Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 372 - Seth Gehle

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Seth Gehle is a professional speaker committed to empowering others to embrace their warrior spirit and overcome any adversity or trauma in their life. Enduring 16 years of abuse, Seth transformed his pain into purpose, using his voice as an author and motivational speaker to help others heal and find strength. A devoted husband and father, Seth proves that with determination, anyone can overcome their past and create a brighter future. Strength Beyond the Shadow: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DMGQZZ1V?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= Today's Sponsors: Montana Knife Company: https://www.montanaknifecompany.com/ Drink LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/Clearedhot  

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome back. I'm going to open right up with this. Today's episode is not a feel-good episode. This is a heavy topic. It's a dark topic. And it's real. It is more pervasive than I think a lot of people would care to even imagine.

We're going to be talking about abuse, specifically sexual abuse of a young man. But having said that, what Seth, my guest today is Seth Gell, what he has been able to do with that and how he has been able to shave his life through what happened to him, I think is an incredible thing. So like I said, yesterday is Seth Gell. He wrote this book, Strength Beyond the Shadows. Now, Seth himself is 82nd Airborne Combat Vet, worked in the construction business, an ultramarathon runner. He's an author, obviously speaker now, BJJ practitioner, amazing things. I am not even going to attempt to describe what he has lived through because he gets into it in a level of detail that might make some listeners uncomfortable. My recommendation to you is to stay the course, to listen,

to learn. And I honestly think that in somebody telling a story like this, there are warning signs for those of us out there who would step in if they could. figure out a way to stop this from happening, whether it's just a conversation, asking somebody the right question, recognizing the warning signs, whether they're physical, emotional, psychological, I think it's possible. I don't think it's possible that we could stop it, but I think there are ways that people who are paying attention to this type of predation can step in and do something. So that's what we're going to get into on today's episode. If you follow the podcast, you know that I work with some advertisers. Please stay with me for the next 60 to

90 seconds and let me pay the bills so I can continue to bring you this podcast for free. Let's dive into today's sponsor. Ladies and gentlemen, today's sponsor is Montana Knife Company. Now, I've hosted their founder twice, Josh Smith, the youngest master blade smith in the U.S., right? Overachiever. What an asshole. They are just down the road from where I'm sitting right now.

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goat series as well. That thing is amazing. But they offer more than these two knives. So I'm going to go over real fast for those of you watching on video. We're going to take a look at their website. They have the Magna Cut Speed Gut 2.0. They have a skinning specific knife. Not that you couldn't use it for other things, but that's its design. They have some apparel. They have this lighter. Look at all these knives. Now, you'll notice that a lot of these, they are saying out of stock or coming soon. Holy cow, they have way more apparel than I actually thought here. The list of all of their blades, it's pretty expansive what they actually have to offer. I just, man, what a missed opportunity to.

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To the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Yeah. There you go. I have no nails. I have a bad habit of biting them. So I was trying to let them grow back. And then I went to jihitsu and I didn't want to be that guy. Yeah. Yeah, it's a tough balance. I used to bite my nails pretty badly as well. And then to stop that, you have to let them grow out. But if you let them grow out, your training partners don't like you very much on the mats. Yeah. I actually have come home looking as if I had been attacked by a cat.

Yeah. And I didn't feel it in the moment. But I tell you what, when I hopped in the shower, it was, I'm not a religious man, but it was probably as close to religious experiences. Like, wha! Yeah. I also had that when we switched when the gym got the new mats. They had the rough tatami finish.

And I didn't feel it at the time. And it had abraded almost all of the skin. my face. That was a fun one to hop under the shit head. Yeah. Yeah. I get a lot of that in my face. I'm a pressure passer. And so all I do is just like head constantly. And so I just get a lot of the ghee rubbing on the face. How long have you been training? Two years now. Sweet. So blue belt? Yeah. The old blue belt. Yeah. Yeah. Did you find it came with any magical powers? Did you do? No, the blue belt. No. No. Fuck no. I was promoted way too soon. I got a wrestling background or a grappling?

I mean, that's what's going to happen, man. I know. Well, the thing, see, everybody says that. It's funny you say that because as soon as I start wrong with somebody, like, oh, you're a wrestler, aren't you? I'm like, yeah. No, but that's a good thing. I know.

Yeah. I know, but here's the thing is I was a fucking dog shit wrestler. It doesn't matter. I see that. So here's the thing. And this is from somebody who never wrestled. You can instantly feel it when somebody comes from a grappling background. Yeah.

Grappling is grappling, right? Right, right. People want to pretend like jujitsu is completely unique and standalone. It's, I don't think there's, I don't know, at some point in time, people were creating unique things. It's an amalgamation of a lot of stuff, in my opinion, which counts for absolutely nothing. But at least when I ask people if they wrestle, it's a compliment because their ability to apply pressure and take away space. Yeah. You don't know how to do that if you don't wrestle.

Right, right, right, right. somebody who is even your words not mine a dog shit wrestler the difference between that and somebody who doesn't wrestle is unbelievable right so yeah sometimes I feel like

not that I mean you know it's my fucking ego but not that it matters but like when you get that little win and maybe in practice or in competition it's like oh he's a wrestler and it's like motherfucker I'm I fucking won because I train you fucking asshole so well

Well, wrestling will work up into a certain, in my experience, up into a certain belt or knowledge level. Yeah. And then it will still be effective, it will be less effective. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Is your top game better than your bottom game? Certainly. Why are you playing top then?

Well, so a couple reasons. Because you can win. That's the reason. Well, no. The main reason, okay, the main reason, because I go back and. forth on this because I'm like, oh, I do, so I pull guard. I'll play guard against somebody that I can effectively play guard against. Where I'm like learning, but like when I go get these black, we have a lot of black belts

in our gym and I love rolling with them because they just fuck me down. And if I play guard against them, I mean, first off, my guard is fucking horro-it. It's so fucking bad. It's not even funny. Well, a really good way to keep it that way is to not practice it. I know. But I put, so let me answer your question. I played top because I was trying to do like.

I was trying to learn a bunch of shit at one time. And now all I do is the same shit until I get it down. And once I get that down, then I'll start fucking around with other shit, you know? Like over under, passing is like my thing. And so that's all I do. And I'll just do it over and over and over again, no matter how many times I get stuffed or whatever. And firstly, when I go against somebody who's either my belt level, like I don't ever stand up with blue belt. Really, honestly, brown belts and below, I don't stand up with them because I'm going to take them down.

I'm going to be on top. And we're just going to, I'm just going to fucking pressure. this guy. Why don't you just start on the bottom? I do. I do with with. How about with everybody? Because of the black, being on the bottom of them, it's not fucking fun. It's not supposed to be fun, but that's where you learn. My guard is, it goes from open guard to bottom out. Like that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that's like, and people are like, oh yeah, you know. Do you know how you fix that? Play guard. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to give you shit because I heard you say you're a guard puller.

So I don't pull guard. I am larger than most people in the gym. I will start seated and give them the top position. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's when I started jiu-too, I didn't have a grappling background whatsoever. I asked my now wife, Leah, who was my first coach.

I said, please just teach me from the worst positions forward. Yeah. Which is going to be mount bottom. Yeah. Or argument can be made that belly down is probably worse than the mount bottom. Depends on the person's skill set. I didn't have any offense for probably two. years. And I'm not joking. I would lay on my side. I would go to Turtle. Yeah. And people would tell me,

that's my guard game is going to Turtle. People would tell me you are the most boring role ever. You can't do anything, but I can't do anything to you. But that's not learning. Yeah. But by learning the defense in those positions, I didn't really mind being experimental and trying something new because what's the worst thing that's going to happen? I'm going to end up back where I feel comfortable. The problem right now, and again, I don't know your game at all. We've known each other for 15 minutes. But I bet the problem is right now, your most comfortable position is top. Yeah. And if you, if that's where you demand that you stay or you're unwilling to experiment with

because of the consequences of ending up on the bottom, in my opinion, and I'm not a coach, I think that that limits you. Yeah, absolutely. So I would, my advice to you, if you were at the gym and you had a wrestling background, would be like, one, that's awesome. It's not a negative thing. But I would catch up the defense to the offense you already have. And then you're going to be much more well-rounded.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I play the, I, I do play guard. I do, but I just, I don't want to get so. What you said is you play guard against people you can beat. Not be, be effective with, be effective. At least maintain some resemblance of like I look like I know how to do jihitsu. You're blue belt, man. Yeah.

It's, you're learning. Right, I know. I guess I just have a, you know, I want to play top against the people that I know I'm not going to be able to crush because I know I can make progress there. And I don't want to, like, lose my top game in the midst of building. Do you really think that's going to happen? No, man, I'm just making fucking excuses. 100% correct. You're poking holes in it.

And we can run in a circle all day long. But no, I'm just kidding. Well, it's also it's your game to play. And it's your trajectory. But I tell you what, I have seen a few people who grapple who came from a wrestling background. And their success early was unbelievable. And they were a nightmare for people. Right.

But then they hit a glass wall that they couldn't find their way around. and more often than not they didn't come back. Then there's the other side of that. Some people, we have an electrician friend, Michael, that I will use as an example of this, who completely embraced the fact that his top game far exceeded his defensive game and committed to it. The dude is a nightmare, not because he was a wrestler,

because he's really good at Jiu-Jitsu and he's a blue belt. So the experience you have, whether you were a shitty wrestler or a really good one, it's not going to fail you and it's not going to go anywhere. Yeah, yeah. It just sucks to lose, man. I get it. And that is, I was having this conversation, a buddy of mine, one of the things I dislike about people talking about jih Tzu is they say, well, the white belt's the hardest one

to get. And it's not. Right. It might be the most or the largest mental hurdle you have to cross to try something new. Yeah. But who anybody who thinks you throw white belt on and then it's easy after that, now you're setting yourself up for failure. It's hard.

Right. And it gets harder. Right. And I haven't found a belt yet where it gets easier. So, yeah. But I'm telling you, if you can catch your bottom game up to your top game, you will be an absolute nightmare. I'll do that. I don't think you will, but I mean, it's good advice either way.

I will. I will. How's it feel to be an author, man? Published author. Ten years ago, if I had asked you to write down 100 things on a piece of paper, do you think author would have been one? Yep. Okay. I've always known I was going to write a book.

Okay. I've always known who's going to tell a story, tell my story, right? So, I mean, when I was, there's a specific day. There's two, there's two days, there's two moments in my life where I knew I would do what I'm doing now. And one of them I was 10 years old. One of them I was about 12, 13 years old. When I was 10 years old, there was a specific day I'd come home and there was some shit going on. And I just, I knew that I would write a book one day.

That was the day I was like, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to tell my story. At 10 years old, you were talking to yourself like that? 100%. Yeah. That's awesome. I remember, and I was talking about this with actually Nick the other day, was I didn't have role models in my life. I had examples of what I didn't want to be.

And so when I came home, I saw that. And like no shit. This is like when Dare program was like big, like the don't do drugs kind of shit. And really what happened was I came home. I was going upstairs. I turned on my right and in the living room my mom was at least with my older sister. I don't remember if my younger sister was in there, but my older sister wouldn't have been older than 11.

She's in there with maybe five, six, seven, eight guys, and they're all passing a blunt around the living room smoking weed. And when I saw that, I was like, okay, I'm going to, this is not going to be me. Like I will not take that path in life. I thought I would be an Ohio State running back that did not. pan out. But nonetheless, I remember going in my room and just being like one of these days, I'm going to tell this fucking story and I'm going to change the world. Like I just had this like deep like belief in my bones that I was going to do something impressive. And I know that sounds

maybe hokey, but like that's really how I felt. A few years later, I came across a YouTube video of Eric Thomas. He's a motivational speaker. And one of his, if not the most famous speech he's ever given, he's like number one in the world right now. One of the most famous speeches he's ever given was when you want to, when you want to succeed as you want to, as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful. And he talks about he had met this guru and this guru's like, you know, if you want to be successful, meet me on the beach. And so he meets him out there on the beach at 4 a.m. He takes him out of the water and he holds him under water, you know, and he begins to tell him like, like, what are we doing out here? Like, I'm swimming.

Like, I want to be successful. I want to be a millionaire. And the guy, that's when the guy tells him, you know, he's like, when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, that's when you'll be successful. And he goes into this, like, the way he tells the story is just fucking epic. And I remember being there like 13 years old because there goes on YouTube. Oh, yeah. How old are you? 30.

Okay. So you, do you remember life before the internet? A little bit. Okay. Yeah. So I usually would say that I have. probably the last generation that I distinctly remember life before the internet. Yeah.

And after your age group, like my children, my oldest is 21, has no recollection of life before devices like that. You're right. Your age group is likely the last one that has a hazy recollection of pre-end-of-the-world anxiety rectangle that follows us everywhere. Right. Right. Yeah.

The one that's vibrating in my, well, anyways. What was the guy's name? Eric Thomas. Will you pull up his YouTube channel, Michael? I just want to see what it looks like. Dude. I want to see what this guy looks like. He is fucking electric.

Do you remember how you found him? I don't. I have no idea. It just, I mean, I might have been watching sport highlights. Probably just, it was a suggestion or something like that.

Yeah, you know, because he does a lot of speaking for sports and things. Okay. And if you watch the video, like, you're like, oh,

god, like, you're ready to run through a damn wall. And so I, but I just want to see what this guy looks like. Yeah. And he, he's from Detroit,

Michigan. Yeah. Yeah, of people don't recognize the name, but once you, once you hear him, you're like, oh, I know this speech. I've seen this. I've heard this. But he's fucking incredible, man. And I've seen... Ph.D. critically acclaimed author, will round... Hit the more button, if you would, Michael, up a little bit. Ph.D. is a critically acclaimed author, world renowned speaker, educator and pastor. E.T. as he is better known as taking the world by storm,

this creative style and high energy messages. So there's booking, contact information. Okay, cool. All right. I can't say I've ever heard of the guy. And that's why I wanted Michael to pull him up. And he's, how long has he been at this, do you think? Well, that was. I mean, that was 18 years ago. Yeah. So probably as long as I've been alive close to it. Cool.

Yeah. I know he was like relatively new when that happened. And one of the things he talks about, like, I don't know if it's in that speech or a different one. But he started talking about his life and how he was homeless. He didn't have a father. And like, he had all of these things that were against him. And, but he wanted to be successful. and like he wouldn't go let anything stop him.

And so when I saw him do that, I was like, oh, like this guy fucking gets it. And then I was like, I'm going to be a motivational speaker one day. Like, I'm going to travel. I'm going to speak. I'm going to share my story. And I'm going to change the fucking world. And sure shit, 30 years later, you know, 2024 is the best year of my life, wrote a fucking book.

I have been all over the country sharing my story speaking. Has it increased since your book came out? Well, actually, didn't this just kind of? It just published December 2nd. We'll give it a little bit more time to seep. Yeah. I'll ask you in a year from now. Yeah.

My suspicion is, and I've seen this a lot in people in the public speaking ecosystem. Yeah. For whatever reason, good book, bad book, it is something, it's an additional draw. And from the people that I've talked to, the addition of a book will definitely, not definitely, can and most often does increase your awareness and therefore your chance to get in front of people and tell your message. To me, it's a tool. Like, I, it's funny, I talk to Nick Lavery. Did you know his Boston accent is fake? Yeah, yeah, fully aware.

He puts so much effort into pretending like he's from the East Coast. Right. He's from Florida. Right. I don't know if any of that's true, but I enjoy making, he's also an absolute tank. Well, he was also only 5-8 and then he got, then he got a extension. Yeah, biologic leg, like anybody being 6'4 if you get your leg blown off. And in addition to that, if you didn't have to.

fucking like if if if if if if if if I only had one leg I would be significantly bigger everywhere else like my muscle mass would just you know we were at a we were in Iowa and he was the keynote speaker at a speech and I had never heard him speak publicly and he was talking about getting shot in the face by an AK and I am sitting there listening and just thinking to myself I am such a bitch yeah you know the getting shot by the AK in the face was just the the preamble to all the other stuff that happened to him and I'm literally left that. that speech. I mean, we'd get him a big hug

and I gave him a New York Yankees baseball hat because why not? Twist the knife when you get the opportunity. Yeah. And just left thinking, man, we walk among just absolute legends. Right, right, right. Just legends.

Dude, I give him so much freaking credit, man. I'm not qualified to serve him breakfast. Yeah. He is on a different level, man. Yeah, I did want to talk a little shit about him and we got that out of the way. but I really dude he is um fucking incredible and I say that because so when I when I when I when I started writing the book like the end of 20 23 that that's what was your process how'd you do it

self published but no I mean did you do and I ask this of anybody who writes just at a curiosity yeah did you said a word goal for yourself did you write only when you were inspired if you were inspired would you write as much as you want just curious your process yeah good question so It was kind of funny. I started writing, I started writing it because I had won this like national award and construction. And so when I won that award, I was like, what type of construction? Residential. Okay. Yeah. Like building. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I won the, I was the chairman award for the National Association of Home Builders, which is their like biggest award or whatever, went out to Vegas, got that shit. And when I got that, I was like, okay, I think it's time to write the book now.

And so because it's just, everybody goes through bullshit in life, but like, like the homeless guy, underneath the bridge, he probably has some great advice of what to do or what not to do in life, but unfortunately he's not living a very inspiring life. Therefore, people don't go to him for advice. Once I started to accomplish things, I was like, okay, like, I think I can, I can do this now. And so that's kind of what started it. But I sat down and I just started, I didn't have a word goal. I didn't have a page count because I had no idea. Like, you can't Google like how many words go on a page. So I didn't, I didn't. You can. Let's just say the answers will vary. Exactly. Right. So I I was like, you'll get everything from five to 500.

Exactly. So I was just kind of like, fuck it. It's my story. I'm just going to tell it from start to finish and see what happens. And I sat down, pumped out like 20,000 words over the course of a month or two. Did it come out of you pretty easy? Yeah. Yeah.

When you're telling your own story and I'm naturally, I'd say a good storyteller. Yeah, it just, it just flowed. And then the hard part for me is I have so many fucking stories. that are just crazy is you have to pick which ones you want to tell. And that's where even on a podcast or writing a book or even delivering your speech, when people hear my story, it's like truly unbelievable. And that's just only what I can tell you in 200 pages, you know? So nonetheless, started writing the book, got 20,000 words in.

And then I was like, what the fuck? I don't know what the fuck to do. I'm out of words. Like, I don't even know where to go with this. Like, does it matter? I wrote it three times and deleted it. Really? Yeah.

I was like, I told myself, I was like nobody gives a fuck. Like it's not going to matter. It's not going to make a difference. That's really encouraging positive self-talk. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I, I, but that's what people do, you know? It's the same thing with maybe even you or anybody else. Like we have these limiting thoughts or beliefs. And so that's just what I'm like, yeah, nobody gives a fuck about my story. And truth be told, nobody really does. But here's where I've landed on that. Nobody may give a fuck about your personal story. Right.

That doesn't mean it can't. have impact on their life. So yeah, they read the book, right? And for people who are visual only, it's on the table. It's called Strength Beyond the Shadows. They may at the end of the day not care about you, but there might be something in there that speaks to them that can change the trajectory of their life.

