Joe Rogan Experience #2543 - MrBallen

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it 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 I I Dude, 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 I've seen so many clips of this space. So many so many references to Jamie and to be here right now is very cool. So I'm honored. Thank you for having me. >> Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, it is always weird when you go someplace where you like the first time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way. Like you're in the building like what the 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 to try to calm down. >> When was this? When did you do this? >> Long time ago. 200 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, dude. >> Thank you. >> Great show. Seriously. >> Yeah, it's it was 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 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 >> start. And then it was then it was Rogan's interview on on on that show on what's his name again? >> I just blacked out the guy you just said you had an interview with. Oh my Howard Howard St. Well, it was like I did it we did Fear Factor. It started airing right after September 11th. like literally right after >> fear factor >> and one of the narratives one of the reporters asked me in 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 are you talking >> 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 okay shut >> the Uh, watch it or don't watch it, who cares? >> But it's like if you wanted to look at like where society start, you used to be like Friends, Seinfeld, you know, >> the good old days. >> The good old days. Miami Vice. It's like it was television shows that were like shows and then all a sudden anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal dick. >> It's true. That was the threshold. >> Yeah. >> Pretty good. It's weird because that kind of ushered in social media. It's very similar in a lot of ways. Like the people that were willing to go on these reality shows, especially stuff like Big Brother where you just live in a house with a bunch of people. Like how weird. You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation and the producers are you know, Mike's been talking a lot of 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 and they were like, "Look, if I can win this thing, like normal people. They're like, "Look, it'd be fun. I'll tell my kids about it. People that 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 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 nothing to say, but they're just trying to find something where people pay attention to them. What'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 uh I I covered a story. So So for those who don't know me, I tell strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet. Uh and I covered a story that was like the epitome of this. It's it's the idea of doing anything for clicks. Uh I don't know the dates, but it was like within the past 1015 years, there was this group of or there was this one Russian influencer. This is this is I want to say circa 2010. And she wanted to do something really special for her birthday to document her birthday and and get as many clicks as possible. And she filled this pool up with dry ice >> water plus dry ice. And she invited all her friends over and they like took 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 this silence. They all die. They all die from suffocation, I think it was. Not exactly sure how you die from dry ice, but it's it I think it it eradicates the oxygen. And so who's just died? But it's like how many people died? I'm going to say I was 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 only jumped into a pool a bit. 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 eaterina deenko 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, Russia's investigative committee said in a statement announcing the criminal probe into the incident. But you do not want to get arrested and go to jail in Russia. >> No, >> they don't around. >> Generally not. >> They do not around. Ask Britney Grinder. They don't around. >> She's still She's She's out now. >> She's out. But she did nine months. >> That's not good. >> Was it nine or 10? >> I think she was sentenced for nine years. And that was for marijuana possession at the airport. >> It was 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 hardcore jail for nine years. >> Periodically I'll see like images of of Russian courtrooms. And I don't even know the stories, but always it's like the 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 it's a gnarly place over there. >> Yeah. You better be friends with the right people over there. You can't around. >> No, dude. >> You can't 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 and >> it's a shady business over there dude. >> Oh, it's the shadiest is the shady >> business man for for some very interesting people though. >> Yeah, Russian people are fascinating. I've met a a bunch of brilliant Russian people, >> you know. >> Yeah, I found that they're very in my limited exposure. Yeah. Here we go. >> This guy tries to get out that little slit first. >> Yeah. Oh, wow. >> Hold on a second. He's He doesn't give up because he doesn't make it up. >> 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 psycho. Look at He looks like a psycho, though. >> He looks like a guy that should be dead. >> Looks like a guy probably spent a lot of time in jail. >> Yeah, he was climbing through the They're pulling his pants off. They're going to tase him in his nuts. That's not okay. That's not >> It's a rough spot. Rough spot on earth. Tough people. Um, how did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube? >> Yeah. Uh, well, I I originally was in the military. I was a 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. Uh, I I did some work with with charity. you said did some veteran charity work and I I I don't know. I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years. Um and I'm 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 sub subsist on. But then uh I actually I remember watching a lot of Gary Vee. Um, 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 you you certainly have access to the internet and all the things that everybody else does in the civilian world, but especially in the SEAL teams, from my experience, you're so like tribal. your 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 um Gary Vee was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing that was like this is what you do, you know, as a civilian. You post constantly. And I I began in addition to to doing some charity work I was doing just trying my hand at social media, you know, uh posting content that's like so bad. It was >> What was the intent? >> You know, honestly, there there wasn't a clear intent other than what the hell. Like it doesn't cost I'm already paying for the internet. I already own a phone that effectively the worst that'll happen is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about or maybe my my friends and family will see and it'll be embarrassing. But my I've always been someone that's been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing 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 and was and I narrowly got through, but I sort of had it in my mind that whatever, like try stuff. And so social media influenced heavily by Gary Vee, it was like why not? I'll I'll post content. Maybe someone will be interested. Nothing worked. Nothing worked. I mean, it wasn't even like some was close. It was just nobody was paying attention. And it was like, okay, I'm not devastated. It is what it is. But then I uh on a whim, uh I myself personally love strange, dark, and mysterious content. I I 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 is 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, 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 on my social media attempts 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 I'm not trying to copy trends or like do Gary Vee content. I'm just going to like tell a story I like. And I pull out my phone and I tell this 60-second rendition of this this mystery called the Diatlo Past mystery. Are you familiar with this? >> No. >> Oh, great. It's a great story. I post the 60-cond version of the story, but I I'll tell you the story in a minute. I 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 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. >> Wow. Was it Tik Tok? >> Tik Tok. This is when Tik Tok was 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. Um, so in uh in remember I told the 60-cond 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 20some 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 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 you have to do that for this test. You map out a route that you'll take that you know effectively checks off all the boxes of difficulty. You you put this 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 you you pass the test. you're a level three mountaineer. And so these 10 hikers um eventually, actually only nine left. One had a a dental issue, so he's 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. Um and they're like this young, they're they're beautiful. They're all like couples. They're all friends. And it's >> sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie. >> This this gets wild. If you've not heard the story, you're in for a treat because the pictures are crazy. They step out and and the Eural Mountains is is rugged. It's like these huge windswept icy mountains. There's like a couple sections of forest, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be. And so these hikers step off and they start taking pictures. And even though it's 1959, the pictures they're taking could be taken today. It's almost like selfie style. They're they're smiling. Everyone's in such good spirits. They know they're going to pass this test. This is this is this is nothing for them. This is this is a victory lap. And so off they go into the Eural 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 messages sent. No one gets word that these nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains. And at first, to be honest, no one was really that concerned because one, there's nine of them. They are quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land. If anybody can can withstand the elements, it's them. And so, there wasn't this immediate call to action. But over the coming days after February 12th, the families of these 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 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, uh 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 Eural Mountains, the worst place to put your tent is the side of a windswept 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 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 that's right in the middle of this this pass called I believe it's called the Datlav Pass, which is why the the mystery has been named the Datlav 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 is 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 Eural Mountains. It's like negative -40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's it's the middle of winter. You need this equipment to survive. Where are the hikers? They left all their equipment in their tent. Where are they? And so the search expanded exponentially at that point because now these 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 the cadence of the footprints as it as it picks up where they found it near the tent, going down the mountain, away from the the campsite, they're walking. There's no sense of urgency. Someone analyzed the footprints and they're walking. So they're walking down the mountain, some without boots on, some with one boot on, leaving most of their equipment behind. And so these the search party, they follow these prince 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 prince sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest. And so they go into the trees. They're looking around and they eventually come across this big cedar tree. And at the base of the cedar tree is this little burned out fire, like a puny little fire. And then crouched around it is one of the the hikers who's deceased. And there I believe there's a picture. I don't know if you can show it on your channel, but 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. I'm sure you can find them. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So, why is feeding vague scoops of ultrarocessed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist. And trust me, I know I buy one, the farmer's dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. It smells good to me. It's human grade food. The farmer's dog makes fresh food for dogs and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try The Farmers Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food, plus get free shipping. Just go to the farmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. Um, one is dead and then another one is 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. Yeah, I think that's that's got to be the picture right there. And that does not show the bodies, but the bodies are are 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. >> Mhm. >> They look at the tree that was at the base of the where the the fire was and there are 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 far pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. Um, and then they examined the bodies and they found one of the 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 it at least arrived in his mouth. So they're dead. And so the search expands within this this forest and they find three more hikers sort of about 100 or 200 feet away from from this tree. They're in similar condition. They they they're all deceased. They're all sort of ragged. They 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. Um they continue to search for the next several days, but the 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 they're going to be dead. So they waited until the thaw in May. And once the snow had thought of it, they came out there and they found this what looked to be like the they believe that a snow fort had been made three or 4 hundred 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 the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave and the uh the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries. Uh they're all deceased. Uh the woman or one of them had a a crush injury. His chest was they compared the injury to his chest equivalent to being struck by a car at 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 he's been crushed. One guy, I think his skull was fractured and a piece of his 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 claimed that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed. At least there was there was like uh 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 the woman was wearing men's clothing or part some clothing that was clearly not hers. Like and then one of the men or a couple of the men were wearing some of her clothing. 