Julian Dorey Podcast - #253 - "The Reaper" - Deadliest Sniper on Hunting Al-Zarqawi w/ CIA & Longest Kill | Nick Irving

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Nicholas Irving 'The Reaper' is an American author and former soldier. He was a special operations sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion for the U.S. Army. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS BOOK 1: https://www.amazon.com/Reaper-Autobiography-Deadliest-Special-Snipers/dp/1250080606 BOOK 2: https://shorturl.at/jypu0 IG: https://www.instagram.com/officialreaper33/ X: https://x.com/irving_nicholas LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Nick Irving Background, Born in Germany & Military Parents, Shooting Guns & Hunting 07:58 - What’s it Like Killing Someone, Failing Navy SEAL Eye Exam, Too Dumb to Quit Mentality 19:17 - Nick Growing Up with Drug Dealers/Prisoners/Dead People, Hardest Part of Ranger School 25:37 - Ranger School Going from 98 lbs to 155 lbs, Meeting His Wife 34:25 - 1st Deployment in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Bizarre Culture/People, First K1ll in Iraq Story 46:51 - Nick’s Relationship w/ Father, Special Forces Working w/ Each Other (CIA, Navy SEALS, etc.) 53:13 - Nick Young Teen, Propaganda Machine of US News & Conspiracy Theories 01:04:12 - Post September 11th & Warzone Impact, Tikrit -> Mosul -> Baghdad Tours 01:16:35 - Becoming a Sniper, Intense Sniper Training 01:23:11 - 1000 Yard Shot, Physics of Bullets & Factors to Consider, Longest Sniper Shot (Canadian) 01:33:23 - Sniper Routine Before Taking Shot, Most Boring Job in Military, Meditative States Before Shooting 01:41:39 - Feeling of Taking the Shot, All Sniper Suffer From This, Nick’s Gun 01:51:54 - Why Nick was Obsessive w/ Painting Gun, Mark Cunningham (Military Comrade) 02:00:03 - Nick’s Challenge of Deploying & Being Married, Afraid of Death, Nick’s Mushroom Trip CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 253 - Nick Irving Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Like when you would actually go to take the shot, so your fingers on the trigger and you'd pull the release, was there... Right before I pull the trigger, I'm looking exactly where I want to shoot, what I want to hit. I might close my eyes for a second and open it just to see if my sights are still on target. That's determining your natural point of aim, and if not, that means something's off with your body position. I'm still breathing at that point. My eyes are still locked onto the target. I'm not going to be surprised and, oh, blink or nothing like that. Eye stays glued onto the like button on the video. And if you don't have time to watch this episode right now, I'd really appreciate it if you saved it to your watch later playlist on YouTube. Finally, if you'd like to follow me on Instagram or X, those links are in my description below. We got Nick the Reaper Irving finally in here. It is great to see you, sir. Thank you for being here all the way from Texas.

All good, man. Thank you for having me. Well, it's our pleasure for sure. I know Alessi and I were both really excited about this. You have been doing, I think I first saw you with like the business insider thing. Does that sound right? Where you were like, what a real sniper says about movies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that.

That's where I pretty much got started. Yeah. That was what? Like two, three, four years ago, something like that? Yeah. Yeah. So I had seen that. And then you were going on Vlad, obviously doing some content there in the last couple

of years. I'm like, I can't figure out why Sean Ryan hasn't had this guy in. And then Sean Ryan had you in right away. Oh, yeah. We have been playing that for a few months, a couple of months. Yeah. Yeah. That was, Alessi said that was incredible. I't listened yet i'm gonna listen tomorrow after we're done

this one go for it didn't want to didn't want to be biased by it but i was excited that you wanted to come in because you know your your book was a new york times bestseller and and you're like a like one of the modern day sniper legends of the military and obviously great at telling a story. So we'll get into all of it today. I appreciate it, man. So what you grew up in a military family, right? Oh, yeah. Mom and dad were both in the army. Born overseas in a place called Augsburg, Germany. Stayed there until 1980. I want to say 1989. When I moved, went to Florida, from Florida to Maryland, and eventually settled down in Texas with the wife, where she's from. But you grew up, you were in Maryland all throughout growing up until going into the Army. Oh, yeah.

Up until 2004. Yeah. And did your parents, like, because they were both in the military, were they both at a young age, like, trying to instill the military thing in you? Like, oh, that might be the path you go? I think that was, like, the only path that they knew I was going to take. I wasn't the brightest kid, man. But it was, like, for them, I saw some stuff, like, their uniforms that they would wear. And I thought that was neat. My dad introduced me to movies with Charlie Sheen and Chuck Norris, Delta Force, and Charlie Sheen's Navy SEALs. But it wasn't like a thing that – and they were both intel, so it was not an infantry background.

None of them went to combat or anything like that they fought the cold war uh copying morse code and deciphering morse code and intercepting like uh signals and decrypting radio stuff i don't know it was that's what they did that's pretty cool that's different than what you did but that's that's some cool shit yeah war yeah yeah my dad has like some um pretty cool award that was uh given to him by the president at the time um he intercepted some russian code and uh it was like a game changer for something he never talked about it but he has a pretty cool story behind it i guess he never talked about it with you no they don't they're very secretive people like my mom and dad are my my entire childhood was just shrouded in like secrecy i know he got out and he worked for the nsa for

you know the most of his uh up until he retired he worked for the nsa um his whole life has just been secretive i don't know much about what they did in it you gotta get your dad i know right good lock the doors let's find out yeah man so but they're so they're on an entirely different side but you as a kid were really into the action it seems like and you started you started shooting when you were young whatever you could get your hands on right yeah i was um dude i want to say i was uh i wasn't even a teenager yet when I first shot my first shotgun, um, 20 gauge shotgun. And I was like hooked after that. But I was gifted a shotgun by my dad.

Uh, this is back when you could do it. Um, gifted a six. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've

been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. From commutes that become learning sessions to dishwashing filled with laughs, podcasts can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. The PC Insider's World's Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. 16-year-old kid a gun. Today he'd be in prison. So now it was like that back then. And I had the shotgun in my room, kept my shotgun. And you know, it was just, I've always wanted, you know, like being around weapons and shooting them. I couldn't shoot them in Maryland, but I had a BB gun that I would shoot, like, indoors in my house.

Oh, indoors. That's nice. You know, putting holes in the walls and patching them up with my sister's Play-Doh and, you know, shooting out streetlights, what all kids do. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. No broken windows. Did you go hunting at all?

I did growing up. I often on, we hunted squirrels and rabbits with my granddad, but it wasn't like, I guess what you would say, hunting like deer hunting or anything like that. I would shoot birds out my window um and like in my backyard and stuff but i never i was never like into hunting i like fishing more than i do hunting i grew up fishing way more than i did hunting what'd you like fishing more i think it's more relaxing man it's a little bit more relaxing like hunting it's

i don't know i think just fishing is way more relaxing and the uh return is almost immediate um as far as like what you can eat you know i i don't know how to skin a deer i'm pretty sure i know how to skin a deer i've seen it done but uh a fish it's it can be from you know from seed to plate in in no time i'm not sure if it's like that for hunting deer i've never hunted a four-legged animal ever never no even today never never i don't think i want to why dude to be honest it's like um like i this is gonna sound really like i don't know uh hippie-ish i guess i don't know i'm just not into killing anymore yeah you know i just don't really care for killing anymore i got will if i have to like if the family but

i'm a vegetarian so i don't i know we all have to say it but this is a safe space no we're good it's uh i haven't eaten meat since uh my son was born in 2016 was there a conscious decision like like a reason for that yeah yeah yeah just became a rastafari and started uh following along those paths no kidding yeah wow yeah we'll get there oh good that's that's a while down the line yeah yeah but no it's it's it's interesting because there was you had a line in your book that really stuck out with me which i'll fuck up when i try to paraphrase this right but it was something like once you've killed a man nothing else can really replace that feeling yeah yeah you're good yeah yeah. I agree with that to this day. It's like I remember what it was like to kill people, but like what I think a lot of people don't know or I talk about a lot is the after effects of it, of that roller coaster of a wave you would ride or I would ride after a while engaging someone. It's like being on,

being on like a, a roller coaster or something like that. You go from this are probably what it's like shooting a deer. Um, you get this huge rush, just a dump of adrenaline and pull the trigger. Body drops like a few seconds after that. It's like,

uh, wow, I just killed someone it's a you go down the roller coaster at that point then you hit this weird space for me it was I just hit like a weird space trying to comprehend and it was you know was I was young too it was 18 when I first killed someone and then stopped killing people when I was 25 so it I was a pretty good person. Your first kill was at 18. Yeah, yeah. I was the youngest guy in my class in basic

and the youngest guy in my class for ranger selection. So I was 18 years old when I was in Iraq, to crit Iraq. So you came right out of high school. I guess you were young by just doing math here. You were young for your grade, too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Was it high school. I guess you were young by just doing math here. You were young for your grade too. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Did you, did, was it the kind of thing where you're, you were still 17 and your parents had to sign you in? I was 16 when they originally, like they said, no, I was 17. I was 16. I went through this baby seal. I was in the Navy Sea Cadet Corps in Annapolis. And I went through this Navy. I was going to take like a Navy seal

pipeline. So you take a Navy seal physical fitness test. You do the 500 yard Navy. I was going to take like a Navy SEAL pipeline. So you take a Navy SEAL physical fitness test. You do the 500-yard swim. I was SCUBA qualified. And, dude, it was like on that path. But 16 is where I was dead set. 17, my parents had to sign the parental consent form. The recruiter came to the house set across the table my mom's crying my dad's like he's gonna do it anyways you know once he turns 18 he's gonna do it so

she signed off on it and and their military parents and their your mom but they knew what i were yeah they knew i was going to ranger though and it was like like i'm guaranteed to go to war if i make it you know but i think that i don't think that they thought that I was going to actually make it, though. Why? Dude, I was just a wild, not a wild kid. I got in trouble a lot, and I wasn't focused, I guess. So they thought something. I don't know.

I don't think that they thought that I was actually going to make it to become a ranger. After my dreams of being a SEAL were crushed from being colorblind. Yeah, what happened there? You didn't know you were colorblind your whole life? No. And how old were you when, and maybe you can actually explain what this test was and where you were, but how old were you when you went to go take the Navy navy seal like basic physical i was 16 at that point 16 but there was no color vision test it was just a navy seal pipeline in the sea cadet corps right so i'm talking about when you took the color vision oh 17 17 going you were full blown i'm gonna be a navy seal yep all ready to roll and then they're like oh you can't see green yeah or red yeah when they're side by side yeah red green colorblind

and i took the test twice the first time i failed it i came home and i studied uh i went on old dial-up the old dial-up aol.com or whatever uh internet and looked up easy horror test and i tried to study like every pattern there was for um this color vision book that i failed and click on hey what's the answer to this one it would say 24 you're looking for numbers in this big bundle of of blots of colors and tried to remember all those patterns to the best of my ability, which I was pretty good at it. Spent a few weeks studying that and I went back to take the test and it was a light test. So it's like a row of lights and they flash. I'm not too sure how it works, but I failed it. I couldn't see certain lights and colors of lights. So

Failed that one cried and this army nurse. She came into heard me crying she came into the little room I was in and Took me over to her room Whipped out an easy horror book color vision test book and started tracing her finger along the the patterns I'm like, okay, this is easy got 14 out of 14 But the only stipulation was like you have to join the army now And I was like just give me the closest thing you have to being a seal and he said Well, we have Rangers originally. It was a Green Beret. But I had it was weird as a kid. I had this book

of all the US SpecialS. Special Forces, Special Operations guys, and I would always skip over the Green Beret portion. I just didn't think what they did was cool And I'm like, I don't want to be a teacher. I want to go and, you know, do stuff. So I said, I'll take the, I'll take the ranger out, took the ranger out. And knowing what I know now, like Green Berets, it would have been, I think, I'm not going to say better for me. It was, it's, it's intriguing what they do. And I'm friends with a lot of Green Berets, but I like being a Ranger too. It was a lot of good opportunities during the time I was in.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all the special forces, they all have their different specialties, if you will, but it's all badass shit. Yeah. Yeah. I get these guys in here. I'm like, damn, y'all were living a different life.