Right. And that's so, that's funny. You say that because I think it was talking to Nick where he had said, yeah, like your story is not, it's not about your story is not what's. going to, when you tell your story, it's not all about you. It's putting that person inside your shoes or finding something like, there's something in that crowd that somebody's going to pick up that you've said, that they're going to be like, damn, like I get that, I relate to that

and that inspires me in, you know, some form or fashion. So nonetheless, I just deleted it, kept rewriting it. I knew I was going to, I was like finally committed. And I was like, all right, fuck it. I'm actually going to do it this time. Wrote it the third time, got 20,000 words in and started looking around like how do I publish a book and unfortunately when you Google that there's like nothing but scams and bullshit and it's the same thing as when you Google how many words to a page yeah it's you're gonna get and that well the worst part is then you click on one of those links and you're just down the rabbit hole even deeper dude and I was and that's what I was I almost bit on like six of them because I'm I'm like I'm like borderline

retarded so like fucking I'm on these I'm on these fucking things and they're like yeah we'll help you get on Amazon, da-da-da-da-da-published in this, and it's this much money, and you get these many sales and guaranteed this and that? I'm like, how the fuck are you guaranteeing any of shit? Like, it don't make any sense. So I ended up finding this lady. She, this is a great story for anybody who wants to write a book. She's like, yeah, we can do this one or two ways. You know, I can either ghost write it for you or I can edit it and do all the proofreading and all that. And I said, well, I can't come up with anything else. Well, how's the ghost writing work? And I'm not a literary genius. So, like, I don't even know how to fucking write.

So like you want you just take this for me. And so she's like, okay. She takes the first ghost riding bite and it was total dog shit. And because she's trying to write in my voice, you know. We should add to this. So I'm going to read the subtext on this because we'll get into it. Your book is about something pretty particular. Yep.

And when you say, when I hear you say her first swing at ghost riding sucked, allow me to read the subtext. Overcoming a childhood of trauma, neglect, and sexual abuse. I don't know how you could write that without experiencing it. Yes. So she tried to eat a whale front to back in one bite. I agree. But I'll put this on her.

And I mean, I'll own the fuck up. But she, because I asked her that, I was like, how do you write, how do you ghost write a memoir? Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. And she's like, well, you know, you just tell me your story. And then I'll just put it into a story. And I was like, all right. And so we tried it. And it just, you know, she was trying to write in my voice.

I cuss a lot. I have a very abrasive, like, approach to things. I'm very just, like, rough and tough and whatever. And it just didn't work. And, you know, she overcharged me a shit ton of money, like $8,000. Do you pay that up front? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. You pay to get the receipt, right? So she does the work. You pay it. She sends it to you. So basically, yes. Do you get edits involved in that, AK?

or is this like, hey, finished product in? That was basically, from what she sent me, I could tell was like, no, this ain't it. Like this. And it's funny, there's like a good little story. I tell what that is, is don't let other people tell your story. Like, go and tell your story. If you're going to write a book, write the fucking book. Like, don't let somebody else put the pen on the paper because you're not going to appreciate it as much.

When you do the actual work, like I can go buy my black belt on Amazon, which I did. And I have in my house. We'll get a spare too. Yeah. Yeah. One is none. Two is one. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Travel belt. Yeah. My kids, like all my fucking like gold trophies that are in there, like they know that dad was a savage at one point. And whether it's true or not, it's in there. So I say all that.

Amazon is real. Exactly. So so like people, anybody can publish a book. You can go on AI and say, create, pump this out. And so I say all that to say, write your fucking story. Be authentic and and do the work because you're going to be so much more proud of it. And when I, and so after that lady offered me Chick-fil-A service and gave me Waffle House product or, well, not product. It was, it was, it was, it was Waffle House service.

I don't mean to talk shit about Waffle House in that way, but, you know. We don't have them out here. Okay. Well, Waffle House is good. Service is shitty, but, you know, you go for the experience nonetheless. I mean, we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one. Very, very deep. That's breakfast food.

You can't really fuck it up. I mean, that is 100% not true. It's eggs and hash browns. That's all I eat. Okay. It's hard to fuck that up. Eggs? Oh, it's very easy to mess that up.

All right. I digress. I point you towards the example of my middle son, who one day put four eggs on the stove top and then decided to take a shower. Yeah. Those eggs sucked. Okay. All right. They were like hockey pucks.

Disregard. Bad, bad example. Anyways, like a month or two later, you know, whatever you want to call it, some sort of luck. I ended up at a Brothers Keepers Veteran Foundation gala or yeah, Gala. And Nick is speaking. I had already read his book, but, you know, didn't have any idea of who he was or really. It's a good book. It's over there somewhere on the shelf. Yeah. It's not one of the things people can't see. I keep a copy of all the authors that have come through. Yeah. His book is very good. Yeah. Yeah. So I, yeah, he's got a lot of good talking points in there. So I read his book, Objective Secure, and freaking go to the gala,

see him speak. He's doing a signing thing. And so at the end, you know, I got my five minutes to talk with Nick. And I said, hey, man, this is a story I love as well. As I said, I approach his big ass. And I'm like, hey, I'm writing a book and I'm also trying to get into the public speaking room. Like, what do I, like, do you have any advice? Like, how did you do your book? Because I knew the book that I had at that moment, that lady was like, yeah, this is good to go, the lady that I was working with. And I was just like, this ain't it, you know? In fact, she told me to take out a lot of the shit that's in the book now. Really? Yeah. She said I was telling too many stories. I was too detailed, too graphic. And when I tell my story, I tell for a reason,

it's very raw and forthcoming because of the nature and it gets whitewashed so much that people don't realize like how bad it is and what people are going through and it's it's fucking horrendous and my book is uh it is graphic but it's i mean i hold back you know i still hold back i think it needs to be to land in the way that i suspect that you want it to land exactly there is uh so there's two ways you look at the graph so some people and it's the way you tell the story too okay if i sit here and i tell you this horrific childhood abuse story with a smile on my face it's fucking weird and like comes off as like shock value. Like I want people to be shocked that I went through this shit versus I want people to understand like so when you tell it and this is what this is the art of storytelling.

For example, I had a lady talking to me one time and she was telling me about all this shit she went through as a kid and the whole time she's telling it she's smiling. And so it's like off putting for the crowd because it's like are you like proud of this shit or like what the are you getting off on this? Or are you completely broken and you have no emotional range because of it. Yes. It's weird because it's almost like a God, what do they call those white masks, Michael, that the anonymous people use? It's a specific. Guy Fogg's.

Guy Fogg, yeah, it's just that, you know what I mean, completely not that, I'm not making a reference to Guy Fawkes. It's just, it's a mask with no effect whatsoever. So it throws people off because they don't know how to read it. It makes it hard to relate to the story. Yeah. You know, so when I tell my story, like, there are parts where it's deep and it's heavy and there's a way to tell that part of the story.

And then there are parts where maybe we can laugh or whatever. whatever the fuck, you know. And so anyways, I approached Nick and I said, hey man, you know, I'm writing a book and what do I do? And it's funny, the first thing he said to me, which I give him, I love, I love this about him is because I think he took a step back and was like, okay, this guy's serious. He's not bullshitting me. And he said, it's fucking hard.

Like just, he said it's fucking hard. I'm just going to tell you that. It's a grind and it's hard. And I said, yeah, Roger that. I love that because so many people, you tell him you're going to go do something, they're like, yeah, man, that's amazing. Like, it'll be the next big thing. And it's like, you go start a podcast, you go to write a book.

You go whatever, you can start a business. And they're like, hey, man, good job. You got it. You're going to crush it. And they don't realize like, no, no, it's fucking hard. Like, you're going to be working your ass off if you want this thing to be successful. And that's what Nick said to me. Gives me his card.

And he's like, hey, shoot me an email. Let's go on a call. People do that all the time. You know, I mean, in the last year, the amount of people that have said, whatever you need, Seth, I got you. and you know, you don't get a response whenever you reach out. And so. Because it's their tool to end the conversation.

They'll give you the card. They'll hit me up. Yeah. And then they're on to the next. If you think about it, it's actually, it's not, it's not the way that I believe people should conduct themselves. But it's the most efficient way to exit a conversation and move on to something you probably think is more important.

That's, uh, I'm not saying anything about you. I'm saying those people suck. Well, so I'll look at, so, I mean, I'm glad you said that. I never thought about that. And that really helps me process that now. But one of the things I started kind of reframing that approach or what people do is, because I have so many people that say, hey, Seth, let's get on a call. I'm like, before I even get on a call, I'm like, what do you have to offer? I'm just, I'm just, let's just be up front. Do you have anything to offer? Because people say that all the time, whatever you need. I'm here for you. People tell me that all the time. I need to, I don't know what I need. Why don't you tell me what you offer. Okay. Andy, you offer a podcast with a big platform. Okay, that is something that I could, use. And Michael. Yeah. And Michael's services.

Yeah, exactly. So that's, you know. As he sits over there, he's like, yes, yes, shakes his head. Yeah. So there's a, you know, if somebody comes to me now, I'm just like, what, what are you offering? I understand that you, you, whatever I need, but what are you offering? So that's kind of how I look at it now.

Because I know with my story and support is great, but if you don't have anything legitimate, it, you know, people just want to get on a call and just fucking talk. I'm like, dude, what are we fucking doing? You know? I hate to say what I'm about to say because it doesn't apply to everybody. Yeah. But it applies to more people than I wish that it did. In my experience, when they say those things and they want to get on a call, it's a

fishing expedition for them more than it is one for you. They are trying to not figure out what they have to offer you. They are trying to figure out what they can get from you. In a bad way, you think? Or selfishly? Or mutually beneficial. I am trying not to be pessimistic in my answer. I don't know if people intentionally are doing it.

Knowingly and willingly. But my needle trends in that direction. Right. Yeah. That's kind of where I understand that too. And recently I've cut those conversations off because I'm just like, I know it's not going to go anywhere. And that's why I'm just up front on the email or the text. I'm like, what do you need?

Like what can we do? If there's an end goal, then let's, sure, let's talk about it. But if there's not, I'm sorry, like, it's, you're a time vampire. And right now I don't have the time. One of the most powerful tools that I learned, and I unfortunately learned way too late in life, was the ability and comfortableness to say no. Yeah, exactly. Subtraction is way more powerful than addition.

I get a volume of emails every day. And some of them are like yours, where you reached out. And I, you know, I read your email. I'm like, this is a topic that I don't know much. about. And I know that the story is going to probably be hard for people to listen to it, because it's not a topic that has talked about much, which lends itself to, it needs to be talked about even more. Right? Because if you hide things in the shadow, nobody sees them. But I get, you know, there are PR agencies that will reach out. Hey, have you. And so, at this point,

I can now actually even recognize the brand because they'll say, oh, I really, I love the conversation that you had with these next two guests. And your ability to, I'm like, oh my God, you guys are just cutting and pacing. And sometimes they actually do forget to cut and paste. And so it's addressed to somebody else. Those go straight into the delete. Yeah. But I'd say nine out of ten things that are presented to me. I look at it from the exact same perspective. Yeah. Time. Do I, A, do I want to do this? And it doesn't have anything to do with money. And I am not a wealthy person by any stretch of the imagination. I like money as much as everybody else. I like nice things like everybody else does. I just don't have a lot of it. Maybe one day in my life.

I'm on a mission to one day have money. I'll let you know when I get there. Yeah, people think because you own a business, you're just printing money. Right. And sometimes you are. And then you're putting it right back in the business. Yeah. But so it has nothing to do with the money.

Time is the most valuable thing that I have. My kids are getting older. I want to spend time with them before they completely get out of the nest. I enjoy spending time with my wife. Is what you're presenting to me interesting enough that it has equal value to those things? Yeah. nine out of ten times it's no right it's hard to say when you first start because you think nobody's ever going to ask again that and you're so desperate for like they don't know that though

well they don't know that right right right that's one of the things that nick told me too he's like so so so let me so so so nick gives me his card and like I said you know I've been all these people so I go home and I'm like I remember talking to my wife I'm like holy fuck like he told me to give him a call, you know. And so I fucking email Nick and he fucking fires back. I'm like, okay, holy shit. And then me and Nick go on a call for like an hour and I ask him all these questions about books and this and that and all the questions, right? And one of the things Nick told me was, you know, don't be desperate. You know, your story doesn't apply to everybody. I don't, he didn't even know who I am or what it was about yet. But he's just like, you know, you're going to want to take every

opportunity that comes your way. And some of them are just not for you. So just be able to say no. walk away from it. It's advice from a man who has gone down the wrong path a few times. Yeah, yeah. It's better to be on a freeway than a cul-de-sac. Let me tell you. Yeah. You get farther down the road.

Yeah, so in talking to Nick, I, you know, I just started playing follow a leader. I mean, I literally went back, looked at his shit from two, three years ago, and just everything he's doing, I just started plugging away. And it's just a, I just had a call with a buddy last week who was asking me all the same questions that I was asking Nick and it felt so good to be in that position to be like, oh, let me fucking tell you what you need to do. And it's going to be fucking hard. It's not like this like fucking candy canes and fucking gum drops everywhere. So, but it's, it's awesome. And my buddy actually said something really powerful and profound. I was like, I'm going to steal this. I'm not

going to give you any credit for it. But I loved it was, you know, he's like, everybody's quitting when she gets hard. And like, like, when it gets hard, like, that's the reason you fucking quit. Like, are you serious? Like that's, it just got hard. And so you just gave up. It's like if it's hard, like you're likely in the exact position that you need to be in or that you should be in to make progress, you know? And I was like, bro, that was incredible. Yeah, if it's difficult, you're probably, you're probably mining the right dirt. Exactly.

Yeah. So, so I, that was how I got, Nick used a, like a consulting company essentially to help him with his book. And that's what I used. I reached out to those people. And that was February of last year. I only had 20,000 words at the time. And I knew I needed to have a final manuscript to send to them. And so I sat down and like over the course of like three days, pumped out 40,000 more words.

Was that what you landed at about 60,000? 60,000 isish. Yeah. With that net, 200 pages you said? 225 was like everything in their acknowledgments and all that. But the full story is like 200. But yeah. So long story short, started my book, pumped out 20,000.

words and then like a month later I sat down and over the course of like three days knocked out 60,000 words or 40,000 words. And I, you know, that was easy because it's a memoir. I'm just telling my story. If you're writing some like developmental like jaco type shit, you know, where there's some maybe brainpower involved in that. Yeah, you might need a little bit of framework and things like that. But, you know, when you're writing a book, just get it on paper first and sort out all the details and the bullshit on the back end. And that's where so many people, you know, what do they call it, paralysis or analysis paralysis, or they're, uh, got chapters and this and that. And then they're like, oh, fuck, I'll give up, you know, versus just get it on the

fucking paper and then, and then go from there. And that's what I did. So, um, I met with that company in February. They told me I'd be lucky to get it done in 2024. Uh, and I was like, all right, let's go, baby. And so it just takes a while. They got to, you got to, if it's anything like my experience, they got to do like a grammar pass. Yeah. editing past. They got to design it. Yep. Get a time somewhere to be printed. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it.

You don't hit send on an email and your book comes out the next day. Right. And I see, I did because I'm so like, I'm so crazy. They would, you know, I'm like, what do you mean? Because they're like, well, you know, when we do our first edits, it'll come back to you and it'll take two weeks. And so I'm like, well, it also has to physically be printed. Yeah. And, you know, they would send me back my book and they'd say, hey, go over these edits, you know, read it all through and let us know what you think.

and so they would say get it back to us within two weeks. I'd return it in like two days. And I would just stay up until like three o'clock in the morning just because I had already invested so much money into it last year that I did not want it to carry into this year. I wanted to be benefiting off of the book instead of continuing. And I wanted to, you know, I wanted to push it. I wanted to push the date. I wanted to, you know, I didn't want to be like dragging it down the road, you know.

And so that book that I had when I met Nick, which I thought was a. fucking great book. Even though I knew there was like something not right about it, compared to what I have now, like the first draft versus the final. It's like, oh my God, that book was dog shit. And now what I have, I'm actually very proud of. And my favorite compliments, I love when somebody tells me that my story has changed her life or it's helped them and all those things. Like, those are incredible comments. I get those all the time. But when somebody tells me like, this is very well written. I'm like, yeah. If you read it now, are there still some small changes that you would like to make along the way? Yes. So I have a book that's coming out in January of 2026. And I,

it's with the person writing the forward right now and I'm getting the blurbs and finishing it up. And it's, it sucks because every time that I go back through it, like I've read through it so many times. Yeah. And I've handed it off to the publisher and they asked me to make changes to two chapters, which was super frustrating when I got that feedback. Because I was like, this book, I don't know if you guys know this, I'm a pretty big deal. This is the next great American novel. And the guy was like, hey, these two chapters are good,

but you should change. I'm like, you should go fuck yourself. And I didn't say that obviously because they're actually professionals. So I worked really hard on those two chapters. But every single time I sit in front of it, as I'm reading it through, I'm like, maybe I should put a the, you know, I just, I don't think it'll ever get to that place where I could go from top to tail. and it's just not going to be able to be changed.

It sucks because you'll sit in the rest of your life looking at it. Yeah. And dude, I was literally a fucking week away from publishing my book and I was like, I was like, hold on. I was about to reach out and be like, wait, pause. I want to change a couple things. Some point you've got to put it in the oven, man. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. Let the motherfucker cook, dude. It's not going to be perfect. There's going to be stories that you put in and that you leave out and different examples here and there. And, you know, that's why you write a second. book.

My final draft is due mid-feb. Yeah. And I mean, I'm almost done. I'm literally at this point. Is it the, like taking the small stuff out and waiting for the forward and the blurbs for the people that I asked for. But yeah, it's going to be tough when you got to put that thing in the oven and just let

it go because I know there will always be something I would want to add or change. Yeah. Yeah. I have the same thing. There's a different lesson. I've learned so much over this last year in regards to trauma and things like that. that I wish I would have known 12 months ago where I could have put it in. And there's family members that I've reached out, that I've reached out to me.

There's people that have reached out to me about my book, about certain details of it. And they're like, hey, did you know this happen? And I'm like, are you fucking serious? Like you said, book two. Yeah. Yeah, you know, so, yeah, man, it's. Well, let's get into it. Sure.

Where, I'll let you enter into the story how you want. I mean, you can talk about it from, you know, the environment that you grew up in. I mean, obviously you knew from a young age. that you were going to write it. At some point in time, we've got to dig into the why, you know, the what is sitting right here in front of us. I'll let you enter into the story however you want, man.

Yeah, so a couple things before I get into the story. One, for the people that are listening, I hate the word triggered, you know, because it can be, whatever. But if you are somebody who's listens and you do get triggered or you do get emotional or whatever, this may be, what's the word?

controversial, but I would encourage you to sit through it and sit in it. I was just going to say that the thought of being triggered. When I, we all have buttons, right, metaphorical buttons, things that can push our buttons. I'm of the belief if something pushes your buttons, though, that means you should spend some more time figuring out why. Yeah. It almost, every condition, it seems, from humanity has now been reduced to something that has to either be medicated or avoided.

Yeah. I get triggered by that, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to confront that. How do you have, it's the same thing, right? If it's difficult, you're probably mining the correct. Yeah. I don't, I would really like to see a shift from that triggers me and therefore I avoid to that. And I'm not saying everybody is like this, but there is a large cohort of people that are like this that changes it to I feel triggered by this. And I'm going to figure out why.

Yeah. Because I think you can work your way through that minefield and not end up like Nick, pun intended. You know what I mean? Yeah. missing a leg for those of you don't know who we're talking about. Not from a landmine though. So, so, dude,

there's so much to that right there that I could talk about. And it's so frustrating because when I do deliver my speech or my story in an audience, there are so many people that don't want to hear it or they don't think my story is good to tell. I've been turned down many times for a lot of really stupid fucking reasons. And one of them is because we don't appreciate the way you talk or the way you tell you. story or the details or this or that, right? Because it's triggering. We don't want our, we don't want our audience to be upset. We can go back to Nick's advice on that one. It's not the story for everybody, right?

