MrBallen Explains What Dying in War Feels Like

YERRRR we are BACK with MrBallen! Part 2 is crazy: - Training to be a Seal - Captivity training - Being ambushed - Surviving a grenade attack - Readjusting to civilian life - Becoming a pariah in the Seal community - HIs transition into becoming a YouTuber and more - PEACE! Timestamps: 0:00 "I should have died" + Becoming a Seal 5:11 Hazing, Shut Up Shakespeare + Roasting 12:56 Tolerating death + This is your job 17:55 Training vs Being a Seal + Risk of death 24:41 This is not for me, Seal Team 6 + Dark side 31:30 Surviving "captivity" + Boots, Boots, Boots 35:44 Afghanistan, Adjust immediately + Primal state 38:39 Trained immaculately, Teamwork + Being shot at 41:14 Zarghun Shar, Just look different + Rules of engagement 47:51 Engaging the enemy, Ambushed + Clearing a building 58:12 Andrew's undefeated streak + Jay-Z for Super Bowl? 1:05:12 Tunnels + Watch the live feeds 1:07:42 Drone spotting enemies, Grenade attack + Facing death 1:21:35 Danger close airstrike 1:30:12 "Not sad, not bad, just is" 1:31:50 Am I going to die? Almost an*lly compromised 1:35:35 Acceptable blackface*** + Another close call 1:41:53 Afghan fans, Being so removed + Re-adjusting 1:47:42 Adjusting to civlian life, Talking openly + Reputation 2:00:38 Does MrBallen regret it? Not being respected 2:04:30 Transitioning into a YouTuber + The Dyatlov Pass This episode is sponsored by Kalshi. This episode is sponsored by Sesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everybody, welcome to Flagrant, it's your boy Schultz, I'm here at Alex Media, Marky Gag, Miles Media, and our guest today is, is one of the most compelling storytellers on the internet, maybe the most, okay? He's focusing on these dark, strange, mysterious stories, but he also has a whole other life as a kind of badass Navy SEAL. And you have a, and I want to get into a lot of these stories because there's a lot of things I'm very curious about, but there is one story that I've been edging myself on.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  That you've told.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Okay? I've been, I've been edging.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  This is, and I don't even know what it's called, a grenade attack, like someone threw a grenade at you.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  And you're here, you have all your limbs and everything.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I do, I do.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  And a grenade has exploded and hit you.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  So take us through that before you tell us about the dark twisted stories on the internet.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, jump right in. Yeah, so I, I should have died in 2014, like arguably should be dead at this point.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  What a hook, that's how you hook.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  You know, I, it's, I often-

• 1:07Speaker 00

  I almost want to redo the intro.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I often think about how much, how much I've done in my life since 2014 to now, anything, like anything I've done from April 19th, 2014 to now, feels like I don't even know how I'm still here, really. So I was, I was a Navy SEAL before I was telling scary, scary stories on the internet. I joined in 2010, it takes about two years to finish training. I was not good in training, I barely clawed my way through training, but I did it, you know, I passed the test, became a SEAL. And then in my first deployment, I had the, it's, it's the good fortune, if you put yourself

• 1:51Speaker 01

  in the mindset of being a Navy SEAL, this is like 2012, I had the good fortune of joining a platoon that was slated to, to go to war. Because it's not always a guarantee at the time that you're going to actually go employ your skillset that you've been trained for years to do. So, so we're all like jazzed up, like we're going to go to Afghanistan. We go to Afghanistan and-

• 2:12Speaker 00

  So you're not worried you could die, you're excited that you get to use your skills? That's the mentality of people in the military, especially the SEALs?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I would say, you know, for those that, that don't like know what a Navy SEAL is, beyond maybe just hearing about it on the internet or whatever, I mean, you're trained how to kill people, that's, that's the job. Yes, there's more to it, but like, that's the job.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Seems pretty easy though, right? Like how much training is there?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  You're trained, it's like-

• 2:41Mark Gagnon?

  I think I might have to move.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  But it's like, it's a level of, it's, okay, so you, you have your target here, we're going to teach you how to get to that target and prosecute that target under virtually any scenario. Whether it's cold, whether it's hot, whether it's via the air, or sea, air, land, that's the acronym for SEAL. You know, obviously there's more to being a SEAL, I mean, there's, we do reconnaissance missions where you're just like gathering intel, you'll do, you know, winning the hearts and minds, that's something that like Green Berets, the special forces in the army are known for, which is like village stability operations and working with local populaces to build up their infrastructure. But at the end of the day, there's this thing known as direct action, which is, like DAs

• 3:23Speaker 01

  are doing raids or doing missions where it's kinetic and shooting is, the killing is done, that's, that's the job. So when you go through training, a lot of the training, now I can say this confidently having been through it, it's not propaganda, like you better be excited to go kill people, that's not how it's set up. But there's an entire world that you gradually are let into as you get through training, because there's so many test gates, there, it's very gradual, like you have to pass this test to get to this test, and it's constant. So as you're like sort of earning your stripes, you're, you're sort of being more and more welcomed into the fold of this brotherhood of trained assassins, whatever you want to

• 4:04Speaker 01

  call it, and your instructors increasingly view you as you're gonna not just be somebody I trained, but you're going to potentially be going out the door with me, to do missions with me, because-

• 4:15Speaker 00

  So you can't fuck up because you got my back.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  You're being judged, like, you better be good at this because you're going to do it with me, I need to know you'll protect me on deployment. So it's like a very intense couple of years where there's this thrill of passing the test, because some of them are like, I don't know if I can do that, and when you pass it, you're like, holy shit, I can't believe I made it. And so there's this incredible like sense of accomplishment, I mean, when you, when you get pinned, when you become a Navy SEAL, that's like this very low key ceremony, but it's like, there's only so many people that have ever not just been to a Navy SEAL graduation, but gotten a fucking gaudy gold trident pinned to their chest. It's just like, it's an incredible thing you're doing, and so when you finally, you cross the finish line and you're, you're a trained Navy SEAL and you get sent to your

• 5:02Speaker 01

  team, and I know I haven't gotten to the story yet, this is what I do, I just talk.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  I'm in, I'm in. I'm holding back asking you questions about the training, which we will get to later, but-

