Ep. 924: MrBallen on SEALS, the War in Afghanistan, and a Career in Storytelling

Steven Rinella talks with MrBallen on: his Navy SEAL experience; the nature of evil; a career pivot into storytelling; aliens; and more. Find MrBallen's latest graphic novel at https://book.ballenstudios.com/ Presented by Can-Am, the leader in ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com http://www.can-am.brp.com Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:35Speaker 02

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• 1:07Steven Rinella?

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• 1:45Speaker 04

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• 2:09Steven Rinella?

  Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

• 2:20Steven Rinella?

  All right, hot damn, everybody. Joined today by John Allen, known as Mr. Ballin. And I finally, I finally found out how you became Mr. Ballin.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:28Steven Rinella?

  John B. Allen.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  There it is. People don't know that. It's like, it's like a secret. People assume it's John Ballin. It's not, it's John B. Allen.

• 2:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, joined today by John Allen, who has many millions of YouTube subscribers, where he tells dark and mysterious stories, many right in our wheelhouse of like wilderness experiences, crazy stuff out in the woods, people vanishing out in the woods.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:54Steven Rinella?

  Lot of wild stories. You have a real penchant for wilderness wildness. Former Navy SEAL, came out of that world and got into storytelling. We're gonna talk a lot about his life, the stories he tells, the mysteries that kind of haunt him.

• 3:11Steven Rinella?

  The ones that, that, that you kind of know what's going, I'd like to talk about a couple where you kind of know what's going on and some where you legitimately are perplexed.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Before we get into that, though, we got our annual Christmas tour coming up. So, me, the Lavian Lover, Yanni's gonna be there, Clay, Brent, Phil the Engineer's gonna be there, Dr. Randall's gonna be there. We're doing our annual Christmas tour. We've got six stops this year's Christmas tour. First, home state, going to Grand Rapids, Michigan, December 14th, 20 Monroe Live is the place.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

  Tuesday, December 15th, will be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Turner Hall. Wednesday, December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin, at Barrymore. Bubbly Doug Durn is gonna join us on that one. Thursday, December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa, at Val Air Ballroom. Friday, December 18th, Minneapolis, Minnesota, at Pantages Theater. And then, this is the first time we've ever done this town, Saturday, December 19th, Fargo, at Fargo Theater. I, you are, if you come to the live show, here's my guarantee to you, you will laugh your ass off. I would say, I guarantee you win something, but not everybody's gonna win something. But you will laugh your ass off, you'll have a great time.

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  Go find anybody that's come to the Christmas tour before, and they will tell you it's a two thumbs up on all things Christmas tour. Can't wait to see you guys at those shows. Tickets aren't on sale yet, though. This is like a pre-deal. This is a pre-pre. So this is the pre, and then the next pre is pre-sale, and then it's, it's kind of dumb. But, um, someday you'll be able to buy tickets. Can they buy tickets, Nate?

• 5:00Steven Rinella?

  16th.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  We're also gonna interview at the Grand Rapids show, we're gonna interview the last American smelt dipper, who I grew up with. If that don't, if that don't grab you by the boo-boo, what will? We'll see you in Grand Rapids.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  What's a smelt dipper?

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, dude. So, how familiar are you with the Great Lakes? You grew up in that neck of the woods.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  I mean, I went to boot camp in the Great Lakes, but I was mostly indoors, getting scolded by my drill sergeant equivalents.

• 5:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The Great Lakes is like America's experimental aquarium.

• 5:33Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's the stuff that was there originally, and some vestiges of it are still around, and there's all the stuff that's been released on purpose, on accident into the Great Lakes. Like, the common carp was let go in the Great Lakes on purpose.

• 5:47Steven Rinella?

  They brought in these, these ale wives came in there, and the ale wives blew up, and there millions of them are dead on the beach. So they're like, we need to bring in something to eat the ale, you know what I mean? We'll bring in something to consume the ale wives. And it just goes on and on and on and on and on. And then ships come in, and they have ballast, and so they release zebra mussels. And it's just insanity in the Great Lakes.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 6:10Steven Rinella?

  Through the years, one thing they tried was they tried a, in a stroke of genius, they put in the rainbow smelt.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 6:20Steven Rinella?

  Which is a great fish, though, very popular fish. And I have, in my, in my life, coincided with the like great smelt blitz. Like when smelt really took off, and you would go down, and they'd run in the spring, they're anadromous, they'd run the rivers in the spring, they're about finger length, two finger length.

• 6:40Steven Rinella?

  You eat them whole.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  Bones and all, fried. So I grew up during it, like, it was like to the point where people would fill beds of trucks with smelt. They'd fertilize gardens with smelt. Like, you just eat, you'd freeze gallons of smelt. I even, I could say this now, I even like illegally sold smelt, okay?

• 7:03Speaker 05

  So smelt dealer.

• 7:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, well, we would get so many, you know, we'd sell the smelt. It was just, it was insanity.

• 7:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:09Steven Rinella?

  And then, like, all things in the Great Lakes, you put it in, it goes nuts, and then it vanishes. This is just kind of a, that's how, that's how introduced species work. So, um, typically, and then they find some sort of equilibrium.

• 7:25Steven Rinella?

  So this buddy of mine, Matt Dros, who we were all smelt dipping enthusiasts, he, he could never shed the lifestyle.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  He's a smelt guy.

• 7:37Steven Rinella?

  He's a smelt guy, and he, he has gone, he goes to incredible extremes to dip some smelt every spring. And so, so I asked him, when we were planning the live tour, I said, you gotta come on, and we gotta get a smelt update for you.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Smelt update.

• 7:52Steven Rinella?

  What's going on with smelt? So, man, John Allen, tell me about getting into the military, man. Like, like, how did that shake out? Because I'm assuming you came in like post 9/11.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  I did.

• 8:02Steven Rinella?

  So you knew it was gonna be, you knew that it wasn't gonna be just good times and hanging out? Like, you knew it was gonna be like, like war?

• 8:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, for sure. Uh, I, I grew up in a town called Quincy, Mass, so just south of Boston, Mass. And, you know, I graduated high school in 2006, and a lot of my buddies in high school, when they graduated, they joined the Marines and the Army, and they went off to Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  And I was always sort of inspired by that in and of itself. I had grown up playing with G.I. Joes, I thought the military was the coolest thing.

• 8:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  But I, my family was these, they're just super smart people, like academics.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but like academics and writers and stuff.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Brilliantly smart storytellers, you know, journalists. And so it just was always a thing that I was gonna go to college. Even though I never really aspired to go to college, it was just sort of part of my upbringing.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  And so I do go to college, actually in Park, as my, my mom, who's a professional writer, wrote my college essay that basically got me into school. But I did graduate from college.

• 9:06Steven Rinella?

  Did you at least make a couple tweaks on it, on your own?

• 9:08Speaker 05

  No, shameless, just right out the door.

• 9:12Steven Rinella?

  Well said, mom.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  My grades were terrible in high school, and I, so I applied to school out in University of Massachusetts, it's in Western Mass. And so I send off my application, and it's got bad high school grades.

• 9:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  And this essay, this poignant, beautiful essay she wrote about the last time I saw my best friend. She wrote it from my perspective. The school got in touch with me, and they're like, well, you know, your grades, not really what we're looking for, but my goodness, that essay, you are in, young man. So I got in on the strength of her essay. But anyways, I graduate college, and I've been telling my family all along that I was gonna, I'm gonna go to law school, I'm gonna go be a lawyer. And I don't even know why I had that pegged as, as my route. I didn't want to do it at all. But really, throughout college, I couldn't stop thinking about those guys I knew from high school that, you know, went overseas. And I didn't, I didn't know if I really wanted to serve, I just kept coming back to wanting to be in the military. And then I had this, this pivotal.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  Meeting, if you will, with these two family friends. So these two guys who I grew up knowing, you know, these two guys were just family friends. They were the brothers of my mother's best friend.

• 10:20Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  Just at cookouts and stuff, I would see them totally nondescript, typical dudes, like 20 years older than me. You know, I didn't think much of them. I knew they were in the military, but I didn't really know what they did.

• 10:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  And then sometime I was a sophomore in college. I found out that those two guys were on SEAL Team Six.

• 10:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  And they were just like super low key about it.

• 10:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  But they were retiring. And so people were going to have to go to development group, to go to the base for their retirement. And it was like, wait a minute, like they were on Team Six? Like it blew my mind completely.

• 10:54Steven Rinella?

  Because you felt, because you felt like if they're on it, I could like.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  I didn't even, it was almost like I couldn't believe that the dudes that I basically had discounted as, man, whatever, just those are just the two dudes I see at family cookhouse and stuff.

• 11:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  Are like commandos, you know, fighting the war on terror overseas. And it was, it was, and it came at a time where I was already sort of thinking a lot about the fact that people my age were serving overseas. And one thing led to another where I, I decided to go visit with these two guys. Who I already knew, like it isn't like I'm meeting them, I know them, but now it feels like I, I'm meeting them for the first time.

• 11:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  And I, I hit them up and I'm like, hey, can I come see you guys? Like just talk to you about your, your military career? And they're like, yeah, come out to this location. And they give me this, this location, it's in New Hampshire. And it was like this kids camp. And I knew that my mom's best friend, so these two guys, it's their sister, she ran a music and art camp for kids. And I'm like, oh, that's weird. I guess, I guess I'm meeting them out of the art camp. And so I drive my way to this, this camp in like scenic rural New Hampshire. And I go through the gate and I see my mom's best friend and she's like, oh yeah, just go up that access road there, they're up there, they have a man cape up there, you can, you can go find my brothers up there. And I'm like, okay, this is a little weird. Kids running around, like there's art camp, it's a literally a kids art camp. And I take this access road up into the, the backwoods, a couple of miles down the road.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  And I come to this, this shack that was just like two by fours and like plywood, like a crudely made shack that was the size of a garage maybe. And as soon as I get out of the car and it's like gravel, so I pull up, everybody can hear me pulling up. I hear the sound inside, there's no windows, I just hear the sound of like grown men, like belly laughing and bullshitting with each other inside of this, the shack. And I get out of the car and I start walking over to the door, which is just on, you know, hinges or whatever, no windows. And the talking inside the shack stops and I'm just like walking over to the door. And then I like open it up, I'm 19, I'm like this kid. I look inside, there's, there's nothing inside, there's no furniture, it's not even like a building, it's like literally someone set up a fort out here.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  And there's something like 10 very burly, intense looking men we've never seen before, and the two brothers. And they're all sitting on upturned like painters buckets and they're like chewing tobacco, they're just sitting in a circle bullshitting. And one of them looks at me and just goes, who the fuck are you?

• 13:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 05

  I was like, oh, my name is John, I'm, I'm the son of Jesse.

• 13:20Steven Rinella?

  Just drove up from the art camp.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it turned out, these are like a bunch of active duty Team Six guys who are training with my, with the two brothers to get ready for deployment. And so I had this amazing day of like almost meeting the two brothers for the first time in a sense where I'm like, wait a minute, you're like commandos? Like what the hell is, I, I play video games with Navy SEALs, you're telling me that's what you do? And they like brought me out shooting, like we're like, I just hung out with bros who were just active duty SEAL Team Six guys. And then also these, these two brothers, which now they feel like heroes of mine. And I, I didn't even have like a, I'm going to go be a Navy SEAL moment. It was, I was just so fascinated with the fact that this is really what they did.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  It was almost like meeting a professional athlete or something. It feels so disconnected from real life. Like you don't, you don't know people that play shortstop for the Red Sox, you don't know those people. They exist, but that's separate, right? And I, I, I asked them all some variation of like, why did you do this? Why'd you join? And all of them had this sense of like, I don't know, I just kind of fucked everything else up and I, I thought this was a pretty cool thing, cool challenge, you know, I always wanted to serve to some degree, but I wanted to see if I could, if I could make it. Cause the training for SEAL training is, it's, you know, it's famously open to the public in some ways. You just got to be like an American citizen in decent enough shape, you can go try out, but very few people make it through it.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you don't need to be in the military to try out?

• 14:44Speaker 05

  You, well, you do, you do have to join the military.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  But you can come off the street and raise your hand and say, I want to go try out.

• 14:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so you come off the street, enlist, like anyone that lists can start the process.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  You can basically be ushered directly into training. You go through bootcamp first, but it's set up to go to SEAL training. And my takeaway from this, this pivotal day.

• 15:02Steven Rinella?

  If you don't make it, do you walk?

• 15:03Speaker 05

  No.

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  You're still enlisted?

• 15:04Speaker 05

  You become needs of the Navy.

• 15:06Steven Rinella?

  Not enlisted, but you're in the, you're in.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  You go chip, chip paint off the side of ships in Japan.

• 15:11Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  And you paint road markers, you know, in different, it's, it's terrible, you don't want to.

• 15:15Steven Rinella?

  So it's a gamble?

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a big gamble. It's not, it sort of pushes you to like try your best, you know?

• 15:20Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  But yeah, I left that meeting feeling like I had aspirations to maybe join the military, it was in the back of my mind. And then I was just so impressed, just so completely impressed with these guys and the fact that they all had sort of earned their reputation in a sense. I, I really didn't know what they actually did. I, my understanding of what Navy SEALs do is the same as anybody else who, you know, was broadly aware of special operations.

• 15:46Steven Rinella?

  Was it wrong?

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Uh, no, actually it was pretty, pretty close.

• 15:50Steven Rinella?

  Right, yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  And so I, I kind of flipped a switch for myself. I, I continued telling my family, I'm going to go be a lawyer, uh, but secretly began really training hard to, as if I'm going to go to SEAL training. And then as soon as I graduated college, I immediately, like within a month, was in the recruiter's office enlisting to sign up to go to BUDS.

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  SEAL training, yeah. And it worked out, but yeah, it was a calling, I would say.

• 16:13Steven Rinella?

  Did you, did you, did you feel like you breezed through all the trials?

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Not even close.

• 16:17Steven Rinella?

  It was tough.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  No, fuck no, I, I did not breeze through it at all. I, uh, there were things I was good at, I think that you have to have something going in, you need to have, you're either a good runner, or you're a good swimmer, or you're just really strong, or you just, there's something about you typically needs to carry the day. I was a good runner. Um, but man, the, uh, there were just some tests that were just exceptionally stressful. Um, I'd say most notably are like the underwater tests you do. So, so SEAL training, it takes, call it two years. If you go the enlisted route, you got to go to bootcamp. Uh, this is if you start as a civilian, you go to bootcamp, that's in Great Lakes, Illinois. You, you do two years, uh, two years, two months of bootcamp. And then you, I went to a prep school in Chicago that is to get you ready for BUDS,

• 17:02Speaker 05

  I don't think they do that anymore. And then you go out to San Diego for like the, the famous part of training, which I keep saying it, it's BUDS, which stands for Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL School. That is SEAL bootcamp, it's the, it's the famous part of training and that's six months long. And then if you graduate that statistically, you're, you're going to be a SEAL. There is quite a bit of follow on training, it's advanced SEAL training where you're like actually taught what to do. But the, the make or break is the six months out in San Diego and six months long. And, uh, it's broken into three phases, first phase, second phase, third phase. The, the most attrition happens in that first phase. Cause it's just physically brutal, you're up all night, you know, you're getting beat up constantly.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  It's just like, you know, whatever you think of as like brutal bootcamp style training times 10, that's sort of what it is for first phase. And if you make it through that, you go to second phase, which is the underwater phase.

• 17:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, that's, that's what the stressful part was?

• 17:57Speaker 05

  For me, yeah, I, I was a good swimmer, but I, I discovered that I am prone to panic underwater and it's something that you have to figure out how to, how to handle. Um, and it's, it's, some of the tests they give you, including there's one, um, called pool competency, where it's, it's a 20 minute test. Pool competency.

• 18:17Steven Rinella?

  Not shooting pool.