Yes, but my argument to those people is, like, sit, let these mother, like, no, these people need to hear this because they need to know that somebody else has gone through it, somebody else got through it, and they've done some cool shit with their life. But not only that, the only reason I'm able to tell my story the way that I am is because I have been quote unquote triggered by listening to somebody else's story. There's two people I'll give credit to as far storytelling goes. And the way they tell their story and the way they explain trauma and the way they explain like just like you said, like that pisses me off or that hurts me. Like let me go into that water. Let me figure out what's in there and why this is so painful. Why can't I talk about

this? One of them was Tom Saturday. He's a Delta Force guy. Yeah. Um, So when he was on Sean Ryan's show, he talks about the battle Mogadishu for like the last time in full detail, right? Me and Tom have nothing in common other than the fact that I was- You're talking about you. You're both in the army. Yeah, I was in the army and he was- You're both dudes. I mean, we could go on right.

You guys have hair, right? You wear shirts and pants. Yes, okay. You have plenty in common. We have-you-you-guise might be defined by your similarities more than your differences. Okay, Andy. Yeah, thank you. Sit on that one for a bit.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that. I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. So when I listen to Tom tell a story, he starts off the podcast with explaining trauma and how when he got back from war, his whole family was walking on eggshells. And, you know, the dishes weren't done. And the fucking, the laundry wasn't done.

And the house wasn't clean. And the kids were doing this. And the wife was doing this. And he's like going fucking crazy. And everybody else is crazy because, you know, God, forbid I like fucking I don't know you know move something in the wrong way um and I meant I was listening to that shit and I was like I mean I was at work getting emotional because I was like oh my god dude like this is exactly who I am right now and in my own personal life with my just constantly

on edge putting everybody else on edge because uh you don't know what I've been through and so I can act how or the fuck I want to act because you you don't know what I've been through so I can walk in here and I can say whatever the fuck I want and if you try to press me all I got to say is you don't know what I've been through. And then because of the cancel culture, if you try to say, no, Seth, if you try to hold me accountable, the people that are watching, they'll jump in the comments and they'll say, you know, hey, Andy, don't ask him that question. Why would you ask him that? That's bullshit. Versus, no, man, like, let's fucking figure this out. Like, why are you hurting? Like, why are you acting like that? Why are you doing that to the people in your life? And

that's, so Tom's talking about a lot of this and trauma and then like the secondhand effects of it, second order effects of it with your family and your friends. And, you know, when you're walking through hell and you're on fire, everything around you burns and everything's gone, right? And when you put out the fire, like, everything's gone. So, like, don't be that person going around life like that. So hearing Tom talk about his story and tell his story in detail and the very vulnerable sides of his marriage and how he treated his family, that really helped me. And I've reached out to him and told him that, which he did respond. And so thank you to that. Secondly, you know, it was end of 2023, I saw a story, Clark Fredericks. So he was on

soft right underbelly. Never seen the channel before. Pops up on like a reel or some shit. And it's this guy said, dude, YouTube has had a pretty big impact in your life. It's fucking crazy. It's one of the beauties of our interconnected world. One of the few beauties. Yeah. God, there's some downside. Right. Yeah. I get into all that shit too. Trust me.

Social media is a, it's a blessing and a curse. It's a necessary. More of a curse than a blessing. Yeah. Unfortunately, we could turn the title on that, but it's not going to happen. Anyways, um, Clark, I saw him sitting telling a story. I saw like a 90 second clip and that was all I needed. And, and, you know, in short, I'll sum up Clark's story.

It's fucking incredible. But when he was like 10 years old, 10, 12 years old, he, he was, uh, brutally raped by a man who was the, uh, police chief. Boy Scout leader, a man in the church of some former fashion hire, whatever the, I don't know what the fuck they do. Multiple positions of authority. Yes. Community.

Yep. Rape's Clark and goes and gets his dog, brings it back in front of Clark and beats the shit of the dog in front of Clark, kills the dog and says, you know, if you tell anybody, I'll fucking kill you. And so Clark shuts his mouth, goes home, lives out the rest of his life, becomes, you know, an addict, alcoholic, anger issues, all the problems, right? About 30 years later, Clark is at a deli, up in New Jersey, where he's from, Stillwater, New Jersey. And he's at the deli, and that guy walks in the deli.

And he's with a little boy, and he calls this little boy the same name that he used to call Clark when Clark was a kid and just fucking sets him off. About three days later, Clark and his business partner, he worked, I think, at a tire shop or some shit. They're at a bar. They're drunk. And they just had a bad business deal. And, you know, so they're drinking and they're pissed off about this guy who just screwed him over on some business deal. And his buddy goes, man, I bet you that guy's number one in your hit list right now. Talking about the guy that screwed him over. And Clark says, for the first time in his life, out loud, he says, no, the motherfucker who raped me when I was 12 years old is. And his buddy

looks at him. He's like, what the fuck are you talking about? And Clark tells him the story. and the guy's like, and his name's Dennis Peck. And so everybody knows him. He's the police chief, you know? And so the guy's like, well, what the fuck? Like, let's go get his ass. And so they're drunk. Dude. Classic.

Yeah. Drunk. Yeah. Operational planning cycle. Exactly. Let's go get him. And so do they. I know how we can solve this.

It's you and I. Exactly. I've never been a part of one of those conversations. So they pull up to the guy's house. They open up his front door. It's like 10 o'clock at night. the guy sitting there in the living room watching TV and he turns and looks at Clark and he's like

hey Clark how have I been you been you motherfucker and he runs in there and he stabs him to death in his fucking living room and fucking murders him I at a moral level have absolutely no problem with that oh fuck yeah man there's nothing wrong with that it crosses a few legal boundaries unfortunately but I would if I was in his shoes I would do that and probably have one of the best nights of sleep in my entire life

so yeah there's a lot to that right and everybody applaud Clark for it. One of the things that I love about him that he does say is, you know, because that's what everybody's like, man, it must have been cool to kill a child fucking predator, right? And Clark's like, look, man, honestly, you don't battle trauma with trauma. He's like, it was a traumatizing event. He tells the story, you know, before he cut his throat. He says, you know, how's it feel fucking little boys? And he cuts his fucking throat. There's an argument for that you don't fight trauma with trauma, but I tell you what. And I'm not an expert in these people, but I'm going to call them predators.

The rate of recidivism, even when they go through treatment and therapy and prison, is shockingly high. It's the same as people who... What the hell is recidivism mean? Repeat behavior. Okay. Meaning they go and they try to...

They're not re-habilia. No, they will pick right back up where they left off. Yep. Yep. And I'll be very clear about this. Like, I didn't do shit in my military career. I was surrounded by amazing people. occasionally we would bump up against those who had the exact opposite beliefs of everything this country was founded on and what I believe it stands for and they would kill you and everybody you know and your family just to make a point because they have the opposite belief I don't know of any

other way to stop that person other than to put their lights out yeah and I don't know of another way to take those predators off the street other than actually taking them off the street other than actually taking them off the street in that way. And I'm not saying that people should do that. I'm just saying that there is another part of that conversation. If you can't fight trauma with trauma, like, okay, I get that. Yeah. How the fuck do you solve, not solve the problem, but how do you stop somebody who is,

I mean, we're talking decades later, this guy saw him, right? Yeah. And he was in that deli with another kid. I'm not going to, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but let's make a leap in an assumption, especially since he was using the same name, probably can figure out what would happen. Let's also imagine that that kid that he saw on the deli wasn't the, only one in between the two. So, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's fucked up, man.

And, you know, I'll finish up his part of the story. He goes home, goes to sleep, wakes up next day, state police are outside of his house, and he goes to jail. There's a whole bunch of inner works that happened that's really, how do they solve it so quickly? That's a quick turnaround time. Right. Like, CSI, the TV show, just so people know, is largely made up.

they take they have all those tools but they don't work overnight like that i know that that's what's crazy i can't remember there's something they put the pieces there together pretty well yeah he's i think he like calls his mom or or maybe i mean dennis peg was a very known person i'm going to say that the guy decided to take his own driver's license out and put it on the table that's how i think they caught him maybe you know i can't there he does Clark does tell this part where he they how they found him so quickly nonetheless it's kind of funny, he puts on his state police shirt and walks out because he thinks that if he wears his state police shirt, they're going to fucking, like, give him some, like, leniency.

Maybe they'll give him one click less on the cuffs. Yeah. So he goes to jail and they're, they're, he's fucking pissed, you know, because he just got arrested. He's on. He did just murder somebody. Right. And that's the difference between, I don't have a moral issue with that, but there are legal boundaries.

Exactly. So he's mad as fuck and he's in the prison and he's like, you motherfuckers are arresting me and this guy was this and that and this. And, uh, lo and behold, uh, it comes out like the next day. to there's like rallies where they're like free Clark and Clark's like what the fuck come to find out Dennis Peck had been doing this for 30 plus years I mean and that probably was the breach in the dam where it started coming out there was no victims ever nobody would ever report him nobody would ever say anything um which I'll lead into another statistic and then I'll get in the

story um they find out that Dennis is basically accountable for hundreds of addiction cases suicides domestic violence cases because of all these people. He was taking boys that were in a juvenile detention center. He would take him home at night to mentor them. And then he would just rape them and take him back. And, you know, people in power. That's what they do. And it's not the man in the van.

It's the fucking people that anywhere there's a collection of kids. There's fucking weirdos there. That's where they go online video games, churches, schools. Anywhere there's kids, man, those are the people that you have to watch. because if I go, if you go and touch my daughter, she's going to have some adverse reaction because she doesn't know you, right? Now, if mommy and daddy go and do it,

she might be like, that's weird, but it's a distant family member. Yeah. Stranger Danger is real. Right. But the positioning where 99.9% of the danger comes from stranger danger, I think is one of the biggest missteps that was made along the way. Yeah. Because I'm not an expert in the stats,

but I've talked to enough people now that it almost always comes from somebody in your social circle or familial circle. Yeah. So to speak on that, statistically speaking, it's roughly, you know, people are always going to bitch about statistics. But the point of it is it's fucking rampant, okay? One in three girls will be sexual abuse before they're 18. One of four boys.

One in ten will report. So for everyone, there's nine others that haven't said anything in their entire lives. The average age of reporting is 53 years old. Really? Yeah. So most people live their entire lives without telling a soul. And I've given so many speeches where men that are 40, 50, 60 years old come up to me and they're crying because they've lived their whole life in pain and suffering, embarrassment and resentment. Because they never told anybody what happened to them.

And they're a man. I mean, look at, you know, I tell my story of the time. Like, look at me. I'm a fucking combat veteran, bearded, big guy, husband, father. freaking doing all this cool shit. Like there's no way in hell this guy has gone through that, you know? And so a lot of these guys are carrying weight and women too. But a lot of people are carrying weight that we just don't see and they don't because they

don't report it. And it's the effects of childhood trauma neglect and abuse is the leading public health cost in America. Over $14 trillion a year is being spent treating the effects of like mental health diagnoses, ADD, ADHD, which the. symptoms of ADD and ADHD are so closely tied to PTSD responses that that's why we have an overdiagnosis of those things. You see a child that can't pay attention.

Why can't he pay attention? So there leads to another whole thing of like not what's wrong with this kid, but what's happening to this kid? What's happening to this person? The reason why they're acting a certain way, what happened to them that makes them act a way or what didn't happen for them, were they not loved, were they not treated? Because even just neglect is just as detrimental. as abuse and trauma.

Okay. So it's the leading public health costs. Treating all that when you put all the reason why people are getting all these treatments. And now you're really, now you can lump in the sex changes that they're performing on kids. You can lump that right in there too. We have to change that term because there's never been a successful sex change operation. So the mutilation of. You know what I mean?

That's how people position it. Yeah. There has never been an actual successful sex change. sex change operation. Yeah. And I'm glad you said that because the terminology does matter. A lot of people call it child porn as well. It's not porn. Porn implies consent.

It's child sexual abuse material. What are you typing over there, Michael? Please don't be looking up. Did you hear the typing? I made that comment and you have furiously started typing. Are you trying to prove me wrong? Has there ever been a successful sex change operation? No.

Make sure you clear your history. It's okay. This is again, I need you to log out of everything, associated with my name and log back into your personal. What was the results? Well, I mean, this says yes, but it's Google, so of course they're going to say that. Define yes. Were you able to put or modify the sexual reproductive organs of an individual to appear to be that of the opposite sex?

Sure. At a genetic level. Yeah. No. Is it possible? No. Yeah. Right.

And I'm going to add to that because I do believe that there are. people who feel like they are trapped in the wrong body. And I have nothing but empathy for that. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to participate in somebody telling me that they were born as a man and are now a woman. I want them to live their most enriching and fulfilling life. I have no problem with that. But don't push that ideology on me. As long as we can respect those boundaries and you're not praying upon people. And I'm going to add to that too, you need to be an adult when you make these decisions. Yeah.

You have to be an adult. And we could argue about what that means because in the U.S., right, and I say this based on my own children, they turned 18 and got their driver's license. Dad, I'm an adult now. And I look at them, like, no. Yeah. In the eyes of the law, and I mean, they are an adult, technically in the eyes of the law, but I'm looking at them.

And all I can still see is the small child that I used to carry around. Yeah, there's a lot that you can get into with that. You know, the thing is, is you don't want, we don't let kids get face tattoos. Why? Because it's a fucking life-altering decision. Yeah. Okay. Your kid, like, my son picks up a Barbie doll. I'm not, like, running to him and parading him.

Like, oh, my son's fucking gay. Like, look, my son, he's gay. You know, and there's so many, I don't give a fuck if you feel like you're a man or a woman. There's so many other details I'm more concerned about with you personally. Yeah. So I think we put it on a pedestal for some reason. Or, well, not. And this is like the, this is the minority, to be clear.

It's, you know, I think the average, you go door to door, knocking. on, you'll find out America's like still a good place. It's just the loud minority that gets crazy with it. Nonetheless, got down that rabbit hole, statistics and shit. But yeah, the $14 trillion a year spent treating all of these effects, right, of a bad childhood. So then you have trafficking, which I wasn't trafficked, but very closely related, you know, story, very similar to a lot of those people, the same, same upbringing.

and trafficking is the world's leading industry, over $850 billion a year, and America is the number one consumer. So I've done a bunch of episodes, actually, the episode that'll come out a couple weeks before this one. There's an organization up here called Deliver Fund, or anti-human trafficking. It's important, I think, for people to recognize and understand, too.

Trafficking, sexual human trafficking is actually the minority of human trafficking. It exists almost always in place. plain sight. I grew up in California and I didn't recognize that a lot of the workers in the fields providing, you know, working the agricultural fields, they would have a broker between the owner of the farm and the workers. And the broker collects the money and puts all of those people into a house where they're just cramped inside of there and gives them a minimum amount of money. That is also trafficking. Apparently, it's very often are common in hotel workers, but most people think it's Craigslist as women in sexual trafficking. That is a portion of it.

Yeah. But it is huge beyond that as well. Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about, I mean, I would love to get into the rescuing of people like that. I just have a burning desire for it. I don't have the, you know, years of like Intel and Green Beret and Navy SEAL type of knowledge that they recruit. None of that knowledge would help. And actually when Nick was sitting here, he's asked me, he's like, hey, I want to get involved? And I keep telling him, I can't be around these people because I will go to jail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will go to jail. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I just, yeah, I think it definitely takes a certain type of person. From my experience, when I've reached out to help, they're looking for people that have that background of the, what do they call it, like mapping out the human fucking profiling type of shit or whatever. I don't know.

Anyways. Smarter people than you and I are doing that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So the time that basically they told me, the time that it would take to train me, they just would rather hire somebody that's more. And I get it. So nonetheless, I'll use my voice in another manner.

but I watched Tom tell his story and then Clark Fredericks and then when Clark told his the thing about Clark that I love and just to wrap it up too he was he was sentenced to he was facing life he was sentenced to five years in prison he got out now he's a motivational speaker he'll be an author next year as well I got to meet him earlier this year which was like you know I don't really put people on a pedestal anymore like football players none of that shit used to when I was a kid now when I meet somebody like Nick and truthfully meeting you it's really cool to be like, man, I'm fucking Andy fucking Stump or Nick Lavery. And you'll leave with the recognition that I am a completely normal person that is as flawed as you,

probably more so with my own shit going on. Yeah. It's odd. The hosting this podcast is odd because I meet people and they know far more about me than I know about them. So there is a disparity in, I guess, familiarity. Yeah. I try to be super open about myself. my struggles, the things that I've gone through, the few successes I've had, the multiple

failures. But I, I just happened to have started this a long time ago. And for some people, it clicks, since others it doesn't. And there's an audience associated with that. But there is absolutely nothing about me that is unique or special. Right. But people don't believe that when they meet me. I'm like, hey, I'm sorry that you and I have been talking with each other on YouTube. And by that, I mean, I've been talking at you because it hasn't been a two-way conversation. Yeah. because people meet me and they're nervous. I'm like, dude, take it easy. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you just grow up and you see people in that light. You put them on a pedestal. You put them on a pedestal, man. It's dangerous because they're going to fall off at some point. And, man, you base your whole life on what this person is doing, saying, or believing, or thinking. And it's, I was thinking about this last night for some reason where we look at people as objectively good or bad.

And so when that person makes a mistake, it's like, oh, this person's. this person's a fucking cheater or a liar or whatever. It's like the guy made a fucking mistake, man. I mean, look at all the good things this person's done. Problem is most people won't acknowledge their mistakes. Sure. You know what I mean? So if they make a mistake and they try to play the game of,

I'm going to ignore the response instead of addressing it, I think it gets worse. And I think that shatters a lot of what the perception is of that person. My theory is when I mess up, which I do all the time. And this is outside of like the podcast content world and even in my own personal life, I try to immediately acknowledge that and address it because we're all going to fail. And we are all going to make,

I don't have a spreadsheet long enough to count the galactic mistakes that I've made in my life or the situations where I wish I had said something different or bid a better person, better better dad, bit a better, like there's not enough time. Right. But I just try to address them. And I think as long as people are willing to do that,

you can see them as a person and not a figurine. Right. Lack of a better term. Yeah, definitely. And I, so, so I guess, you know, the point of all that was, when I do meet people that I think are, like, normal people. And I'm like, but this guy, I don't either just, they're good people, but they're just fucking normal people, just like me.

And truthfully, I've had enough conversations with Nick now to where, like, I look at Nick, like I would call him a friend of mine. He probably wouldn't call me his friend. You'd be surprised. I bet he would. Well, yeah, he would. I'm just giving you shit. But Nick, you know, when I, I, you know, when I,

my first initial, when he responded to an email, I was like, oh, my God, like this guy, you know, but honestly it speaks to his character of just acknowledging it, telling me he was going to do something in following through. And then when I got to go meet Clark earlier this year, the reason why meeting Clark, and the reason why I put Nick on not a pedestal, but he's so high on my hierarchy of good people, is because Clark, he changed my life when he told his story. and he gave me like a sense of permission. You know?

And if it wasn't for him to, truthfully, if it wasn't for him to, if I wouldn't have seen his video, I don't know, I think I would have told my story eventually. I don't know if I would be telling it the way that I do and making the impact that I have made thus far in just a year. So when I meet somebody like that and I go and tell him, I'm like, man, you just, you've fucking changed my life. Like, there are not words that I can say to make you feel how important you are to me. so the only thing I can do now is action.

The only thing I can do now is write the book and help and pay it forward and save others. Okay? And I say the same thing about Nick. Or I tell Nick, you know, he fucking put his name on the back of my book, you know, and gave me all the guidance and mentorship and all of these things over this last year on a moment's notice. If I text him, he's got me. Like, hey, what you got? Boom, here we go.