• 5:12Speaker 01

  So I, we wrapped up and I became a Navy SEAL in September of 2012, and then I was told to go to my team, I was going to check into my team on the east coast by like that Christmas. And so there was a period of time where I had to go through language school, and then I had to move from San Diego where the training was to Virginia Beach. And I, because I knew, I'd heard stories about like the check-in process at your team, it's like hazing on another level is sort of the idea, because it's like, the SEAL teams, so you get to your, you get to the base where your team is, and it's like there's a big military base, so you have to get through that, which is, you know, it's a basic military base, and then like within the base, there's another base.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And you get through those fences, and then within that, there's another building with security access codes to get you into your SEAL team, which is totally nondescript, like there are barely any windows, like it's this totally nondescript space that is the SEAL team. And inside, it's like, that's, that's it, you're surrounded by the active duty SEALs. And when you check into your team, you often have to check in when the active duty veteran SEALs are there, and they know when you're checking in, because there's only a handful of you that are coming to the team at any given time. And so there's just all these stories about like what to expect when you check in, it's like pretty gnarly, it's like you're the fucking brand new guy, you know, walk into the room filled with your, your seniors and introduce yourself, no one wants to do that.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And so like I decided I would, I would like, you know, jump ahead of the power curve and I would rush and get to Virginia as fast as I could, like drive there across country with my wife and my cats and in the truck, barreling across the country, get there as fast as I can, so I can check in during break, because it was like winter break, and all the guys, they'd be gone, and it would just, I'd just go in, like punch my papers, and then I could, I could then like a week later-

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Avoid the hazing.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, get away from the hazing. Not what happened.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  It wasn't too much hazing, but it was like super intense, I get to the team, and my first exposure to like actual Navy SEALs beyond my instructors who are SEALs and whatever, is I, I go through the first gate, and then I get to the SEAL team gate, and then I finally, I finally get into the quarter deck of the SEAL team, SEAL team two, and there's this dude lumbering down the hallway, and he's still wearing his like beat up camis from, they just got back from Afghanistan, and they had a very kinetic deployment, it's like lots, lots of gunfights. And this dude straight up has a scar from an IED blast that blew up in his face that runs the length of his face.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  So he has this vicious scar that looks like, if you did, if you put this like on your main character in a movie, like here's the main character, here's their scar across their face.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  It'd be too unbelievable.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, come on, this is too on the nose. So this dude's like fucking yoked with a scar across his whole face, and he walks down the hall and looks at me and he goes, who the fuck are you? And I'm like, I'm Seaman Jonathan Allen, he just walks past me. And then I made my way up to my platoon, and like the whole team has just gotten back, and they're like bullshitting in the space, and like they're all, they just got back from Afghanistan, and I had to go in and be like, hey everyone, I'm the new Navy SEAL that's joining your team, like get the fuck out of here, and like there's some stuff that happened in there, but, uh, can't fully get into it, but, uh, yeah, no.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Some gay stuff or?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  All the fraternity hazing is gay.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  It's white, but gay.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Not all.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Not all. You were in a fraternity?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, barely any.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Barely made out with spring.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was close.

• 8:39Mark Gagnon?

  I bet you had seen it.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. So we, so I check in, and it was more than anything, it was like a, when you, when you finish training in San Diego, there, there aren't really other competing SEALs, you're sort of like the top of the, it's like when you're in high school, you're like a senior in high school, you're like the coolest guy there, you know? And so that's what it was like graduating SEAL training, those like few months where you're the top of the food chain, everybody thinks you're so fucking cool.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Now you're right back to freshman.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  You're like pathetic, you're the bottom of the barrel. But the cool thing was, is, so again, coming back to like being excited about going to war, you check into your team, you find out effectively pretty early on where you're slated to go, and there's a workup cycle where you're preparing for this deployment, and you sort of slowly come to realize that as much as the guys that you're with are more experienced than you, if nothing else, they've done this stuff in real life, but you realize you can keep up for the most part, and it's actually a little, little unknown fact, is the brand new SEALs tactically are brilliant, because they just left the schoolhouse. Shooting on point, everything's on, but you've never used it in real life.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  And so you're really skilled, no experience. And so you're sort of realizing that these guys, some of them-

• 9:49Speaker 00

  It's like being great at hitting the pads.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that is probably true, and so the guys that, you'd see some guys at the team, and I'm not casting shade at all, this is just true, who like, you're like, I don't know, like, he's not like the best at this, or he's not the most athletic or whatever, then you deploy.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And it's a different story, like the, the level of expertise was just unbelievable, but by the time we were about to actually go to Afghanistan, it was like a year and a half of, of training with this platoon and our guys, and I felt like I was part of the gang now, I'd like earned my stripes.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  When did you think you won them over? Was there a moment, you did something where you gained their respect?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  You know what, for me, I think that I was, I was pretty, I was, actually, honestly, I told a lot of stories. My nickname was Shakespeare.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Just because, that's not even really a fitting name for a storyteller, it kinda is, but like, I just like, shut the fuck up Shakespeare. He's telling stories all the time in the platoon space. But I was, we used to do like, skits for the older guys, like, out of nowhere, they would go, "New guys, do skits."

