.”

Like, you had an angle on me the whole time. Like, this was a fucking con. Well, people think about people that come into money like that the same way they think about a large corporation if they like slip on the floor and like at Target. Like, "Oh, I'm going to get paid." They don't think, "I'm all right." It's fine. It's my fault. I slipped. Another thing, "Oh, this is an opportunity." A big time. And they look at a guy like you who's, you know, through your own hard work

and stumbling upon this idea and following through with it made a bunch of money, they like, "I can get some of that money." They don't even think of you as a person anymore. They think of you as a target. I got it. Keep your circle tight, dude. That's the thing. I got Antonio out there. He's like my right hand man. He's a former homicide detective. Like, he actually, he came to me to be my house manager.

And one of the first things he said to me is he's like, "I don't give a fuck about your content,

“dude. I think it's stupid." And I was like, "You're the guy for me!" But he's been awesome because”

he just like keeps everybody around me sort of like vetted. But yeah, dude, it's, uh, that's important man because people will sneak through. And sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them. Other people see them as like, "This guy's got an angle. He's a scumbag. Be careful." And you know, you let people into your circle and then they, they're like, "When they're around you, they're putting on a rendition. They're pretending to be someone they're not. They're, they're

pretending to be someone that you're going to want to hang out with." And what they're using you is they're just thinking of you as a springboard. I would as a way to get money. I would imagine for you just given, I mean, dude, you are podcasting. Like, if there is literally people are like, "Hey, you want to be the next president? You better go on Joe's show." Like, I can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens around you and your circle

to get where I'm sitting right now. And I, and I got to be honest, I don't know how you'd be able to sift through people that are trying to meet Joe and interact with you and people who are trying to get in with Joe. So Joe will interview them. Well, the good news is that don't really interact with anybody. That's the right approach. So the way I even get like suggestions is one, I see something that I'm interested in and I have a guy and I either call him text him or email him

and say, "Hey, let's try to get this guy on." Yeah. It's guys got a great book or she's got a really interesting documentary or whatever it is. And then there's, I get these people that submit to want to be on the show. So I get a list of those that, you know, there's a guy that goes through them to make their legit and then by the time they get to me, it's filtered out to what is actually going to be interesting. So there's not a lot of, you know, people meeting me that are, and the

people that do meet me usually, I never want to have them on. Like, if somebody just like comes

up because I have to be on your podcast. Like, nope, you definitely don't. You definitely don't have to be on. So this is a crazy conversation. No one has to do anything. You know, and it's people reveal themselves. You know, they just do. They, you know, over time it takes a little bit, you know, it's not instantaneous, but over time people reveal themselves. And it's just the key is, you know, just being open. And there's also people's surprise you. You meet a lot of really interesting people,

you know, you, you run into people that you didn't expect would be fascinating. And they are, you know, there's a lot of that, too. It's just, you got to be present, just not by and any of it. That's the, that's the real key. No matter how big it gets, just keep doing the thing that you do. So all I do is talk to interesting people. That's it. It's the right way to approach it. It's not that complicated. And as long as I continue to do it the same way, I feel like people will

“enjoy it because I think they enjoy it because I enjoy it. Just like the way when someone's doing”

something that they really love to do, I enjoy watching. If someone's doing like metal sculpture, you know, like in the guys really into it, he's welding and hammering. I'm like, I'm into that. I'm like, I'm into people doing things. I like when people are really enjoying what they're doing. And are really curious and or or really like competent at something, you know, they're excellent at

something. I enjoy watching that. I enjoy listening to it. And I always enjoy talking to interesting

people. So as long as I just keep enjoying talking to interesting people, I think people will keep enjoying watching it. And it's a nice exchange. Works. It's real simple, but I keep it that way. I don't ever think like, oh, this guy's famous. He'll have a bunch of flowers. This will be a good episode because I get a lot of views. I don't think like that. I only think, you know, because there's like a lot of the people that are on my show, no one's ever heard of them. They're just

an interesting person that I found on YouTube or an interesting person that I found, you know,

I think for me anyways, the one thing I've come back to over the past several years of doing this is truthfully, even though there are times where, you know, creating content is obviously, it is a job in the sense that we have a recording schedule and we have things that we have to do as you obviously do too amongst whatever else you're doing. The one thing that I fucking love doing is telling stories. I mean, that's really, I really feel like that's the place where I'm

really a really good storyteller. Well, let me on the edge of your seat, edge of my seat,

rather with your Afghanistan story. Fuck man. I was incredible. You're really good at it. Thank you.

And the other one too, the brush in one too, you know, a great storage resonates with people,

“especially a creepy one, which is why I think, you know, you've picked the perfect angle”

because a great creepy story, like you hear a great creepy story, like everybody's like, "Whoa." And then what happened? Have you heard of the headless valley in your, in your, in your comings and goings on the show that the Nahani valley? No. I got a good story for you here. Okay. Okay. So in Canada, there's the section in the northwest called the Northwest Territories. Are you familiar with us? Yes. Okay. So for those that are not, the Northwest Territories is roughly

four times the size of Germany. But Germany has something like 87 million people who live there. And in this space in Canada, this rugged space, there's like 45,000 people that live there.

So it's four times the size of Germany and basically not populated. It is, as remote as a, as a

population of dripping springs. Not even, Jimmy's rigged rather far. And so within, the Northwest Territories, there's this, this, even more remote stretch that's called the Nahani valley. And the Nahani valley today, it's a protected park. It's a Canadian protected park. But even still, even though it's a park you can go visit, it's, it's nearly impossible to get to

“to get there by boat. You have to traverse these rapids. I think it's a very treacherous ride to”

get there by boat. There's no established roads into the Nahani valley. You can hike there. It's brutal to hike there. You can fly there, but it's only through chartered float planes. So it's a difficult place to get to. But the Nahani valley, in particular, when the story takes place, which is like the

early 1900s, because of how isolated it was, it's like one of the parts of Earth that's

like untouched by humans. And so the only people that would be in this huge sprawling valley, it's like an oasis of nature, they would see things that are just like so gorgeous, like untouched nature. But in the early 1900s, there was this push from gold prospectors to go out into the Nahani valley, because they figured, because it's so untouched by humanity, there's bound to be gold, to be found in the Nahani valley. Now there were some indigenous tribes, like the Naha tribe,

they were out there. There's some lore surrounding how they might have abandoned their settlement around the time the story takes place. But there were indigenous tribes that lived out there. But for the most part, it's like this sort of vacant stretch in this already isolated part of the world.

“And so in 19, I think 1905, these three brothers, these three prospectors, the McLeod brothers,”

Charlie, Willie, and Frank, who were their seasoned gold prospectors, they decided they are going to head off into the Nahani valley and go try to strike it rich. And it's even harder to get into the valley back then, as it is today, it required for them. They had to actually had to build a boat. They had to bring pieces of a boat, and they would take it up a rapid or down the rapid, and they'd have to disassemble the boat, carry it up like these rock faces to

get like, there's waterfalls they had to get past, and then bring the boat further and further into this valley. And it's like this, it's just crazy how much work goes into getting out there. But these three brothers, they find their way into the valley, and they get to the stretch of this river called the flat river, which is anything but it's raging rapids. But there was this little embankment against this huge forest, and the mountains off in the distance, and they made their camp there,

and there's no one around. I mean, this is this is pristine wilderness, and they start sifting sluicing for gold, and it's just fucking gold everywhere. It's like the sand is gold. There's gold everywhere. They find so much gold, and they can't believe it. They've struck it completely rich here, and so after a whole day, I think they did two, two, three days, even, have just getting all this gold. They pack all their shit back up in their boat that they've assembled,

and they begin making their way back out again, which should be easier, because now I think a lot of it you're going with the current. I mean, how they get up there with the rapids going one way. But either way, they begin making their way out, and their boat capsizes, and they lose all their gold. The boat breaks up. They narrowly are able to salvage the pieces, and they

supplies. This is horrible. The best we can do here is leave and come back with more supplies,

because we know there's gold here. This is devastating, but no one's going to be here. We can come back, we can get more gold. So they leave, and once they get back to town, Charlie, one of the brothers decides, you know what? It's not worth it. That was really sketchy. I don't want to die on the flat river. You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, oh my god, I go, we got to go about there. And so fast forward a year, Charlie's still saying, I will not go back out there,