It is a different life, man. It is. It's like coming back to the civilian world and comparing it, you realize like, wow, I do some pretty neat stuff, man. It's wild, though, and you're far from the first guy that either came right out of high school or like as a college kid right into Special Forces. special forces but it's just wild to me that like especially being 18 years old you don't start off like all right let me start in the army or start as like a marine which is also you know a difficult job but like you're going right into the yo let's go into hell's kitchen yeah yeah yeah it's a i don't know man it takes a different breed and at that time like i was influenced by movies a lot you know from rambo to delta force i was inspired by all that uh saving private ryan i grew up with that you know era i'm

not even sure if they still make war movies like that anymore but uh that was like they do no you'll yeah you'll never find they need to make uh i don't know i think the war in afghanistan will be a pretty neat one to see you know especially up leading like to the 2008 9 era 2010 up until like the withdrawal i think would be pretty neat to document but just a different breed man um like out of everybody who signed up or went to that class, I was the only one out of that class to graduate. And the class before me, like we had a basic training platoon designated for these guys are all going to go Green Berets and these guys want to go Rangers. None of the guys, well, one guy did make it to Green Beret and no one made it to Rangers during that time. And I was like, I don't even know if I'm going to be able to make this, man.

But luckily, I did. I did. I was just too stupid to quit, man. It takes a smart, dumb person to be in Special Ops, Special Forces. You got to be smart and dumb at the same time. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I always ask the Navy SEALs or or the special ops guys that I have in here like what the – if they could point to a character trait that gets – that is the dude that gets through because they always talk about it.

You hear all the stories across all the different special forces of like the guy who shows up who's like the triathlete, 2% body fat, and they're like, oh, he's going to win and then he's like the first one out. Yeah, yeah, he's going to win. And then he's like the first one out, you know? And what's crazy is every person I've had in here has given a different answer and you just gave a new one again. Like you gotta be smart, dumb at the same time. Exactly, man. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Too dumb to quit. Smart enough to keep going. Smart enough to even want to pursue that job. But you're, I mean, you're a a kid i know i know dude when i look at pictures like you you bring it up and like the age i look at pictures i'm like man i was a baby face kid man it's where i see 18 year old kids now i'm like man i wasn't built like that they don't they really stop making them how they used to but it's different man it's different but that's

you know to it i always say this i would have no concept of that because I was a fucking idiot when I was 24. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was 18, but you're like, I'm going to go into the military. Nope, I'm going to go into the special forces. I'm going to go through six months of this shit up in the hills where they're yelling at me, and I'm going to make my bed perfectly every day. Yeah. I'm just like, man, I was like ripping like ripping what was that calico jack and fucking

smoking weed at that oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah i don't say i was too but that was pretty close maybe i was but you cleaned it up like you you talk about like maybe being immature in certain ways in high school but obviously like overnight you have to oh you have not anymore yeah you sign the contract we were just talking about it earlier it's like you sign your life away for a little a portion of your life four years there's no getting out of it you know unless something i don't know medically came medical condition you had come up or you died or got blown up that's like the only way you're getting out of a contract so you're stuck there you know i think i i don't know i think i wanted the the challenge of doing something like that it was more

so of uh wanting to prove my family that i could do it prove my dad prove to my dad my mom that you know i might have failed in school but i'm you know i'm gonna make it through this thing you know so it was a lot to do with that. Just being told or having the I might have been telling myself that, that, you know. They whether they wanted or whether they believed in me or not, maybe I made that up. So I did have something to, me going, but I also didn't want to come back home to all the guys and the kids that I grew up with saying, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. And they're like, what are you doing back here? I turned out to be a cook or something like that.

Nothing wrong with being a cook, but it just wasn't what I talked about for all those years. Yeah, you wanted to be a man of your word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cooks are cool, though. Did you have friends who wanted to join the military as your word yeah yeah yeah cooks are cool though but did you have friends who wanted to join the military as well or who did no they all wanted to be drug dealers and drug dealers man and all my friends the guys that i grew up with have all been to prison still in prison are dead oh wow yeah most of the crew that i was hanging around with at that time yeah and you made it out

yeah so you never it seems like that was never a thought though like you're gonna go down that road yeah like it was intriguing for a little bit uh that's all i had was the army if i'd i told my wife about this and like if i didn't join the army have the military like i would have been in prison yeah for doing stupid stuff yeah probably would have killed somebody more than likely where i grew up why do you say that you would have killed somebody i was a hothead man like it was uh i was i was a i was a hothead yeah and just the guys that i hung around um they've killed people so it was just a probably a matter of time before i was going to get the same opportunity if you want to call it that but my sister's friends same situation like

when i was when i just left the arm or to go to the army, we had this park behind my neighborhood and it was this guy I used to hang out with, went to school with, and he was friends with my sister. But one day he just decided to, he said, Hey, I want to catch a body. It was like a thing back then. So he went to the park, waited out in the park, and just waited for the next jogger to come by and shot him up. So it was like that. Yeah. And that's someone you grow up with, you think you know, and then.

Oh, I always knew he was like that. Everybody was like that back then. We're not scared to do stuff like that, you know just to uh build up street cred yeah but i'm like that's not even that's not like oh you know i killed like a rival dealer or something that's yeah this is just somebody blowing someone away yeah man yeah it's weird happened a few times in that little park so that was that was my option stay there get in trouble or join the military and see what happens so you go hard the other way you join the military you go into training and like we said i think it was like six months the initial yeah training so you're still 18 you make it through wasn't it like something like 12 guys made it or something like that out of 80 did i

make that up no yeah almost close uh six right from the original class uh we had seven total make it out of like 85 guys and the ranger selection so it's like a 14 week basic training boot camp in in georgia then you do a three week, airborne school. I think it's three weeks. You hated that shit. Oh, yeah. Scared of heights, man. Like my dad was taking me up on ladders before it was time to join the Army, like 10-foot ladders just to try to get over this fear of heights thing.

So you wanted to be a sniper. Yeah. That shoots from heights sometimes. Yeah. A sniper that's scared of bugs too. I don't like bugs. I don't fuck with bugs either. Yeah. But I'm not a sniper that's all you're scared of bugs too i don't i don't like bugs i don't fuck with bugs either yeah so i'm not a sniper yeah different different you got to be smart and dumb man the same time uh three weeks of airborne then it was um basic airborne then i went to the selection and at that time was about a month

a little over a month what was the hardest part of that all of it man all of it was monday through monday every day was the same just a beat down of how much can your body take um it was just yeah one big one big beat down every day was a like we would lose so many like a few guys every day a few guys the most i've ever seen drop out was like 20 30 guys at one time and that was just we were cold it was outside we hadn't slept in like three days so it was a a big demoralizer but i would feed off of guys that were quitting because it's like dude i'm still here right you got to feed off of it. So I would always look for the next person to quit. And yeah, because I was always on the verge of quitting.

Every day, man. Waking up, you're back. I was feeling like I was 80 years old, you know, going through it. And I'm like, I don't know how guys continue to do this, man. And you run a lot. Six, eight, 12 miles a day. You're doing, you know, push-ups to your arms fall off it's just a big smoke fest man big smoke fest for like a month did you still come in there like you know

when you're 18 you're not filled out yet so are are you coming in there like pretty lanky and then suddenly like dude i was 98 pounds bro when i graduated high school yeah dude 98 and uh after basic it was the first time i ever had three meals in a day so basic training i bumped up to 135 then uh you weren't working with much no no easy to get up there two glasses of water man i'm i can't believe it i bet the army like you walk through the door after they recruited you they're like i can't we gotta see this shit yeah yeah yeah bro 135 and basic after i graduated went to uh ranger selection after i no i went to Ranger Selection. After I – no, I went to – after Ranger Selection or after Airborne and then Ranger Selection, I bumped up to 155.

And I stayed and I still hover around like 155 to 170 depending. What are you, like 510? I wish. I wish, bro. I used to be before I had a bad accident, jumping out of a plane, collapsed. No, bro. You should have gone with the house buying it. No, man.

5'7", bro. 5'7". All right. So 5'7", 155, though. It's pushing some weight. Yeah, you're a unit. It's up there a little bit. I've seen some bouncers at that size.

You don't want to fuck with those guys. Feisty. Yeah. 98 pounds graduating. The lowest I've ever been in the Army was after ranger school. And I think you may be thinking about ranger school. That is a 62-day long course. But I spent 80-plus days in there because I failed the first portion portion of it i had to recycle it i'll recycle

it uh i failed it's called darby phase so it's um like the very first phase in ranger school you have darby phase then you have a mountain phase and you have a florida swamp phase and i failed the first portion and then had to do it again and went all the way through after that but i lost almost 40 pounds 35 40 pounds and in that yeah wow yeah came back and put it back on before that deployment in like a month yeah but we were also during that time um yeah we were we were on some stuff too to help help out with that you were on some stuff, too, to help out with that. You were on some stuff. Everybody was. Like Toradol? Like you name it.

Yeah. Testosterone. The good shit. Yeah, the good stuff. Yeah. The stuff that they don't let the baseball players use. Yeah. But it'd be very interesting if we did let them use it.

Yeah, yeah. Before, you know, D-ball and all that stuff was banned or considered anabolic steroids. Yeah. Right. Tests are on the military. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't safe for, you know, 21-year-old kids to be, you know, boosting up their testosterone to like a million percent. You're talking about like at 17 wondering if you're going to be a guy blowing people's heads off and now you're just bruising your desk.

Like, yeah, we need our killers here in the Army. Yeah. Literally, man. Oh, yeah. On some stuff. And like we lifted a lot. We had our own personal gym in Ranger Battalion. We had our own chefs.

We had our own chow hall places to eat. That's good. And we ate really good. Really good. I forgot about really good, really good. I forgot about this, though. I just had Rocco Vargas in here. I forget this with Rangers. You guys, you go through, like, the initial training school to become a Ranger, and then you do, like, a deployment, and then you do Ranger school.

Yeah. And that's what you're talking about now. So it was after your first deployment, you're doing the – This was after my second deployment. Oh, so you went on two. Yeah. I was trying to hold off as long as I possibly could to not go to ranger school. But the thing is, if you don't go within like two years, then yeah, kick you out, man.

And I was about to get married at that time. I just found, rekindled this relationship I had with the elementary school girlfriend. Yeah. How did this, you were telling me before she was, she lived out of town at this point too. Like how did you reconnect with someone that was my friend when you were like six? MySpace. Oh my God. Yeah. She hit me up on MySpace. There's a throwback. Yeah. Throwback, man. She got in contact with me on MySpace, and the internet sucked that day when I checked my messages. And there's this girl named Jessica on there, but her profile picture or her picture did not load up. It was just a generic little female silhouette.

And I thought it was a different Jessica that I didn't like. I was like, I don't want to talk to this girl. So I kanked it and went back to my room. Then something told me, it was like, dude, go back and check on it. So the next day or a few days after that, I went back and loaded up the message, and a picture popped up. And I just saw this Mexican hot-ass girl, and I was like, oh, she changed up. You know?

She didn't look like that back oh did she did she put you in in the top eight at least? Like, was that a thing? Dude, that became a thing after we started to date. And so, you know, like the MySpace thing, the top eight. I remember this. I was like 11. Really? Oh, man, I'm old.

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Sorry. I'm crying now. But I didn't make it to the top eight yet. She was still dating a guy, or about to end the relationship with this guy. And after I saw her, I hit her back up. And I'm like, hey, I remember you and whatever. I looked at the guy next to me.

I'm like, dude, I'm going to marry this girl. He didn't believe me. And I just believed myself. So that's all that counted. I went back to the compound we stayed at got a satellite phone called her up uh from this weird 0001 number or whatever um talked for like half an hour she's like where are you at i tell her i can't tell you but i'm in the army um i'll be back whenever when i do come back i would like to come see you

and that's pretty much what happened and the first week after that deployment i found a ticket to san antonio and flew out to see her and that was all she wrote man well not not really because it went on yeah for like we dated for like nine months on and off she did not i don't know i don't know what it was but a lot of her parents had something to do with it they were not into the whole like inter interracial you know relationship thing they didn't believe in that but i was like i'm not a bad guy. Some tough Mexicans. Yeah. Yeah, it was bad, bro.

You're Cuban. I don't want to hear it. It was bad. But luckily she came through. And after I proposed to her before I left, where was I going? Dude, I was going to, I was going i was on yeah going to uh believe it was mosul iraq i proposed to her um before that deployment and she said yes then she said no saw him overseas on that deployment like you know thinking about that not the job and made me more angry she said yes but then she said no yeah she said yes after the women

thing it is bro it is right after like that next day as i'm getting on the plane she's like i changed my mind i'm like are you kidding me are you kidding me so yeah it worked out it worked out good though i i kept trying i kept trying i knew going to happen. I knew it was going to happen. She was just scared, I guess, and had a lot of influence. But then she found out who I was, and she was like, oh, he's a badass. And hell, yeah, I like that. So before she had no idea. That's impressive.