• 18:18Speaker 05

  Not shooting pool, maybe I'd be better at that. You basically, you go, there's this thing called the combat training tank. It's, it's this huge pool, it's got a six foot section that slopes down to the nine foot, slopes down to the 15. And pool competency takes place entirely in the nine foot section of the pool. You jump in the pool, usually there's about eight students, I think, that are taking the test at any given time, they start at different points. You get in the pool and you got a picture, when you're on the pool deck waiting for your test, it's very stressful, everyone's yelling at you, you're getting hosed off, you're not allowed to look at the pool, you get your stupid tanks on, but you got to sit on the ground facing away from the pool. And it's, it's just that they create a very stressful environment, it's all SEALs in the pool deck yelling at you. But then you jump in the water and you think about it, your hearing is gone, it's like silence. Been underwater before, it's like peaceful.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  And you sink down in this, this huge.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  Wearing tanks.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, you scoop a tank on. And you just see in front of you, cause you jump in on the side of the pool, you're looking essentially across, perpendicular across the whole pool. You see all the other guys who are testing. And the test, pool competency, it basically is two instructors per student coming down and tying knots in your hoses, turning your air off, flipping you around, literally like beating you up underwater. And each student, we, we have the same set of effectively emergency procedures to recover your air source.

• 19:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  But they give you progressively harder challenges to overcome, starting at the beginning of, of the test through 20 minutes. The test is, the procedures they give you, you follow them in the same order every single time. And if you do that, you will eventually solve your problem, whatever problem they've given you. But they know some of the problems take longer to fix than others. By the time you get to them, you, you're out of air, you're hyper, you're totally hypoxic, you're, so it's a test of, you're, you're basically out of air towards the end of the test, you're barely hanging on, but in that state of near passing out, can you still follow steps one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, knowing at this point, they're not going to fix your problem, so you're not going to get air.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  But you have to systematically showcase that you can do all these procedures and eventually when you're like chicken necking, you barely breathe, you fix your stupid air source, which sometimes might even be where your head's cocked to the side, because there's still a knot, but it's a breathable air source where it's, there's not a perfect seal. And so every breath you take requires drinking pool water to get a little breath of air. And that's the, the rest of the test, you'll be tested on that. So it's like you're looking out across the pool and it's just a sea of chaos, but it's silence. And you're like, I'm about to do this for 20 minutes. And it's just, the whole test is just, you're, you're progressively becoming more and more, you're like hyperventilating, they, they come down to like turn your air off and they watch when your bubbles are exhaling, so you're like on an exhale as the, as each of these breath holds begin.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  And it's, it's just like breath holding in stress induced situations for 20 minutes. I mean, it's sort of been, uh, the, the test pool comp is, is, it's likened to simulated drowning. Like can you handle simulated drowning? Uh, and it's like such a gut check and I was horrible at it, but I eventually passed it, but by the skin of my teeth. Some guys are phenomenal and they can just go, they get the whole Hawaiian surfer guys, they'll go in there, they can hold their breath for like five minutes.

• 21:24Steven Rinella?

  Cause the panic's low. I had a buddy of mine explain it to me. He's like, he's like, they use, the thing that struck him most, he's like, they use cold water.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:34Steven Rinella?

  To like break you down.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:36Steven Rinella?

  And I remember thinking, well, I'm already done because if I can bring my wet suit.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, dude.

• 21:40Steven Rinella?

  If I can bring my wet suit, I might have a good time because I don't, the water doesn't stress me, but the cold, I can't like, the cold water I can't handle.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  No.

• 21:48Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean? I can handle like long hikes, no food, but cold water is, my kids laugh about it.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  Cold water is tough.

• 21:55Steven Rinella?

  My kids want me to get into a pool with them. I'm like, let me put my wet suit on.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  We, I mean, basically every day in the early part of SEAL training, when you get, when you get to the compound to start your day at, you know, four or five in the morning, like every day begins with jumping in the ocean, which is sort of like not a big deal, but psychologically, you know, the whole day is going to be awful. You're already pretty much sleep deprived to begin with. And every day, starting with, go get wet. And the water is not even that cold. It's not, it's cold. It's not frigid.

• 22:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  But every day began with that, like, I don't want to get in the water. And that's the first thing I'm going to do. And all day I'm going to be cold. It's, it's mental. It's, it's, it's difficult. It's difficult to handle.

• 22:35Steven Rinella?

  Where, where did you wind up getting deployed?

• 22:37Speaker 05

  I deployed to Afghanistan, the first tour, and then I went to South America, Peru, the second one. And actually, your question was like, you know, when I joined, it was, it was war, right? Like I rose my hand at a time of war.

• 22:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Like you know you're going to be.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I, it's weird, like, in many ways, the experience I had in Afghanistan was exactly what I expected it to be in terms of combat. By no means did we get to Afghanistan and we're like shooting off the plane. But, you know, it's not like that. But I mean, it was fairly routine, you know, that we would get into a gunfight. And some of these gunfights, to be clear, were like, someone shot us from a, a mile away and we have no idea where, if they even were shooting at us, but we definitely heard the snap of a round, like, you know, the snap. We heard the, the gunshot, like someone's probably shooting at us and we'd like take cover and try to figure out where they, where they were. And then you never find them. Like that's a gunfight. Nothing really happened. No one got hurt.

• 23:37Speaker 05

  But then alternatively, we would have, not a lot, but you'd have like very intimate, very close quarters gunfighting where, I mean, my experience was you just sort of default to your training. I mean, there's nothing else you can do when you're, when you're, when you're running down an alleyway or you're turning a corner and you're looking at the end of the alleyway and you know, there's like someone with a gun is trying to kill you. There isn't, you're not really able to, to think that hard about it. And you'll think about it years later. But in the moment, it's survival. And what you do when you're trying to survive is you just do the things that are just ingrained. And one of them is just like,

• 24:17Speaker 05

  target recognition, like trigger discipline, like, you know, listening to the commands of your team, you know, just doing what you've been trained to do.

• 24:25Steven Rinella?

  Is the, is the second time way different than the first time? The third time way different than the second time?

• 24:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's all mental because functionally I was just as talented at handling a gunfight on the first volley as I was on the end of the deployment. I'd actually make the case I was worse by the end of deployment because you're more complacent. But when I.

• 24:48Steven Rinella?

  I guess what I'm getting at when I say that is in terms of, um, you know, if you experience like a super high stress situation, be the, let's say you're driving on the highway and all of a sudden you're doing three sixties on the ice.

• 25:01Steven Rinella?

  Like, my understanding of, there's people that everything slows down.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 25:05Steven Rinella?

  There's people, everything, that, that everything speeds up. There's people that become fixated on a certain detail. Right? And then undoubtedly there's people that are just, I'm spinning down the road. I need to do this. Right? Did, did, did you find that that sort of thing changed?

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:27Steven Rinella?

  Like that the holy shitness of it wore off maybe? Or I don't know how to put it.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  No, no, it's a good question. I, I would say that when I, when I first got to Afghanistan, I was brand new guy, you know, I'm completely well trained. I mean, I've done all the training as anybody else. I'm ready for this deployment. I've just never employed my skillset in real life. But I'm so green, you know, I've never done anything combat related. I've only done training and that really hits you hard when you, at least for me, when I got in country. It was like, holy shit, like I'm really going to do this now. Whatever this is, I'm going to go do it for real now. And I remember when we touched down, I was part of the, the early group that arrived in country. You don't, it isn't like your whole SEAL team just like goes at once and you show up and just start doing stuff. It's, it's like a rotation of people that go in. Sometimes you go in

• 26:16Speaker 05

  weeks ahead of the rest of your team and you typically get to wherever you're going to be stationed. And which for SEALs is a lot of times like in these sort of outstations that are out in the middle of nowhere. You, you turn over with the team that's currently there, who's been doing this now for months. And so we turned over with SEAL Team Eight. And so I got in country with I think two other new guys and two other senior guys, like five of us arrived in country. And my understanding is we're going to, we're going to get to our outstation. We're going to land at the big base, travel our way out like an hour to our outstation, which was like out in the sticks sort of. And, you know, we'll have a couple of weeks at least to learn the ropes, talk to SEAL Team Eight. We'll wait for our team to get here. We'll sort of,

• 26:57Speaker 05

  you know, get our bearings and then I'll go do Navy SEAL stuff. That was, that was my mental map.

• 27:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  Completely not accurate.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

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• 28:37Speaker 05

  So we, we land in Afghanistan and I remember we had to sign this, I, I joked that it was like a permission slip. You get there in the JAG, who's the, the Navy lawyer. They have you like sign a document saying like, you, you understand that you're going to be leaving the wire and you could be like killed or maimed. Yep, totally get it. Like signing my permission slip to go to war.

• 28:57Steven Rinella?

  And they give it to you there?

• 28:59Speaker 05

  I forget what it was, but it was some goofy like legal understanding of what you're getting yourself into. And I'm like, all right, I guess this is weird. But then we drive out.

• 29:07Steven Rinella?

  Like as if it wasn't abundantly clear through this entire process, just one last check in here.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  And so we, we hop in these up armored vehicles. They're called MRAPs and they're like 60,000 pound, huge, like IED proof vehicles. And I remember I had meticulously arranged all my equipment and I'd put it in the, in the ISU, the big shipping container that got sent ahead of us. But something I didn't even consider is that I would potentially need to arrive in Afghanistan and immediately put my kit on and go use it. And so I have all the things that I might want to molly onto my kit, you know, all the different holsters and all the different mag pouches and all the, that I was going to put together. Cause remember my head is like, I'm going to get there. I'm going to have at least a few days to think about what I want to put on my kit, how I want to arrange it.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  But as soon as we get there, the Team Eight guys like, dude, let's get the fuck out of here. Come on, guys. Like the five of you, let's go hop in the MRAP. We're just going to go. And let's just knock out a mission tonight. So you guys can kind of like break it in because there's so many missions you have to do until they can go home. Like turnover ops have to happen. And so I'm like rummaging through the ISU. I'm the brand new guy. The, the MRAP is literally idling, waiting for me. And I'm like trying to find my, my Pelican case to like put my kit together. It's all new shit. So it's like, nothing's been frayed. Everything's brand new. And I'm piecing together this kit. And then I'm running over to the MRAP. All my, my BDUs are completely brand. I look so pathetic. I'm like the greenest of green guys. And the dudes in the vehicle, they, they had hit an IED on the same route we're going on the day before. And one of them

• 30:37Speaker 05

  has this like huge cut across his face. And he has like a mohawk. And he's wearing a cutoff shirt. And he's like as hardened as it gets. And I'm running in like straps hanging off of my stupid kit that I didn't put together. And I jump inside the MRAP and they seal the door. And they're, they're just like, they don't give a shit. Like they're, they're just so checked out. Checked out like don't want to be here anymore. And we drive out of where we were. It's called FOB Shank. It was this big, you know, established NATO base. And they put like the jammers on, the, the vehicle can project a radio frequency that keeps any radio IED from blasting. And so like, they're like, oh, jammers are on. And it's like, oh, that's right. We're in a place where like explosions happen. And like, this is an IED

• 31:19Speaker 05

  proof vehicle, but you'll still get fucked up inside of this thing if you hit an IED. And we're going to be driving on the only paved road in Afghanistan, 45 minutes to our site. And I'm looking out the window and the windows are like, you know, three inches thick because they're super bulletproof. And I'm surrounded in, in my vehicle, there's a bunch of vehicles by only teammate guys who are like hardened, jacked, just been doing combat for the last six months. And I'm like the newest of new guys. They're not even talking to me.

• 31:45Steven Rinella?

  This is like a staple of Vietnam movies. I want you to know, the scene you're laying out. I'm a great connoisseur of Vietnam movies and like the new guys.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  Oh, I felt so pathetic. And so we rolled through these bazaars, these, you know, these Afghan bazaars. And this is in 2013. At this point NATO has been in Afghanistan for a while. And there's this weird, almost deference that the locals tend to pay to NATO. NATO's like these massive 60,000 ton like war machines are roaring through their bazaar, these narrow streets, these people out everywhere. And people like barely get out of your way. They're just, they don't get, it's like you don't even exist at this point. But we had this thing where we couldn't slow down to us. We couldn't go below a certain speed going through these bazaars, because the jammers that were designed to protect us in case

• 32:37Speaker 05

  there's a radio IED that's going to be detonated near us. If we went too slow, it wouldn't protect us. So you had to go a certain speed through these bazaars. And so you're looking, it's like, imagine if you drove 20 miles an hour too fast through a crowded, busy street full of people. You're not driving, but you're looking out the window. You're like, oh my God, we're gonna, we're, the driver's blasting through, just like weaving through these bazaars. And, uh, you know, we get to these mountain passes and this road route Utah, it's, it's the only paved road in Afghanistan at the time. It was the target of IED, IED attacks all the time. And so there were pockets of the road that would be badly damaged from IED blasts. But what are you going to do? Stop and like fix the road to keep driving? No, you got to just drive over it. And so we would be driving

• 33:22Speaker 05

  along the side of these mountains where the mountain is practically a cliff face. The road, even if it was in great condition, was so narrow and it wasn't designed for 60,000 ton MRAPs. It was designed for little Toyotas. And they'd be barely hanging on. So we'd have to turn these corners where the wheels literally are hanging a couple of inches off the road. No guard rail. It's pure death if you go down below. And like there's all these pockets in the road from blasts. So it's just like this crazy thing. This 45 minute like white knuckling ride. I'm thinking if we get engaged while we're out here. And they kept saying, yeah, if we get engaged, we'll stop, we'll pop out, we'll just like take some shots, we'll call in an airstrike, whatever. They're just talking about, yeah, here's what we're gonna do if we get engaged. And I'm thinking like, my mags are all over the place. I don't even know if my gun will work right now. Like

• 34:07Speaker 05

  I put my gun together like on the fly. And so I, I'm so stressed. We finally get to our base, which is just this FOB, not a FOB, it was like a little outstation, just HESCO barriers. And it's, it looks like out in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it was on the leading edge of sort of the NATO war effort. It was, it was one of the last spots before Kabul. Kabul was, I think about an hour away from us. But this is sort of the last established area for spec ops. And it's, it's sort of a staging point to go out and try to stop the, the flow of suicide bombers and weapon caches. And so we get to this, this rugged, not even a base. It's like just HESCOs and some shacks and stuff. And like, this is where you're going to live for the next six months as we deploy, as

• 34:50Speaker 05

  we do combat ops out of here. And we get there and it's like the evening and I can hear out in the mountains, the sound of like an A-10 Warthog. It's like doing a gun run over a village that's like right over there. And it's too dark. You can only see the tracers. And it's just, it's sound, you're like, you're in a war zone. That's what it feels like. I mean, and so anyways, that night, I'm thinking, they can't be serious. That we're gonna like, gonna, gonna, gonna go on a mission tonight. I mean, give me a break. Like, we just got here. They must know that I'm, I'm green. Like, they're gonna give me a little bit of time here. No. So as soon as we get there, uh, after like 30 minutes or so, and I'm hearing the A-10 out in the distance, having this gun run, the Marines were getting contacted or something. Uh, the guy who was running the platoon for

• 35:32Speaker 05

  SEAL teammate grabbed me and the other guys who had just shown up from my platoon. They're like, hey, we're gonna have a little brief. We're just gonna go out tonight and, and do a quick, quick patrol. I'm like, all right. And so I go into the briefing room, which is just a shack, this like metal tin. Like imagine a garage that's been gutted of everything. There's just a couple of tables and like fold out chairs. And the teammate guys, they are cowboys. Like first, just all of them are jacked. Just like, there's, they're all wearing like shorts and like they have mohawks. They got beards. They've been deployed all this time. They are like the coolest and most intimidating group. And they've been doing this for months now. They, they're used to what we're about to do. And I've

• 36:12Speaker 05

  never done a combat operation. And I walk in there and, uh, the main guy, I forget his name now, but he's like, he's a really smart, I think he was a Rhodes Scholar. And he's like this brilliant guy who became a SEAL. And he's like, all right, guys, so we gotta do some turnover operations. He's talking to the teammate guys and now me and the four other new SEALs that have come from Team Two. And he's like, all right, so we're just gonna head up to like this mountain range that's near us. We'll just drive up there. The, the new guys, you guys can just drive, like just to get, get the ropes. You're gonna drive these MRAPs, the 60,000 ton vehicles. And there's some caves up there. And we're pretty sure there's some fighters up there. So we're gonna go in there. Uh, you know, definitely bring, bring your silencers. Like, we want to make sure your, your guns are silenced. But more than that, just bring it, bring a good knife.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  We're gonna keep it nice and quiet. And we're gonna go up in the mountains and we'll see what happens. Like, that's the whole briefing. And he's like, here's a map. You know, we're gonna, we're just gonna go up there, see what happens. And they're like, all right, cool. And the dude's like, yeah, let's go play video games the next 20 minutes before we go out. And I'm like, okay. And I go back to my room and I'm finishing putting my kit together because it's not even set up yet. And, and I remember thinking like, what the fuck have you gotten yourself into? Like, I obviously know this is the job I've been training for. I obviously know this is, I was, I was excited to go to Afghanistan as everybody else in my platoon was. But I had this stupid mental model that I was gonna have this transitional period. You're gonna get there, you're gonna slow roll your way into combat and you'll figure it out. No, it's like you're gonna arrive and go

• 37:41Speaker 05

  to war. And I remember dropping to my knees before we were supposed to go out that night and praying that we did not go out. Like, and I'm not religious. Please.