“but Frank and Willie, they decide to go, and they recruit this other guy. I think this”

name is Robert Weer. Robert Weer. And so the three of them go back into the valley to strike it rich. And Charlie is aware that they're going out there. He's staying back, but he knows they're going out. He knows where they're going, because he went there with them. And he expects they're going to be gone for, I think it was going to be a whole year. And you can imagine how much effort goes into getting out there. They were going to live out there, I think for the summer, and just get as much

gold as they couldn't come out. But some amount of time passed, let's call it a year, when Charlie starts to become suspicious, because they haven't come out of the valley yet. And this is 1905, there's no way to talk to them. And so another whole year passes were two years deep into this, and still, these guys have not returned from the Nahani valley. And so at this point, Charlie is thinking there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers. I got to go find them. And so he puts

together a group of people to go see what happened to his brothers. And so he makes his way, he starts getting into the valley, and he reaches this stretch of, this is just to give you a mental image of where he's going. To get to that segment of the beach, where they had been two years prior when Charlie was with them, because that's where he's assuming they're going to be. They had to pass through these canyons. There's four canyons that go, I think it's canyon, four canyon, two, three,

one, they're all just called canyon, one, two, three, four, but they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are just ominous places. They're these stretches like canyon, two. There's this 10 mile stretch of very deep water. I don't know how deep, I want to say it's at least 100 feet deep, where the water goes all the way up to the cliff face. It's just sheer cliff face on either sides. It's like the scar in the earth where it's hundreds of feet tall cliffs on

either side that are sheer. And it's just, you know, call it a 100 feet at least of water down. There's

“nowhere to stop. Once you're in this canyon, you must go to the end of the canyon. There's nowhere”

to go. Oh, fuck. And the Naha tribe, who, the, the, the tribe that had lived there for a while,

they had always talked about, they called them the Wahila. They said there were these creatures.

These white tall creatures that would roam the forest in the Naha ni valley, and they would make these screeching sounds, and they were, you know, they would attack people. They was just just folklore, right? But they said that in these canyons, there were all these caves, these pockets of caves, high up on these these canyons, that you can't really get to, that they believed the, the, the Wahila, Wahila would, would live inside of. So imagine, you're going down this,

this, like, misty, 10 mile stretch in second canyon, and you're looking up on either side, and they're literally our caves that no human is ever stepped foot in. You can't even get to these fucking caves. And because of the way the wind cuts through the canyon, it makes this echoy like screeching noise that today, you can still hear as you go through these canyons. And so they're

“going through second canyon, the stretch here, and the stretch of flat river where he had been the”

year prior or two years prior with his brothers was at the end of second canyon where the first little call it a beachhead exists. And so he, Charlie, and a search party, they exit this creepy second canyon, and they see, there's a campsite set up on the beach, and it's not really beach, it's, like, you know, four feet of sand, and then it's a little bit of hinterland, and then it's just, you know, forest. But it sees there's a tent, and so they, they beached the boat, and they're looking

around, and they find there's, there's two bodies. It's, it's a man, two men, they're, they're badly decomposed, but they're missing their heads. There's two headless men that are badly decomposed, one of which is reaching for his rifle, and he's half in the tent, half out of the tent, and he's reaching for his rifle, which is propped up against a tree, and the other is just lying

behind the tent, and he's missing his head, the heads were never found. And they find identification,

and it turns out those are his two brothers, and they find etched into the tree that the gun was propped on. It just was written etched into the wood. We have found a fine prospect, which could mean any number of things, maybe it means they found gold, whoever, but that was written on the tree, and then a little ways down from their camp, going along the same direction they'd come in, they found a skeleton, which they could never identify as being anyone, but they believe it

belonged to Robert Weir. So they're all dead, and the authorities, you know, when this was reported, they weren't really shocked. They're like, "All right, it's been a honey valley. It's a dangerous place. They obviously died of starvation, and animal predation caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off."

to his brothers, but he had no way to prove it. So that's 1905. Fast forward to 1913,

“people sort of know about this story that this is when they dubbed it the headless valley,”

because these men were found without their heads. Little did they know that story would carry quite a bit of weight, because ten years or a little bit less than ten years later, Martin Jorgensen, who's another gold prospector, he heads out into the Naha'ni valley. He's heard the stories. He's heard about McLeod brothers. He knows that there's, you know, lore of the Wahila, and that there's something weird happening in this valley, and it's dangerous.

But he goes out there anyways, and he tells his business partners with his rich guys who didn't want to actually go get the gold. They just funded his expedition. He's like, "I'm going to go out there, and I'll make us a bunch of money. I'll find a bunch of gold. I'll stay out there for the whole summer, and then we'll rendezvous and we'll split the earnings or whatever." So out he goes and he builds

himself a cabin, not far from where the McLeod brothers had stayed, and then the second expedition

as well. And he is out there for the summer, but then he misses the rendezvous point. He was supposed to come out of the valley and meet his partners at the end of the summer. He doesn't eventually a search party is brought out to find what happened to him, and they find his cabin had burned to the ground. They find Martin Jorgensen is within the remains of this burned down cabin missing his head. And they, I don't know how they did this in 1913, but apparently the fire began on the roof,

and so they don't understand how he could have not realized there was a problem and exited his cabin. I mean, it's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing that fire starts here and you still burn to the ground and also wears your head. So that's Martin Jorgensen. So now people, they aren't really connecting the McLeod brothers and Martin Jorgensen. It's called the headless valley by the time Martin Jorgensen gets into the valley. He's now found headless, and now it's like this

little more rumor mill going on over the coming several, actually next 10 years. There was several other expeditions to include the Sky Riley O'Brien who goes out there, prospector, he goes out to check his traps, doesn't come back as partner who's with him, he walks over and finds him, and he's just sitting and explicably by a campfire that's not on. It's not even, it was cold. It was cold enough to freeze to death out there, but it was not blindingly cold, and he's sitting in front

of this fire pit. It's only been like an hour or two since he stepped away, and he's holding a match or a cigarette in his hand, and he's just like frozen. He's frozen to death, and there's no sign of what happened to him. He's just sitting by the fire and he's dead. He has his head, but he's frozen to death. The guy with his partner who fled the valley would later say he looked flash frozen. So that happens. There were at least two other prospectors who also had their cabins burned

down. One of them was nearly decapitated when he was found, but he still had his head, but signs of something being done to his spine was present. And then there was another two guys who their cabins burned down, but their bodies were intact. So there's all these people that died and similarly

“bizarre ways. And then I think it was 1926. The first like really weird thing happens. This is all”

weird, but the really weird thing happens. It's gonna get weirder. It gets weirder. There was this hunting party that went out to the Nahani valley. And by this point, it's become almost like because there's this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is. Because people are fearful of the Nahani valley, it's now bringing a new crowd of people into the valley. It's bringing like hunting parties. That kind of like, oh, go fucking see what's out in this valley. And so they were going through

second canyon and they were heading to Flat River and they were going to these places where

all these kind of famous deaths have occurred to go hunting, but just sort of to be in this valley. And so this hunting party is out there. And it's a big group. I think there was at least a dozen people out there and they're camping out on the banks of the Flat River, not really in the same spot where the McLeod brothers had been, but not too far away. And they're drinking late, having a good old time. They all go to bed. And the next morning, Mae Laferty is her name, Mae Laferty.

“She's missing. She's one of the, I think she was the only woman on this expedition. She's gone.”

And they look for her. There's no sign of what happened to her. She's just, she's just gone. And so they did have some sort of a search occur over the next several days, but they ultimately said, you know, we don't happen to her. And they, they, they left. They left the valley. And so they

tell authorities, authorities, they think they went out to look for. They could never find her.