• 10:57Speaker 01

  We'd be like in Walls, Mississippi, at like, the shooting course out in the backwoods, and like, all the new guys had like, 30 minutes to come up with skits about the older guys, and was like, sort of roasting them, but like, gently. And like, we would always go too far, and like, fully make fun of a senior guy, who'd get like, really fucking pissed, but the other guys would think it was funny. So, but, uh, it was just like, uh, you know, by the time, so skits, I got pretty good at doing skits. I just was like, kind of outspoken a little bit, like, uh, I was comfortable talking back to some of the older guys. Not even, I was, I was not a dick at all, but like, there was this one guy who just, he rode the like, "Shut the fuck up, new guy," like, too much.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Like, "Bro, I've been on your fucking team for a year and a half, I'm better at you, than you at a lot of things at this point. We're about to deploy together, like, at this point, I'd like to be viewed as your fucking teammate. I get it, I'm still a new guy, I get it, but like, stop acting like I'm a fucking idiot all the time." And so I'd like, call him a [BLEEP] to his face, you know, stuff like that. But ultimately, dude, I definitely was not nearly like, the best shot, far from it, like, the most tactically sound, far from it. But I definitely had like, an aptitude for aggression, I suppose I would call it. Like, I, I was good at, I was good at turning it on, you know?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  And I think the guys, I think that the older guys saw that, uh, in country, somebody who has an aptitude to be aggressive, someone who's ready to be aggressive, then not for play, but like, like, you're into it, you can be a valuable asset, you can be, you can be, you can be a liability too. So, uh, we find out, we're going to Afghanistan early in the workup cycle, so right when I got to a team, and then it was a little bit in flux. We were at one point slated to go do maybe some, some drug interdiction stuff in South America, and then we're like, "Shoot, that's kind of a bummer." And then we, again, were told, "Nope, you're definitely going to Afghanistan," like, maybe six weeks before we actually went, and it was like, it was really exciting.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  But I would say the first sort of eye-opening experience for me, uh, maybe the first time I realized the seriousness of the job, is there was this dude on my team, this like, jacked dude, he looked like a professional, like, WW wrestler, like, comically jacked guy. Couldn't have been more like, intimidating, he was on his fourth rotation, which puts him at like, pretty senior guy, he'd been to Iraq and Afghanistan, like, he's, he's a combat vet through and through, and he didn't speak much, like, he just kinda kept to himself, he'd always had a fucking jaw in his mouth, it was like, this big. He just stayed away from that guy. He was cool though, but he was like, really intense, even the older guys were a little bit intimidated of him.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And, uh, we, uh, we were out in Nevada, we were doing some, some training out there, and one of, a guy in another platoon was killed in training. And we had a, you know, safety stand down, we all went into the classroom, and it was actually a guy who was in my class, there was a rollover in Kentucky, and he was killed, his name was Jonathan Kaluus.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  What does a rollover mean?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Uh, he was in a Humvee, and he was standing outside of the Humvee, now we have mostly covered Humvees, but he was standing outside of it, and it flipped, he couldn't get down in time, and he, he was killed. And so, that in and of itself was like, really shocking, I mean, we're, we're in the, this classroom, in the middle of like, the, the middle of nowhere in Nevada, it's like a training place for SEAL teams, and our troop commander came in and was like, you know, there was an accident last night in Kentucky, our sister platoon, Jonathan Kaluus, he called him, that's not, that's not his name, was killed, and everyone's looking around, like, "Who's that?" And then it was like, "Oh shit, that's, that's Kaluus, he was killed." And the first thing I noticed is the older guys in the room, which comprised, let's say, of the, you know, 90 some odd SEALs that are in the room,

• 14:39Speaker 01

  that we, we were just about to start training today, we were all rushed in here, everyone's like, kitted out, like, ready to start the day. Everyone's solemn, but like, the 70% or so of the older guys, that hear this news, that someone's been like, horribly killed, this is like, a horrible death.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  And that no one was making light of it, by any stretch, but it was much more routine. There was like, a reaction to it that was like, "Man, that's, that's a real shame, that's a shame." And it was like, "Okay, now we need to move on and keep training, because we're going to Afghanistan in six weeks." It wasn't like, the way I just said it to you, but the feeling in the room was not catastrophic. It was not all stop, "What do we do?", whereas like, me and the other new guys were like, "Well, wait a minute, what are we doing, like, we can't go out and train."

• 15:21Speaker 00

  It just became very real to you guys, whereas they're probably more accustomed to losing life.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  One of the guys that, that we, was our, one of our senior guys, the platoon, told me that by the end of your career, you'll memorize the funeral procession for Navy SEALs. Because of the very specific order of things you do for a SEAL funeral, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. It is the case that I've been to several, and I only was in for the minimum amount of time. But anyways, we get out of this classroom in Nevada, and we're supposed to go out to our, these 50,000 ton up armored vehicles that we're gonna be driving around in Afghanistan with, and this terrain out in Nevada is meant to sort of mimic the terrain in Afghanistan. So it's like, really important training, and I knew that, but I was, I mentioned before being a little bit outspoken, I was sort of offended, I guess I would say,

• 16:11Speaker 01

  that we aren't at least taking today off, this is a multi-week-long block of training out here. Today's training is not crucial in and of itself, why aren't we stopping, confirming plans to go to the funeral, talk to his family? A lot of the guys in this classrooms were very close with him, I mean, I was, I was close with him because there was only so many of us in the class, but I know some of his best friends were in, were next to me, as we found out. And I remember being really annoyed, but like, who do I even direct this at? And so we leave the classroom, and we're walking over to one of these huge vehicles, they're all turned on, so the diesel engines are like, pumping, you can barely hear anything. And the dude I was telling you about, the jacked guy, he's, he was gonna be my, the passenger seat, I was gonna be driving one of these vehicles, he'd be my shotgun guy. He's like, "Your senior director," I forget what the position's called.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  And I was basically bitching to him, just in generalities, like, "What the fuck, dude, like, I can't believe John was killed, like, what are we doing here? Like, we should be taking today off, to like, make plans or whatever." And he goes, "Dude, shut the fuck up." He was like, "What do you think we're gonna go do?" He was like, "What do you, what do you think this deployment is about to be? What do you, what do you think's gonna happen in deployment? Like, somebody here is gonna die, if not more than one person, like, if we go to Afghanistan, which is what we're doing, you better believe that at least one person in this group is gonna get killed, at least." He's like, "So shut the fuck up," he's like, "This is your job." He's like, "Picking with me? I don't even wanna go." He's like, "Fuck this, like, I don't wanna go." And like, believe me, this dude has every combat mission you could imagine, but it was like, "Oh shit, like, this isn't just like, this cool thing you do."

• 17:42Speaker 01

  It's like, super hazardous, you know?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Why is he still in, you think, if he doesn't wanna go?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It's a weird thing, where I would say there's a, there's a steep drop-off, there's sorta, in my limited experience, and this is probably heresy to some people, it's sorta like, you have the guys that join, that view it as like, this incredible challenge. That, of course, there's some, there's some element of wanting to serve, you can't not wanna serve to some degree. But like, if I just wanted to serve, I could have just joined the military and just gone where they sent me. This is a really intentional choice, and so there's a group of guys that, that fall into the category of, you get through the training, you get to a team, and being a SEAL is, is so different than training to be a SEAL.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  There's overlap, I mean, we do lots of tactical stuff in training, and you learn how to do the job, but the, the application of the job is, it's, you don't spend every day just like, shooting your gun, there's so much administrative crap you get to do, there's, so, there's like, sexual harassment training, there's SABR, there's all these things that just come with the environment of, you're sort of in corporate military, if that makes sense. And then also, I would say that like, the risk to life and limb is extremely high, I mean, like, we were doing probably the most hazardous thing I can recall doing, I sometimes think about, like, "What the fuck are we doing? This is, this is ru- ru- routine training, guys, we're gonna go out, out into the bay in Virginia,