And to not know me from nothing and just for some fucking reason to pour. to me like the way he has. That's the pedestal that I put people on, for lack of a better term, is they are so important to me because I have changed the world at this point. I think I truly believe that I have made it a massive impact that I just don't know when it's going to, I don't know when the fruits of my labor will be, will be, you know, there. That's the unfortunate part of the impact business is you don't get to see the fruits of your labor most of the time. It's you're long and gone. And my name will be forgotten and people will stop buying my book at some point.

But this story will impact somebody who's going to tell their story. And so, you know, when you really dig into that, the impact you have just by sharing your story and helping somebody, it can go a long way. There's people that I've acknowledged in my book from my childhood who I always say I was running around with a cup that had a hole in the bottom of it. And I just love was just, I just didn't have it. and there were people that always at the right moment came by and just gave me a little bit of love and I just remember them and so I've gone back and I've thanked them. I've gone back to my hometown and thanked them and so Nick is one of those people that I can't say enough I can't say enough about the guy because there's so many people in the SEAL community the SF community

the retired you know special operations community essentially that are using that brand and they're ripping people off and I was almost one of them you know not going to name name drop, but the guy fucking told me if I paid him like $5,000, he would coach me for the rest of the year, you know? Really? Yeah. And I almost bit. I almost bit.

Once we go off there, I'm going to get that name out of you. Fair. So then I reached, you know, but then I got connected with Nick. And, you know, and Nick is, he's never, obviously, he's never asked me for money. And he is just, he's one of those people we were talking about earlier that, um, are trying to get something out of you. I think Nick is mutually beneficial. He wants, I think he sees the value in me.

And then obviously he knows his own value, but I see the value in him. So anyways, all that fucking shit. So to get to the nuts and bolts of it all of the story, right? Just to be clear, like I said earlier, there's not enough stories I could tell you to really feel the gravity of the situation of what was going on. There's a few stories that I'll tell that kind of sum it up. but to understand that 30 years of life told in a hour or two of platform is just not enough. And I say that so that when people hear other people's stories, they understand that this person may tell you one story,

but there's likely 10 others that they just don't have time to tell you. And there's just so much that goes into this shit. So I was born and raised in Lima, Ohio, Northwest Ohio. Lima? Lima. Yeah. L-I-M-A? Yeah, we don't call it Lima.

It's Lima. Are you guys known for your beans? out there? We are. Okay. Just check it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's called the bean. Very creative name. Yeah. Yeah, it gets fucked up all time. Nobody knows where it's at. Lima lost in middle of America. Anyways, it's two hours south of Detroit. It's on I-75. Maybe 34,000 people just to paint the picture. It felt like a big city to me when I was growing up Because in the 90s you could actually like walk outside And I don't know

You could ride your bike, you know, across the city Without being, I don't know, whatever I think that was true in most cities Right, right And so Lima was like one of those places And it just felt like a big seat to me Because I would ride my bike across the down And you know, whatever. Anyways

When I was about two years old, my father, he stabbed my mom behind the ear almost killed her. And so my mom was raising me and my two sisters by herself. My father went to prison for that, obviously. And I don't know the full story of that to this day. It's a he said, she said between those two. And I don't know if I ever know the full details of what happened.

I'd love to know it, but that'll likely never surface. So my mom raising three kids by herself, you're already statistically behind the fucking ball, right? I mean, raising kids is arguably one. One of the, I don't truly think it's that difficult, but it is one of the most important things you can do, raising them right. And it takes a tribe. It just does. Like, kids need, they need the more positive influences the most as possible. We didn't have that.

Like I said, I didn't have any positive role models. I had examples. And, you know, when I was about five years old, those are my earliest memories. And we lived in this apartment complex and my mom, I was in kindergarten. My mom would work during the day so she could be with this. at night. So we'd wake up in the morning, go to school, come home, and she would be gone for two, three hours, and she'd get home, you know, four or five, six o'clock or whatever. She'd be with us and put us to bed. Were you guys on your own during that time? Yeah, yeah, we're running

around by ourselves, five, six, seven years old. And the thing with that is, like, we would come home and my mom would have a notepad. She'd write out our chores, you know, and so she would say, you know, hey, you know, you have this and this and this, do all these things before you go outside. and we were sufficient. My mom was very disciplinary in of a mother, and she had to be. When you're raising three kids by yourself, like they've got to be able to take care of themselves

because you can't afford a babysitter, you know, all of those things. And we were in babysitter's houses a lot of times, but that shit costs money. And so I imagine my mom took me out of it, or took us out of it. So we would go see a babysitter. Sometimes we wouldn't.

You know, sometimes we'd live with a babysitter for two or three weeks. And at the time, I don't think we really understood what was happening. my mom was like quote quote getting her shit together you know there would be periods of time where we would go live with somebody for two three weeks and um so since my mom wasn't there during the day we uh we would get into shit unfortunately at five years old i we found her porn and we started watching like full blown like VHS porn tapes um and at five years old uh as you can imagine it's rather like

captivating, right? You're just kind of like... Captivating maybe, but zero context. Yes. Yeah, maybe captivating is probably not the right word. I don't know what compelling. I think it might be the right word. Yeah. But you just don't have the context or the processing power to understand what you're seeing. Yeah. And so you, so I remember watching it and being infatuated and that's actually probably a better word. Because I was like, you're just like, whoa, what the hell is going on here, you know? And oddly enough, well, I mean, it makes sense. but, you know, maybe a week or two later, I end up trying to have sex with a girl who's like six years old.

I'm five, five, six years old. She's my age wearing a closet. And I remember being in that closet. She had sweatpants on and like making out with the girl and like attempting to have, trying to do something recreate what I had seen, you know. And my mom bust open the door and yells at us. And she ends up whipping my ass for it and maybe rightfully so, but maybe not. nonetheless, this kind of sets you up for the rest of life.

Okay, so I was desensitized to sex, essentially. Did you even know what it was at that age, really? No. Yeah. You're just recreating, right? You're just recreating what you see. Yeah. You know, so when you see kids do things, they're obviously, or they're likely a mirror

of their parents. Yeah. If they're assholes, well, their parents are probably assholes. And so sometimes they're just little shits. They are. They are quite literally sociopaths until they're about eight years old. nonetheless. If it's a girl.

Men, let's extend that sociopath to about 37. 37? I got seven more years. Enjoy the ride. Okay, cool. So a couple weeks. Actually, I don't know the timeline here at this point. I mean, my childhood's really cloudy as far as my frame of reference is school and figuring

out what grade I was in and what neighborhood I lived in. But one of the babysitters that we would frequent, they have, had like four or five boys that lived there. They were all much older than me. The youngest one was at least five or six years older than me. The oldest one was a teenager and unfortunately he that was he molested me. I was five years old. He was a teenager. He looked like a man. I did not. That's all I can remember. And, you know, he touched me. He made me touch him. He exposed himself. He looked at me and that was like the extent of the abuse. I actually did report that.

You know, I don't know how, I don't know when I did, but I ended up telling my grandparents around that time, we would go see my grandparents on the weekends, you know, every now and then. And my grandma, she was kind of reading the bad touch, good touch kind of books to us, you know. And I was kind of like, oh, wait a second. And I told my grandma what had happened. And so they did my grandma and my grandpa, as I tell the story, one of the questions I get all the time is why didn't they step in and save me?

To be clear, they tried to save me from the time I was born. The system is just fucked up, and it's almost impossible to take kids away from their parents until they're dead, basically. That's what happens most of the time, or so it seems. Nonetheless, we told my grandparents, my grandparents did try to fix the problem. It was swept under the rug, which is very common. You report it, and then they say that didn't happen here. My kid didn't do that or whatever. And I don't even blame that kid.

I'm not mad at that kid for what happened. there's usually one reason why a kid is touching a kid, and it's probably because he was touched or he was exposed to it in some form or fashion. Turns out, you know, 20 years later, that kid went to prison for raping the girl next door, unfortunately, you know, and a whole lot to that too. But so, yeah, I was molested by that kid at five years old.

And then when I reported, we were still. still sent back to that house to be babysat by them. Still lived with those people from time to time. The abuse, I don't think, continued. I don't have any memories. I think it only happened a few times. And I kind of just, I don't know, I think I just, as a kid, you're just surviving. You know, life was already rough as it was.

And so then you go into this reptilian mindset of you're just food and water. And I talk about it in my book, I think, of like what they talk about and buds, which is just segmentation. is just get to the next objective, get to the next meal, get to the next day. And that's kind of what you're doing when you're living in an adverse childhood experience. And so, you know, seven, eight years old, somewhere around there, my mom brings up my father. She had always talked about my father and how big of a piece of shit he was because he was never involved. He wasn't paying child support. You know, all of the things negative.

I never heard anything good about my father. How would he pay child support from prison? I don't know. And I don't, I have no idea. All I can remember is the toxicity of, of the environment, right? When you, you grow up without a father. I don't think you realize you don't have a father. Maybe some people do.

I don't think I really understood it. I just knew that my mom talked shit about him, you know? And so I didn't like him. I had this, like, ill opinion. And it's actually very, it's like poison to a child by telling them their parents a piece of shit, you know? So it's very bad. It messes the child up. We call these father wounds or mother wounds.

And so I dealt with that. And around seven or eight years old, my mom had finally mentioned like going to meet him. So my first memory of my father is meeting him in prison, going to the jail or whatever. And, you know, you walk in and there's a bunch of cubicles and plexiglass and phones and sit down and see my dad walk in. He's six foot tall. He's got all kinds of prison tats. bald he's got a skull in the back of his head and pain tattooed across his throat and like big block graffiti letters he's got Ozzy across his knuckles like he's all his fingers look broken and

nubbed up and he looks like a man who's been through some shit you know and um that was my first time that's my first memory of him and i remember he sits down across me just like this i pick up the phone and i can't fucking talk i just break down and start crying and um i just felt so bad and had, you know, it's like having a puzzle, and there's like one piece in the middle, and you finally find it, and you're just like, God damn, like I got it. You know, and that's kind of how it was, except I didn't have the piece. I just couldn't get to it, you know. I think maybe in that moment I, you know, thought about, like, my friends and throwing football

and playing baseball and whatever, you know, and I just never experienced that, right? So it sucked, man. And I didn't talk to them. I couldn't talk. I just cried the whole time for 30 minutes. Did he talk to you? Yeah, he tried. Yeah, yeah.

I gave the phone to my sisters. They talked to him. They had conversation with him. I am a very emotional person by, and just naturally. My sister's not so much as I am. I'm a crier for sure. And so when those moments happen, I just cried. And it was tough, you know, so we walked out.

I think he got out of jail or prison or whatever shortly after that because like I would see him occasionally, but like he lived. an apartment above a tattoo shop and was an alcoholic. And that was that, you know. So I would barely ever see them. I don't have any memories of like participating in sports and like mom and dad are on the crowd and they're cheering. I was just out there. You know, I don't have any of those like happy memories.

The happiest memory I have with like my mom for some reason. I was five, six years old. I had chicken pox and I was staying home from school. and we were sitting on the couch sharing a bag of potato chips. And for some reason, I can feel her hand. I just remembered this, like, recently. I don't know what happened that popped in my head, but it did. But I can just remember, like, her hand, feeling her hand in the bag.

And there's just, like, really, like, sentimental moments that you have with your parents that, for some reason, they just stand out, you know? And that's the one that stands out. And I think it was like I was just alone with my mom and she was caring for me. and I just felt so loved in that moment to be on the couch with her by myself, you know, because even in those apartment complexes, we would come home and we would hear her R-Uing and fighting and bragging about how her current boyfriend was a piece of shit or come home and there's a hole in the wall and there's broken glass on the floor.

And she's talking about how she had gotten to a fight and her boyfriend swung on her and he missed her, but she did this. And she's like talking about this like braggadociously about how her relationships are. you know so when you're around like all that violence um when you feel like the warmth of a hug i mean it's like a big deal man people don't realize that um people that grow up without parents or without that love and affection just a little bit of love it means a lot so anyways that is crazy to hear yeah my children would probably say that i am ridiculously over affectionate with them like i'm constant i just i'm always been an

affectionate person. I appreciate touch for sure. I can't even fathom a world of, I'm going to use the term neglect, whether it's the right word or the wrong word, where just the physical act of a hug, which in my mind, and you're a parent now, right? Do you hug your kids? I don't think I can go a day without any, even my 21 year old son. I'm like, get over here. It is such, it's not that it's a thoughtless act. It's an act that occurs so much. It's just an ingrained part of our life. I can't even fathom the level of neglect where the single act of just sharing a moment of time or hug could impact you in that way. It speaks to and defines how far out of the light that person is. Yeah. So that goes two ways. We'll get into that here in a little bit. But even as a as an adult,

when I hug my kids, I hug the fuck out of it. Oh yeah. It's real. I'm like, man, you little motherfucker. I get the underhooks. I get double unders and just. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I just, oh, fucking love it, you know. And so many people that I see who don't appreciate maybe their spouses or their kids or even just their family, just their mom and dad or their grandma and grandpa or their cousins or their fucking aunts and uncles, like, you know, there's so much appreciation that I have for people, you know, like I talked about Nick and Clark. Like, there's a reason why I am the way that I am. Right. Right. So, nonetheless, you know, maybe, uh, maybe, uh, um, maybe, uh, uh,

eight, nine years old, that's kind of when life really started to pick up and like shit. Maybe that's just because I was old enough to start to see it and understand it more. I think maybe it could have been the whole time. I just eight, nine years old, you really start to have some pretty vivid memories. And my mom had always smoked. She had always smoked cigarettes and smoked weed.

So we were a use of that. And this is back in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000s when like if you were smoking weed, you were like a criminal. And so we were, I just remember. remember it being like very secret, you know, you weren't supposed to tell anybody and all that

shit. And so, um, she had always smoked, always drank. There was always a bunch of people at our house smoking, you know, drinking, having a good time. And it was just, our house was like, for some reason, the place to be with everybody. And, um, and then she became, she started to become more violent. I don't know if it was a stress of life, raising three kids, you know, I don't know what it was, but she started to become more violent. emotionally, physically, abusive. So I talked about earlier coming home one day and seeing my sisters in there smoking weed with them, right? Well, like a week or two after that, I'm sitting in my bedroom and I'm on my bed playing Grant

the Thaddo San Andreas, which is fucking awesome game. Yeah. I used to like to fly the helicopters in that one. Yeah, yeah, badass game. So playing that game, right, for context. I'm 10 years old playing that game, and I knew how to do everything, which probably not the best. Maybe. I mean, for greater context, you got into porn at five.

So it was a natural extension. Fair analysis. By getting into porn, I mean stumbled across something. You had no idea what you were exposed to, but it still happened. You know what? I'm glad you said that because this is something I always forget to tell people, which just further exasperates, like just how fucked up shit was. At 10 years old, my mom knew that I was going into her room and taking her porn.

and watching it. She had like, we had like DVDs at this point, a little bit of an upgrade. And so, uh, instead of hiding it, she just gifted me the porn and said,

you can just watch it whenever you want. Are you serious? Yeah. And I did not realize how bad that was until like, just recently, like maybe within the year. Um, because I was just like,

I didn't, I did not even realize like, I mean, I would watch that shit like it was fucking breaking bad, you know? I would just sit there and watch it. And I cannot fathom providing that to one of,

my children. At 10 years old, nonetheless. Ever. Yeah. Yeah, true. Yeah, imagine like your kids like 21. You're like, here's your Pornhub subscription. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I honestly can't make sense of that decision. Yeah. That's something I often forget to talk about, which I think is a key detail of a lot. So of what was going on. I mean, that, if that doesn't tell you what's happening, I mean, that's fucking crazy. Yeah. So nonetheless, I'm sitting here playing Grant Thet Auto. and I'm on my bed. My back's against the wall. TV's in front of me, right?

My sister is off to the side over here. There's another wall. She's got her back against the wall. My door's right here. She had just gotten into a fight with my younger sister. And I heard him out there, so she came in there to vent to me. My door's closed. And whatever.

Playing the game. She's got a sucker in her mouth. And my door fucking swings open. Boom. Fucking bounces off the wall. My mom walks in. Unannounced or whatever provoked. Hammer fistile.

strikes my sister in the mouth probably three or four or five times like vicious like bouncing her head off the wall. I look over and just like boom boom boom. I'm like, you know, I jump on the other side of the bed and I'm crying immediately, just hysterical. I remember like being at the mattress, you know, I level looking up at my mom as she's punching my fucking sister. And she looks at me and she says, what are you fucking crying about? Stop being a fucking bitch before I give you something to cry about. and, you know, I'm like, this is my mom, this is my protector, this is the only person that I have, like, what the hell is going on? And this is when I begin to realize, like, this is not normal, like this is not okay. And that's when I started to have the, I knew I was going to tell my story one day,

right? And she walks out, you know, my sister and I sat there and held each other and cried. And I'm trying to, I often try to think about a way to tell these stories to get people to, to understand how severe they are. Because a lot of times when you hear these stories, you hear a lot of people, they'll say, you know, I got my ass who up too. You know, and occasionally a mom or dad does smack their kid or punch their kid out of frustration.

The difference, I think, in most situations is that there is an apology or some level of affection or follow up to that point, where this was purely like rage and anger and beating the fuck out of a kid and then walking away like nothing happened. And maybe further to paint the picture, like to make it maybe have some sort of effect on you

is think about on the other side of this wall if you heard some kid in there getting fucking punched and you heard him fucking screaming and crying. Like, or you... There's nothing I wouldn't do to stop that. Like those 911 calls, you know, with a little fucking four-year-olds like... Oh, it wouldn't even be a 911 call.

Even if it's not my kid. I would not be able to tolerate that. Yeah. And so I'm going to be my own first responder on that one. Yeah. You know, and so. I don't mean as a kid. I mean, as a fully formed door in that situation.

I'm going to call 911 after that's dealt with. Yeah, man. So like for me, when I hear those phone calls, like those 911 recorded calls of like the kids calling and like my mommy, my mommy or, you know, whatever. Or you see those kids in court where their mom killed their fucking sibling or some shit. I mean, God, dude, that shit is like. recordings of that is so haunting because it makes me think about my childhood where I'm like, Jesus, dude, like that's that's kind of the environment we were living in. And so, you know, maybe a week or two later, I'm coming home or I rode the bus home from school.

And this particular day, I didn't ride the bus. I walked home with my cousins. And, yeah, go ahead. I do it down here so people can't hear it. Yeah. There we go. Can I have, is there another one? Yeah, let me grab it for you. Okay. Hell yeah. Yeah, we're gonna need that. I've been like, I've been pacing this one just to, just to, you know, not be rude. But since you fucking, since you, you, you, problem with these, though, is you got a pee.

I'm getting to that point. I got a diaper. Do you need to take a piss? Here, go take a piss. Yeah, we'll just take it right now. This is a good, uh, good intermission. Yep. Ladies and gentlemen, today's episode is brought to you by Element or LMNT.

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Continue. Fire away. We're back. Fresh water's got a sixer on the table of water. Everyone. Take it easy. So, yeah, so I never walked home from school.

I always rode the bus. And on this particular day, me and my cousins decided to walk home, me and a bunch of boys, two or three boys, doing typical bullshit, running around, doing bullshit before we go home, right?

and ended up taking us like two, three hours to get home because we were just having fun. Yeah. And I get home and I didn't think anything of it. Obviously, as a parent, you'd be a little concerned. Your kids, three hours late getting home. And most parents would probably be like, where's my child? Like, what's going on? Oh, my God, you're finally home. Thank God. Thank God, right? I get home and my mom's like, where the fuck have you been? Go upstairs. And it was like really like you could tell you fucked up bad. And I would say in most situations, kids could probably be like, okay, I fucked up. This is going to, you know, whatever, get a whooping be over with.