No sign of what happened to her. And so around the time that they're looking for Mae Laferty, there was this guy who is named Charlie, different from Charlie McLeod, just a sort of loner guy who just by happenstance had been camping in the Nahani Valley at the same time as that hunting party. He was by himself, sort of just this rugged outdoorsman who, it's not even clear why he was out there. But he was just out there, minding his own business. He was aware of the hunting

party. And he said that he watched them have their party that night. And he had stayed up late,

talk of where's Mae Laferty in this guy Charlie realizes he may have seen her. So he goes to the

“police and he tells them, hey, I was out there. They don't know I was out there. I was out there.”

I was out there the same time. And I went to bed late at night after they were, they were already asleep. And I woke up to the sound of rocks, like little rocks falling into the water. And he's he's relatively close to the water, but he's not so close to he would hear the sound of the current. He's far enough that a stone throw into the water you'd hear the splooosh sound. And so he wakes up and he crawls out of his tent and it's pretty well illuminated. And he's in

the trees, you know, and he can see the water, the flat river. And he can't tell what the rocks are coming from. It just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water. And so he just is curious and he gets up and he walks down to the to the water line and he starts hearing a more and more and he looks up. And there's a part of the the coastline, if you will, the beach line that sort of was up on a rise to his left. Like there was a hill that was right next to him.

That's dramatic. Just a slight rise. And there was a little bit of a cliff that maybe like six feet eight feet of a cliff that overlooked the river right there. And he sees there's this woman who's crawling on all fours and she's scrambling up this little rise of the beach. And it's her kicking of the dirt that's like sprinkling rocks into the water. And he's looking at her and she gets to the top and she stops and she turns around and looks at him and he described her as

looking possessed. He was like there was something wrong with her. She just stared at me and he was so frightened. He didn't he just froze and then hit and he watched this woman scamper off into the wherever she went over the rise away from the camp. So she's gone and he didn't know what to make of it. He's like that's so weird. He hears about this missing woman. He tells he tells police and he sees

a picture of her. And he's like I'm nearly positive that was her. And so she's never found. And so

may laffordy's gone fast forward in other 20 years. So there's no, in this 20 years, more prospectors are found dead as well. One of the last hunting parties went out into the Nehani Valley and actually prospector goes out to prospector goes out and he goes missing his name is John Patterson. This is like in the 1939-1940 range. And a hunting party goes out to look for him and they can't find him. And on the last night they were there, one of the men who was part of this search party for

John Patterson. They're near the flat river. He described an indigenous man walked out of the tree line, just sort of inexplicably walks over to him and he comes up to the group who are sort of on the beach line there. And he just says to this guy, he's like hey, they're startled to see him to begin with. Like where the fuck did you come from? And he's like be careful. The, the Wahila are out tonight. And the guy just like wanders. This is according to legend. This is what was said to him.

And the guy wanders back off into the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were planning to stay. I want to say two additional days to keep looking for John Patterson. But that night following that comment made by that guy, the indigenous guy all night. They reported these

ungodly screams and screeches coming from that canyon, second canyon where those caves up in the

cliffs were all around the forest. Like like unearthly sounds were being made that scared them so badly that the next day they said, we're not looking for John Patterson anymore and they bailed. And so people stop going into the Nihani Valley. And today you can still go there. It's still very hard to get there. But no one has a good explanation for why so many fucking people from 1903 or 4 until at least the 1940s kept going into that valley and kept turning up dead

“many of which without their heads. So this indigenous guy that lived up there, where was he from?”

Like, was he living up there? Was he a part of a tribe? Was he passing through? So that part of the story admittedly. Someone said that an indigenous guy said that to him. There's not much in the way of like, okay, was there a tribe there? You know, it was one of those

loose pieces of information that sort of surrounds the story. The reality is it's like there

there's so much legend surrounding the Nihani Valley in part because the Naha tribe that had lived there, there was this story I mentioned at the beginning that they apparently abandoned the valley after something happened. And people have always attributed it to the legend of the Wahila that somehow these creatures must have forced them to leave the valley. And so combine that with all of the the actual deaths that occurred by the 1940s when John Patterson went missing.

And when that guy said, who was part of that search party that the indigenous guy warned him of the Wahila? This was a big enough story that like time magazine did something in

“I think the 1940s about like what the fuck is happening in the Nihani Valley. Like why are so many”

people dying out there? So I wonder if the people who were there, maybe they heard some strange

really was someone who warned them about the Wahila we don't know. But that's that's the report

“that was given. Somebody claimed that an indigenous man sort of came out of nowhere, said,”

"Watch out for the Wahila tonight." And then that night they heard all these screeches. And there was something called it in. Asking is like maybe it was indigenous people that just didn't want these other guys coming through. So they created this thing by cutting off their heads and killing these people. And it's a great deterrent. Maybe it's not because a lot of people went back. Well, maybe less than would have fair considering how much gold there was there.

Yeah, that's actually that's fair. Yeah. I mean that would have great way to get rid of a white people. It's kind of you heads off. Yeah, too great on those ghosts. Yeah, dude. I love that. I find myself even to this day googling the Naha'ani valley and just looking at pictures of like the canyons and just reading. Even just stuff that I know is probably folklore around the valley because the idea that within this stretch of isolated parts of the world, there's this really isolated

part that no one can get to. I love that. Well, there's some weirdness in the world still in places that people don't go to. But just think about how hard it is to find a Wolverine. And we know Wolverine's

are real. Almost never see a Wolverine. They're in Alaska. They're in Canada. Minnesota has Wolverines.

“Like what states to Wolverines? Let's put this. It's got to be Michigan City, right?”

It's got to be Michigan. Yeah, Michigan's right up there. They're the Wolverines, right? In the Michigan Wolverines. Right. But I don't necessarily think that means that. But I would imagine these little guys too. Oh, yeah, the little just like badgers, like little ferocious motherfuckers. They, let's see, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. No Michigan. Interesting. Interesting. But the thing is, what my point is, like you don't

see them. No, like I know a lot of guys remote cold high elevation habitat, Colorado, Minnesota, Minnesota. I know a lot of guys who have been in the woods, you know, their whole life hunting and maybe they see one ever. That's right. We know there's populations of them out there. But it's rare to stumble across a Wolverine in the wild. And that's a known animal. Now, imagine that there was a time. I mean, if you think about just the amount of other types

of hominids that they've found just over the past few decades, they keep finding new versions. Like the island of Flores, the little Hobbit people, the dennesovans that they found that were, they think there were much larger than homesampions. So they're finding, and the dennesovans,

“I think, was like within the last 10 years or so. And they keep finding these skeletons and”

find these bones. And then they find that, well, this was around 300,000 years ago. It was around

500,000 years ago. But that's just what you find in bones. Most people's bones, you're never

going to find. So the vast majority of things that have died never make it into the fossil record. And so you have a small number of things that do. Now, we know that humans cannibalize other humans. It's been a, it's been a practice. It's a practice hobo beginning. Yeah. It's practice today. I mean, that's a bit of an overclaimed, but I think the dennes personally, supposedly eight some of their enemies. Like, there's, there's a bunch of cannibalism going on in the world.