• 19:07Speaker 01

  we're gonna take a SWIC boat, which are these, these super high-powered boats, that, they go so fast, that there's no seats, there's just boards put up, that you get G-force against the board. And we're gonna pull up alongside an actual moving tanker ship that's at full steam, so a fucking huge ship. They know we're doing this, this is, they're not being surprised, and we're gonna, they're called hook and ladder, so if you look up, Special Operations Hook and Ladder. So that's a SWIC boat. These boats go so fast, like you hydroplane and you're going, it's crazy. But you need to match the speed of the boat.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  But when you look at a tanker from like the shore of a huge freighter ship, it looks like it's going pretty slow.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  When you're next to a freighter ship.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  It is moving so much faster than you realize and it creates all this weight.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And we would take this, this janky homemade, like a literal pool stick.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Now, this is high speed. We'd not do that. So we would take this pool, they're called hook and ladders, I believe it's called, like Navy SEAL hook and ladder. You have a pool stick that you attach a literal like coat hanger hook to, a big hook. And then inside of this tube that is the pool stick is a, it's a ladder that unspools. It's like spooled up inside of the stick. And so you literally, you extend this fucking huge, like 15, 20 foot long hook and ladder. And you throw it over the edge of the moving vessel while you're on this unstable platform. And you hook it, you hope it's solid, and then you yank the tubing, the actual like stick, if you will, off, exposing the ladder which unspools.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And now you have this metal ladder that is hooked to the side of the ship. And by the way, this is literally how you board a ship. You want to board a moving ship, this is how you do it. And then you start climbing up and you're like, you have a carabiner, you got your kit, it's sort of like that. But imagine moving really, really fast. And then as soon as you board this vessel, if you were to do this in real life, I've never done this in real life, although I know some guys that have done this in real life. You're on a ship where like you have no fucking clue what you're getting yourself into. And the first guy over the wall, you're on your own dude.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Good luck. So, but, one of the things that you train for is, well, what if you fall off the ladder as you're moving? And in training, unfortunately, there's not really a good way to simulate it. It's like you just gotta, if you fall, if you fall, you fall. And so this one kid on this really choppy day, and he lived, but we were going up these climbs, doing iterations of circling around and hooking, because a lot of it is just the teamwork of getting it hooked, pulling it off, stowing our gear, climbing up. It's not really even the clearance of the ship. But this one dude, he fell off the ladder because he got bounced from the wake. He fell and he fell between the swick boat and the tanker.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  The props on these ships are like, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 feet each, and they're spinning at full tilt. He survived because he's underwater, being pulled into the props, which was pretty far back towards the back of the ship. And he said he opened his eyes and he's seeing the props, he's being sucked into the props. And he pulled at the last second his emergency inflatable device, this little CO2 canister pumps it full real quick. And it jettisoned him out the side of the ship, like narrowly missing.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  The props at the end.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  See.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  But it's like when you're doing training, and I'm, this is obviously, this is very dramatic the way I'm telling, and not everything is like, sometimes you just do dry runs with no bullets being fired, and that's not dangerous. But it's like you do, you do stuff where the risk of death and injury is really high. Like we would do the, we would do these, we'd learn how to do ambushes at night in, out in like the, where were we? I think in Nevada or somewhere out there where, you know, you train during the day. You learn how to tactically set up who's going to be over here, who's going to be over here. And with an ambush, you basically set up an L ambush. If you're, if you're the enemy, and I come at you like this, you have every opportunity to like go in any other direction to avoid us. But if I come over here and I have someone at a lazy L over here and you're sitting in the middle,

• 23:12Speaker 01

  if you come this way, you get shot, you come this way, you get shot. If you go in either directions out, we have an angle on you. So it's, this is not, this is not a SEAL team specific thing. This is like wartime 101. But imagine trying to coordinate that in the dark on night vision in real time.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Like, how do you know where everybody else is? Because the beauty of an L ambush is that this guy over here and this guy over here on the outer ends of your L ambush, they have to be able to shoot pretty aggressively in this direction to cover all angles.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  But you can't give up your position without giving up to the enemy as well.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Where everybody, holy moly.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And so we would train how, there's ways to do it, you know, I honestly couldn't even remember exactly how we communicated. But we would shoot, not live rounds, they're called Serta rounds, which are like, I think they're like clay tipped rounds.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  So you could feel it if it hit you?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Oh, it'd kill you. But don't worry, it's technically not a round.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  I mean, what?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  So, but like, there's a guy who was killed out there, you know, just because he got shot in the head doing an L ambush. And so that's not to say they're like, oh my god, I can't believe this job is dangerous. This is so eye opening for me. But you have a group of people that when they join, it isn't that the hazards are suddenly apparent. They were always apparent. But it was masked behind this, you're doing it, you're gonna make it. Like so few people get this far in training, like you're so caught up in, I can't believe I've gotten this far in training.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  And the achievement, yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  So that when you actually start doing it full time, it's not a letdown. It's more like, what the fuck are we doing?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Which group did you fall in?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I was in the first group. I was in the like, so there's two groups, the group that is like, I don't know if I want to do this in general. Like, I don't know if this is for me. Not, I don't want to do this, but more like, this is not the same thing as what I set out to do. I just wanted to know if I could kind of do it, right? And then the other group, to be honest, is like the hardline dudes that are like, this is what I do.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  And there are some ungodly talented people that fall into this group. And those guys typically go to SEAL Team Six, and that is a whole other world. I was never.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Really?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  The level, it's like, it's JV to varsity doesn't even cover it.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  It's JV through the pros.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  This is like, you don't even know how to shoot a gun.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Professional level gun shooter.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  It's, it's.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  How many people are in that?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I don't even know. It's very small.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  We're talking about like 50?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a little more than that. And there's a lot of support people that it's very difficult to get over there as well. And they also, I think they work closely with other special operations as well. They are fucking unbelievable.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  A guy like that walks into a restaurant.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  I think you would know.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  But like, let's say, for example, he needs to clear out the restaurant. There's no.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  There, so like I.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Give me the level of lethal force that these.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  When people, when people find out that I was a SEAL, there is, there is an assumption that what you've described, I'd be capable of like, oh, like he can say, he can survive in any environment and he can kill anybody. No. I mean, there are things that I could do as a result of training, but like, put me up against like a decent MMA fighter and I'm probably getting my ass kicked. I'll fight until I die.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Like, I'm prepared to do things that are sort of from training, but like, I don't possess some special ability to protect myself or I can do things with a weapon, you know?