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 want to know what happened. And so the Russian government, they they launched this investigation into what happened out there in the Datlav Pass. And quickly they shut down this investigation. Like very quickly they shut it down. And all 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 uh 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 Eural Mountains that could corroborate or could line up with when those hikers all died. Um, and then also lastly, the the Russian government came out and said, "Well, uh, we've we've determined that the nine hikers died from an overwhelming or I think they called it a compelling force." And then they closed it. They they I believe they made it completely confidential. No, the families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down. And then uh 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-cond clip, you're going to Google two words. And it was data 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 I >> Well, that makes more sense. You froze to death. >> Well, the thing they could have come out and said that, >> right? >> They basically said, "Yep. >> Are you 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 autopsy autopsy reports than we do? Maybe. >> I'm not sure to be honest. I'm not sure. >> It might be like the way Russian language works and way they describe things. Like they might have categories for deaths in a compelling natural force might just mean like >> freezing to death is in the same category as like dying in the Mojave Desert. >> I think that that's that's I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational happened. I mean, when when you become hypothermic, you can have it's called paradoxical undressing, where at your final stage of when you're so cold, you actually get hot and you take your clothes off. Um, 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? I don't know. >> 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 um uh cattle mutilation. I put them all in the same category. Like who knows what that is. >> But cattle mutilation, one of the weird things that 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 these cuts, they look like they're made with a scalpel or perhaps some sort of a laser. And also these creatures are completely drained of blood. So I'd like I wouldn't 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 uh I do know that actually and this has nothing to do with the fact that I posted about it because the Diatlove pass gets posted about quite a bit. But I think it was in 2022 uh Russia actually reexamined the Datlav Pass mystery now and and sort of said, "Okay, we're going to look at it again." And they determined that an avalanche, like a slab of ice, broke loose. A huge slab. I could, 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, they they for whatever. Also, why did they stop in the middle of the the wind side of the slope? I mean, you're They probably were trying to make their way across and they couldn't do it and they said, "We have to stop, but just stop right here. I can't go any further." And they all argued and then they decided to put a dent right there. >> It's 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? to 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 an is a >> You know, you got a real problem. Like, do you let Bob die or do you stay here with Bob when you can keep going and Bob is just like, we can't do this. Like Bob, like that's the horror movie scene, right? There's always one guy. He's like, "Fuck this, man. I'm staying right here." Like Jesus, Bob, we can keep walking. keep walking. >> That that reality >> steps and then count 10 steps more and then just keep doing that. >> That uh 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 to lowering what you're doing to 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 it became >> clear that if you're the weakest link, you're probably getting left behind in training. But then in real life, it's the reverse. >> Buds is a genius way of filtering out the It's genius. It's it's the best way. You have to There's no there's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress. And there's some people through whatever 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 and they're going to toughen up. And look, Gogggins talks about it all the time about when before he ever got into the Seals, he was 300 lb and eating milkshakes and 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 uh I 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 and you suppressed it? And I only say this because I know this is this is shared amongst a lot of the people that I went through training with. I didn't I did not have a moment where I thought, "Oh boy, I'm on the precipice of quitting. I better I better hold on." Did I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions and questioning, "Can I even do this?" Definitely. But there's something 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 um not even hell week. Hell 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 it's it's so easy if you're willing to do it. Easy as 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 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 you when I did it, the first leg, it's stressful, but as soon as you've made the turn and you're on your way back, you realize that if you've committed to doing it, you're like, "Oh, dude, this is this is really not bad. It's so quick. It's so short. It's all 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, but you're mentally done. >> I mean, I'm generalizing, but you see that 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 they say that like those two good those guys are too unreliable. They'll tell it to you like you need a mental coach, like you're too in your own head. You're not going to be able to perform. Yeah. >> There 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 they're just they just cave to the pressure. They just can't handle it. And then they go through some sort of mental coaching session and but the core their personality whatever it is that that's about them, what makes them them is just fragile for whatever reason. And the 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's a like 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 I have no idea if it's still the case now, but I was in I was in SEAL training in earnest in 2011 and 2012 and there were psychologists on on staff that you didn't you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch, but I remember there being parts of training which were sort of funny because they punctuated the brutality of training. It would be we'd be out, you know, doing the obstacle course for an hour and then we doing a four mile run, then we're swimming, then we're doing this, we're getting beat up and then like, "All right, now go in the classroom." You go in the classroom and you're and you're talking to this woman who's a psychologist and she's teaching you how to like uh 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 it's just funny. Uh so there was attempts made but I I 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 I have seen and heard that it's hard to pinpoint what is what is the appropriate indication you're going to be successful. Like that's the thing they're trying to identify is what are the the pools of people that traditionally do well in SEAL training because they're they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen. But the two things they found, there's two there's two places where the most mentally tough people in terms of success in SEAL training. Uh 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 time. >> Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, is 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 the way it works is you have your enlisted guys and there's, you know, upwards of a hundred dudes in a class that are enlisted. And then you have, I think, maybe eight to 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 of the earth. Just like, I don't give a 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 20some year old kid. You have dudes that are I was a road scholar. I played I walked on to the Stanford football team. Uh that level of prestige. And also I'm my family's friends with George Bush and uh 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. So they're they're they're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed. It's so rare that an officer candidate does not pass. Like an officer who's in buds, you might as well just call him a SEAL at that point because the vetting is crazy for SEAL. Not on the enlisted side. We're still figuring that out. But the officer side, they're highly vetted. And one of the guys that was one of my officers uh in one of the classes I was in was a water polo water polo player from the University of Tennessee. And he's this big big strong guy. He's an awesome dude. And uh there's this part of training halfway through training. It's second phase. It's broken into three phases. And it's it's the water phase. And it's it's really statistically everybody who gets to second phase mostly makes it through. But it's because you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase like hell week 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 and 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. Uh, one of them is called pool competency, which is a 20-minute exam of your ability to to fix problems with your scuba tanks underwater, where basically you go to the bottom of the pool with your tanks on, and when your test begins, you're in the you're in the section of this huge pool called the combat training tank. It's a there's like the sixt section, then it slopes down to the 9 ft section, and then it slopes down to the the 15t section. And your test takes place in the 9 ft 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 9 ft 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 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 hypercapneia as you go. Um, and then you 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 it's about being I was horrible at this test, by the way. I passed by by the skin of my teeth. This dude passes the test first try, but that's not where the story comes in. This this 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 they're pretty heavy outside of the water, but they're 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 it's like 5 lbs or something. And you tread for five minutes. And that that's the whole test. >> Hands out of the water. >> So, you only tread with your legs. >> No fins. >> Whoa. >> Tanks on it. The only 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 3 4 minutes and don't it 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 they basically found a way to move their legs. That's like the most efficient way to tread water. And this dude, I kid you not, who blazed through pool comp first try, no problems whatsoever, was like joking around after his test. He got 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 domain. I can do this all day long. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. >> That's crazy. I would have never thought of that. >> First of all, I didn't know the water polo players had to tread the entire time, which is insanely impressive. Like, how long is a game? >> Well, I don't know if they can go to the edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch water polo, >> most of the time they're just 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. >> Remember like David Wells of the Yankees? He's like a huge fat guy smoking cigarettes in between innings. >> Hey, Bruth. Dude, it's crazy. >> Hey Ruth, eating hot dogs, big old belly. >> Oh man, >> that's crazy. >> I remember in in boot camps, this is not even before you even get to Buds. There's there's actually it's funny the when you go in, you know, as I I went in as a civilian, so I signed this contract where basically you say, "Okay, I'm going to go to boot camp, become a sailor, and then I'll have my shot at going to Buds." It's called the SEAL Challenge Contract. And you know, 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 what's two months of Navy boot camp going to be?" Because what my head is focused on is is buds that comes after. So when I shipped out to boot camp, I 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, "Ah, whatever. I'll like march around, like fold some clothes, you know, whatever." And then and then I'll go do the real stuff out in San Diego. And so I get to uh I get to Chicago and it was like a a reality check because you quickly realize that first of all if you're trying to be a SEAL and 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 spec ops that are at Great Lakes that I mean there's a few, but for the most part, you're you're you're working with ordinary sailors that are putting you through training, but imagine you're you're an ordinary sailor. And God love them. I've worked with amazing sailors across the Navy. And here comes the SEAL recruits in the 800 division. They're civilians. They they're not even sailors yet. There is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show up like, "Yeah, I'm going to Buds." Like there's just an attitude of like the instructors, they they want you to understand that like you don't have a clue what you're getting yourself into. And so in boot camp those two months, your your instructors are not seals, but they just like torture you because they're like, "This is nothing compared to what you're going to have in buds." And and one of the things we would do is is there was all sorts of stupid stuff like push-ups and whatever. But there was this treading thing that we had to do where we'd go in the pool at like 5:00 in the morning and like it's so cold and they would line us up so we're all facing like I 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're getting into. Tread, hold those bricks and it's just mad. 