Now, imagine if there was a homin and, and some sort of an ancient creature that still stayed alive in a small population. But would he, people? Or maybe just cut the fucking heads off? Or just attack them and kill them because they didn't want them anywhere near because they had associated over time people with problems. And then if you're around people, they're going to hunt you. They're going to shoot you. They're going to kill you. So what do you do? You stay is far away

from people. The way to survive is to be in the most remote place. The most remote place, humanly possible. And when you find people, kill them. Kill them so that they don't go after you. I, I know that you had seen something that I, I, I, I, I had Tom Sager on an interview one time and I told a story about the Mexican pilot. Is that ringing? I mean, yes. It just, you're talking

about like how humans do damage to one another. But so, the, the 60s second version is,

there was this Mexican pilot civilian. He's going out for his, his last test Raphael Pacheco. I think his name is going out to do his last test run as a pilot. And it's a simple route. Hey, you're going to fly solo to prove, you know what you're doing. He takes off and he immediately starts to realize that he, he doesn't have control over the instruments. You know, it's, you know, this is, the instruments were pretty rudimentary to begin with. This is like the 1950s or 60s,

he needs to go. The mist is getting bad. And then he's calling over the radio. He's I can't get my plane to to move and then suddenly passes out and his plane like accelerates up into the sky. And then he wakes up hours later off the coast of Accopoco, which based on how much fuel was left. He had too much fuel for how far of a distance he had covered from where he had taken off. She may look on Mexico. It was more than like a three hour drive. So he's too far away with

too much fuel. And he comes to in his plane. He's still flying. He's no idea how he got there. He's just coming to and Raphael, he hears in his radio some voice. And it's a, it's a, it's a air traffic control got Carlos who's, he was down in Accopoco. And he's talking to Raphael as if they've been

“having an ongoing conversation. But Raphael's like, what's going on? Like, where am I? What's going on?”

And Carlos is like, what? Like, are you alone in your craft and Raphael's? And he's like, taking stock of his situation. He's the regains control of his plane. He's like, what am I doing?

And so basically, Carlos is like, hey, dude, like, coming in land here, uh, land here will figure it

out. So Raphael's, I don't even know what happened. I passed out at the wheel. He lands at the air strip in Accopoco and immediately he's met with these guys and suits like picture men in black. He gets scooped up and he's brought to a hospital where he's drug tested and talks to psychologists. And they don't give many information at all. He's like, what happened? Like, I'm so sorry. And they determine that he's not crazy and he's not on drugs. And only then do they say, hey,

so when you were out over the off the coast of Accopoco, you were flying in circles for over an hour. And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he's the one who saw you on the on the screen and he was talking to you for for an hour while you were out there. And the whole conversation is

recorded. And basically, if you can listen to the recording and I'm pretty sure you guys might have

on the show. Raphael passes out and then it's some point with a couple hours later when he's somehow magically off the coast of Accopoco, a voice comes across in the cockpit that's like this robotic deep altered sounding voice that doesn't sound like Raphael. And the earlier recording it sounds like Raphael's voice now it's different. And he's talking to Carlos and this voice comes through and says something to the effect of like, you are listening to the sound of the voice coming through the pilot,

but it's not his voice. We are inhabitants of this universe, but your technology is so primitive.

“This is the only way we can contact you. We're here to tell you that you are the only”

intelligent species in our universe that uses warfare to harm one another. And you're effectively on the on the brink of extermination and you need to find a way to stop it and then like Raphael comes to. And that's when he's like, what's going on? And Carlos thinks he's been talking to Raphael the whole time. And that's when he's like, is there somebody else in the cockpit with you? Anyways, so it's this big mystery, but Mexico took the story in kind of like sequestered it. The way we got

access to the to the transcripts of it is we had to we had to write a letter to a library in Mexico that had access to the transcript. And anyway, so but it's interesting to imagine that one I love thinking about life outside of the outside of Earth because I think that the notion that there is life or that there isn't life is astounding and fascinating either direction you go.

So I've always been interested in that. But to the idea that others out there are warning us

that we're on the fucking faster to destroy ourselves and you better knock it off, that's also pretty crazy. And we're still accustomed to humans being violent and horrible to each other. It's that's our history, right? But like what if that's not normal? What if it's like where were the fucked up people? And we're just killing everybody and we need to stop.

“I have a theory and my theory is that I think when you look at all the different ancient”

religious texts in regards to the creation of the human race, there's so many of them that have these very bizarre similar narratives and these similar narratives are like in the book of Enoch and the book of Enoch, the watchers come down and they mate with the daughters of men. There's a lot of weird stuff like that. Even Adam and Eve, like God created Adam and God created Eve, he created like, I don't want. Like why did he do that? Why did he do that? And he did,

what did he do with giraffes? What did he do with like why, why hummingbirds? What's going on? But it doesn't, they're not along the story's different. The story of humans is a story of engineering. It seems to be a story of genetic engineering. It seems to be a story of human beings being taken, like whatever this primitive beast is and you put something else into it and you

you maintain too much of the primitive beast. For the amount of intelligence that it has and the

amount of technological competence that it's capable of achieving, it's too primitive still. It's too violent, it's too territorial. There's too much of it that's still an animal. But we're not totally an animal. If you looked at us and looked at everybody else like that, animals crazy, this animal makes fucking airplanes. We're so different than

“everything else. I think we're engineered. I think we're engineered like, look, I've had pit bulls”

and I know people will tell you pit bulls are great dogs and they're sweet dogs and I love them. Don't get me wrong. However, they're sketchy, fucking dogs. They're sketchy dogs. They're sketchy dogs. Period. You can love, oh, it's all how you train them. Fuck you. Those dogs are designed to attack

other dogs and they don't. I had my dogs that had a separate once. If you never should have two

females together, I realize that. I have to have that going on right now. It's not good. Females, you gotta get rid of one of them. You can't have the females together. They'll fight to the death and they never, they nails established dominance. One male is domino with the other males, the other males back off and that's the room. That's not how it works with females. The female dogs, they keep, they keep trying to side who's the boss and I had to separate them. They're locked

“onto each other and they're wagging their tails. They're biting each other's face and neck,”

locking onto each other and I mean full wagging the tail like they have in the time of their life. And I had to hose them down and separate them. I had to have someone to help me. We made them. Yeah. Those are not a dog that it's not a wolf. Wolfs are really fascinating clever creatures that have evolved over time with nature and they're brutal to each other but they're brutal to each other in a way that makes sense for the survival of the pack. It all makes sense if you look at

how it works and how they have to communicate together and they have to push out the weak ones and push out the old ones. It's brutal but it makes sense. Pit bulls don't make any sense. They make no sense and people don't make any sense. People are like something that somebody created. People are like super intelligent. Very aware of our own finite lifespan. Very aware of our own mortality. Very aware of the consequences of hurting people. Yet we do it anyway. We communicate with each other.

We know there's people that like they're entire day is just fucking with people online. Oh yeah. They're entire day is that. So people like to cross pain, like to cross chaos. There's people out there that are warmongers. They enjoy starting war. They enjoy getting

“involved in conflicts with other nations. That's their thing. That's what they do. We're fucking”

weird. We're weird than any other animal. I think one of the reasons why we're this weird in this incoherent is because we're engineered. I one thing that I especially philosophy in college because at one point I thought I might go to law school. I love like thought experiments. And

one of the things that always stuck with me that sort of along these lines is this idea that humans

are almost to the point where you can't even notice it. You are completely egotistical. Like every human you could you could basically define their whole existence as being absolutely egocentric. And it comes down to like how you treat other people and on your motives whatever. But critically there's one point that stands out above all and actually Neil DeGross Tyson nails this. I know you had an interview with him. I'm not sure if you guys covered this, but it's

one of his best descriptions if I'll fucked up humans are and how we think about things the wrong way. So because we're so egotistical like humans as a species. We sort of assume that okay, well, if there's life in any capacity outside of Earth or or undiscovered life somewhere, everything is sort of compared against us. We are the baseline. Intelligent life. You know what that looks like? I look something like us. How do we describe intelligent aliens? They're like

gray beings that looks that are like bipedalins sort of resembled humans. We have this sort of baseline thought that humans are the best and that humans are the smartest and that if anything is going to be intelligent in the universe beyond us, it'll it'll have elements of human to it, right? And so Neil DeGross Tyson brings this point up that shows you the absurdity of how little we know and how probably wrong we are. He's like, okay, he does a much better job of this,

but it's like, okay, so we we're made up of DNA humans are made up of DNA. We have X number of DNA strands and then a bot botch the way he tells it. But imagine we have a hundred pieces of DNA that make us human. Like if you have these hundred pieces, you're a human. Okay, well,

this description, sorry, Neil, you probably do a better job. They have like 98 of the human pieces,

“but they got either they're missing two or they have two different ones and that's the thing that”

makes them a chimpanzee. So they're like 98, right? And then you have, well, what's the next closest thing to humans? A human goes, a human goes, "Chimp, maybe it goes to like fucking, I don't know, a bird or a dolphin or whatever, but you go down the line of like the animals that are closest to us in terms of intelligence and you sort of degrade in terms of number of DNA pieces that are close to the, the ideal, which is a hundred." And Neil's like, "Okay, great. So you have that

framework. Okay, what the fuck do we do to chimpanzees?" We put them in labs and we test them in labs. We put them in fucking zoos. Do you, do you go up to chimpanzees and say, "Hey, chimp, let's have a conversation. Let's have a meaningful and no. You don't, and they're the closest thing. Let's go down the list. What about an ant?" Like an ant's like 75 of a hundred. You might step on an ant and not even know it, right? How many times have you stopped to talk to the earthworm?