• 37:50Steven Rinella?

  You weren't a regular, you didn't, you didn't hold counsel with God on a regular basis.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  This is like, I don't know what else to do. Uh, and so we, we ended up actually not going out the night. We went the next day. And I was like, very thankful to have a little bit of a breathing room. And then, you know, we, we go out the next day and nothing happens. Like, as, as I discovered in Afghanistan, it's pretty typical. Oh, we're gonna go into this village. We hear there's like 75 fighters and there's bomb makers, there's me, this. And you get there, nothing happens. Like friendly villagers, like nothing happens. But then conversely, it was fairly common to be like, ah, we're gonna go out. Like, this is nothing. We don't expect anything. And you get killed, like just destroyed by whoever's out there. Um, but, so that operation that we ultimately did, the first one, I basically wished we, I didn't want to do it. I was scared. I'm like, I, I don't know

• 38:38Speaker 05

  if I'm ready to do, I've been trained, but I don't know if I'm gonna be capable of walking into a cave with my knife out and potentially going hand to hand and killing somebody with a knife. I don't know if I can do that. I'm sure I would be capable of doing it, but it's just, it's, it's such a departure from your civilian life. Even in training, we would do really intense training stateside for, for SEAL, for the SEAL teams, like really intense, like role players. I mean, we would do like, uh, there's a training you go through where you basically prep for what it would be like to be in captivity. And it's, it's very hands on. I mean, you're effectively tortured and, and put through the ropes for a long period of time. So I'm used to training that's extremely intense.

• 39:20Speaker 05

  Nothing beats actually mortal combat, because that's what it is.

• 39:24Steven Rinella?

  I can imagine that, man. Like, the training thing.

• 39:32Steven Rinella?

  In the backyard, you know you're not in captivity.

• 39:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:36Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it's probably better than no training, but I mean, it's gotta be totally different, man.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  It's crazy. And also, I would say, and maybe it was something that we all sort of intentionally did to, to, to make the situation feel better or something, but very quickly, very quickly, I would say within maybe two to three weeks of being in country, I went from being the guy who was scared to go on the operation to being not excited to go, but utterly indifferent, utterly indifferent. I, I.

• 40:07Steven Rinella?

  That's where you landed?

• 40:08Speaker 05

  All of us did. The only, the only thing we would be concerned about would be like, are we doing something that needlessly risks the lives of our team? Because there were definitely times where in order to try to capture someone or go after some known bad guy, the only way to do it was to do it in a way that was sort of risky to the team. Now, obviously, there's quite a bit of risk every time you go out. But there were, the only time that people had real gripes was if it's like, why are we need, seemingly needlessly risking our lives here? We're okay with the baseline risk. But yeah, I, I, we, we, I never slept better in my life than I did in Afghanistan, minus the first few days. That was the worst

• 40:50Speaker 05

  sleep of my life. And I, I tell people that you, you enter into this state of, you're not literally in survival mode all the time. I mean, you're not every second of every day in Afghanistan defending for your life, but you live with a pretty constant state of, at any point, we could get attacked here. The, the base where we were was sort of always potentially vulnerable to a suicide attack. And those happened across the country and it with enough regularity that we had some mitigating things in place to try to protect ourselves. But I mean, to be honest, if, if fighters decided to overrun where we were,

• 41:32Speaker 05

  they'd probably be able to do it, even if we were ready and saw them coming. And so you lived with a baseline understanding that for sure, people could die here. It's part of the deal. And then that's not revelatory. You go into, you go into the, the war zone knowing that. But I, you enter into a sort of a weird zen place where I, I don't think I ever really, and this is bad in a way, I didn't really think about my wife back home beyond like, I would talk to her periodically, but I, I couldn't, I wasn't really capable of thinking about anything other than my current existence.

• 42:09Steven Rinella?

  And you, you were married to the same person then, you're married to now?

• 42:12Speaker 05

  Correct. Yeah. She met me pre, she, she met me when I was talking about becoming a SEAL. I met her in college and she's been with me to today, Amanda. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just, it's weird. Like it's a, you end up becoming very pri, like primal, I would say, where you'd go out and a lot of times like rounds would start being shot at you and your team. And the scariest point in my limited, because it is a limited combat exposure. I didn't, I didn't do a million combat ops. I've done a few. But in the ones that I was in, the first few rounds that come in are the scariest, at least when we were there, because our rules of engagement said that we couldn't proactively shoot anyone. You had to be shot at first. And so when I talked about, why are we needlessly risking our

• 42:57Speaker 05

  lives? Some of the operations we, we would plan for, because we did all our planning ourselves, you sort of invited people to shoot at you in order to then be able to be on the offensive or respond to the threat. So we would literally design operations where we, we want to go here because if we get shot at here, we can defend ourselves. But think about what that really means. You're, you're the bait. You're going in there and you don't know where the first round's going to hit. And so when the first rounds come in, a lot of times, no one knows where they're coming from, unless they're super effective and then you do. But I remember the, there was one particular engagement in this town called Zarganchar, this pretty urban, tightly compacted Afghan village where I'm pretty

• 43:40Speaker 05

  sure the first few rounds were fired at me. I don't know for sure, but I know it was very early in the engagement where I was, I walked across this like four-way intersection where there's low walls across the entire intersection. But when you walk across the middle, there's no cover, there's no anything. You're just sort of exposed for a second. And there was like a, a tall tower that sort of overlooked it. And there was a shooter up there who fired several rounds into the, into the intersection. And, and I was the one that had just walked past the intersection. He missed me. And this was deep into the deployment. I remember being instantly out of breath and I'm.

• 44:15Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, like immediately, it was as if I had sprinted 10 miles. I like fell to the ground because it wasn't immediate because the rounds hit, then you hear the snaps. It isn't, you know how it works.

• 44:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's already done.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  It's already done. Yeah, you're fucking dead or you're not.

• 44:29Steven Rinella?

  You already got missed.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  And so I like dove behind a low wall and it, the weight of what had just happened was like so intense. My body's reaction was like some sort of cortisol dump or adrenaline dump. But it was like, I was out of breath, but then training kicks in and you just, you just go for it.

• 44:46Steven Rinella?

  You eventually got injured though, right?

• 44:48Speaker 05

  I did, I did. Yeah. Actually, that same town, I, we, this is at the tail end of the deployment. We were there, we were going to be there for six months. I ended up getting medevac out at five months. There was this one town, Zarganchar, what I was just telling you about. It was, it was just, it was a, it was a very hectic place. Lots of, lots of fighters in there. It's also a place historically that it was so close to where our base was, where we stayed for the deployment and so many teams had rotated through where, where we were. It was not just teammate before us, before them. It was like any number of spec ops guys that were there. And the, the number one place that you would typically go was Zarganchar. It's literally across the road from where the base was. And a big reason

• 45:33Speaker 05

  for that is Zarganchar was, as I recall, it was one of the last known staging points for suicide bombers before they'd make their way along Route Utah, right up to Kabul and they'd blow themselves up.

• 45:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:45Speaker 05

  And so there was some, there's a basic understanding that the dudes that were at our base, whatever unit you were with, some, part of your job was trying to identify and stop the flow of suicide bombers, which meant going into Zarganchar and literally looking for them. And so we went in there a fair amount, but it was, it was a lot of times, it was the only place that we, we went in any of the missions we did where the fighters were very brazen. The, the, there were these long stretches in Zarganchar where it was almost like the, the village or the town was built sort of haphazardly, but there were these almost like long roads where from certain angles, you could see down almost like the entire length of this huge village. But at other points, everything is obscured.

• 46:30Speaker 05

  But there were these few vantage points where you could basically see like over a mile down, down the city. And we, we'd drive into the city and women and children would run out into the, the desert because they'd see the NATO trucks approaching. We only could do operations during the daytime due to rules of engagement.

• 46:46Steven Rinella?

  In the town?

• 46:47Speaker 05

  In, yeah, pretty much everywhere with, with rare exceptions. Sometimes we'd go like super early hours that technically was the morning, but it was still dark out. But we would roll into Zarganchar and you'd see people running away. And it's all women and children. So you know, whoever's left is going to be military age men. But we would look down these, so that we'd see the women and children run and we'd pull onto one of those roads and we'd look down the road and the new guys would drive the vehicles. So I'd be like driving sometimes and you'd see like, you know, half a mile away, standing in the road, be a dude with an AK-47. And he's, he's showing you like, I don't care that you're here. This is utterly not the case outside of Zarganchar.

• 47:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  The, a big reason for it's, it's, it's very simple. If you're identified as, as a combatant and you're threatening a NATO force, you're fucking dead. And it's not, there's so many things that can get you killed at that point. If you brandish a weapon or do something sort of threatening to NATO, we have the most air assets available to us. We have targeting systems. We have, and this is not even to be braggadocious. It's like we can, we can practically point to a map and say, hey, we know there's a guy right there. And whether it takes us five minutes or five hours, we'll find you and kill you or we'll capture you. So like to brandish a weapon like that to an, an entire convoy

• 48:12Speaker 05

  of, by the way, we would roll in with special equipment. We had certain vehicles. They knew we were spec ops. We would, we would oftentimes talk to some of the people we would capture after a gunfight who had survived. And they knew when spec ops was showing up. So they knew the difference. To have someone standing there, brandishing a weapon. I mean, that's a level of confidence that you only saw in Zarganchar. And I, I admit, and I give credit where credit's due, it was intimidating because their equipment is terrible. They don't have really any of the resources we do, but they're prepared to go toe to toe with the strongest military and some of the best warfighters in the fucking world. No problem.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Please help us. They're everywhere.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  We think they're murder hornets. 911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. I will send swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe, 211 Nashville, all new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 49:22Speaker 01

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• 50:24Speaker 05

  So we went in one day, and we, this is the day I got hurt. I wasn't the only one. We went into the village, and the way the rules of engagement worked is, I'd mentioned to, to mention this to you before, you needed to be shot at in order to shoot back, in essence. There were some rare situations that would allow you to be offensive, but for the most part, you needed to be responding. That was sort of the gist. And it also had to be daytime. So we, we, we go into Zargunshar. We begin our infill, and Zargunshar is like, it's a really urban environment. Like, everything's really tight on top of each other. And we began making our infill, and we stopped because we realized there was a courtyard. We were in an alleyway between a couple of buildings, and we would be walking into a courtyard.

• 51:07Speaker 05

  And there were two-story buildings on either side. And, you know, from a strategic standpoint, you don't want to walk into an alley, you don't want to walk into a courtyard where there's multiple angles on you in case there's shooters in the second floor. And we knew, given the fact that we rolled up, saw women and children leave, you know, we also earlier had heard some chatter on the open source radios. There were fighters in town. Guys are brandishing weapons, like, they're here. And so we stopped. No one had shot at us at this point, broad daylight. And our team lead, he's like, hey, hold on a minute, let's take some cover. As we backed up, we got behind this bridge, and he's like, wait a minute. If we go forward, I think we're going to walk into an ambush. It seems like, based on the chatter we're hearing on the radio, that it, it very much appears like there are fighters in those second floors, and they're going to shoot. They, they know the rules

• 51:52Speaker 05

  of engagement. They know, they get one shot to, to knock off a few of us with that first volley. And you could hear it on the radio, they were talking about, like, when to shoot. But if we go back, if we retreat, the way Zargunshar was built is it's like this, again, very urban, very tightly packed, pretty sprawling town. But then, just outside of the city walls, it's like, there's no infrastructure, no buildings, nothing. It's just desert. So it's like this really densely populated space, and then nothing to the outside. And so, if you think about trying to retreat, trying to exfil out of Zargunshar, you're exfilling into an open area where you're sort of exposed. And so we found ourselves in this position where either we had to go forward into the courtyard, knowing very likely there'd be

• 52:37Speaker 05

  an ambush, or retreat, because we put ourselves in a bad tactical spot. But from those second floor windows, we, we saw they would have the drop on us as, as soon as we exited. So there's a period of time where invariably, we're going to be, our backs are going to be exposed. You know, firing RPG at us, one of us is getting killed at least. And you, even, even though we're in this bad of a situation, you can't call in an airstrike. You can't be like, we're in, we're in, we're in a bad way, we got to get out of this. Can't do it. And so we sat there for like 20, 30 minutes, and my team lead, he's amazing, very stoic guy. He's, he's currently over at Team Six, one of the best guys I've ever met. He finally just went up and down the line, and we're all hiding sort of behind this, this bridge. And we're listening periodically to the chatter coming through of these fighters

• 53:22Speaker 05

  talking about, you know, getting ready to shoot us. And he's like, take, take one last piss, like, have a sip of water, like, we're Navy SEALs, we're gonna, we're gonna go forward. If we're gonna get shot, we're gonna get shot in the chest, you know? We're gonna go forward into the city and conduct this mission. And so I remember taking a piss, like, kneeling and taking a piss behind this wall, and thinking, is this the last time I'm gonna pee? Is this it? Like, this is the end? And so we get our shit together. But it was like motivating in a way. We weren't like blood thirsty. It was like, fuck it, dude. Like, this is, this is what we came here for. And so we walk through this alleyway, and it brings us out to this courtyard. It's a pretty big courtyard. Again, broad daylight, it's eerily quiet, you know, the women and children are gone. It's like, just like, it's a ghost town. And then at some point, machine guns open fire on us. This is on body cam, we've

• 54:07Speaker 05

  watched the video back. It's, it's eerie. It's like silent, and it's, it's an ambush. I say this, and I usually try to be careful how I say it, but the people who got shot off the jump in this initial volley were Afghan partner force who were with us and our dog, which was a blessing, because this was a situation where it wasn't just a couple people in the windows, there was fighters all over the village, like, waiting for us. And as soon as the, the shooting began, you know, we were probably outnumbered pretty significantly, but you don't know where anybody is. This is a very guerrilla warfare, very urban warfare. And if we're going to survive this, the people that are going to get us out of the situation are the Navy SEALs. Just because from a skill perspective, from

• 54:49Speaker 05

  a weapons perspective, we, we were able to get out of this. If SEALs were getting shot in that initial volley, I gotta be honest, I don't know how it would have gone. So fortunately, and that's where I'm trying not to be crass, the partner force and the dog get hit. SEALs take our positions up against walls. And, and one of the things that we're great at, really special operations generally, but SEALs in particular, is you're trained how to do basically everybody's job. Like, for example, when you go into a building, it there's, it's a highly choreographed thing with, when you're clearing a building, it's extremely choreographed. But the only way it can work is if you've trained so much with your team, that in the dark on night vision, you can read everybody's body language, because