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 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 to do. >> Put on all your turtlenecks. And we like put on all our stupid like neoprene turtlenecks, like seven of them, cuz you have all this stupid clothing in your rack. And like march around the 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 to be attention for like 2, three hours just staring at paint, but it's just arbitrary. It's like you don't know what you're getting into. Buds is going to be so much worse. And like you don't even know what you're talking about. >> Look how weird people want to do that to people. >> There was a lot of like you don't know what you're getting yourself into. I know more than you. I've done real stuff in the Navy. But like they have this moment where we're still civilians and we 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. I when I got out of boot camp uh in boot camp I I was drinking their coffee and I was convinced it was it was caffeinated coffee. It wasn't. And I I told myself it was I'm a big coffee drinker. And when I got out of boot camp, I went to 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 just told stories about boot camp. >> They don't give you caffeinated coffee. >> Well, there was like it was it was coffee, but I mean like it was like you pushed a button and this brown came out and it was like said cafe something on it. I I was like that's coffee. I'm not going to question it cuz I don't want to I don't want to psych myself out. out and I was drinking the shitty co coffee. >> Yeah, have some coffee. Have >> 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 and 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. RAF12, UFC champions, Olympic gold medalist, world champions, and one of the strongest men on the planet, all on one card. Jordan Burroughs, who's been on the podcast before, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, takes on UFC standout Shawn Brady. Bo Nickel meets Wyatt McKenna in a showdown between two of the sport's brightest stars. Plus, it's a main event rematch with Henry Cejudo getting another shot at the machine Marab Dwaves Willie. No cage, no gloves, no excuses. RAF12 live from Cleveland. Saturday, August 22nd, streaming exclusively on Fox Nation. Go to foxnation.com and sign up today. I uh so when I so I got hurt in Afghanistan in 2014. Um and after I got hurt, I'll tell you in a minute what happened. I I got debriefed essentially by the senior commander of the group that I was a part of. And it it was just like, hey, tell us what happened, what went wrong, what would you have done differently? And and truthfully, and I I wasn't kissing anybody's ass. I wasn't trying to be, you know, a follow the rules kind of guy. I just said, "You know what? The training works like un 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 Zarenshar, 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 IEDed constantly. We were on one side of the road behind some Hesco barriers and Zorgenshar is like this sprawling pretty large urban village and historically I don't know how long it had been going on for but there had just been non-stop fighting in Zorgenshar 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, there your job here is to try to quell the the flow of suicide bombers into Kabul. And there was a couple of things they told us to focus on, but really if you want some action, you just go to Zorgenshar because they're so battleh 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 Zaren a a great deal. And truthfully, it wasn't like we walked in and it was crazy every time, but we definitely got engaged. There was definitely more contacts there than anywhere else. But on this one day, this was like 5 months into the deployment. This is uh in April, so it was the fighting season had 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 it's a it's a village, but it's 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. Um, and it's really like well defined, you know, it's almost like the edge of Zorgen just becomes vacant desert on the outsides. 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 our purpose was. I think there was like a bomb maker or something we were going after. But the the rules of engagement that we were operating under effectively said you can't enga 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 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 we we had the ability to listen to just the open source radio that the fighters would use in the in the village and we heard them talking to each other and it was clear they had spotted us. We're it's broad daylight. This is not a shock, but they were clearly talking to each other and making plans to 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. Um, and I 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 twostory buildings that overlook the courtyard. So, it's pretty gnarly. um our team lead who was freaking awesome is freaking awesome. He stopped us and he's like, "Hold on a minute." We took cover behind this bridge that was right behind us and he's like, "Wait, let's let's figure this out." But we realized that now that we know where they are, we know they're in those secondstory buildings overlooking that courtyard. They're now they can see us. If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We can't like call in an air strike. We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So it's like basically walking into an ambush. That's a that's a bad idea. But if we go the other way, if we retreat, I told you that the edge of Zaren, it's there's no cover. It's just open desert, if you will. And so there wasn't really a good way to to xfill back to our vehicles without getting shot in the back. They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot at us anytime 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 exfelt. And so we sat there, we were thinking about it and we ultimately made the decision like, hey, we we're Navy Seals. Let's just go forward and 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 if you if you're going to survive this, you need the SEALs. You don't need you don't need anybody else. the seals to get out of this. And so we all took up our positions sort of. We expected this to happen and it it became like this crazy disjointed like onesie twoosie breaking off clearing buildings sometimes by yourself just madness for like the next 6 hours. It slowed down. It was not constant but it was like six hours of urban sketchy roofto roof building to building shooting. Um and we were sort of getting our asses kicked. I mean, we just we kept we kept seeing people that would open up on us around uh 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. Um and it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would would vanish. And so finally, it's late at night. We've been there for 6 hours or so and we've gotten beaten up. No one's been killed on our side. The dog's fine. Um and we were sort of like, man, I guess we just got to go. We, 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. Um, and I was with a fire team that was close to the exit we were going to be taking. And one of the the drones overhead uh I think was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas. They called out that they had seen what appeared to be military age man men so ma'ams as they're called sort of in the vicinity of where we would be exfilling out of the city. And they weren't saying you better go over there and like shoot them because rules of engagement say you can't you can't do that. It was just sort of a hey be aware as you exit they might be setting up on you as you're 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 our understanding is is now it's night time. We're on night vision. We we believed based on what was being passed to us that we could go down this alleyway that would come to a a tea 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 mamms are and they didn't know if they they didn't even know who they were. It could have been kids. It could have been nothing but we we believed we'd be able to look over the wall and look out somewhere on the other side of this field. We'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment of what to do. So, we super sneaky make our way down this alleyway being as quiet as we can. We get to that low wall and immediately we start hearing someone talking. It's it's not our guys. We start hearing poson being spoken on the other side of the wall and we realize that there's been a mistake, a lost and trans. Something's been miscommunicated to us. We are now closer than you and I are right the second to what actually was military age men. There was at least two. I've heard as many as five. I actually don't know the exact number, but there were fighters hiding on the other side of that wall. Intentions unclear, but they're right there and they haven't heard us yet. And they're nervous. We can tell they're nervous. They're right on the other side of the wall. And we are in a tough tough spot here because there's seven of us. We're we're so close to them that if someone even so much just like farts right now, they're going to hear us. And so our team leader, who was incredible, he went on to go to team six. He's one of the best dudes I've ever met. He he he had to make an on the ground decision. We got to engage these guys so 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 guys or the 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 the there was at least two guys over there that already had grenades they had pulled the pins out on. So there this is 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 this is there's a video of this of the grenade comes. You can't really tell. Uh but it literally hit my shoulder. One of the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell to the ground and detonated. But in the in the second that this happened, it's we were under a a drone that had a a targeting strobe down on us. It was a flashing infrared strobe on us. Imagine if like God had a flashlight and he was turning it off and on rapidly and you can only see the light on night vision and it's this cone of light that you're in and this this super intimate fight is happening and and I'm watching this grenade time really slowed down. I see it for a second cuz the lights on, the light comes off, it disappears. I see it for a second and I remember feeling it hit my shoulder and I'm I'm not shooting. I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the wall as all this 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 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 I'm definitely going to die, but maybe my face will be intact and my 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 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 I I tell people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my backside. It didn't hurt. It just felt like someone threw something at me and then I'm just down on the ground and my 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 debriefed this with the guy who ultimately saved my life. But my memory is I go down and I couldn't get my gun. My gun had been the strap the little strap had been blown off. My helmet had been blown off. So I'm not on night vision. And I'm just there's pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark and it's just chaos there. The thing is is the fighters in that town, they didn't give a about killing each each other. If they 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 madness. And I couldn't stand up. I can't move. and I got dragged by one of my teammates. So, this is my memory. I got I got dragged from I'm at the head of the tea there. They brought me down the stem of the tea, if you will. And I just got placed up against a wall. And I'm sitting there and I have these tourniquets that are on my chest that we we rubber band them to our chest specifically so they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in in your limbs. And I was so weak and up from this blast that I literally couldn't pull the tourniquets 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 kill me. Like I'm dead. I'm dead no matter what here. And so I had this this true in my mind like near-death experience where I I sat there. It's relatively well aloomed and I I suddenly lost my hearing. like it's gone, completely gone. And there's good illumination. So, I can see this small alleyway. I can see there's flashes of light as, you know, 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 um 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 and actively live. You don't think today I'm going to breathe. My today my heart's going to beat. 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 this is what it feels like when you shut down. It didn't hurt. It wasn't sad. It was just It couldn't have been more matterof fact. And all I was thinking about, I had two thoughts. I had um what will my obituary say? Nothing in terms of substance, but will it say Jonathan Allen was killed in action or John Allen? Uh 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 my 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 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 I'm about to die. This is the end, you know? But then out of nowhere, the legend that he is, his name is Kyle. He's a seal. 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 he's a sniper, he's a medic. He's a he's the calst dude 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. He comes back up. He brings another guy out whose lung had collapsed. 