It's impressive you could compartmentalize something that serious, though. And I'm impressed with this with a lot of military guys for different reasons like balancing relationships being overseas and on and off in such a different world but like to be getting on the plane and like you just proposed yesterday you're in ecstasy now she's like no fuck that yeah or however you say that in spanish and then you know you got to get on a plane and be all business. You get drunk before you go. Yeah. That's what I did at least. That's what I did. And then by the time you're overseas, like, you only have so much time to think about it.

And it's more so in your downtime. Like on the mission, I didn't think about home at all. I didn't think about mom, dad, her, no one. It was just a mission. It was just when you got back and things settled down and, you know, you start trying to, you know, you get back up on my space and you see all the fun that everyone's doing. That sucks. Yeah. Yeah.

The word, I think right before we were getting on camera, we were touching on like some of your sensory understanding. But the word that really came to mind when I was reading your Battlefield stories, which were amazingly written, by the way. Thank you. Was like presence. You had massive, massive presence in the moment. Yeah. Like, you know, we'll get into your approach with shooting later, I'm sure. But like.

I wish I could do that more so now, man. Yeah. You can't re-simulate something like that. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, can you be like that at Walmart versus like in the middle of know a field where like 40 guys are like depending on you to still live yeah yeah yeah yeah living in the present time is the hardest thing to do i think for anybody until you go to

war then it's like you have no other choice than to right but to live in the present otherwise you die well that that first time before you go to ranger school, you said you had two deployments and they were both to Iraq. Yeah. So the first one is what, like 04? 05. 05? 05 was going into 06, yeah. Okay, so the insurgency has popped off.

Yeah, yeah. It's a mess. Yeah. But you thought you were going to be going down into Vietnam. Oh, yeah. You landed calmly. All the books that I read growing up um which weren't many but the ones that i did read were all like vietnam based the um the marsak guys are not the marsak it's the uh

sog the sog the saw guys in vietnam they were uh like my inspiration they're the only guys who like had books about you know vietnam then i read I read Carlos stuff about Carlos Hathcock and the Marine Sniper and a few other books about Vietnam. So my, you know, my perceptive or my percept, my perspective of what war was, was just, you know vietnam you know i was of course training with guys and in ranger battalion but it was uh i don't know you don't really know what to expect until you get there and all the training in the world is not gonna like you know simulate combat so you know i didn't expect to be raiding schools and stuff like that in iraq but you would train in old rundown schools stateside to practice, you know, room clearing and taking over compounds. And like the ranger specialty primarily is to take over an airfield. So, you know, you jump in, take over an airfield, secure it and move on from there. Not one time

did I ever have to, you know, secure an airfield overseas. They were all, you know, little houses here, complexes here. They were never, you know, anything in that nature. So my, what I thought war was going to be was totally different. But yeah, we landed in Iraq and like there were McDonald's or little fast food shops, coffee bean places and stuff like that. It was totally different. You're like, this ain't Saigon. Yeah, far from it, far from it.

You didn't find out until you went outside the wire. And even then, it wasn't what I expected. It's more urban warfare in Iraq, like pretty much across the country now. Yeah, all urban. I didn't do anything. Like, Iraq and Afghanistan were almost night and day iraq was all urban and at least you could see the enemy um for the most part unless they were using like ieds or whatever but afghanistan it was like fighting ghosts though it was uh rare you saw

someone for the most part yeah rare a lot of tree lines small tucked away villages mountains mountains yeah wide open fields and dude they've been fighting in that land since you know yeah forever so what do they say about it it's like that's where empires fall yeah come to die or whatever it is yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah didn't like i I might be making this up, but maybe it was like Alexander the Great, like, worked his way around Afghanistan or something like that. See, now that you've said something like that, now my mind's thinking about it. Can we Google that, Alessi? Alexander the Great, what did he do vis-a-vis Afghanistan? He might have battled through it, but there's something that goes back to someone like him, like way back then.

That, like, every time people try to someone like him way back then. Every time people try to fuck around, they find out. Saw this on the History Channel, man. My mind's drawing a blank. We got anything? All right, let's see. Alexander's campaign in Afghanistan was a part of his war against the Persian Empire. He entered the territories that are now Afghanistan after his victory over the persian empire in 331 and 330 however his plan to use the territories as a highway to india failed due to strong resistance from the afghan tribes i didn't even get up even he had a hard time i didn't want to mess with that which is

weird i didn't i did not expect afghanistan to even be like that though like from its appearance and the people that you see there you would have no idea that they are willing to fight this thing out for decades. What about the appearance of the people gives no idea about that? Skinny, frail, malnutrition. I'm not trying to be mean, but their intellect, I think, was a little off to me. You know, their belief system and just they knew one thing, and it was just basically how to fight or how to survive, you know. And even talking to the – we worked with some Afghan guys over there,

and it was just their culture was far different of men were for pleasure and women for for reproduction so it was uh where'd we hear that one yeah you'll remember it later someone else said that yeah yeah it's a weird culture you know um and you see weird stuff based around what i just said of men being for pleasure. And, yeah, it's just weird. Yeah, I heard the word boys where you said. Yep, boys. There you go. Boys.

Yeah. T-boys or chai boys, whatever we called them. Yeah. Now you got your lesson. Now I came upstairs. Yeah. Yeah. I've walked into a room full of it and did a mission where literally like guys were doing their thing

in the tree line and we had to go in there and take care of that it was a weird sight to see all right well we're gonna be pulling guys apart all right we're gonna be getting all into afghanistan but back to iraq just to come because that was the beginning you what one of the things you talk about is like people make these legends of people and start to exaggerate some things so you're very clear in your book exactly you know where your numbers are and stuff like that but you had to do your first kill on your first deployment in Iraq. Yeah.

What happened there? Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. 50-cal machine gunner. So I started off in battalion as an assaulter. I was a 203 guy, grenade launcher. Went on to weapon squad where it's like all the heavy weapons.

You have your 50-cal machine gun, your 240 machine guns, your Mark 48s, and all the big machine gun stuff. Being a 50-cal machine gunner on top of a striker, which is another piece of equipment we use, it's like a 40-ton vehicle, has eight wheels, four on each side. It's like a tank on wheels. I was a gunner for that and a driver for it. For this particular mission, I was a gunner, and during that time, it was a curfew. People were not allowed to be outside during a certain time. And that's time had elapsed.

And we see a vehicle like veering towards a convoy that I was in and me being the lead vehicle and the gunner, I had a PL with me, I believe. And he's telling me to engage this guy. The car was like way down in the back. A lot of weight in it. I had no idea what a vehicle born IED was or how they used them or what to look out for. He's telling me to engage this car. And in my mind, I'm looking at him like, what are you talking about?

Like, I didn't think, you know, to shoot someone. I always thought my combat experience was going to be a blaze of glory. You know, your first kill, you're getting shot at, big firefight, and you have to kill someone. I always thought my combat experience was going to be a blaze of glory. You know, your first kill, you're getting shot at, big firefight, and you have to kill someone. Not we're just cruising downtown or not cruising downtown. It was we just got done doing an operation, taking some prisoners back. And like as the sun is coming up, you see a vehicle start to pick up speed and come straight towards our convoy. And your commander's like, hey, light this guy up.

And it takes a while. And he slaps me on the helmet. He's like, light this fucker up now. And I did. Pulled the trigger on it, butterfly trigger, and skipped the rounds from the hood of his car all the way through him. Like a good nine round burst and car went all you know sideways and veered towards us or past us and um we stopped got out they investigated the vehicle popped open the trunk and he had these uh old artillery rounds like wired all together in there and that was like their stick back then artillery wired to

chlorine i believe um to make like a chlorine bomb and yeah shot that guy was the first one i ever killed and but you didn't know until they confirmed it going to the car to check him out because he was in the car yeah yeah so when they opened the car that's where i could see what had happened to him um what a good amount of 50 caliber rounds to do to someone you know i just saw from my perspective i saw sparks sparks and red ish pinkish mist i guess um but when they popped open the car it was just like half it not even half a human it was a disfigured human you know like like jelly like jelly a little bit yeah you know do you can you even process that like right in the moment when

you've got that confirmed or are you still just very much i was still in mode yeah still like rushing off the wow i just shot my first weapon overseas in combat it wasn't um like it was hard to i didn't think it was going to go down that way you know i thought i was going to be getting shot at or something not just a guy who wants to you know use his car like a torpedo um but i lived off that high and just up until I got back. It was a weird experience. This is not how I expected it to go down. So it was just weird to kind of put that all together. But it was weird when I got back, though.

How long was that deployment? 90 days. 90 days. Yeah. Okay. So that was like the one time there where there was action. The rest of it was you're basically out in convoys checking places out, and you didn't have to take action? Every day was action.

We did 100. There was. 120 missions in 90 days. We killed, I forgot, like 1,000-something guys. The most we've ever killed in a deployment was like 1,900 in a three-month time span. So it's every day is action every day is action i might not be you know pulling the trigger on all those missions or operations a lot a lot of the

yeah the assaulters and stuff like that they are but um like every day was a a a pretty pretty hectic day yeah did you lose any guys during that first one? Not from my platoon. We lost somebody from another platoon. I was a first platoon. We had first platoon, second platoon, and third platoon. Somebody from, I believe, second platoon died. And maybe somebody else from third platoon.

A couple of guys did die. Yeah. I just did not know them directly. I know they were in a couple of guys did die yeah i just did not know him directly i know they were in them you know range of battalion and we might have you know passed each other going to chow or something like that going to eat but i didn't know him personally though so you don't have a there's not like that straight line connection yet to like how real it gets when yeah you or anyone else can go down out there yeah yeah i didn't i didn't see that yet firsthand we felt like or to me it felt like

my platoon was just a untouchable platoon made of like little gods man we were just untouchable it's a dangerous feeling big time because when it happens it's it makes it worse too but and again you're still 18 at the time your cerebral what is it the prefrontal cortex or whatever not developed yet not developed at all no so you don't even have like a no no and we're doing stuff like this man it's crazy it's crazy that's a like now it's crazy to you but at the time did you have any appreciation for that no at the time i mean i felt like i was a grown man like i felt like i was more of a it's gonna sound weird like more of a man than my dad or like at my dad's level a little bit it felt like that at that time because i was doing stuff my dad never got a chance to do you know um is that

competitive a little bit like is that where that's coming from probably yeah yeah I could I'll show you old man that's exactly what it is yeah a lot of that a lot of that and yeah like the first time I ever killed someone that next day I had told him about it. And he's like, don't talk about that. Not on the phone, at least. So just never talked about it again after that. He didn't find out until I left the Army. And he started to hear stuff and see stuff online or whatever. Oh, your other, what came later?

He didn't know about that at all? No idea. I stopped talking about killing altogether with my family. My wife didn't know until after I got out. Well, it was that last deployment. One of my team guys, we were talking, and she overheard some stuff. Yeah. And she was like, what the hell are you talking about?

That's how she found out. But there's only been one deployment I haven't killed someone. And that was a trip to Afghanistan with SEAL Team 6. And that was later. Yeah, that was like 08. Yeah. All right. So you do another one in Iraq after that.

Similar kind of op tempo? I went to ranger school, to baghdad that op tempo was really low like not slow it was fun we got a chance to work with the seals and uh use their boats i forget what their boat is called but we would ride up and down the river um dismount off the river it was like almost like vietnam a little bit just like a small i'm not you know wasn't it vietnam but it felt like you know vietnam the jungle style environment yeah tall trees coming off the water the ravine and using boats to infill that was pretty sick working with seals like that yeah how does that i've asked this to different guys this is always this part's always a little confusing for me like how does it work

where they're like all right rangers you're working with seals or delta force you're working with seals or marines you're working with rain like how does this go down that's a good question um i believe it comes down to who's in theater and who has a certain operational um capabilities i think it comes down to that. Like, during my early, or the first, or the second deployment in Iraq, I was a part of a joint task force. Not sure if the name is known yet, but it was a joint task force where it was us,

SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, some SAS guys, and some CIA guys. And it was a pretty cool task force. It's like the Avengers team right there. It was literally like that. The stuff we were doing was really, really neat. Really neat.

What kind of stuff? Just straight taking it to them. A lot of killing. A lot of killing. Now, is that task force post-Alzacar we going down? I was there for that. Oh, you were there for that? Yeah, yeah.