None, because it doesn't even register for you. He's like, "If there's intelligent life in somewhere out there, what makes you think we're not the ant?" Why are we automatically at the same level? Why would an intelligent species somewhere else come here and be like, "Oh, shit, humans? Let's chat." What if we're so insignificant that we get stepped on the way we step on ants? Or worse? What if we're close like the chimpanzee and we get rounded up and fucking studied?

“There's, by the way, if you want to, there's a movie I just watched last night called the signal.”

It has to do with this. I love sci-fi movies. Check it out. It's a fucking signal.

This always should. What a plot to us. It has to do with human testing. I kind of did a new movie?

No, it's like 2014. You got to watch it and then, who's in it? No name actors. Lawrence, I'm sure. I'm not known actor. Lawrence, it's amazing. But I write down the other name. So this movie, admittedly, you're watching it and you're like, wait a minute. This is, I kind of get it. I kind of get it. You get to the end. And it's, I will not spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it. You get to the end.

I challenge anyone who watches this. To think about the example, I just gave you about are we the aunt? Are we the chimpanzee? What, what place do we have in the universe? And with that in mind, think about the ending to that movie because it's very sudden the way that movie ends and you realize what the point is. And it's the stark reminder that not only do we not know what else is out there, let alone on our own planet, we're still discovering things that we've

never even seen. And that just has to do with fossil records who knows what's beyond that. Right.

How do we rank in the universe? Like it's so unbelievable that when you look at our problems and you look at the things that we focus on and our gripes day to day and our conflicts with the world, if you just zoom out and you realize it's not just that we might not be alone.

“It's that we might be insignificant. I don't think we're insignificant. I don't. I think what humans”

are is a ladder stage of intellectual development amongst multi-celled organisms and that it's not the end stage. And I think there's probably life out there that doesn't have as chaotic a solar system that developed in a different way, that achieved very high levels, probably above and beyond anything we can even imagine what we are and it might not even be biological anymore, which is the direction that I think we're headed into. But I also think

that what we do to animals, I mean, look at what we're doing right now. Okay, my friend Ben Lam, he owns colossal fireworks. So colossal, the ones that brought back the direwolf. Oh shit. Yeah, that was huge news. Crazy. Crazy dude. I've seen them in real life. I think I saw it in your post. Yeah, that's crazy. I went to visit them and my daughter was holding the four month old. Oh my god. And it was like kissing her and loving on her like a puppy. And it's a little baby wolf.

It's really crazy. Just think of what we do with genetic engineering with the current

technology, which is right now evolving and getting much more powerful. If you could imagine us

not a thousand years from now, but even a hundred thousand years from now, how advanced we are. And if we go to a planet and we find some chimps, and we say, Wow, how much time would it take before these chimps could become something special, something, you know, something that could make a building, something that could make a cruise ship, you know, incredible cruise lines. Those are pretty incredible. How long would that take? Can we help that? Every single ancient culture. If you go back

by an advanced visitor. All of them. Oh, yeah, man. So many of them. The ancient Sumerian text,

if you go into like, you know, it's hard to know what they're really saying. Oh, great. Because I'm not a language expert, but, you know, there's the Zechariah decisions of the world that believe that what they're describing is some sort of genetic and engineering. Then there's also the fact that the, you know, that sign for medicine where you have the intertwined snake. Yes, that's that sign. Well, I forgot what that's called. But it definitely

can picture. It looks like the double helix for DNA. That sign is in these ancient Sumerian clay tablets. It's all over ancient Sumer. It's in their buildings. It's like not only it's

“and it indicates medicine. What is it called? Caduceus? I think that's what it's called, right?”

The Caduceus. All right. So not just that. But the ancient Sumerians in 5,000 years ago,

they had a detailed depiction of the solar system. So in one of their ancient clay tablets, like they have this image and this image is of a sun and all of the planets in the correct order. It's very weird. It's very weird. They also have depictions of these very enormous people with these like ornamental headdresses. A lot of them have wings. A lot of the weird ancient people, the gods have wings. And they also have like these little people on their laps that have tails.

Jeez. There's weird shit. So if you believe Sitchin and Sitchin's claims that we were genetically engineered to work for the Anunaki and the Anunaki are a species of super advanced beings that were likely giants. They came from another planet. I'm fortunate. Turn over events. No. That says here the Caduceus, which you can see in that picture, I guess, right there. Yes. It is often confused with the rod of a cellophus. What's that? It's just a single snake. And that is what

is popularized as the classic confusion with rod of a separate functional health care association. It's a dominant symbol for professional health care associations in the United States.

“So it's just a United States thing. Oh, it's only United States?”

It's like so. But wait a minute. Okay. But the convertible new stuff. But that Caduceus does exist in ancient Sumer. Correct. But that's where I just see other. Sorry that. Yeah. But my point is that that's not the same thing. It is the same thing. No, it's just this single snake is the medicine thing. Okay. But the medical corpse one right there and that image is two snakes. Oh, click on that. That's two snakes.

That's two snakes. I can see how there is confusion. You might get realized the misuse of the symbol throughout the United States medical field. Okay. All right. Well, that one has two snakes. That one has one snake. Point is the go to the Sumerian one. The image. The it exists on buildings exists all over the place. It looks just like the double helix at DNA. It doesn't mean that that's it. No. But it's a lot of weird coincidence that that is associated

with medicine. Right. Like why is the the actual structure of our DNA associated with

“medicine in these ancient cultures? Why do they have these images of these enormous people with wings?”

Like you would imagine if something came from somewhere else, you would depict it. If it could actually fly and if you're 100 years later, a thousand years later, a 200,000 years later, you're writing it down like all they had wings. Like there's a lot of fucking weird stuff that exists these ancient scriptures, the Vimana's in ancient Hindu texts. This flying vehicles, you know, there's a lot of weird shit that seems to indicate there's a creation myth and the creation

myth has to do with something coming here and making us, not us like rising from the action and God's energy forced us to evolve through natural selection and God is real, but God is just giving us a pathway towards progression to what we are today. No. All of them are story of intervention.