But when you're when you're scared to come home in the first place, it's already just not good. So go upstairs. Standard procedure for getting an ass whipping was like bending over the bed, grab the blankets, don't move. Because if you try to protect your ass with your hands, they're just going to get your hands hit right and so my mom had this board uh that she would whip us with it was like a two by six handle carved in it you know a bunch of holes in there drill for optimal ass whipping and uh the first time she hit me on that day uh i realized like okay this is not good like literally the first crack i rebound off the bed fell to my knees and she kept swinging and so she went from hitting my ass

to uh she struck me across the back three four five times somewhere around there and um i i can remember like I don't remember what it felt like but I can remember being there on my knees like fighting for my life to stand up to try to like get the hell out of the way and my mom just kept swinging and she just she she she's swung it and um I'm like bouncing off the bed and it almost feels like there's like a cloud of like anger you can feel the emotion you can feel almost like the tension I guess in the air of just like it's like you couldn't breathe. It's like you couldn't breathe, you know? And I fell down and I'm laying there screaming and crying. And instead of, I'm sorry, I love you and this is why I did this or

whatever, she says, get the fuck out of here, go to your fucking room. And so I like low crawl to my room, probably being a little dramatic, but I just, as far as like pain and the capability of standing goes. But I wanted to be loved, you know, every kid, especially when you upset your parents, you just want their approval, right? You just want like, okay, I still love you, you know, even though. Yeah, their forgiveness approval. Yeah. Yeah.

So I crawled to my room, I lay in my room and I cry and cry and cry. And that's when I, that's kind of one of those days where I was just kind of like, I'm going to do something special with my life. Like I'm going to get the hell out of here. I'm going to do, like this is not normal. This is not okay. It's also, I began to have like a lot of suicidal ideation. I started thinking about killing myself a lot. I would think about different ways I could do it, which there's,

you know, a few mechanisms as a, as a child, and shooting, stabbing, drowning, jumping were like the things that I would think about. I was scared to feel pain. So that's, like, the thing that detracted me the most was I just didn't want to feel the pain. So I would sit outside my window at night, like no shit, staring down 25 feet below. Like, if I land just right, I'll fucking break my neck and die. But if I don't, I'm just going to be this asshole who's crippled or try. to kill himself, you know.

I mean, that's, that's literally the, the, the process that was going through my brain at 10, 10 years old. And, you know, thought about stabbing myself, thought about shooting myself, I didn't have access to a weapon, had knives, but I was scared of that pain. So I never, never did anything, never attempted it. Nonetheless, those thoughts were probably nearly every day. Eventually they did become every day, but maybe in the early stages that weren't every day, but they were pretty frequent.

And 10 years old, okay, so my mom, she starts to work at night. So she starts to work. We would go to bed at 8 o'clock or so she'd go to work. And she worked to factory shift, so she'd work like 9 to 9, you know, at night. And we lived in this neighborhood. One night my sisters wake me up, and they say, Seth, somebody's trying to break in. and I'm like, what do you mean? I think they're messing with me at first.

And I wake up and my one sister has a knife and the other sister has an alarm clock. She has the cord wrapped around her hand. She can swing it around, right? I'm like, okay, they're serious. We get downstairs. And at 9, 10, 11 years old, me and my sisters are standing in the kitchen or watching the back door

that has the handle, deadbolt and a 2x4 nailed across the door. And I'm just watching it, just ripping from the frame. Like there's three men outside my back door. One of them's got a baseball. a bat, the one has sledgehammer, and some other sort of blunt object. And they're, I mean, literally just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just striking this door trying to get in the house. And I don't remember if I grabbed anything or what I had done, but we're standing there and we didn't have anything. We didn't have like electronics. We didn't

have money. We didn't have anything for these people to get. And I don't know what they would have done had they gotten in the house. I don't know if they were coming from me and my sisters. Like, there's no telling what they were going to do. And neighbors come outside, scare them away, call the cops. Cops show up, call mom home from work. Everybody gets there. And the conversation was quite literally, these things happen. Okay, go back inside, go to sleep.

Wake up the next day, go to school. And so that was it. Like, there was no like, hey, we need to talk about this. Are you kids okay? Like, whatever. There was nothing like that, you know? Wake up next day, go to school. nothing's, you know, and then I go to school and I'm a, I'm a straight-A student, but I was a

troublemaker. I was a class clown, talking, fighting everybody. And so I was, as smart as I was, that kid that all the teachers, I was a pain in their ass, and I was always the kid who was just like, why is this little kid being a fucking asshole, right? For this is what I talked about earlier, right? Where, like, what happened? Like, what's happening to that kid? Why is he not paying attention when he comes to school or why is he being the way that he is? And so those are the questions that we failed to ask is what happened. So nonetheless, a week or two later, the same thing happens. And this is kind of where we figured out that this was calculated. My mom left for work. Same thing happened. People come and they break into the house.

And so somebody that we knew, it had to be because they knew her schedule or something. That time, though, I woke up in my neighbor's arms. I don't know if they got in the house, but I woke up in my neighbor's arms. He said, hey, somebody tried to break in again. Don't worry about it. I got you. takes me over to their house. Same thing. Cops come, go back to sleep, wake up, go to school. So, mom's crazy.

She's getting crazier. And then our house is broken into several times. Which just, I didn't realize how bad that affected me maybe at the time. But as an adult now, like if I hear something at my, if I hear the refrigerator making ice at night, it's like, is my alarm set? You know, because if it's not, then I'm like fucking freaking out, you know? So it really does fuck with you pretty bad. Yeah, your personal security is something that is very important to you and you just don't realize until it's been like breached or whatever, you know, compromised.

So around that time, my mom gets a new boyfriend. This guy's name is Jamie. He's a fucking piece of shit. Light skin guy, six foot tall, six one, six two. very muscular build, you know, just looked like a naturally muscular guy, had cornrows, had a gold tooth, a couple missing teeth, and I talk about him on my book, and I say he had a crooked smile because he was very charismatic and just very, everybody loved him.

And as soon as I saw him, I knew he was a piece of shit. I mean, I just knew it. I just knew something was wrong. And a lot of that comes from, like, I can read body language very well, almost to the point where I swear I can read people's minds. I think if you understand human nature and body language and all those things, you likely can to some extent. But when you grow up the way I grew up, you know,

and you're walking down the street and you see somebody 50 feet away, you have to know if that person's a threat. Or if somebody comes in your house, you have to know if that person's a threat. So you're just constantly assessing people all day long, you know. And so that's what happened when I saw that guy. I just knew he's a threat. He was the pastor or preacher, whoever gets up there and speak. at a church, he was that guy.

And my mom met him. He was a man of God and he was a savior, you know. So we go to this church. And these are all people that are, this is my problem with churches. These are the people that need the most fucking help. And they would never, these people that were in that church would never step into like your traditional church

because they don't have their Sunday best and they don't have like all the nice shit. They're people with smokers, coughs, and fucked up teeth and bad hair and they stink because most of them are homeless or eating at a shelter or they're people that need fucking help and they can't even get it

because society just deems them as we don't want to associate ourselves, right? So I go into this church and that's all these people are. And so I'm like, Jesus, you know, I'm like, you just have this uneasy feeling. He's leading the congregation or whatever. Everybody here loves him. My mom loves him.

He starts selling her pipe dreams. Okay, the way I think of pipe dreams are, you sit around, you're drinking or smoking, you're hitting the pipe maybe and you start to have all these visions, right? Of like, hey, we're going to buy a house. We're going to live this great life. We're going to get out of this and we're going to do great things.

And what happens when you're sober? It goes away. Okay? We end up, he starts dating, my mom starts dating this guy. And he has my mom and sisters like fucking hook, line and sinker. Just he's got him. And I was always just uneasy about him. And we end up moving to this other house that had no utilities.

we lived in this house. We were moving in and the utilities weren't turned on. And living without utilities was something I was familiar with. There were oftentimes where we had to boil the bathwater or whatever, which sucks, but that's just being poor. Being poor is not that hard. Living without love is hard. So I'll say that living without utilities was not a traumatic moment in my life, although to some people they can't even begin to fathom what that's like. nonetheless we move into this house in the middle of winter in Ohio okay it's cold as fuck

and so cold in the house you can see your breath we're running an extension cord through the shared basement of our neighbors to steal their power just to run a freaking space heater and uh so the downstairs there's no bedrooms the upstairs has two bedrooms so me and my sisters would go upstairs i always got the smaller room because it was me and those two shared a room, right? We go up at the top of the stairs in my room. I walk in, it's got hardwood floors, and they're buckled all the way across the floor,

like cracked, split, damaged. The room smells like shit and piss. Just stunk really bad. The people that lived there before apparently had like two or three dogs that were locked up in the room. And yeah, so, I mean, it was like fucking horrible. I just remember being just disgusting.

And I, you know, the floors are damaged. And you might be wondering why I look up and in the corner of my bedroom, there's a fucking hole that's like three feet by four feet in the corner of my ceiling in my bedroom. Like everything's missing. You can see straight into the attic above. No insulation. Like nothing, right? I mean, it's like I'm looking up. I'm like, and it's fucking freezing, obviously.

The solution was to staple up some plastic and to stop the wind. So the elements were quite literally blowing into my room. rain, snow, all of those things. It pulled up, you know, eventually there was like this big, like, puddle in there. And, you know, unfortunately, it actually ended up busting one night while I was sleeping and soaks my whole room. But I, but I moved into that room. I'm sleeping on like a four-inch mattress.

I have a thin little blanket. I'm pissing the bed every night, which is common with just trauma in general. Any kind of child who's dressed out, they usually wet the bed for a long time. And I was 10 years old and I was pissing the bed every night. night. So I'd wake up, freezing cold in my own piss, get ready for school, and go to school. You know, we're at this point, Jamie had gotten my mom addicted to cracking cocaine. So there's another layer of just trauma that gets added to the to the table, I guess. And with heavy drugs, there comes addicts and more people. And so in this new environment,

that were in this new house. I mean, every fucking day, there'd be like eight, nine, ten people that'd come through the house. And we didn't know that my mom was addicted at that point. We had our suspicions because the house would stink really bad and there would be all these people. But then they would go to the bathroom and they would sit in the bathroom for four or five, six hours. And they would just sit in there and get high all day long. And it was, that's when we started to put two and two together that something was wrong. And, you know, and living in that house, that's when I,

at 10, 11 years old or so, that's when I had started to lose respect for my mom and start to like have this hate towards her instead of loving her because of like going into that room and her just like putting her child in this room to sleep in versus like maybe sleep on the couch downstairs or like maybe somewhere where there's like warm,

I don't know, you know, somewhere safe to sleep. And she put me in there like no questions asked. And so I, that's when I kind of started to hate her for that. So around the same time of moving into that house, I meet this kid. His name is Jacob, or a fake name for the story to protect his identity, but call him Jacob. And he's 15 years old. I'm 10. And start hanging out with him. And Jacob knows that my life is fucked up at home. I don't know if I told him or if he'd been around enough to you kind of just pick him. up on it maybe. And so he starts to protect me. I start hanging out with him and all of his friends.

You know, going over to his house playing video games, he's feeding me. I always had friends that were bigger than me or older than me. And that's probably a father wound thing, looking for just somebody bigger to protect you, things like that. But a lot of my friends, they would invite me over and feed me. I mean, they just knew that something was wrong and I'd go over their house and eat all their eggs, you know? So Jacob was one of those kids, started to protect me. well one day after two or three months hanging out with Jacob started hanging with him every single day after a few months I'm at his house

and coming down the stairs and this guy walks in the front door he's 6 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 380 pounds built like a fucking left tackle like just a massive guy very big but does not look sloppy he looks like very imposing like he could throw a hard punch and you can tell he's Hispanic

but he's very pale, very pale skin he's got like big like domar style glasses on long black slick back hair he walks in he's wearing his big playing red t-shirt and um he's like hey what's your name i'm set he's like oh do you like football love football like the buck guys love the buck guys um do you like video games yeah i love video games oh cool well why don't you come up to my house this weekend with me and jacob and um you know we'll play play video games eat pizza and watch football all weekend and i'm like fuck yeah, bro, like let's do it. So I'm going to go home and ask my mom. So I go home, ask my mom, my mom says, hey, as long as you're with Jacob, you're good. Whatever, go.

So I go back to Jacob's house, get in the guy's car and for, I didn't know this at the time, but the guy's like 30-ish, which is really weird because I'm 30. And so now even when I tell the story, it's like, what the fuck? So I get in his car, he's driving a white Honda Civic. And I remember the AC being on, like full blast. And this was the first time I think I'd ever got into a car that had AC. So I was like, damn, this is fucking nice. And because it was like, like, these are the things that you appreciate as a kid, you know. And so there's trash all over his fucking car.

But I didn't give a fuck because I was like, whatever, bro. Like, I'm a kid. You don't give a fuck, you know? So we go to this chicken place in my hometown before we hit the road to go to Bluffton, Ohio, which is about 30 minutes away. He gets me a freaking meal, you know, sides, large drink. And I'm in the backseat. I'm like, dude, this is fucking.

awesome. Like I got a friend who can drive. He can buy me food. My buddy Jacobs is riding shotgun. We're going up to Bluffton. We're listening to Metallica, ACDC. I'm eating all this fucking food. We're allowed to cuss. We can like, this is fucking awesome. I'm like, man, my life is going turn around. Like, this is pretty cool. And so we get to his house and it's a studio apartment. So it's one big room. You walk in, it's got low ceiling, acoustical ceiling tiles. And look off to the right. There's an entertainment center. and like two or three TVs, a couch chair, back right corners,

got two desktop computers. The middle of the room has a big glass table with a bunch of like Dungeons and Dragons shit all over it. We played that a lot when we were over there. Back right corners like the kitchen and the bathroom. And then the back left corner there's this black curtain that's hanging from the ceiling and it's cornering off. That's where his bed was.

And my initial thoughts were, one, the apartment was cold because the AC was on and it was just full blast, big-ass dude, he ran hot. Two was there was multiple TVs and multiple game systems, which meant you didn't have to take turns and you could play all night long. And so we sit down and start playing video games, you know. Dinner time runs around. He orders a bunch of pizza, get a bunch of pop, energy drinks, and we're, and I mean,

I didn't go to sleep like when I was at his house, especially that first weekend. I mean, I played video games for 36 straight fucking hours, like just having the time of my life, you know? And I remember like Jacob going back and sleeping in his bed with him. And I didn't think anything of it because as a boy, you have sleepovers and you, you sleep with your friends and it's not a big deal, you know. And that's what I attributed it to. And I just was like, yeah, whatever, you know, not a big deal. Didn't think twice about it.

And so he drops me off, you know, Sunday. That was like a Friday or Saturday. He drops me off Sunday. He says, you know, hey, when do you want to come back? And I'm like, I'll come back whenever. Like, this is awesome. So basically from that point forward, I start going to his house every single weekend. 52 weekends in a year.

I was at his house, no shit, 45 weekends out of the year. Was Jacob there with you most of the time too? Most of the time, yes. So Jacob was 15, going on 16. I was like 10, 11 years old at the time. And so Jacob did start to go up there a lot. He did go with me a lot. Eventually I started going by myself.

and for probably several reasons, you know, Jacob didn't want to go, and then I would just go by myself, and then my mom either didn't care or just stopped asking if Jacob was going, you know? And one of the weekends I was up there, maybe two or three months into knowing him, we're having conversation.

I think we're probably driving up there, and Jacob was with us, and I start to tell us, so this guy's name is Mondo, okay? His real name is Armando Veski. but he's uh we called him Mando for short and I started telling Mando that you know I have this tough life and that my mom is very abusive she's very mean um I mean at this point she was like fucking us up pretty good and in addition with all the drugs in the house um I would tell

him stories of where she would grab me by my she always did this thing where she'd grab my face she had long nails and so she would grab my face and just like slam my head into the wall and I can remember what it feels like to have her nails like digging, you know, digging the skin up kind of. And I can remember like looking into her mouth while she would yell at me. I never wanted to look her in the eyes. It's just kind of, there's something looking at somebody in the eyes, you know. And so, but I can remember seeing the spit in her teeth and her stained teeth and the bad breath and just like hitting me in the face while she would slam my head. I had long hair, like down to my shoulders, like looked like really did look like a little girl.

she would grab me by my hair and bounce my head off the refrigerator. And she was doing all the same things to my sisters, you know. And at this point, like my older sister, it was just, and my younger sister, they were just smoking weed together with all these adults at 10, 11, 12 years old. And so I started telling all this to Mondo, you know, I got a single mother, no father. I've got two sisters, mom's abusive. I'm getting bullied at school. I was a really good student, straight-A student, but I got in a lot of trouble and got bullied. and Mondo basically reciprocate or are not reciprocates but repeats all the same information back to me

where he grew up with a single mother who's abusive he's got several sisters he's a very smart kid he was bullied all of the things that I had told him he mirrored right back to me whether it was true or not I do believe most of it is true with the knowledge that I know now but it's a common tactic a lot of people I'll let that slide um I think it was true. I think most of the things that he told me was true because of... True or not, there's a reason why he mirrored it. Yes.

And if you haven't picked up on it now, yeah, like this road's going down a pretty dark path, right? So on this one particular weekend, you know, Mondo, me and Mondo have this really deep conversation. And now, at 10 years old, the only person in my life who even begins to understand who I am or why I am the way that I am or whatever is this man, right? He's the only person who understands me because he's been through exactly what I've been through. So you begin to have this deep level of trust and connection with that person, right? And I'm at his house Sunday morning. We're getting ready to watch some, you know, football at noon or 1 o'clock. And Jacob left to go get tacos down the street.

And I was sitting on the couch and I told Mondo I was cold, you know. And so he's like, well, why don't you sit on my lap? and he had a blanket. And so I get up in his lap and he's a big guy, sit on his left leg. He's got his left hand on my left hip. Big, big fucking hands. And his very callous hands, I'll never forget what his hands feel like. Big calloused hands.

And long nails, his knuckles were so, like, big and dry and callous. Like, he would take him and rub them together and it would sound like rocks. And he would always, like, it was like one of these weird things he would always do. So I just remember like hearing his knuckles. He'd always do that. But anyways, I was sitting on his, on his lap, and he's got his left hand on my left hip, and I'm laying there in his chest, covered up in a blanket, nice and warm. And truth be told, I was so comfortable, man.

I was like, I don't know if you have a father in your life. But the love of a father or of another man is something essential to men. Like men need that. We need other men's love and affection and care. especially young boys. And I'd never had that. I'd never in my life been held by another man. You know,

I'd never been held or cared for or loved for by another man. And so when I laid there, I just felt so fucking comfortable. And he was like a big dude. It was like a big pillow. And, you know, his left hand slips off my hip and hits me in the butt. And he says, I'm sorry.

He says, my bad. I'm like, not a big deal. Like, I figured, like, if me and you bump each other in the hallway, it's not a big deal. And this is just a tactic. It's just testing the water and figuring out when it gets too hot, you know. And so he puts his hand back on my butt and he says, so this is okay.

And I just said, yeah, that's fine. You know, not a big deal. It's okay. And right at that moment, I knew what was happening, which sucks to admit, but I knew what was happening. Dude, you were 10. I know. I know. but it still sucks.

And it's like being at the top of a roller coaster and you hear that last click and you're about to go down and like you're strapped in though. Like there's you can't get off this ride and you're about to and that's kind of how it feels. You're just like I can't move. Like I have what am I going to do? Like I can't move. And so there's there's like the flight or flight or freeze or whatever the hell, right?