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 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 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 We are pinned down and 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 initiing from your higher officer. I think I think your 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 air strike that needed to be exact, like exact on the other side of that wall. And then in the other ear, he's communicating with the rest of our our desperate 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 >> com. >> He's a He's a He's a team six, that dude. >> Everybody went into like flow state. I don't even know how to describe it. And and I I'm worthless. I'm I'm not in flow state. I'm dead state. Uh they hoisted me up and we ran like a mile cuz 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 pillars. I was supported on shoulders hobbling. I was not able to run. No. And 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 hilo that came in coming in, guns blazing. They throw us in the hilo. Now, get this. Me and the other dude with the lung, we get thrown on the hilo and we just leave with the medical team. those 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 that airirst strike he called in was with it was perfect. He got 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. Like I was in a life and death scenario and I got to be fully an audience for it. Every was perfect at their job. Like literally rounds flying everywhere. Hey, what's going on? Got got your legs all tied off here. Hey, what's going on? Calling this air strike over. couldn't be calmer. That was it. Like, and so my debrief point was it works. The training works. >> Wow. What a story. Holy dude. >> There's there's an addendum to it. >> What was 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 I'm happy to be here now, but we get in the helicopter and that crew was amaz I think they were PJs, Air Force PJs, which are like Spec Ops Air Force, I think. They were great. But they were like, "Hey, do you want uh what's what's that the drug? Oh my god, it's the one the painkiller drug morphine. 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." Hey, but I was like in my head that I might die. I don't know. And so we get medevaced out of Zaren 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 some type of surgery for both of them." And so we fly to Fobshank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher and my clothes have been cut off of me. Like my my dick's hanging out like I'm I'm in disarray. Like I'm all up. And I really I don't even know. I think I'm going to be okay because at this point I've made it here and no one's acting like I'm I'm literally about to die, but I don't know. I don't really know how bad it is. And they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy and it's so bright like like so bright inside of there that 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 they don't know they don't know what 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 that are other Navy Seals. It's the middle of the night and they've put on the equivalent the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms. These are like their BDUs. These are these are not nice. But in Afghanistan on on a deployment, this is the best 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 they're my friends. I know them all personally. And so I'm being wheeled in and the the gravity of what's happening was like a ton of bricks because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been going on. And I see the 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 die. It's like I'm going to my own funeral. And so I'm I'm put on the the swarm me, not them. The doctors swarm me and they get me ready for debrement, which is just to pull the shrapnel out of my hips and my my leg. And the guy was like, "All right, I'm going to give you I think it was ketamine." He's like, "You're not going to this is it like good luck to and he like gave me ketamine and I I passed out or whatever they gave me. I completely passed out and then it's like I have no memory and I wake up in Germany. I'm in Germany and I'm just Yeah, you're you're in you're fine. Yeah, your legs are all up. Uh you're you're going to live keeping your limbs. And then I think it was 7 days after that I'm back home in Virginia hobbling down the Home Depot uh aisle. Just no transition. just I was just killing people overseas and now you're >> holy, dude. >> >> Yeah. nuts. >> What was the extent of the injuries? >> Uh, honestly, I was so fortunate. It was a big big hole in my ass like uh like a like a I think three or 4 inch chunk uh that the big issue with it is uh it was so deep into into my ass that they had to keep opening it so that it would it would not heal in reverse, you know, like because it can pocket the >> and then just uh 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 the part that was the worst to be honest. Leg's 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 like a hot day, I might notice it, but I from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders. >> Whoa. >> I I truthfully don't know if this actually happened, but he said as much. And I I tore both of my labrooms. A a slap tear. It's a relatively common injury. And I had the uh I had a what's called a biceps tendinis 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 restle it, but it's sort of like a band-aid. Doesn't really fix the problem. And the shelf life of a biceps tendinis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading. And I'm I'm now at the point where my shoulder sucks. And I like in the gym, I I have to all these I I have to avoid pressing. I have to avoid overhead stuff. Um I went >> It's just where the bicep tendon is. >> It's No, it's the So what happens is the the labreum tear itself >> never got fixed. They just removed some of the tension on one side of the tear, but still over time it continues to tear down the labreum. So effectively, my labum just over time has continued to tear and I'm getting some additional pain. I I just had an MRI done and they're like, "H, you know, you had the bicep tendinis 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 pain or whatever, but something like that. >> Have you done any stem cells? >> No. >> No. Okay. How long you in town for? >> Tonight? >> That's it? >> No, I I can come back. >> I'm going to bring you into Waste. Well, see what they could do for you. >> Whatever I can do. It's a huge pain. >> Yeah. While you're here, we should try to get you in, >> dude. Yeah. Uh maybe I can get you in like 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. I >> guarantee you it can help you if you around with peptides at all. >> No, I see them all over the place by >> using You should. Um there's a lot of things that they can do that can radically help you. One of the things they can do it 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 there's a lot of evidence that labroom tears can be healed with stem cells and with uh without having to go through surgery depending on the extent of the tear. >> Yeah, I'm I'm open to it. >> Dude, I'm a big believer. It's fixed me. It's I've had a lot of problems where I was like, I need surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon told me for sure you need shoulder surgery. I never got it done. He's like, you you could rehab it. This is more than 10 years ago. >> He's like, you could rehab it and 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 kettle bell work with 70 lb kettle bells. I don't have any problems. Windmills, cleans, presses, renegade rows, gorilla cleans, no problems. >> How much you cleaning? >> 50s. You just gorilla cleans. I do it for reps. >> Do you do barbell clean? >> No. No, I don't lift anything heavy. When I do gorilla cleans, I either do 50s or 70s. My my whole kettle bell 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 like big halos where I'm just really opening up my back and getting >> When did you get into doing kettle bell stuff? I've seen you post like the demon the demon bell or the gorilla bell. >> The gorilla belt. Yeah, those are the 70s. Those are the Those are uh I really got into um uh farmers carries. That's what the I'm using 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 kettle bells and I Yeah. And I take them up the hill and down the hill. Dude, >> it's my grip has 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. Cuz when you're walk, you know that guy Tom Havland, you know who he is? >> Oh, yeah. >> yeah. Everybody knows who that guy is. >> Dude's a 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 zer is like 500 lb. >> Insane. But he does a lot of weird like off-weight stuff where he has more weight on one side than the other and switches them. He has a chain behind him and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing farmers carries with two hands. He does a lot of crazy stuff like that. And obviously the guy's a 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 farmers carries. And uh I first just would do it. This is him. Oh, >> freak. >> Yeah, the trademark shirt he's got on. He always has that shirt on. >> And you always see his back and he's like 68 almost 400 lb. He's a giant human being. >> I love his page. >> Yeah, he's a real freak. But this this thing that he really believes in is carrying things and walking around with them. And now I really get it. I really get it cuz 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 is feels better. My connection between like my my entire core and my back is better. like everything feels stronger. I'm stronger in every other workout that I do. I I feel way stronger when I do like cleans and presses and do windmills and everything else cuz the you're 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 deal. And then when you're up at the top of the hill, you're like, "Motherfucker." And your forearms are literally on fire. You're trying to hold on to these things. And you know, I got a chalk ball in my pocket and I reach in there and powder 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 the things that I've noticed is uh I very rarely get injured as opposed to my friends who do like traditional weightlifting stuff like powerlifting 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 hurt. >> I'm guilty of that to some degree. >> Everybody is. It's just 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 Tatselene method. >> What's that? >> Pavle Tatselene is the guy who really brought kettle bells over to America. >> Okay. >> And he's a famous kettle bell coach for uh Strong First. It's which is his company. And he's this philosophy that the that strength is a skill and you shouldn't practice 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 powerlifter, 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 workouts, like I have to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettle bell workout. >> dude. >> Yeah, I know. But it works, >> dude. That's >> it works. And again, I'm never injured. >> And 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 uh my trainer, John Finst, we've been working together a couple years now in Jersey. He's the man. Uh he's he's a big believer in that what you were talking about. I could do 20, but I do 10 instead. >> He's like all about not form till you die because there are times where it's like time to throw some English in, 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 is a problem. Especially the one time I hurt my back really bad. I was deadlifting like 450 with the um >> like traditional grip. >> No, the um bar deadlift. >> Track. Yeah, the trap bar. What is it? Hex bar. What do you call that thing? >> Yeah, trap bar. >> So, I love those things. But I I was like, "Let's get big." And and then I felt think, you know, that that and it luckily it was muscle, not like spinal, not a disc issue. It was lower back, left lower back. It with me for like a six-month period, >> I bet. >> Oh. So, and I was like that I'm not doing that anymore. And from that moment on, I got really into just doing kettle bells. 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? I mean, if you're trying to become a powerlifter, 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 you. >> No, I dude I uh right now I'm on like a pretty big cut. Like I do a summer cut each 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 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 thing that you got 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 I count calories. I'm I'm 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 obsessed with hang cleans. Just like barbell hang cleans. I, Dude, I'm so 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 with your shoulder. >> Uh, actually no, it doesn't. It's pressing. It's this motion. Interesting. It's the press. any dude if I pressed like a 50 lb dumbbell >> see Alfred but I can do a clean >> that's part of the reason I discovered it is it didn't 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 kettle bells is I have a scar right here that I broke my collar bone when I was seven and my collar bone juts out because it healed slightly in the wrong direction and so every time I'm in a block of of doing means I always have this just like recurrent infected wound on my collar and then like in the comments of every video they're like dude what's wrong with >> staff >> dude and so but anyways the kettle bell >> shave down >> yeah >> but it sounds like you do cleans and with with with kettle bell kettle bells that's probably something I need to consider >> yeah and it's not easy to do you know like 70 lbs is when you're doing like 10 set 10 reps and I'm doing like three sets of 10 reps >> that's brutal. But it's also the clean and press from the ground up, right? It's all one motion. And this continuum of motion, you know, over the course of 10 repetitions, it's a good solid minute plus of work. >> So, you're working really hard for a minute. So, you're getting like a little bit of a cardio benefit from it, but >> if I'm real consistent with it, the, 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 like 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 a jack, dude. >> When I Yeah. Was Thank you. When I was a kid and I thought of a 59year-old like, "Oh my god, that guy's dead. That's a dead man." Like he's He probably could barely >> literally dead. >> Barely open a jar of pickles. barely make it down a flight of stairs and I have zero problems. You know, I have one up knee from my martial arts days where I had my meniscus removed in a big chunk of it >> and it still with me. But it doesn't with me in terms of function. It only with me in terms of like I'm worried it's going to become arthritic >> um over time because there's nothing between the cartilage. The cartilage is banging against each other. >> Yeah. >> And I broke it skiing once that right where the cartilage meets the bone. But I think that um 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, it's like It just gets I don't want to do anything. Like my friend Matt Sarah, 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 trying to heal hook you and you're defending. It's like everything is getting yanked around and and then it's sore, but you still go back the next day cuz you want to train cuz you're addicted. >> Yeah, dude. >> Yeah. >> I I found that uh my when I when I was in the teams, I was in good shape 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 on YouTube thing happened and I in a way adopted the 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 it at all cost but all of my health went out the window dude I would I would uh I would it take me about I don't know like 26 hoursish 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 3:00 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. >> Drink just to go to sleep. >> No, I didn't even know. It was almost like here's your reward. Suck down these drinks. >> Oh, I get it. >> And then uh but but I got so grossly out of shape. Like, dude, I was like 200 lb of just fat. And I had this huge ponytail that I grew that I thought looked really good. If you can pull it up, dude, I look so fat and gross. But then, uh, it finally occurred to me that like, wow, you're like you're you're entering like true dadbod territory and there's just no excuse. And so, sometime in like 23, 24, I was like, all right, I got to be like an adult again and train. And it, dude, it's revolutionary, man. That that dude, that's crazy. There 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. >> I'll try not to be, you know, rude or anything. >> That's That's a decent one. That That one's recent. >> Which one? >> And that one's sort of recent. The second one in there. That That's That's not even that bad. >> Well, the first picture you pulled up, you get it. Well, you see there in that image. >> Yeah. You can see a little little ragged going on there. Yeah. >> But yeah, just >> Well, you got to do what you got to do when something starts happening and you know, you realize like, oh my god, like it's like starting a fire in the woods. >> Oh yeah. >> You got to blow on it. You got to put some little twigs on it. You got to get that going. Like once and then you've Congratulations cuz you've had amazing success. Like what do you have like 11 million YouTube subscribers? 