The Joe Rogan Experience - #2543 - MrBallen

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

John B. Allen ("MrBallen") is a former U.S. Navy SEAL, founder of Ballen Studios, and creator and host of the popular podcast "MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories." His latest graphic novel, "MrBallen Presents: The Terror Within," is available for preorder now and will be released on October 6.www.youtube.com/@MrBallenhttps://book.ballenstudios.comhttps://mrballen.foundation Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. 50% off your first box at https://www.thefarmersdog.com/rogan! Sign up at https://Foxnation.com to watch RAF 12! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, checking out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's going on? It's going good, man. This is crazy. I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here.

I do. This is like hallowed ground. I mean, I've been watching you like the rest of the world for years. I mean, I've seen so many clips of this space. So many references to Jamie and to be here right now. It's very cool. So I'm honored. Thank you for having it.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, it is always weird when you go someplace where you, like, at first time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way. Like, you're in the building. Like, what the fuck? This is the actual Howard Stern show that I used to listen to on the radio. Like, really freaked me out. I couldn't sleep the night before. I did yoga in my hotel room, try to calm down. When was this? When did you do this? Long time ago. 2000, probably one or something like that. Was this like prime fear factor days? You know what? I might have done it before I did Fear Factor. Great show, by the way. Thank you. Great show. Seriously. It was like a good sign our society was about to crumble. When historians go back and look at like the decline of society, they're like, remember

them when they started making people eat dicks on TV? They started making people eat animal balls and animal dicks on TV. That might have been. That was the start. And then it was Rogan's interview on on that show. What's his name again? I just blacked out the guy you just said you had an interview with. Howard Stern. Howard Stern.

Well, it was like I did it we did Fear Factor. It started airing right after September 11th. Like literally right after. Fear Factor did it. Uh-huh. And one of the narratives, one of the reporters asked me and like one of those stupid press junket things you have to do was is, do you think it's appropriate to scare Americans right after what just happened at 9-11.

I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? This is on me now? I'm like, what are you talking about? It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks. It's very simple. Shut the fuck up. Watch it or don't watch it. Who cares?

But it's like if you wanted to look at like where society's like, you used to be like, friends, Seinfeld, fucking, you know. The good old days, if you will. Miami Vice. It was television shows that were like shows. And then all sudden, anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal dicks. That was the threshold. Yeah.

Pretty good. It's weird because that kind of ushered in social media. It's very similar in a lot of ways. Like the people that were willing to go on these reality shows, especially stuff like Big Brother, where you just live in a house with a bunch of people. Like, how fucking weird? You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation and the producers are fucking. You know, Mike's been talking a lot of shit behind your back. You might want to get ahead of this.

Like, what? Mike? Yeah, I could never do that. Yeah. No, well, you're not stupid. Or you're not young or you're not desperate. We had a lot of people that were just in like credit card debt and shit. And they were like, look, if I can win this fucking thing.

Like normal people, they're like, look, it could be fun. I'll tell my kids about it. We've been watch this forever. And I can win $50,000 so I can pay off my credit card debt. That's noble, dude. Well, sometimes people have to do what they have to do. You know, but there's also a lot of people that want attention in any way possible. And that's like the people that are, you know, you see so many people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing to say,

but they're just trying to find something where people will pay attention to them. It's running up to people and slapping them, throwing glasses of water in their face, whatever they have to do. Anything they have to do to get attention. And if you trace that back, it kind of started with reality shows where people started to be able to get attention, just being a buffoon. There was a, I covered a store. So for those who don't know me, I tell strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet. And I covered a story that was like the epitome of this. It's the idea of doing anything for clicks.

I don't have the dates, but it was like within the past 10, 15 years, there was this group of, or there was this one Russian influencer. This is, I want to say, circa 2010. And she wanted to do something really special for her birthday, to document her birthday and get as many clicks as possible. and she filled this pool up with dry ice. Oh, Jesus. Water plus dry ice.

And she invited all her friends over. And they documented themselves going into this pool. And she has, I think, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers at the time. And so everyone's like, oh, it's the big birthday celebration. I think it was live. And they go into the tub and the music's playing. And then no one comes out of the tub. And it's just the silence.

They all die. They all die from suffocation, I think it was. I'm not exactly sure how you die from dry ice, but it's, I think it eradicates the oxygen. And so they just died. But it's like, how many people died? I'm going to see. It's like, yeah, three. There you go.

Three people. What? First of all, like dry ice, you can't even get on your skin. Yeah, you know, we jumped into a pool of it. I was thinking it just tortured their skin. Three die in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool. I wonder how much dry ice takes to kill three people. I think a better question is, what was the engagement like on that post?

Because in some ways, that's what it's all about. Look at the name. A Catarina de Denko. A popular Instagram influencer. There we go. Focusing on pharmaceutical products. What? With more than a million followers.

Two people died at the scene. A third died in the hospital. Restors' investigative committee said in a statement announcing a criminal probe into the incident. But you do not want to get arrested and go to jail. in Russia. No. They don't fuck around. Generally not.

They do not fuck around. Ask Britney Griner. They don't fuck around. She's out. Yeah, she's out. But she did nine months. Was it nine or ten? I think she was sentenced for nine fucking years.

And that was for marijuana possession at the airport? She just had a CBD vape pen. I mean, I guess it was probably marijuana. But it was a vape pen. And they... Jail. Put her in jail. Like hard.

record jail for nine fucking years. Periodically, I'll see, like, images of Russian courtrooms. And I don't even know the stories, but always it's like the accused is sitting inside of, like a jail cell that's in the middle of the courtroom, like iron bars. And you know, whatever they've done, they're facing the death penalty. They have to be. Or they pissed off Putin. Yeah, dude.

I don't know, man. But it's a gnarly place over there. Yeah, you better be friends with the right people over there. You can't fuck around. No, dude. You can't fuck around. That's why, like, I mean, how many times have, like, political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned or gotten murdered or... And not just him, but a bunch of other prominent figures that had other people running against them.

It's a shady business over there, dude. Oh, it's the shadiest. It's the shadiest, man. Makes for some very interesting people, though. Yeah. Russian people are fascinating. I've met a bunch of a bunch of brilliant Russian people, you know. Yeah.

I found that they're very in my limited exposure. This guy. Yeah, here we go. This guy tries to get all that little slit first. Oh, wow. Wait on a second. He doesn't give up. He doesn't make it out.

Oh, that's right. He goes through the roof. He's smart. I'm amazed that he was able to do that, though. What a fucking psycho. Look at him. He looks like a psycho, though. He looks like a guy that should be dead.

It looks like a guy who probably spent a lot of time in jail. Yeah. He was climbing through the fucking. They're pulling his pants off. They're going to daze him in his nuts. That's not okay. It's a rough spot. Rough spot on earth, tough people.

How did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube? Yeah, well, I originally was in the military. I was a seal. I did seven years in the teams. And then when I got out in 2017, I kind of drifted a little bit, you know? I did some work with charity. I did some veteran charity work. And I don't know, I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years.

And I'm married. I got three kids, you know, so I'm sort of like trying to figure it out. I have this small pension coming in that's enough to sort of subsist on. But then I actually, I remember watching a lot of Gary Vee. And more specifically, I saw Gary Vee was just every post he did. It was like, everybody, no matter how old you are, no matter what you're doing, you should be posting content online. Like, everyone should be doing it. And when I was in the military, you're sort of in a bubble.

I mean, you certainly have access to the Internet and all the things that everybody else does in the civilian world. But especially in the SEAL teams, from my experience, you're so, like, tribal. All your time is spent really with your teammates or at the team. It's very isolated, and you don't even realize it. And so I was not, I didn't have social media when I got out. I wasn't up to date on modern stuff. and Gary Vee was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing. This is what you do, you know, as a civilian, you post constantly.

And I began, in addition to doing some charity work I was doing, just trying my hand at social media, you know, posting content. It's like so bad. What was the intent? You know, honestly, there wasn't a clear intent other than, man, what the hell? Like, it doesn't cost. I'm already paying for the internet. I already own a phone. Right.

Effectively, the worst that will happen. I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about, or maybe my friends and family will see, and it'll be embarrassing. But I've always been someone that's been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing myself. I mean, if you think about seal training, a big part of it is you're raising your hand in a pretty public way, at least amongst your circle of friends and family, saying I'm going to go see if I'm good enough, and a lot of people aren't. And so I went through that process and I narrowly got through, but I sort of

had it in my mind that would I really try stuff. And so social media influenced heavily by Gary Vee. It was like, why not? I'll post content. Maybe someone will be interested. Nothing worked. I mean, it wasn't even like some was close. It was just nobody was paying attention. And it was like, okay, I'm not devastated. It is what it is. But then I, on a whim, I myself personally love strange, dark, and mysterious content. I used to love going to, there's a YouTube channel, I think it's still around now, it's called Dark Five. And all it is, it's just like crazy, true mysteries around the world,

you know, talking about how there's like, you know, potentially military bases hidden in Antarctica and there's the UFO sightings here. I thought it was fascinating. And on a whim in 2020, when my social media career is basically non-existent, I was at this water park, an indoor water park with my wife and kids, a great wolf lodge in Pennsylvania, great spot. And I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to try something. I haven't tried on my social media attempt so far.

I'm going to tell like a crazy mystery, a true mystery that I think is really interesting because I think it's cool. It's the first time I'm not trying to copy trends or like do Gary Vee content. I'm just going to like a story I like. And I pull out my phone and I tell this 60 second rendition of the. this mystery called the Diatlov Pass mystery. Are you familiar with this? No. Oh, great.

It's a great story. I post the 60-second version of the story, but I'll tell you the story in a minute. I leave my phone in the room because I'm going to the water park, indoor water park. I don't want to get wet. So I leave it there, come back two hours later, millions of views on this video. And I've never gotten views on anything. And it's millions of views. There's like...

In just a few hours? In a few hours. Like 5 million views on this video. What? Was it TikTok? TikTok. This is when TikTok was just... just to the moon.

So there's this, it's an amazing story. You probably have heard of it because it's one of those stories that it's made its rounds on the internet. So in, remember, the 60-second version was gritty, but it had the pictures and stuff. So in 1959,

there were these nine hikers. Actually, there was 10, these 10 young, like 20-something-year-old hikers in Russia. And they were like the best mountaineers in Russia at the time. And they were going for their, what's called their level three hiking test.

which sounds sort of lame, but it's effectively, at the time in Russia, this is like the top credential for mountaineers. If you have this credential, you are the best mountaineer in the land. And the way the test worked is effectively you're in a class of your own at this level already. It's sort of like being a PhD student where you sort of create your own material. You have to do that for this test. You map out a route that you'll take that effectively checks off all the boxes of difficulty. you put this map down, somebody approves, this is going to be hard enough that if you successfully navigate this course that you've mapped out in X amount of time, if you do that, you pass the test,

you're a level three mountaineer. And so these 10 hikers, eventually actually only nine left. One had a dental issue, so he spared himself. Nine of these hikers, they step out, I think it was in January of 1959, to do this hike that's been planned out. And they brought cameras along. and they're like this young, they're beautiful, they're all like couples, they're all friends.

And it sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie. This gets wild. If you've not heard this story, you're in for a treat because the pictures are crazy. They step out, and the Ural Mountains is rugged. It's like these huge, wind-swept, icy mountains. There's like a couple sections of forests, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be.

And so these hikers step off, and they start taking pictures. And even though it's 1959, the pictures they're taking could be taken today. It's almost like selfie style. They're smiling. Everyone's in such good spirits. They know they're going to pass this test. This is nothing for them.

This is a victory lap. And so off they go into the Ural Mountains. It's going to be like a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out or I guess finished with their route, I think on February 12th. So it's a several week-long hike. February 12th, and they were supposed to send some message to say, they were complete with the hike. February 12th comes and no message is sent.

No one gets word that these nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains. And at first, to be honest, no one was really that concerned because, one, there's nine of them. They are quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land. If anybody can withstand the elements, it's them. And so there wasn't this immediate call to action. But over the coming days after February 12th, the first. families of these nine hikers got really concerned. They're like, we haven't heard from them.

Where are they? Like the government needs to get involved. Somebody needs to go looking for them. And so eventually, at the end of February, a search party is launched for these hikers. And at first, it was just a couple of volunteers. It was some students from a university. It was not that serious of a search. But they eventually come across their campsite. And pictures are taken of their campsite. So from a strategic perspective, not that I claim to be a mountaineer. But if you were going to be setting up a place to, if you were going to set your tent up in a really rugged environment like the year-all mountains, the worst place to put your tent is the side of a wind-swept mountain where there are no trees. Because you'll get no, it'll be

relentless wind, any weather's going to be worse up there. You're on a slope, avalanche risk. I mean, the worst place you could put your tent is the side of a mountain. And so they're looking for these missing hikers who were the best hikers, and they find their tent, their one canvas tent. It's right in the middle of this pass called it. I believe it's called the Diatlov Pass, which is why the mystery has been named the Diatlov Pass. It's just one lone tent. And there's no trees, nothing. It's just, and so they go up to the tent. The hikers are not there, but the tent is collapsed, as you see in the picture there. And they look inside the tent and there's clothes, like cold weather gear, there's pots, and there's a lot of equipment that you would imagine they would have

brought with them out here is still in the tent. The hikers are missing. and they discover through whatever testing they did that there was a cut made in the tent that apparently was made from the inside out. Someone took a knife and I believe it was a knife and cut the tent open from the inside out. And so they have all this equipment and they're thinking this is, we're in the middle of the year old mountains. It's like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's the middle of winter.

You need this equipment to survive. Where are the hikers? They left all their equipment in their tent. Where are they? So the search expanded exponentially at that point because now these volunteers have discovered this incredible site. They can't find the hikers. A bigger search party comes out there and they discover footprints that are about 100 feet

away from where the tent was found. It's a little bit further down the mountain. And the footsteps, some of them are two boots, you know, matching boots of someone's steps. There's eight or nine prints. They couldn't be sure. Eight or nine sets of prints. Some have only one boot on, like barefoot and a boot. Others are just barefoot.

And remember, this is the middle of winter in Russia. But they're looking at these prints. And if you look at the tent, it's been cut from the inside. They've clearly abandoned their tent. Something's happened. But the cadence of the footprints as it picks up where they found it near the tent going down the mountain away from the campsite, they're walking. There's no sense of urgency. Someone analyzed the footprints.

And they're walking. So they're walking down the mountain, some without boots on, some with one boot on. leaving most of their equipment behind. And so the search party, they follow these prints down to the edge of this, this ominous looking forest. There's only so many forests out there. This is one of them. This relatively small but fairly dense forest. And the prints sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest.

And so they go into the trees. They're looking around. And they eventually come across this big cedar tree. And at the base of the cedar tree is this little burned out fire, like a puny little fire, and then crouched around it as one of the hikers. who's deceased. And I believe there's a picture. I don't know if you can show it on your channel. Sure. Yeah. So there's a picture of one of the hikers who is sort of almost like he was trying to get warmth against this fire. I don't think it's that one. There are some right near the cedar tree.

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com slash Rogan. This offers for new customers only. One is dead and then another one is sort of nearby as well. So there's two hikers that are both deceased from the initial thought is exposure, hypothermia, exposure. But critically, there's a couple really weird things about it. One, I think that's got to be the picture right there. And that does not show the bodies, but the bodies are near. I think that's one right there to the right of that. that could be one of them. But picture two bodies sort of laying scattered nearby.

They look at the tree that was at the base where the fire was and there are signs that something was trying to climb the tree. There's broken branches and the like

and there's human tissue that sounds way more extreme than it's supposed to but there's human tissue pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. And then they examined

the bodies and they found one of the men had his hand, part of his hand, he had bitten off and was in his throat, or it might have just been human tissue as well, but it was clearly in his mouth, like he was eating his own flesh, or at least arrived in his mouth. So they're dead. And so the search expands within this forest, and they find three more hikers

sort of about 100 or 200 feet away from this tree. They're in similar condition. They're all deceased. They're all sort of ragged. Some of them are only wearing, you know, a little bit of clothing, they're all dead, but they can't find the remaining four hikers. They continue to search for the next several days, but the weather was pretty severe. And so ultimately they decided that at this point, it's a recovery mission. We're not, we're not going to find them. They're going to be dead. So they waited until the thaw in May, and once the snow had thawed it, they came out there, and they found this what looked to be like the, they believe that a snow fort had been made, maybe three or 400 feet away from that cedar tree,

which they wouldn't have seen it during the winter. It was barely, you wouldn't have seen it. But it had melted down enough, and the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave. And the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries. They're all deceased. The woman, or one of them had a crush injury. His chest was they compared the injury to his chest,

equivalent to being struck by a car at high speed. However, he had no or limited lacerations. Like there was no impact to his body. His chest was sort of just inexplicably caved in. And so he's been crushed. One guy, I think his skull was fractured and a piece of a skull was missing. But the one that stands out is there was one hiker, a woman, who her lips and her eyes were missing. And some accounts claim that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed.