I was on that task force as well, yeah. So you were hunting Alzacar? Yeah, yeah. I still have the little, they dropped these pamphlets, or little pieces of paper in that town before we had actually captured him. And then we have the picture of him where his head is yeah you know looking like that but can't show that one on screen but people google it at home yeah i was there for that and i was there for we found all that whole operation or during

that mission i remember the thing that stands out to me is like all the money we found. Like, and his little hideout spots and stuff that he would, I guess, visit. Or people who worked for him stayed and we would go after those guys. But they had so much money. Like crisp $100 U.S. currency bills stuffed in walls. I believe it. Yeah. You ever hear about like the the biggest robbery in world history that happened at the beginning of the war no so like saddam's sons went to like the bank of

baghdad like a day into the war and just took like a billion dollars she said see ya jeez no yeah i mean the money that just floats around yep I have not come across a terrorist that has not had like a crisp $100 bill on them. They hate America, but they do love our greenbacks. Yep. Yep. Yep. That part's interesting. Isn't it? Yeah. Then you wonder like, you know, how is this all getting there? Right. Yeah. And remote caves.

Remote caves. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Where they're hiding and stuff. Yeah. So that task force, that Zakari task force, this is like 05, 06, you're on that, right? Yeah. Wait, is that the one that was like Team Avengers? Both of them.

I was on two task force, yeah. Because this is, I mean, obviously like the CIA was like the brain unit of trying to hunt this guy. So are you directly interfacing with people from there on intelligence as far as like where these houses are before you hit them? Yeah, they would supply all the information, all the intel. Like we're not – and if I ever came across a CIA guy, like for the majority of the time, I had no idea they were even with the agency or anything. I just thought they were some cool army guy. That's how they like it. Yeah, I had no idea they were even with the agency or anything. I just thought they were some cool Army guy. That's how they like it. Yeah, I had no idea who these guys were. And that's how it was for a lot of the operations.

Like, you would know the Delta guys. They would either stay with us or they had no issue saying who they were with. But they wouldn't say, hi, I'm Delta Force. They would say, you know, I'm with the unit or something like that um but yeah they were cool guys and they would recruit from us like every deployment so they would recruit from you yeah from the range oh to get right yeah to get new guys um the agency guys they were. Like you don't know who you're really dealing with or anything like that. It was just spooky dudes. And especially being that age that I was, you know, it was hard to – you know you're working with some cool guys, but you don't know who's who.

Do you have a concept at all of like the geopolitical implications of what's going on and the reason i asked that is because you're getting there when shit has hit the fan the whole like separating separating out the bath party backfired the insurgency of terrorists has basically seized on the upset population to rally them behind them to be like fuck these people who are here which includes you obviously yeah like it's a weird yeah weird time do you have any grasp of that or is are you just so focused on like all right what's the next mission here's what we gotta do all right great that's it yeah just what's the next mission what's an every day sometimes two or three missions a day but it was that's my only focus you know i guess the after one particular mission we had taken down a high value target um and i remember sitting in the chow hall and seeing the mission we had just accomplished like on the news i think

that was like the most i've ever been like holy shit we're doing some pretty impactful stuff and they didn't say who did it they well they did they said it was iraqi special forces or something but i was like man we just that was pretty neat to be a part of missions like that where you didn't your name or your unit does not get mentioned it gets passed off to uh somebody else that was pretty cool right i would imagine that's how most of it has to get that's a yeah and then when you watch the news over there you you realize how much of it is, like, it's just all propaganda. Right. That was neat to see as a kid. Like, everything that you guys were getting back here

was almost a lie. Not a lie, it was just a lot of propaganda. So beyond, you're saying, like, obviously, beyond just, like, changing a team that did it or who did it, the actual information of what's happening on the ground is different. Oh, it's totally different. Totally different different so what would you say during that time period was the the main problems with like the reporting of what's happening in iraq um the main problems probably the numbers i i think the numbers of maybe civilian deaths, I think casualties.

We wouldn't really advertise our mess, all the times that we messed up or not messed up where something bad happened. Our innocent person got killed or some of the tactics we were using to get who we were going after. But then you get older and you realize that, well, yeah, a lot of the stuff that these companies and, like, your cell phones are always listening to you and stuff like that, you know, I think looking back at it now, you realize or you think,

depend on, like, how much of a conspiracy theorist you are, like were we testing all this technology out on these people first before we implemented it here? It feels like that sometimes too. Yeah. I haven't heard that one before. Really? That's believable though. Yeah, I believe so. So I mean, just it's impossible to know. But in talking to some of the people I get to talk to doing this job, you in your head, you're like, all right. So is DARPA 40, 50 or 60?

Right. Right. Right. How far? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go. Yeah. 40 to 60. Right. Yeah. They're pretty up there. Pretty far out there. Yeah. So what are they testing? You know, in this case, you're talking about them testing it in a war zone over there. Because who gives a fuck about them? Exactly. Right? But then what are they testing on your own population too?

Yep. 5G. No, I don't know. You haven't even been here an hour. Damn it. 5G. Yeah, I can imagine that's got to be frustrating though because you know i hate when people in offices in washington dc wearing suits yeah have to run and duck and cover for their own decisions and

then it gets painted back on on the guys who are there like there's no better example than what you studied growing up with with the vietnam vets i mean those guys were spit on when they were brought back but it's like they got drafted to go there. Like, what the fuck do you want them to do? Right. You know what I mean? It's hell when you get there. Yeah.

Hopefully we won't have to go through that again. But the way things are looking now, hopefully we don't have to incorporate the draft again. Who knows? Yeah. I've heard rumors about that yeah maybe being a thing that would suck really bad because i we lose so bad what was the last time we ever like what was the last war did we have one i mean does this 91 gulf war count no no it's like two days yeah

and we just picked up where we left off. Yeah, the two we continued. Yeah. Yeah, but the other thing is when you look at the history of modern warfare, like post-World War II, it's usually big country in small proxy country, right? in korea russia the soviet union in various little countries that you know weren't world powers united states in vietnam united states in iraq yeah russia in ukraine yeah you know israel in gaza like you know gaza's they're not gonna be number one in gdp right right neither is ukraine i hate to break it to you guys yeah it's the truth well it might be now all the money we're giving them they still need a few years but i see what you're saying yeah point being you know it's like we they're they're all these wars are really what's behind what's happening outside of the wars diplomatically or i don't even know if that's

the right word to use there but it feels like like warfare is is this almost like a hammer in in the in the toolbox just take out and bang in some nails and who gives a fuck how they feel yeah yeah 100 which is weird when you think about it especially the guys who are sending those guys out to do that stuff get a chance to go home and eat caviar you know every night if that's your thing but yeah it's it's got to be frustrating though because you know we're not putting boots on the ground there which i like because i don't like endless wars i'm not one of the just to be clear i'm not one of these people who's like we can never be involved that's a that's a really bad way to look at things.

Unfortunately, the world is a nasty place and shit happens and you do have to take action. Yeah. But I'm also not one of these people that's like, well, let's just pump endless cash reserves into all these things. And all right. You know, they lose 100K. They lose 200K. We're talking lives. Whatever.

Like as a human being. Yeah. I'm never going to get behind that. Yeah, I agree. I'm like that now too. Yeah. Yeah. But in Iraq, you talk about like the civilian deaths. You feel like we're being misreported and stuff like that.

At the same time, you guys, it's not your fault that the people there now hate you because of what politicians have decided to do. It's also probably understandable that maybe not the total total terrorist but some of the other people may not like you yeah because like you guys are forced to have to go to door to door every night and like do checks and uniforms with guns in the faces of kids yeah but like you know one of the things i always ask the guys who are over there is in no way to condone terrorism or anything like that. But could you see how the seven-year-old in 2006 who was getting his house broken into every night by people in suits that say America on it might hate America now at age 26? We knew that back then. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You'd kill a, you know, kill a dad right in front of his kid. And you can only imagine, you know, the disdain that he has towards the guys who did that or the country that did that to his dad and what he's going to grow up to be. I knew that back then. And you would, we were, some of us were there long enough to actually see the manifestation of that, you know, over those years, you know uh 20 something years is a long time and you can that's a yeah long time i sent my mom a video this morning of a kid you know because you got to be careful with all these videos because there's propaganda like crazy everywhere so i'm pretty tight with those and i can't be 100 on stuff but there was one of of of a kid who was probably about nine ten years old crying i'm like all right i don't be 100 on stuff but there was one of of of a kid who was probably about nine ten years old crying i'm like all right i don't think he's a hollywood actor and you know he's in lebanon and his family had just been bombed or whatever and he was crying but he was

making sense he wasn't just like hysterical he was talking about you know he's like god needs to get back at these perpetrators or whatever and i said to my mom i said when this kid blows up a building in 15 years i won't condone it and i'll hate him for it but i'll damn well understand where it started yeah 100 oh yeah it's a never ending cycle man and that's what i don't get a i mean these wars are confusing at this point it's like you know in order to you know i guess alleviate that issue you have to kill everybody and that's the only way that you can make that but then you're just going to piss off somebody their next door neighbor or something like that so but it's a weird

battle to fight you know very strange battle to fight and it sounds like you based on what you're saying even at 18 19 in those earliest deployments, you even have some understanding of that as a kid. Oh, yeah. That's impressive. You get a chance to see it firsthand, you know? Yeah. And, you know, if I were a kid, I'd feel the same way, too. If you killed my dad, yeah, probably not going to like you after that.

It's up. Yeah. I'm going to come find you. Yeah. I'm going to come find you. Yeah. Yeah, but that was one of the things you talked about, how you're in these countries and these people are used to just having helicopters over their head at all times, people carrying rifles around and military uniforms on the street. And here, when we had that happen for like a week or two. Which one was that? After 9-11. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like that was weird for people. Were you here for that when that happened? like a week or two which one was what was that after after 9-11 okay yeah yeah yeah like that was weird for people were you here for that when that happened no i grew up in south jersey but i remember 9-11 close enough it's like one of my first memories yeah yeah how old were you i was seven okay wow man i remember that vividly yeah that whole everything about it's crazy how it's scarred into your mind like that and that's yeah damn dude but we had that for like two weeks really point whatever it was where you know not not down where i was but like when i say we i'm talking about people who were like here in new york where they walk outside and you know someone there's military i forgot about that humvees and all i forgot about that man yeah yeah that was crazy and it's like two weeks yeah imagine two

decades damn or like 200 years that too yeah you know wow that's all they know yeah dude it was weird when i was over there like some people had no idea while we were even over there like what are you talking oh that was a weird one like you guys don't have tv you don't know what happened like we didn't have anything to do with that. That was Saudi Arabia. They're next door. Come there. The wrong house. You can borrow some sugar though.

There was a frontline documentary. I don't know how long ago, but it was years after Iraq had happened where they went and interviewed a lot of now adults who were like kids and teenagers when the war started. And they talk about like, okay, you know, Saddam was a very bad guy. Let's not rewrite history here. But they talk about some of the normalcy in their life. Ah, yeah. I've heard stories about that too.

Yeah. Like, yeah. With Saddam Hussein being the dictator or the leader. Yeah. But like they, you know, they knew where they were going to go get lunch that day. They could go to school, stuff like that. You couldn't say anything bad about Saddam or your head was going to come off. But like, you know, not to say they, their point was not to say we wouldn't have had complaints about that. We did. Yeah. Yeah. But holy shit, this got way worse.

It didn't. Big time. Wait a minute. Yeah. I can't carry a shovel? There was a time in Iraq where you couldn't have a shovel or a cell phone when we rolled up. You couldn't have a cell phone? No.

Or a shovel. You would get shot for that. Why a cell? Because they think you're calling them? IEDs, yeah. Artists calling calling an ied it was such a big problem back then so the rules of engagement at one point for spec ops were um they were not going to say sketch they were just uh wow you know just wow i don't think that the your average person doesn't hear about that too much

or know some of the things that the rules of engagement, how they change and fluctuate over the years. One minute it's this, next minute it's I got to win the hearts and minds now. I was never a part of doing any of that. That was like regular military, regular Army stuff, winning the hearts and minds. Ours, the thing was was like we'll take them they can win them but we did a lot of that yeah we'll take them yeah did a lot of that but you do those first two in iraq yeah you go through ranger school now we're in like 07 08 something like that is this when you first go to Afghanistan? Afghanistan, yeah.