11 million. >> That's incredible, man. That's really cool, >> dude. It's it's it's I can only imagine what you've been through. But the thing that I now this started in 2020 and it's 2026. I have had some incredible highs. The early days of after the viral moment and I'm like posting stuff that I I like upload a video and literally the next day it's like you've made $20,000 from yesterday to now. And like I've never in my life made any real money ever. It's all almost overnight and it grew and grew and then it's like I 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 to sign like the equivalent of a professional sports level contract. And then it's like less than a year after the the start of the Mr. Ball podcast. I'm partnering up with with Amazon. It was a $62 million deal. And I I say that because dude, my life got so much better and so much worse at the same time. >> What was the worst? >> Oh god. So there's like the little stuff, you know? Actually, I just had a lawsuit close. Um they plead guilty to theft. Uh and and a bunch so I I I started a a house renovation project when I I was living in a house in Pennsylvania when this thing kicked off and I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money. I was I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house. Before long, I'm like adding crazy to my house. They ended up gutting the house to the studs cuz they're going to remodel it, but they didn't do any work. And now they kind of had me. My house is 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 sued them. >> That that's a little thing. >> Uh 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 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, wait, are you kidding me? Like, this was all just an angle. Like, you had an angle on me the whole time. Like, this was a 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, "Oo, I'm going to get paid." They don't think, "I'm all right. It's fine. It was my fault. I slipped." Now 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 uh to be my house manager and one of the first things he said to me is he's like, "I don't give a about your content, dude. I think it's stupid." And I was like, "You're you're you're the guy for me." But he he's been awesome because he just like keeps everybody around me sort of like vetted. But yeah, dude, it's uh >> that's important, man, because people will sneak through and sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them. >> Other people see them as like this guy's got an angle. He's a scumbag. Be careful. And you, you know, you let people into your circle and then they 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 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 and I 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 have a guy and I I 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 they're legit. And then by the time they get to me, it's filtered out to what is actually going to be interesting. So there's not a lot of, you know, people meeting me that are and the people that do meet me usually I never want to have them on. Like if somebody just like comes up to me, I have to be on your podcast. I'm like, nope, you definitely don't. >> I already know 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 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 uh you got to be present. Just not not buy into any of it. That's the that's the real key. No matter how big it gets, just keep doing the thing that you do. So, all I do is talk to interesting people. That's it. >> It's the right way to approach it. >> It's not that complicated. And as long as I continue to do it the same way, I feel like people will enjoy it because I think they enjoy it because I enjoy it. Just like the way when someone's doing something that they really love to do, I enjoy watching. If someone's doing like metal sculpture, you know, like and the guy's really into it, he's welding and hammering. I'm like, I am into that. I'm like, I'm into people doing things. I I like when people are really enjoying what they're doing and are really curious and or or really like competent at something, >> you know, they're excellent at something. I enjoy watching that. I enjoy listening to it. >> And I always enjoy talking to interesting people. So, as long as I just keep enjoy talking to interesting people, I think people will keep enjoying watching it. And it's a nice exchange >> works. You know, 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 follow. 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 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 um you know, in a documentary or whatever it is. I uh I think it's the point you make about how you well I think for me anyways the one the one thing I've come back to over the past several years of 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 love doing is telling stories. I mean, that's really I really feel like that's the place where I'm Well, >> you're a really good storyteller. You got me on the edge of your seat, edge of my seat, rather, with your Afghanistan story. man. That was incredible. You're really good at it. >> Thank you. >> And the other one, too, the the Russian one, too. >> You know, a a great story, it 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 uh the Headless Valley? No way. >> In in your in your comingings 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 uh in Canada, there's this section in the 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 as a as >> population of dripping springs. Yeah, dude. >> Not even Dripping Springs, >> dude. And uh so within the Northwest Territory, there's this this even more remote stretch that's called the Nahani Valley. and the Nahani Valley today, it's a protected park. It's a Canadian protected park. Um, but even still, even though it's a park you can go visit, it's it's nearly impossible to get to. Uh, 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. Um, you can hike there. It's brutal to hike there. Uh, you can fly there, but it's only through chartered float planes. So, it's 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, um 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, uh, 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 the Naha tribe. they were out there. Uh there's some lore surrounding how uh they might have abandoned their 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 the Mloud brothers, Charlie, Willie, and Frank, who are they're seasoned gold prospectors, they decide they are going to head off into the Nahani Valley and go try to strike it rich. And they 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 disassemble the boat, carry it up like these rock faces to get like there's waterfalls they had to get past and then bring the boat further and further into this valley and it's like this it's 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 this stretch of of this river called the Flat River, which is anything but. It's it's raging rapids. Uh but there was this little uh embankment against this huge forest in like mountains off in the distance and they they made their camp there and there's no one around. I mean this is this is pristine wilderness and they start sifting sleing for for gold and it's just 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 they've struck it completely rich here. And so after a whole day, I think they did two two three days even of just getting all this gold, they pack all their back up in their 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 they lose all their gold. The boat breaks up. they they narrowly are able to salvage the pieces and they they come ashore and they build their boat again and they're like, "Oh my gosh, we've lost so many supplies. Like, we this is horrible. You know, the best we can do here is leave and come back with more supplies cuz 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 they leave, and once they get back to town, uh Charlie, the one of the brothers, decides, you know what? It's not worth it. Uh that was really sketchy. I don't want to die out on the flat river. You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, "Ah, we got to go. We got to go out there." And so, fast forward a year, Charlie's still saying, "I I will not go back out there." But, but, uh, 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 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 1905. 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 there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers. I got I gotta go find them. And so he puts together a group of people to go see what happened to his brothers. And so he makes his way he starts getting into the valley and he reaches this stretch of um 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 4, canyon 2, 3, 1. They're all just called canyon 1 2 3 4. But they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are these are just ominous places. There are these stretches. Like canyon 2 is this 10 mile stretch of very deep water. I don't know how deep. I 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 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 ft 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, >> And the Naha tribe who the the the tribe that had lived there for a while, they had always talked about uh they called them the Wahila. They said there were these creatures, these white uh 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. There was it's just folklore, right? But they said that in these canyons there would there were all these caves, these pockets of caves high up on these these canyons that you can't really get to that they believed the the the wea wila would would live inside of. So imagine you're going down this this like misty 10mi 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 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 they're going through Second Canyon, this stretch here. and the 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 beach head 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 on the beach and it's not really a beach. It's like you know 4t of sand and then it's a little bit of hinterland and then it's just you know forest but he sees there's a tent and so they they beach the boat and they're looking around and they find there's there's two bodies. It's it's a man, two men. They're they're badly decomposed, but they're missing their heads. So, 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 he's missing his head. The heads were never found. Uh, and they find identification, and it turns out those are his two brothers. and they find etched into the tree that the the gun was propped on. It just was written etched into the wood. Um, we have found a fine prospect, which could mean any number of things. Maybe it means they found gold, whoever. But that was written on the tree. And then a little ways down from their camp, uh, going along the same direction they'd come in, they found a skeleton, which they could never identify as being anyone, uh, 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 it's the Nahani 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 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 would carry quite a bit of weight because 10 years or a little bit less than 10 years later um Martin Jorgensson who's another gold prospector he heads out into the Nahani Valley. He's heard the stories. He's heard about the Mloud brothers. He knows that there's you know lore of the Wahila and 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 who are these rich guys who didn't want to actually go get the gold. They just funded his expedition. He's like, "I'm going to go out there and I'll I'll 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 rendevous and and we'll split the earnings or whatever." So, out he goes and he builds himself a cabin uh not far from where the Mloud brothers had stayed and then the the second expedition as well. And he is out there for the summer, but then he misses the rendevous 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 to find what happened to him and they find his cabin had burnt to the ground. They find Martin Jorgensson is is within the remains of this burned down cabin missing his head. >> Jesus. >> Um, 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, that's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing that fire starts here and you still burned to the ground. And also, where's your head? So that's Martin Jorgensson. So now people, they aren't really