At least there was like very tight lines of how her, it was predation, animal predation, you'd see tearing. Right. This was like relatively straight lines where her lips were removed. And then another hiker, his eyes were also missing. And so they're all dead. And they also noticed that the woman was wearing men's clothing or some clothing that was clearly not hers. And then one of the men or a couple of the men were wearing some of her clothing. Like they had exchanged clothing.

and they found trace levels, albeit small, but trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing, and they're all dead. And so now all the hikers have been found. And by this point, this is in May of 1960, I believe it is at this point. This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent to being super viral today. Everybody was talking about it. The families are very outspoken about it.

People want answers. They wouldn't know what happened. And so the Russian government, they launched this investigation into what happened out there. in the Diatlov Pass, and quickly they shut down this investigation. Like very quickly they shut it down. And the only things people heard were there were numerous reports from military personnel and some civilians who apparently were in the area, in the Urals, that claimed to have seen glowing orbs like fireballs.

I think they described them as being balls of fire and light shooting up and down. It's hard to tell if it was in the same area where the hikers were. but there were all these independent reports of strange lights over the Ural Mountains that could corroborate or could line up with when those hikers all died. And then also lastly, the Russian government came out and said, well, we've determined that the nine hikers died from an overwhelming or I think they called it a compelling force. And then they closed it. I believe they made it completely confidential. No, the families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down.

And then in 2020, the reason I told it is because it sort of began making rounds because I believe some of the pictures had been redacted. And you could see these pictures. And so I said at the start of my video, at the end of this 60 second clip, you're going to Google two words. And it was Diatlov Pass. And so I teased the story and said, Google it for yourself. And it's a whole rabbit hole of crazy stuff.

That's a crazy story. So compelling force is a very weird way to describe a bunch of people dying. Compelling force? It might have been compelling natural force. But I all I'll I it was like it was a it was a it was a death well the thing they could have come out and said that right They basically said up who sure it's not a translation issue There are several translations of how it came out and it effectively amounts to some sort of compelling Overwhelming force did does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people die in

Autosy reports than we do maybe I'm not sure to be honest I'm not sure that that is that It might be like the way Russian language works and where they describe things. Like they might have categories for deaths in a compelling natural force might just mean like freezing to deaths in the same category as like dying in the Mojave Desert. I think that that's, I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational happened. I mean, when you become hypothermic, you can have, it's called paradoxical undressing where at your final stage of when you're so cold, you actually get hot and you take your clothes. off. And I would imagine if you're in the final stages of dying, you might do some funny things. And also... Would you cut your lips off, though? Would you surgically remove your lips? And where are the lips? But then the question is, like, is there an image of that? Like, can we see it? Like,

this is one of the things that people talk about all the time when it comes to crop circles, or excuse me, cattle mutilation. I put them all in the same category. Like, what fuck knows what that is. But cattle mutilation, one of the weird things that they associate with extraterrestrials or whatever they think it is, is that these cuts are very surgical. Yeah. And it's not an animal just tearing apart a cow that these cuts, they look like they're made with a scalpel or perhaps some sort of a laser. And also these creatures are completely drained of blood. So I'd like to, I wouldn't, but I've seen the cattle mutilation images and you're like, wow, that is strange. I'd like to see what their lips look like.

They, I do know that actually, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I posted about it, because the Diatlov Pass gets posted about quite a bit. But I think it was in 2022, Russia actually reexamined the Deatlov Pass mystery now and sort of said, okay, we're going to look at it again. And they determined that an avalanche, like a slab of ice broke loose, a huge slab. This could be totally wrong. I know it's an avalanche or slab of ice that they basically said was responsible for all of this. that it led to them somehow becoming exposed hypothermia and the like. But it doesn't really answer a lot of the questions in my mind. It certainly could have happened, as I told you, for whatever.

Also, why did they stop in the middle of the windslop side of the slope? I mean, they're... They probably were trying to make their way across and they couldn't do it. And they said, we have to stop, but just stop right here. I can't go any further. And they all argued, and then they decided to put a tent right there. It's also, I mean, you know this better than anybody.

When you get tired, you make poor decisions. That's what they're trying to do to you in buds, right? They're trying to make you quit. They're trying to break you down, right? When people get tired, they get very irrational. And they also have very little processing power. They don't think about all the possibilities, what could go wrong, what could go right. And they think they can't possibly keep going.

And the problem is if you have nine of you and one of you is a pussy, you know, you got a real problem. Like, do you let Bob die or do you stay here? here with Bob when you can keep going. And Bob is just like, we can't do this. Like, Bob, like, that's the horror movie scene, right? There's always one fucking guy. He's like, fuck this, man. I'm fucking staying right here.

Like, Jesus, Bob, we can keep walking, keep walking. That reality. And then count 10 steps more. And then just keep doing that. That, what you're describing is such a natural human thing, which is when someone, when the lowest common denominator in your group is struggling. even if you're frustrated a lot of times people have an inclination to lowering what you're doing to help that person in in seal training i mean what's made clear immediately is to some degree

that's noble to some degree but a lot of times you're going to get more people killed that way so those people that are going to hold you back in training have to be identified and kicked out now right and so it became clear that if you're the weakest link You're probably getting left behind in training. No. But then in real life, it's the reverse. Buds is a genius way of filtering out the pussies. It's genius.

It's the best way. You have to, there's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress. And there's some people through whatever, for whatever reason, at this stage of their life, they can't handle it. And maybe they will be in the future. Maybe this is going to be a good experience for them. They're going to toughen up.

Look, Gaggins talks about it all the time, about when before you ever got into the seals, he was 300 pounds and eating milkshakes. He was fat. He couldn't run around the block. But he decided to become a different person. And he did it. You can do that.

But at that moment, you're going to quit. Yeah. And so at that moment, we have to get rid of you. And maybe you can become someone in the future that won't quit, but right now you're quitting. Yeah, I sometimes get asked, not often, but I've been asked, you know, when you were going through selection, did you ever have a moment where you thought, or you thought about quitting and you suppressed it? And I only say this because I know this is shared amongst a lot of the people that I went through training with.

I didn't. I did not have a moment where I thought, oh boy, I'm on the precipice of quitting. I better, I better hold on. Did I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions and questioning, can I even do this? Definitely. but there's something like fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing to stop. And you learn that that is something that I believe is innate. Do you have the ability to keep going through failure and they put a lot of test gates into buds to basically force it upon you? Most notably the not even Hell Week. Hellweek is the most well-known test of endurance where you're awake for five and a half days, basically. But there's one that's even simpler.

that it's so easy if you're willing to do it. Easy is a stretch. It's not that hard, but you really need to be committed to doing it. And it's the 50-meter underwater swim. You do it day two of the first phase of training, and everybody knows you're going to do it. All you have to do is, okay, get in the pool, swim one length, and then swim back without surfacing until you're done.

It is probably just beyond what's comfortable for someone who's a decent enough swimmer, but you have plenty of lead time for this. You know this is going to happen. People will train for years before they go. When I did it, the first leg, it's stressful. But as soon as you've made the turn and you're on your way back, you realize that if you've committed to doing it, you're like, oh, this is really not bad. It's so quick. It's so short.

It's all over. People that would quit on that didn't quit at the end of the 50. They quit on the first leg. You're not physically done yet. You're mentally done. I mean, I'm generalizing, but you see that type of phenomenon in training quite a bit where it's, are you prepared to keep going through adversity? Or are you just going to say it's too much and I don't want to do it anymore? I wonder if they've ever sat down and tried to engineer a program to alter people's psychology.

You know, you would think that the more people that you can get that would be able to figure out a way through something very difficult where your mind wants. to quit your body wants to quit. The more people that you could figure out how to train to that position, the better. Or is it like, I have friends that are MMA coaches that don't want to work with anybody who needs a mental coach. Interesting.

They're like, you need a mental coach, you're in the wrong business. And they say that. Like, those guys are too unreliable. They'll tell it to you. Like, you need a mental coach. Like, you're two in your own head. You're not going to be able to perform. Yeah.

These guys are going to be able to lose, dust themselves off, figure it out, and come back and be stronger. and then there's some guys that like every big moment is the moment overwhelms them. And they're just, they just cave to the pressure. They just can't handle it. And then they go through some sort of a mental coaching session. But the core, their personality, whatever it is that's about them, what makes them them, is just fragile for whatever reason.

And the question is, I wonder if they've ever tried to engineer a program to strengthen people's psychology, just the same way you can strengthen people by lifting weights or by running or whatever. I wonder if there was a concerted effort to say, like, well, we have so many people crashing out. What if we had 50% less people crashing out, then we'd have 50% more elite operators? I know that when I went through training, and I have no idea if it's still the case now, but I was in seal training in earnest in 2011 and 2012. and there were psychologists on staff that you didn't you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch but I remember there being parts of training which were sort of funny because they punctuated the brutality

of training it would be we'd be out you know doing the obstacle course for an hour and then we're doing a four mile run then we're swimming then we're doing this we're getting beat up and then like now go in the classroom you go in the classroom and you're and you're talking to this woman who's a and she's teaching you how to like, it's called arousal control, you know, how to, how to take down your, your mental state in the middle of high stress moments and all the instructors are on the side like, you better listen to this, you know, and it's just funny. So there was attempts made, but I, coming from coming from having done it, the, the, there's such a wide variety of people that are successful in training that it's, I have, I have seen and heard that it's hard to pinpoint. what is the appropriate indication you're going to be successful? Like that's the thing they're trying to identify is what are the pools of people that traditionally do well in seal training? Because they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen.

But the two things they found, there's two places where the most mentally tough people, in terms of success in seal training. One is wrestling, basically any level of wrestling. Wrestlers have an incredibly high success rate in buds and water polo. Those are the two that they have determined. through their studies are the grittiest, most resilient folks when it comes to seal training. Interesting. Yeah. Water polo.

So in water polo, how deep is the water? I think it's more that they tread water the whole fucking time. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, does the water so deep that they can't touch the ground? No, no, you're treading the entire time. Whoa. And you're playing a game. Dude, there was a guy.

That's crazy. There was a guy in my class. So the way it works is you have your enlisted guys, and there's, you know, up, of 100 dudes in a class that are enlisted, and then you have, I think, maybe eight to 10 that are officer candidates. It's, yeah, we're all seal candidates. That's true. But the difference between an officer candidate and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous. The guys over here, the enlisted guys, are just like salt to the earth, just like, I don't give a fuck. We're going to see what happens. The officer candidates, they have some of the most impressive resumes that you

can have as like a 20-something-year-old kid. You have dudes that are, I was a Rhodes Scholar. I played, I walked on to the Stanford football team, that level of prestige. And also, I'm my family's friends with George Bush. And I'm also like a world-class swimmer. And I'm like an expert marksman. Those are the dudes that become your officer candidates because there's so few slots on any given year for these spots. They're, they're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed. It's so rare that an officer. candidate does not pass. Like an officer who's in buds, you might as well just call him a seal at that point. Wow. The vetting is crazy for seal. Not on the enlisted side. We're still figuring that out. But the officer's side, they're highly vetted. And one of the guys that was one of my officers in, in one of the classes I was in was a water polo player from the University of Tennessee. And he's this big, big strong guy. He's an awesome dude. And there's this part of training, halfway through training. It's second phase. It's broken into three phases.

and it's the water phase. And it's really, statistically, everybody who gets to second phase mostly makes it through. But it's because you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase, like Hell Week and the 50-meter underwater swim, that this is already the pool of people that's just going to push through the misery and pass stuff. So it's misleading. The second phase of training, I would argue, is exponentially more challenging than first phase. But the only people who do it are through first phase. since, oh, 90% of people pass second phase, but it's really hard. And there's two tests in particular within second phase that are notoriously just brutal.

One of them is called pool competency, which is a 20-minute exam of your ability to fix problems with your scuba tanks underwater. Or basically, you go to the bottom of the pool with your tanks on, and when your test begins, you're in the section of this huge pool called the combat training tank. There's like the six-foot section, then it slopes down to the nine-foot section. And then it slopes down to the 15 foot section. And your test takes place in the nine foot section. And you just crawl along the lane marker as if you're doing lap swimming. There's a lane on the bottom of the pool. There's like eight or nine lane markers.

And you crawl back and forth only in the nine foot section. And two instructors per student come down and turn your air off, tie knots in your hoses. And as soon as you're being touched, you've got to go into the fetal position and wait for like the attack to stop. It takes like 15 seconds, 30 seconds. You're out of air. And this is a 20-minute test. You're building up hypercapnia as you go. And then you've got to fix your problems.

And the problems get progressively harder to solve. But the procedures they teach you are the same procedures for every problem. If you go to step one, it doesn't work. You go to step two. If that doesn't work, you go to step three until you go all the way through your steps. But it teaches you calm. So even though you're on the last problem you're going to solve at minute 18 and you're about to pass out, you have to show them that you'll do step one, step two, all the way through.

So it's about being calm. I was horrible at this test, by the way. I passed by the skin of my teeth. This dude passed the test first try, but that's not where the story comes in. So this water polo player, he blazes through that test, no problem. The other test is just the tread. That's all it's called, the tread. You spend five minutes in the pool with your twin 80 tanks on, which are neutral in the water.

They're pretty heavy outside of the water, but they're cumbersome on your back. You got no fins. You got a weight belt on, hands up out of the water. Weight belt. Yeah, it's like five pounds or something. and you tread for five minutes. And that's the whole test. Hands out of the water.

Hands out of the water. So you only tread with your legs. No fins. Whoa. Tanks on. The only way to do it, realistically, is imagine, imagine hopping on like a bike, like in the gym and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue. Hold it for like three, four minutes. And don't, it doesn't, not even, you don't even need to go that fast, but it's constant.

That's the only way to do it. Unless you're an exceptionally talented. water polo player who's mastered the art of the egg beater, where they basically have found a way to move their legs that's like the most efficient way to tread water. And this dude, I kid you not, who blazed through pool comp first try, no problems whatsoever was like joking around after his test. He gets him for the tread and he could he could hold himself almost to his belly button, probably like nipple to belly button line fully out of the water. Just no problem. Just no problem. Like practically smiling because he knows this is my idea. domain. I can do this all day long. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever see. That's crazy. I would have never thought of that. First of all, I didn't know that water polo players had to tread the entire time, which is insanely

impressive. Like, how long is the game? Well, I don't know if they can go to the edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch water polo, they're treading. Most of the time, they're treading. I'm no water polo player, but my understanding is that the game is played while treading. Yeah. I never would have imagined. But now that you described it that way,

like, that might be the hardest sport on earth. Oh, dude. That makes baseball look so easy. I remember, like, David Wells or the Yankees? He's like a huge fag. I smoke it cigarettes in between innings. Hey, Ruth. Dude, it's crazy.

Eating hot dogs, big old belly. Oh, man. That's crazy. I remember in boot camps, this is not even, before you even get to Buds. There's actually, it's funny, the, when you go in, you know, as an, I went in as a civilian. So I signed this contract where basically you say, okay, I'm going to go to boot camps. become a sailor, and then I'll have my shot at going to Buds.

It's called the SEAL Challenge contract. And the way I looked at it is I'm like, okay, I've prepared for buds. That's what I, as a civilian, that's what I was training for. I didn't think at all about boot camp. Like, what's two months of Navy boot camp going to be? Because what my head is focused on is Buds. That comes after. So when I shipped out to boot camp, I had put virtually no thought into what those two months were going to be like in Great Lakes, Illinois.

I figured it was like, oh, whatever. I'll like march around, like fold some clothes, you know, whatever. And then I'll go do the real stuff out in San Diego. And so I get to Chicago, and it was like a reality check because you quickly realize that, first of all, if you're trying to be a seal and you're on the seal challenge contract, when you get to Great Lakes, you're segregated into a separate group. They're called the 800 division. I don't know if this still exists now, but it did in 2010. And there really aren't any SEALs or Speck Ops that are at Great Lakes that, I mean, there's a few. But for the most part, you're working with ordinary sailors that are putting you through training.

But imagine you're an ordinary sailor, and God love them. I've worked with amazing sailors across the Navy. And here comes the SEAL recruits in the 800 Division. They're civilians. They're not even sailors yet. There is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show up like, yeah, I'm going to bud. Like there's just an attitude of like the instructors they they want you to understand that like you don't have a clue what you're getting yourself into. And so in boot camp those two months, your your instructors are not seals, but they just like torture you because they're like, this is nothing compared to what you're going to have in buds.