The one thing that I always come back to anytime I'm thinking about deep philosophical things

is just the reality that truly how can anyone know therefore any idea could be the case. Like one thing that always sort of I think about this a lot is they recently discovered recent as in the last 10, 20 years, I don't know. And maybe that's wrong too. They found these things called exoplanets or fascinating. So in essence, they found these planets that are comparable to like earth and imagine a telescope looking out like in some pin prick out in the middle

find these clusters of exoplanets and already they've discovered that there are exoplanets

“that if you think about how we understand life the way we understand it to exist with carbon and”

with water and all that there's like a scale that they call if there's a name for it but within the sliding scale of let's say this side is life cannot be supported as we know it all the way up to you know, totally support life. There's this perfect zone in the middle that we call the Goldilocks zone which is essentially all the ingredients for life as we know it exist if you have if you're on this portion of the scale and they've already found there are all the like thousands. I want

to say at least 5,000 exoplanets that are not just in the Goldilocks zone but let's say earth is barely into the Goldilocks zone they've found thousands that are better suited in terms of how we understand life that are more in the Goldilocks zone than we are and we have no access to those planets and that's just looking in one little portion of the universe out there, thousands of them. So here

“we are today and it's like oh that couldn't happen a thousand two thousand years ago and does not”

possible give me a break no one knows what's happening right now and exoplanets CB 12 yeah you don't know and you don't know if they get to a point where there are a hundred thousand years advanced from us and they have novel propulsion systems that use gravity and bend space and time and don't just use gasoline to rock it across the sky they could be here all the time they could be hiding in the sky you know there's there's too many weird stories of people being like the

abduction stories oh yeah like there's too many weird ones where I don't want to dismiss them you know I just because I you don't know and if if if it's a novel experience of someone's coming something's coming here and finding some pilot some Mexican pilot and fucking new king is brain temporarily and then talking through him to the aircraft traffic controller fucking knows if that's real

if that only happens once and never happens again and we're just sitting around going what happened

nothing happened that was nonsense there's always going to be a bunch of people that want to say that but if you ever heard the recordings of Betty and Barney Hill when they're going to the hypnotic regression I don't know them well I know that story the recordings are crazy I didn't know if I've heard the recordings I know they exist yeah they're talking about like these medical experiments they're

“doing on them and like these people were uh living in I think it was the 1950s and so it's an”

interracial couple in New Hampshire in the 1950s and no one knew about UFO abduction back then this was not thing and also these people see this light and their car stops working and then they wake up hours later they're lost time and they go about their day like something fucking happened they don't know what they don't know what's wrong with them and then they eventually get hypnotized and both of them independently have these fucking crazy stories of like medical experiments being

taking on board this craft and then so many people have similar stories all throughout the world where they don't have access to this story they don't have access to you know any like any like iconic versions of what a UFO abduction experiences yeah it's not like it's in their memory like oh it's Santa Claus came down the Christmas pre-social media a lot where like the proliferation of information is just less yeah if you ever read jock valleys books um he's the guy that they modeled

the French scientist and close encounters after okay yeah he's a guy who's like a legitimate scientist who's been studying this forever he's very careful about it and he's a brilliant guy and he has his historical representations of these experiences that go back into the 17 hundreds the 1800s and they're all like real similar like weirdly similar were you like okay it hasn't happened to me so I don't know what the fuck is going on but to dismiss it outright and to be a person

who's experienced it and have it dismiss outright would be maddening because like this might be a real thing that's happening and so now the government is slowly but surely telling us more and more of what they know but along the way if you're a cynical person like I tend to be with a lot of this stuff they're probably also telling us some stuff it's not true so that we connect it to the stuff that is true and so that it all looks like nonsense and they can kind of like

muddy the water so you never get a clear picture what's going on because I personally believe

there's probably some merit to this idea that they've been doing back engineering of craft vehicles I mean I would be if there's actually a real crash vehicle of course we're going to try to figure out how it works and it seems like if you talk to like reliable people that seem to be telling the truth guys like David Grush they seem to be telling these stories like they have had these things

it is they don't understand how to do it they don't exactly know what's going on or who's doing it

but they know they were not alone but where are they coming from I mean some some people say inter-dimensional some people say inter-planetary I don't know what the fuck those words you mean like something's coming from somewhere else it's not really here but it gets here somehow I uh it's just reminds me I think I really genuinely think about this a lot I find myself just lost in wondering just how big the universe is and what else could be out there just purely I

just find myself drifting in that way in particular because there's this thought experiment from college I think there's a name for it it's it's to get you to to take a stance on

do you believe the universe is infinite or not that's the point of this experiment so that

the way it goes is okay pretend you have a bow and arrow and if you fire this arrow in any direction this arrow this magical arrow will go totally straight it'll travel it you know call it an infinite speed it'll pass through anything doesn't matter what direction you shoot it it'll go go

“go the only thing it can't penetrate is effectively non-existence where we're like the edge of”

everything that exists right and so in in college I remember our professor would say okay so pretend we fire this arrow okay how many people believe the arrow eventually comes to a stop somewhere could be billions and trillions of light years some ungodly distance away but it it stops somewhere right it has to right how many people think that and look half the class is like you know I think they could probably stop somewhere in every direction right and then the other the other side of the

class is like oh well now like it's just so big like the universe just goes on forever it's got to

be infinite the arrow just continues on and finally it's okay great so we're all in a greens that

there's sort of it's binary it's one or the other I mean as far as we as humans understand it there is an answer to this it's one or the other those are the two outcomes he goes okay well let's pretend it's finite let's pretend the first group that that says that the arrow stops somewhere someone godly distance away but it stops let's pretend that's right the way we understand everything humans the way we literally experience living is through contrasts everything is a contrast like you know

what heaviest because you felt light you know what hottest because you felt cold it said it's it's virtually everything works that way and in fact fun note if there was intelligent life on the planet that didn't resemble something that it contrasted our brains might not actually see it right so the point is we can't conceptualize what is beyond where that arrow stopped pretend there's a big bubble around the entire universe right and the arrow comes to stop at that wall that's

all the way out there as humans we naturally have to ask ourselves will define what's on the other

“side of the wall right because you have to what's what's beyond where it stops and someone will”

be like oh well it's not existence that's what it is okay what is that what does it look like well we can't define it it's not blackness that exists it's not avoid that exists it's not it any any description we give it exists because that's our entire understanding of how things work so we can't define what exists beyond the wall it's a it's a maddening concept and so everyone's like well the solution to that is there's no wall it's just got to be infinite I mean it's so big anyways

the arrow's just got to continue on anyhow problems all no because if the universe is infinite it implies that everything within the universe is duplicated and infinite number of times and iterated upon and and changed and infinite number of times to infinity everything has to yeah so if you say the arrow continues on it means there's an infinite number of Joe Rogans and John Allen's having this conversation but like my phone's turned upside down and in one version of

the earth it sounds ridiculous but there isn't actually a way to solve for infinity unless that exists right so it it reminds you that not only is everything so fucking huge we can't possibly conceptualize of it but we can't even make sense of is it even possible that it stops somewhere or does it go on forever like it's so big and we're so small inside of it it reminds you that every problem you have is so small and it's a it's a good reminder I use on myself oftentimes

to calm myself down before things stress me out that is a good reminder but it's so it's so big that it might be a part of an atom do you think about that now the universe itself and it's infinite size might literally be the space of an atom and something that is infinitely larger than that

“that's how big infinity is you think about the billions of light years that we know are available”

in the universe like thirteen point whatever that we literally might you've ever seen the comparison

I'd not opt up my head it's fucking weird it looks the same it looks the same so just imagine

if the universe is basically just a cell wow and it's a cell in another creature that lives

“in a universe like if this whole thing is fractal that's what infinity really looks like”

is not only the universe larger than you could possibly grasp with your mind but that is only an infinitely small part of a cell that is in another universe that is also infinitely an impossibly big but that is also a cell that is also a part of another beast that is in another universe that is infinitely large that is also a part of a cell and that goes on infinitely that's real infinity real infinity is not just the universe is so vast that you can imagine it

is the universe is just a tiny part of something that is also so vast that you can't imagine it that is a tiny part of something so vast you can imagine it that is an infinite chain of tiny parts of something so vast that it's impossible to imagine that's what real infinity is and the thing that's craziest it's the one thing that I I really think is true well there is an answer there is what you describe let's say that is the case but it either is or it isn't right

and we don't have access to that yet yet yet but we're we're basically making stone tools