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Like, right now, can you take out all three of us?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Probably, I don't know, probably not.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Nah, he's been training pretty heavy lately. I don't know if you've seen it.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  But the team.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  But what would you do if you had to? All right, what would you do if you had to?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Well, the Team Six guys, they train in like every discipline of warfighting.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And it is, it's a professional sport. Like, I'm not saying that the, they call it the white side and the dark side. The white side is everything non-Team Six, and Team Six is the dark side. So on the white side.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  That's a military rule.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  The white side, like, there is definitely a very serious attitude about doing the job, no doubt.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Serious attitude, 100%. Pay the laws, pay their taxes.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  But like the, the dark side dude, like you meet these guys. And like, there's one guy that is in my mind, like, and I'll name drop him because he's, he's public now.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Fucking talking the movie.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  DJ Shipley, do you know who DJ Shipley is?

• 27:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so DJ Shipley is, he, he went over to Dev Brew, I want to say when he was like, Dev Brew is SEAL Team Six, it's called Development Group is the name. I think he joins SEAL Team Six at like the youngest age anyone ever has. And so the gist is like, you first have to go to the white side and do a certain number of rotations before you're even eligible to maybe try out for Team Six. And so he basically went over there at the start of the war on terror. He's like at Team Six.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And so this dude is like, one of the most physically gifted people. Like, he's just, he probably couldn't have been a professional athlete. Like, he's that level of physically gifted, just good at everything. And really, he was in that camp of like, this is my profession. I never served with them. I'm sort of inferring a lot of this stuff from other people who've worked with them. And I know him now, but post military. But like, this guy has been on like all the missions. He's done all the stuff. And he knows everybody who's been on all the missions. And he looks like a GI Joe. I mean, like, I remember I was at Starbucks in Virginia and like, team guys come into Starbucks all the time. And like, he walked in and I, I know who he is just by reputation when he was still active. But immediately you're like, you're looking at him, like, there's something different about that person over there.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  He's also like completely covered in tattoos and just looks super intense. But like DJ. Comparing him to like a white side team guy, it isn't that one is better than the other. It's just that this guy has devoted his entire essence to being an operator. And he's doing it around other people that have dedicated themselves at a level that's just not comparable. And they, their level of training is insane. Like these dudes, again, this is me, I don't even know, I've never even been in the building. So I'm, this is, I am very hearsayish right now, but like, I believe even now, they have a pager system still, where like you're periodically put on like, I think it's called like notice or something, where you literally have a pager that if you get paged, stop what you're doing, time to go.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And like they act, but unlike the white side where we would periodically get like spun up for something and we wouldn't do anything, we'd like come in the team and they're like, what are we gonna do? And they're like, ah, nothing, we're not gonna go. These guys, it's like they're on a plane that night. And a lot of times, like, they can't even necessarily tell anybody where they're going.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Do they, do they even know?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Is there a part of them where it's like, hey, you're on a basis?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  I'm sure they, I'm sure they're brought into the fold, but this is like, yeah, so just an extremely high level. And these guys, if you want to talk about who could like handle themselves in all environments, a SEAL Team Six guy is that guy.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Drop him in the woods, he can set up shelter, food, he'll find a way to make a weapon.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Like out of a movie type of survivalist.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  He's making it back home.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So for me though, when I finally go to Afghanistan, I was like so pumped that I got to go, when I got the nod that you're gonna go to Afghanistan. And I actually, I did sort of fantasize a little bit about dying in combat, like before I left, which is, it sounds really dark, but.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  How?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Like, uh, how does it sound dark or how did?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  No, like, how did you fantasize doing it?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  I, I thought that being a Navy SEAL was the end all be all, like, so I, I.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Kick in Bin Laden's door, his wives fuck you to death.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like the best outcome I could have, dude.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  As you guys already know, we're back in the lab this fall, getting this new hour ready. Houston, we're here this weekend, show's sold out, thank you guys so much. West Nyack next weekend, show's sold out, thank you guys so much. Helium in Indianapolis, Indiana, October 23rd and 24th, Star Dome. In Birmingham, Alabama, November 6th and 7th. Cleveland, Ohio, November 13th, 14th. Raleigh, North Carolina, December 4th and 5th. Columbus, Ohio, December 11th and 12th. Those are all these shows for the fall through the end of the year. TheAndrewScholes.com for tickets, if there are any tickets left there, go grab them. Let's get back to the show.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  A SER is something that loads of people in the military do. It stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. And it's, there's different levels of training, but within the military, if you're a unit, if you're attached to a unit that has the potential to be effectively captured by the enemy, you are trained in advance by going to SER school. And there's a bunch of different SER schools all over the country. There's one in Washington, there's one in San Diego. And it's basically like how to survive captivity, like the shitty parts of captivity. So we went through SER training proper. At the end, the last block of training, when you are about to become a SEAL, you go through actual SER school. And in virtue of being a SEAL, you go through like the highest level of SER school, because it's like you're, you're gonna be behind enemy lines, you have to know what to do.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And believe it or not, there's, there are tactics and strategies to how to basically look like a complete pussy and make people think that you're kind of worthless and you're not even worth interrogating. And it's remarkably effective, not that I've had it happen in real life.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Could you share?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I don't think I can, actually.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  But you play possum a little bit.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit, but they put you in these scenarios where it's like, you know, simulating torture. And like one of them includes, they put you in a closet.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Things in your butt, right?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, things in your butt. Actually dude, they give you, to humiliate you, you have to do a prostate exam, like you're right at the start, and it's to humiliate you.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Really?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Like in front of your, your brethren, that's one of the things during the.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Was there a guy that like, it just went in too easy? And you're like, it was just, you're like, that thing's deep.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Come on dude. Come on bro.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  It's also someone's job, which is crazy. That like, it's like, okay, you're the guy that does the exams.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  But did one of your boys moan? Like one of my.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  There were dudes fucking around. This is guys being like, come on, do it again, do it again. But they put us in these closets in this dark like, probably inside like a hangar or something, so it's like pitch black. And they put us in these closets, like a broom closet, but it was too short to stand up all the way.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  It's like, all the, all the.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Claustrophobia.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  You're sort of like trapped, but you can breathe, you're good, and they gave you a bucket, and that's like your bathroom too. And we were in there, I, I lost track of time, I've heard as long as 10 hours, 20 hours, but like you're, you're in there, but the whole time, the whole time, you are listening to, it's called Boots, Boots, Boots. This is worth listening to, it's so fucked up. It's a poem, and it's definitely called Boots, Boots, Boots. And if you look up Boots, Boots, Boots SER school, somebody put a YouTube video together that plays this song, if you will, Rudyard Kipling, that's the poet, Rudyard Kipling, it's Boots, Boots, Boots.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  How the leper got his spots.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Listen to this. You go, it gets more and more intense. And so it just goes in this loop, and they play it at as loud as it would go.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  But is it, is it meant to be like all?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  I don't know what this is.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  But it was like that loop on repeat, as loud as it could, interspersed with a, a little girl crying. And you're like, okay, this is sort of like on the nose of all, you're like torturing us. You're in this little room, it's pitch black, you're like, you're, by this point, you gotta pee and shit in this bucket. And like, you're periodically being brought out to have your butthole examined. And like that, that's, that's what you do for like 10, 20, 30 hours, not 30, it's like 10, 20 hours. Um, anyway, so I'm giving you a sense of how like intense SER school can be, which is, that's not even a SEAL pro, that's not even a SEAL school, that's like a military.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  What are you wearing when you're in the closet?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I think you had like, uh, beat up BDUs on, they give you like a cami or whatever. Like one of the, another one they had you do is you just had to like sit on a hardwood floor, but you couldn't, but you couldn't sit with your hands back, you had to sort of sit on, on the bone of your butt.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  But for like 10 hours, and then in the middle of the room is a, is a single bucket, and there's like 30 of us. And you sat there for like 10 hours, you gotta pee or poop, you gotta do it in front of the whole group. And then you go back to your, sitting on the bone of your butt, and you just sit there. So a lot, a lot of SER schools just being physically uncomfortable. I say all this because then you get to a team and it's like, hey, we gotta be refreshed on SER school. Uh, you can just do the digital version, and so like you'd hop on line, and you'd get your little avatar, and you'd march him around into the torture chambers. But, uh, you know, I don't even know how I got on topic of that though.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Well, you, you go to Afghanistan, you're excited to be there.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Excited to be there, and.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  And you almost die.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  I did, I almost died, I did, yeah. So we're finally getting to the opening question. Uh, yeah, so we get to Afghanistan and I, and I had fantasized about dying, you know, before, a little bit, I even told my wife, I was like, dude, honestly, if I die over there, that wouldn't be so bad, like that's pretty fucking bad.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  What did she say to that?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  She was like just pissed, like really, thanks, thanks for the send off there, dude.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Do you have kids at that point?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  No, we didn't, we didn't. We've been married for, for several years though. Um, but, uh, so I get to Afghanistan and like even just the, the arrival in Afghanistan was, it was jarring, you know, like, anytime you expect, like in my, this, I had one combat tour of my whole life, I'm sure other guys that have done like 50 have a very different experience, but with my singular deployment, if you expected things to happen, it usually didn't. If you didn't expect things to happen, if you're like, oh, there's nothing there, it's gonna be a dry hole, as they call it, invariably you're gonna get shot at, you know, it's, that's sort of how it went. And honestly, over the course of our deployment, there was not like a cascade of gunfights constantly, but it happened.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  But the thing that was crazy is so quickly you adjust to that environment. It's, it's sort of, I don't know how to say it, it's, it's almost disturbing how easy it is to, within a matter of weeks, it was, I was at peace in Afghanistan, like utterly at peace. I practically blacked out everything going on at home, not that there was anything going, I was married and, you know, sorry to my wife, but like I just, my mind was fully focused on Afghanistan. I mean, we, if you think about it, we were living in this base that in theory could be overrun with a suicide attack at any moment. It, it, other bases, while we were there, that happened, people were like blown up and