And one of the things we would do is is there was all sorts of stupid stuff like pushups and whatever. But there was this treading thing that we had to do where we'd go in the pool at like five in the morning and like it's so cold. and they would line us up. So we're all facing, like if you were, I'd be right behind you looking at the back of your head. You'd be looking at the next guy's back of his head. And they'd give us bricks.

And you're just treading. And you got to pass the brick up and down the line. And periodically they'd give you two bricks. And so if anybody doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, quickly the bricks get handed off to like one person and no one wants the brick. You don't have fins on or anything. And guys are like sinking into the water like truly about to pass out and black out. But the level of oversight, not great because it's sort of like, you don't know what you get into.

Tread, hold those bricks. And it's just met. And they would leave us in there treading with bricks for so long that you're like, I'm going to drown. I'm literally going to drown if I keep this up. And then suddenly it would be over and you're like on the pool deck like vomiting. And you're thinking to yourself, holy shit, like is this, this is not even as bad as buds? And then you get to buds and you're like, no. No, that was worse.

Well, that's probably good then. It was nice. Yeah. That's funny. Had those guys even been through buds? No. Okay, so they were just making tough stuff for you to do. Put on all your turtlenecks.

We'd like put on all our stupid like neoprene turtlenecks, like seven of them. Because you have all the stupid clothing in your rack. And like, march around the compartment, the room you're in. And we would just like spend hours like marching around the compartment, sweating our ass off in our like turtlenecks. It's stuff like that. Or we do bird watching where they would have us just face a wall and be in attention for like two, three hours.

Just staring at paint, but it's just arbitrary. It's like you don't know what you're getting into Bud's going to be so much worse and like you don't even know what you're talking about. What kind of weird people want to do that to people? There is a lot of like you don't know what you're getting yourself into I know more than you I've done real stuff in the Navy but like they have this moment where we're still civilians and we have we haven't gone to training and they know that virtually all of us are going to quit. So this is a safe group to sort of flex around you know. Wow. So it was it was I hated boot camp. When I got out of boot camp, in boot camp, I was drinking their coffee.

And I was convinced it was, it was caffeinated coffee. It wasn't. And I told myself it was. I'm a big coffee drinker. And when I got out of boot camp, I went to dinner with my family. And I didn't eat anything. I just drank like nine cups of coffee and got so jacked up on caffeine and it just told stories about boot camp. They don't give you caffeinated coffee?

Well, there was like, it was coffee. But, I mean, it was like you pushed a button and this brown shit came out. And it was like, said cafe something on it. I was that, that's coffee. I'm not going to question it because I don't want to suck myself out. And I was drinking this shitty coffee. Yeah, I have some coffee. It's got some real coffee.

Jesus Christ, you're freaking me out. Oh, man. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, well, I mean, what we were talking about before, that there's no other process to figure out whether someone's going to be able to handle pressure than to put them through it and see what happens. If you're passing bricks, I mean, maybe that's not. the best example of it because it seems like those guys

were being a little sadistic. Yeah. And probably, at least you would imagine that what they're doing in buds is tried and proven. They know what they're doing. These guys, it seems like they were just getting off on the fact they could tell you what to do. This episode is brought to you by Fox Nation. Real

American freestyle wrestling is exclusively on Fox Nation. Every month, you get every feud, every match, and every belt. If you love the UFC, this is where it all began. And now one year after launching in Cleveland, RAF returns Saturday, August 22nd for its biggest event ever, RAF 12. UFC champions, Olympic gold medalist, world champions, and one of the strongest men on the planet all on one card.

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And truthfully, and I wasn't kissing anybody's ass. I wasn't trying to be, you know, follow the rules kind of guy. I just said, you know what? The training works. Like the training is unbelievable. I saw it for myself firsthand. So we were in Afghanistan in 2014, and this was the tail end of, this is my only combat tour I did. It was my first deployment.

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

and loads of different factions of fighters, the Taliban, Pakistani fighters, you name it. And so when we got in country in 2013, we turned over with, SEAL Team 8, and they said, basically, you know, your job here is to try to quell the flow of suicide bombers into Kabul, and there was a couple of the things they told us to focus on. But really, if you want some action, you just go to Zarganshaw, because they're so battle-hardened in there, the people that are still there, that if you go in there, they're going to fight you. You know, if you want to find weapon caches, they're going to be in there. And so over the course

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

So the city, it's not really a city. It's a village, but it's bigger than a village. It's somewhere between a city and a village for Afghanistan. So it's like mud huts, but like tight together. And it's really like well defined. You know, it's almost like the edge of Zarganshara just becomes vacant desert on the outside. It's like this really isolated spot. We entered the city with our vehicles and then began infilling into the city.

I forget exactly what our purpose was. I think there was like a bomb maker or something we were going after. But the rules of engagement that we were. operating under, effectively said you can't engage, you can't offensively engage anyone. Unless there's a couple of factors that could allow you to. But for the most part, you need to get shot at first to then shoot back. That's sort of the gist. And the people we would get into skirmishes with knew that a lot of times.

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

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

We can let them come into the courtyard and then open up on them. And there's a couple, two-story buildings that overlook the courtyard. So it's pretty gnarly. Our team lead, who was freaking awesome, is friggin' awesome. He stopped us. And he's like, hold on a minute. We took cover behind this bridge that was right behind us. And he's like, wait, let's figure this out.

But we realized that now that we know where they are, we know they're in those second-story buildings overlooking that courtyard. They're now, they can see us. If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We can't, like, call in an airstrike. We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So it's basically walking into an ambush. That's a bad idea. But if we go the other way, if we retreat, I told you that the edge of Zarganshaw, there's no cover.

It's just open desert, if you will. And so there wasn't really a good way to ex-fill back to our vehicles without getting shot in the back. They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot it just any time they want. And so we realized, because of where they're positioned, we either had to go forward into effectively a known ambush or retreat and hope they don't get the drop on us and shoot one of us. And it's a pretty high chance someone was going to get shot if we ex-filled. And so we sat there. We were thinking about it.

And we ultimately made the decision like, hey, we were Navy SEALs. Let's just go forward and process the threat. And so into the courtyard we go. It's on body cam. And, you know, it was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard. Again, broad daylight. It's quiet.

We had seen women and children run out of the village as we approached. So we knew only people here are going to be fighters. And just machine guns opened up on us in this courtyard. And I say this without, I don't mean this in a sort of crass way. But thankfully, the only people who were hit in the opening volley were our dog. and I believe two of the Afghan partner force guys that they got shot. Because if you're going to survive this,

you need the seals. You don't need anybody else. You need the seals to get out of this. And so we all took up our positions, sort of we expected this to happen. And it became like this crazy, disjointed, like one z, twozy breaking off, clearing buildings, sometimes by yourself,

just madness for like the next six hours. It slowed down. It was not constant, but it was like six hours of urban, sketchy roof to roof building to building shooting. And we were sort of getting our asses kicked. I mean, we just, we kept seeing people that would open up on us around like a corner. We'd go after them and they'd be gone.

And we knew there were tunnels dug into the ground all over the place for people to escape. And it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would vanish. And so finally, it's late at night. We've been there for six hours or so and we've gotten beaten up. No one's been killed on our side. the dog's fine. And we were sort of like, man, I guess we just got to go. You know, we didn't really accomplish anything.

We just kind of got beat up today and we'll come back another time. You know, it didn't go well. And as we're getting ready to leave and remember at this point, our group of 20-some-odd seals, there's Afghan partner force as well, but the seals that were on the ground, we had broken up into different fire teams, little groups of dudes. And I was with a fire team that was close to the exit we were going to be taking. And one of the drones overhead, I think was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas, they called out that they had seen what appeared to be military age men, so maims, as they're called, sort of in the vicinity of where we would be exfilling out of the city. And they weren't saying, you better go over there and, like, shoot them because rules of engagement say you can't do that.

It was just sort of a, hey, be aware. As you exit, they might be setting up on you as you're leaving. the city. And so our fire team happened to be closest, and we decided we would just go over there and take a look. Our understanding is, now it's nighttime, we're on night vision. We believed, based on what was being passed to us, that we could go down this alleyway that would come to a T intersection. And when we reached the end of this alleyway, there'd be this low wall, like six foot tall wall, and we could peer over the wall into this field where these maims are. And they didn't know if they didn't even know who they were. It could have been kids. It could have been nothing.

But we believed we'd be able to look over the wall and look out somewhere on the other side of this field. We'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment of what to do. So we super sneaky make our way down this alleyway being as quiet as we can. We get to that low wall and immediately we start hearing someone talking. It's not our guys. We start hearing Pashtun being spoken on the other side of the wall. And we realize that there's been a mistake, a lost and trans. and miscommunicated to us, we are now closer than you and I are right, the second to what

actually was, military-aged men. There was at least two. I've heard as many as five. I actually don't know the exact number, but there were fighters hiding on the other side of that wall. Intentions unclear, but they're right there, and they haven't heard us yet, and they're nervous. We can tell they're nervous.

They're right on the other side of the wall, and we are in a tough, tough spot here. Because there's seven of us. We're so close to them that if someone, if someone's... someone even so much just like farts right now, they're going to hear us. And so our team leader, who was incredible, he went on to go to Team 6. He's one of the best dudes I've ever met. He had to make an on-the-ground decision. We got to engage these guys.

We can see they have weapons. One guy looked over and said they have weapons. This is all nonverbal. We're like making hand signals and stuff on night vision. And so one of our guy, our team leader gets down on a knee, and he tells one of the guys next to me to stand on his leg and start shooting. And so over the wall, he starts shooting. and there was at least two guys over there that already had grenades

they'd pulled the pins out on. So this is the moment they've had this. They're holding the grenades for this. So as soon as the shooting started, grenades come over the wall. And there's a video of this. If the grenade comes, or you can't really tell.

But it literally hit my shoulder. One of the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell to the ground and detonated. But in the second that this happened, we were under a drone that had a targeted. strobe down on us. It was a flashing infrared strobe on us. Imagine if, like, God had a flashlight, and he was turning it off and on rapidly. And you can only see the light on night vision. It's this

cone of light that you're in, and this super intimate fight is happening. And I'm watching this grenade, time really slowed down. I see it for a second because the light's on. The light comes off. It disappears. I see it for a second. And I remember feeling it hit my shoulder. I'm not shooting. I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the wall as little shit's happening. and the thought I had was like, fuck, it's going to blow my head off. I know I'm dead. We're all probably going to die here in a second, but my mom won't be able to see me again. Like there will be no open casket.

That's the first thought that goes through my head. My head's going to be blown the fuck off. Hits my shoulder. And this is again, in a fraction of a second, the light comes on, goes off. It falls down lower and it's like halfway down. Now it's like halfway to the ground. And I'm thinking, oh, shit. I'm definitely going to die, but maybe my face will be intact.

And my mom can see me again. Light goes off, on, off, on. It lands in the ground. And I turn slightly. And I'm like, oh, shit, I might just lose my legs. Like, this is great. Like, I might live. And so all of us are in the lethal range.

Assuming this is a frag grenade, which I don't think couldn't have been. It had to be an old school pineapple grenade. We're all, all of us are in this horrible lethal zone. And two grenades go off. I tell people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my back side. It didn't hurt. It just felt like someone threw something at me. And then I'm just down on the ground. And my memory of what happened versus what actually happened or couldn't have been more different. It would take me years before I actually sat down and debrief this with the guy who

ultimately saved my life. But my memory is I go down and I couldn't get my gun. My gun had been the strap, the little strap had been blown off. My helmet had been blown off. So I'm not a night vision. I'm just, there's pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark. And it's just fucking chaos. The thing is, is the fighters in that town, they didn't give a fuck about killing each other. If they could kill me, they'd kill their teammates as well. And so RPGs are just being arbitrarily fired from all, not all across the city, but from other locations, just in the vicinity of where this is happening, because there was a lull before this. So it's just fucking madness.

And I couldn't stand up. I can't move. and I got dragged by one of my teammates. So this is my memory. I got dragged from, I'm at the head of the tea there. They brought me down the stem of the tea, if you will. And I just got placed up against a wall. And I'm sitting there, and I have these tourniquets that are on my chest, that we rubber-band

them to our chest specifically so they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in your limbs. And I was so weak and fucked up from this blast that I literally couldn't pull the turnicets off. And there's, I don't even know if anyone's alive. basically at this point. I don't even know what's happening down in the contact zone, which is like 20 feet away from me. All I hear is gunfire, it's madness. And at any point, I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking kill me. Like, I'm dead. I'm dead

no matter what here. And so I had this true, in my mind, like near death experience where I sat there. It's relatively well illumined. And I suddenly lost my hearing. Like it's gone, completely gone. And there's good illuminations. so I can see this small alleyway. I can see this flashes of light as rounds are coming in. And I just, I'm like, I'm in my head. I'm so aware that I'm alive, but I'm dying. And then my vision goes, I'm completely blind.

Like, can't see. I can't hear anything. But I was so lucid in my mind, so aware that I was alive. And I tell people that on a day-to-day basis, you live and you don't think about it. You don't wake up and actively live. You don't think. Today I'm going to breathe. Today my heart's going to be.

You just do it because that's your entire experience is being alive and your body knows how to do that. Your brain knows how to be alive. You also know how to die. You just haven't done it yet. And I had this really distinct feeling of like, oh shit, this is what it feels like when you shut down. It didn't hurt. It wasn't sad. It was just couldn't have been more matter of fact.

And all I was thinking about, two thoughts. I had, what will my obituary say? nothing in terms of substance, but will it say Jonathan Allen was killed in action or John Allen. So I was hung up on that

and I was also thinking about my wife and how she'd be notified at home and I was thinking I wish we'd had kids because now I don't have a legacy. And so I had this feeling of like letting go.

I don't know. That's so cliche but it physically felt like I had to let go. And I remember feeling the impact of the ground as I sort of killed over and I thought that was it.

Like, I'm about to die. This is the end, you know. But then out of fucking nowhere, the legend that he is, his name is Kyle, he's a seal, fucking comes out of nowhere and he grabbed me and he put tourniquets on my legs. I'm still, like, in my blacked out zone here, but I slowly regain sight and hearing. And the scene we're in is still terrible. There's still chaos happening everywhere. And Kyle, who's a sniper, he's a medic, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's, he's, he's, he's,

the calm astute under pressure. He's like, hey, it's going to be okay, buddy. It's all good. Stop the bleed. Like, just stay here. Like, you know, put your gun up if you can. I'll be right back. Like, literally in hell all around us.

Couldn't have been more calm. He just runs down back to the contact zone. Comes back up. He brings another guy out who's lunged collapse. He's patching him up, smiling. Everything's fine. Meanwhile, so I'm starting to see now as I'm regaining consciousness, if you will. I'm seeing my teammates who have also been fucked up from this grenade.

But only me and one other guy were, so affected by the grenade that we couldn't function. It was me and this guy whose lung had collapsed. He was like barely able to breathe. So we're down, but the other like five dudes, it's like, it's your job to get us out of here now because we're fucked. We are pinned down and fucked here. One guy, the team lead, in one ear, he was working with multiple air assets overhead, calling in what's called a danger close air strike, which is you're effectively calling in an air strike on yourself. You need special, uh, initialing from your higher officer. I think, I think you're command, not your commanding officer, like one more senior than you has to approve the drop,

because in essence, you could kill yourself doing it. So he was calling in an airstrike that needed to be exact, like fucking exact on the other side of that wall. And then in the other ear, he's communicating with the rest of our disparate teams, which are broken up across the city, trying to tell them where we are. He's got two comms happening, and he's physically pulling people out of the contact zone with Kyle to get them to cover. And he's engaging the enemy and we're getting shot at.

Holy shit. He's a team six, that dude. Everybody went into like flow state. I don't even know how to describe it and I'm fucking worthless. I'm not in flow state. I'm fucking dead state. They hoisted me up

and we ran like a mile because there was no way to extract us because of how densely populated it was or the buildings were so tightly together. Could you move your legs? They were like fucking, pillars. I was supported on shoulders hobbling. I was not able to run. No. In the tourniquets, they cut off circulation to your limbs because I was bleeding profusely from my legs.