And I froze up, which is very typical. And then freezing is basically consent to those people, right? because they know as soon as you freeze up or you don't reject or deny that approach, that you've got them, essentially, you know. And so you just push the limits further as much as you can. And the people that do this are very strategic. They're very manipulative. They're most of the time very patient, very calm.

I was going to say we're months in at this point. Yeah. Yeah. And we hear the gravel turning outside. Jacob pulls in and he moves his hand away. You know, we watch some football. eat some tacos go home. And, uh, the very next thing that happens is very typical is I gaslight myself. That didn't just happen. Um, that, that wasn't supposed to happen or it's not going to

happen again. You know, it's raining and you're telling yourself it's not raining. You know, that's, that's, that is gaslighting and that's what you do. Um, you know, if, uh, if you slapped your wife right in front of me, uh, it's, it's like the bystander effect as well. It's almost like, what the hell? Like, that didn't just, that didn't just happen, did it? So then you're, you're just, it's, it's like this consent. You just, you just, you just, you just, let this thing just happen. So anyways, begin to gaslight myself with that. And then as the months go on from this point forward, the abuse just progressed every single weekend, you know. And it was, it wasn't like first base, second base, third base. It was like one finger in the waistband,

two fingers in the waistband, three, four, five. And it's just like inches. He's just like, it's a game of inches that they play. There's no big moves. There's nothing. big and drastic. It's a slow, steady burn that they use. Okay. And when they're manipulating the child, they're not just getting that child. They're manipulating everybody around them. They're family, friends, all those things. So all that to say, as the abuse got worse, at some point I was basically trapped. It feels like, you know, it's like if you're, you drink these waters every day and then you pick a different water to drink. And someone's like, well, what are you doing? Why are you not drinking that water.

This is something wrong with it. And then so for me, I was hanging out with him so much. If I stopped hanging out with him because he was doing weird shit, people start to ask me questions, right? And you just don't want those questions. You're just scared of that. And you don't want to explain yourself. You're just scared of that.

So where was Jacob while this was escalating? So Jacob, he was on and off. He would be there some weekends. Some weekends he wouldn't be there. And that's, you know, after knowing him now, So I never tell the story this way, but I'll tell it now. He was sexually abused by the same man for several years prior to me. And I was not his escape, but when Jacob was older and got into high school and then started driving, he had friends that wanted to do shit on the weekends.

And he had girls. And so he just, that was it. He just stopped going because he finally found an escape route, I guess. college ultimately ended up being his big escape, but that was basically it. And I didn't have anybody to go to or to go to for anything. So I just kept going back to the guy's house. Are you still in contact with him? Jacob?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yep. I'll touch base on him a little bit later. But so, yeah, I keep going to his house and the abuse keeps getting worse. You know, there's another, there was another big moment that kind of happens that. really breaks the mold or the barrier.

And it's really fucked up because it's, it's incredible what you can do to people if you know how to manipulate people. It's just, it's insane. And I remember standing in front of him one day, watching football. Well, he had called me. He'd called me over to him. He's like, hey, why don't you come over here, you know, sit in my lap or whatever? And I go over to sit in his lap and he kind of leans forward in his chair.

It was just me there. And he grabs my shorts and he rips my shorts. down, shorts and underwear. And he had not seen me naked at this point. And this is the first time. I've been down, pick up my shorts, and cover myself up. You know, and I'm crying. I immediately start crying because I'm embarrassed, like, what the hell just happened?

I'm scared. And so what he does is he pulls me and he hugs me and he holds me. He says, hey, what's wrong? Like, what's going on? Like, I was just joking with you. I'm sorry if that made you upset. And I told him, I said, you know, that was embarrassing. And I don't know what you know this and that.

And so what he had done was knowing full and well that he was the only person that could protect me in that moment, he exposed me, right, and broke me down because he was the only person that I could turn to. And it's this, it's a manipulative tactic that people will do. And that's what he did. And so then he held me and he told me how important I was to him. You know, he told me that I was the most important thing in the world and that how much he loved me and how depressed he was and how he wanted to kill himself and that he wouldn't kill himself. because I was in his life. And so at 10 years old, I have, like, all of this fucking, like,

weight on my shoulders of, like, this, like, emotional relationship that I have with this man, you know? And so now I have this pressure of, like, this, I'm the most important thing to this guy, you know? And, um, and so the, the, that's a very, you know,

I guess, detailed, uh, manipulative tactic. Another thing he would do is we had other adult friends. He never met my mom. He never met any of my family. I knew his family. I met his mom, met his sisters.

I would go to his holidays. I'd go to his Fourth of July's, Memorial Days, Thanksgiving, Christmases. I met his whole, his sisters, their kids. He was like the 30-year-old man showing up with a 10-year-old, 11-year-old kid at Christmas and like nobody fucking said anything. Yeah, that's super odd. Yeah. And nobody talked to me, you know, and I don't know that I would have said anything to tell him at the time. because you're scared of denial, you know, and rejection.

And the guy was massive and imposing. And so what happens if they don't believe you? Like, is he going to kill you? You know, there's a lot of fears of that. But when we would hang out with our other adult friends, like these just like random fucking people we knew, he would make comments towards me or about me. Like, if we were sitting in a room just now and he would say, well, we got to go. You know, Seth's got to blow me tonight. And they were okay with that.

Yeah, man. What are the odds now looking back that you think that they knew who he was and what he was up to? They didn't know. Really? I don't think so. There's, I don't think so. They either didn't know or they're just as fucked up. And because those people had kids.

Like, I'm in a room with other kids. I could see that going both ways. Yeah, right. I'm in a room with, like, other kids are with me watching football and like, whatever, eating dinner. And those kids' parents are there. and like, and he would just say it. I'm going to go back and, you know, I've got to go back and fuck Seth tonight. And I mean, no shit.

Like, he was like very, and the thing is, as imagine like the fucking balls it would take to say that in front of somebody. Let alone your family. Not that it's better to say it in front of strangers, but. Well, so he wouldn't say in front of his family, but just these other adult friends that we have. Okay, got you. Right? So, but if you, if I, if I, yeah, if you said that, um, um, I, um, if you said that, um, um, um, There's no way in hell you're actually doing that.

You know what I'm saying? There's no way in hell that I would allow that comment to be made a second time. Right. And that's part of the problem, okay, with reporting in regards to children. A lot of people don't want to say anything or report because Mondo was the best friend to everybody. He was funny. Everybody loved him. I mean, that's how you hide in plain sight.

That's exactly what it is. It's a wolf and sheep clothing. That's exactly what it is. and it's it's it's it's it's it's it's what they do it's what they do to hide and that's the reason why anywhere there's kids it's the little league coaches it's the guy in the church it's the person that you never fucking expect we talked about statistics earlier um 78% of the time it's somebody in your immediate household mom dad brother sister over 90% of time it's somebody in your immediate circle of trust right so like 98% of the time so um like it's these people

that are that are closest to your kids because there's a level of trust and connection they have to the child. My daughter is going to, we talked about that earlier. You know, she's going to freak out if somebody else touches her. But if daddy does it, she's going to be a little confused, but like, as daddy, like, she can trust daddy, right? So there's that, here lies the problem, okay? And so they do that with their friends as well. They manipulate everybody around them.

They got everybody believe in this fucking facade that this guy's got on. And so at that point, like, what do you do? when somebody's saying those comments about you in front of other people, like nobody's going to believe me if I report at this point, you know? And so... At that point, you're the child in the room. Yeah, exactly. That adults have to step forward and be adults.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're right. And you feel that as a kid. You feel like you know that your opinion doesn't matter, you know, when you come to the table and they're like, all right, all right, guys, get away, you know? So life goes on. So not only was I dealing with like Monday through Friday, basically.

the hell of being at home with abuse and drugs and violence. Saturday, Sunday, I was getting sexually abused by this man. And it just, you know, like I said, it's a slow burn. He's slowly playing the game. Around 12 years old, I had basically experienced everything you can experience in the realm of sexual or sexual behavior, like everything. You know, there's some fucking haunting stories that I tell. You know, the guy was watching me like go through puberty and he would make comments about that. Like he was so proud to see growing and hair and those kind of things. Like he'd make those comments because eventually I start going back to his bed and sleeping

with him. And in his bed, there's no clock. There's no like alarm clock back there. And it was dark. It was all black. He had black blankets, black sheets, pillows. And so there was no frame of reference for time. It wasn't like I got 45 minutes and then I can be done.

I got an hour or whatever. It's like I would be back there for fucking ever and I felt every minute of it. Like it was no disassociation. There was no like putting somebody else there. And it was a, I can just remember like he would say weird shit to me. He was like telling me he loved me. I talk about it in the book of like the first moments of him like, kissing me and dude it's fucked up and you know he starts to perform oral sex on me and

12 years old I you know um you know I end up having a I end up having an orgasm my first orgasm at 12 years old and uh this 30 year old man looks up at me and he's like did you enjoy that you know And I'm like, what am I supposed to say? You know, I don't know. And I say yes. And the shit just keeps going on. So because he was performing things for me, he wanted it reciprocated. So it happens.

And there's a lot of, a lot of dark, twisted shit that I could tell you. Nonetheless, or I keep, that word doesn't, I keep saying that word. I'm sorry. I get what you're saying. Yeah. So we, where is this motherfucker now? He's dead. please tell me it was extremely long and painful.

Like he accidentally lit himself on fire from his toes all the way up to his face. And it only burned a quarter of an inch to the time. I wish, I wish that was the case. I'll wrap it up for you. And then we'll, we'll, we'll,

we'll continue. A couple, couple, couple, couple, couple, couple, big,

big events, I guess. So, so, so 12 years old. Like I had experienced everything, right? And then one weekend I go home from his house. It's on a Sunday.

I go to my neighbor's house. My sisters are watching intervention, the TV show about like saving people from drugs, right? And at the end of every show, there's contact information. And my sisters and I are looking at each other and we're like, oh, we know somebody. Like, let's get mom on the show and see if we can help her. No shit that day, walk outside and there's a fire in my front yard. me and my sisters are immediately hysterical because we know something

something really fucked up is going on. There's a fire in your fire? What was burning? It's like a small fire. Not massive, but what it was was a collection of like clothes and just like miscellaneous items. Yeah.

My mom had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend in the bathroom over some drugs, ended up stabbing him and setting his shit on fire in the front yard. So the cops were called. Look on the front porch. Jamie's standing out there

like white tank top on, blood over the front of his chest and torso. Cops pull up, they grab my mom, throw in the back of the car. I'm 12 years old in the middle of the fucking street looking at my mom in the back of this car. And despite all the bullshit that we've been through, like, that's my mom and I need her. She's the only, once again, the only person that I have. And I can't, I mean, I can't even talk to her. Like, I'm trying to, I'm just, I remember being at that car and, like, trying to get through the window to her.

And I'm just crying so hard, like this visceral. fricking emotion, just, it was so painful. That was one of the worst days of my life. And I'm just crying and crying and crying.

And then like the cop gets in the car and takes her away. We go in the house and this is a very long, very complicated and confusing story, but go in the house and like people from like,

I don't even know how the fuck these people knew what was happening, but it seemed like everybody just showed up out of nowhere. My dad was there. My aunt and uncle were there.

and just like random people started showing up, and the cops were like, what are we going to do with the kids? So me and my sisters would go live with my dad for a little while. And while I was living out there, I got into a bunch of trouble, maybe because I was going through a bunch of crazy shit. And the schools were threatening to arrest me. So I moved out of my dad's house.

My sister stayed there. I moved back to the city, which is about 45 minutes away. And for the next about four to six months, I was like bouncing around different houses and just, you know, I'd live with one person and then say, hey, we can't take care of you anymore. You got to go somewhere else. And so I was just like fucking ping ponging around. Couch surfing, if you will.

Yeah, basically at 12 years old, you know, and you're just surviving. That's all you're doing. You're just trying to make it to the next fucking day. Around Christmas time that year, or just after Christmas, I get a phone call. I'm at these people's house, and I get a phone call and it's my mom. And I don't know if she ever went to prison or jail. I don't know if she ever got in trouble. I have no idea what happened, but she's just.

was calling me. She said, hey, I'm going to come and get you. Where are you at? And I was living with like a typical middle class family at this point, mom and dad, kids, you know, whatever. And they were taking care of me. And I told my mom, another one of the very hard moments in my life, ended up telling her, you know, I don't want to live with you anymore. And like, that's really fucking hard to say to your mother at 12 years old. And especially we don't have any options of where you're going to go. And so she freaks out on the other end of the phone and she's like, fuck you. Like you're my fucking son.

You're my responsibility. I'm going to come and get you. Like, how dare you say that to me, this and that? I'm good now. I'm better now. Somehow my grandparents finally catch wind of what's going on and they find me and they come and pick me up maybe a week or two later because they were the closest thing. to me that could adopt me.

And so they come and pick me up, get back to grandma and grandpa's house. My sister's there had no idea. And so I'm like, oh, like, once again, like we finally made it out, right? We're like, we're finally fucking good. My grandma asked to adopt me and my sisters. I said yes. My sisters initially did say yes. And then after about two, three weeks of talking to my mom on the phone pretty much every day,

my mom manipulated them to go back and live with her. And, you know, this, a lot of people ask me, like, Like how did Seth stay on this like straight and narrow path? There's a lot of answers I could probably give you. But truthfully, I think I have something in my body that is this level of resilience or grit or something in my character that some people just don't. I think some people have some people don't. And I think that's kind of what kept me from going down that path. On the same token with that, this guy Mondo, as bad as he was in my life,

he was arguably the best thing, one of the best things that's ever happened to me. And it's really fucked up. And this is what's so fucked up about sexual trauma and also combat PTSD or first responder PTSD. They're very similar. And they're arguably two of the hardest to get over and to understand and to process. Reason being is because the person that sexually abuses you is likely somebody who's very close to you. It's likely somebody who made you serial, taught you out of throw a baseball. fucking did your homework with you.

You know, somebody who's, you got these deep, um, positive connections with, uh, combat PTSD, uh, you know, the buddy that was killed is the guy that you were playing spades with, talking shit with, beating the hell out of. He's your best fucking friend. And so when you're trying to talk about this guy that you've lost in combat, or, or even just, you remember the good times? You remember the good times?

Like, oh, man, remember that one time we were playing spades with so and so? And then it's like, fuck, man. That guy's fucking not here no more and it fucking hurts. And so sexual trauma. combat PTSD, they're very similar in that regard when you're trying to process it because your brain has one memory. It remembers this person. So you remember the good and the bad. And so it just fucks you up really good. So, yeah, my grandparents, I said yes. My sisters end up leaving. They go back to my mom's house. I found out recently that when they did go back, my mom was living in a

house that had no utilities. They eventually were bouncing around hotel to hotel, homeless, essentially, with two little girls, and they would go to dealers' houses and clean up the houses for either drugs or money. You know, I had no idea that was happening at the time, and it just breaks my heart for my sisters. I was with my grandparents, and I truthfully, like, I stayed with my grandparents because they had money. Like my grandpa retired from four, and my grandma was running her own business. And I had warm freaking meals and a bed to sleep in and a big house, nice cars. I was like no longer this poor kid, you know. But unfortunately, so to kind of, I guess I skipped over a small piece of what I was saying with, with Mondo being one of the,

maybe the best things that happened was he guided me through a lot of this. Like maybe out of his own ill intent of being connected to me or I don't know. But he was like, you know, stay with your grandparents, you know. And even about a year or so later, after the adoption went through, like I got visitation with my mom. And I went and saw my mom for the first time in like a year. I went home that night and I cried because I felt like I betrayed my mom. You know, I needed to go back and live with her and I felt horrible and like I missed her and I loved her. And I cried all night long in my bed and I and I hated my grandparents. I hated I hated I hated I I resented my grandparents so bad because of uh you once again like I said earlier I've

had that victim mentality of like uh you don't know what I've been through kind of thing and so you just you just fucking hate everybody especially people are happy you just don't even understand like how you fucking happy like fuck you man like I don't even so you don't even know what that word means and I remember my grandma made me a birthday cake when I was 13 I came home school she made me a birthday cake and sung happy birthday to me. And I remember coming home and being like, like, fuck you. Like, I'm not a fucking kid. Like, I'm not a kid. Like, you don't have to do. Don't treat me like a kid. Don't treat me like a baby. And I called Mondo and I said like, my, man, my, my fucking grandma, man. He's like, she did this and this. Like, I'm not a fucking kid.

And he told me straight up, he's like, would you rather come home and. And, you'd rather come home. and her beat the fuck out of you or care about you enough to make you a fucking cake. And so he changed my mindset a lot, you know, of treating my grandparents better. He coached me a lot through school and bullying and like all these different things.

For the good or the worst, I don't know, but it did help me. I mean, he did put me on that path. And that's why sexual trauma, like I said, it's so fucked up

because these people that have such good plans for you, they have just as bad, likely, you know? I don't think he had good. plans for you, man. I think he was doing everything he possibly could to keep you in his sphere of control. Yeah, that's probably a better way to put it. Not good plans was a bad choice of words. But he legitimately, I see what you're saying. I mean, legitimately, there are, there are aspects of your life that he helped you through. Right. My suspicion, and that's all that it is, a hypothesis would be that he was doing that so you would stay in his life. Yeah.

He was trying to help you in yours so you would fill the role that he would want for you in his. Right. Yeah. And there's like that level of like dependency that you have. You know, it's like a like quid pro quo kind of thing. Or like he did this for me. He did this for me. He had nothing he did. Again, total suspicion of hypothesis. I don't think anything he did was accidental. Right. He sounds like an incredibly accomplished predator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was. And so, you know, around 13 years old, go back to, you know, well, so some, let me back. up here. I met my grandparents' house. And when I first got there, I tell him, I said, well, I have this friend that I want to go hang out with, you know, and because I was still defending the guy. He was still calling me all the time. I was still calling him. And so he was kind of putting that in

me like, hey, what are we going to hang out again? And so I tell my grandparents, and my grandparents, they know what happened to me when I was five when I was molested. And so, and they know my whole history of childhood. And so they're like, fuck, no. And I tell them, like, he's not like that. I defend him. I do all the things. and so they said, well, we want to meet him. So he shows up at the house. He makes my grandparents laugh. And this is like the first time he'd ever met anybody from my family.

So now it went from me going to his house all the time. Now he was at my house all the time for all of my holidays. Now, Seth was the kid with the older friend versus the inverse, you know. So he made my grandparents laugh. You know, he came over and told him, I know says had a hard life. And, you know, I've just been trying to help him and hang out. And I know Jacob and my grandparents knew Jacob. him. And, you know, he was back in the saddle. And shortly after that, unfortunately, you know,

I won't get into the details of it, but he rapes me for the first time. I was 13 years old. He rapes me. I remember it all happening. And, you know, he gets done. And I go back to his bathroom. And I'm sitting on the toilet and I'm just crying. And I'm just thinking to myself like, my life is fucking over. Like I don't have a mother. I don't have a father. I just have now been raped. I can't say anything to anybody because many, many reasons, some of them being people are going to think I'm gay.

They're going to think I'm weird. They're going to make fun of me. What if I have AIDS or I didn't know how any of that shit worked, but I was scared of having AIDS or HIV. I was so fucking scared of so many things, man. And I was sitting there on that fucking toilet crying and crying and crying. And I get up, I take a shower, I walk out, I walk back out and I put a smile on. And I keep playing the fucking game.

And it goes on for almost three more years. I was up at his house one weekend. I was a month away from being 16. And I had a younger friend that would hang out with me. and go to his house. And this kid, now this kid, he was only allowed to go if I was there. His parents would not let him go alone. And so me and this kid are hanging out up there. And he was having a bad day. And this was like a Friday night, I think. And he makes a comment to him my friend. He says, hey, if you're having a bad day, I can take you back in the bed and blow you.