• 37:33Speaker 01

  killed, it happened, that's, you're in a war zone, right? So we had like this thing that flew over the top of our base called a P TIDS blimp, that's really, its whole purpose was to look for suicide bombers and warn us before a fucking vehicle came up, blew up a HESCO, and then a bunch of fighters rolled in here and killed us all. And so at night, you'd go to bed knowing that you might literally have to just wake up and grab your gun, you have like seven guns next to your bedside, rockets, you name it, and just run out and start shooting. Like that's, that's the environment you're in. But because that's where you live, your brain just simplifies it and makes it, it could, it's, I have not slept better in my entire life than I did in Afghanistan. And it's no, ask, ask most people who have gone and spent any time in a war zone, it's

• 38:18Speaker 01

  not, you can't function unless you're able to sort of enter a primal state. And that primal state is effectively it's us versus them. It couldn't be more simple.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  It is us versus fucking everybody else. And like, we would go on these operations and just seeing your teammates, even now, it gives me goosebumps. Like going into buildings in real time. Like when you're clearing a house for real, like live rounds and you're watching your teammates, like masterfully moving through the house. And a lot of times, nothing happened, but you just feel fucking invincible. Like nothing can touch us.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Why?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  The training is much better for the, even the white side teams, I've sort of degraded them relative to dev group. But make no mistake, like special operations is special operations. Like the training is immaculate, our gear is exceptional. We train as a unit a lot. So like we would, when you clear a building, a lot of, a lot of the clearance, and this is true at every level, as far as I've heard and have seen, a lot of clearing any structure, being inside of any structure where there's potential bad guys. It's watching other people and reading their body language because you don't have time to like, "Hey Andrew, I'm gonna go left, you go right." Nope, it's little taps, it's flashes of your laser, which you can only see on infrared. It's, it's literally getting to know your team so well and doing so many runs with them

• 39:40Speaker 01

  that you know what they're gonna do before they do it. And also everyone's trained on how to do everybody else's job in the train, so to speak. So you enter a house, which is fluid and there's, you have no idea what's gonna be in this building. You, you don't know if there's gonna be obstructions, like shooters, you know, it doesn't matter, but you're trained for all of it. And so you go in in silence and everyone just peels off and does all the things they're trained to do. Seeing it in real life and being a part of that, it's, it's like an adrenaline rush that's hard to match. And then when you get shot at, again, it hasn't happened an enormous amount, but it did enough. Seeing people react to it and like being able to respond to a threat and knowing that you're fucking winning is just, it's incredible. It's like, uh, you feel like a Navy SEAL. Hey, I guess that's the way it is.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  What's the first reaction when you hear a bullet whiz by? Do you remember your first?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  I remember the first time we got shot at, but only because it was sort of comical. Like they were shooting at us from like a mile away. So like level of, level of effectiveness, zero. We can't even see you, but someone's shooting at us because we're up on this fucking ridge and some poor kids by firing his AK-47 at us from like a mile away. So like utterly ineffective, we'll never know who shot us, but shot at us. But we, you sort of follow the protocol of like what to do, which is like you take cover and you figure out where it's coming from. And okay, now that we're being engaged, what can we do? Because now we have air assets that we can call in. We have all these things that open up to us because now we're in a tick. Troops in contact, like now the rules of engagement are sort of out the door because we're defending ourselves. But honestly, the only other time that I would say I really remember the feeling is like early on,