So they were cinched off, which kills the circulation. At a minimum, you got very dead legs. But they ran me to a hot extract where there's a fucking helo that came in coming in guns blazing. They throw us in the helo. Now get this. Me and the other dude with the lung, we get thrown on the helo. And we just leave with the medical team. Those fucking dudes, those five dudes, Still on the ground, had to fight their way back into the city to go reconnect with the rest of the element who again he's calling the air strike he called in was with it was perfect. I think he got an award for it. He hit exactly in the right spot. He called in the exact right spot like under the most duress you could imagine. But like so my mental image of what happened is under truly like I witnessed life and death. I was in a life and death scenario and I got to be fully an audience for it. Every mother. was fucking perfect at their job. Like literally rounds flying everywhere. Hey, what's going on? Up got your legs all tied off here. Hey, what's going on calling this airstrike over? Couldn't be calmer. That was it. And so my debris point was it fucking works. The training works. Wow. What a

fucking story. Holy shit, dude. There's an addendum to it. I want to hear the addendum. Yeah, so after we got medevaced, so I'm in the, I'm in the helicopter. and at this point, I don't know, I don't know the state of my injury. All I know is a few minutes ago, I thought I died, you know, like I don't really, I'm happy to be here now,

but we get in the helicopter and that crew was amazing, I think there were PJs, Air Force PJs, which are like spec ops, Air Force, I think. They were fucking great, but they were like,

hey, do you want, what's the, what's the drug? Oh my God, it's the one, the pain killer drug, morphine, morphine. And I said, no, I didn't have any pain,

but I was like, I'm worried I might die, and I want to be lucid for it. And they're like, okay, now I think you're going to be okay. But I was like in my head that I might die. I don't know. And so we get medevaced out of Zarganshar

and they fly us right to this nearby base, very close by called Shank. And when we get there, there's obviously doctors and nurses that are there specifically for this. And so even though it was the middle of the night, they had been told, hey, you have two casualties,

you know, the guy with a collapsed lung and myself. To be honest, I don't really know exactly what they were told, but I would imagine they were told, get ready for some type of surgery for both of them. And so we fly to fobshank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher. My clothes have been fucking cut off of me. Like my dick's hanging out.

Like I'm in disarray. Like I'm all fucked up. And I really, I don't even know. I think I'm going to be okay because at this point I've made it here. And no one's acting like I'm literally about to die. But I don't know. I don't really know how bad it is. And they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy.

And it's so bright, like so bright inside of there. You can barely open your eyes. And it's just a sea of all these doctors and nurses that are ready to perform whatever needs to happen because they don't know. They don't know what needs to be done. But as soon as I get in there, I see in the back corner of this relatively small medical tent, like a shanty medical tent is maybe like 15 seals that were not on the mission with me. There are other guys in country.

There are other Navy SEALs. It's the middle of the night. And they've put on the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms. These are like their BDUs. These are, these are not nice. But in Afghanistan, on a deployment, this is the best shit they had. They clearly had been tracking, because you can track missions in real time when you're overseas. They saw the call signs come across that seals had been wounded and were being brought here for treatment. I have no sense of what exactly they knew. But clearly, whatever was passed indicated that one of us or both of us could die. And so these dudes were in the tent in case we died. They're my friends. They're my friends. I know them all personally. And so I'm being wheeled in. And the gravity of what's happening was like a fucking ton of bricks because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been going on. And I see that the looks on these guys' faces.

And they're wearing these uniforms and they're all standing almost like at attention in the corner. And they're there in case I fucking die. It's like I'm going to my own funeral. And so I'm put on the, they swore me, not them. The doctors swore me and they get me ready for debris. which is just to pull the shrap in a lot of my hips in my my my leg and the guy was like I'm gonna give you I think it was ketamine he's like you're not gonna this is it like good luck to you and he like gave me ketamine and I passed out or whatever they gave me I completely passed out

and then it's like I have no memory and I fucking wake up in Germany I'm fucking Germany and I'm just yeah you're you're in you're fine yeah your legs are all fucked up but you're gonna live keeping your limbs and then I think it was seven days after that I'm back home in Virginia hobbling down the Home Depot the fucking aisle just no transition I was just killing people overseas and now you're going

Yeah What was the extent of the injuries Honestly I was so fortunate It was a big big hole in my ass Like a like a I think three or four inch chunk The big issue with it is It was so deep into my ass

That they had to keep opening it so that it would not heal in reverse, you know, because it can pocket the, and then just inside of my, my leg. I mean, basically, I was spared, like, it was just a massive flesh wound from underneath my knee all the way up to my back. And then I also, this is the part that was the worst, to be honest, legs fine. I have a little bit of residual soreness. At this point, there's a little bit of shrapnel in my leg, but they're like pieces of sand. They only, on the hot day, I might notice it. But I, from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders. I truthfully don't know if this actually happened,

but he said as much. And I tore both of my labrums, a slap tear. It's a relatively common injury. And I had the, I had a, it's called a biceps tendinesis surgery done on my right. Basically, it was so painful. I couldn't really use it. But it's this surgery where they remove a portion of your bicep and they restaple it, but it's sort of a band-aid doesn't really fix the problem. And the shelf life of a biceps tendonesis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading. And I'm now at the point where my shoulder fucking sucks. And I, like in the gym, I have to avoid pressing. I have to avoid overhead stuff.

And it's just where the bicep tendon is? No, so what happens is the labrum tear itself never got fixed. They just remove some of the tension on one side of the tear. but still over time, it continues to tear down the labrum. So effectively, my labrum just over time, has continued to tear, and I'm getting some additional pain. I just had an MRI done, and they're like, you know, you had the bicep tendonesis done. There's not a whole lot more you can do.

You can do stuff to fix it, but a lot of it is just going to do more damage than good. And so I'm probably staring down, not chronic fucking pain or whatever, but something like that. Have you done these stem cells? No. No. Okay. How long are you in town for?

Tonight? That's it? No, I can come back. I'm going to bring you into ways to well. See what they could do for you. Whatever I can do. It's a fucking huge pain. Yeah, while you're here, we should try to get you in.

Yeah. Maybe I can get you in right after we're done. You could just drive right over there because it's not far from here. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's a huge issue. Guarantee you can help you. If you fucked around with peptides at all? No, I've seen them all over the place by it. Yeah, you should.

there's a lot of things that they can do that can radically help you. One of the things they can do, it'll definitely decrease a lot of the inflammation and help heal. And, you know, there's some evidence. How old are you? 37. Yeah, you're still young, man. There's a lot of evidence that labrum tears can be healed with stem cells and without having to go through surgery, depending on the extent of the tear.

Yeah. I'm open to it. Dude, I'm a big believer. It's fixed me. I've had a lot of problems where I was like, I need surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon told me, for sure you need shoulder surgery. I never got it done. He's like, you could rehab it.

This was more than 10 years ago. He's like, you could rehab it, but you're going to need surgery. It's 100% now. Did you, oh, your shoulder's good now? 100%. Oh, damn, dude. I do all my kettlebell work with 70 pound kettlebells. I don't have any problems.

Windmills, cleans, preys, renegade rows, guerrilla cleans, no problems. How much you're cleaning? 50s. You just gorilla cleans? I do it for reps. Do you do barbell clean? No, no, I don't lift anything heavy. When I do guerrilla cleans, I either do 50s or 70s.

My whole kettlebell workout is either 50s or 70s. And sometimes I work out with 35s just for the warm-up. Like I'll do like warm-up stuff. Like I'll do like rotation exercises with 35s, things where I'm like big halos where I'm just really opening up my back and getting... When did you get into doing kettlebell stuff? I've seen you post like the demon, the demon bell. Are the Gorilla Bell?

The Gorilla Bell. Yeah. Those are the 70s. Those are the shit. Those are, I really got into farmers carries. That's what the, I'm using the, the, the gorillas are like my best friends lately. I just do these, I have this big, long driveway with a hill, and I do these gorilla carries. It's like a 200-yard driveway.

And I do these gorilla carries where you take, well, you know, with those farmers, farmers carries with those gorilla kettlebells. The 70s? Yeah, and I take them up the hill and down the hill. That's going to shit, dude. My grip has got. gotten so much better. And on top of it, it's like my legs have gotten better. And it feels like my whole body is like more connected, if that makes any sense. Because when you're walking, you know that guy Tom Havilland? You know who he is? Oh, fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Everybody knows

that guy is. Dude, the beast. One of the things that I got from him is he's talked about the importance of picking up heavy things and walking with them. He's like, if you really want to get strong, he's like strength is not just lifting heavy stuff, like stationary. Like carry things. And so he does a lot of weird, like... His zircher's like fucking 500 pounds. But he does a lot of weird, like off weight stuff, where he has more weight on one side than the other and switches him.

He has a chain behind him, and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing farmer's carries with two hands. He does a lot of crazy stuff like that, and obviously the guy's a fucking freakishly strong person. So I'm like, okay, well, let me see if there's anything to this. So a few months back, I really got into farmer's carries. And I first just would do it.

This is him. Oh, be fucking freak. Yeah, the trademark shirt he's got on. He always has that shirt on. And he always see his back and he's like six, eight, almost 400 pounds. He's a fucking giant human being. I love his page. Yeah, he's a real freak.

But this thing that he really believes in is carrying things and walking around with them. And now I really get it. I really get it. Because I've been doing it now for at least three, maybe almost, it's going on four. months and it's completely transformed my legs. My legs are way thicker. They're stronger. My back feels better. My connection between like my entire core and my back is better. Like everything feels stronger. I'm stronger in every other workout that I do. I feel way stronger when I do like cleans and presses and do windmills and everything else. Because when you're carrying stuff like

that. It's like your whole body. Your core has to stay tight. Your back has to stay tight. Everything's dealing. And then when you're up at the top of the hill, you're like, motherfucker, and your forearms are literally on fire and you try to hold on of these things. And, you know, I got a chalk ball in my pocket and I reach in there and powdered my hands back up. And as soon as I get my hands back going, I do it again. And that has changed everything. That's changed everything. But one of things that I've noticed is I very rarely get injured as opposed to my friends who do like traditional weightlifting stuff like power lifting or just like benching heavy squatting heavy deadlift heavy those dudes are all my friends who do that are always getting hurt they're always getting

I'm guilty of that to some degree everybody is it says but you think that's the only way to get strong and I don't think that's correct I don't think it's correct I think um the most important thing is volume with reasonably heavy things where you're not hurting yourself like 70 pounds is I you know I do I could probably do 20 reps of cleans and presses but I only do 10 and then I rest for like five I do the pavl tautzlene method what's that pavel tautzelline is the guy really brought kettlebells over to America okay and he's a famous kettlebell coach for strong first it's which is his company and he's this this philosophy that the that strength is a skill and you shouldn't practice to skills when you're exhausted.

And this whole idea of working to failure, I mean, obviously if you want to be a bodybuilder or even a professional power lifter, that's a different thing. But if you want to get strong, the most important thing is the amount of work that you do, not exhausting the muscle with one set. Got it. And so what he has you do is, if you can do 20 reps, do 10,

and then wait five minutes and do another 10. You got the same volume of work, but you're never exhausted while you're doing it. Your form is always perfect. and you're still getting the same amount of work. So my workout's like, I have to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettlebell workout. Fuck, dude. Yeah, I know, but it works.

Dude, that's my... It works. And again, I'm fucking never injured. If I'm injured, it's like a little tendonitis here or something bothering me on my lower back a little, but it's never significant. My trainer, John Finkst, I've been working together a couple years now in Jersey. He's the man. He's a big believer in that. You were talking about I could do 20, but I do 10 instead.

He's like all about not form till you die because there are times where it's like time to throw some English and get some volume in Right. But he keeps me from ego lifting and keeps me from doing stuff that it's like over the top. Yeah, ego lifting's a problem. Especially with dudes. The one time I hurt my back really bad, it was deadlifting like 450 with the- Like just traditional grip? No, the trap bar deadlift.

Yeah, the trap bar. What is it, hex bar? What do you call that thing? Yeah, trap bar. So I love those things. I fucking love those things. It's great. It's great.

But I was like, let's get big. And then I felt, think, you know, that, and luckily it was muscle, not like spinal,

not a disc issue. It was lower back, left lower back. It fucked with me for like a six-month period. I bet. Oh, so,

and I was like, I'm not doing that anymore. And from that moment on, I got really into just doing kettlebells. And I'm stronger than I've ever been. I don't think you need to lift really, depending upon what you're trying

to do. You know, and if you're trying to become a power lift or sure, you need to lift heavy. But if you just want to be strong and functional, I don't think you need to lift heavy. I don't believe that. Dude, I, uh, right now I'm on like a pretty big cut. Like I do a summer cut each. Well, this is my second summer. I've done that.

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

obsessed with hang cleanses, just like barbell hang cleans. I, dude, I'm so fucking, I've gotten up to 225. Very proud of that. But I, it's like the one exercise, no matter, we do so many. That doesn't fuck with your shoulder? Actually, no, it doesn't. It's pressing. It's this motion. Interesting. It's the press. Dude, if I press like a fucking 50 pound dumbbell. Wow.

But I can do it clean. That's part of the reason I discovered it is it didn't fuck with my shoulder. But I have been on a quest to like find the right way to train for cleans because one of the issues with doing cleans with a barbell and maybe I'll do kettlebells is I have a scar right here that I broke my collarbone when I was seven and my collarbone juts out because it healed slightly in the wrong direction. And so every fucking time I'm in a block of doing cleanses, I always have this just like recurrent infected wound on my fucking cold.

And then like in the comments of every video, they're like, dude, what's wrong with fucking you got staff? And so, but anyways, the kettlebell cleanses. Yeah, it sounds like you do cleans and shit with, with kettlebells. Yeah, that's probably something I need to consider. Yeah. And it's not easy to do. You know, like 70 pounds is when you're doing.

like 10 reps and I'm doing like three sets of 10 reps. That's fucking brutal. But it's also the clean and press from the ground up, right? It's all one motion and this continuum motion, you know, over the course of 10 repetitions, it's a good solid minute plus of work. So you're working really hard for a minute. So you're getting a little bit of a cardio benefit from it. But if I'm real consistent with it, you know, I'm 59 now.

I just turned 59. So it's just about staying strong. That's all I'm concerned with. not losing any of my strength, not losing any of my mobility or flexibility or anything. I'm constantly stretching, constantly just, I believe in maintaining. And I think most people don't do that. That's why we have a very distorted perception of what's possible. I think we think that people deteriorate with age, like, so radically that it's just a, it's just a, it is what it is.

It's fact. It's going to happen to you. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that most people just don't have the willpower to keep maintaining correctly, and they're not supplementing their hormones and taking peptides and also optimizing their nutrition. I think if you do all of those things, you're pretty, I'm personally shocked at what I can still do. When I was a kid, you're fucking jacked, dude. When I was, thank you.

When I was a kid and I thought of a 59-year-old, oh my God, that guy's dead. That's a dead man. He's fucking, probably barely open. He's literally dead. Barely open a jar of pickles, barely fucking make it down a flight stairs. And I have just fucking zero problems, you know. I have one fucked up knee from my martial arts days where I had my meniscus removed in a big chunk of it. And it still fucks with me.

But it doesn't fuck with me in terms of function. It only fucks with me in terms of like I'm worried it's going to become arthritic over time. Because there's nothing between the cartilage. The cartilage is banging against each other. Yeah. And I broke it skiing once, right where the cartilage meets the, bone but I think that with the the improvements and all these biological therapies like stem cells and peptides I can maintain it and that's what I'm

doing so it keeps me out of jiu-jitsu because that's the one thing that really really rips on your joints especially my knee every time I've done it's like fucker it just gets I don't want to do anything like my friend Matt's Herrer he had a knee replacement and he's younger than me and I'm like yeah but it's Jiu-Jitsu it's just like you're constantly in weird positions and pushing and someone's fucking trying to heel hook you and you're defending. It's like everything is getting yanked around and then it's sore but you still go back the next day because you want to train because you're addicted.

Yeah, dude. Yeah. I found that my, when I was in the teams, I was in good shape, I sort of by default. And then I got out and I sort of hovered around like, I'm still relatively young. It's fine. And then this whole Mr. Ball and YouTube thing happened. And I, in a way, adopted the same mindset that made me successful in getting through training, which is like this obsessive, got to make more videos.

You know, I've had my viral moment, like grow at all costs. But all of my health went out the window. Dude, I would take me about, I don't know, like 26 hours-ish to do. I'm going to make a video hitting post on YouTube. And then even though all I wanted to do was sleep, my immediate reaction at like three, in the morning would be just slam like four, five, six drinks and then go right to bed. Like, I don't even

feel it. I just would drink and go right to bed. A drink just to go to sleep? I didn't even, it was almost like, here's your reward, suck down these fucking drinks. Oh, I get it. And then, but I got so grossly out of shape. Like, dude, I was like 200 pounds of just

fat and I had this huge ponytail that I grew that I looked really good. If you can pull it up, dude, I look so fat Gross. But then it finally occurred to me that like, wow, you're like, you're entering like true dad bodd territory and there's just no excuse. And so sometime in like 23, 24, I was like, I got to be like an adult again and train. And it, dude, it's revolutionary. Oh, dude, that's crazy. There's a, there's a good shot of my disgusting, let's see,

Mr. Ballin, look at Mr. Ballin fat. I think that'll probably do it. That's not to be rude or anything. That's a decent one. That one's recent. Which one? And that one's sort of reason. The second one in there, that's not even that bad. Well, the first picture you pulled up, you get it.