Well, I did Mosul, or to crit Mosul, Baghdad. Then I went to first deployment to Afghanistan was, damn, I think it was not Kandahar. Maybe it was Kandahar. No, it wasn't Kandahar. It was Bagram, B afghanistan because it was cold that year and my first time ever seeing mountains um yeah like to that nature but bagram afghanistan that was a dull deployment it wasn't what i expected but no it is what i guess you could say it is what i expected we knew it wasn't going to be like Iraq where you have like a more city environment.

And it just wasn't that much action for guys like us in Afghanistan during that time frame. It was the slow deployments. That's where guys would just go to lift weights, you know, and you found out what SEAL stands for. It's sleep, sleep eat and lift those were those deployments yeah but uh it picked up quick though it picked up my second go around to afghanistan but what when when you first get called in to go there this is now six seven years since we invaded oh three we go into go into Iraq and the line I think that's very fair is like took your eye off the ball, right? Because I mean people forget but the beginning of Afghanistan was like one of the most successful modern military operations in history.

Yeah, yeah. So now you're going there where the resources have been pulled a while ago. Big time. where the resources have been pulled a while ago and now the what was the running and hiding and fledgling taliban is like when i hear this history it's like they were slowly dripping their way across the country and telling people hey your life wasn't that bad before this right yep yep yep it was a weird uh environment i think. But you're 100 percent correct when you say the the resources were just pulled out of that. It was all focused, you know, focused towards, you know, Iraq and getting Iraq done with. But I think that we had a loss, like a huge influx of the foreign fighters coming in at that point, coming into Afghanistan.

And they started to have more balls, man. They were more ballsy of, we're going to have a safe haven here and we're going to fight. And Afghanistan started to slowly become that. And depending on where in Afghanistan you were, it was kind of crazy. Like up in the mountains, the Hindu Kush, I don't know what it was called, but regular army guys i'd never got a chance to do any outpost stuff like that ours was all direct action just going to this hut that hut that mountain yeah that village so it was a little different but but the first one none of that really happens the first one you're just chilling and working out every day yep yep trying to fight

seal team six guys man that's literally what it was all about they didn't like us we didn't like You're just chilling and working out every day. Yep, yep. Trying to fight SEAL Team 6 guys, man. That's literally what it was all about. They didn't like us. We didn't like them. Oh, you didn't get along with them? No. It was a bad deployment. They had to put up a big fence in between us because the tensions were high.

They were not allowed to mess with us or see us we had different eating times different bathrooms different everything the tensions were high over what fuck someone's girl i don't know i don't know i was just along for the ride man i'm like hey you got beef with my guys and yeah i don't know it was just the um i guess it was just a lot of competition. And we didn't think that those guys were as good as who they, as good as what other people say. We thought that we could do the same things they could do because we had been doing it for so long side by side with Delta. Sometimes Delta would give us their missions

if they were going to go do something else. So we were good at what we were doing, but it was like they wanted to, uh... Like big bro, like a big brother, you know, with a little brother, uh, just push you off to the side. You know, I wanna, I wanna do this. And it just got old after a while.

Like, uh, no, we don't do that. So... Little bit of arrogance very much very much so very much so yeah that's my where i got my disdain for seal team six guys i likes the the seals are cool they're fine and they didn't do they just weren't they did not do they're water-based guys you know if you want us take over an oil rig, don't call a ranger. Call a SEAL. We'll tear that thing up.

We'll all drown. So call those guys. But when it comes to destroying something on land, call us. So when you see bin Laden get whacked in 11, you're like, yeah. And then they're like, it was SEAL Team 6. They're like, fuck. Yep. I was hoping for Delta, man.

I was. I was hoping for Delta to have it, but they were in Iraq at that time. It's like those are the same guys I was fighting with in 08. Yep, yep, yep. Same. No shit, man. The same guys. Yeah, the same guys.

You must have. Corbett was there because he was SEAL Team 6 at that time. I just had him sitting in that chair. I'd have to see faces, yeah. Can we pull up Daniel Corbett, there because he was sealed team six at that time. I just had him sitting in that chair. I'd have to see faces. Yeah. That was the, can we pull up Daniel Corbett, Serbian prisoner?

This is the guy I was telling you about. Yeah. Who was taken prisoner in, in Serbia. I feel like he would have been one of the guys, like he's the dude in the corner of the room. Like, God damn it.

Like he just doesn't give a fuck. This dude. More than like, how does he, he looks familiar, man. This dude. More than likely. He looks familiar, man. That dude in the glasses on the left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's him. Yeah, yeah.

That's him with Mike Ritland right there. More than likely, dude. I've done ops with him. Yeah, he did not strike. Like I don't know that I've had a six-team guy in here, but I've seen a lot of content with SEAL Team 6 guys. Yeah. Yeah.

I was surprised that he was. And then he got talking, just his approach. I'm like, oh, he's a savage. But not the... Stereotypical. No. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He's no Taylor Kavanaugh. You can always spot a SEAL Team 6 guy. Yeah. But some of them blend in really good. I could never tell. That's the guy that blends in. Gotcha. For sure. But yeah, he must have, unless maybe I'm off a couple months

on the deployment, but he was there. He was there with SEAL Team 6 at that time. Obviously, they have heats that they go in. Yeah, yeah. Still, that's funny. Small world. So you guys are just chilling and you couldn't even work out with him? No, no. We had this little prison gym in a small, like an old rundown, old empty,

or a schoolhouse, old school. And that's where we lived at. They expanded the compound and SEAL Team 6 had their own equipment, had their own MWR, their computers, their phones and stuff. But it wasn't many. They don't ever travel. Like we're traveling with 35 to 40 guys. Still Team 6 guys, they're like a small handful.

Right. A very small handful. I found that cool. I found that cool. What they could do with the least amount of guys but i just felt like we were way better and you never left during that deployment you never left the base oh hell yeah we went out with those guys all the time oh you did yeah they would just do all the killing okay wait so there was action you were just oh there was actually you were hanging back yeah you guys exactly yeah yeah it was a lot of that like no you guys you guys carry our stuff and when we get there we'll get

it back and we'll go knock this out it was a lot of that got it so you're like in the rear in a way well in the rear enough to like smell the gunpowder. Yeah. And see the dead bodies. Yeah. You're like, we missed it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. All of you guys in Special Forces do say the same thing, and it makes sense to me. It's like if you train your whole life to be in the NFL and you get there, you ain't trying to be backup quarterback.

You want to play. But in the NFL, with very few exceptions people don't die right like you know some bad injuries but for the most part like people do live you're talking about though the same mentality where it's like you're gonna go out there and there's bullets flying at you and you and your boys might not come back but that's the only place you want to be hell yeah you don't even think about i don't i've never thought about it as like uh oh no there's like you know the you know guys are going to be shooting at you that doesn't scare you though and you don't like i thought about death all the time not all i thought about it a lot but i'm not thinking about it so much as to where it's going to like make me a coward or shy away from something.

It's just like, oh, well, you know, you could die. You could die tomorrow too, you know, could die back at home. You could die anywhere. So it really wasn't like that big of a deal. And you have a gun. Like one of the greatest speeches I've ever been given was by my first sergeant. And he said, it's the easiest, most memorable speech I can remember. It was, they got guns, we got guns.

Let's go. That was it. So it's, you know, we're just better at what we do. They have a gun, oh, well, that's fine, that's cool. But, like, we've been training for this for months and months on end, so you don't really think you're going to walk into a firefight and expect it to be your last firefight no no 99 of the time if we're going up against people with guns which was a lot like it was a very one-sided extremely one-sided yeah

what what deployment did you become a sniper officially? Officially 2008, yeah. Okay, so this is for this one, not your sniper. Yeah. So you've gone through sniper school and all that? I went through, so in our battalion during that time, we had a, I guess you them to uh like civilian sniper courses but they were sanctioned by the u.s government u.s military army um i went through a extreme long range uh precision sniper school no first it was just precision precision sniper school in in texas place called kingsville i went through an extreme long range,

and I went to a high-angle one in California, but not the Marine Corps one. It was put on by a really well-known shooting instructor. And then after that is when I went to sniper school. And I think it was like five weeks or six weeks. I forget how long sniper school is. It might be eight weeks long. I don't remember. Was that in no that was in fort benning that was in fort yeah yeah okay um then after that so i did like four sniper schools before are all together total three before i went

to the official u.s army one and that's like it's an easy sniper school course um after you've been through all the other courses you've taken like you're not even shooting that much in u.s army sniper school a lot of it like 10 of it's shooting 20 of it's shooting 80 the fundamentals the um sniper formulas the star formulas yeah um what's what good one okay so like the scopes we Sniper formulas. Sniper formulas? Yeah. What's a good one? Okay, so like the scopes we use are mil-dot scopes. Inside the scope, you have that crosshair, and you have dots on it or lines on it or hash marks on it. And you can use that as a form of measurement to see how far away something is and to adjust for the wind and elevation for the bullet. So let's say easy calculation would be I'm looking at a target and I measure him from his

groin to the top of his head. The average human, the average male body is around 40 inches, give or take a few inches. So 40 times this constant 24 meters would be 25.4. And 40 times 25.4 is 1016. And if I take two mil dots from the groin to the top of your head and plug it into 1016, it comes out to 508. So I know you're 508 yards away um then there's one for like yards and it's multiplying it by 27.7 and you get a different formula different yeah but that's the a basic very basic formula then you have your wind formulas and then you have to go out and apply it and stuff like that then you have stalking and everything else. Stalking? Yeah, stalking where you're ghillie suit stalking, given a target. Our instructor is sitting in the back of a pickup truck, and you have to sneak within like 200, 300 yards of this instructor.

You're given a time limit. And there's a team of instructors looking at you. They know where you're starting from and they know where you have to be. And they're looking all in that field, that area. And the objective is not to get caught, pull off a shot and sneak back out without being seen. And they have instructors that after you take the shot will come within a few feet of you. And they'll say, I'm within three feet of the sniper the instructor on the back of a truck or something he's looking it's like i think i see him down here by your feet at this area this

location put your hand on them top of his head they're like no that's not him um that's like the hardest part of sniper school then you have to sneak back out and whoa yeah most people fail that portion like 70 60 70 fill that portion and then did they get a chance to redo it or are they out oh you get kicked i mean you get five i think it's five chances to do it i forget but if you feel like you have to make 70 of your stocks um if you don't, then you get kicked out. I'm not sure if you can come back to sniper school or you have to wait like a year or something like that. I have no idea. I went straight through.

That's like the only one of the only courses I went straight through. And it wasn't hard like that. You were just kind of born for it. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. i think so that comes across yeah because like snipers are so fascinating to speak with because it's not to put down any other types of warfare it's all it's all important like where it comes from but like when you're up in front on the assault it's like you're much more not literally hand to hand but you know what i

mean you're right there like all right point shoot kill you guys you know you're much more not literally hand-to-hand, but you know what I mean? You're right there like, all right, point, shoot, kill. You guys, you know, you're doing fucking Albert Einstein's equations out there and doing insane math. What's the term again for the curvature of the earth you got to take into account too? They call that the Coriolis effect. That's it. Yeah, the Coriolis effect, right? You got to – and I love that you laid out the formula there and how that would work based on inches and distance and everything.

I hope my math is right. What is 40 times 25.4? It should be 1,016. He didn't have a calculator when he was doing this. He would have had a calculator out there. Oh, yeah. No, I wouldn't. No?

No. You didn't take a calculator out there with you? I hated technology. Like, I like the old school 25.4, 40 times. 40 times 25.4? Yeah. That changes the game that you didn't have a calculator. There we go.

Yeah, you were dead on. Yeah, I didn't like the calculator. I liked the old school Carlos Hathcock type vietnam sniping um green berets they love that stuff but i was just never into that well it's i mean it's it's like the smallest thing can move can can change from a kill to a complete mess oh like like like literally a millimeter oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100%. Which we saw with the attempted assassination. Yes.

The first one. So it's a matter of millimeters and inches, definitely. And that one was only like 375, 400 yards. Very short distance. Right. And you're talking about, I mean, you did a shot from 750. What was your longest one? Like a thousand? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a whole different ballgame. Over half a mile. Yeah. That was a, I'm not going to say it was luck. It was less math. Well, I did use a, like apply a little bit of math, but what I did was watch where the bullet impacted the first bullet. Like when it missed, I was like, okay, well, I just need to hold up. Oh, okay. Just pick it up a little bit. Hold it right there. Right there. Yeah, yeah. A little to the left.