• 41:14Speaker 01

  we would go into this village and this is where I nearly died. It's called Zarganshar. And it's like, it was right across the street from where we were actually based. So our HESCO barrier base was on one side of Route Utah. And you get a picture, it's like desolate wasteland in all directions, maybe a couple of mud huts here and there. But it's like a really wide open space where our base was situated and we're on one side of the road. And Kabul is the direction the road is going. It's north of us like an hour. And that's like the one city in, in Afghanistan that gets bombed constantly. And then on the other side of the road from our base is Zarganshar. And it's like the one pretty heavily populated, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's a town, I guess I would call it. It's not quite a city, but it's dense.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  You know, it's mud huts, but it's multi-story mud huts. They're right on top of each other. It's like, you would look at it and you wouldn't think, oh, that's a little village. You'd think like, that's a small city. And Zarganshar had been fighting with whoever was at the base we were at for years. And the base we were at was set up by special operations, either ODAs, which is Green Berets, or like the Polish Grom route, that is the Grom, they're special forces, SEAL teams. Like it's been a rotation of very high caliber warfighters that have been sitting here. And in virtue of being right across the street from you, and we know you staged suicide bombers and there's gun caches over there, there was a steady stream of operators like going in there and stirring shit up with the fighters in there.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  And so now what you have is this group of people who have survived, or it's their lineage, who are hard as fuck, don't give a fuck about getting in a gunfight with you. There's tunnels that like run out from the city, that they just like escape into the tunnels, which by the way, sometimes they'll get trapped in those tunnels and they'd get them sealed off. And then it's like drop a grenade down there. It's like horrible things are happening to these people, but they're totally battle hardened. And so every time, just about, not every time, most times if you went into Zarganshar, it was the one place where it was like, they were okay, they being the combatants you'd run into. They were okay showing you that they were armed and they were ready to fight with you.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  And I say that because anywhere else we went, if you brandish a gun and heaven forbid you shoot at us, we have immediately, I told you, rules of engagement are gone. We have targeting, targeting assets that can immediately find you. We have people all over the place. If you try to shoot at us,

• 43:42Speaker 00

  It's over.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  You're fucking dead.

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  And the thing is, is like, there was this one guy who shot at us one time and I'm in the, the up armored vehicle that has a 50 caliber machine gun on it. And it's, it's, it's a remote controlled 50 caliber machine gun. And it jams all the fucking times. It's called the Crow's system. It was sort of a mess, but you have a video game screen that's like every type of camera that's coming off the, this gun. And this guy like took like three pot shots at us. And it's like, I have a tracking device on the camera. I can lock it on to him and just let it aim at him and just hold the trigger and just,

• 44:18Speaker 00

  He'd sensor it?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  It would only fire if it saw him.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  How does it know it's him?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  You, you basically, it's a little bit, you could potentially shoot some other people, but there's only one. Basically, you lock it on to him, but he was running

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  To get away after he shot at us. And it's just like you lock it on to him, you pull the trigger back.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Hand over.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he, I, I think he probably was killed, but he, he managed to run behind a house. But it's like a 50 caliber round could like blow you apart. And this is just belt fed 50 caliber.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  What does a 50 caliber look like?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  It's like a cigar, bigger than a cigar.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's big. This is totally probably not the case, but I've heard that like even a 50 cal going, even if it doesn't hit you, if it went near you, you could have like impact injuries from the round. That's, that's probably some bullshit. But 50 cal is like closer to a very small rocket.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Shit.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  But it's just like, so as a result, if you're gonna take a shot at NATO, especially by the way, we found out from interacting with a lot of the folks that we would get in these gunfights with, because you'd finish, you'd finish prosecuting the target. Invariably, there'd be people on target that we'd wrap up, we'd hand over to the police, whatever. And you'd talk to them and they knew you were special operations because you look different, even at a distance. We drive different vehicles, we have different weapons, we literally physically look different, we, we move differently. And so if you're gonna brandish a weapon in front of any special operations, that is a fucking bold move. Because you, you basically said, go ahead, try it. So that's the place that Zarganshar was.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Dudes openly walking up and down the street with AK-47s, which I gotta be honest, I give an enormous amount of respect to the people. Not respect for the things that they did, but the idea that, that you could do that, that's, it was like our adversary in that village was formidable, at least from a mental perspective. That was scary. I'll just say it for what it is. I'm kitted up to the net now, I'm dialed in by this point.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  You know, I'm fully protected. We had like 10 air, air assets overhead and this is a dude with an AK-47.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  And sandals probably.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he's ready to jump into his tunnel and face death in the tunnels if he has to. But it's like, so, but the, one of the times we got shot at in, in Zarganshar, I was, at the time, because again, because of the rules of engagement, the first rounds that are shot at you are the most hazardous because you're, you're not engaging anyone, you're waiting to get shot at. And so the first round typically, and also you have to understand at the time, the, the other side was aware of these rules of engagement. So they'd take their first shot really carefully because it's usually the first one they're gonna get. And so the first rounds are sort of the stressful ones. And then you just sort of do your training and you, you fight, you, you know, you fight.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  But I was walking through this little intersection and there was a little bell tower or something. I wouldn't even call it that, it was a tower in Zarganshar. And there was a shooter up there that we didn't see and he took shots, I believe at me, or at least the people I was with. And you know, the sound of the round happens after the impact. And so I saw rounds, I saw what looked like rocks skittering around like right next to me. And I was like, that's weird. And then it's like snap, ooh. And then it was like immediate adrenaline dump where I actually felt like I had just sprinted a race. I was like suddenly out of breath, dove behind cover and, and you know, it was just, it is what it is. But it was on one of the days we're in Zarganshar, um, at the end of deployment. This is April 19th, 2014. I, uh,