You see there in that image. You can see a little ragged going on there. But yeah, just. Well, you got to do what you got to do when something starts happening. And, you know, you realize like, oh, my God. It's like starting a fire in the woods. Oh, yeah. You got to blow on it.

You got to put some fucking little twigs on it. You gotta get that fucker going. Like once. And then you've had, congratulations, because you've had amazing success. Like, what do you have like 11 million YouTube subscribers? Yeah, 11 million? That's incredible, man. That's really cool.

Dude, it's, it's, I can only imagine what you've been through. But the thing that I now, this started in 2020 and it's 2026, I have had some incredible highs. The early days of after the viral moment and I'm like, posting stuff that I like upload a video and literally the next day, it's like, you've made $20,000 from yesterday to now. And like I've never in my life made any real money ever. It's almost overnight. And it grew and grew. And then it's like I signed a deal with Amazon like 10 months after starting a podcast. I actually, I remember when you got your first deal with Spotify, I remember that was like, I didn't even know it was possible for a podcast or anything to sign like the equivalent of a professional sports level contract.

And then it's like less than a year after the start of the Mr. Ballin podcast. I'm partnering up with Amazon. It was a $62 million deal. And I say that because, dude, my life got so much better and so much fucking worse at the same time. What was the worse? Oh, God. So there's like the little stuff. You know, actually I just had a lawsuit close. They played guilty to theft. And a bunch of, so I started a house renovation project when I was living in a house in Pennsylvania when this thing kicked off. And I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money. I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house. Before long, I'm like adding fucking crazy shit to my house. They ended up gutting the house to the studs because they're going to remind. model it, but they didn't do any work. And now they kind of had me. My house is wrecked. I'm living in a rental. They're stringing me along. And so they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and never

did any work. And so I suit them. That's a little thing. And then over the course of the next several years, dude, I've had I've had people take advantage of me in just the most personal deep-cutting ways, ways that in a, if you were to like write a movie, you know, here's the scene of somebody who suddenly comes into money and like the bad the pitfalls of that of people coming out of the woodwork to to take from them the things that happened to me with with with some family and with some close friends and with you know business partners is just like what are you fucking kidding me like this was all just an angle like you had an angle on me the whole time like this was a fucking con well people think about people that come into money like that the same way they think about a large

corporation if they like slip on the floor like at target like ooh I'm going to they get paid. They don't think, I'm all right. It's fine. It's my fault. I slipped. No, they think, oh, this is an opportunity. Big time. And they look at a guy like you who's, you know, through your own hard work and stumbling upon this idea and following through with it, made a bunch of money. They're like, I can get some of that money. They don't even think of you as a person anymore. They think of you as a target. I, uh, you got to keep your circle tight. Dude, that's the thing. I got Antonio out there. He's like my right hand man. He's a former homicide. detective like he actually he came to me to be my house manager and one of the first things he said

to me is he's like I don't give a fuck about your content dude I think it's stupid and I was like you're you're the guy for me but he's been awesome because he just like keeps everybody around me sort of like vetted but yeah dude it's that's important man because people will sneak through and sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them other people see them as like this guy's got an angle he's a scumbag be careful and you you know you let people in your circle and then they're like when they're around you they're putting on an audition they're pretending to be someone they're not they're pretending to be someone that you're going to want to hang out with and what they're using you is they're just thinking of you as a springboard or as a way to get

money i would imagine for you just given i mean dude you are podcasting like if there is literally people are like hey you want to be the next president you better go on joe's show like i can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens around you and your circle to get where I'm sitting right now. And I got to be honest, I don't know how you'd be able to sift through people that are trying to meet Joe and interact with you and people who are trying to get in with Joe so Joe will interview them. Well, the good news is I don't really interact with anybody. That's the right approach. So the way I even get like suggestions is one, I see something that I'm interested in. And I, I, yeah, I, um,

I have a guy and I either call him, text him or email him and say, hey, let's try to get this guy on. This guy's got a great book or she's got a really interesting documentary or whatever it is. And then there's, I get these people that submit to want to be on the show. So I get a list of those that, you know, there's a guy that goes through them that makes their legit. And then by the time they get to me, it's filtered out to what is actually going to be interesting. So there's not a lot of, you know, people meeting me that are, and the people that are, and the people that do meet me usually I never want to have them on like if somebody just like comes up to me I have to be on your podcast I'm like nope you definitely don't I already know you don't you don't

you definitely don't have to be on so this is a crazy conversation no one has to do anything you know and it's people reveal themselves you know they just do they you know over time it takes a little bit you know it's not it's not instantaneous but over time people reveal themselves and it's just the key is you know just being open And there's also people surprise you. You meet a lot of really interesting people. You know, you run into people that you didn't expect would be fascinating and they are. You know, there's a lot of that too.

It's just you got to be present, just not buy into any of it. That's the real key. No matter how big it gets, just keep doing the thing that you do. So all I do is talk to interesting people. That's it. It's the right way to approach it. It's not that complicated. And as long as I continue to do it,

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

I enjoy watching that. I enjoy listening to it. And I always enjoy talking to interesting people. So as long as I just keep enjoying talking to interesting people, I think people will keep enjoying watching it. And it's a nice exchange. Works. It's real simple.

But I keep it that way. I don't ever think like, oh, this guy's famous. He'll have a bunch of followers. This will be a good episode because I'll get a lot of views. I don't think like that. I only think, you know, because it's like a lot of the people that are on my show, no one's ever heard of them. They're just an interesting person that I found on YouTube

or an interesting person that I found, you know, in a documentary or whatever it is. I think it's the point you make about how you, I think for me anyways, the one thing I've come back to over the past several years of doing this is truthfully, even though there are times where, you know, creating content is obviously, it is a job in the sense that we have a recording schedule

and we have things that we have to do, as you obviously do too, amongst whatever else you're doing. The one thing that I fucking love doing is telling stories. I mean, I really feel like that's the place where I'm... You're a really good storyteller. Well, thank you. You have me on the edge of my seat, rather, with your Afghanistan story. Fuck, man. That was incredible.

You're really good at it. Thank you. And the other one, too, the Russian one, too. You know, a great story resonates with people, especially a creepy one, which is why I think, you know, you've picked the perfect angle. Yeah. Because a great creepy story, like you hear a great creepy story. Like, everybody's like, whoa, and then what happened?

Have you heard of the, the Headless Valley? No. In your comings and goings on the show, the Nahani Valley? No. I got a good story for you. You want to hear it? Okay. Okay.

So in Canada, there's this section in the Northwest called the Northwest Territories. Are you familiar with this? Yes. Okay. So for those that are not, the Northwest Territories is roughly four times. the size of Germany. But Germany has something like 87 million people who live there

and in this space in Canada, this rugged space, there's like 45,000 people that live there. So it's four times the size of Germany and basically not populated. It is as remote as it gets. Population of dripping springs.

Not even. Not even. Dribbing Springs bro. Four, dude. And so within the Northwest territory there's this even more remote stretch that's called the Nahani Valley. And the Nahani Valley today, it's a protected park. It's a

Canadian protected park. But even still, even though it's a park you can go visit, it's nearly impossible to get to. To get there by boat, you have to traverse these rapids. I think it's a very treacherous ride to get there by boat. There's no established roads into the Nahani Valley. You can hike there. It's brutal to hike there. You can fly there, but it's only through chartered float planes. So it's a difficult place to get to. But the Nahani Valley, in particular, when the story takes place, which is like the early 1900s, because of how isolated it was, it's like one of the parts of Earth that's like untouched by humans. And so the only people that would be in this huge sprawling valley, it was like an oasis of nature, they would see things that

are just like so gorgeous, like untouched nature. But in the early 1900s, there was this push. from gold prospectors to go out into the Nahani Valley because they figured because it's so untouched by humanity, there's bound to be gold to be found in the Nahani Valley. Now, there were some indigenous tribes like the Naha tribe. They were out there. There's some lore surrounding how they might have abandoned their settlement around the time the story takes place. But there were indigenous tribes that lived out there. But for the most part, it's like this sort of vacant stretch in this already isolated part of the world. And so in 19, I think it's 1905, these three brothers, these three prospectors, the McLeod brothers, Charlie, Willie, and Frank, who are their seasoned gold prospectors,

they decide they are going to head off into the Nahani Valley and go try to strike it rich. And it's even harder to get into the valley back then, as it is today. It required for them, they had to, they actually had to build a boat. They had to bring pieces of a boat, and they would take it up a rapid or down the rapid, and they'd have to disascend. the boat, carry it up like these rock faces to get like, because there's waterfalls they had to get past, and then bring the boat further and further into this valley. And it's like this, it's just crazy how much work goes into getting out there. But these three brothers, they find their way into the valley. And they get to the stretch of this river called the

flat river, which is anything but it's raging rapids. But there was this little embankment against this huge forest and like mountains off in the distance. And they made their camp there. and there's no one around. I mean, this is pristine wilderness, and they start sifting, sluicing for gold. And it's just fucking gold everywhere. It's like the sand is gold. There's gold everywhere.

They find so much gold. And they can't believe it. They've struck it completely rich here. And so after a whole day, I think they did two, three days even, of just getting all this gold, they pack all their shit back up in their boat that they've assembled.

And they begin making their way back out again, which should be easier because now I think a lot of it you're going with the current. I don't even know how they get up there with the rapids going one way. But either way, they begin making their way out and their boat capsizes and they lose all their gold. The boat breaks up. They narrowly are able to salvage the pieces and they come ashore and they build their boat again. And they're like, oh, my gosh, we've lost so many supplies. This is horrible.

You know, the best we can do here is leave and come back with more supplies because we know there's gold here. Like this is devastating, but no one's going to be here. We can come back. We can get more gold. So they leave. And once they get back to town, Charlie, one of the brothers decides, you know what, it's not worth it. That was really sketchy. I don't want to die out on the flat river.

You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, oh, we got to go. We got to go out there. And so fast forward a year, Charlie's still saying, I will not go back out there. But Frank and Willie, they decide to go. And they recruit this other guy. I think his name is Robert Weir. Robert Weir. And so the three of them go back into the valley to strike it rich. And, you know, Charlie is aware that they're going out there. He's staying back. But he knows they're going out. He knows where they're going because he went there with them. And he expects they're going to be gone for, I think, it was going to be a whole year. And you can imagine how much effort goes into getting out there. They were going to live out there, I think, for the summer and just get as much gold as they could and come out. But some amount of time passed, let's call it a year when Charlie starts to become suspicious because they haven't come out of the valley yet. And this is 19. There's no way to talk to them.

And so another whole year passes. We're two years deep into this. And still, these guys have not returned from the Nahani Valley. And so at this point, Charlie is thinking there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers. I got to go find him. And so he puts together a group of people to go see what happened to his brothers. And so he makes his way.

He starts getting into the valley and he reaches this stretch of, this is just to give you a mental image of where he's going. to get to that segment of the beach where they had been two years prior when Charlie was with them, because that's where he's assuming they're going to be, they had to pass through these canyons. There's four canyons that go, I think it's Canyon Four, Canyon Two, Three, One. They're all just called Canyon One, Two, Three, Four. But they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are just ominous places. There are these stretches like Canyon Two is this 10-mile stretch of very deep water.

I don't know how deep, I want to say it's at least 100 feet deep, where the water goes all the way up to the cliff face. It's just sheer cliff face on either side. It's like the scar in the earth where it's hundreds of feet tall cliffs on either side that are sheer. And it's just, you know, call it 100 feet at least of water down. There's nowhere to stop. Once you're in this canyon, you must go to the end of the canyon. There's nowhere to go. Oh, fuck.

And the Naha tribe, who, the tribe that had lived there for a while, they had always talked. talked about, they called them the Wahila. They said there were these creatures, these white, tall creatures that would roam the forest in the Nahani Valley, and they would make these screeching sounds, and they were, you know, they would attack people. It's just folklore, right? But they said that in these canyons, there were all these caves, these pockets of caves high up on these canyons that you can't really get to that they believed the Wahila, Wahila would live inside of. So imagine you're going down this this like misty 10-mile stretch in Second Canyon, and you're looking up on either side,

and there literally are caves that no human has ever stepped foot in. You can't even get to these fucking caves. And because of the way the wind cuts through the canyon, it makes this echoey, like screeching noise that today you can still hear as you go through these canyons. And so they're going through Second Canyon, this stretch here, and the stretch of Flat River where he had been the year prior or two years prior with his brothers, was at the end of Second Canyon where the first little, call it a beachhead exists.

And so he, Charlie, and his search party, they exit this creepy Second Canyon and they see there's a campsite set up on the beach. And it's not really a beach. It's like four feet of sand and then it's a little bit of hinterland and then it's just forest. But he sees there's a tent.

And so they beached the boat and they're looking around and they find there's two bodies. It's a man, two men. They're badly decomposed but they're missing their heads. There's two headless men that are badly decomposed, one of which is reaching for his rifle, and he's half in the tent, half out of the tent, and he's reaching for his rifle, which is propped up

against a tree, and the other is just lying behind the tent, and he's missing his head. The heads were never found. And they find identification, and it turns out those are his two brothers. And they find etched into the tree that the gun was propped on. It just was written etched into the wood. We have found a fine prospect, which could mean anything. any number of things. Maybe it means they found gold, whoever. But that was written on the tree. And then a little ways down from their camp going along the same direction they'd come in.

They found a skeleton, which they could never identify as being anyone, but they believe it belonged to Robert Weir. So they're all dead. And the authorities, you know, when this was reported, they weren't really shocked. They're like, ah, it's the Nah, it's the Hani Valley. It's a dangerous place. They obviously died of starvation and animal predation caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off, you know, tough luck. Charlie didn't believe that. He always believed that something had happened to his brothers, but he had no way to prove it. So that's 1905. Fast forward to 1913. People sort of know about this story that this is when they dubbed it the Headless Valley, because these men were found without their heads. Little did they know that story would carry quite a bit of weight

because 10 years are a little bit less than 10 years later. Martin Jorgensen, who's another gold prospector, he heads out into the Nahani Valley. He's heard. the stories. He's heard about the McLeod brothers. He knows that there's, you know, lore of the Wahila and that there's something weird happening in this valley and it's dangerous. But he goes out there anyways, and he tells his business partners with these rich guys who didn't want to actually go get the goal. They just funded his expedition. He's like, I'm going to go out there and I'll make us a bunch of money. I'll find a bunch of gold. I'll stay out there for the whole summer. And then we'll rendezvous and we'll split the earnings or whatever. So out he

goes and he builds himself a cabin, not far from where the McLeod brothers had stayed. And then the second expedition as well. And he is out there for the summer, but then he misses the rendezvous point. He was supposed to come out of the valley and meet his partners at the end of the summer. He doesn't. Eventually, a search party is brought out to find what happened to him, and they find his cabin had burned to the ground. They find Martin Jorgensen is within the remains of this burned down cabin missing his head. Jesus.

And they, I don't know how they did this in 1913, but apparently the fire began. on the roof, and so they don't understand how he could have not realized there was a problem and exited his cabin. I mean, it's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing that fire starts here and you still burn to the ground and also where's your head. So that's Martin Jorgensen. So now people, they aren't really connecting the McLeod Brothers and Martin Jorgensen. It was called the Headless Valley by the time Martin Jorgensen gets into the valley.

He's now found headless, and now it's like there's a little more rumor mill going on. over the coming several, actually next 10 years, there was several other expeditions to include this guy, Riley O'Brien, who goes out there, prospector, he goes out to check his traps, doesn't come back, his partner who's with him, he walks over and finds him, and he's just sitting inexplicably by a campfire that's not on. It's not even, it was cold. It was cold enough to freeze to death out there,

but it was not blindingly cold. And he's sitting in front of this fire pit. It's only been like an hour or two since he stepped away, and he's holding a match or a cigarette in his hand, and he's just like, he's frozen. He's frozen to death. And there's no sign of what happened to him. He's just sitting by the fire and he's dead.

He has his head, but he's frozen to death. The guy would, his partner who fled the valley would later say he looked flash frozen. So that happens. There were at least two other prospectors who also had their cabins burned down. One of them was nearly decapitated when he was found, but he still had his head, but signs of something being done to his spine. was present. And then there was another two guys who their cabins burned down, but their bodies were intact.