Yeah. That's pretty much how it went. He saw the bullet. He saw it impact. And by the time he looked up to see where it was coming from or where he thought it was coming from, like the second one was already apexing. Like it was a clean shot. And you can see the vapor trail. It's like the Matrix type.

Yeah. I always think, remember that movie, Wanted? Where they'd, like, turn the bullets and shit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, like, crazy, but I always think about... if some of it is in just enough slow motion for people as highly skilled as you, that, like, it's not like that, but that but like you can literally almost stop time for a second and feel where that bullet is yeah yeah yeah yeah it is almost like it takes a trained eye to pick up on um trail or trace of a bullet

and it takes time i think to adapt your eye to it because it's happening so quick. You know, at half a mile, the bullet is taking, oh, shit, what is it, 1.7, 1.8 seconds to get there. That's a pretty good chunk of time, you know. But shorter distances, like a few hundred yards, it's hard to even comprehend how fast that bullet gets there. Can you even, if you're at 1,000 yards and it happens to be a day where it's stormy, can you even take that shot? Stormy? No, no. Right. How much wind are we talking?

20, 25 miles an hour. With rain coming down. Rain's not a factor, though. Really? Yeah. Not at all? No. Rain's not a factor though really yeah not at all no rain is not a factor why not bullets moving fast enough and you have a you ever see the video or a video of a a super a sonic jet

when it's that cone coming off of it what do we search let's pull it up uh i'm not a jet guy. The cone that comes off the plane when it's going really fast. Try a sonic jet cone coming off plane. Vapor cone? Not the vapor cone. That's a... Breaking the sound barrier? Yeah, yeah. All right, let's try that one.

There you go. Yep. Our bullet moving really fast. They have like a still photo it's almost like that also people if we if it cuts ahead at some point here it's because it's copyright and you missed the video i'll put the link in the description if not then we'll put it and wanted there we go i love that i love that movie should be a picture or whatever of like a bullet when it's going that's not and that's fake

you can tell because it still has the cartridge attached to the actual projectile oh that's ai oh yeah damn it but when you see a a still image of a of a bullet there's a cone going off of it no it'd have to be a picture still frame all right if you find it later i'll throw the link in the description for people i get what you're saying though but there's a cone that comes off of it and it's not affected by any water or anything like that and those are all fake photos oh there is one right down the black and white one it's that cone yeah so you see the there you go that's perfect all that that's the uh water does not touch the bullet didn't affect the bullet nothing like that i would never guess that because like you would just think like the physical force i

mean it's not much but it doesn't take much you know i mean to move a bullet off once the wind does yeah but once it hits transonic when it stops being supersonic maybe you might have an issue there what distance does it hit transonic oh that's a tough one um depends on what you're shooting depends on what you're shooting 200 yards past donald trump what do you mean meaning his was close enough that it doesn't hit transonic? Oh, with transonic, it's 1,000 plus, a mile plus. Yeah, depending on what you're shooting. But at that distance, no, it's still very hypersonic. Yeah.

And, yeah, so that wouldn't be a factor. Wind's going to be the greatest factor. And, like, I may have shot in 20-mile-an-hour wins once here, down here, or not here, but in Texas, in Kingsville. Wasn't very accurate. How far? Maybe like 500, 600 yards. So how much would, let's say 500 yards, rounder number.

Yeah. How much would a bullet move in 20-mile-an-hour win there? Oh, my gosh. You're getting my math going now. Well, you're apparently good at it, even if you didn't try in school. It's in there. It's in there. I haven't done a wind formula in a minute.

So let's say per one mile an hour wind at 1,000 yards, per one mile an hour wind at 1,000 yards, per one mile an hour wind, a drift year round, damn, I think it's like 10 feet with a three-year weight. I'm totally, I might be off with the wind formula. But I know it's a drastic, drastic, drastic. 10 feet's a lot. 10 feet's from there to the edge. So you're shooting here to get there at 500 feet. That's going to be in like 0.8, 0.9 seconds.

You're shooting from here to get it to there in 0.8 seconds. At a certain distance, like at 1,000 yards. At 500 yards, at 20 mile an hour wind, dude, that's... You're holding mils, so... You're holding what? Mils.

The dots inside the scope on the the crosshair and in between so there's um like a mil dot itself is 0.2 mils it comes from a mil radian um and then in between each one it's three point oh shit three point i want to say three points we would use 3.4 3.6 or something i think 3.6 um distance in between each one so if at 100 yards right if i put a if i'm lining my crosshairs up with the center of an object let's say a quarter and i shoot the quarter or try to shoot the quarter my crosshairs are lined up and i'm 3.6 inches high it should that bullet impact should be exactly are very close to where that first mill dot is going to be at so it's uh at that distance at 200 yards, it times it by two.

300 yards, you multiply it by three, and it increases at that rate up until forever. So, yeah, a 20-mile-an-hour win at 500 yards, it's significant, very significant. You're not going to aim at it. You'll miss by feet what was the what was the longest military shot on record do you remember we can google it i i can't remember it off the top of my head this is going to sound crazy i might be way over my head i think it was like two plus miles i'm totally not sure let's check that out and i if i'm not mistaken it was a by a canadian guy oh is this the dude that was on sean's show i don't remember i think it is

all right so this one this is a ukraine made volodar oh the longest military sniper shot in history was made in november 2023 by a ukrainian sniper see i don't believe this this is i think bs we'll we'll consider it we'll consider it but there should be a yeah the canadian sniper right there for 2.19 miles i don't maybe the the ukrainian guy did get it but i saw the equipment he used and i don't know can you leslie can you type in Sean Ryan, Canadian sniper, longest shot? I feel like this was the guy. He had him on for something else. This is a while ago.

That guy. I think it was him, right? Yeah, that's him. 2.2 miles away. His name is like Dallas or something? Is that it? Wow, yeah. Can you just click that real quick, Alessi, so we can get his name?

Give him a shout-out. Pause it real fast. I don't want Sean to copyright strike me. Dallas Alexander. Yeah, Dallas Alexander. That's it. Oh, wow. 2.2 miles, man.

2.2. That's a shot I would not ever take. I'm just not comfortable with that. No, good for him. That's sick, man. Because there's people in the kill radius that you might not want to kill. good for him that's sick man because there's people in the kill radius that you might not want to i don't even care about that it's just fuck them kids

i'm not worried about that's just a long shot i don't have time for that math a mile yeah two two pluses, that's pushing. I don't know how long it took the bullet to get there. It had to be sandwich-making time. Yeah. Sandwich, that's good. Sandwich-making time. Enough to make a sandwich, yes.

You wait for it to get there. Yeah. That's a minute, man, of travel. It's like a scud missile coming in and away. Yeah. And coming straight up, yeah, straight on top, too. That's, yeah, man, of travel. It's like a scud missile coming in in a way. Yeah. And coming straight up. Yeah, straight on top, too. That's, yeah, straight on top.

Now bullets falling at that distance. The bullets you were using in your gun, like using your fingers, how long are they? About like that big. Oh, the projectile part that comes out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like maybe that big enough to do damage yeah like pinky the tip of your pinky right yeah and you're lobbing that you know half a mile to a mile maybe not a mile now what was your like ritual with this like you talk a lot about the

gun and like painting the gun and stuff like that i thought that was really cool because you wanted it's almost like you wanted to feel it and whatever but once you actually and you can talk about that too but once you get out there and you know the spot you're going to that you want to use you from from the minute you get to the spot to the minute you go to be ready to take a shot what are you doing from the moment i'm about to from the moment you get there like you haven't set up anything yet like you're about to get down like get in your nest right here like what's what's your routine i'm looking at when are feeling the wind mainly and like there's not really we didn't have that much time by the time i set up on the rooftop and

by the time that the assaulters got there it's one minute two minutes so it's not much time to even like absorb all that mainly just the environment I just want to feel the environment you know feel if there is any wind um just feeling the environment getting in tune with that and locking myself into a bubble that nothing can distract me from that was like the only routine that i had and just just it's just a a certain amount of focus that i haven't achieved outside of that line of work is being inside that bubble of and that in tune with with just nature you can feel everything you're like one big you know um like a radar a meteorologist like style radar or something like that you feel everything the wind the temperature humidity barometric pressure i mean not exactly metric you're not really feeling that but it's that does get taken into

consideration depending on how far a shot is i don't even know what that is really yeah it sounds familiar i forgot that one they talk about it on the news every once in a while on the weather channel is that like the thing that you you put the stick on top of the can and it like moves up and down like a barometer or whatever is that what you're talking about you guys did that in school yeah my school is different man i don't know we put that shit outside and watch the move really yeah that's barometric pressure is that the same i have to see the the tool you're talking i have no idea you type in a barometer homemade barometer alessi if you if you can make a homemade barometer i might use this for my kid, teach him how to make one. I remember this was like.

You had a cool school. This was when I was in school at 9-11. I remember this was like right. Yeah, yeah. In the corner. Oh, wow. That shit right there. Yeah.

Wow. That is really neat. Right? You're going to take that out sniping now. Yeah. That is really neat i can't believe i taught you something wow yeah dude i've never incredible i don't know what that shit does

it tells you what it's gonna rain and what it's not what does that family got it's gonna rain oh yeah we used to watch so much family overseas on the bases yeah i know exactly the episode you're talking about let's start raining sideways i know exactly the episode it's raining sideways so you're but yeah i got you off your topic you're feeling the the wind you're feeling the environment around you the temperature the barometric pressure and then when you actually get into mode with your gun you know a lot of snipers you guys have like breath work right with with how you shoot so how would yours work calm, as calm as I can get it. Cause after like we're walking into an objective, it could be for a couple of miles, three miles or

whatever. Um, you're not smoke tired, but you can be, uh, depending if you're walking uphill or something, or if you just got done running, uh, to the objective. So I'm calming down my heart rate as much as I possibly can breathing. Just that's my, I guess, definition of getting into the bubble. It's where you take your deep breaths, deep breaths, and you're just calming everything down, calming your heart rate down. You don't want the heart rate to, you know, when it's beating really fast, you'll see it flutter inside the scope. And you want to calm that down as much as possible. And just relaxing. It's borderline sleeping like

sniping is one of the most boring jobs in the military as a war fighter it's extremely boring extremely boring it's a lot of sitting and waiting and yes it's fighting boredom but when that one time comes where you have to to make shot, then it makes up for everything. The excitement, the thrill, all the stuff that went into making that shot happen. It's a huge tradeoff. The idea of slowing down your heart rate, though. Yeah. It's like telling adrenaline not to be there.

Because I hear what you're saying about it being a boring job, and that makes sense for most things. But we're going to get to the deployment where it popped off soon and like unless i'm reading that wrong there's nothing boring about what happened during that because you were basically getting put in and shit was firing which one were you talking about the uh three and a half months oh that was yeah that was not boring yeah that was different yeah that was way different so like that's what i'm saying though and it's different if you're like bad time to be saying this but like presidential protection and you're sitting up there and it's boring as hell yeah versus like shit's popping off and your adrenaline's going because you see bullets flying everywhere they're in your earpiece going shoot shoot shoot whatever

like how do you how do you basically tell your body, hey, adrenaline, stop. A lot of training. A lot of training. That's the only thing I can chalk it up to. It's the amount of training we go through to where certain situations don't really knock you off your game as much. By that point, you should know what it's like to be shot at. So that's not really too much of a concern. It's concerning, but I mean, you just, to make it stop, you just have to shoot the person

shooting at you and then you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about it anymore. So that's like a huge, I guess, factor in it. You want the bad stuff to happen with the boogeyman to go away, just kill the boogeyman. Other than that it's just a lot of stuff comes from breathing you look at the like uh shaolin monks or whatever guys who can are the uh tibetan monks are the guys who can uh meditate for days on end and like almost borderline not exist in this reality.