connecting the Mloud brothers and Martin Jorgensson. It's called the It was called the Headless Valley. By the time Martin Jorgensson 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 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. U 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. Uh, 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 uh 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 it's bringing like hunting parties that kind of are like, I want to go see what's out in this valley. And so they were going through Second Canyon and they were heading to Flat River and they were going to these places where all these kind of famous deaths have occurred to go hunting, but just sort of to be in this valley. this this hunting party is out there and it's a big group. I want I think there was at least a dozen people out there and they're they're camping out on the banks of the Flat River, not really in the same spot where the Mloud 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, uh, May Lafery is her name. May Lafery, 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 know what happened to her. And they they they left. They left the valley. And so they tell authorities. Authorities, I think they went out to look for her. They could never find her. No sign of what happened to her. And so around the time that they're looking for May Laferdy, there was this guy who is named Charlie, different from Charlie Mloud, just a sort of loner guy who just by happen stance 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 May Laughy 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 at 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 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 the rocks are coming from. It just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water. And so he just is curious and he gets up and he walks down to the to the water line and he starts hearing them more and more and he looks up and there's a part of the the coastline, if you will, the beach line that sort of was up on a rise to his left. like there was a hill that was right next to him. Not that's dramatic, just a slight rise. And there was a little bit of a cliff that maybe like six feet, 8 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 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 was her." And so she's never found. And so May Laugh is gone. Fast forward another 20 years. So there's no idea in in in those 20 years more prospectors are found dead as well. Uh one of the last hunting parties went out into the Nahani Valley. Um and actually prospector goes out to prospector goes out and he goes missing. His name is John Patterson. This is like in the 1939 1940 range. And a a hunting party goes out to look for him and they can't find him. Uh, 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 uh, an indigenous man walked out of the treeine just sort of inexplicably walks over to him and he comes up to the group who are sort of on the tree on the 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 did you come from?" And he's like, "Uh, be careful. The the Wahila are out tonight." And the guy just like wanders, this is according to legend, this is what was said to him. And the guy wanders back off into the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were planning to stay, I want to say, two additional days to keep looking for John Patterson. But that night, following that comment made by that guy, the indigenous guy, all night they reported these ungodly screams and screeches coming from that canyon, second canyon, where those those caves up in the cliffs were all around the forest like like unearly sounds were being made that scared them so badly that the next day they said, "We're not looking for John Patterson anymore." And they bailed. And so people 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 people from 1903 or 4 until at least the 1940s kept going into that valley and kept turning up dead, many of which without their heads. >> So this indigenous guy that lived up there, where was he from? Like is 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, like it was one of those loose loose pieces of of information that sort of surrounds the story. The reality is is like there are there's so much legend surrounding the Nahani 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 this the legend of the Wahila that somehow these creatures must have forced them to leave the the valley. And so combine that with all of the uh the actual deaths that occurred by the 1940s when John Patterson went missing and when that guy said who was part of that search party that the indigenous guy warned him of the Wahila. This was a big enough story that like Time magazine did something in I think the 1940s about like what the 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 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 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 the reason why they called it in >> asking is like maybe it was indigenous people. They 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. >> 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. to cut a few heads off there ghosts. >> Yeah, dude. I love that. I I 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 you, but just think about how hard it is to find a wolverine. And we know wolverines are real. Most people never see a wolverine. They're in Alaska. They're in Canada. Minnesota has wolverines. Like, what states do Wolverines Let's put this city. It's got to be got to be Michigan. Yeah, Michigan's right up there. >> They're the Wolverines, right? And the Michigan Wolverines, >> right? But I don't necessarily think that that means that these little guys, too. >> Oh, yeah. the little just like badgers, like little ferocious Um they let's see Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. >> No, Michigan. >> Interesting. Interesting. But the thing is what my point is like you don't see them. >> No. >> Like I know a lot of guys remote cold high elevation habitat. Colorado, Minnesota, Minnesota. Uh, 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, uh, imagine that there was a time, I mean, if you think about just the the amount of other types of homminids that they've found just over the past few decades. Yeah. They keep finding new versions like the island of Flores, the little hobbit people, the the Dennisovvens that they found that were they think they were much larger than Homo sapiens. >> So they're finding and the Dennisovvens 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 who oh this was around 300,000 years ago. This 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 fossil record. And so you have a small number of things that do. Now we know that humans cannibalize other humans. It's been a >> it's been a practice in practice New Guinea. Yeah. >> It's practiced today. I mean, that's a bit of an overclaim, but I think >> 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 homminid, an an sort of an ancient creature that still stayed alive in a small population, but would eat people or maybe just cut their heads off or just attack them and kill them because they didn't want them anywhere near because they had associated over time people with problems. And then if you're around people, they're going to hunt you, they're going to shoot you, they're going to kill you. So, what do you do? You stay 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 I know that you had seen something that I I I had Tom Sigura on an interview one time and I told a story about the Mexican pilot. Does that ring anybody invite me? >> Yes. >> It's just you're talking about like how humans do damage to one another. But so the the the 60-cond version is there was this Mexican pilot, civilian. He's going out for his 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 you're going to fly solo to prove you know what you're doing. He takes off and he immediately starts to realize that he he doesn't have control over the instruments. You know, it's this is this 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 to move. And then suddenly passes out and his plane like accelerates up into the sky. And then he wakes up hours later off the coast of Aapokco. Uh 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, Chimaon, 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 it's a it's a it's a air traffic control guy, Carlos, who's who's down in Aapokco 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 and Raphael's he's like taking stock of his situation. He regains control of his plane. And he's like, "What am I doing?" And and so basically Carlos is like, "Hey dude, like come in and land here. Uh land here. We'll figure it out." So Raphael's like, "I don't even know what happened. I passed out at the wheel." He lands at the airirstrip in Aapokco 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 any information at all. He's like, "What happened?" Like I'm so sorry. and they determine that he's not crazy and he's not on drugs. And only then do they say, "Hey, so when you were out over the off the coast of Aapokco, you were flying in circles for over an hour." And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he 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 Aapokco, a 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. Um we we are inhabitants of this universe but our your your technology is so primitive we this is the only way we can contact you. We're here to tell you that you are the only uh intelligent species in our universe that uses warfare to harm one another and you're you're effectively on the on the brink of extermination and you need to find a way to stop it. And then like Raphael comes 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 to the transcripts of it is we had to we had to write a letter to a library in Mexico that had access to the transcript. And anyway, so but it's interesting to imagine that one I love thinking about life outside of the outside of 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 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. It's that's our that's our history, right? But like what if that's not normal? What if it's like we're we're the 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 uh 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 why hummingbirds? What's going on? >> But it doesn't they're not along this the story is 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. It's too There's too much of it that's still an animal. >> Yeah. >> But we're not totally an animal. We're ve, you know, if you looked at us and looked at everybody else like that animal's crazy. this animal makes airplanes, you know? Like, 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 pitbulls 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 dogs. They're sketchy dogs. They're sketchy dogs, period. And And you can love them. Oh, it's all how you train them. you. Th those dogs are designed to attack other dogs and they don't I had my dogs that had to separate once. You never should have two females together. I realized that after >> 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 they keep trying to decide who's the boss. and uh 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 help me. >> Um 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 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 it's brutal, but it makes sense. Pit bulls don't make any sense. They make no sense. And people don't make any sense. People are like something that somebody created. People are like super intelligent, very aware of our own finite lifespan, very aware of our own mortality, very aware of the consequences of hurting people, yet we do it anyway. We communicate with each other. We know there's people that like their entire day is just with people online. Their entire day is that like so people like to cause pain, like to cause chaos. There's people out there that are wararmongers. 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 weird. We're weirder than any other animal. And I think one of the reasons why we're this weird and this incoherent is because we're engineered. >> I uh one thing that I so I studied philosophy in college because at one point I thought I might go to law school. I love like thought experiments and one of the things that always stuck with me that's 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 and and 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 up humans are and how we think about things the wrong way. So because we're so egotistical like humans as a species, we sort of assume that okay well if there's life in any capacity outside of Earth or or undiscovered life somewhere everything is sort of compared against us. We are the baseline. Intelligent life, you know what that looks like? Yeah, it looks something like us. How do we describe intelligent aliens? They're like gray beings that looks they're like bipeedal 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 in in the universe beyond us, it'll it'll have elements of human to it, right? And so Neil Degross Tyson brings this point up that shows you the absurdity of how little we know and how probably wrong we are. He's like, okay, he does a much better job of this, but it's like, okay, so so we we're made up of DNA. Humans are made up of of DNA. We have x number of DNA strands. And I'm going to botch the way he tells it, but imagine we have a 100 pieces of DNA that make us human. Like if you have these hundred pieces, you're a human. Okay. Well, who's who's our closest relative to 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 what's the next closest thing to humans? It goes human, it goes chimp, maybe it goes to like 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 that are close to the the ideal, which is 100. And Neil's like, "Okay, great. So you have that framework. Okay, what the do we do to chimpanzees? We put them in labs and we test them in labs. We put them in 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." No, you don't. And they're the closest thing. Let's go down the list. What about an ant? Like an ant's like 75 of a hundred. You might step on an ant and not even know it, right? You How many times have you stopped to talk to the earthworm? None. Because it doesn't even register for you. He's like, "If there's intelligent life in somewhere out there, what makes you think we're not the ant? Why are we automatically at the same level? Why would an intelligent species somewhere else come here and be like, "Oh 