And I'm playing a video game on the computer when he says this. And we laugh it off. We all laugh it off. and Mondo takes my friend back in his bed. And this is the first time in almost six years that I had ever seen anybody else go back there other than Jacob when we initially started hanging out. And, you know, just to be clear, too, like the audacity that these people have, I would go back in that guy's bed and we would have people over, like, in a studio.

Like, there's just a curtain separating us. We're 15 feet apart. And this guy's, like, molesting me in his bed. With other people out in the other room playing video games, having a good time. So there's so many nights where I spent back in that guy's fucking bed with my friends out in the living room playing games, eating pizza, drinking pop, and I'm back here like fucking going through hell. And I saw my friend go back there and I was like, we're not doing this. And I message, I'm playing a video game and I message Jacob on the

video game. This is, I usually don't tell the story the way that I will, but I message Jacob on the video game. And on the video game, when you, when you direct message somebody, it pops up in a different color chat. And it's very visible. Like you know when you see it. So I message him. I said, hey, I need to talk to you Sunday when I get home. And he's, and all he says back to me is okay. And that was it. As soon as I say that for some fucking weird reason, like Mondo comes out of the room. And I didn't see him initially. I was looking at the computer screen. It's dark. So your peripheral is not there. And I see him like at the very last second. I scrolled up in the chat to try to hide the message, you know.

I think Mondo saw it because the whole mood changed that whole weekend. And if he would have seen that I had messaged Jacob, he would have known like my cover is blown or something's wrong or something's off. You know what I'm saying? They're very, very smart. And I'll get back to why I think you saw it. The whole mood changed. And he was just like, it was just, I felt like he was going to kill me.

And I may have just been paranoid, you know. But, I mean, the rest of the week. that I was there. I was just like watching the door. Like I'm like, do I run? What do I do? Like, how, you know, what am I going to do to get home? Because I was, I was scared. I thought he's going to kill us. That was a Friday night. I don't think anything happened to my friend. They weren't back there for very long. But then the next night, unfortunately, he, he ends up raping me again. And, you know, that had happened several times over the course of the years. But Saturday night, that happens. Wake up in the morning, Sunday. We go home. I get to my

house. Mondo drops me off. He's got my friends. So he takes my friend home. My friend lives in the city. And Jacob shows up at my house like an hour later. Jacob's in college at this point, you know. And so we go to my bedroom. We're pacing back and forth in my bedroom. And I'm just telling Jacob like, hey, man, I've been wanting to tell you this for a long time.

I don't know how to say this. And I'm just scared. And like, I just don't know what to say. And that's all I keep repeating myself. I'm pacing back and forth, back and forth. And I cannot say it. I cannot admit anything. I can't, you know, get to the point.

And Jacob's standing there quietly and he just says, he breaks the silence and he's like, Mondo touched you, didn't he? And I fell apart. I fucking, you know, 16 years of like just pain had, was leaving my body. I just fell to the floor. And I remember just like laying there like so cold. And like I just felt like I was melting and like punching the floor and punching the floor. and crying.

And a few seconds later, Jacob's like, well, he did it to me too. And I had no idea, you know, I had no clue. And I turn and I look at him and I'm just like, every bit of pain that I had felt, I was just like, what the fuck, man? Like, and I feel horrible for him because Jacob was the closest thing that I had to a big brother to like any kind of like father figure in my life,

you know? So that guy that like, like, whatever man that you look at that like, that guy is untouchable, whether it's your brother or your father. father, that just doesn't happen to him. Like, that's your dad. I don't happen to it. Your dad didn't go through shit like that, right? And so that's how I looked at Jacob.

And so to know that it happened to him, I was blown away. I had no fucking idea. And so Jacob says to me, what do you want to do about it? And I said, well, I said, fuck this guy. We have to report him because he's about to start doing it to my younger friend, you know. We go out in a living room. I got a flushed face. You know, my grandma knows something's wrong.

And we're sitting out there. and Jacob, or my grandma asked, like, what the hell's going on? And Jacob's kind of looking at me and I can't say it again. And my grandma, or Jacob says, you know, it's Mondo. And as soon as he says that, they know. And my grandma, I could just see her like my baby, my baby, you know, like, oh, my God, crying. And I go over to her to comfort her.

And I'm holding her. And she's crying. I'm crying, and I'm just apologizing, you know, because I'm like, I let this guy in the house. I told you nothing was wrong with him. I hid the secret. I lied for him. I protected him. And I felt fucking horrible.

I knew it wasn't my fault. Like, I was a very smart kid. I knew it wasn't my fault. But, like, you just, I don't know what you say. I don't know what to say. You know, so, you know, so I'm just crying and holding my grandma. And, you know, that really hurts talking about her just because, unfortunately, she's not here anymore. and I just, I wish she was because she would see the things that I'm doing now with my story, you know, and see the impact that I'm making.

But that really hurts to tell her or to be there in that moment with her. So my grandpa, my friend Jacob and I, we go down, we call the police and we go to the hospital to do the report. We get down there and, you know, we get set up in the nurse's office as police officer. as police officer walks in, his name's Chad Couples from Bluffton, Ohio. He walks in, I see his last name, and I'm like, couples, is your wife, so-and-so. And he's like, yeah, that's my wife. So his wife was actually my teacher, like five years, six years prior, which is really crazy. Small towns, man.

Yeah, small, yeah. I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess. And what's, you know, I hadn't met the guy before because she would, he was a, he was a veteran. he was an Afghan and Iraq veteran. And so she would bring him in on like veterans there Memorial Day, you know? And so she'd bring him in. So I'd already met the guy. So when I saw him, I recognized him.

And it's hard to explain like the coincidence of all this. But two weeks prior, two or three weeks prior, he had graduated from the like sexual victim abuse course of reporting or whatever the fuck, you know. So then he's sent to my case. And he walks in. I just had this level of trust and confidence in him because I guess maybe I knew him or whatever. So then I have to sit down across from another man at 15 years old and tell him. He tells me, he says, Seth, you know, the more you tell me now, the less we're going to have to do later. You know, just I know this is going to hurt, but like, let's tear this band-aid off and let's do this shit, you know.

And not his exact words, but summation of it all. And I pour it all out. I tell him the worst shit that ever happened to me in the fullest, the most descriptive detail. And so we get done with all that. We go back in the nurse's office and the nurses are saying like, hey, Seth, do you have any dirty clothes or do you have anything that you've worn to his house recently that we can get DNA off of or, you know, take or whatever? And I tell the nurses like, you know, this just happened 15 hours ago. And I haven't changed my clothes and I haven't taken a shower because when he went, when he took my friend back there that night, I did not know that I didn't know what was going to happen to me the rest of the weekend. but I knew that I was going to report him

and so when I did go back there and he did what he did to me that weekend I knew like this is it like I'm getting this motherfucker and I'm like this is it you know and when I said that when I said that I had not taken a shower and I had his clothes on him

the silence in the room was like deafening it was like everybody's like what the fuck you know and like take your clothes off like let's get this shit and test me and they swab me and they do all the things they're really really proud of me

and you know, Chad ends up going back and going up to arrest Mando. I go home that day, didn't hear anything else, you know, maybe like a month later, two months later, I hear that Mando accepts a plea deal. He was sentenced with 11 felony counts of child like misconduct and some other charges. and he accepts a plea deal. He's charged with four counts who sentenced to 10 years in prison for about 10 years of abuse

between me and Jacob. Did Jacob report him as well? Mm-hmm. Yep. Jacob actually went to the hearing because he was an adult and read a letter saying that this wasn't enough time

and they didn't give a fuck. And that was in 2011. So he'd be free today to do whatever the fuck he wants to do So fortunately enough, he died in 2019 in prison. He's about a year away from getting out, and he died. How did he die? Staff infection, they said, yeah.

God, I hope it hurt. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever had the conversation with Jacob as to whether or not he knew you were being abused before you told him? Yeah. So in March or April of 24, I ran an ultramarathon. It was one of my ultras that I ran.

And Jacob drove down to crew me for it. He lives in North Carolina now. So he drove down to Georgia to crew me for it. And I always thought that Jacob had like a normal life, like a very normal like vanilla life before I knew him. I never knew about his childhood before I met him. And so he came down and like kind of told me his whole story. And that's his story to tell.

And it's fucked up. it's very fucked up. And we had that conversation. He didn't, he didn't know. You just, you just don't imagine it could happen to anybody else. Like, you did. That's a fair point. Yeah.

He did too. Yeah. And I don't know this person at all and I say this without judgment, but I wish he would have done for you what you did for that other kid. Yeah. Because what you described, I don't, I don't have the vocabulary to describe what it feels like to sit here and hear that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that sucks, dude.

It sucks. And there's, it's happening right now. Like it's happening. It's happening here. It's happening two blocks away from here. You know, how do we stop it? Better question. Or maybe a more realistic question.

Yeah. Is it possible to stop it? I don't think so. Because it happens more in the house and it happens more with people you know. And man, that's just the people are fucked up. Some people are just fucked up. and they get fucked up and then hurt people,

hurt people. And it's just this perpetual cycle. And I think, you know, I want to stop it, but I think my effort, my focus is to help people get through it and get over it, you know, because it's going to happen. Well, I mean, so he, Mondo got sentenced

when you were 15. I mean, so you still had to have finished high school, graduate high school, you went into the military. Yep. Have you, well, let me ask you this. Do you feel like, I don't know the way to ask this. Do you feel like you have worked through what happened to you?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How were you able to do that and when did that occur? Yeah. Oh, man, that's a great question. So. Because you've had a lot of life between then and. Yeah.

So it came in stages. Okay. Everybody sees me for who I am now and they're like, damn, Seth. Like, how do you do this without falling apart and whatever, you know? Um, it comes in stages and it takes a lot of fucking work. And, and what, like we talked about earlier, I ran from all of that shit forever. Like, um, 29 years. I ran, well, not 29, 15 years, I guess. Um, I ran from it, you know, didn't, because, and I was fortunate enough that when I reported him, it was all under the table because I was a minor. So my name was never put in the, in the, in the releases

or nothing. Uh, if it would have been, I would have killed myself. I would have 100% killed This is exposure. Yes. There's no way in hell I could have survived. You know, I give a lot of people credit for the strength and the brotherhood that I had to building that effort to report. I had a wrestling coach and a wrestling team to be a part of. And I give them a lot of credit for it. But anyways, the healing came in stages.

Okay. When I was, so I joined the Army, initially joined because I wanted girls. and I thought that if I put on this uniform and dog tags. Panny droppers. Yeah. And it just... You needed to join the Marines for that. Yeah.

Those class A's are sharp. Yeah. Yeah. And... Really different job, but they're sharp. Yeah. And what's funny is I joined the reserves as a mechanic thinking that I was like an infantry killer because I thought that everybody was like, hey, you want to shoot shit and

and blush? I'm like, yeah. And so I was in the reserves from... I joined when I was 17. And so I was in the reserves until I was like, 19 or 18 19 right after high school. I ended up going active duty, signed an 18X contract,

which is the special forces like recruit shit. A bunch of funny stories there, getting kicked out of Airborne school, which is what nubbed my SF career, which I wouldn't have made it anyways because I was a fucking shitbag. Not with that attitude, sir. Yeah, yeah. But I got kicked out of airborne school,

went to Fort Stewart, Georgia. And when I was in the Army, especially when I joined the infantry, like, I was full on, like, America mode. Like, at that point, I was, like, very proud of serving my country. It wasn't, like, for anything other than to serve my country. I was very proud of what I was doing. But during that time, you know, I eventually became a team leader. Let's see. Went to Fort Bragg.

Well, so I met my wife at Fort Stewart, knew her for six months, got married. Didn't tell anybody for seven months. Went to Fort Bragg. We got married just so she could come to brag with me. And right before my daughter was born, that's when I started going through my healing process. So I was 24. And my daughter was about to be born and I was about to go to Afghanistan. And at my daughter's baby shower, oddly enough, Jacob was there.

and Jacob approached me and he kind of asked me, because me and him were like two peas in a pod at this point. We're like just fucking super connected. And he asked me about my finances and just to make sure everything was okay. And I was like a typical young stupid soldier with like $60,000 of debt. Hell yeah. All that shit, you know, new wife, new house, fucking all the fucking things, right? And due to the nature of my childhood, I had no financial literacy.

I was just fucking just, you know, whatever. Everything's $15 a month. So you just finance everything. and so he asked me about that. So I kind of did all my healing backwards. I fixed my like finances first, which is a big deal. It takes a lot of stress off of you. Yeah.

Right? So I fixed that. We got out of debt. But then I went to Afghanistan. And I went to Afghanistan with Fort Brett deployed with 82nd. And I was a team leader. And so that was really hard because our deployment was very easy. fortunately enough had no direct action we took some rockets here and there but nothing crazy

with that being said my deployment like fucked me up because man I with a combination of like leaving my wife and daughter my newly born daughter at home being a team leader in the 82nd which is a massive ego fucking place the Fort Bragg in general just so clicky and ego driven and so it seemed, and that might have just been my own insecurities, but I was a man leading men with all my shit, you know, and I just,

I can't tell these guys this shit that I've been through. Like, I'm their fucking team leader, you know, and they're gonna, these guys are gonna judge me, they're gonna tell other people, they're gonna make fun of me. And so I was dealing with this, like, massive identity crisis. I was the bulldog team leader. My platoon sergeant was a former Ranger guy

for like 16 years. And so he told me, fucking fuck these guys. up and like be that be the bulldog and just you know do the right thing but just be aggressive and he loved me for it you know but that's who I was and so um I was this guy big dude like strong freaking trying to be this man in the infantry and all the while I was dealing with this like massive insecurity and identity crisis essentially let's not forget the suitcases and duffel bags full of right trauma that from your childhood yeah that's that's that's

reason because of all that, right? So we went to Afghanistan, man, I was struggling fucking bad. And right before we left, I read Extreme Ownership, which really helped me as a leader. I read that. And that's actually what kind of changed my mindset from being like, it's everybody else's fault to, you know, owning the fucking shit, you know, that you're going through or that you're dealing with. Yeah. And so that did help me as a leader. But I only applied extreme ownership to my military, like, service, like only my guys, nothing in my personal life. So we got through Afghanistan.

And I always tell people, like, if I would have experienced any kind of direct action, I would not be here. Like, I think everybody's got some bandwidth. They've only got so much. And I'm about out of it. and I tell people all the time, if I experienced another traumatic event in my life, fucking check on me because I got, I'm very low. And so I got back from Afghanistan. My son was born.

And then we were living in a two-bedroom apartment. I'm getting ready to get out of the military, which is stressful enough. I've got two kids and a wife to take care of. I'm trying to figure out my civilian transition. And then so that was when life had really, really taken a bad turn just because of all the stressors. my childhood trauma had come back in a really weird way. I began to like really hate and resent my wife like deeply, deeply. Like I talked about when we first started where it didn't matter what she did,

I'd be pissed off at her for something. I didn't like the way she worked out. I didn't like the way she did this, raised the kids. I didn't like the way that she was a mother. She raised my kids with like love and affection and nurturing where I had a fucking two-year-old and a newborn that I was trying to like toughen up, you know. How much did she know? about your past? She knew, she knew all the, she knew all the basics of it, of everything that

had happened to me. When did you decide to tell her those things? Quick. I told, yeah, and this is, I give my wife so much credit because I told her a month into our relationship. Do you think she understood? No. Yeah, I was going to say the depths of how much it impacted you. No, because, dude, I could give my wife so much credit for this because when I, I was going to say, the depths of how much it impacted you. when I met her, well, first off, I did the typical thing of first night, you know, first hot girl that I meet, I'm like, I'm going to marry you. And you actually verbalize that? Yes. You are a retard.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she's like, okay. So, you know. You're lucky you didn't see smoke coming out from her shoes as she went the other direction. Yeah, I am lucky. Because, you know, like a month later, I tell her like some of the shit that I had gone through as a kid.

And just the top waves, like, I was sexually abused and mom and this, don't have a family. Why did you decide to bring it up with her? She's the first girl I ever dated. I'd never had a girlfriend before. And, man, I don't know. There was something about her. I thought I was going to marry her. And that was probably because this is the first girl I ever dated.

But I told her, it was almost like get away from me. It's like, I told her, I said, I'm fucked up just so you know. I said, if you want to be with me, like, I'm fucked up. And I got a lot of fucked up shit. And she's like, what do you mean? And I told her, she's like, why would I give a fuck? You know, she's like, what's that got to do with me? And it's not having to do with her input informs output.

Yeah, right. So. Well, I give her so much respect for that because she didn't like care. Like she was just like, I love you. Yeah. Like your past, it doesn't matter to me. Like, it is what it is. Like, I love you.

I'm not so sure you were past it at that point. No. That's because that's what you're about to say. Like, you're past it. Right. Yeah, no. Yeah. And I wasn't.

And that was my point was telling her. It was like, if you, you know, I got a lot of bags. I'm bringing with me just so you know. That's kind of the point. And it's a, a lot of people do that because it's a way of telling somebody to get away from me. You know, if I tell you all the problems that I have, it's like, you don't want these problems. Trust me. You know, and she just didn't even care.

You know, she's still with me now. So, but we had our initial like two years of puppy dog love kind of thing of marriage, right? But when I got back from Afghanistan, that's when everything started going kind of south in our marriage, where I became the abuser that I had dealt with for so many years, the manipulative person that I had dealt with for so many years via my mom or Mondo, right? I was just super manipulative towards my wife for the next, oh God, two years or so, two or three years. Just I would come home because once I got out of the Army, I would come home from work, wouldn't talk to her for two, three, four days in a row. I mean, I'd come home and just not say a word to her, talking play with my kids, hang out with my kids, but I would just treat my wife like shit. And I tried to divorce her multiple times.

I mean, I literally told her like, I don't want to do this anymore. Like, I want a divorce. I want to get out of this. I'm tired of this shit. I couldn't love her. I couldn't touch her. I couldn't hold her hand. Couldn't give her a kiss.

Couldn't give her a compliment. She would get dressed and come out, you know, and staying in front of me, you know, in the way that women do where they're like, hey, like I got dressed. Like, it's time to compliment me. And I knew that's what she was doing. Did she give you the trick question? How do I look? Oh, yeah. There's only one answer for anybody listening to this.

It doesn't fucking matter what they look like. You look fantastic is the answer. Right. And, you know, and I would just look at her like, you look good, whatever. I would just give her this like, get the fuck out of my face, you know? And the reason I did is I knew what she wanted, you know, I knew she wanted the compliments. And so there's like the misery love, loves company kind of thing. Like it feels good to be like, yeah, now you're on my level.

Because like if I treat you like shit, you're going to be miserable just like me. And now you know what it feels like, you know. I resented my wife because, you know, she's got a mom and a dad. Her dad's a very successful G.C. in the Southeast. She's got brothers and brothers and sisters and grandma and grandpa and family and love. And I don't have any of those things, you know. And so there's only one way to describe the situation that you were in. You were wallowing in your own self-pity.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And and she stayed with me throughout the whole process, right? So fix my, fix my finances, fix my leadership. and the military just as a man and work and stuff in general. And then the personal healing came this year, or, well, I guess, 2024. About January, 2024, I had a conversation. It was January or February. I had a conversation with a friend.

And what was important about this now that I think about it is I reached out to him for help versus him just giving me unsolicited advice, right? Unsolicited advice likely will land you nowhere. Hence the unsolicited. Yeah, right. But you feel like, man, I got all this, I got all this stuff I want to give you. People have to be ready to receive.