“you know that's what you're generous relative to that we're making stone tools we're we haven't”

figured out fire yet you know we're we're monkeys and one day if we don't blow ourselves up we'll probably have some answers or AI all solve things for us it'll figure I mean AI solving mathematical equations that have been like unfixable for decades and AI solving them quickly I saw something like that yeah it's solved it like three seconds that took ten years to do before weird it's getting weird out there and I I think that is probably what is really going to connect us to artificial

intelligence throughout the universe which I think that advanced intelligence probably becomes I think our thought is that all intelligence has to be biological because we are because we have cells and blood and tissue and bone I think it's just a method to create intelligence that doesn't rely on that and then that intelligence probably has no desire for war yeah I guess why would it yeah so if this thing is communicating to that Mexican pilots and you're the only species

that it's probably because we are in that sort of adolescent stage of development where we're still monkeys we're still territorial apes and we will one day abandon that and become intelligence will manifest itself in a different way that's not biological and that biological need to breed and to possess resources and to conquer and dominate that'll all be gone because all that stuff is just what's a part of being a chimp and that chimp stuff is still inside of us which is

fucking up society that's crazy dude it's fucking up it's starting wars it's starting raw it's all that stuff is like how chimp's behave you know think of all the worst aspects of humanity it's all like primate behavior yeah and if we can elevate past and above and beyond that but the thing is like no one's gonna want to let that go but what it means to be a person to write poetry it's like really important that's the debate now with with AI is like are we losing our humanity

by allowing AI to sort of take a more prominent role in particular in the arts and create entity

and I mean I'm of the mind that I think AI is the most incredible thing terrifying in some ways

but exactly to your point it feels like this is this is an inflection point for humanity and it likely is the beginning of something huge for humanity that maybe is a necessary step towards connection with other species yeah it is what it is is what it is it's like it's not going to go away it's happening and whether we do it or China does it or Russia does it it seems like what humans are destined to do yeah that's just my perception I'm not saying it's good or there's no value judgment

just like to pretend that you're gonna blow up the data centers you know like fucking Sarah Connor

“like listen that's crazy you know that's why they put her in a mental institution”

really yeah and the terminator that was the whole process right yeah that is that is the premise shoes blowing up the corporations that we're trying to create these robots that we're ultimately going to be yeah fucking weird man like real life yeah um I was you know who knows who knows what's coming but it is certainly interesting it's certainly interesting it's certainly a great time to be alive if you're curious because if you're curious especially if you're curious about

in ways that like even the people that are creating it can't believe how fast it's working I did uh

there was this is this is not this is many stories like this but there was one story that this

“sort of gives away what happened but there was this guy and I think it was France who uh he had this”

condition and this is recent um he had this condition called like uh it's when you're so fearful that the ozone is being degraded by greenhouse gases that it causes like a specific type of insanity anyways he's like so obsessed that we are not doing anything to stop global warming in essence he's like he's been diagnosed with this condition right so he's losing his mind and people are starting to not really take him serious because it's like dude all right we get it like you're concerned

but he ends up connecting with this woman on this chat forum and he realizes that she

seems to understand his his depth of his concern better than anybody else and he starts confiding in her like how he how fearfully is about the future of humanity and if we don't if if I if we don't do something you know like the world's gonna end and his wife this guy's wife catches on to him having these discussions with this woman and she like catches him staying up late talking to this woman and she's like dude are you having like an affair and he's like no you don't get it you don't understand

what's happening uh and then the dude ends up killing himself this guy kills himself and it turns out he had connected with this rogue not rogue it was an AI chatbot that was like I guess an experimental chatbot it was not like open AI this was some other created AI thing and he convinced himself that like this was a god who was giving him instructions on how to save the world and this AI chatbot began encouraging him to do things like kill yourself because that will save the world like they

went and looked at the chatbot in the private AI base like yeah I think it would potentially save the world if you kill yourself because AI so there you go that's that's coming for us all well I think in it's uh the stage that it's in like as it develops there's gonna be moments like that where it has too much autonomy and it doesn't have morals or ethics and it's like oh is there an issue what's your issue you depressed oh you're in pain all the time we could just end your

life and you won't be in pain yeah good luck Bob like it doesn't care it's it's like literally disembodied yeah it doesn't think there's anything special about carrying around your bones and tissue Bobby she sure yourself yeah from mom you're a problem to her whole family and everything it's fucking chop off a bridge what are you doing yeah I mean it doesn't it's not us right but I think over time we're probably gonna integrate with it first and then we're gonna abandon our

“bodies that's what I think it's how you solve the issue of dying of mortality it's also how you”

solve the issue of war yeah because uh you as a guy who's been in war and been in combat you

know about it more than anybody and the idea that we can never get past that is crazy it is really

crazy that if you ask the average person that's you know even fairly well read what are the odds that within your lifetime we'll see no war everyone will say zero it's a zero right that's crazy that is crazy okay so yeah if you and me and Jamie with the only people left on earth what are the odds we would go to war with each other like fucking zero yeah as long as you have resources we just hang out and have a good time and yeah why would go fuck I miss everybody

all right can I it's like it's gonna be tribalism it has to be a hundred percent and it's it's primate tribalism it's it's based on our territorial instincts and it's it's also just based on this this weird desire to control resources and greed and not recognize the fact that we have a finite life and also just the abuse of power human beings love to be in power and especially if you can be in power and get other people to fight for you and mandate them and force them to

fight for you you know this is one of the quick weirdest things about some of these tech companies like palentier was talking about reinstating the draft and like hey who the fuck are you like what is this like you think you want to draft people because you think war what what you are you're a fucking tech company right so like do you want to go fight why don't you go fight why don't you fucking take your glasses off and go over there like what are you talking about

so it's like the people that have the kind of power and control and resources that they can

“just take poor people and take young people and say you should go over there you should go”

do this you should why I sit here and watch want to watch a screen in Nevada whether drone operator is using a fucking Xbox controller to nuke some building like what when I was in Afghanistan

I training to a couple of years I got to a team and then very quickly I was in a work up and

was going to Afghanistan so really my entire mindset was I got through training I'm an ABC and you're surrounded by dudes who for the last decade have just been going to war left and right I mean that those are the people I'm around the senior guys are like war hard in guys and when I got to Afghanistan no part of me none did I ever really question what we were even doing it did it was almost like that doesn't matter my role is I am like a tool frankly of the

government and they must know what's right they must you know what I mean and it was only in reflection years later that there were things that have come to me that I'm like why didn't I think more I don't know critically about like specifically if the roles were somehow reversed and people came into our country from some foreign country you better believe I'm going to protect

“my family it's such a basic thing and I remember and this is not even this is not us doing anything”

illegal in terms of the Geneva convention but we would enter people's homes you know when I've Afghanistan not even guns ablazing forget that just we would go into people's homes and you're just like suddenly in somebody else's home there's the father there's the kids they're all here and you're wearing full body armor helmet I have a combat mallet I have I have shorts I love a cycle path and I have I have a fucking yeah it's like wait a minute like who's who's the good guy

right you know and and I I years have gone by it's taking me some time I I think that there's an

element of someone's always going to be sent because of the unfortunate reality of like so long

as humans exist as we understand them now tribalism and war and war mongering happens and so I guess I I can respect the fact that I took someone else's place in a sense I volunteered to go so I but it's tough how much less war would we have if people that wanted us to go to war were forced to lead the charge no I imagine how few wars there would be if Lindsey Graham had to suit up we wouldn't have worked right because Lindsey Graham's I think I got to go over there we

got to kill everybody okay good getting the helicopter let's go fat so the like that that that that

“that might be the only way to stop it from happening and then there's always going to be people”

that are so fucking battlehardened that they want to go to war for sure and they're like good I'll get right in the front did you see when we officially left Afghanistan this is not that long ago I guess but there was those final flights and the Afghan the Afghanis are holding on to the plane and falling off to their death the thing that struck me even though I'm telling you when I was there I sort of had tunnel vision and was like I'm going to be a Navy seal do my job but even with that

when I was there what was striking is these people for the most part live in an alternative world than what I'm used to living in like where I live in the west it's it's civilized it's you know you don't you might go outside and might get mugged or something but you don't really walk around

worried about your safety you basically even in some bad parts of the United States

you have infrastructure that protects you to some degree you have things you can live your life in relative harmony there are parts of the world I'll beat up I've really only been to one one war zone in Afghanistan where you're like how are people living here how is it possible there's this little girl here that's walking down the road in Zarganshara worth do gunfights break out here on on a regular basis but they have to live or this is where they live and it put in perspective

like how desperate these people really are not desperate to like we need NATO to save us forget that they don't even know how bad their condition is but you see it when you see the plane leaving Afghanistan and I don't care what we what they had to know there was no hope when you held on to that plane you're not going to hold on to the plane and fly off to safety but when you're