• 55:31Speaker 05

  you don't have time to communicate back and forth. And so everybody knows everybody's job and how to do it, and you can just visually understand the tendencies of your teammates when you're clearing a building, to include if somebody gets shot, you know, exactly to step over them and take up their position. I mean, it's, it's unbelievable. And so we all just began clearing buildings, like, immediately, because there were buildings everywhere, but there wasn't the luxury of having a lot of people to do it with. It was like onesie twosie going into buildings. You know, a lot of people weren't in buildings, but it was like intimate, you know, door-to-door fighting for the next six hours or so. At one point, I was up on a rooftop with another guy, and he, he was filming from his body cam, and we're laying down on the, on the roof, and there's like maybe a foot tall

• 56:15Speaker 05

  lip that sort of, the wall extended a foot higher than the actual flat of the roof. So we're like laying down, and, and rounds are impacting right there, because there's a guy in the alley who can see us. And we're like, fuck dude, what are we gonna do? Like, we're pinned down. It was just, it was this crazy thing. So we were fighting our way. We, we managed to roll off the roof and get out of there. But for the next six hours or so, it was just intimate, sporadic gunfighting. But by the time it got dark that night, even though we had in many ways sort of survived the initial volley, the dog survived, the, the Afghans who were shot, they survived as well. We had medevac them out, like, we were, we were sort of on our toes now. We now were cleared to, we've been, we've been

• 57:00Speaker 05

  engaged, so now we're able to sort of, the rules of engagement are off. And, but the, the night, really, it just, it didn't really amount to much. We, the people that were shooting at us, they would just vanish. And there were known tunnels that were dug under the city for these fighters for years, they've been fighting, for years and years and years. There's like secret tunnels to escape the town. And so it's like, somebody would be shooting at you, and then they just vanish, and you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to find them. And so it sort of just felt like we were getting our butts kicked all day. We were able to, you know, survive, but it didn't go well. It just was like, wow. So we walked in here, they got the drop on us. We sort of were able to keep our, our wits about us, but we didn't, we didn't find a bomb maker, suicide bomber, weapon cache. We just got shot a bunch, narrowly survived, and, and here we are. Now it's like, you

• 57:45Speaker 05

  know, 10 o'clock at night or whatever it is, and it's, the city's kind of gone quiet again. And so by this point, you know, our team lead reminded us, like, our job now is not just to stay here and try to shoot something, you know? Like, we didn't accomplish what we wanted to do, it didn't go well, let's get out of here. But as we're getting ready to leave, and by this point, we've all broken up across the city. You know, we're, we're in these disparate little fire teams that are spaced out pretty far away from each other. And we had these, these maps that were printed out, like an overhead view that showed each building. We had numbers for each building. You know, it's like, we sort of knew where everybody else was, the different fire teams, but for the most part, you're sort of on your own, like, five, six, seven dudes at a clip. And so there's like this

• 58:28Speaker 05

  effort to try to figure out where is the best place for us to meet up, for us to then exfil and get out of the city without getting killed. And so as, as the team leads are doing that, our fire team overhears one of the drones overhead, it's being flown by someone, I think in Las Vegas. They were flying around. By this point, there's air assets stacked over us, because once an engagement starts, you got everything known to man at your disposal. And they, they told us over the radio, not our fire team, but we heard it over the radio, that there were these potential military-aged men that were set up near the exit of, of the village. So they knew the route we were likely going to take on the exfil, because you, you plan a bunch of stuff, and you give all the potential routes

• 59:13Speaker 05

  you'll use to go in and out, and you give it up to your higher command. And so as you leave, you can call in, like, hey, we're gonna exfil, we're taking this route. And they know to follow you, to basically protect you on the way out. And so knowing we were likely going to be taking this exfil route, this drone operator spotted what they thought was military-aged men set up behind a wall or in this field. Maybe they're gonna shoot at you guys when you leave. And so it was not like you better go prosecute them, but just be aware. Our fire team happened to be physically closest to where those potential military-aged men or ma'ams, as they're called, were. And so we decided we would just go look. We would go over there. They told us there was this T intersection, you could walk down the stem of the T, and you could look over this wall, and there'd be this field, and you'd see them in this field, you know? And, and, and we would be able to

• 59:58Speaker 05

  make a decision about what to do. Are they military-aged men? Are they kids? Are they women and children who have come back? Is it nothing? We don't know. But because it represented a risk to the entire convoy, we went over to look. So we sneak down this alleyway. It's dark, it's, it's dark enough, we're on night vision. It's, it's been quiet for a while, there's been a big lull. And so me and the, I think it was six other guys that I was with, we make our way down this, this, the stem of the T to the T, the head of the T.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  And when we get there, we realize there's been some sort of miscommunication because we snuck down this alleyway very quietly. So like we've made no noise. We're on night vision. Here we are. And we start hearing talking and it's not English. It's Pashtun. It's, it's on the other side of this wall. It's on the immediate other side of the wall that we're right next to the six foot high wall, seven foot high wall. The, it turned out there were military age men that were in this field, but we were of the belief we'd get to the wall, look over and they'd be somewhere out there.

• 1:00:57Steven Rinella?

  Out yonder. Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  They weren't. They were on the immediate other side and they haven't hurt us yet. And now we're in a similar position as when we first got into the city where, well, we're less, we're closer than you and I are right now physically to these people who don't see us. Either we engage with them and it's as intimate as it gets. Besides the wall being between us, it might as well be hand to hand. Or we try to get out of here and figure out another way to handle this, but they're going to hear us probably. I mean, it's amazing they haven't heard us yet.

• 1:01:24Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  And so without saying anything, because there was, you couldn't make any noise, the team lead, the same guy who I have such a high opinion of, the guy who was in charge of the whole movement that night, he knew that, you know, even though realistically it's, it'd be tough to defend immediately engaging with them, just because we weren't entirely sure if they had guns or not. We looked over the wall. We could see that it looked very much like they had weapons. It was like, if we don't engage with them right now, there's a very high chance that this is going to turn bad for one of us. We're going to get shot and killed. And so the decision was made to, let's start shooting. And so he got down on a knee. Another guy stepped onto his knee and began engaging. And these, there was at least two. I've heard as many as five. I don't really know. Two of them had grenades that they had pulled the pins out of. They were holding like a booby trap in case they were discovered.

• 1:02:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Unclear what their intentions were generally, but they were fighters and they had grenades ready to go. And the way a grenade works is you pull the pin, you hold the spoon down, and until you release the spoon, it doesn't detonate. But imagine you get shot and you drop the grenade. Well, now you booby trapped your body. It's a way to ensure your, you know, whoever you're up against gets hurt in the process. As soon as the shooting began, they threw those grenades over the wall and one of them hit my shoulder and landed on the ground and we're all very tightly together. And I, I tell people that, you know, we were in the drone overhead that had spotted this. They had a targeting infrared spotlight on us. It's almost like, imagine a flashlight shining down from God, that you can only see the light on, on night vision, but it was flashing in and out like you're in a

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  strobe. And when the grenade came over the wall, I was not one of the people shooting. I was like sort of holding my position next to the guy shooting. And I see this grenade come over the wall. And what happened in the blink of an eye, felt like it took 10 minutes. I see it for a second in the light and then it disappears. I see it for a second in the light. It's getting closer and closer to me. And by the time it's hitting my shoulder, I was super aware that I'm about to die. Like full stop. There was a grenade about to kill me. And all I thought when it landed here was it's going to blow my head off and my mom won't be able to have an open casket because my head's going to be fucking gone. Light goes off, light goes on again. The grenade's now falling to the ground because again, this is the fraction of a second that feels like it took 10 minutes. Light on, light off, light on. And as it's falling, it caught to like my hip level. And I'm like, oh, maybe,

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  maybe I'll, I'll survive. Maybe it'll blow my legs off and I'll, I'll get out of here alive. It finally hits the ground and it blows up. And to be honest, I was shocked at how it felt because it, no pain whatsoever. It just felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just sort of threw it at the back of my leg. I fell to the ground. It was absolute madness. I mean, the, the thing is, is even though there had been this lull in the fighting, there were loads of fighters still in the village, in the, in Zargan Shah. And one of the things is a lot of these fighters are, they want to be martyrs and they're perfectly fine with sort of dying in an effort to kill one of us, or potentially killing their own people in an effort to kill one of us. And so as soon as the explosions and

• 1:04:21Speaker 05

  gunfighting began in this little intimate alleyway here, fighters were just firing RPGs arbitrarily in our direction, knowing full well they could be striking their own people, but it didn't matter because this is smarter than them. And so it's like tracers and RPGs are sort of periodically being fired into this area. I'm down. My gun's fallen off of me. My helmets come off. There's pretty good loom from the, the moonlight, but I, I, my vision's pretty bad. I tried to move. I couldn't move. There's just constant gunfighting happening. I have no idea the state of the people around me. I end up getting pulled. I was effectively like on the, the hat of the tee. I was up there. I got pulled down to the stem of the tee, which was a narrow alleyway. I was dragged down there and put

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  up against a wall. And then whoever did that went back down to the contact zone. Just more gunfighting back and forth. And we had these tourniquets to stop the bleeding on our kit that were put on with rubber bands that were set to be quick release specifically. So if you're bleeding to death, you can still quickly pull these off.

• 1:05:22Steven Rinella?

  That's a good idea.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  You know? And I, I was so weak from blood loss and just so shocked from like, like actually in trauma from the shock, I couldn't break the, the elastic band. I couldn't do it. And as I'm like trying to pull it off, I'm sitting with my back against this wall. To my right is like the bottom of the tee. And that's like the main of Zargan Shah. And we know there are fighters here. And I'm thinking any moment now, fighters are going to run down this alleyway. I'm the first thing they're going to see. I'm going to get shot and killed if I don't bleed to death by then anyways. And so I can't get the tourniquet off. I'm bleeding to death. I'm looking down the alleyway. I'm like, well, any minute now.

• 1:05:58Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  And I'm also, I'm hearing the chaos at the head of the tee, which is more shooting and explosions and whatnot between my team or the guys I was with and the guys on the other side of the wall. And then all of a sudden, as I'm having this moment of knowing death is coming, my hearing completely goes like absolutely deaf, but I can see. And then my vision goes, but I'm totally lucid. I'm very aware that I'm alive, but I can't see and I can't hear. I'm just in this darkness in my head. And I know for a fact, I knew this is dying.

• 1:06:30Steven Rinella?

  Dude, yeah. You're like Helen Keller all of a sudden.

• 1:06:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I tell folks, it was so matter of fact, the, I say, you know, in virtue of being a human, your, your entire life has been existence. Everything you, every, everything you've done, everything you can remember, your entire life is existing. You don't think about it. You don't wake up and think, today I'm going to exist. Today I'm going to breathe. Today my heart's going to pump. You just do the things that allow you to be alive and exist. But the same way your body is very capable of seamlessly every day allowing you to exist and live, it's also ready to shut down. Like you're ready to die. You just don't know it yet. It's just as familiar, but you only do it once. And

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  I'm sitting in this void and I know that's what's happening. And I'm like, fuck, like this is it. I'm, I'm, this is, I'm dying. It wasn't even sad. It was just like, fuck. And I was hung up on.

• 1:07:25Steven Rinella?

  Were you having like wish I would have?

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  A little. I, well, I had one that was sort of funny. I was caught up on, will my name be in the paper for my obituary? Will it be John Allen was killed in action? Or Jonathan Allen was killed in action?

• 1:07:38Steven Rinella?

  You thought about that?

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Hung up on that. And then I also thought about the fact that I hadn't had kids yet. And I was like, man, it's a bummer. Like no legacy. But then I remember this feeling of almost letting go. It felt physically like I was letting go. And I just remember the, the feeling of hitting the dirt next to me. So I was sitting, I slouched over.

• 1:07:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  And it's like, that's it. I'm dead. I'm, I'm very, I'm about to die. And then out of nowhere, my medic, who's a SEAL as well, calm as can be, he apparently came charging down the, the stem of the tee, saw me leaned over, pulled my tourniquets off. He managed to stop the bleed in my leg. And as I'm laying there, I like come to, my vision comes back, my hearing comes back. I'm still very fucked up, but I'm, I'm aware that I'm coming back to life in a way. And here's Kyle. Madness all around us. He's like, hey, what's going on buddy? Yep. Stop the bleed. Just, you know, put your gun up and just stay right here. We're going to be just fine. Like we're not going to be fine. Like it's, it couldn't be clearer that we're not going to be fine. But he and so one other guy had a collapsed lung.

• 1:08:36Steven Rinella?

  Did it strike you like a hallucination? Or was it like clear that you were, that you were fine or fine-ish and he was there?

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  You know, it felt lucid. It did.

• 1:08:44Steven Rinella?

  It was like, it felt real.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  It felt real. But what didn't feel real is that the experience I just had felt so real. It was like, I'm dying now. This is, I'm not, I'm for sure I'm dying. And so to open my eyes, it wasn't like, am I in heaven or something? It was like, wait a minute. What's, did I hallucinate that? And so the, the team were, they were incredible. I mean, the blast fucked all of them up. One guy, the shrapnel went into his lung and collapsed his lung. We all survived, but he, he could, he was basically unable to breathe. And then every breath he took, it's like his lung, this other lung is like filling with blood. It's like this horrible thing. So he's getting constant needle decompressions where the

• 1:09:25Speaker 05

  medic is putting a, a needle into his intercostal space, like driving a needle with a, an opening on the back that relieves pressure in your lung. And so he's like a porcupine with all these needles because you have to keep doing it to keep the pressure from not fully collapsing your lung. So it's just where this ragtag group, I can't walk. There's, they managed to call in, they, one of the, the team lead, he managed to call in an airstrike on the dudes on the other side of the wall. And we managed to, to run out of there. I, I was hoisted up and carried. I sort of half ran. My legs are trash. I was put in a helicopter. We had a hot extract. These pararescue jumpers, these air force spec ops guys, they came in and they, they took me and the guy with a collapsed lung away. They flew us to, to

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  a shank, the place I originally landed when I first arrived in Afghanistan for treatment. And the other five guys that were down there, like they're, they're broken off from the main group. They're badly beaten up. It isn't like they were unhurt, but they had to fight their way back into the city to reconnect with the rest of the, the SEAL team. Like what they did was incredible. But then I got brought to a medical tent and I was wheeled in. And I, I remember on the, on the flight over to, to shank, I didn't know the state of my injuries. I, I figured I was going to be okay at this point, but I didn't really know. And they had asked me, the PJs on the flight, like, hey, do you want morphine? And I was like, no, I don't. Because in case I die, I want to be lucid. I want to be aware that I'm dying, you know? Get to the medical tent and when we're wheeled into the tent, there's all these doctors and nurses.

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  It's a big, white, bright tent inside. They're like ready to do whatever surgery is required. I still didn't really know if I was okay or not. Figured I was at this point. It's been, you know, 20 minutes of riding in the helo. No one's acting like, oh my God, he's dying.

• 1:11:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 05

  But I just don't know. It was just very hazy. And when I got brought in there, the SEALs that were stationed at FOB Shank, who I know all of them, they had been tracking that mission. There's a way to track each mission in real time when you're overseas and they had seen that there were two SEALs who were hurt. And I guess whatever was passed to them suggested they could be catastrophic injuries, that some, both, maybe one could die. And so they were in the tent. There was like 12 or 15 of them, like in the back corner, but they put on their best uniforms and they were just standing there with these solemn looks on their faces as, as me and the guy with the lung are wheeled in because they're basically there in case we die. They're there to support us. And so I went from thinking I'm okay to being wheeled into that tent and seeing them in the corner and it like hit

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  me. Oh, fuck, are we like about to die here?

• 1:11:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Speaker 05

  And then they like, the guy-

• 1:11:53Steven Rinella?

  This don't look good.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, dude. The guy gave me, the nurse or doctor gave me ketamine, I think it was. He said, all right, you're not going to remember anything. Gave me ketamine and then I, I passed out. They did the debridement, got all the shit out of my legs. And then I, it's, I have no memory. I wake up at like 20 hours later or whatever later in Germany. And it's like, yeah, you're fine. You're bad flesh wound, but you're okay. Like, we're going to bandage your wounds, but you'll be all right. And then like a week after that, I was back home in Virginia, pushing a shopping cart down the aisle of Home Depot. Just back to, back to life.

• 1:12:23Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Steven Rinella?