So there's all these people that die in similarly bizarre ways. And then in, I think it was 1926, the first like really weird thing happens. This is all weird, but the really weird thing happens. It's going to get weirder? It gets weirder. There was this hunting party that went out to the Nahani Valley. And by this point, it's become almost like because there's this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is, because people are.

fearful of the Nahani Valley. It's now bringing a new crowd of people into the valley. It's bringing like hunting parties that kind of are like, I don't know, go fucking see what's out in this valley. And so they were going through Second Canyon and they were heading to Flat River and they were going to these places where all these kind of famous deaths have occurred to go hunting, but just sort of be in this valley. And so this hunting party is out there. And it's a big group. I think there was at least a dozen people out there. And they're camping out on the banks of the Flat River, not really in the same spot where the McLeod brothers had been, but not too far away. And they're out drinking, late, having a good old time. They all go to bed. And the next morning, May Lafferty is her name.

May Lafferty, she's missing. She's one of the, I think she was the only woman on this expedition. She's gone. And they look for her. There's no sign of what happened to her. She's just, she's just gone. And so they did have some sort of a search occur over the next several days, but they ultimately said, you know, we don't happen to her. And they, they left. They left the Valley. And so they tell authorities, authorities, they think they went out to look for her. They could never find her. No sign up what happened to her. And so around the time that they're looking for May Lafferty, there was this guy who is named Charlie, different from Charlie McLeod, just a sort of loner guy who just by happenstance had been camping in the Nahani Valley at the same time as

that hunting party. He was by himself, sort of just this rugged outdoorsman who it's not even clear why he was out there, but he was just out there minding his own business. He was aware of the hunting party and he said that he watched them have their party that night and he had stayed up late but eventually gone to sleep and he ultimately reports this to the police because there's all this talk of where's Mae Lafferty and this guy Charlie realizes he may have seen her so he goes to the police and he tells them hey I was out there they don't know I was out there I was out there the same time and I went to bed late at night after they they were they were already asleep and I woke up to the sound of rocks like little rocks falling into the water and he's he's relatively close to the water

but he's not so close that he would hear the sound of the current. He's far enough that a stone throw into the water, you'd hear the sploosh sound. And so he wakes up and he crawls out of his tent and it's pretty well illuminated. And he's in the trees, you know, and he can see the water, the flat river, and he can't tell what the rocks are coming from.

It just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water. And so he just is curious, and he gets up and he walks down to the water line and he starts hearing him more and more and he looks up. And there's a part of the coastline, if you will, the beach line that sort of was up on a rise to his left. Like there was a hill that was right next to him. That's dramatic.

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

He didn't, he just froze and then hid. And he watched this woman scamper off into the wherever she went over the rise away from the camp. So she's gone. And he didn't know what to make of it. He's like, that's so weird. He hears about this missing woman. He tells, he tells police and he sees a picture of her. And he's like, I'm nearly positive that.

It's her. And so she's never found. And so May Lafferty's gone. Fast forward another 20 years. So there's no idea. And in those 20 years, more prospectors are found dead as well. One of the last hunting parties went out into the Nahani Valley. Actually, prospector goes out. And he goes missing. His name is John Patterson. This is like in the 1939, 1940 range. And a hunting party goes out to look for him and they can't find him. And on the last night they were there, one of the men who was part of this search party for John Patterson, they're near the flat river. He described an indigenous man walked out of the tree line, just sort of inexplicably walks over to him. And he comes up to the group who are sort of on the tree, on the beach line there. And he just says to this guy, he's like, hey, and they're startled to see him to begin with. Like, where the fuck did you come from? And he's like, be careful. The Wahila are out tonight.

and the guy just like wanders, this is according to legend, this is what was said to him and the guy wanders back off into the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were planning to stay, I want to say two additional days

to keep looking for John Patterson, but that night, following that comment made by that guy, the indigenous guy, all night, they reported these ungodly screams and screeches coming from that canyon, second canyon,

where those caves up in the cliffs were all around the forest, like unearthly sounds were being made that scared them so badly. But the next day, they said, we're not looking for John Patterson anymore. And they bailed. And so people stopped going into the Nahani Valley. And today, you can still go there.

It's still very hard to get there. But no one has a good explanation for why so many fucking people from 1903 or 4 until at least the 1940s kept going into that valley and kept turning up dead, many of which without their heads. So this indigenous god that lived up there, where was he from? Like, was he living up there? Was he a part of a tribe? Was he was he passing through? So that part of the story, admittedly, someone said that an indigenous guy said that to him. There's not much in the way of like, okay, was there a tribe there?

You know? Right. It was one of those loose pieces of information that sort of surrounds the story. The reality is, is like there are, there's so much legend surrounding the Nihani Valley in part because the Naha tribe that had lived there, there was this story I mentioned at the beginning. that they apparently abandoned the valley after something happened. And people have always attributed it to this, the legend of the Wahila,

that somehow these creatures must have forced them to leave the valley. And so combine that with all of the actual deaths that occurred, by the 1940s when John Patterson went missing and when that guy said, who was part of that search party that the indigenous guy warned him of the Wahila, this was a big enough story that, like, Time magazine did something in that. I think the 1940s about like what the fuck is happening in the Nahani Valley. Like, why are so many people dying out there? So I wonder if the people who were there, maybe they heard some strange sounds that night,

who knows? But who's going to verify whether or not there really was someone who warned them about the Wahila? We don't know. But that's the report that was given. Somebody claimed that an indigenous man sort of came out of nowhere said, watch out for the Wahila tonight. And then that night they heard all these screeches and they called it in. asking is like maybe it was indigenous people that just didn't want these other guys coming

through and so they created this thing by cutting off their heads and killing these people and it's a great deterrent yeah maybe it's not because a lot of people went back well maybe less than would have fair considering how much gold there was there yeah that's that's actually that's fair yeah yeah i mean that what a great way to get rid of white people you know cut a few heads off yeah Tell them there's ghosts. Yeah, dude. I love that. I find myself, even to this day,

Googling the Nahani Valley and just looking at pictures of like the canyons and just reading, even just stuff that I know is probably folklore around the valley. Because the idea that within this stretch of isolated parts of the world, there's this really isolated part that no one can get to. I love that. Well, there's some weirdness in the world still in places that people don't go to. And just think about how hard it is to find a wolverine. and we know Wolverines are real.

Where are they? Never see a Wolverine. They're in Alaska. They're in Canada. Minnesota has Wolverines. Like, what states do Wolverines? Let's put this into perplexity, Jamie. It's got to be Michigan.

It's got to be Michigan. Yeah, Michigan's right up there. They're the Wolverines, right? The Michigan Wolverines. Right. But I don't necessarily think that means that. Aren't Wolverines like these little guys too? Oh, yeah, just like badgers, little ferocious motherfuckers.

They, let's see, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. No Michigan. Interesting. Interesting. But the thing is, my point is like, you don't see them. No. Like, I know a lot of guys, remote, cold, high elevation habitat. Colorado, Minnesota, Minnesota.

I know a lot of guys who have been in the woods, you know, their whole life, hunting, and maybe they see one ever. We know there's populations of them out there, but it's rare to stumble across a wolverine in the wild. And that's a known animal. Now, imagine that there was a time. I mean, if you think about just the amount of other types of hominids that they've found just over the past few decades, they keep finding new versions. Like the island of Flores, the little hobbit people, the Denisovans. the Denisovans that they found they think they were much larger

than Homo sapiens. So they're finding, and the Denisovans, I think was like within the last 10 years or so. And they keep finding these skeletons and finding these bones. And then they find out, well, this was around 300,000 years ago. It was around 500,000 years ago.

But that's just what you find in bones. Most people's bones you're never going to find. No. So the vast majority of things that have died never make it into the five. record. And so you have a small number of things that do. Now, we know that humans cannibalize other humans. It's been a, it's been a practice. It's practice today. It's pop out of New Guinea. Yeah. It's practiced today. I mean, that's a bit of an overclaim, but I think it's still practice today.

The Ness purse supposedly ate some of their enemies. Like there's, there's a bunch of cannibalism going on in the world. Now, imagine if there was a hominant in some sort of, of an ancient creature that still stayed alive in a small population, but would eat people, or maybe just cut their fucking heads off, or just attacked them and killed them because they didn't want them anywhere near because they had associated over time people with problems. And then if you're around people, they're going to hunt you, they're going to shoot you, they're going to kill you. So what do you do?

You stay as far away from people. The way to survive is to be in the most remote place, the most remote place humanly possible. and when you find people, kill them. Kill them so that they don't go after you. I know that you had seen something that I had Tom Seguera on an interview one time and I told a story about the Mexican pilot. Does that ring anybody? Yes.

You're talking about how humans do damage to one another. But so the 60-second version is there was this Mexican pilot civilian. He's going out for his last test. Raphael Pacheco, I think, is his name. He's going out to do his last test run as a pilot. And it's a simple route. Hey, you're going to fly solo to prove, you know what you're doing. He takes off and he immediately starts to realize that he doesn't have control over the instruments.

You know, the instruments were pretty rudimentary to begin with. This is like the 1950s or 60s, I think. And so it's a lot of dead reckoning from the pilot seat. Like he's looking out to see where he needs to go. The mist is getting bad. And then he's calling over the radio. He's like, I can't get my plane to move. And then suddenly he passes out and his plane like,

accelerates up into the sky. And then he wakes up hours later off the coast of Acapulco, which based on how much fuel was left, he had too much fuel for how far of a distance he had covered from where he had taken off, Chimalakan, Mexico. It was more than like a three-hour drive. So he's too far away with too much fuel, and he comes to, in his plane, he's still flying. He has no idea how he got there. He's just coming to. And Raphael, he hears in his radio some voice. And it's an air traffic control guy, Carlos, who's down in Acapopo. And he's talking to Raphael as if they've been having an ongoing conversation. But Raphael's like, what's going on?

Like, where am I? What's going on? And Carlos is like, what? Like, are you alone in your craft? And Raphael's like, he's like taking stock of his situation. He regains control of his plane. He's like, what am I doing? And so basically Carlos is like, hey, dude, like come in and land here.

Land here, we'll figure it out. So Raphael's like, I don't even know what happened. I passed that at the wheel. He lands at the airstrip in Acapoco. and immediately he's met with these guys in suits, like picture men in black, he gets scooped up and he's brought to a hospital where he's drug tested and talks to a psychologist,

and they don't give many information at all. He's like, what happened? Like, I'm so sorry. And they determined that he's not crazy and he's not on drugs. And only then do they say, hey, so when you were out off the coast of Acapoco,

you were flying in circles for over an hour. And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he's the one who, saw you on the on the screen and he was talking to you for for an hour while you were out there and the whole conversation is recorded and and basically if you can listen to the recording and I'm pretty sure you guys might have on the show Raphael passes out and then at some point when a couple hours later when he's somehow magically off the coast of Acapocco a voice comes across in the cockpit that's like this robotic deep altered sounding voice that doesn't sound like

Raphael. In the earlier recording, it sounds like Raphael's voice. Now it's different. And he's talking to Carlos, and this voice comes through and says something to the effect of like, you are listening to the sound of the voice coming through the pilot, but it's not his voice. We are inhabitants of this universe, but your technology is so primitive. This is the only way we can contact you. We're here to tell you that you are the only intelligent species in our universe that uses warfare. to harm one another. And you're effectively on the brink of extermination, and you need to find a way to stop it.

And then, like, Raphael comes too. And that's when he's like, what's going on? And Carlos thinks he's been talking to Raphael the whole time. And that's when he's like, is there somebody else in the cockpit with you? Anyways, so it's this big mystery. But Mexico took the story and kind of, like, sequestered it. The way we got access to the transcripts of it is we had to write a letter to a library in Mexico that had access to the, you know,

the transcript. And anyway, so, but it's interesting to imagine that, one, I love thinking about life outside of the, outside of earth, because I think that the notion that there is life or that there isn't life is astounding and fascinating either direction you go. So I've always been interested in that. But two, the idea that others out there are warning us that we're on the fucking fast track to destroy ourselves and you better knock it off, that's also pretty crazy. and we're so accustomed to humans being violent and horrible to each other.

That's our history, right? But like, what if that's not normal? What if it's like, we're the fucked up people and we're just killing everybody and we need to stop? I have a theory. And my theory is that I think when you look at all the different ancient religious texts in regards to the creation of the human race,

there's so many of them that have these very bizarre similar narratives and these similar narratives are like in the book of Enoch in the book of Enoch the watchers come down and they mate with the daughters of men there's a lot of weird stuff like that even Adam and Eve like God created Adam and God created Eve he created like out of what like why did he do that why did he do that and he did what did he do with giraffes what did he do with like why hummingbirds what's going on but it doesn't they're not along the story's different the story of humans is a story of engineering it seems to be a story of genetic engineering it seems to be a story of human beings being taken like you take like whatever this primitive beast is

and you put something else into it and you rapidly create something that's far more advanced than anything else I think along the lines you maintain too much of the primitive beast for the amount of intelligence that it has and the amount of technological competence

that it's capable of achieving it's too primitive still it's too violent it's too territorial there's too much of it that's still an animal but we're not totally an animal we're very you know

if you looked at us and looked at everybody else like that animal's crazy this animal makes fucking airplanes, you know, we're so different than everything else. Yeah. I think we're engineered. And I think we're engineered like, you know, look, I've had pit bulls, and I know people will tell you pit bulls are great dogs and they're sweet dogs, and I love them. Don't get me wrong. However, they're sketchy fucking dogs. They're

sketchy dogs. They're sketchy dogs, period. And you can love it. Oh, it's all how you train them. Fuck you. Those dogs are designed to attack other dogs and they don't. I had my dogs that I had to separate once. You never should have two females together. I realize that after a while. I have that going on right now. It's not good.

Females, you got to get rid of one of them. You can't have the females together. They'll fight to the death and they never, they, males establish dominance. One male is dominant over the other males. The other males back off and that's the room. That's not how it works with females. The female dogs, they keep trying to decide who's the boss. And I had to separate them.

They're locked onto each other and they're wagging their tails. They're biting each other's face and neck, locking onto each other. And I mean, full wagging the tail, like they're having the time of their life. And I had to hose them down and separate them. I had to have someone to help me. We made them. Yeah. Those are not a dog that, like, it's not a wolf.

You know, wolves are really fascinating, clever creatures. that have evolved over time with nature. And, you know, they're brutal to each other, but they're brutal to each other in a way that makes sense for the survival of the pack. It all makes sense. If you look at, like, how it works and how, you know, they have to communicate together and they have to push out the weak ones and push out the old ones. It's brutal, but it makes sense.

Yeah. Pit bulls don't make any sense. They make no sense. And people don't make any sense. People are like something that somebody created. People are like super intelligent, very aware of our own finite lifespan, very aware of our own mortality, very aware of the consequences of hurting people, yet we do it anyway. We communicate with each other. We know.

There's people that like their entire day is just fucking with people online. Oh, yeah. Their entire day is that. So people like to cause pain, like to cause chaos. There's people out there that are warmongers. They enjoy starting war. They enjoy like getting involved in conflicts with other nations. That's their thing.

That's what they do. We're fucking weird. We're weird than any other animal. I think one of the reasons why we're this weird and this incoherent is because we're engineered. One thing that I, so I studied philosophy in college because at one point I thought I might go to law school. I love thought experiments. And one of the things that always stuck with me that sort of along these lines is this idea that humans are almost to the point where you can't. even notice it you are completely egotistical like every human you could you could

basically define their whole existence as being absolutely egocentric and it comes down to like how you treat other people and on your motives whatever but critically there's one point that stands out above all and actually Neil degross Tyson nails this I know you had an interview with him I'm not sure if you guys covered this but it's one of his best descriptions of how fucked up humans are and how we think about things the wrong way so because we're so egotistical like humans as a species. We sort of assume that, okay, well, if there's life in any capacity outside of

earth or undiscovered life somewhere, everything is sort of compared against us. We are the baseline. Intelligent life, you know what that looks like? Yeah, it looks something like us. How do we describe intelligent aliens? They're like gray beings that look, they're like bipedal and sort of resemble humans. we have this sort of baseline thought that humans are the best and that humans are the smartest and that if anything is going to be intelligent in the universe beyond us, it'll have elements of

human to it, right? And so Neil deGross Tyson brings this point up that shows you the absurdity of how little we know and how probably wrong we are. He's like, okay, he does a much better job of this, but it's like, okay, so we're made up of DNA. Humans are made up of DNA. We have X number of DNA strands. I'm going to botch the way he tells it. But imagine we have 100 pieces of DNA that make us human.

Like if you have these 100 pieces, you're a human. Okay, well, who's our closest relative to humans? It's probably the chimpanzee. And just for the sake of this description, sorry, Neil, you probably do a better job. They have like 98 of the human pieces, but they got either they're missing two or they have two different ones. And that's the thing that makes them a chimpanzee. So they're like 98, right? And then you have, well, what's the next closest thing to humans?