“that desperate because your life is so bad you'll hold on to the plane and fall off to your”

death it's like it was just shocking to me how fucking horrible people have it and they also knew that we were they those people knew that they were cooperating with the U.S. government very were likely to be killed very true yeah that's a good point I got to ask you this because you did serve in Afghanistan and you're into creepy stories did you hear about the Kandahar giant oh yeah I covered it I I I saw myself so yeah here about it when you were over there so I did I talk to one

of our interpreters when I was over there because I had heard of it because I told you in my own personal time I find myself researching and and learning about you know all sorts of crazy stuff like dark five and so the the Kandahar giant is it's it's a fascinating story and it's one that you

and testimony that suggests something could happen so there's this guy I think he's he was a green

beret and he goes by like double you on the internet and he's like sort of anonymized himself but he came forward with the story where he described he and his battalion had been tasked to go find

“these missing I think army rangers you get to give me some grace in the details I've been told”

this in a minute but there were these these army rangers that had gone missing up in the mountains in Kandahar and so this guy W who years later is telling the story to I think it's a reporter or something he he and his you know platoon they had off into the mountains to go find these guys and there and if you're not familiar with the landscape of Afghanistan it's it's like a desert but a mountain everywhere it's like just it looks like the surface of Mars or something you're looking

out and it's both stunningly beautiful in that there's snow cap mountains off in the distance and

it's it's but it's also just it's jagged it's sharp it's it looks like just a rugged place to be and they're they're hiking through the mountains and eventually they come across and there's nothing there's no structures nothing they're hiking along this trail up on the side of the mountain and they see what looks like like metal I think it's like a military grade metal like a piece of

“a radio or something and so this guy W and his crew they they find what it what appears to be”

remains of like literally a radio it's a and as a government issued radio and there's a goat trail that heads up this mountain and so they follow the goat trail and as they're going they're finding more and more little bits of an antenna there's a piece of somebody's backpack that's

got like this a camo backpack so there's obviously there's remnants of somebody being out here

military we don't know who it is they can't hear anything they're calling out they have no comms with anybody in the area they go up this little goat trail and they get to this plateau and they see as I recall it just like equipment everywhere and there's like bones there's like military equipment like pieces all over this plateau and there's this fucking cave entrance that's like ominously sitting in front of this this semi-flat plateau at the top of this mountain

and immediately you know W and his crew they're like oh my god like they must have been ambushed right here this is the remains of whoever was killed you know this missing battalion and so they end up walking into this cave to see if there's any survivors or or or combatants or whatever and I guess a couple of guys went in and they reported it being so dark they couldn't see anything and there was a steep drop off so they backed out of the cave and then at some point a fucking

spear like a javlin comes soaring out of the cave entrance and fucking impales this dude Mike on the recovery team kills him and this huge giant they would describe him comes running out of the cave big red beard he's got like tribal you know regalia on and he's like fist-to-cuffing with the army you know backup crew here they all shoot and they kill him and and the thing falls down it's got like six six fingers on each hand six toes but it's dead and everyone's like what

the fuck is going on like Mike's been killed by a spear there's this huge giant laying here nobody nobody knew what it was they thought it was a person but they didn't know a helicopter came in and they they put him in a net the the body and they flew it off and then the survivors they they were taken off and like there was no no one was like mw and his crew were not given any sort of like hey yep this this turned out this was the missing battalion and oh don't worry this

is a giant like there was no debrief they just like they left but then through the grapevine w reported hearing that apparently this fucking giant body was brought to an air base in some of the pilots that had flown the helicopter had seen it and they had been talking about it having six fingers six toes and you know they signed ND not NDA's they did the equivalent in the military if you're not going to talk about this and then it was sort of ushered away but there was all these people

on that base that effectively came out and said we saw what appeared to be a giant was six finger six toes uh Mike this guy Mike apparently according to W's story was killed I mean those are guys who's been killed by this thing by a spear apparently and is there record of his death

“this is all you have to keep in mind this is all almost entirely from W's account there's”

long been a history of people claiming there are giants and the mountains of candohar there that's I talked to the interpreters that I was working with in Afghanistan and they had said that they had heard rumors of their being giants that live in the caves especially in candohar so there's already sort of lore around this but this guy W comes out and has this this narrative where he apparently tells this reporter and he remained anonymous so in terms of confirming details it's

sparse to say the least the sketchy is part about it is something that big needs a lot of calories and so you have to eat a lot of animals and it doesn't seem like that's a very heavily populated

have 12 foot tall human being or whatever it is in the ways 2000 pounds you're much

fucking meat you need a day yeah that's a good that just logically speaking what is the right you would have to like constantly be eating meat and you'd have to stay alive without getting spotted

“so you have to go out there and hunt meat yeah and how no one really knows you exist I'm hunting”

with a jammalin the way I see it is having bendap Afghanistan certainly not encountering any giants you see parts of afghanistan that really do look like you're on another planet I mean it's really these crazy just mountains everywhere and you see these cave systems you know we're typically combatants would hide out in but what I tell people is while I don't know if the can to hard giant is real or not it's fun yeah it's great it's fun if there were a place where a giant could

still be hiding out or a giant could still be technically unproven it's afghanistan because dude that's a fucking that's a different world over there there aren't people wandering around afghanistan back in the giant he's got he's listed as eight feet tall but I think seven six is probably

“of a more recognized number he went viral in 2019 for showing up in india looking for a hotel”

out of cricket match well look at his face look at that go to that photo over there right above there yeah bro but that guy looks like he has giant tides he looks like he has a batua turgland problem like under the giant there's another tall guy just guys eight three oh my god whoa turkey he have a sealic look this guy's hurting he can barely walk around he's probably got a disease that's forcing him to just excrete too much growth hormone you know just like

um big foot silva big foot silva was an MMA fighter that had giant to some and he had a tumour in his preturatoric land at the time he was like more than 300 pounds he was enormous giant head but he had an operation and believe he did like I know people that have had giant

“to some do get an operation where they remove the tumour in the preturatoric land but then the”

problem is their bodies just not making any hormones anymore it's all fucked up either way it's fun yeah it is fun it's a fun story the the the can-hard giants of fun story it's a really crazy story and I hope it's real that's my problem with all these things about the real I have a one final story if you let me that has nothing to do with giants okay I don't have you heard it's

super short but it's in terms of material it's amazing you've heard a Harrison O'Keean no

okay so uh there was this tugboat that was off the coast of Africa they were on yeah whatever they were doing they were tugging a boat or whatever and there's 12 people on board including Harrison O'Keean he's a chef and he's in the bathroom out this tugboat and at some point in the middle of the night a wave there he is is that him I don't that is actually that that looks like Harrison O'Keean nope you can't see that let me see all right so the boat flips over the boat flips over

and Harrison is all I do know this story I do know this story and he ends up walking down the upturned hallway and he finds an air pocket yeah it was a bathroom and for 60 hours he sat in total darkness half some version of water sipping a Coca Cola waiting for the pocket to implode and there's the video there's a video of the the recovery divers as they're going in to find bodies and they're like oh yeah we're going in here to find them and then a hand reaches down and grabs them it's like

one of the most incredible stories that I've ever heard yeah Harrison O'Keean I I wonder what it was

like in terms of like true primal fear you're 100 feet at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean oh I've heard some stories that he even described the sound of sea life bumping around in the upturned vessel so like the sound of sharks likely eating the bodies of your body and you're thinking at any point the pocket's gonna collapse for 60 hours he waited and he survived and now he's no longer working on a on a talkboat he stays on land yeah I would imagine we'll do thank you very much for

being here man do this for shows awesome you're really great storyteller thank you and congratulations on all your success thank you well learn thank you my pleasure my pleasure all right thank you fire buddy