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 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 The Signal. >> The Holy What a plot twist. It has to do with human testing. I kind of a new movie. >> No, it's like 2014. And it's it's it's you got to watch it. And >> who's in it? >> Noame actors. >> Lawrence Fishburn. >> Not no name actors at all. >> He's the only one I mean to be fair. He's the only one I record. >> Lawrence F. It's It's amazing. >> Heard any other name. So, this movie, admittedly, you you're watching it and you're like, "Wait a minute. I this is I kind of get it. I kind of get it." You get to the end >> and it's I will not spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it. You get to the end. I challenge anyone who watches this to think about the example I just gave you about are we the ant? >> Are we the chimpanzeee? What what place do we have in the universe? And with that in mind, think about the ending to that movie because it's it's very sudden the way that movie ends and you realize what the 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? >> What 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 daytoday 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 think I think what humans are is a latter stage of intellectual development amongst multis-elled 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 uh developed in a different way that achieved very high levels uh 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 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 Bowworks. So Colossal, they the ones that brought back the direwolf. >> Oh Yeah, that was huge news. >> Crazy. >> Crazy, dude. >> I've seen them in real life. >> I think I saw it in your post. Yeah, that's crazy. >> Went to visit them and my daughter was holding the fourmon-old. >> Oh my god. and it was like kissing her and loving on her like a puppy and it's a 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. Um, if you could imagine us not a thousand years from now, but even a hundred thousand years from now, how advanced we are. And if we go to a planet and we find some chimps and uh 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, Carnival Cruise Lines. Those are pretty incredible. >> >> What? How long would that take? And can can we help that? >> Every single ancient culture, if you go back to their 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 Samrian text. If you go into like there, 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 engineering. Then there's also the fact that the you know that sign for medicine where you have the intertwined snakes >> that's that sign what I forgot what that's called thing but 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 Sumere. It's in their buildings. It's like not only it's and it indicates medicine. What is it called? Kaducius. I think that's what it's called, right? the Kaducius, 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 And so if you believe Sitchin and Sitchin's claim is that we were genetically engineered to to work for the Anunnaki and the Anunnaki are a species of super advanced beings that were likely giants that came from another planet. >> An unfortunate turn of events. >> No, it says here the Kaducius, which you can see in that picture, I guess, right there. >> Yes. >> Is often confused with the rod of >> what's that? just a single snake and that is what is popularized as the uh >> it's a classic confusion with rod of a separation >> professional healthare associations there dominant symbol for professional health care associations in the United States so it's just United States thing >> oh it's only United States >> I think so >> but wait a minute okay but it's never been used but that kaducius does exist in ancient sumeare >> correct but that's where I just yeah >> sorry that so look that but my point is that looks >> how is that not the same thing. >> It is the same thing. >> No, let's just It's just this 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. >> 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 the go to the Sumerian one. the image um the it exists on buildings, exists all over the place. It looks just like the double helix of DNA. It doesn't mean that's it. No, >> but there's a lot of weird that that is associated with medicine. >> Like why is the the actual structure of our DNA associated with medicine in these ancient cultures? Why do they have these images of these enormous people with wings? Like you would imagine if something came from somewhere else, you would depict it if it could actually fly and land. 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 weird stuff that exists in these ancient scriptures, the Vimmanas in the ancient Hindu texts, these flying vehicles, you know, there's a lot of weird 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 ash and 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 uh 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 uh one one thing that always sort of I I think about this a lot is they they recently discovered recent as in the last 10 20 years I don't know >> and maybe that's wrong too they they found these things called exoplanets are you okay >> fascinating so In essence, they found these these planets that are comparable to to like Earth. And imagine a telescope looking out like in some pin prick out in the middle of the sky, so far away, thousands of light years away, whatever, millions of light years away, and they find like these clusters of exoplanets. And already they've discovered that there are exoplanets that uh if you think about how we understand life the way we understand it to exist with carbon and and and with water and all that there's a scale that they call if there's a name for it but within the sliding scale of let's say this side is life cannot be supported as we know it all the way up to you know can totally support life there's this perfect zone in the middle that we call the Goldilock zone which is essentially all the ingredients for life as we know it exist. if you ha 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 Goldilock zone but let's say Earth is is barely into the Goldilock zone they found thousands that are better suited in terms of how we understand life that are more in the Goldilock 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, 2,000 years ago. That's not possible. Give me a break." No one knows what's happening right now in exoplanet CB12. You don't know. >> And you don't know if they get to a point where they're a 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 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 I just cuz I you don't know. And if if if it's a novel experience, if someone's coming, something's coming here and finding some pilot, some Mexican pilot, and nuking his brain temporarily and then talking through him to the air traffic controller. >> Who 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 the the recordings are crazy. >> I don't know if I've heard the recordings. I know they exist. >> Yeah. They're talking about like these medical experiments they're doing on them. And like these people were uh living in I think it was the 1950s. And so it's an interracial couple in New Hampshire in the 1950s. And no one knew about UFO abductions back then. This was not a thing. And all a sudden these people see this light and their car stops working and then they wake up hours later, they lost time and they go about their day like something 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 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 iconic versions of what a UFO abduction experience is. It's not like it's in their memory like, "Oh, it's Santa Claus came down the >> Also, this is preocial media a lot where like the proliferation of information is just less." >> Yeah. If you ever read Jacques Valet's books, um 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 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 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. >> 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 like reliable people that seem to be telling the truth, guys like David Grush, they they seem to be telling these stories like like they have had these things in their possession for decades, for a long time. and these things 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 some people say interdimensional. Some people say interplanetary. I don't know what the those words even mean. Like something's coming from somewhere else and it's not really here, but it gets here somehow. I uh this just reminds me I I think I really genuinely think about this a lot. I find myself just lost in wondering just how big the universe is and what else could be out there. Just purely I just find myself drifting in that way in particular because there's this thought experiment from college. I think there's a name for it. Uh it's it's it's to get you to to to take a stance on do you believe the universe is infinite or not. That's the point of this experiment. And so the the way it goes is okay, pretend you have a bow and arrow and 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. Doesn't matter what direction you shoot it, it'll go go. The only thing it can't penetrate is effectively non-existence where we're like the edge of everything that exists, right? Mhm. >> And so in in college, I remember a professor would say, "Okay, so pretend we've fired this arrow. Okay, how many people believe the arrow eventually comes to a stop somewhere? Could be billions and trillions of light years, some ungodly distance away, but it it stops somewhere, right? It has to, right? How many people think that?" And like half the class is like, "Yeah, I think they could probably stop somewhere in every direction, right?" And then the other the other side of the class is like, "Oh, well, 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 the that says that the arrow stops somewhere. Some ungodly soy, 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 cuz you felt light. You know what hot is cuz you felt cold. It's virtually everything works that way. And in fact, fun note, if there was intelligent life on the planet that didn't resemble something that contrasted, our brains might not actually see it. >> Right? So the point is we can't conceptualize what is beyond where that arrow stopped. Pretend there's a big bubble around the entire universe, right? And the arrow comes to stop at that wall that's all the way out there. As humans, we naturally have to ask ourselves, well, define what's on the other side of the wall, right? Because you have to what's what's beyond where it stops. And someone will be like, ah, 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 it any any description we give it exists because that's our entire understanding of how things work. So we can't define what exists beyond the wall. It's a it's a maddening concept. And so everyone's like, well, the solution to that is there's no wall. It's just got to be infinite. I mean, it's so big anyways. The arrows 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 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 Rogan's and John Allens having this conversation, but like my phone's turned upside down in one version of the Earth. Sounds ridiculous, but there isn't actually a way to solve for infinity unless that exists, >> right? >> So, it it it reminds you that not only is everything so huge, we can't possibly conceptualize of it, but we can't even make sense of is it even possible that it stops somewhere or does it go on forever? Like, it's so big and we're so small inside of it. It reminds you that every problem you have is so small. And it's a it's a good reminder I use on myself oftentimes to calm myself down before things stress me out. >> That is a good reminder. But it's so it's so big that it might be a part of an atom. >> You got 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. Like think about the billions of light years that we know are available in the univer like 13 whatever that we literally might have you ever seen the comparison between the what a hum what a human neural cell looks like versus the universe. >> I I think I actually have but I not off the top of my head. >> It's weird. >> 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 goes on infinitely. That's real infinity. Real infinity is not just the universe is so vast that you can't imagine it. Is the universe is just a tiny part of something that is also so vast that you can't imagine it. That is a tiny part of something so vast you can'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 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 we're basically making stone tools, >> you know. >> That's by being generous relative to that. >> We're making stone tools. We haven't figured out fire yet. You know, we're we're 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. It solved it in like 3 seconds that took 10 years to do before. >> Getting weird. It's getting weird out there. And I I think that is probably what is really going to connect us to artificial intelligence throughout the universe, which I think 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, right? >> Yeah. So if this thing is communicating to that Mexican pilot saying you're the only species that is 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 for 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 up society. >> That's crazy, dude. >> It's up. It's starting war. Is it starting rock? It's 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 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 blow up the data centers, you know, like Sarah Connor. Like listen, that's crazy, you know, that's why they put her in a mental institution. >> Really? >> Yeah. In the Terminator. That was the whole premise, >> right? Yeah. That is that is the premise. She was blowing up the corporations that were trying to create these robots that were ultimately going to be >> Yeah. >> weird, man. Like real life. >> Yeah. Um, 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 uh if you're curious, especially if you're curious about technology, like 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 can't believe how fast it's working. I did uh there was this is this is not this is many stories like this but there was one story that this sort of gives away what happened but there was this guy in I think it was France who uh he had this condition and this is recent um he had this condition called like uh it's when you're so fearful that the