  Man.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  So that's, that, so I got medevac from there and then I did deploy a second time to South America years, years later, but there's just residual physical issues, mental issues. I was a fucking shit show by the end of that deployment. Um, then I was ultimately medically retired after that.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. At what point did you, um, coming out of that, like you'd already gone to college? See, that opens up all kinds of opportunities, as we've been trying to explain to our 16 year old. Um, that opens up opportunities that you may or may not want. So you'd been to college, you had military. At what point did you start conceptualizing like what you would, what you'd do now? Because it wasn't like, being a lawyer, so like, I get it. You go to regular college, you go to law school, you take the bar exam. Like, I get it.

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:13:13Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's probably books about how to do that.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Steven Rinella?

  But then you kind of hit on this deal that isn't, uh, there's no blueprint.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:13:24Steven Rinella?

  Like do what you do now, you know? So like, what, what point did you start to, to think like, man, I'm going to like-

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  I do scary stories on TikTok.

• 1:13:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm like, tell scary stories.

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  You know-

• 1:13:37Steven Rinella?

  Haven't just been through one. I might traffic in these someday, right?

• 1:13:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, it was my, I left the military at the end of 2017 and even though I was aware I was going to be medically retired, it doesn't happen immediately. There's a process to it. Uh, it was sort of abrupt when I finally got the orders to, to leave and I didn't really have a plan. I had-

• 1:13:59Steven Rinella?

  Was it unexpected? Was it, was it like unwanted?

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  No. Um, I, I was probably gonna get out of the team. The truth is, is I, I, I was certainly skill wise, capable, capable of doing the job. I think ideologically, I think I began to wonder what we were doing, why we were doing it. And I, I honestly felt like I was a detriment to the team. I felt like I, I wasn't a, like, I'm a pretty outspoken person and I remember our second rotation. So we, our first rotation, a rotation is your training, a rotation is a two-year block in the teams where it's like you get ready for deployment for a year and a half with the same guys and then you deploy for six months. So it's a two-year block called a rotation. Um, my second

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  rotation, when I came back from Afghanistan, you know, when I have a new group of guys that I'm with, a new platoon, um, I was just such a negative Nancy, like so cynical, to the point where it wasn't even funny. It was just, I, I fucking hated the job. I think I had a lot of, a lot of resentment, a lot of just, I didn't even, it's hard to even classify exactly why. I just was bitter about everything and I fucking hated our leadership at SEAL Team Two, to the point where I got in open conflict with some of the very senior people who were way, way more important than me. I just, I, I strayed away from, from it and I felt like it wasn't a good-

• 1:15:25Steven Rinella?

  And you recognized that the solution was to get out.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  So I would have gotten out. The, part of the reason I was medically retired is I was espousing these like very dark views about how I felt about stuff to people around me. And they're like, you better ought to see somebody.

• 1:15:39Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:15:42Steven Rinella?

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• 1:17:12Steven Rinella?

  Can I ask you one? I know I was asked, I wanted to get into your career now, but maybe it's not possible to answer this quickly. During that really chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, I texted a buddy of mine who'd spent many years there, in and out of there. Um, I was like, man, what do you, like, what's your take on what's going on? This is just a text exchange.

• 1:17:35Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:17:35Steven Rinella?

  Said, should have happened a long time ago, which seems so weird to hear from someone that had so much invested in it and also that had left friends dead there.

• 1:17:43Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:17:45Steven Rinella?

  Um, what did you feel watching that?

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  I, you know what? Truthfully, I had already had a little bit of a recognition that I didn't necessarily agree with what we did, sort of on the ground, literally what we did on, on deployment in Afghanistan and more broadly, like the US in general. Um, so by the time the, the withdrawal happened, it was just sad for so many reasons and, and not so much because of all, you know, of course I feel bad for a lot of the people, the civilians that got caught in the, the chaos of this in Afghanistan, but all the people on, on the NATO side that were killed in the line of duty and people that were maimed along the way. Um, so it was like sad, you know? And I think there was, there's no way to look at that withdrawal and feel like, oh, that, we won, you know?

• 1:18:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 05

  There was no win. It was like, we were there and there was a whole bunch of reasons we should or shouldn't have been there, but we were there for a long time. A lot of horrible things happened and now we're out. It was, it, and this is not even me trying to say we, we didn't lose or something. It's more like, no one really even knows what was gained or lost. It just was this tragic 20 plus years of fighting. I, I found that I had already begun to wonder, like, there's so much, and this is important, and I, I say this in a, in a, in order to be, for example, a Navy SEAL and to do a good job. If you think about what a Navy SEAL is, a Navy SEAL, and you could really make the same comparison to any special operations with any military.

• 1:19:19Speaker 05

  You are the best warfighters that your country has to offer. And whether you like it or not, humans, they need warfighters. Even though we live in a civilized society here in the West, the reality is warfighters are going to exist, whether you agree with that or not.

• 1:19:37Speaker 05

  In order to be really good at fighting wars, you need to have a particular mindset to do it. And it's not something that you necessarily have innately. A lot of times in my exposure to having gone through the training, you're given the mindset of how to be a warfighter. You are literally trained in words and in actions by the senior people that put you through training, how to be a warfighter.

• 1:20:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  And a big part of it is killing is something you're going to be doing.

• 1:20:07Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:20:08Speaker 05

  Killing and being around death is simply a part of this job. It's not even something that we push to the side or we talk up like it's something great. It simply is a part of what you're going to be doing and it has to be normalized. It must be normalized. It's not about creating the boogeyman in the people you're going to go attack or you'll go to war with. It's about understanding that your country needs you to do this. You must be comfortable with it. And when you go through the pipeline of becoming a Navy SEAL, you are around men, because it's only been men who've been SEALs so far, who have really done and seen the worst of the worst. They've been in the thick of it and they're here to like talk to you and it's so motivational.

• 1:20:52Speaker 05

  And honestly, a lot of times the talks we would get from these grizzled veterans were never to talk about how great it was to go, you know, employ your skillset. It was like, what an honor to be the person who got to do that. Like someone's going to do this for our country. Why not you? You should take pride in being the best at this. So then by the time you go to war, if you're, and I hate to say it this way, but it's the way it's framed. If you're lucky enough to go to war as a Navy SEAL, it's the place where your skillset, it's designed for it. That's what it's for. You get there and you're so ready mentally. I told you that experience of being scared about that first exposure to combat, I know it's not uncommon.

• 1:21:35Speaker 05

  I don't know if a lot of people have that experience, but I know it's not uncommon. But you know what else is not uncommon? Is how quickly you completely adapt and become extremely good at being in war. Extremely good to the point where it is fun in a way to go out and be, you know, to be playing like the most dangerous game, you know? But what ends up happening, and it's something that's taken me years to understand is you go, you have this exposure to the thing you've been trained to do, the thing that you've, you've built an identity around that. Think about the way the world, for the most part, the way, I'm sorry, Americans view Navy SEALs, generally speaking.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Like when I'm, when I meet people and they find out I was a Navy SEAL, it is rare that the reaction is not some huge level of admiration, respect. Even if they disagree with the politics around whatever the United States has done or hasn't done, there's always like, wow, thank you for your service.

• 1:22:34Steven Rinella?

  I think Americans are good, Americans are good at separating and understanding those two things.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  100%.

• 1:22:40Steven Rinella?

  Thankfully, they're good at that.

• 1:22:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. But then what ends up happening is you, over time, after you get back, and again, I had one combat tour. I can't imagine how this would be after 10, 15. There's so many people that go through so much more than me. You naturally reflect, like we do on anything else in our lives. You reflect on what it is you did, good or bad. You just think about it. I sometimes think about college. It's neither good nor bad. This class I took or these friends I had, whatever. You think about all this stuff. We're always processing the past. But when you, when you separate yourself from having been in war, it's really hard to look back at decisions made in the fog of war, as they call it, and understand them.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  Because they're decisions you make when you've been trained to kill and you've been trained to be at war. You're making decisions that are, that are, you've been trained to make. I hate to say it that way. You've been trained to be aggressive, to be violent and to be ready to step into the fray and do, you know, your country's bidding or whatever. When you sort of come back to reality years later, it's just hard to reconcile that you did those things. They're not wrong. It isn't even like, oh my God, we did something horrible. A lot of the things you're thinking about are sort of standard fare for warfighting. Like you go into a building where there's a guy trying to kill you and you end up prosecuting the target and you kill the guy. He was shooting at us.

• 1:24:08Speaker 05

  He was shooting at us. But like I have memories of like, oh, there's the guy that was, you know, the father of the kids that we pushed over there who were crying in the corner. I'm, I'm fingerprinting their dead father. He tried to kill us. We're at war. It happens, right? But like, I'm a father. I literally, I've watched kids cry over their dead parents that we killed. It's like, that is the part of thinking about war that's hard to unpack.

• 1:24:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:24:36Speaker 05

  And so when you watch the exit from Afghanistan in such a horrible way that it went, like the planes taking off and Afghans are clinging to the plane and falling to their deaths from the last transport plane.

• 1:24:46Steven Rinella?

  When I was having, that was all I watched, you know?

• 1:24:49Speaker 05

  It's hard not to feel like, what the fuck was that for?

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 05

  What good did we do? And even though, you know, that's a deep discussion in and of itself. As an individual, I think a lot of people that have been to war, many more with more experience than me, it feels like you, you did something that you were trained and you, that you were trained to do, that you believed was good to do. But then the humanity of yourself just kind of creeps in over time and you start questioning what it is you were even doing. And it isn't like you're like, I'm a bad person. But you're like, I feel like I have had this life over here and I've had this life over here. And they absolutely are not congruent. Like the person I was in Afghanistan, good or bad, is not the person I am now. And it almost feels like I need to keep it a secret that I ever like lived this life.

• 1:25:36Speaker 05

  Even though I was a good Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. I was, I was really good at my job. I'm really good at it. I did all the things that I was trained to do. And if you evaluated our tour in Afghanistan, you would say, wow, you guys were really effective over there. Like you, you did a bunch of things you were supposed to do and I was a part of that. But then I'm a human. And so it's just, it'd be one thing if it felt like there was a boogeyman. Like if it felt like there was a clear existential threat that we were quelling. But it never really felt that way. It felt like we were in somebody else's land and they were defending themselves a lot of the time. Not all the time, because there were plenty of horrible people we came in touch with. But like the father, like he had a shitty shotgun with slug rounds.

• 1:26:20Speaker 05

  He fired like one slug round and then he gets obliterated because you can't do that. We also came into his house in the middle of the night. Now, we had intelligence that said that there was something in there worth going for. But what would happen if someone barged into your house in the middle of the night? Is it, is it possible you might, you might defend yourself? Yeah. Especially if your kids are there. And so those are the things that as a human being, it's hard not to be like, fuck, man, I have kids. You know? And so, but like this, this is the, the sacrifice in my mind that, that soldiers, military folks make that go in harm's way. Of course, there's the physical sacrifice. Of course you might die. Of course you might get maimed. And that is an enormous sacrifice, undeniably. But there's also this other part that's described as moral injury,

• 1:27:05Speaker 05

  where you do things that you were trained to do, that you were encouraged to do, that is part of like the geopolitics. This is what we're doing as a country and you did those things. But now you get to live with the fact that you did them. And no one's going to tell you they were wrong. You just got to literally live with them. And that's difficult, especially when you watch that sort of half-assed exit from Afghanistan. You're like, great.

• 1:27:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Steven Rinella?

  When you see other guys from your community, I mean, is there like a, um, I don't know, man, do you? Well, let me put it this way. I got, I got a hand, I got a handful of friends that were like career firefighters.

• 1:27:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Steven Rinella?

  Totally different, but just the things that they have to deal with.

• 1:27:46Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:47Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you do that shit 20 years. I mean, the stuff that you see, the stuff that you have to deal with.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Steven Rinella?

  Um, if you're a little kid, you think it's cool.

• 1:27:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:57Steven Rinella?

  Running into burning buildings, whatever. Kids want to be firefighters. You get a sense that like after, over time, when I'm talking to my friends, I get the sense of being like, almost like, man, I'm like, sorry, man. Do you know what I mean? I'm sorry that the, like, all that went on.

• 1:28:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Steven Rinella?

  You gotta feel that way with your colleagues.

• 1:28:19Speaker 05

  You know, the, the one person-

• 1:28:20Steven Rinella?

  I shouldn't say you got you. I guess I should ask you. Is that like a-

• 1:28:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  Does that feeling pop up?

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  You know what's interesting about that is I'm describing effectively like the, the, the second order effects of having gone to war. And then again, this is not even me trying to be humble. I just think it's important for perspective that we have been at war, you know, decades. There's been decades of warfighting and there have been so many people that have dealt with so many combat tours in a row, like some of the Marines and the Army infantry that we, we would see overseas. These guys are doing nine, 12 month deployments multiple times. Like these are guys that have terrible support and they're getting effed up. Their friends are dying left and right. Like there's, there's a huge amount of, of like trauma and, and, you know, problems that arise from that for sure. And I've only really gotten a little taste of that myself.

• 1:29:08Speaker 05

  But I, not ironically, but there's this, there's a flip side to the coin, which is not equally bad, but it's bad for certain people. And that is, it's referred to as chasing the dragon. And, and at least in my limited exposure to the teams. You get to a SEAL team.

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  You don't really have a say in where you go. You get, you, you have some level of say, you know, in what platoon you get put into, to a degree. But you sort of get sent off to a SEAL team. You basically get placed in a platoon of 25 guys. And where you end up deploying to is dependent on so many different factors, but none of them are, boy, I'd really like to go to war. That's what I want to do. Like you, who can, every, everybody wants to go to war. That's sort of how it works. But you don't really have a say in it. You just go wherever your platoon is attached to. And so there have been guys I know personally who went through all the same training as me, that literally were in my graduating class, that went to the same SEAL team as me, that in virtue of just the, the way the cards were dealt, they never went and saw combat.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  There's nothing to do with capacity at all. It's just your platoon didn't go.

• 1:30:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Speaker 05

  That creates enormous problems for guys that do all the training to go be an A B SEAL.

• 1:30:24Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. It's called chasing the dragon as you keep re-enlisting, you keep staying in because you hope you get to go to war soon. But then what if you never do? It's like you've, you've chased that thing you never got to do. And so those guys, they struggle with like imposter syndrome, like big time imposter syndrome.

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  And so that, that's an issue that I definitely see as well. But in terms of like, there's another one, survivor's guilt is a big one. There's, there's the literal survivor's guilt where, you know, somebody died, you live there. You see that. I, I've seen it firsthand with some people that I know. But actually the, one of the guys that helped save my life, the, the medic, he, uh, so he, from an injury perspective, physical injury perspective, the grenade blast, I don't think it actually physically harmed him. That he was concussed by it. He was every bit as affected by it, but from a, a like mechanical injury perspective, he was not really injured. And he saved my life. He, he, he did all these things that, that saved people's lives. I mean, you can, you can point to the people that are alive because of him.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  The rotation before that, so when I was not at a team, I was in training, he was, he's older than me. He did a rotation to Afghanistan on the previous tour and he as well was a medic on the ground. And he was involved in a couple of, I think there was an IED blast where one person, uh, he had his legs blown off. He survived. But, you know, like he was a, the medic was a part of saving his life. I think there was another guy who, another IED blast where the medic is close to both of these things, but never actually got hurt. He saved their lives completely. But this person, he developed this, this feeling that somehow he was like lucky, but in like, in a bad way, that like, like I'm the guy that never really got hurt.

• 1:32:10Speaker 05

  Everybody else is getting hurt. Everybody else is bleeding for their country and I'm, I'm just in the right place at the right time. And it became like a big problem for him that he felt bad. It's hard to imagine that. But the, the way the, the men, frankly, that I've seen in, in special operations, it's so like you want so badly to be somebody that the others rely on and trust. It's like reputation is everything and that anything that could potentially damage the way you view yourself, if you think your reputation is damaged, it's, it's crushing. So like the guys chasing the dragon, they worry that frankly, guys like myself, even though I've had, again, the one combat tour,

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  that I somehow think less of them because they haven't seen combat. I don't, not at all. I'm, I'm like, I've done one tour. Similarly, guys that have been close to tragedy, close to death and destruction, but they themselves never were hurt. They as well suffer from this idea that do other people think that I just got really lucky, even though you saved these people's lives. Like you're winning awards for saving people's lives, dude. So it's just like, it's a big mindfuck, to be honest. There's just so much identity wrapped up in it. And I think I struggle with it a lot on the way out.