And it all stems from breath work. If you don't have the foundational breath work for anything, then it doesn't matter anyways. But you can calm down your adrenaline rush, anxiety attacks, panic attacks, all with breathing. So it's just a lot of breath work. Yeah, I believe in that stuff, especially when I was dealing with some cortisol problems from some other health problems yeah like some of those little like what would it be like four shallow breaths in four deep breaths in one and then two

out like it's like a box what do they call it box breathing or something yeah Yeah. Yeah. That, listen, it didn't take it away completely, but it would help big time. I could see that. And there's no different when it comes to sniping. We're not doing box breathing or anything. It's regular breathing, just deeper, more conscious breaths. But it's a, and you want to hear, you can get really in tune with your own breath listening to it like slow down calm down calm down I'm just shooting a gun you know relax the more tight that

you are more tension in your muscles the worst shot you're gonna have you just want to be a slab of meat behind the gun and once you have achieved that state everything else is like second nature what's the like when you would actually go to take the shot so your fingers on the trigger and you'd pull the release was there like danny hall talked about it was like actually trippy watching him talk about it because he turned like right to the camera and like aimed at the camera and he's like he would just go or something like that is it similar like what you would do i'm always on the glass like looking through um right before i pull the trigger i'm looking exactly where i want to shoot what i want to hit i might close my eyes for a second and open it just to see if my sights are still on target

that's determining your natural point of aim and if not that means something's off with your body position uh to the rifle so you want to change up a body position or whatever um but one long breath out good breath out not to the point to where you hold it because then after a while you start to get little twitches and your you know lack of oxygen so right on my my, I'm pulling the trigger back as crisp and straight back to the rear as I possibly can. I went to this shooting school in Texas, and it talked about the harmonics of a rifle. Every time the rifle shoots, it whips at a very, like'm not gonna say microscopic level but um it if you slow down a rifle shooting you'll see it whip and it's actually pretty amazing that these bullets can go straight

that way or as straight as they do when the bullet whips after you shoot it or the gun shakes and it's a yeah the harmonics of it but it has a natural harmonic frequency or tune or whatever that it it it's always going to be consistent or within that that those parameters but if you introduce an outside influence let's say if i were to rest the barrel on top of this wooden table, right? And pull the trigger. The bullet's not going to go straight anymore, or it's going to go straight because it's not going to go where I wanted it to because of the harmonics when it goes off.

So I'll get an impact up high. You'll see the bullet go up higher. If I'm introducing tension or pressure on the top part of the barrel with the hard object, it causes the bullet to go low or shoot lower. introducing tension or pressure on the top part of the barrel with the hard object, it causes the bullet to go low or shoot lower or wherever. So pulling the trigger straight back to the rear so you don't interfere and touch the rails on the inside of the gun helps out with the harmonics of making the rifle shoot as straight as it possibly can within its uh you know parameters and that's the stuff i'm looking for straight uh straight pull back to the rear

don't touch the sides of the rail with the trigger hold it back don't slap the trigger it's called follow through um i'm still breathing at that point my eyes are still locked onto the target i'm not gonna like be surprised and oh blink or nothing like that i stays glued onto the target onto the scope and shoot see where it hits if i have to make an adjustment don't freak out about it and say oh and hit here adjust here if i have to dial up or if i'm to hold it up or use the little mil dots we talked about to adjust for the shot.

But there's not much. Maybe I just never thought too much into it. It was just like, it's a job, I guess. You know, you know the job, you know what you have. It won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients vodka soda natural flavors so what should we talk about no sugar added. Neutral.

Refreshingly simple. To do to calm down. And it took you a lot to get there anyways. You just don't, you know, wake up and say, I'm going to be a sniper today. You know, that's a tough, tough, different, it's a different mindset to uh get into yeah i think you have to be for different just to be in the military and or special ops in general you have to be built mentally a little differently but then in the specific jobs one can have there's different mentalities that may work the best for each yeah yeah it's very clear that at least you know when you were in your career doing this and in the moment like you are you almost come across as like dry very like very like cut

and dry this is what it is all right there's a shot cool let's take it yeah and that's to me you know because like i'm an emotional guy really yeah i would not I would not in your job. I don't know that I, if I had trained to do that, I wouldn't have been as suited for it because I'm emotional. How like you would cry. No, no, no. Like,

like I would, I'd be too jacked. Ah, I'd be, I'd be like, well, fuck, let's go.

You know what I mean? Like, like you saw that dude, like recoil on the, in the video on, of the Trump attempted assassination up there. It was almost like he was like a little too up for that moment right there. That's not the guy who took the shot, right?

Like you doesn't – I mean we're all human. There might have been something there at some point where you're like, oh, shit. But you are very like, oh. Yeah, yeah. That's how I think all snipers are. The guys that train me and the guys that I've seen. Just very, most of the snipers that I know are quiet. Very quiet.

Very, like you said, just very cut and dry. Just very, this is it. That's it, you know. There's not too much thought behind it. If you thought a lot as a sniper, I don't think you'd make a great sniper. The more you think about stuff i'm out yeah they could if your mind starts getting to you and asking too many questions yeah it's not a not a good job to have yeah there's a lot floating around in this head of mine you

you wouldn't you wouldn't like that in your job but after you become a sniper and after you've served then you just develop this weird case of ADD like all snipers have ADD now. Well not a lot of them that I know. What do you think that's because of? I think we've always had it. It's just for some odd reason sniping like

I guess it's natural remedy or medicine. I don't know. But I know a lot of snipers with add like i have add really bad yeah yeah bad but but you the state it's almost like the stakes are you need the stakes there to be high enough that it's like oh other people are depending on me so i can lock there you go yep yep yep i would have made like a terrible um I guess like, I don't know. I don't think I would have made a great seal.

Like my mind gets to me in dark places. And I've been scuba diving, got the whole scuba diving thing, but I don't like being in dark places and not being able to see. Like that freaks me out. Day out daytime jumping out of a plane i'm still terrified but i'll like borderline pass out at nighttime jumps and that's the majority majority of the jumps that we did in battalion were all nighttime and i have some terrible stories of jumping at nighttime it's just uh i can't see anything the unknown it's just weird yeah so i'd have made a terrible seal in the long run. So I'm glad they didn't.

It worked out for you. Yeah, it worked out perfectly. It worked out just fine. But you named your gun Dirty Diana. Yes, sir. Where'd that come from? Michael Jackson. Just the song itself?

Straight up Michael? I just want to name it Dirty Diana. I was a huge Michael Jackson fan growing up. One of the oldest memories I have, I was still in Germany. I was sitting on my mom's lap, and this Michael Jackson concert, or his performance came on. And I remember him ripping off his shirt, opening up. Dirty Diana.

That's all I remember, man man and that stuck with me and like i loved michael jackson uh you know growing up and listening to his music and stuff but dirty diana i like the the guitar in it just like that i had no idea what it was about you know i just liked the song and the guitar and i remember we were doing this mission and this was in iraq and uh we had these and inside the striker they're speakers you have internal comms and stuff one of my teammates uh not gonna mention his name he was um he plugged in his what do we call those things an ipod ipad ipod like where it was the music without the phone yeah it was just ipods he connected his ipod to the internal speakers and we had some michael

jackson playing in this crazy firefight in moscow and it was a wait you had michael jackson yeah playing oh yeah while you're out here snatching bodies yeah it's the sickest thing ever that was the you guys might need to talk to some shrinks yeah yeah that was one of the one of my cooler times in iraq can you imagine just being a terrorist and you go out to like michael jackson just be like no it's the time man oh yeah then it uh it kind of grew from there and by the time i got issued my rifle it was just like everybody gave their rifle a name um like a girl name i forget some of the other guys but mine was i wanted dirty diana it was yeah it's a michael jackson fan yes mg at the time i'm not too sure about about it now but how we all feel about michael but uh yeah at that time he was he was he was my guy hey look that was the king of pop man yeah

yes no one like him unbelievable talent oh yeah nothing else listen i believe i can fly all right oh you're talking about i'm talking about r kelly now i'm glad he's in prison but i'm bumping that shit i still i still might play a little r kelly send me to jail for doing that good music good music i don't know i feel you man like someone asked me like yo what if hitler made a banger song i'm like don't do that i banger song? I'm like, don't do that. I'm going to bang you. Don't do that. Don't do that to me.

But yeah, what was the whole thing? I brought this up a few minutes ago, but like why were you so into painting the gun over and over again? Weird story. I don't think I like talked about it in the book or anything. So like I sucked at school, but i was really good at art um i got so i don't think it was like middle school middle school eighth grade um i got invited from a college to join their art program so i was going to college for a little bit doing art because i like art drawing and painting and i think that's where it like stemmed from i just like to i like drawing and painting and i didn't like the way the gun came stocked um the sr25 that i had it just looked dull

and painting it for me was like a um one, my artistic expression, because I would change it up all the time, the patterns. One week it would look like a leaf pattern. The next operation may have like a checkered style pattern. Different color variations. I like the, I guess, the artistic expression behind it. It was mine. It made you feel more connected to the rifle. Or for me, it did.

And I think that's what, like, why I did it all the time. And I have ADD, so it was, like, never, never, never good. It was always, I gotta do it again. It was, like, a fix, you know? And there's only so many things you can do overseas. Like, either you're to watch Anchorman again, go to chow, do what guys do.

There's no one around. According to Mike Ritland, they do it when people are around. Oh, I bet. Oh, he's a seal. Yeah.

Seals probably do. Yeah. He's like, they're just sitting in beds, yanking their chain. Oh, that too. Yeah.

Yeah. Been there, been there. Oh, you're talking about, what were you talking about? Just, he's like, they're just sitting in beds, yanking their chain. Oh, that too. Yeah, yeah. Been there. Been there. Oh, you're talking about, what were you talking about? Just because of the fact that they're SEALs. The Navy, it's a Navy joke. Navy joke. Just a bunch of semen just being together.

But, yeah, it's only so much you can do overseas. And painting my rifle was one one of them and a way to like connect to yeah it felt like a ritual big time big time big time a huge like um like your your rifle has to be like an extension of your body it cannot be any different if it doesn't feel like your arm or your heart then it's just it sucks you can tell if it's your rifle or if you pick up someone else's rifle and they're both identical same sr25 rifles but it's just, it sucks. You can tell if it's your rifle or if you pick up someone else's rifle and they're both identical, same SR-25 rifles, but it's just something about yours

that I have a connection to that one. That one's mine. It's what keeps you alive. Yeah, big time. You know? Yeah. I hear so many of you guys who are over there just talk about like, that's the reason I'm here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. It's weird to think about it. Yeah, that's that's the reason i'm here yeah yeah yeah that's it it's weird to think about it that's yeah that's weird to think about it's the only reason why we're here yeah that gun so maybe that's why we all get out and get them you know all of us man yeah i mean i i what what strikes me is that know, you're going through so many things here in so many different eras in a way, whether it be all the different massive training you're doing or the different deployments to different theaters as well. And it's like the story of someone who's like 45 and saying like, look at what I just finished doing. but you're 23 at this point you're like 22 yeah you've kind of lived you're not the first person to say that that's weird but when i think about it like you're kind of right like it does sound when i hear myself talk about it i'm like damn it sounds like i did a lot but then i know guys with like 14 deployments. So it's all perspective for me.

Well, he died. So yeah. I know guys with like way more deployments and stuff. Yeah, but I'm saying like maybe by the end, right? But I'm saying like once you rack up a few deployments, like you've been around, right? I'm saying you've been around and have seen the shit and done the shit and been in all the different shit at like 22 yeah you know there's not a lot of guys that that can talk about at that high level that they had done all that at that age and it's almost like you have the you went from this kid who you felt like you were immature in a lot of ways to suddenly jumping into the not just aren't

like jumping into special forces yeah and now you're like you're like a hardened older dude yeah it's weird that the the change up in mentality you know because you're around grown men you're around like-minded i guess you could say men who are on the same page as you um just a little bit more mature guys who have been around the block a few times as opposed to me just coming off the block it was uh you have to adapt if you want to fit in you have to um but yeah there's a there's a a certain level of like maturity but then you take it a step further to like guys who are in delta and their level of maturity and just like their their way of thinking is night and day compared to us, man. Those guys are absolutely fascinating.

But I get what you're saying. It's weird to look back at who I used to be and then getting into that line of work. It is weird, man. It is weird to see. Like I don't know where I would be with well i do know but if i didn't have that as a as a you know my background the military it'd be it would suck man it would suck we wouldn't be having this conversation you know yeah yeah be bad but you you know none of your friends that you grew up with like you said came in and did this no right you were totally alone going and do it as a kid i i think one of the best parts i ever hear about the military from anyone from all

levels of the military is that the the brotherhood and camaraderie you get from that is second to none and oh yeah afterwards you can't replicate that in any oh yeah like the guys that i grew up with they were cool but are at the time but compared to like the relationships i had overseas and the guys i had in the ranger battalion dude it's it's more than brothers you know what i mean it's a it's a real like brotherhood a real family that dude it's funny i was talking to um not too long ago, it was Mark Cunningham is his name. He was there on my first and second deployment in Iraq. And I hadn't talked to him since then. And he found me a couple of weeks or months ago on Twitter. And he just messaged me and gave him my phone number. We

start talking and my wife was there and she's like, it's gave him you know gave him my phone number we start talking and my wife was there and she's like it's crazy how you guys can just pick up right where you left off at like nothing happened nothing changed i'm like damn i never thought of it like that but it it's that bond is just hard to break you know you've been through something like that you know with uh with uh you know one of your brothers in combat brothers in arms and yeah you can't like never make that go away. That's always going to be there. And no one else understands that.