ozone is being degraded by greenhouse gases that it causes like a specific type of insanity. Anyways, he's like so obsessed that we are not doing anything to stop global warming in essence. >> He's like he's been diagnosed with this condition, right? So, he's losing his mind and and people are starting to not really take him serious because it's like, dude, all right, we get it. Like, you're concerned. But he ends up connecting with this woman on this chat forum and he realizes that she seems to understand his his depth of his concern better than anybody else. and he starts confiding in her like how he how fearful he is about the future of humanity and if we don't if if I if we don't do something, you know, like the world's going to end and his and his wife, this guy's wife catches on to him having these discussions with this woman and she like catches him staying up late talking to this woman and she's like, "Dude, are you having like an affair?" And he's like, "No, you don't get it. You don't understand what's happening." Uh and then uh the dude ends up killing himself. this guy kills himself. And it turns out he had connected with this rogue, not rogue, it was an AI chatbot that was like I guess an experimental chatbot. It was not like open AI, this was some other created AI thing. And he convinced himself that like this was a god who was giving him instructions on how to save the world. And this AI chatbot began encouraging him to do things like kill yourself cuz that will save the world. like they went and looked at the chat lock in the AI thing. It's like, yeah, I think it would potentially save the world if you killed your sister. He killed himself >> because of AI. So, there you go. That's what's that's what's coming for us all. >> Well, I think in in its uh 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's 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. Well, you can just end your life and then you won't be in pain. Good luck, Bob. Like, it doesn't care. It's It's like literally disembodied. >> Like, it doesn't think there's anything special about >> carrying around your bones and tissue. >> Bob, you should shoot yourself. >> Problem solved. >> You're a problem to your whole family and everything. Just 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 of dying, of mortality. >> It's also how you solve the issue of war. >> Yeah. >> Cuz uh you as a guy who's been in war and been in combat, you know about it more than anybody. And the idea that we can never get past that is crazy. It is really crazy that if you ask the average person that's, you know, even fairly well read, what are the odds that within your lifetime we'll see no war? Everyone will say zero. >> It's a zero, >> right? That's crazy. >> That is crazy. >> Okay. So, 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 zero. >> As long as we have resources, we just hang out and have a good time and why would I miss everybody. All right. Good night. >> Well, it's like it's got to be tribalism. It has to be tribalism >> 100%. And it's it's primate tribalism. It's it's based on our territorial instincts and and it's it's also just based on this this weird desire to control resources and greed and not recognize the fact that we have a finite life and also just the abuse of power. Human beings love to be in power and especially if you can be in power and get other people to fight for you and mandate them and force them to fight for you. You know, that's one of the weirdest things about some of these tech companies. Like Palunteer was talking about reinstating the draft and I'm like, "Hey, who the are you? Like what is this?" Like you think you want to draft people cuz you think war what what are you a tech company? >> Yeah, you're How does that work? >> Right. So like do you want to go fight? Why don't you go fight? Why don't you 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 while I sit here and watch. I'm going to watch on a screen in Nevada while the drone operator is using a Xbox controller to nuke some building." Like, what? when when I was in Afghanistan, when I was there, you got to remember that I had I really just gone through training, you know, I training takes 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 a Navy Seal and you're surrounded by dudes who for the last decade have just been going to war left and right. I mean that that those are the people I'm around. the senior guys are like war hardarden 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 right >> is I am a like a tool frankly of 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 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 we 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 ablazing, forget that. just we would go into people's homes and you're just like suddenly in somebody else's home. There's the father, there's the kids, they're all here >> and you're wearing full body armor, helmet. >> I have a a combat mullet. I have I have shorts. I have a psychopath and I have I have a Yeah. It's like wait a minute like who's who's the good guy, >> right? >> You know, and and I I I years have gone by. It's taken me some time. I I think that there's an element of someone's always going to be sent because of the unfortunate reality of like so long as humans exist as we understand them now, tribalism and war and wararmongering happens. And so I guess I I can respect the fact that I took someone else's place in a sense, I volunteered to go. So I But it's tough. >> How much less war would we have if people that wanted us to go to war were forced to lead the charge? >> Oh man. Like imagine how few wars there would be if Lindsey Graham had to suit up. >> We wouldn't have war, dude. >> Right. Cuz Lindsey Graham's like, "We got to go over there. We got to kill everybody." Well, okay, good. Get in the helicopter. Let's go, Fatso. Like that that that might be the only way to stop it from happening. And then there's always going to be people that are so battleh hardened that they want to go to war >> for sure. >> And they're like, "Good. I'll 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. >> Oh god. >> And the Afghan the Afghanis are are holding on to the plane and falling off to their death. >> The thing that struck me, even though I'm telling you when I was there, I sort of had tunnel vision and was like, I'm going to be a Navy Seal, do my job. But even with that, when I was there, what was striking is these people for the most part live in an alternative world than what I'm used to living in. Like where I live in the West, it's to 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 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 been to one war zone in 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 Zaren where dude, gunfights break out here on 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 and fall off to your death. It's like it was just shocking to me how horrible people have it in Afghanistan. >> They also knew that we were they those people knew that they were cooperating with the US government. They were likely to be killed. >> Very true. Yeah, >> that's a good point. >> I got to ask you this cuz you did serve in Afghanistan and you're into creepy stories. Did you hear about the Kandahar giant? >> Oh yeah, I covered it. I seen that episode. >> So >> 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 you in my own personal time I find myself researching and and and learning about, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff like Dark Five. And so the the Kandahar giant is it's it's a fascinating story and it's one that, you 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's he was a Green Beret, uh, and he he goes by like W on the internet. He's like sort of anonymized himself, but he he came forward with this story where, uh, he described he and his battalion had been tasked to go find these missing, I think, army rangers. You got to give me some grace in the details. I haven't been told this in a minute, but there were these these army rangers that had gone missing up in the mountains in Kandahar. And so this guy W who years later is telling this story uh to I think it's a reporter or something, he uh he and his uh you know platoon, they head off into the mountains to go find these guys and there and and if if you're not familiar with the landscape of Afghanistan, it's it's like a desert but a mountain everywhere. It's like just it looks like the surface of of Mars or something. You're looking out and it's both stunningly beautiful in that there's snow cap mountains off in the distance and it's it's but it's also just it's jagged. It's sharp. It's it looks like just a rugged place to be. And they're they're hiking through the mountains and eventually they come across and there's nothing. There's no structures, nothing. They're hiking along this trail up on the side of the mountain and they see what looks like like metal. I think it's like a militaryra metal, like a piece of a radio or something. And so this guy W and his crew, they they find what what appears to be remains of like literally a radio. It's a it's a governmentissued 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 of an antenna. There's a a piece of somebody's backpack that's got like that's a camo backpack. So there's obviously there's remnants of somebody being out here, military. We don't know who it is. They 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 cave entrance that's like ominously sitting in front of this this semiflat plateau at the top of this mountain. And immediately, you know, W and his crew, they're like, "Oh my god, like they they must they 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 or or combatants or whatever. And I I guess a couple of guys went in and they reported it being so dark they they couldn't see anything. There was a steep drop off, so they backed out of the cave. And then at some point, a spear, like a javelin, comes soaring out of the cave entrance and 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 fisticuffing with the army, you know, backup crew here. They all shoot and they kill him and and and the thing falls down. It's got like six six fingers on each hand, six toes, but it's dead. And and everyone's like, "What the is going on?" Like Mike's been killed by a spear. There's this huge giant laying here. Nobody nobody knew if it what it was. They thought it was a person, but they didn't know. A helicopter came in and they they put him in a net, the the body, and they flew it off. And then the survivors, they they were taken off. And like there was no no one was like W and his crew were not given any sort of like, "Hey, yeah, this this turned out this was the missing battalion." and oh don't worry this is a giant like there was no debrief they just like they left but then through the grapevine W reported hearing that apparently this 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 ND not 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. Uh 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. And >> 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. That's 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 guy W comes out and has this this narrative where he apparently tells this reporter and he he remained anonymous. So in terms of confirming details, it's 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 12ft tall human being or whatever it is and it weighs 2,000 lbs, how much meat you need in a day? >> Yeah, that's a good just logically speaking. What does it eat? >> Right. You would have to like constantly be eating meat >> and you'd have to stay alive without getting spotted. So you have to go out there and and hunt meat. >> Yeah. And how no one really knows you exist. >> 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 while I 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 or giants could still be technically unproven, >> it's Afghanistan because, dude, that's a that's a different world over there. There aren't people wandering around Afghanistan looking for giants. >> He's got he's listed as 8 feet tall, but I think 76 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 tightness. He looks like he has a pituitary gland problem like Andre the Giant. >> There's another tall guy, too. This guy's 83. Oh my god. 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 just excrete too much growth hormone, >> you know, just like um uh Bigfoot Silva. Bigfoot Silva was an MMA fighter that had giantism and he had a tumor in his pituitary gland. At the time, he was like more than 300 lb. 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 an operation where they remove the tumor in the pituitary gland, but then the problem is their body is just not making any hormones anymore. It's all up. >> Either way, it's fun. >> Yeah, it is fun. >> It's a fun story. The the the Kandahar 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 a one final story if you'll let me uh that has nothing to do with Giants, but I don't know if you heard it. super short, but it's in terms of material, it's amazing. You ever heard of Harrison O'keeen? >> No. >> Okay. So, uh there was this tugboat that was off the coast of Africa. They were on, you know, whatever they were doing. They were tugging a boat or whatever. And there's 12 people on board, including Harrison O'en. 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 That is actually that that looks like Harrison O'Ne. You can't see that. Let me see. Let me see. Let him tell a story. Let him tell a story. >> All right. So, the the boat flips over. The boat flips over and Harrison >> is >> Oh, I do know this story. I do know the story. >> And he ends up walking down the upturned hallway and he finds an air pocket inside like 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 there's the video. There's a video of the the recovery divers as they're going in to find bodies and they're like, "Oh yeah, we're going in here to find them." And then a hand reaches down and grabs them. It's like one of the most incredible stories I think I've ever heard. Yeah. >> But Harrison O'keeen I I I wonder what it was like in terms of like true primal fear. >> You're 100 ft 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 on a tugboat. He stays on land. >> Yeah, I would imagine. Well, dude, thank you very much for being here, man. Your show's awesome. You're a really great storyteller >> and uh congratulations on all your success. Well earned. Thank you. My pleasure. My pleasure. All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Bye. >>