• 1:33:19Steven Rinella?

  You, you have kids? You got a boy?

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  I do have a boy. I have a son who's about to be six and two, and two girls who are older.

• 1:33:24Steven Rinella?

  Would you let him do what you did? Like if you, if you had a say in it?

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  I don't know. I mean, would I want him to be a SEAL? Absolutely not.

• 1:33:33Steven Rinella?

  You know, Bo Jackson told me that he wouldn't let his kid play football.

• 1:33:36Speaker 05

  No kidding. Wow. What did he say? Did he give a reason? Yeah.

• 1:33:41Steven Rinella?

  Head.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  I can't remember the details, but yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 05

  I-

• 1:33:45Steven Rinella?

  Bang your head.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  I think that in a way, the, becoming a SEAL and going through the experience that I had, there, there are many things about it that I, you know, I don't, I don't regret it. I don't regret it. I feel, you know, like there are some issues with what I did. Me personally, internally, I struggle with some stuff that, that happened and how I conducted myself. But it taught me so much about resilience. It taught me so much about accountability, even if it's just my own accountability. It also frankly, in a weird way, set me up to be really able to handle the, the pressure of being a YouTuber.

• 1:34:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:34:23Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting.

• 1:34:23Speaker 05

  You know? Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, don't get me wrong.

• 1:34:26Steven Rinella?

  It's gotta seem like child's play, man.

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  It, it does and it doesn't. You know, it's, it's weird. Yeah. So I, I leave the military and I end up by happenstance. I posted something on TikTok that went viral. It was me telling a story about these missing hikers. It was this mystery. It goes super viral and I've always loved telling stories. I didn't really have a clear career path. And I was like, well, what the hell? I'll tell more stories. I like telling stories.

• 1:34:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:50Steven Rinella?

  Hang tight for a second. Cause I want, I want to understand like a transition piece here. Like I'm sitting where I am because I've always made minor turns.

• 1:35:00Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:35:00Steven Rinella?

  Very minor turns. And none of them were a question. Like I was going to be a writer from a young age.

• 1:35:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:35:07Steven Rinella?

  And like, I've just made minor swerves.

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:35:11Steven Rinella?

  And here I sit. Okay. But you went, you went like, um, like solid, solid 90.

• 1:35:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Um, was it, were you sort of like, did you have a, what do I do now? Or did you have a, I know exactly what I'm going to do now?

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  You know, I've discovered that I do well with not slight turns. I do well with like 180s or 90s. Not 180s, 90s. Um, when I, growing up, I was around very smart people, my parents, my sisters, like brilliant minds, like academically very successful. And I certainly had the aptitude to, to probably be as successful as they were academically, but I just wasn't really interested in it. I, I preferred to go drink in the woods with my friends and not go to school.

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  But then, uh, I went to college because my mom wrote my college essay, got me into school. And I immediately after one semester effectively flunked out. I technically withdrew, but bad behavior, you know, horrible grades. It was clear that I was not cut out for college. So in order to avoid expulsion, I came back home, uh, to live in my mom's basement and figure out my life. And it was in the moment when I came home that I realized what a mess I had made of my life, you know? Like I've had all these things handed to me. I shouldn't even have been allowed to go to college. I had bad grades. If it weren't for that essay, I wouldn't have gotten in. I wasn't paying for college. My parents were. And so I had a- Probably the first time at the age of 18, you know, I'm in my mom's basement being like,

• 1:36:43Speaker 05

  huh. So it's not really cool that I've rebelled from not being an academic like my family. I've just become a loser, you know, I shit the bed in high school, college, and now what? And my mom, God love her, she was ruthless. And I came, when I came home, she's like, cool, you want to go to college? You figure it out. You pay for it. You do it yourself. You're going to pay rent, you know, you're going to get a job and you're, you're an adult. Like you figure it out. And I needed that. But I found that I thrived when it was like, well, I better, better make a drastic change in my life.

• 1:37:17Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:37:17Speaker 05

  And I decided I would go to school locally. I went to UMass Boston, which was not a community college, but you could basically get in if you're from Massachusetts. I got a job at a gym scanning ID cards at like 5:00 AM to let people in. I'd ride my bike there at like 5:00 in the morning and I'd scan ID cards and I'd go to the school and I'd study philosophy because I thought I'd go to law school. But I sort of, it was the first time I'm like, wow, I'm taking my life into my own hands and doing something on my own. And it was like really powerful. And then it was around the time that I'm realizing the power of I'm going to be an adult. I'm going to go to school. I'm going to have a job that I have that not chance encounter, but that really intense encounter with the two brothers where I'm discovering that these guys I had written off as just random dudes

• 1:38:01Speaker 05

  at cookouts to like Navy SEAL commandos. And I was so taken with what they did. And they all talked about it being this calling to go be a SEAL. They talked about how, you know, I screwed a bunch of stuff up, but I decided, you know what? I want to see if I can do this because I just want to see. And they, they went off to SEAL training. And I'm like, that kind of fits my mold, you know, like I've kind of fucked some things up. I'm on the straight and narrow now, but I don't know if I want to be a lawyer. I kind of liked the idea of the serve of going to the military. And so I didn't really tell my parents. They knew that I was considering the SEAL teams, but not, they didn't know how committed I was to it. But in my mind, I was like, I'm going to graduate college because I feel, I feel like I want to finish the thing I said I was going to do. I'm going to graduate college and then I'm going to go be a SEAL. That's my new thing. And so

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  I began training for that. I graduate college. I go, go to SEAL training. It's such a departure from academia. It's the opposite. It might as well, it might as well be. I, I did well with like sudden and complete change, but I think I've also done well when there's something on the line, you know, with, with becoming a good student and graduating college. I think what drew me to that is it's binary. Either you'll do it and you'll, you'll prove everybody, everybody wrong, or you won't. And you'll be the loser that you sort of have become now, the guy in his basement with no, no future. And then with SEAL training, it was like, you'll either succeed or you won't. And if you don't, people are going to know. They're going to be like, man, I didn't make it. Not, not shocked, right? And you'll be chipping paint on the side of the USS, you know, whatever in Japan. And, and so when I got through SEAL training, I actually realized that I think I'm someone who does

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  well with big, huge life changes. And so part of the reason I think I soured on the SEAL teams so much when I was in, after I came back from Afghanistan and I was Negative Nancy, I think it's in part because it's like, all right, I became a SEAL, like I'm kind of over this. You know, I'm struggling with, with doing the same thing. And so again, I recognized that I probably was not an asset. I was a detriment. And then when I got out, it was like, okay, uh, now what? And I floundered around a little bit. I started a, a charity that helped veterans get jobs. It was a small time thing. I did some consulting work, but I didn't really have a place. And then I, I was following Gary Vaynerchuk, you know,

• 1:40:13Speaker 05

  Gary V, you know, he's, he's, he's a, he's an older guy who, he's been like on social media since before social media. He's still like an early influencer. And he, um, his message, if you were to distill it down to one thing is everybody should make content because the barrier to entry is near zero. Pretty much everyone's got a phone and an internet connection. And if it doesn't work, you don't lose much other than maybe you embarrass yourself online. But if it works, you can build brands, you can, there's all this opportunity right now, you know, with social media, with content creation. And so I was like, oh, fuck it. I'm okay with embarrassing myself.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  I never even thought of it that way, but yeah.

• 1:40:49Speaker 05

  And I, I began posting content. This is like 2019. I'm out of the military. Don't know what I'm going to do. And this is actually a part of my chapter of my life that was so painful. I initially began making content around being a SEAL because like what else is there to talk about? And I don't really know what else I would talk about. And it was, I would call it pretty benign. I was very cognizant of not sharing anything sensitive. It isn't like I'm sharing details that you're not supposed to hear. But it was sort of a, hey, look at me. I'm a Navy SEAL was definitely the vibe. And I attracted the ire of the entire active duty community. I was disowned, like aggressively disowned. People thought that

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  I was like, who's this fucking dude? This one, two platoon wonder thinks he's the man, like talking about, I, I was hated, reviled. And, you know, it's funny, there's so many SEALs that have, there's content everywhere about Navy, there may be SEAL movies, Navy SEAL books, like it's everywhere.

• 1:41:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man. Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  And, um, but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that, and I'm part of this in some ways, but it's really the minority of SEALs are actually part of the loud Navy SEAL stuff.

• 1:41:58Steven Rinella?

  That, that's, that's the thing I've wondered about, like, is the, what is the, what is the ratio equivalent to?

• 1:42:04Speaker 05

  The, the, the.

• 1:42:05Steven Rinella?

  Like media, politics, is it that there's so, that, that it's not a higher representation than the normal public or it's, but it's gotta be higher than the normal public to be in high profile positions coming out of the SEALs?

• 1:42:19Speaker 05

  It's, it's, it's weird how many SEALs are, are like in public doing stuff, whether it's creating content. They're everywhere. And, and God love them. Like I, I pretty much know all of them at this point, the guys that are out and they're awesome dudes. And then trust me, like how people perceive them is often very different than they really are. Um, so, uh, there, there is a huge contingent of active duty SEALs that really look at anybody who goes out in public and talks about being a SEAL in any capacity as like, that's not allowed. That's not allowed.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

  But then they can't go on social media to say it.

• 1:42:53Speaker 05

  It's very true. But you know what you end up getting is you end up getting like phone calls and emails and you, you get people that are.

• 1:43:00Steven Rinella?

  Private communications.

• 1:43:01Speaker 05

  People are, these are, they are not afraid of conflict. Like, think about it. Imagine, imagine being actively detested by a group of people whose job is to go, you know, commit to go, go to war. And so I was living in Virginia Beach and I was aware that there was a growing feeling of disdain towards me. And I noticed it because guys I served with in Afghanistan were sending me messages, be like, bro, I do not agree with what you're doing online. Like it's a fucking embarrassment. Go fuck yourself. And, and truthfully, I was, I felt like I was conducting myself in a way that was not sellout, so to speak. But now looking back at it, I, I was totally being like, hey, I'm a Navy SEAL. Follow me on the internet. Um, no matter how I dressed it up, that's, that's effectively what it

• 1:43:46Speaker 05

  was. And if I was active duty and I saw me doing the things I was doing, I would have a similar opinion. Who the fuck is this dude? Like he's, you did like one tour to Afghanistan and now you're going to represent the SEAL teams? Meanwhile, all the guys inside the teams, they know in virtue of my limited experience that I am fully aware, there are dudes in the teams who are active, who've done 15 combat tours.

• 1:44:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 05

  That will never say a word.

• 1:44:13Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:44:13Speaker 05

  And I know they exist, but by going out in public and talking about my experience, I'm sort of allowing the public to sort of, wow, like this guy, he, he's the top of the top. Wow. But the guys in the, in the community are like, you know what you're doing? You're allowing civilians to view you in a really high way. Um, and so it got to a point where I, I did grow, I mean, a modest following. I think there was like 50,000 people total that followed my content about SEALs. Um, and it was devastatingly painful. It was not worth any of it. Cause I'd open up my DMs and it's like, just a list of people that they want me to know who they are. This is not anonymous. This

• 1:44:55Speaker 05

  is like, this is my name. Here's my phone number. Here's my email. Here's where I live. And here's how I fucking feel about you. And it was like deep cutting. And it was like every little thing I said on the internet, it would be, they would examine it and they would say, here, here, you said this about this particular incident in Afghanistan. Here's what really happened. And it would be, you know, some absolutely fine nuanced issue that technically I'm wrong, but the whole point is you're, you're fucked up for doing this. And it was devastating. And I, Mr. Ballin didn't exist. I don't have, oh, I'll just go tell scary stories. Everything will be fine. I, I don't really have anything. I don't, I don't really have a meaningful career. I'm sort of starting social media, if you will. And I made the decision to just delete it all. I was like, this is simply

• 1:45:39Speaker 05

  not, and it wasn't, now I'll get my friends back. Gone. Bridges are burned. You know, it's not, it's not going to be damage control. It's protect my mental health, really.

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• 1:47:22Speaker 05

  And so I delete everything and I didn't, you know, reach out. I never tried to get mad at anybody. I, for the most part, just accepted that people felt a type of way about me. And then in my now, what do I do? Not just, oh, God, what content do I make? No, more broadly, like, what do I do with my life now? I, I did experiment a little bit with social media, not seal stuff at all. Didn't go anywhere, very cringey, just like stupid shit. No one was paying attention to it. I was still sort of doing consulting and doing some charity work, but I didn't really have a purpose. And then it was just, I, I, I've always been a huge fan of strange, dark, and mysterious true stories.

• 1:48:04Speaker 05

  Just personally, I love mysteries, not like, not like murder mysteries. I'm talking like world mysteries, like crazy stuff, like people going missing in the woods and crazy evidence found about them, stuff like that. And there's this one story that always fascinated me about these hikers that go off into the Russian mountains in the 50s and they vanish and.

• 1:48:23Steven Rinella?

  Tell me, tell me a quick version of the story.

• 1:48:25Speaker 05

  So these, these nine hikers.

• 1:48:26Steven Rinella?

  This is, this is your breakout?

• 1:48:28Speaker 05

  This is the breakout. Yeah. So in 1959.

• 1:48:31Steven Rinella?

  This is something you're already aware of, or you find out about?

• 1:48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, no.

• 1:48:33Steven Rinella?

  This is a story you already liked?

• 1:48:34Speaker 05

  I love this story. I thought it was fascinating and I had, I had been, again, doing stuff with social media. But at this point, I don't view it as the thing I'm going to be doing.

• 1:48:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 05

  You know, the, the seal stuff, I'm never doing that again. It's been, it's gone from the internet. So I don't have a presence at all. And I was like, you know, just, I'll try telling this story because I think it's really cool. Like, I personally love scary, real stories. So these, these nine hikers, they're the most experienced hikers in Russia in 1959. And they were going out to do what's called their level three hiking test, which is like the, the top mountaineering certification you could do in Russia at the time. So if you pass this test, you are like the top mountaineer in the, in the land. And the way it works is, it's sort of like when you get your PhD, you do your own research, you sort of present your own stuff. You, you build new information into the zeitgeist. Well, with this, it's so, this, this, this test is so advanced.

• 1:49:29Speaker 05

  You plan the route and you show with how, how hard it is to do this route, that if you can complete this, you are a level three hiker. And so you map it out and you give it to the, whoever's administering the test. I think it's a university. And then you go out and you do it. And if you successfully navigate the route you've given, then all right, you're a level three hiker. And so these hikers, they, they go out and they've given their route to the university and they have these rendezvous points and how long it's going to take them. And they set out and they bring cameras along and these, these are like nine, young, fit, like happy, just like beautiful young people. A lot of them are dating each other and they're like taking selfies. It's 1959. Like, it's almost odd, the pictures they're taking because they seem so current.

• 1:50:11Steven Rinella?

  How many miles they hiking?

• 1:50:14Speaker 05

  We can look it up, but it's, it's a decent distance. This is going to take weeks to hike through the Ural Mountains.

• 1:50:18Steven Rinella?

  Big old hike.

• 1:50:18Speaker 05

  This is a big hike. This is a multi-week long.

• 1:50:21Steven Rinella?

  Not running up a peak or something?

• 1:50:22Speaker 05

  No, this is, this is serious.

• 1:50:23Steven Rinella?

  Like an excursion, like a, like an expedition. I got you. Yeah.

• 1:50:26Speaker 05

  And so they off into the mountains they go and the Ural Mountains are these huge windswept, just like snow and ice. There's little pockets of forest down below, but it's mostly like just jagged ice, just peaks everywhere. And so into the mountains they go and then they don't turn up for their, they, they don't finish the route on time. I don't, I don't know if they hit one or two of their rendezvous points, but I think it was February 12th of 1959. They were supposed to be out of there and they weren't. And remember, the people that are, that are overseeing this test, they're talking about, these are like the best mountaineers. And so if they're delayed, no one's like, oh my God, we need to go get them. It's more like, all right, something happened, they'll be out of here.