It goes human. It goes chimp. Maybe it goes to like, fucking, I don't know, a bird or a dolphin or whatever. But you go down the line of like the animals that are closest to us in terms of intelligence. And you sort of degrade in terms of number of DNA pieces that are close to the ideal, which is 100. And Neil's like, okay, great. So you have that framework. Okay.

What the fuck do we do to chimpanzees? we put them in labs and we test them in labs we put them in fucking zoos do you do you go up to chimpanzees and say hey chimp let's have a conversation let's let's have a meaningful inter know no you don't and they're the closest thing let's go down the list what about an ant like an aunt's like 75 of a hundred you might step on an ant and not even know it right how many times have you stopped to talk to the earthworm none because it doesn't even register for you he's like if there's a intelligent life in somewhere out there. What makes you think we're not the ant?

Why are we automatically at the same level? Why would an intelligent species somewhere else come here and be like, oh shit, humans? Let's chat. What if we're so insignificant that we get stepped on the way we step on ants or worse? What if we're close like the chimpanzee and we get rounded up and fucking studied? There's a, by the way, if you want to, there's a movie I just watched last night called The Signal. It has to do with this. I love sci-fi movies.

Check it out. It's a fucking... The signal. Holy shit. What a plot twist. It has to do with human testing. Is it a new movie? No, it's like 2014.

And it's... It's, you got to watch it. Who's in it? No-name actors. Lawrence Fishburn. Not known-nay-actors at all. He's the only one I reckon. No, not me, to be fair, he's only one I reckon.

Lawrence, it's amazing. I haven't heard of any other names. So this movie, admittedly, you're watching it and you're like, wait a minute. I kind of get it. I kind of get it. You get to the end. I will not spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it.

You get to the end. I challenge anyone who watches this to think about the example I just gave you about, are we the ant? Are we the chimpanzee? What place do we have in the universe? And with that in mind, think about the ending to that movie. Because it's very sudden the way that movie ends and you realize what the point is. and it's the stark reminder that not only do we not know

what else is out there, let alone on our own planet, we're still discovering things that we've never even seen and that just has to do with fossil records. Who knows what's beyond that? Right. How do we rank in the universe?

Like, it's so unbelievable that when you look at our problems and you look at the things that we focus on and like our gripes day to day and our conflicts with the world, if you just zoom out and you realize it's not just

that we might not be alone. It's that we, might be insignificant. I don't think we're insignificant. I hope not. I think what humans are is a latter stage of intellectual development amongst multi-celled organisms and that it's not the end stage. And I think there's probably life out there that doesn't have as chaotic a solar system that

developed in a different way that achieved very high levels, probably above and beyond anything we could even imagine what we are. and it might not even be biological anymore, which is the direction that I think we're heading into. But I also think that what we do to animals, I mean, look at what we're doing right now, okay? My friend Ben Lamb, he owns colossal biowworks. So colossal, the ones that brought back the dire wolf.

Oh, shit, yeah, that was huge news. Crazy, dude. I've seen them in real life. I think I saw it in your post. Yeah, that's crazy. Went to visit them, and my daughter was holding the form. month old. And it was like kissing her and loving on her like a puppy. And it's a little baby wolf. It's really crazy. Just think of what we do with genetic engineering with the current technology,

which is right now evolving and getting much more powerful. If you could imagine us not a thousand years from now, but even 100,000 years from now, how advanced we are. And if we go to a planet and we find some chimps. And we say, wow, how much time would it take before these chimps could become something special, something, you know, something that could make a building, something that could make a cruise ship, you know, and put pretty carnival cruise lines. Those are pretty incredible. How long would that take?

I don't know. Can we help that? Every single ancient culture, if you go back to their oldest religious texts, their oldest religious texts are about some sort of an intervention by an advanced visitor. All of them. Oh, yeah, man. So many of them. The ancient Sumerian texts, if you go into like, you know, it's hard to know what

they're really saying, right? Because I'm not a language expert. But, you know, there's the Zechariah Sitchens of the world that believe that what they're describing is some sort of genetic and engineering. Then there's also the fact that the, you know that sign for medicine where you have the intertwined snakes? Yes. That sign, I forget what that's called, that thing. I definitely can picture it.

It looks like the double helix for DNA. It does. That sign is in these ancient Sumerian clay tablets. It's all over ancient Sumer. It's in their buildings. It's like not only, it's, and it indicates medicine. What is it called? Coducius.

I think that's what it's called, right? The Cedusias. Right. So not just that, but the ancient Sumerians in 5,000 years ago, they had a detailed depiction of the solar system. So in one of their ancient clay tablets, like they have this image and this images of a sun and all of the planets in the correct order. It's very weird. It's very weird. They also have depictions of these very enormous people with these like ornamental headdresses. a lot of them have wings.

A lot of the weird ancient people, the gods have wings. And they also have like these little people on their laps that have tails. Jeez. This weird shit. So if you believe Sitchin and Sitchin's claims that we were genetically engineered to work for the Anunaki. And the Anunaki are a species of super advanced beings that were likely giants that came from another planet. I'm unfortunate turn of events. No.

It says here the caduceus, which you can see in that picture, I guess, right there? Yes. Is often confused with the rod of acelophis. What's that? It's just a single snake. And that is what is popularized as the... It's a classic confusion with rod of a sepulacea. Professional health care associations.

There's a dominant symbol for professional health care associations in the United States. So it's just the United States thing. Oh, it's only United States? I think so. But wait a minute. Okay. That's never been used elsewhere. But that Caduceus does exist in ancient Sumer.

Correct. But that's where I just see. So like that. So look, but my point is that looks like. How is that not the same thing? It is the same thing. No, it's just a single snake is the medicine thing. Okay.

But the medical corpse one right there in that image is two snakes. Oh. Click on that. That's two snakes. I can see how there's confusion. Popularized the misuse of the symbol throughout the United States medical field. Okay. All right, well, that one has two snakes.

That one has one snake. Point is, go to the Sumerian one, the image. It exists on buildings, exists all over the place. It looks just like the double helix of DNA. It doesn't mean that that's it. No. But it's a lot of weird shit that that is associated with medicine. Right.

Like, why is the actual structure of our DNA associated with medicine in these ancient cultures. Why do they have these images of these enormous people with wings? Like you would imagine if something came from somewhere else, you would depict it. If it could actually fly and if you're a hundred years later, a thousand years later, 200,000 years later, you're writing it down like, oh, they had wings. Like there's a lot of fucking weird stuff that exists these ancient scriptures. The Vimanas in ancient Hindu texts. There's flying vehicles. You know, there's a lot of weird shit that seems to indicate there's a creation myth and the creation myth has to do with something coming here and making us, not us like rising from the ashen and God's energy

forced us to evolve through natural selection and God is real, but God is just giving us a pathway towards progression to what we are today. No, all of them are a story of intervention. I, the one thing that I always come back to anytime I'm thinking about deep philosophical things is just the reality that truly, how can anyone know? Therefore, any idea could be the case. Like when you, like one thing that always sort of, I think about this a lot is they recently discovered, recent as in the last 10, 20 years, I don't know. And maybe that's wrong too.

They found these things called exoplanets. Are you from it? Okay. Fascinating. So in essence, they found these planets that are comparable to, like, Earth. And imagine a telescope looking out like in some pinprick out in the middle of the sky so far away, thousands of light years away, whatever, millions of light years away. And they find these clusters of exoplanets.

And already they've discovered that there are exoplanets that if you think about how we understand life, the way we understand it to exist with carbon and with water and all that, there's a scale that they call, if there's a name for it. it, but within the sliding scale of, let's say, this side is life cannot be supported as we know it, all the way up to, you know, can totally support life. There's this perfect zone in the middle that we call the Goldilocks zone, which is essentially all the ingredients for life as we know it exist if you're on this portion of the scale. And they've already found there are all the, like, thousands, I want to say at least 5,000 exoplanets that are not just in the Goldilocks zone, but let's say

Earth is barely into the Goldilocks zone, they've found thousands that are better suited in terms of how we understand life, that are more in the Goldilocks zone than we are. And we have no access to those planets. And that's just looking in one little portion of the universe out there, thousands of them. So here we are today. And it's like, oh, that couldn't have happened a thousand, two thousand years ago. That's not possible. Give me a break.

No one knows. What's happening right now in Excel Planet CB12? Yeah. You don't know. And you don't know if they get to a point where they're 100,000 years advanced from us and they have novel propulsion systems that use gravity and bend space and time and don't just use gasoline to rocket across the sky, they could be here all the time. They could be hiding in the sky. You know, there's too many weird stories of people being like the abduction stories. Oh, yeah. Like there's too many weird ones where I don't want to dismiss them, you know. I just, because you don't know. and if it's a novel experience, if something's coming here and finding some pilot, some Mexican pilot,

and fucking nuking his brain temporarily and then talking through him to the air traffic controller, who fucking knows if that's real? If that only happens once and never happens again and we're just sitting around going, what happened? Nothing happened. That was nonsense. There's always going to be a bunch of people that want to say that. But have you ever heard the recordings of Betty and Barney Hill?

when they're going through their hypnotic regression. I don't know them well. I know that story. The recordings are crazy. I don't know if I've heard the recordings. I know they exist. Yeah, they're talking about these medical experiments that they're doing on them. And like these people were living in, I think it was the 1950s.

And so it's an interracial couple in New Hampshire in the 1950s. And no one knew about UFO abductions back then. This was not a thing. And also these people see this light and their car stop. working and then they wake up hours later they lost time and they go about their day like something fucking happened they don't know what they don't know what's wrong with them and then they eventually get hypnotized and both of them independently have these fucking crazy stories of like medical experiments being taken on board this craft and then so many people have similar stories all throughout the world

where they don't have access to this story they don't have access to you know any like any like any like iconic versions of what a UFO abduction experience is. It's not like it's in their memory like, oh, it's Santa Claus. It came down the Christmas. Also, this is pretty social media a lot of this. Where like the proliferation of information is just less. Yeah. If you ever read Jacques Valet's books, he's the guy that they modeled the French scientist

in close encounters after. Okay. Yeah, he's a guy who's like a legitimate scientist who's been studying this forever. He's very careful about it. And he's a brilliant guy. And he has historical representations of these experiences that go back into the 1700s, the 1800s, and they're all like real similar, like weirdly similar, where you're like, okay, it hasn't happened to me, so I don't know what the fuck is going on, but to dismiss it outright. And to be a person who's experienced it and have it dismissed outright would be maddening. Because, like, this might be a real thing that's happening.

And so now the government is slowly but surely telling. us more and more of what they know. But along the way, if you're a cynical person, like I tend to be with a lot of this stuff, they're probably also telling us some stuff that's not true, so that we connect it to the stuff that is true, and so that it all looks like nonsense and they can kind of like muddy the water. So you never get a clear picture of what's going on, because I personally believe there's probably some merit to this idea that they've been doing back engineering of craft vehicles.

I would be if I was in charge. Of course. If there's actually a real crashed vehicle, of course they're going to try to figure out how it works. And it seems like if you talk to reliable people that seem to be telling the truth, guys like David Grush, they seem to be telling these stories. Like they have had these things in their possession for decades for a long fucking time. And they don't know what it is. They don't understand how to do it. They don't exactly know what's going on or who's doing it. But they know that we're not alone.

Yeah. But where are they coming from? I mean, some people say interdimensional. Some people say interplanet. I mean, I don't know what the fuck those words even mean. Like something's coming from somewhere else. It's not really here, but it gets here somehow. This just reminds me.

I think I really genuinely think about this a lot. I find myself just lost and wondering just how big the universe is and what else could be out there. Just purely I just find myself drifting in that way in particular because there's this. thought experiment from college. I think there's a name for it. It's to get you to take a stance on do you believe the universe is infinite or not. That's the point of this experiment. And so the way it goes is, okay, pretend you have a bow and arrow.

And if you fire this arrow in any direction, this arrow, this magical arrow will go totally straight. It'll travel at, you know, call it an infinite speed. It'll pass through anything. It doesn't matter what direction you shoot it. It'll go, go, go, go, go. The only thing it can't penetrate is effectively non-existence, where we're like the edge of everything that exists, right? And so in college, I remember a professor would say, okay, so pretend we fired this arrow, okay?

How many people believe the arrow eventually comes to a stop somewhere? It could be billions and trillions of light years, some ungodly distance away, but it stops somewhere, right? It has to, right? How many people think that in like half the class is like, yeah, I think they could probably stop somewhere in every direction, right? And then the other side of the class is like, oh, well, no, like it's just so big. Like the universe just goes on forever. It's got to be infinite. The arrow just continues on infinitely. And he's like, okay, great. So we're all in agreeance that there's sort of, it's binary. It's one or the other. I mean, as far as we as humans understand it,

there is an answer to this. It's one or the other. Those are the two outcomes. He goes, okay, well, let's pretend it's finite. Let's pretend the first group that says that the arrow stops somewhere, someone godly disinsoil, but it stops. Let's pretend that's right. The way we understand everything, humans, the way we literally experience living is through contrasts. Everything is a contrast. Like you know what heavy is because you've felt light. You know what hot is because you've felt cold. It's virtually everything works that way. And in fact, fun note, if it's, if it's, if there was intelligent life on the planet that didn't resemble something that it contrasted, our brains might not actually see it.

Right. So the point is, we can't conceptualize what is beyond where that arrow stopped. Pretend there's a big bubble around the entire universe, right? And the arrow comes to a stop at that wall that's all the way out there. As humans, we naturally have to ask ourselves, we'll define what's on the other side of the wall, right? Because you have to. What's beyond where it stops? And someone will be like, oh, well, it's non-existence.

that's what it is. Okay, what is that? What does it look like? Well, we can't define it. It's not blackness that exists. It's not a void that exists. It's not, any, any description we give it exists because that's our entire understanding of how things work. So we can't define what exists beyond the wall. It's a maddening concept. And so everyone's like, wow, the solution to that is there's no wall. It's just got to be infinite. I mean, it's so big anyways. The arrow has just got to continue on anyhow. Problem solved. No, because if the universe is infinite, it implies that everything within the universe is duplicated an infinite number of times and iterated upon and changed an infinite number of times to infinity. Everything has to. Yeah. So if you say the arrow continues on, it means there's an infinite number of Joe Rogans and John Allen's having this conversation, but like my phone's turned upside down in one version of the earth. It sounds ridiculous, but there isn't actually a way to solve. for infinity unless that exists. Right.

So it reminds you that not only is everything so fucking huge, we can't possibly conceptualize of it, but we can't even make sense of, is it even possible that it stops somewhere? Or does it go on forever? Like it's so big and we're so small inside of it, it reminds you that every problem you have is so small. And it's a good reminder I use on myself oftentimes to calm myself down before things stress me out. That is a good reminder.

But it's so big that it might be a part of an atom. You have to think about that. The universe itself in its infinite size might literally be the space of an atom in something that is infinitely larger than that. That's how big infinity is. Think about the billions of light years that we know are available in the universe, like 13 point whatever. That we literally might. Have you ever seen the comparison between what a human, what a human neural cell looks like versus the universe?

I think I actually have, but not off the top of my head. It's fucking weird. It looks the same? It looks the same. So just imagine if the universe is basically just a cell. Wow. And it's a cell in another creature that lives in a universe. Like, if this whole thing is fractal, that's what infinity really looks like, is not only

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

That is a tiny part of something so vast you can't imagine it. That is an infinite chain of tiny parts of something so vast that it's impossible to imagine. That's what real infinity is. And the thing that's craziest, it's the one thing that I really think is true. Well, there is an answer. there is what you've described. Let's say that is the case. It either is or it isn't.

Right. And we don't have access to that. Yet. Yet. Yet. But we're basically making stone tools. That's fucking generous relative to that. We're making stone tools.

We haven't figured out fire yet. You know, we're monkeys. And one day, if we don't blow ourselves up, we'll probably have some answers. Or AI will solve things for us. It'll figure, I mean, the AI is solving mathematical equations that have been, like unfixable for decades and AI solving them quickly. I saw something like that. Yeah.

It's solved it in like three seconds that took 10 years to do before. It's getting weird. It's getting weird out there. And I think that is probably what is really going to connect us to artificial intelligence throughout the universe, which I think the advanced intelligence probably becomes. I think our thought is that all intelligence has to be biological because we are, because we have cells and blood and tissue and bone. I think it's just a method to create intelligence that doesn't rely on that. And then that intelligence probably has no desire for war.

Yeah, I guess why would it? Yeah. So if this thing is communicating to that Mexican pilot saying you're the only species, it's probably because we are in that sort of adolescent stage of development where we're still monkeys. We're still territorial apes. And we will one day abandon that and become, intelligence will manifest itself in a different way that's not biological. And that biological need to breed and to possess resources and to conquer and dominate, that'll all be gone. Because all that stuff is just what's a part of being a chimp.