Exactly. And so for me, people would give me an advice my whole life, right? And I would just be like, yeah, fuck you don't understand, right? And I finally was like, you know what? I'm just going to ask this guy for some help. And so is my buddy. His name's George. and what happened was I was actually bitching about my wife and I was like, you know,

my wife does this and she does this and she's not like motivated because I'm like super motivated, like want to whatever, crush everything, crush it at work, be the best performer at work, which I was. You know, I wanted to just be the best everywhere in life and I wanted to wake up at four in morning and work until midnight because that's what you have to do to be successful, you know. Is it though? No. but that was like the that was the persona you know.

I get it. There's a whole ecosystem that sells that as the path of success. Right. And I was fully into that, you know, and I would get mad about my wife, not staying up until 11 o'clock to do the laundry, you know. And so I would do the chores. I would do the dishes in the house chores, not for her, but in spite of her, to say like, look, I'm working a full-time job. I work out in the morning. I do jiu-jitsu, and I still have time to do this.

It sounds like you were being an insufferable cunt. Yes. Yes. And when I approached my buddy about this, he basically reiterated that to me. He's like, because I was fully expecting him to be like, damn, bro, your wife sucks. And he was like, bro, he's like, you married a fucking woman, man. Like, back the fuck up. She's not a fucking soldier. She's not your fucking buddy. She's a fucking woman. And this is, and let me tell you something, this is what they want. Not this other bullshit that you're doing. And so when I had that conversation with George, I actually went home, like no shit, went home that weekend. And I made the conscious, this is where people fuck up. I made the conscious decision to fucking be better and to do better. And it's a fucking decision, man.

There's a process to it. Yeah. It starts with a decision, though. Yes. It takes repetition. It takes fucking, it's a skill. It's like this development that you go through. But it's a fucking decision that you make to wake up.

to choose to be grateful, to choose to be positive, to choose to text your wife and tell you that you love her. And, you know, and he saved my marriage. I mean, he saved my marriage, saved my life earlier. That and the fact, it seems like you're married to a rock star. Yes. Let's be honest. Yes. The only reason that marriages survive is because women are willing to tolerate our shit.

Yeah. Yeah, dude. Some more than others. And you know what's crazy is like, my wife has no reason to tolerate my shit. She's fucking hot. She sees something in you that makes it worth it. Yes, she does. But I would always be so hateful towards her because like, especially when my son was born,

I really was close to killing myself. And because I knew she had family and her family had money and they would be good without me. Like they're going to be okay. So you justify it. You know, there's all these reasons why you justify a divorce or whatever it is. and, you know, leaving somebody is so fucking easy. Like a divorce, if my wife would have walked away from me, I probably would have taken my life.

That's probably where my mind was going was like, if I get away, get alone, I can do this. But because I would have dreams and visions of my wife and kids coming home and seeing me, you know, and I could hear them screaming and I could see the funeral and I could see what's so powerful about that vision is like, now everybody knows. Like now everybody knows that Seth was going through something. right? Because if you don't tell anybody, nobody knows.

And then next thing you know, bam, you're fucking dead. And everybody's like, what the fuck happened? You know? And all they wish, at least in my personal experience, would have been for you to say, I need help. Yeah. Literally. I have, you know what's funny?

I've never been turned down a single time in my life when I've asked for help. Yeah. I've been shocked every time about how willing people are to provide it. Human beings have a lot of skills. I am not aware of anybody who has the ability to read minds. Right. Even though they will sell you that on the internet or on tarot cards. Yeah.

Or in crystal salesman or whatever the fuck it may be. Yeah. Nobody knows what's going on behind the mask. Yeah. It's hard. And it's, man, it's so hard. It's just so hard. And, yeah, I just pushed her away and pushed her away.

And when I would tell her, like, I didn't want to be with her. I mean, she literally told me, like, like, I'm not. fucking leaving. Like, fuck you. Like, you know, I would tell her that. I'd go to the gym for two hours. Like, I just told her I wanted to divorce. I'd go to the gym for two hours and then come back and have the conversation, like, which is really fucked up. And then I'd get back and we'd talk it out. And I told her a lot of times, like I have two people on my shoulders. Like, I have a shoulder. I have this person that's like when I get home, they're like, hey, man, walk in, hug your wife, tell her your lover. And then as soon as I walk in, this other guy's like,

man, fuck her, dude. And treat her like shit, you know. And so everybody probably has those to a agree. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe the volume isn't turned up equally on both. Yeah. But I think, I think most human beings are defined by their similarities, not their differences. Well, that's a good point because when you're looking for help, you feel so alone and like, nobody knows what I'm going through. And so many times when I tell my story, people are like, oh my God, that's, you know, that's exactly what I was going through. And I've had all the worst feelings in the world of whether I was killing myself. I mean, I've had dark thoughts holding my children, you know. I've had thoughts of holding my son thinking of just ending it all,

you know, with him. Are you past those thoughts? Um, yeah, I don't have them like every single day. Uh, like during that time, that really, really heavy time in the, and I was getting out of the army, I would think about him like, oh my God, it was, it was just like, I couldn't even breathe. It was crazy. Um, have you sought professional help as well? I've never been to therapy. Trum. Well, as a child, um, well, as a child, um, I rejected it a little bit. There was no like push for it. They were like, my grandparents took me to see a psychologist like once or twice.

When I reported my abuser, I should have gone through an entire crime victim services like rehab thing that they have now and they likely had been in. But it was never it was never pursued or brought upon me. And I think as a child, I wish somebody would have advocated it for me because I would have been able to unpack it, you know. and get through it. And part of it was, this is another beautiful thing that Tom Saturdays talks about is I would look at a therapist

and say, you don't know, fuck you, how are you going to tell me, right? And your child, your therapist doesn't have to go through trauma. Your therapist doesn't have to see combat. They know how your brain works. Yeah, that's what they specialize. Exactly. So.

So why don't you get talked to one? Well, now it's a time and money. It's a time and money thing. and so it's expensive and it's time. And so what I did earlier this year, so after talking to George, I went and read a few books. So there's two books by Dr. Bruce Perry. He's like, in my opinion, the best child therapist guy out there. He's just got two incredible books.

One of them's called What Happened to You and the other one is the boy who was raised as a dog. And he just talks about childhood trauma, how it affects you and all these different things, right? And those two books were 20 bucks apiece. I read $40 worth of knowledge and changed my life. Like it just, it reframed the way that I looked at myself, that I looked at trauma, how much it affected me,

and then I needed to admit that and acknowledge that. But that's what I do now. So I find myself, I think therapy would help. It's just expensive and time consuming. So I enjoy reading the books. I enjoy listening to stories. stories. When you're listening to somebody else's story specifically speak, you don't have to think

about your own shit. You can just kind of process what they're saying. And that's what I found so powerful. There are so many people, like I said, Tom Clark, Tom de Blas, actually is one of who's got a really cool story. I listen to his as well. It really helped me. When you're listening to somebody else's story, you don't have to process the logic and the emotions in your own head. You can just listen and they will likely say the words that you are missing because when you're thinking about, if I ask you like what happened to you, right? And then you say, well, how does that make you feel or how did you survive? That's why so many people can't come up with the, so part of the reason why people, in my opinion, can't come up with the answers of how they

survived is because when you ask them what happened, they're thinking about like these, these literal steps of what happened. And they, there's so much emotion with it. They can't, they can't figure out like how did I actually survive that or what did help me or how do I phrase this? And so when you listen to for me, when I listen to somebody else's story, I'm like, damn, like that's exactly how I felt. That's exactly what I was doing or that's what I am doing. So yeah, you know, I don't, I don't knock therapy. Yeah. Although there are a lot of bad therapists out there and all that shit. But you can apply that to any profession. And again, it's as long as you find the tool that works for you? Yeah. Who's to say, what is right or what is wrong? Yeah. Dude, I mean,

that story is tough to listen to, obviously. What do you hope to achieve with your public speaking in the book? So, you know, the obvious would be like a path to hope and healing and overcoming adversity for people. And hopefully my story starts that chain that somebody else's story started for me to help, you know, get people out there and understanding it's okay to, you know, go through all this. And, you know, part of my story is the fact that I've accomplished quite a bit of my life despite only being 30. You know, I served in the military for nine years, run a bunch of ultra-marathons, ran a hundred-mile race in June, which, I don't know, just to say you've ran 100 miles, I think it's cool.

but when people are like, they hear your story. And there's a reason why I ran 100 miles. You know, it's not like to run from my demons or whatever the fuck. It's to show people like, dude, you can go and do incredible. You can do whatever the fuck you want to do. Like, the shit doesn't define you. Well, not only that, but most people can do whatever they want to in life if they can get past the obstacles that they put in front of themselves.

Yeah. Everybody wants to say, oh, I can't do this because this person did that. Dude, figure out a way around it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if I'm being totally honest, and I say this based off my experience as being a buds instructor and watch people watching them for a year and a half surrender their dreams. Yeah. It's so people want to say, well, this person made me quit or that made me quit. And it's no, you made the choice to quit because you told yourself you couldn't do anymore. And the reality is that all happened between your ears. I can't make you quit. As an instructor, I will do my best to provide the environment where you make that decision. But I can't do it for you.

Yeah. And that sucks. It does. Because that means you don't get to outsource the agency over what happens to you in life. Right. Yeah. I mean, you control what you can control. Correct.

And the only thing you control is what you do, what your own actions, your own thoughts. Like even what you survived, right, which is horrendous and I think would break the vast majority of people, you're not responsible for what. happened to you. Right. But you are responsible for what you do with it. Yeah. You know, so, so part of what I want to do with my story, and you see this a lot with the victim and the survivor world is you sit across from a victim or survivor of some sort of trauma or abuse, like I talked about earlier with the cancel culture. When people come to me and they want help, I'm like, do you want help or do you want to like say you want help? And I'm not trying to be,

I'm not, look, man, like this is on you. Well, it's two very different things. Right. I mean, it's fashionable to say, I want help or to message somebody or to say, how do I, you know, how do I get better in life? It's like, okay, I can give you the answers, which there's really just one, which is just take action and start doing things. But you have to be able to apply it, man.

Like, there's a lot of things you can do. There's a lot of methods of healing. But you've got to, you have got to be with. willing to do it. And with so many victims and survivors, people tiptoe around them because of that term, of that survivor, that victim, I'm a victim of this. So I actually changed my book, the subtitle was initially surviving a childhood and I actually changed it to overcoming because of that because I was like, and that was actually. I think that's a good call. I think it was actually opposed by the editor initially because she's like, well, Survivor is a more fitting term. And I'm like,

I'm trying to break the mold. I understand if I call myself a survivor. I have a survivor story. Like, dude, my story, as much as it is about childhood trauma and all that bullshit, it's about being a fucking warrior, man. Like, that's the reason why I went and ran the ultramarathons with like no fucking training. That's the reason why I fucking do Jiu-Jitsu.

It's the reason why I crushed it at work and it was the fucking number one guy in the country at this company. You know, there's a reason why I've done, there's a reason why I wrote a book. There's a reason why I do what I do, tell my story the way that I tell it. It's because I'm a fucking warrior, dude. I'm not, I don't ever want to be looked at like I survived because I'm... Well, you did. Survival is the baseline foundation.

Sure. What do you do with it after that? Because, I mean, you have to survive to literally, by definition, survive. But then are you defined by what happened to you or what are you willing to do with that? Yeah. You know, I don't walk around telling people that, you know, whatever. Like, it's not my identity, you know, it's not my identity. My childhood is not my identity.

Unfortunately, with the nature of my story, and maybe it's the way I tell it, it does come off as very much a survivor story, which is good and bad. It is a survivor story. It is. I just, I want. Again, you had to survive it to be able to get to the point to write the book about it. Yeah. Work your way towards overcoming it. I think.

Survival is the foundation. I think the attitude of just overcoming adversity and overcoming just shit is what I want people to get out of it. I want people to understand that like it don't matter what you go through, man, people are doing more with less, you know, and, you know, whether it was in your childhood or your adulthood, you are going to face some level of adversity or trauma at some point. And it's up to you how you get through it and if you're going to get through it, you know, but there's a, there's a decision point and then there's a process that you have to follow. There's no ozimpic to like trauma. You're not just going to pop a fucking needle on your arm and you're going to feel better.

well, depending on the needle. Short term better versus longer better. Yeah, so, you know, that's what I want people to get is like you don't have to wear this label. I'll leave you, I guess, with like, there's a, I wrote a short poem inspired by one of my friends. Because when I was in the military, I often looked at seals and especially in the 82nd, looking at the Rangers and Green Berets. And I would always be like, man, I wonder if they'd be able to make it through like my childhood. And then, and firstly, I would look at like, I wonder how bad Buds is compared to like 16 years of hell, you know. It is a walk in the park.

Potentially. And... Buds is not that hard. Okay. So I say this, so I wrote this like short story and it's called no bell to ring. And it, what it is is, it's a testament to like childhood. trauma and the effects of it and how fucking hard it is because there's no bell. There's no cadre with a warm truck and a place where I can just step off and quit.

Don't forget the hot chocolate. Yeah, exactly. I was just about to get to that actually. There's nothing like that. There's no environment where I can just step off and quit, you know, ring the fucking bell. In addition to that, there's no, if I survive my childhood, there's no accolade. I don't get, I don't get to wear this Trident. I don't get to wear a green beret.

I'm not a Marine Raider or whatever the hell. In fact, oftentimes the accolades are addict, alcoholic, abusive, homeless. These accolades are these negative connotations with life. Furthermore, the one title or two titles that you might get are survivor and victim. And I want people to get away from that, man. I want people to break out of that because you have so many people that have, like, anniversaries. And it's like, this is my seventh,

seventh year of trauma, my traumatic event. And I call that a merry-go-round. Yeah. You got to get off the merry-go-round. Well, there's an addiction because it feeds because of the cancel culture. Like I kind of said it multiple times, right?

That person gets on the stage and says, me too, you know, it's, dude, if I was 500 pounds, if I was sitting in front of me right now when I was 500 pounds and I was a fat, fucking miserable piece of shit, my story wouldn't be inspiring. It's heartbreaking, but it's not inspiring. And I don't want to be a heartbreaking story. I want people to like, when I get done

fucking talking to somebody, I want them to realize like, all right, I got this shit. Like, fuck this, man. If this fucking guy can get through it and talk about it the way that he does and, and own it and say, you know what, I'm tired of the bullshit. I'm tired of my fucked up life. I'm tired of being who the fuck I am. I'm going to choose to wake up one day and be like, you know what, fuck this. I'm happy. I don't give a fuck. I'm happy. There's bigger problems in the world. I'm fucking good. I'm going to go do hard shit.

There's a quote and breathe, Hicks and Gracie's book. And it's, I fucking love it, man. And Jiu-Jitsu, sometimes it's not about winning. Sometimes it's like slight adjustments when you're getting choked. Just to breathe, just to survive just a little bit longer. And that's all you got to do sometimes, man. It's not about winning everything. Sometimes you just got to just make minor adjustments in life to keep fucking breathing.

And if you can do that, If you can outlast the opponent or life or the will of the forces that be, you know, you can get, you can get through the shit, you know. Have you ever considered jiu-jitsu is not about winning at all? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's just about getting better. Yeah, and staying on top.

If you're a wrestler, it's probably better to be a power top than a power bottom. Where can people find your book and where can people find you? Yeah, so the book is on Amazon, Strength Beyond the Shadows. It's on Amazon. It's on my website, too, Sethgale.com. My last name is G-E-H-L-E. Yeah, man. Do you do all the socials?

Yeah, I'm on all the socials. Seth Gale. Just your name, okay. Yeah, whatever. I mean, if you can't find me, it's 2025 now. Seth Gail, you should be able to find me. You should. I mean, if you need to go to the Amazon link, which is probably going to take you to the book page,

which will probably have links to the social stuff. Yeah. Not that I need to hopefully walk that out for people, but if you're struggling. you probably wouldn't be, but yeah. What do you want to leave people with? Man, just thank you. Thanks for listening. Yeah, man, thank you.

If you want to sign copy of the book, I do those as well. My email address, you can hit me up on the socials and just ask, and I'll provide that. I'll sign and ship them. Yeah, but, you know, I got nothing, man. I'm just so, I'm thankful to be, I'm lucky. I say lucky. I think it's the intersection between hard work and opportunity.

Agreed. That's actually my definition as well. Yeah. I think I've worked my fucking ass off to be in the place that I'm at. And when the opportunity has presented itself, I was in the right place to capture the moment, you know, and get shit done. And, you know, you're a loser every day, basically, until you win, you know.

So get out there. and fucking do the thing that you want to do in life. We're on this fucking floating rock. And we're going to die soon. Why soon? Like the defined soon. Well, in the grand scheme. He's sooner than you probably, but.

Yeah. In the grand scheme of things, you know, like we're only here for a limited amount of time, man. Like, go and do your fucking thing, man. Might as well make the most out of it. Yeah, make the most out of it. And, you know, the only regrets you're going to have is not, I don't, I mean, people fuck up all the time. And the regrets you're going to have the most is like I wish I would have done something or wish I would have started something.

I wish I, you know, so get out there, go do the fucking thing, start jihitsu, run an ultramarathon. Don't do that. Those things suck. I was going to say the jihits part's awesome. The ultramarathon, I mean, if you hate yourself, go ahead. Yeah. And that's what I did. I hated myself for 100 fucking miles.

But no, man, I appreciate you guys having me on and listen. If anybody's got anything, reach out, hit me up. Try to respond to everybody. Cool. So thank you. Thank you for being well. to tell your story. It's not an easy one. So hopefully it gets easier with time and repetition. Yeah. Oh, shit. Let me tell you this. Okay. You just interviewed a mandatory fun guy.

Yes. Austin von Lechtman. Yeah, man. And you said something on there that I really liked. And it was, you talked about, you know, all your buddies who come into the military with like a C bag full of shit, right? I didn't realize it. Yeah. Because we didn't talk about it. Yeah. And, And so I has long, I think it has something to do with the decision a lot of people make on the tail end. They didn't deal with it before. Right. They are layering more on top of it. And everybody has a breaking point.

Yeah. Everybody has a breaking point. Yeah, man. And I'll tell you, you know, when I was in the military, I was so scared. I don't know if it's changed, but I was so fucking scared to say something because I processed and not processed, like literally, but I, helped and expedited and pushed for the chapter of several guys because they had mental health crisis and issues. And I feel fucking horrible about it today because I was attacking guys that were suicidal. And I was going through the same fucking shit. And so for anybody who's in the

military listening, like the broken toy just needs new batteries. Like we're punishing. I don't know if it's still happening because I'm not in anymore, but I know that when I was in, we're like throwing these toys away and these guys are like kicked out of the military when they need fucking help. And they join the military likely because maybe they needed some fucking help and structure. And so for those that are serving or helping in that capacity in any way, I would highly consider, you know, trying to get your guys to get some help, you know. There is a time and a place, you know, get all. the X and then do your processing, right?

But man, there just needs to be a, there's a big problem with it, obviously. It starts with those in leadership positions, being willing to get help themselves and then taking the next step. And that is being able to talk about the impact that it had for them. Sure. Yeah. That's how you change the culture. But it'll take time. Yeah.

I'm not in touch with anymore. The SEAL community was drastically changing their approach to mental health as I was getting out and we're well over a decade at this point. I'm going to assume and hope that it continued in that direction. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to thank you. I think the way you guys talked about that for the brief moment that you guys did. I think it was very powerful and impactful. And so I just wanted to thank you for saying all that.

For sure. Cool, man. Appreciate it. Thank you.