• 1:51:07Speaker 05

  So a little bit of time passes and they're, they're waiting to hear from them and they still don't come out of the, that of the mountains. No one, so a month goes by and they haven't turned up and the families of these nine hikers are really, they're concerned. And they're getting in touch with the university and police. And finally, they, they launched this pretty lame search for the, for the hikers. Um, it's just like students and teachers and a few police, I think, went out as well. And they hike their way up to the, this, this huge mountain face. They're down in this valley, looking up at this mountain face and it's all snow and ice. And they see there's this one canvas tent that's just conspicuously located on the side of this mountain. Like in a really strategically nasty spot to put your tent. It's very sloped.

• 1:51:50Speaker 05

  It's windswept, like it's an awful place to be camping out. And they don't see any people and they, they walk up and they find the tent is vacant and the hikers are gone. And the tent is, it's collapsed. There's some snow on top of it, but they open it up. And inside is a lot of the equipment that the hikers had left behind, you know, cold weather equipment is in there. And also they noticed that the tent on one of the sides of the tent, it had been cut open. And they were able to determine it had been cut open from the inside out. So someone had cut the tent open from inside. They, at this point, the search got much bigger because now they're like, something obviously has happened. It's like negative 40 degrees out here. They've been missing for a month. Here's their abandoned campsite. Something's off here.

• 1:52:33Speaker 05

  A bigger search goes out there and they end up picking up footprints that were near the campsite that are going down the mountain, sort of on the, the far side of the mountain. And the footprints are, some are two boots, some are one boot and a barefoot, some are two bare feet. And they're making their way down the mountain. They find at least eight sets of prints. And the cadence of the steps was walking pace, so they're not running. So they're starting to put together this mental picture of like, okay, wait a minute. So these hikers.

• 1:53:00Steven Rinella?

  All the tracks are the same vintage?

• 1:53:03Speaker 05

  What do you mean?

• 1:53:04Steven Rinella?

  Like they feel they're all sets of tracks or traveling at the same time?

• 1:53:07Speaker 05

  Yes, all at the same time. And so they're like, all right, so they cut the tent open, left their stuff behind, exited the tent with one boot on, no boots on, in negative 40 degrees. And they're walking, not running, walking down the side of the mountain and they don't know. That's all they've seen so far. They follow the tracks down. And at the base of these, this mountain, it brings them to this forest and the, the, the prints sort of disappear into the forest. They go in the forest and they find, uh, three of the hikers. They're deceased. There's a big cedar tree that is, uh, it's in this clearing and at the base of the clearing is this burned out little fire, like a puny fire. Wouldn't have been enough to keep you warm. And one of the hikers, one of the men is curled around it, like he was trying to get warm and he's got tattered clothing on and he's died of hypothermia.

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

  And then they, the tree, there was signs that one of them or multiple of these hikers had tried to climb the tree. There were broken branches pretty high up and there was human tissue pretty high up on the tree, but no one's in the tree. And the other two hikers are found nearby in similar states of decomposition. They're down, they're, they died of hypothermia and their clothes are pretty ragged, but like they've hiked down here and they've died. So three of the nine hikers have been found. They also find that one of the hikers, I think it was the one who was near the fire, actually had flesh from his hand that was in his mouth, as if he was eating his hand. And I'm actually, I don't know if it was his hand, but it was definitely his flesh. So they, they look and they can't find the rest of the, I'm sorry, they find, uh, two other hikers nearby.

• 1:54:33Speaker 05

  So five have been found, four are missing. So five sort of scattered around in this forest, starting with this tree. Unclear what happened to them, all died of exposure and they are indeed missing boots and missing their equipment. So it's like, okay, I don't know what brought them down here, but they died of exposure. Thus, they, they, they found it was too hard to look for the remaining four because the weather was quite bad. It's the winter. And so they waited until May, because at this point, the search party is like, probably the other four are dead. There's no way, you know, they're alive. And so sure enough, in May, so a couple of months later, they go back out there to look when the snow's melted a bit. And they find this collapsed snow cave that they hadn't seen in February. And they find the other four hikers that are in this, this collapsed snow cave. They're dead.

• 1:55:16Speaker 05

  Uh, but their injuries are catastrophic. Uh, one, one man, he had a crush injury that was consistent with being struck by a speeding train or a speeding car. But he had little to no lacerations or, or bruising on his chest, like his chest was caved in. But missing was like the mechanism by which this happened. Um, the, the woman, or there was a man who was missing his eyeballs, could have been predation though. So at first they're like, okay. And then the woman, uh, she was, her lips were missing and they looked like they had been surgically removed. And her eyelids and her eyeballs were also missing. But again, they sort of chalked it up to this is potentially predation.

• 1:55:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Speaker 05

  But it was noted that the lines of, of like the lips being gone were, were fairly neat, almost like what you see with cattle mutilations.

• 1:56:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, this got cattle mutilation vibes to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  Uh, the woman had on men's clothing or some, some men's clothing and the men had some of the women's clothing on. No one was dressed appropriately and there were trace levels of radiation, small, but trace levels of radiation on the clothing. And so they're all dead. And so all nine hikers are now accounted for. The, the best mountaineers in the land have all died under this totally bizarre condition. And the families were outraged, you know, because it just seemed like, okay, well, what, you have to get to the bottom of this. Like something obviously happened out there. And so the, the government, they did launch a initially pretty hardy investigation. Uh, by this point, it was sort of a known, uh, drama unfolding in Russia. People were aware of this story.

• 1:56:47Speaker 05

  Uh, but then Russia quickly shut the investigation down and said, okay, we're, we're done investigating it. They said, we figured out what happened. They said a, an, an unknown, no, I'm sorry. They said a compelling force was what, what was responsible for their deaths. And then they.

• 1:57:03Steven Rinella?

  The ones in the snow cave?

• 1:57:05Speaker 05

  All of them, all of them, their deaths were because of a compelling, or either compelling or overwhelming force. And there was no further explanation.

• 1:57:14Steven Rinella?

  What does that mean though?

• 1:57:15Speaker 05

  No one knew and the case was.

• 1:57:17Steven Rinella?

  They don't mean like, they don't mean. Exposure.

• 1:57:21Speaker 05

  No, they didn't say they died from exposure. They said they died from a compelling.

• 1:57:24Steven Rinella?

  But would exposure be bucketed under compelling force or not? You know what I'm saying? Like.

• 1:57:29Speaker 05

  I don't know. I mean, the, the thing is, is you gotta figure that by now, I'm sure there's some issue with translation, you know, but the, the, the reason this story took on a life of its own is because they, they, the, the case itself at the time was made confidential. And so years later, this is actually the reason I told it at the time. This is in 2020. I told that story. The pictures were redacted. Some of the pictures were redacted and you can go for yourself and see pictures from not just the, the ones, the, the hikers took before whatever happened to them happened. And they're very eerie. I mean, like I said, they're selfies. Everyone's so happy. This is so great. This is like a, you know, a formality doing this test, even though it was hard. They knew what they were doing. They were going to ace this test.

• 1:58:11Speaker 05

  And there's like a couple of pictures taken at the tent, the one that they would ultimately find and everyone's fine. They're getting ready for bed and then something happens. And then the next pictures you see are of their bodies being found and they're like in various stages of decom. It's eerie. And then on top of that, there was multiple reports from military and civilians in Russia that reported seeing what they called fireballs over the Ural Mountains. Hard to say what these were. If they really coincided with where these hikers were in the mountains, the Ural Mountains are huge. But there were numerous independent reports of around the same timeframe that those hikers were out there. There were fireballs shooting up and down, up into the sky, including a senior military official said as much.

• 1:58:55Speaker 05

  But it was never, no one figured out what it was. And so it's just this big mystery. Years later, I would tell a 60 second version of that story, thinking, I think that's really fascinating. And I, the way I told it, it was on TikTok when TikTok had really just begun its thing. And I, and I also thought it was safe to post on TikTok because no seals are going to be on TikTok. Like I can do the new thing over there and no one's going to be mad at me. And I, I told the story and I said, at the end of this story, you're going to Google two words and the words are Dyatlov Pass, because that's the name of this mystery. If you Google it, you can see pictures. So I, and then I tell those quick version and I ended it on, you should Google Dyatlov Pass. It's fascinating. And I was at this water park in Pennsylvania in 2020 with my family. Great Wolf Lodge, this indoor water.

• 1:59:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:40Speaker 05

  Love them.

• 1:59:40Steven Rinella?

  I've been to one of those with my kids.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  And I, I tell it and then I left my phone in the room because I'm going down the water park with my wife and kids and I don't want my phone wet. I'm like, I'm never away from my phone, but I left my phone in the room. And I came back a couple of hours later and there was over five million views on that video. And I've never gotten any attention on the internet ever, besides negative attention, really. And I was like, wow, this is something that's divorced from being a SEAL. I'm fascinated by it. I love telling stories. And I wasn't like, boy, here, here's a career, but it was like, oh, here's a spark. I don't know what this is. Like I'll tell more stories. I love telling stories and TikTok wasn't even monetized really at the time at all. It was just like, cool, someone's paying attention. And so I went into a flurry of just telling every story I could

• 2:00:25Speaker 05

  find about missing lighthouse keepers and aliens and all this stuff I could find.

• 2:00:29Steven Rinella?

  Well, you're doing, are you doing original research and chasing things back to sort of like primary source? You just kind of reading people's work and delivering stories?

• 2:00:38Speaker 05

  I think, I, so the, the way that I've done it is definitely of the latter variety where I'm not, I'm not pretending that I've discovered these stories. Oh, boy, look, look what I found out. It's more like, I'm going to tell you a story that you, you might've heard of, but you've not heard of it the way I'm going to tell it.

• 2:00:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, got it.

• 2:00:53Speaker 05

  And the way I typically tell stories is I am really good at holding information until the end. So there's always something to wait for, a plot twist or a reveal, not, not to the point where it's like, come on, bro. We, we know the thing that you've hid, the, the obscurity thing that you did. We know what it is. It's like, I, I've, I told a story.

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  Well, as an example, there was this couple in Utah in the seventies. They're out on their first date. It's not going well. They're at a diner. There's no chemistry. They both know it's not going well. And they know at the end of this, you know, diner date, they're just going to go home and probably never see each other again. And so the guy who's not normally a particularly adventurous guy, he, he says to the girl at the end, he's like, hey, you want to like just ditch this thing and go for a hike with me right now? Like it's nighttime, you know? And she would later say, she was so caught off guard by it and he seemed so like, he knew it was an awkward request. It was almost like they both recognized this date ain't shit. This isn't going anywhere. We got nothing to lose. And she was like, you know what? Yeah, let's do it. Let's go on a hike together in the middle of the night, whatever. Let's go. And since suddenly the date is really exciting, it went from this is going to be nothing to like, great.

• 2:01:59Speaker 05

  Oh my God, their, their chemistry's picking up. They go outside, they hop in the car, they drive over to this, this canyon where this guy apparently went hiking all the time and he reassured her like it's, it's, it's a, it's a known trail. We'll just go up this overlook. It's a beautiful sight. The moon's out. We'll come back and that'll be it. So like now it's exciting. This date's going great. And so they start hiking into the woods. You know, it's dark out, but decent illumination. And as they're walking, they're holding hands. There's nobody out and they both would later say that for some reason, as they're walking, it just started feeling like something was wrong. There was something off. They couldn't place it, but they don't know each other. They don't have the ability to be like, hey, like, do you feel something weird here?

• 2:02:39Speaker 05

  It was like, they don't have, they don't have a, a history with each other. So they both quietly are, are feeling like this sense of dread come over them as they walk deeper and deeper into this forest, which again, it's a marked trail, but it's nighttime. Who's, who's going hiking in the canyon at night? And so deeper and deeper into the woods they get, and they both at some point are like speed walking because they had to go to a, a turnaround point that was going to be, that's where we're going to go. We're going to look out over the canyon, then we're going to turn and come back. And so as their dread is building, they're like naturally speeding up, like let's just get there, turn around and come back. They stopped talking to each other. It's no longer fun. They're just silently maneuvering into the woods. And at some point, the guy, he steps on something that he, he remembers thinking it felt soft. And he's looking straight ahead. He's not looking down. He steps on something soft and he stops.

• 2:03:24Speaker 05

  And he's holding the girl's hand and she feels him stop and she stops too. She doesn't step on anything. And the two of them, without saying anything, without investigating, without doing anything, they just instantly, they have not reached the turnaround. They turn and they leave the, they leave the canyon. Boom. They leave the canyon. Right? And by the time they get out of the canyon, like they didn't really even talk about what happened. They're both like so relieved to be out of the canyon. Like, oh my God, that was kind of scary out there. Like, oh man, I don't know if I want to do that again. Ha, ha, ha. So they end up leaving and this experience, even though they have no idea what that was, it meant really not much to them. It was like they spooked themselves. That's what they thought it was. It ended up bonding them and they got married. This couple ends up getting married because of this weird first date that like sort of went badly and good at the same time.

• 2:04:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:08Speaker 05

  Years later, they're at home and the TV's on and one of them, the husband or the wife is in the kitchen. The other is watching the TV. And there's a reporter who's on the TV and they're talking about this interview they've just conducted with this death row inmate. And like this, apparently this, this inmate had given their tell all before they are going to get executed. And they, they cut to the, the interview with this person. Uh, and it's the journalist and the, the death row inmate. And the journalist says something to the effect of, was there ever a time before you got caught that you almost got caught? Like, was there ever a time it almost, it almost happened before the jig really was up? And this death row inmate's like, actually, yeah. I was out in Provo Canyon one night in the night, 1970, whatever

• 2:04:53Speaker 05

  it was, and I had just killed this girl and I was dragging her across the road to hide her off the side of the trail. And this couple out of nowhere comes bombing around the corner and the guy stepped on the body. And I, I thought I'd have to kill him, but for some reason they just turned around and they left. That was the only time. It turned out that the couple had accidentally walked into Ted Bundy, the most infamous serial killer of all time. There you go.

• 2:05:21Steven Rinella?

  We, we had this series we were doing called Close Calls.

• 2:05:24Speaker 05

  Oh, nice.

• 2:05:25Steven Rinella?

  There's a story about, we, we interview a game warden at length who was working a serial poacher case.

• 2:05:36Steven Rinella?

  Never got anywhere on it, but one night he trailed him for a long time. Following his truck and lost him.

• 2:05:45Steven Rinella?

  He got out to look at a mud puddle and determined that, that his truck hadn't gone through the mud puddle. Cause the mud wasn't stirred up the way he thought it would be. So he goes off in a different direction.

• 2:05:55Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 2:05:56Steven Rinella?

  But he got out and examined the mud puddle. And he's like, no, he didn't go this way and takes off.

• 2:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Later, there's a guy, um, I can't remember what he eventually got caught for, but there's a guy in for something much more serious than than serial poaching. And he's telling a guy a story where he's telling him a story. One night, you know, I was being trailed by a game warden. And I drove through a big puddle, parked my truck behind a juniper and got out with my rifle and I was gonna hose him with my rifle. The minute he crossed in front of me. And he goes, and that lucky son of a bitch got out, stared into that mud puddle and drove off a different direction. And then this guy went and met with him, you know, and talked to him. So yeah, like very similar story where this guy realized he was like, later. This game warden realized.

• 2:06:47Speaker 05

  That's crazy. Stories like that are crazy.

• 2:06:49Steven Rinella?

  No, it's it's wild, man. So how how many do you have now? Like, how many stories do you have? I mean, I know you got like, you got like millions of.

• 2:06:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we.

• 2:06:57Steven Rinella?

  Tune into your stories.