Yeah, exactly. She won't understand it. She's been there for all the deployments. Other people from the outside won't understand it. But you can't have that same relationship. At least I don't think you can. If you worked at walmart with someone and yeah you 10 years later 20 years later you're like oh man remember that time we

were stacking boxes you know i'm like no no no yeah it's it's different bond different relationship man yeah but it's good though and what was the deployment where your wife was going back and forth between actually marrying you was that like one of the first iraq ones yeah yeah so you guys get married though at the point we're at you guys have been married how how difficult was it in the early years there while you're active to be constantly going on deployments and and also having a relationship like that at white that sucked man like i never cried before a deployment after a deployment like that but for some odd reason after we got married and living with someone for like at that point it was like six months we had lived together in this apartment um you kind of like

build a bond i guess and like i cry like a baby before that deployment and i remember going into the uh compound our little area before we start packing our bags are onto the plane and um the guys are like dude what's wrong with you man man? I was like, oh, nothing. I was just smoking some weed. My eyes were bloodshot red. It was so good, I'm crying. Yeah, just crying like a baby in the car. And I did that for every deployment, man.

I just cried like a baby. Like, I didn't want to leave. It always felt like, damn, this could be my last time ever seeing her again and like then what is she gonna do if she get how are they gonna tell her you know getting are they gonna come knock on the door are they gonna call her or that stuff would always play with me but by the time i was on the plane popped an ambient like i was i was good to go i would call her from germany and call her uh the first one in the first few hours, I guess, after I got in the country. And it kind of just felt a little bit better.

And I would just start counting down the days. I know it's between 90 and 120 days. I would just start marking them down. Like, damn, I can't wait for this to be over. Is there ever like a block in your head where not that you consciously say this to yourself but looking back on it where you're subconsciously like oh it won't be me yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah especially like going over you look around you know looking you know just like man i don't think it's gonna be us i don't think i know for damn sure it's not gonna be me but you just

never know you just never know and that's a yeah it's a weird feeling yeah i know for damn sure it's not going to be me, but you just never know. You just never know. And that's a, yeah, it's a weird feeling. Yeah. I just didn't feel, it's weird how we make our own, like our life is like one big never ending play.

And we're like the director of it. We just don't have the script, you know, but for some odd reason it was just like, well, I know in this script, I'm not going to get whacked, you know,

but you don't know. I didn't, I don't have the script. it was just like oh i know in this script i'm not gonna get whacked you know but you don't know i didn't i don't have the script it was just right place right time you know a lot of a lot of that and a lot of things i can't explain supernatural if you want you know things supernatural not supernatural but depending on what you believe in religion supernatural something of a higher power definitely had my back a few occasions. So you do believe in a higher power? Oh, 100%. Did you believe in it before you got into the military? Yeah.

I grew up always going to church with my parents. Every Sunday that I was in the choir at one point, I'd never sing. You got some pipes? I have none at all. You want to take them for a ride? None. I like that one. I have none at all.

I didn't even sing in the choir. I would just hum our rock side of song. I don't even like singing. My wife can sing really good. But no, I'm not a singer. I grew up in the church. And before every mission, like on the helicopter, before the helicopter landed, like I would say a quick prayer of like, you know, watch after my guys, watch after my family, and watch after me. Let us just make it out this thing you know in one

piece that was before every operation and it worked you know it worked minus minus one operation where you know some guys got hit one unfortunately died but it was uh other than that like yeah there were a lot of times where i didn't feel like I was going to make it out or it's just weird how I made it out or we made it out. It's a lot more than I can count of how did we just survive that? You know, it's a lot of that. Yeah. For sure. Big time. organized religion guy but you know something put me here right so i'm here for a blink of time

right in what the context of the world and the galaxy is especially and it's like do good because you're gonna have to answer for something and maybe if you're doing that when you do have a moment of need whatever that source power is god if you will yeah something can be a little angel on your shoulder there i'm a huge believer in that and it sounds like that's oh yeah that seems to be what you're talking about yeah you sound like my mushroom trip what did you do mushrooms this was uh years ago i thought you were gonna say like last week oh no i don't think i'll ever do them again no no? No, I took way too much. My first time, I didn't know what they – I had no idea.

I thought I was going to see like pink elephants and I was just going to laugh and be like, oh, this is funny. Nope. Nope. No one told me that, no, like you go to a different dimension. And I watched Mike Tyson eat mushrooms on – That's a bad story. It was. eat mushrooms on the line it was i was uh watching mike tyson on like the what are the paul logan paul whatever the brothers were and he took a handful of them and i was like

well i could probably do that so i took i got some and uh i took the whole bag. And I remember telling my wife, first I was like, I could see the, I was like, man, something's going on with reality. Like it was shimmering. And then I told her, oh, shit, I can feel the light. I had a lamp next to me. And I was like, I can feel the light. And then the light came out. And I remember telling her, I said, bow your head, bow your head bow your head i said i think god's coming and then uh out of the light i saw a scroll and it's the scroll said the law follow the law

and it was just like the 10 commandments and stuff and like i zapped in and out of reality multiple times multiple times and uh like met with a higher power that i perceived as god and like we had some conversations about my life what was that like terrifying terrifying terrifying dude like i haven't been that scared ever in my life to this day of that conversation. Yeah. But what's the conversation like? Along the lines of what you just said, do good and judge others how you would like to be judged you hold against people the disc like i had a bad relationship with my parents for a little bit after the fact and it's like well all right your time's coming up here soon too i'm gonna judge you the same way i'm like oh no so then i had got sent to the dark place what i perceived to be hell and that was terrifying yeah i went to

both realms dude oh they gave you the preview yep yep you want to go here you want to go here you got the ebony's your screwed yep yep yep and i felt like stripping naked and like running to georgia where my parents live at just to apologize yeah but then i was like I can't because this place is one big play. And reality was weird. What the hell looked like? Dark. Void.

You see like little Nas X down there? No, I didn't see anybody. But I heard snakes or what? I heard snakes or slithers. It was completely pitch dark. And it was void of all emotion. A void of love. Of anything. And you were like, it was just my spirit emotion a void of love of anything and you were like it was just

my spirit was down there void of so you're conscious that you don't feel anything in all the wrong just a pit a pit in all directions and there was no nothing no no emotion whatsoever just emptiness like what it felt to be have no ego no nothing just empty void of who i thought i was just a naked soul yeah so even though you don't want to do it again because there's a bit of a catatonic experience it sounds like you got something got a lot oh yeah it changed my life man after that like for the better big time i love that like the 57 155 guys sees mike fucking tyson be like yeah i'm gonna take like a whole bit of the thing i'm just gonna fuck this up and you can do it too i did i did i'll never do it again i was pissed at mike for that man i was like no i actually i thought like

how does his reality look to him to be able to function? I guess he's functioning. I don't know if he's really like here consciously, but. I'm functioning. Yeah. I'm like, dude, that's the TBI kicking in. I love Mike Tyson. I'm not going to lie. Because I do feel like, you know, you joke about the guys that obviously like that dude's been through.

A lot. A lot of fists and a lot a lot of life but like you know it's cool to see how in tune with himself he is now yeah like that was mike fucking dyson like he was he was a legalized murderer right yeah and now you know he's more mellow i mean apparently he's gonna go fight jake paul but yeah you get the point like he allegedly allegedly yeah right like like he he has such apparently he's going to go fight Jake Paul. But you get the point. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. Right?

Like, he has such a – he's got, like, such a beautiful soul. Yeah. That's great to see. Mushrooms did that, man. Have you ever taken mushrooms? I've done ayahuasca. Oh, so you're good good. Yeah.

Okay. Why do you say I'm good good? Because I've heard that stuff is, like, the shit, man. Better than mushrooms when it comes to leaving this reality, I guess. It's great. I can't speak to mushrooms because I haven't done them. But ayahuasca was a beautiful experience. The way I describe it is it was just an unbelievably intense meditation where you are – you get the most present you've ever gotten

and i also wonder because like a lot of people like don't like the taste of ayahuasca and they end up throwing up as well not dmt i'm thinking i okay yeah you drink this one but like i actually i liked the ayahuasca like it tasted great and i i think maybe that also played a role in me just being so calm the whole time. Yeah. But it was a profound, profound experience. Not like nothing happened like what you speak of right there. Like I really, any quote unquote hallucinations that happened, I was still right here. Really? Yeah. I knew that they weren't happening.

That's crazy. Like they weren't there. I wasn't turning to the lamp and being like, oh, not that there was a lamp. Yeah, yeah. But there wasn't anything like that. It was almost like I was watching a movie and the movie was invisible. I could see right through it. Ah.

And it was just very, very calming. And the big thing it did is it took like all these micro problems that I build up in my life, right? Yeah, yeah. And it just was like, my God, there's really only like three or four that matter. Yeah, there you go. my life. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it just was like, my God, there's really only like three or four that matter. Yeah.

Just focus on those. Yeah. Yeah. And that has been, look, I still run into micros. It's not like, yeah,

you're fixed when you come back. But like since then, I mean, I'm sure Alessia would even tell you there's certain things that I probably would have like been like, no, we got to do this. We got to do that.

And now I'm like, all right, whatever. It's fine. It'll work itself out. There's other stuff I'm still picky on, but it's way, the balance is way better than it used to be. All about balance. Yeah. I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind ayahuasca, but I don't know. You got to go do it at the right place though. Cause like- Mexico?

No, I was down in the middle of the amazon jungle oh my buddy paul rosalie has been on the podcast a bunch he's lived there for the last 19 years what yeah yeah he's a savage damn would love to connect you with him he's he's cool amazon jungle like the legit jungle oh wow yeah he lives on it he lives on a wood floor 200 meters back into the jungle with no running water. What? So, like, you know how, like, we would put a towel, a fucking sock on the door? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you got a girl in there, he has to put a fucking industrial towel across. Jeez.

Yeah. Like, he lives, he's about it. Why? Yeah. Because he's always been such a nature guy that he went down there. He didn't fuck with school. He was like you. He was smart but just didn't like school.

Probably did a lot worse in school than you did to be honest. And, you know, was like, fuck it. He had always been in nature and loved animals. Fucking guy's a Sicilian from Brooklyn. But, you know, whatever. And he went down there when he was 18. And, you know, he spends probably three months of the year in America and then he spends probably another one to two months traveling to other big nature places in the world. But seven, eight months of the year, he's there and they've built this whole thing where they now own 80,000 acres of the Peruvian Amazon that they protect from the loggers and the gold miners and everything and

it's fucking amazing thank for a long time it was thankless work that he did and now you know he's been able to get on lex friedman and joe rogan and now like he's i think i've seen him yeah on lex friedman they did the interview in the jungle yeah lex was there he left like an hour before i got there really right before i was there yeah that's sick man yeah he was that was i i owe a lot to paul because i'm sitting in this room partially because him he had never done a podcast before he went on mine and that episode really i mean it was a win-win for both of us because it got him to the big boys like that who can really make a huge difference for him but it also it definitely helped put put me on the map which was cool but

yeah when we were down there he he knows like his partners they're all native peruvians who grew up in the jungle okay he's the only american huh right and so one of them his partner jj multiple of those brothers the durans are involved with the with the company jj is like the godfather of it and there's like 20 brothers it was two wives but 20 brothers and one of them is like maybe like the most legendary shaman that's like left really yeah so we really got got hooked up yeah Yeah. But like even what Paul will tell you is like even in South America though, you go to like somewhere and you think like, oh, I'm getting a real shaman. And no, the fuck, you're not. You know, it's like a really – ayahuasca is apparently a real tough one to get it right with the right guy who actually knows what the fuck he's doing.

So we got really lucky. It was cool. Good deal, man. Yeah. we'll see like i said the mushrooms kind of that did it for you yeah i learned enough i learned enough all right well let's let's go let's take a break real quick we'll get some food for you and we're gonna come back this i i don't know maybe it'll be like a second episode here just looking at the time but we're gonna come back we're gonna talk all about what went down in afghanistan and then some other things as well all good man all right

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