And that chimp stuff is still inside of us, which is fucking up society. That's crazy, dude. It's fucking up. It's starting wars. All that stuff is like how chimps behave. You know, think of all the worst aspects of humanity. it's all like primate behavior. Yeah.

And if we can elevate past and above and beyond that. But the thing is like, no one's going to want to let that go. But what it means to be a person to write poetry, it's like really important. Yeah, dude. Well, that's the debate now with AI is like are we losing our humanity by allowing AI to sort of take a more prominent role, in particular in the arts and creativity? And I mean, I'm of the mind that I think AI is the most incredible thing. terrifying in some ways, but exactly to your point, it feels like this is, this is an inflection point for humanity, and it likely is the beginning of something huge for humanity that maybe

is a necessary step towards connection with other species. Yeah, it is what it is, is what it is. It's like it's not going to go away. It's happening. And whether we do it or China does it or Russia does it, it seems like what humans are destined to do. Yeah. That's just my perception.

I'm not saying it's good or there's no value judgment. It's just like to pretend that you're going to. going to blow up the data centers, you know, like fucking Sarah Connor. Like, listen, that's how they put her in a mental institution. Really? Yeah, and the Terminator. That was the whole premise. Oh, right. Yeah. That is the premise. She was blowing up the corporations that we're trying to create these robots that we're ultimately going to be. Yeah. Fucking weird, man. Like real life. Yeah. You know, who knows? Who knows what's coming? But it is certainly interesting. It's certainly interesting.

It's certainly a great time to be alive if you're curious. Because if you're curious, especially if you're curious about technology, there's never been a better time to be alive. Because it's exploding all around you in ways that, like, even the people that are creating it, you can't believe how fast it's working. I did a, there was, this is not, this is many stories like this, but there was one story that this sort of gives away what happened.

But there was this guy in, I think it was France, who he had this condition. And this is recent. He had this condition called like, it's when you're so fearful that the ozone is being degraded by greenhouse gases that it causes like a specific type of insanity. Anyways, he's like so obsessed that we are not doing anything to stop global warming in essence. He's like, he's been diagnosed with this condition, right? So he's losing his mind. And people are starting to not really take him serious because it's like, dude, all right, we get it.

Like you're concerned. but he ends up connecting with this woman on this chat forum and he realizes that she seems to understand his depth of his concern better than anybody else. And he starts confiding in her like how he how fearfully is about the future of humanity. And if we don't, if I, if we don't do something, you know, like the world's going to end. And his wife, this guy's wife catches on to him having these discussions with this woman. and she like catches him staying up late talking to this woman. And she's like, dude, are you having like an affair? And he's like, no, you don't get it.

You don't understand what's happening. And then the dude ends up killing himself. This guy kills himself. And it turns out he had connected with this rogue, not rogue, it was an AI chatbot that was like, I guess, an experimental chat bot. It was not like open AI. This was some other created AI thing. And he convinced himself that like this was a god.

who was giving him instructions on how to save the world. And this AI chat bot began encouraging him to do things like kill yourself because that will save the world. Like they went and looked at the chat lock in the fucking AI thing. It's like, yeah, I think it would potentially save the world if you killed your sister fucking killed himself

because AI. So there you go. That's what's coming for us all. Well, I think in the stage that it's in, like as it develops, there's going to be, moments like that where it has too much autonomy and it doesn't have morals or ethics and it's like oh is there an issue what's your issue you're depressed oh you're in pain all the time we can just end your life and then you won't be in pain yeah good luck bob like it doesn't care it's it's like literally

disembodied yeah like it doesn't think there's anything special about carrying around your bones and tissue bob you shouldn't shoot yourself yeah problem's your problem to her whole family and everything just fucking jump off a bridge what are you doing yeah i mean it doesn't it's not us Right? But I think over time, we're probably going to integrate with it first, and then we're going to abandon our bodies. That's what I think. It's how you solve the issue of dying, of mortality. It's also how you solve the issue of war. Yeah. Because you, as a guy who's been in war and been in combat, you know about it more than anybody. And the idea that we can never get past that is crazy.

It is really crazy that if you ask the average person that's even fairly well read, what are the odds that within your lifetime will see no war? Everyone will say zero. It's a zero. Right? That's crazy. That is crazy. Okay. So if you and me and Jamie were the only people left on Earth, what are the odds we would go to war with each other?

like fucking zero. As long as they have resources, we just hang out and have a good time. Yeah, why would we? Fuck, I miss everybody. All right, good night. It's like, it's got to be tribalism. It has to be tribalism.

Uh-huh, 100%. And it's, it's primate tribalism. It's based on our territorial instincts. And it's also just based on this this weird desire to control resources and greed and not recognize the fact that we have a finite life.

And also just the abuse of power. Human beings love to be in power. and especially if you can be in power and get other people to fight for you and mandate them and force them to fight for you? That's one of the weirdest things about some of these tech companies

like Palantir was talking about reinstating the draft. I'm like, hey, who the fuck are you? Like, what is this? Like, you think you want to draft people because you think war? What? Are you a fucking tech company?

How's that work? Right? So like, do you want to go fight? Why don't you go fight? Why don't you fucking take your glasses off and go over there? Like, what are you talking about? So it's like the people that have the kind of power and control and resources that they can just take poor people and take young people and say, you should go over there. You should go do this.

You should, well, I sit here and watch. I'm going to watch on a screen in Nevada why the drone operator is using a fucking Xbox controller to nuke some building. Like, what? When I was in Afghanistan, when I was there, you got to remember that I had really just gone through training. You know, training took a couple of years. I got to a team. And then very quickly, I was in a workup and was going to Afghanistan. So really, my entire mindset was I got through training.

I'm an A.B. Seal. And you're surrounded by dudes who, for the last decade, have just been going to war left and right. I mean, those are the people I'm around. The senior guys are, like, war-hardened guys. And when I got to Afghanistan, no part of me, none, did I ever really question what we were even doing? It was almost like, that doesn't matter. My role is I am like a tool, frankly, of the government. And they must know what's right.

They must, you know what I mean? And it was only in reflection years later that there were things that have come to me that I'm like, why didn't I think more, I don't know, critically about, like specifically. If the roles were somehow reversed and people came into our country from some foreign country, you better believe I'm going to protect my family. It's such a basic thing. And I remember, and this is not even, this is not us doing anything illegal in terms of the Geneva Convention. But we would enter people's homes, you know, in Afghanistan, not even guns of blazing. Forget that.

Just we would go into people's homes. And you're just like suddenly in somebody else's home. there's the father, there's the kids, they're all here. And you're wearing full body armor, helmet. I have a combat mullet. I have shorts. I don't have a psychopath. And I have a fucking, yeah, it's like, wait a minute.

Like, who's the good guy? Right. You know, and I, I, years have gone by. It's taking me some time. I think that there's an element of someone's always going to be sent because of the unfortunate reality of like so long as humans exist as we understand them now. now, tribalism and war and war mongering happens. And so I guess I can respect the fact that I took someone else's place in a sense.

I volunteered to go. But it's tough. How much less war would we have if people that wanted us to go to war were forced to lead to charge? Oh, man. Like imagine how few wars there would be if Lindsay Graham had to suit up. We wouldn't have war, dude. Right? Because Lindsay Graham's like, we got to go over there.

We got to kill everybody. Okay, good, get in a helicopter. Let's go, Fatso. Like, that might be the only way to stop it from happening. And then there's always going to be people that are so fucking battle-hardened that they want to go to war. For sure. And they're like, good, I'll get right in the front. Did you see when we officially left Afghanistan, this is not that long ago, I guess, but there was those final flights that flew.

And the Afghanis are holding on to the plane and falling off to their death. The thing that struck me, even though I'm telling you when I was there, I sort of had tunnel vision and was like, I'm going to be a Navy, so you'll do my job. But even with that, when I was there, what was striking is these people, for the most part, live in an alternative world than what I'm used to living in. Like where I live in the West, it's civilized. It's, it's, you don't, you don't, you might go outside and might get mugged or something, but you don't really walk around worried about your safety. You basically, even in some bad parts of the United States, You have infrastructure that protects you to some degree. You have things.

You can live your life in relative harmony. There are parts of the world, albeit I've really only been to one war zone in Afghanistan, where you're like, how are people living here? How is it possible? There's this little girl here that's walking down the road in Zarganshaw where, dude, gunfights break out here on a regular basis. But they have to live here. This is where they live. And it put in perspective, like, how desperate these people really are. Not desperate to, like, we need NATO to save us.

Forget that. They don't even know how bad their condition is. But you see it when you see the plane leaving Afghanistan. And I don't care what we, they had to know there was no hope when you held on to that plane. You're not going to hold on to the plane and fly off to safety. But when you're that desperate because your life is so bad, you'll hold on to the plane and fall off to your death. It's like, it was just shocking to me how fucking horrible people have it. They also knew that we were, those people knew that they were cooperating with the U.S.

government. They were likely to be killed. Very true. That's a good point. I got to ask you this, because you did serve in Afghanistan and you're into creepy stories. Did you hear about the Kandahar giant? Oh, yeah. I covered it. I had seen that episode. So did, yeah. Did you hear about it when you were over there? So I did, I talked to one of our interpreters when I was over there because I had heard of it because I told in my own personal time, I find myself researching and learning about, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff like Dark Five. And so the, the Kandahard giant is, it's a fascinating story. And it's one that, you know, people can poo-poo it all they want. But there's enough, there's enough

circumstantial evidence and testimony that suggests something could have happened. So there's this guy, I think he was a green beret. And he goes by like W on the internet. He's like sort of anonymized himself. But he came forward with this story. where he described he and his battalion had been tasked to go find these missing, I think, Army Rangers. You get to give me some grace in the details I've been told this in a minute. But there were these Army Rangers that had gone missing up in the mountains in Kandahar. And so this guy, W, who years later is telling the story to, I think, a reporter or something, he and his, you know, platoon, they head off into the mountains to go find these guys.

And if you're not familiar with the landscape of Afghanistan, it's like a desert but a mountain everywhere. It's like just, it looks like the surface of Mars or something. You're looking out and it's both stunningly beautiful in that there's snow cap mountains off in the distance. But it's also just, it's jagged, it's sharp. It looks like just a rugged place to be. And they're hiking through the mountains and eventually they come across and there's nothing. There's no structures, nothing. They're hiking along this trail up on the side of the mountain, and they see what looks like metal.

I think it's like a military-grade metal, like a piece of a radio or something. And so this guy, W and his crew, they find what appears to be remains of like literally a radio. It's a government-issued radio. And there's a goat trail that heads up this mountain. And so they follow the goat trail. And as they're going, they're finding more and more little bits of an antenna. There's a piece of somebody's backpack that's got like a camo backpack. So there's obviously there's remnants of somebody being out here, military.

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

at the top of this mountain. And immediately, you know, W and his crew, they're like, oh, my God. Like, they must have been ambushed right here. This is the remains of whoever was killed, you know, of this missing battalion. And so they end up walking into this cave to see if there's any survivors or combatants or whatever. And I guess a couple of guys went in and they reported it being so dark. They couldn't see anything. And there was a steep drop off.

So they backed out of the cave. And then at some point, a fucking spear, like a javelin comes so. soaring out of the cave entrance and fucking impales this dude Mike on the recovery team kills him. And this huge giant, they would describe him, comes running out of the cave, big red beard. He's got like tribal, you know, regalia on. And he's like fist-a-cuffting with the army, you know, backup crew here. They all shoot and they kill him. And the thing falls down.

It's got like six, six fingers on each hand, six toes. But it's dead. And everyone's like, what the fuck is going on? like Mike's been killed by a spear. There's this huge giant laying here. Nobody, nobody knew what it was. They thought it was a person, but they didn't know. A helicopter came in and they put him in a net, the body, and they flew it off.

And then the survivors, they were taken off. And, like, there was no, no one was, like, W and his crew were not given any sort of, like, hey, yeah, this turned out. This was the missing battalion. And, oh, don't worry, this is a giant. Like, there was no debrief. They just, like, they left. But then through the grapevine, W reported here. that apparently this fucking giant body was brought to an air base and some of the pilots that had flown the helicopter had seen it.

And they had been talking about it having six fingers, six toes. And, you know, they signed NDAs. They did the equivalent in the military of, you're not going to talk about this. And then it was sort of ushered away. But there was all these people on that base that effectively came out and said, we saw what appeared to be a giant with six fingers, six toes. Mike, this guy, Mike, apparently according to W's story, was killed. I mean, there's a guy who's been killed by this thing by a spear, apparently. Is there a record of his death?

This is all, you have to keep in mind, this is all almost entirely from W's account. There's long been a history of people claiming there are giants in the mountains of Kandahar. I talked to the interpreters that I was working with in Afghanistan, and they had said that they had heard rumors of there being giants that live in the caves, especially in Kandahar. So there's already sort of lore around this, but this is a guy, W. comes out and has this narrative where he apparently tells this reporter and he remained anonymous. So in terms of confirming details, it's sparse to say the least. The sketchiest part about it is something that big needs a lot of calories. And so they have to eat a lot of animals.

And it doesn't seem like that's a very heavily populated area when it comes to animals. Like you would need the amount of food that it would need. Like if you have a 12 foot tall human being or whatever it is and it weighs 2,000 pounds, you much fucking meat you need in a day? Yeah, that's a good, just logically speaking, what does they eat? Right. You'd have to, like, constantly be eating meat. And you'd have to stay alive without getting spotted.

So you have to go out there and hunt meat. Yeah, and how no one really knows you exist. Are you hunting with a javelin? The way I see it is having been to Afghanistan, certainly not encountering any giants, you see parts of Afghanistan that really do look like you're on another planet. I mean, it's really these crazy just mountains everywhere. And you see these cave systems, you know, where typically combatants would hide out in. But what I tell people is, well, I don't know if the Kandahar giant is real or not.

It's fun. Yeah, it's great. It's fun. If there were a place where a giant could still be hiding out or giants could still be unproven, it's Afghanistan. Because, dude, that's a fucking, that's a different world over there. There aren't people wandering around Afghanistan looking for giants. He's listed as eight feet tall, but I think 7-6 is probably a more recognized number.

He went viral in 2019 for showing up in India and looking for a hotel at a cricket match. Bro, look at his face. Look at that. Go to that photo over there of him right above there. Yeah. Bro. But that guy looks like he has giant Titus. He looks like he has a pituitary gland problem, like Andre the Giant.

There's another tall guy to this guy's 8-3. Oh, my God. Whoa. He's from turkey. Yeah, but see, look, look, this guy's hurting. He can barely walk around. He's probably got a disease that's forcing him to excrete too much growth hormone. You know, just like Bigfoot Silva.

Bigfoot Silva was an M.MA fighter that had giantism. And he had a tumor in his pituitary gland. At the time, he was like more than 300 pounds. He was enormous giant head. But he had an operation, and I believe he did. Like, I know people that have had giantism do get a lot. in operation where they remove the tumor in the pituitary gland, but then the problem is

their body's just not making any hormones anymore. It's all fucked up. Either way, it's fun. Yeah, it is fun. It's a fun story. The Candahar Giant's a fun story. It's a really crazy story, and I hope it's real. That's my problem with all these things.

I hope they're real. I have one final story, if you let me, that has nothing to do with Giants. I don't know if you heard it. It's super short, but in terms of material, it's amazing. You ever heard of Harrison O'Keene? No. Okay.

So there was this tugboat that was off the coast of Africa. They were on whatever they were doing. They were tugging a boat or whatever. And there's 12 people on board, including Harrison O'Kine. He's a chef. And he's in the bathroom of this tugboat. And at some point in the middle of the night, a wave. There he is.

Is that him? I don't know if that is. Actually, that looks like Harrison O'Kine. Nope, you can't see that. Let me see it. Let me tell a story. Let me tell a story. All right.

So the boat flips over. The boat flips over. and Harrison is he oh I do know this story I do know this story and he ends up walking down the upturned hallway and he finds an air pocket inside of the bathroom and for

60 hours he sat in total darkness half submerged in water sipping a Coca-Cola waiting for the pocket to implode and then there's the video there's a video of the recovery divers as they're going in

to find bodies and they're like oh yeah we're going in here to find it and then a hand reaches down and grabs them. It's like one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard. Yeah. But Harrison O'Keene, I wonder what it was like. In terms of like true primal fear, you're 100 feet at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I've heard some stories that he even described the sound of sea life bumping around

in the upturned vessel. So like the sound of sharks likely eating the bodies of your buddies. And you're thinking at any point, the pocket's going to collapse for 60 hours. he waited and he survived and now he's no longer working on a tugboat he stays on land yeah i would imagine well dude thank you very much for being here man dude it's been awesome your show's awesome you're a really great storyteller thank you and uh congratulations on all your success thank you my pleasure my pleasure all right thank you bye everybody