• 2:06:58Speaker 05

  We've, uh, I mean, so the the way we structure the stories a lot of times are like per episode on YouTube, there'll be like two or even three individual stories that are within the episode. They're not connected. It's just individual stories. And so if you if you look at each story individually, not total of uploads, uh, cause our total uploads on YouTube is like five or 600 or something. We're probably north of a thousand or 1,200 stories. Um, and in the early days, it was just me Googling, finding stuff, writing it and then doing it. Now we have a team of people. Ironically, my sister, uh, who's a, she's brilliant. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She came over from the Boston Globe.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  And she's my chief creative officer. She has the writing room up for me. And my mom, who's also a professional writer who wrote my college essay, she's written for me.

• 2:07:45Steven Rinella?

  So she's writing for you again.

• 2:07:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so, but we have a great writers room. A lot of care has gone into figuring out how to find people that can really write in my voice. And then even though we have a great system of creating scripts, um, invariably, I think one of the things that I've just gotten good at doing is we tell the story, but I I will often riff and sort of take the story as it needs to go on days we film. But yeah, but thousands, thousand plus stories easily. Yeah, that's crazy. It's so weird. I mean, when that one viral moment in on TikTok.

• 2:08:16Steven Rinella?

  What year was that?

• 2:08:17Speaker 05

  That was in 2020.

• 2:08:18Steven Rinella?

  What year did you get injured?

• 2:08:19Speaker 05

  Twenty, well, I got injured in 2014. I finally was officially discharged end of 2017. And so I'm a civilian again, January 2018.

• 2:08:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So you were cast about two years.

• 2:08:31Speaker 05

  I was an outcast.

• 2:08:32Steven Rinella?

  Found your Russian hikers.

• 2:08:33Speaker 05

  Dude, and you know, you know, I'll say this about this, the the people that had the most negative things to say to me that from the teams.

• 2:08:43Speaker 05

  It took time, but I mean, after I fully changed and was doing this new venture, uh, two things. One, I've never once publicly bad mouthed or in any way insinuated that anything those guys did was wrong, but rather it was just really painful. And that in many ways I brought it on myself. I know the culture of the teams. I was a SEAL. I know how people view that stuff. So I think like the fact that I wasn't making excuses and sort of said, okay, this isn't working. I don't want to do this anymore. And then I started doing something new. That is, you know, it's a new venture. It has nothing to do with being a SEAL. Um, I think that that in many ways, it didn't get me back in by any stretch.

• 2:09:23Speaker 05

  But I think people respected and appreciated that I saw what I was doing, stopped it and did something new. And I've gotten loads of messages from people that are now very supportive, which is.

• 2:09:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 2:09:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, it's great to see. It's not like, hey, we're cool now. It's more like, I respect that. I respect that you heard it and you changed. That's cool.

• 2:09:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell me about the book you got there.

• 2:09:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. So actually I brought this one for you. Uh, this is our third book. Uh, it's called The Terror Within.

• 2:09:50Speaker 05

  It's a graphic novel. It's nine stories. Uh, each of them can live on their own. Uh, it basically is like us. You know, we do the strange, dark and mysterious is sort of our, our, our genre. And so we've chosen stories that intentionally sort of touch on each of those genres as we see them. It's beautifully illustrated. You can pick it up and just grab one story and just go for it.

• 2:10:13Speaker 05

  But yeah, this is our third one. So it's called The Terror Within. The theme, the through line of this one is, uh, it's sort of like you don't know who, you never know who's walking down the street near you. Like you don't know what people are really capable of, like the terror within all of us. There was some crazy statistic, even though this has really nothing to do with serial killers. But right now, and this is gonna be, someone's gonna fact check me and say I'm wrong, but the gist is there. There's something like several thousand right now in the United States, uncaught serial killers.

• 2:10:43Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man.

• 2:10:44Speaker 05

  And it's like, that could be your barber. That could be the person at the grocery store with you. And so this is sort of poking at this idea that there's, there could be darkness in people that you just don't know about. So it's a, it's a great story. It comes out October 6th. And you can preorder it right now. Terror Within.

• 2:11:00Steven Rinella?

  Find it on Amazon or whatever.

• 2:11:01Speaker 05

  Yep. Pretty much anywhere you you get your books. And so this is actually for you. I'll sign it and give you a whole merch box for you.

• 2:11:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, thanks.

• 2:11:07Speaker 05

  Including, I got, I, I wear flannels in all of my, in everything I do. And I got you a sick flannel as well.

• 2:11:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:11:15Speaker 05

  Pass that along to you.

• 2:11:16Steven Rinella?

  Let me hit you with a couple of quick ones.

• 2:11:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:17Steven Rinella?

  Just as simple as yes or no, or you can give a little more if you need to. Are you like a Bigfoot guy? Cause you like the occult and you like the unexplained. Like are you, are you a legitimate Bigfoot guy?

• 2:11:26Speaker 05

  I wouldn't say, oh, so I can't do short answer. I'll give the shortest answer. I wouldn't say I'm a true Bigfoot guy. But I'm definitely open to the idea of it.

• 2:11:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay, okay. Do you feel that there are like, um, aliens running around right now, um, in, in, in, um, planet Earth?

• 2:11:42Speaker 05

  I think that the chance that there's life outside of human and the life that we know.

• 2:11:50Speaker 05

  I think it's high. Uh, I would say, I don't know.

• 2:11:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, life.

• 2:11:54Speaker 05

  Life, sure.

• 2:11:55Steven Rinella?

  Somewhere, I think is extraordinarily high. Are they chilling here? I think, no. Me.

• 2:12:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, if I'm being super pointed about it, I'm gonna be cynical and say no. Yeah, but I would say the reason I say no is I am of the belief that if there's life out there, I have this analogy that's not mine. It's, it's one Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist gives, where it's like, we, we're comprised of X number of DNA strands. Let's call it 100 DNA strands make us human. Chimpanzees are like 98 of the human 100, but two are different.

• 2:12:30Steven Rinella?

  Carrots are 67.

• 2:12:31Speaker 05

  You get the idea. And it's like, we automatically assume that you will think, how do we treat chimpanzees? How do we treat carrots? Well, chimpanzees, we put in zoos and we, we test.

• 2:12:41Steven Rinella?

  We eat, I made some pickled carrots on my garden last night.

• 2:12:44Speaker 05

  Or like earthworms. You don't stop and chat with an earthworm. You step on an earthworm and don't, don't even notice it. And then so when I think about life outside of planet Earth, I wonder sometimes, are we wrong for assuming that we automatically are like equal to the other life out there? What if we're the earthworm? What if we're the ant? Are we so insignificant that they wouldn't even notice us? And so my cynical mind says that that's why I don't think there's very likely aliens. Just, boy, I can't wait to talk to these humans. These guys are great.

• 2:13:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What I, what I don't, what I don't get, what I don't accept is that they would, that whatever life is out there, molds, bacterias, some, something.

• 2:13:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:13:26Steven Rinella?

  Um, that humans have this thing where we want them to like kind of resemble us and share our motivations.

• 2:13:34Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:13:35Steven Rinella?

  But there are, there have been millions, there have been millions of species on Earth. There are currently tens of millions of species on Earth. Only one shares our motivations.

• 2:13:50Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 2:13:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's shocking. And we've only been transmitting electronic signals for a hundred years. So you have a four billion year old planet. You have 75,000 years of modern humans. You have a hundred years of transmitting signals and you think that in some other planet, that shit's gonna line up?

• 2:14:11Speaker 05

  It seems far fetched, to say the least.

• 2:14:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and I'm a big Star Wars guy.

• 2:14:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I hear you, man. I would believe.

• 2:14:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay, now, now, uh, do you think evil is personified? Or do you think it's like just scattered around? Like, do you think there's an evil source?

• 2:14:24Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 2:14:25Steven Rinella?

  Cause you deal a lot in evil stuff.

• 2:14:28Speaker 05

  Good question.

• 2:14:28Steven Rinella?

  People.

• 2:14:29Speaker 05

  Man.

• 2:14:29Steven Rinella?

  What's your perception of evil?

• 2:14:32Speaker 05

  Well, evil's tough because not to get too deep into it, but I think that, uh, we are all, actually to reference the book, The Terror Within. I think people, not just that there are people that have done terrible things that we don't know about, like serial killers who are uncaught. But I think that we are all as humans capable of doing pretty brutal things, uh, when put in the right environment. And I can actually pretty much speak to that in real, real life. I mean, if you think about what it means to go to war on some level, you need to be brought into this mindset of being ready to, to commit violence, right? It doesn't mean it's evil. Plenty of people would say.

• 2:15:08Steven Rinella?

  You don't view it as it's, or I shouldn't say you don't.

• 2:15:12Steven Rinella?

  But man, I'm reading what you're saying is it's not handed out. It's just there.

• 2:15:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 2:15:20Steven Rinella?

  It comes forth.

• 2:15:21Speaker 05

  I think that evil exists and we're all capable of it. I think that systems, like social systems are what prevent us from committing evil.

• 2:15:31Steven Rinella?

  I, I imagine it that way. I imagine that it's not distributed. It's not assigned.

• 2:15:37Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:15:37Steven Rinella?

  But it rises forth.

• 2:15:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we all got it and it's controlled through society.

• 2:15:45Speaker 05

  Badly.

• 2:15:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that might be the first thing we disagree on here. But so, okay, when you go, when you, when you sleep in the woods.

• 2:15:56Steven Rinella?

  Cause you like to go backpack and hike and stuff.

• 2:15:58Speaker 05

  More in the Navy, but sure.

• 2:16:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, when you sleep in the woods, is it spooky or peaceful for you?

• 2:16:05Speaker 05

  I mean, the last time I did that, uh, actually, let me think. It probably, probably pretty peaceful, but, but I, I would say there are certain places I wouldn't necessarily go based on my own research. Like I wouldn't go to like, uh, there's this notoriously haunted forest in Connecticut. Like I would probably avoid that place, even the last people like that. Um, when I was in, in the Navy, we did some cool stuff out in Alaska. We like hiked up and built little snow caves and slept in the snow caves. It was like awesome. I'm like by myself in an Alaskan forest. It's awesome. So.

• 2:16:34Steven Rinella?

  But you know, some people become, I guess what I'm getting at on that one is that

• 2:16:40Steven Rinella?

  you could like almost bifurcate people. There's people that when they're like way out in the woods, like way up in the mountains. And their head is like this litany of things, like the precise, like the crazy ax murderer guy being like high on the list. Animals would, they feel like I am now in a place of risk.

• 2:16:57Speaker 05

  True.

• 2:16:58Steven Rinella?

  There are other people that'd be like, I am now in a place free of risk.

• 2:17:02Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 2:17:04Steven Rinella?

  Then no one knows I'm here. Jimmy, like in their mind, like this is relaxing. I'm not within the chaos of, I'm not within the chaos of all these people around me.

• 2:17:15Speaker 05

  How do you feel about it? You've got to be the peace guy. Yeah, I bet.

• 2:17:18Steven Rinella?

  Much more chill.

• 2:17:18Speaker 05

  I wouldn't keep doing it.

• 2:17:19Steven Rinella?

  But I don't lay in my bed, like I don't lay in my bed at night at home with my wife, feeling like, like, you know, who's going to come through the door?

• 2:17:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Steven Rinella?

  But I just, it's just like, it's, I don't know, I'm in a place of greater peace away from there. And I think that really probably what's going on is my, my chore list. The buzz in my head.

• 2:17:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:17:43Steven Rinella?

  Has less components to it.

• 2:17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I dig that. I think that.

• 2:17:47Steven Rinella?

  There's just not as much things I could do.

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  I think that people represent bigger threats to us than, I mean, I say this not having had tons of experience in the wild like you have, but generally speaking, people are a bigger threat than environment. Obviously you can go into a, of an environment and not be prepared for it and it'll kill you in a heartbeat. But if you're prepared for an environment and you're smart, I think that you're probably in a more peaceful and safe environment than being in a city. Where frankly, there are people that are perfectly willing to let the, the terror within them come free.

• 2:18:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Speaker 05

  And you might be caught in the crossfire.

• 2:18:21Steven Rinella?

  Uh, one last one for you. If, if you look like the, the, the hiking disasters, the wilderness disasters, the not, the national park disasters, whatever, missing people. Trips gone awry, right? Do you have a little, do you have a bit of advice where you're like, if blank happens, blank, or no matter what happens, don't.

• 2:18:44Speaker 05

  Oh man. Honestly, a lot of the stories that it goes really bad for people have to do with either really poor communication to people that are not like their loved ones and friends.

• 2:18:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:18:58Speaker 05

  Uh, or worse, like overconfidence combined with that, like telling someone that you're, you're more prepared for something than you really are.

• 2:19:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:19:04Speaker 05

  There's this horrible case, this is the very short version is this guy, he was a big outdoor enthusiast. He was a, uh, he was a outdoor photographer. This is in like the 1990s or eighties. And he goes out into the Alaskan wilderness. He does it every, uh, summer. He goes out for like two, three months at a time by himself and just takes pictures of this particular bird or something. But he loves it and he's like pretty much broke and he raises enough money each year to go on this trip.

• 2:19:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:30Speaker 05

  Um, and so he'd done it like several times over and he goes out this one year and he tells his family where he's going to go. Yeah, I'll see you in like two months or whatever. But, uh, the, uh, the, the guy that he had asked to pick him up at the end of the summer had apparently just not gotten the memo that he was being asked to get picked up. And so at the end of the summer, he didn't have a ride. And unfortunately, this is where I think the communication part is important. This guy, I think his name is Charles. He had had, he had had this experience like two, three years earlier where he had been late coming out of a trip into the wild. And his family had been worried about him and they had called the authorities and they had gone out looking for him and he had come out on his own strength.

• 2:20:13Speaker 05

  But he was really embarrassed that there was the search that was launched for him because it made him look like he didn't know what he was doing. And so he made his family swear that if he ever was late coming out.

• 2:20:23Steven Rinella?

  Don't panic.

• 2:20:24Speaker 05

  Don't you dare panic. Don't you call it in. Don't you do anything. Uh, and, and so basically he ends up being in this terrible position where he doesn't have the equipment, the food or anything to survive the winter.

• 2:20:33Steven Rinella?

  And he's admonished his family not to do anything about it.

• 2:20:35Speaker 05

  No one's calling it in. And finally, uh, a search is launched for him. He's barely hanging on. It's, it's winter time now and, uh, this plane comes swooping in, uh, over this lake where he was camped out near. And it's, it's an Alaska state trooper plane and they see him and he raises one hand up and he's waving. But he doesn't realize that the, the, this in, in this part of Alaska, if you put two hands up, it means you're in distress and you want to get picked up. And he put one hand up and he basically signaled, I'm okay. Don't pick up. And the trooper was like, here's a dude out in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. He's got a camp set up. He's just smiling and waving. And so he didn't get picked up and he ends up, he ends up dying out there.

• 2:21:13Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 2:21:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. He ends up dying out there, but it's just sort of like, you probably should say, hey, to a degree, don't call it in. But if it's like, you know, several weeks into the winter, maybe come get me. So tell people where you're going.

• 2:21:23Steven Rinella?

  All right, great. Uh, Mr. Ballen, you can find him on YouTube, find him where else. It's Mr. Ballen, no matter where you go.

• 2:21:30Speaker 05

  Search Mr. Ballen. We have a podcast, YouTube, books. We have some live dates that are probably coming up. Just, yeah, search Mr. Ballen everywhere you.

• 2:21:38Steven Rinella?

  At the live shows, you tell some good rippers, you tell some good stories.

• 2:21:41Speaker 05

  I love telling a good live story. Yeah. I got one coming up in, in New York and Comic Con coming up in October.

• 2:21:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, excellent. Yeah. Excellent. Thanks for coming on the show, buddy.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 2:21:49Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

• 2:21:50Speaker 05

  Take care.

• 2:22:17Speaker 06

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• 2:22:59Speaker 02

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• 2:23:03Steven Rinella?

  I did. Mike Tyson.

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• 2:23:12Steven Rinella?

  That's a low blow.

• 2:23:14Speaker 02

  Totally. But you can do something about it.

• 2:23:16Steven Rinella?

  You have to punch back.

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• 2:23:23Steven Rinella?

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