• 47:56Speaker 01

  By this point, our platoon was very battle-tested for this deployment, you know, especially Zarganchar was almost, it was the place you went knowing what you're getting yourself into. Other places you go, it was a lot of nothing, but Zarganchar felt like a place you went and pretty good chance somebody was gonna engage with you, especially by the spring, which was the fighting season. So there's more fighters that are in the town. And the reason we would even go into Zarganchar beyond presence patrols was there were, like, that was a staging spot for suicide bombers to go to Kabul. And there was known weapon caches over there. And so one of the things we were somewhat responsible for was stemming the tide of those things making it up to Kabul.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  So there was like a reason to go in there. But we went in there and we ended up walking in on one side of this village in broad daylight, because there also were rules that said you couldn't operate at night. It was a whole ethical thing. So it's like broad daylight and it's like maybe 20 some odd SEALs, maybe like even less, 10 or 15 SEALs, and then all partner force, so Afghans, who, you know, God love them, but they were utterly useless from a tactical perspective. It was like, the skill level was even lower than amateur to professional. But they were with us. And we start making our infill into this village and we get into this alleyway that dumped out into a courtyard where there were these, I think, one or two buildings that had two-story, you know, windows to look down on the courtyard.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  And at the same time, we began hearing chatter on the radios that were, you could listen to these radios, they were open source radios. And so we could hear chatter of the combatants in the city and, or in Zarganchar. When we had rolled up and our vehicles got out and began the infill on foot, we had seen women and children running out of the village, which is, you know, a clear sign that there are fighters that are now waiting for you. And so we know that, you know, there's definitely fighters here. We hear the chatter and we start to pick up that they're up in those windows, in the second floor there. They're talking about things that suggest they can see us making our movement right now. And our team lead, who was one of the most brilliant dudes I met in the teams, he immediately stopped

• 50:05Speaker 01

  us. He pulled us back like maybe 20 or 30 yards. And we sort of ducked down in this little like ravine that was next to this bridge that gave us a little bit of cover from these buildings. And the reason he did that is he's like, our vehicles were too far back and we couldn't really drive them up to then climb in and take the vehicles. So if we wanted to find another way in, we really had to do it on foot. There wasn't another way in to speak of. It was sort of go forward into the courtyard or retreat all the way back to our vehicles, but it was all exposed. And if these guys start shooting at us, like they have a really open shot at us if we retreat. And so we're sort of pinned down here, and I should have said this before, the guys in the windows were very aware of, don't shoot until you have a great shot. It was like very, they're not just gonna start spraying.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Don't waste it.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  They know. They got one really good shot at us. And it's like, they're saying their prayers and stuff on the radio. Like, these are men preparing to die. And they're talking about how they're gonna go about trying to take out at least one of us. And I remember the predicament was, it felt like we had really put ourselves in a bad way. They're really, you couldn't call in an airstrike. One, you'd be blowing up people that shouldn't be blown up to begin with. But it was like, there's really not much you can do. You could wait indefinitely, but to be honest, it's not really an option, because one of the things that happens if you stay out too long in an area is more fighters begin showing up. You run the risk of being overrun. There's, so it's just, it was a really bad situation. And for maybe like 30 minutes or so, we just hunkered down in this ravine and it was weirdly

• 51:36Speaker 01

  like calm. No one's like, we're not hugging the wall, you know, oh God, don't let them see me. They see us. They're talking about us. And our team lead, he comes around and just tells us all like, hey, take a piss, like get, get ready. You know, our best move here is just to go forward, like go through the alleyway. We're gonna just prosecute target. We're gonna continue the mission. You know, we're Navy SEALs. We're here to do this. Like, be ready. Be ready for whatever happens. And I remember like taking a piss in this ravine and wondering if it was the last piss I was ever gonna take, you know? But it wasn't like, oh my God. It was like, damn, like this is, this is an unfortunate position we're in here. So we, we eventually begin making our movement through this alleyway. We leave

• 52:18Speaker 01

  the cover of this ravine. You know, the guy is out in the vehicles, you know, several hundred yards back. They're sort of covering our infill, but they can't do much. It's sort of on us. And there were body cameras rolling. So I've seen the footage. Make sure we have a platoon video from that deployment. This is a big part of the video. But it's like eerie. I've seen, it's like, we're all walking in and it looks like nothing's happening. It's like, it's daytime, like there's nobody out and there's one row of guys on one side, close to the wall, another guys on the other side of the courtyard. And we're like, we're alternating a onesie, twosie, and we're walking straight through. And when we got most of the way through the courtyard, machine guns opened up on us and, which was expected.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  And it was just madness for like a few seconds. It was just, it was hard to tell who was shooting at us from where. Granted, we all were really expecting this to happen. So it wasn't really like shock and awe. It was more like, oh my God, it's really happening. I usually preface this by saying, I'm not trying to be, to be crass, but the, the people who were hit immediately were our dog and two Afghan partner force. And I think it was just sort of, that was just the way the bullets landed. And that ended up probably saving other people's lives. None of those people died. I believe the Afghans survived. The dog did survive. But if we're gonna survive what amounts to an ambush at this point, like the only people that are getting us out of here are gonna be the SEALs, just based on

• 53:43Speaker 01

  skill alone. This requires like fighting your way out of this area and securing the area and then effectively getting out without getting fucking leveled in the process. And so the team guys, the SEALs, myself included, just jumped into action. You know, we began sort of clearing the nearby buildings, because as soon as you can clear a building, you can take the roof.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  High ground.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so like me and one guy, we went in one building and it's like, the process of clearing a building is normally you go in with at least one other person. You're doing solo building entries.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Block.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  And you know there are fighters here. You're just going in, like you just.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Every single room, you're kicking in a door.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  You're running. You're not even checking all the rooms. You're just running to get to the high ground. Cause at this point, it's like, we don't know how many fighters there are. We don't know if other guys are down.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Are you worried somebody's gonna come back up the building you're in and then take you out?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  The first move is like, get suppressive fire. Like figure out who's shooting at us and start shooting back.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  So that they stop and then you guys can start taking.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  And so like, we ran up to this rooftop and there'd be like, me and my buddy, we like took, took a knee next to this low wall that looked down another alleyway that was sort of like an ambush. It would have been a good spot to set an ambush on us. And there's a dude there and we start shooting at him. He's shooting at us. And suddenly we're pinned down on the roof and like, there's a video of him looking at me laughing hysterically as like rounds are hitting. He was a fucking psychopath.

• 55:03Speaker 00

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• 58:22Speaker 01

  Who'd you go with?

• 58:23Speaker 00

  The Eagles.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Same for that.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Very, very, listen, I'm not about to let my love of the Jets or Giants.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, passionate love.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  That passionate love that I really do not have care about. Whoever's worse, I root for every single year. But I will say, the undefeated streak meant more to me. Uh, but it got me thinking about like this year's Super Bowl halftime show.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  They gotta go, they're going white woman, I think.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  White woman. Was Kendrick last year?

• 58:56Mark Gagnon?

  Yes. No, no, no. Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Bad Bunny.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. They gotta go white. I don't know if they go white boy, but I think they'll go girl. Like Adele-esque would be like a crossover.

• 59:08Mark Gagnon?

  Thinking it gotta be Taylor.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  I just don't know if they can afford that.

• 59:13Mark Gagnon?

  I don't think so.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  They don't get paid. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. It's like priceless.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  You think they're going Taylor?

• 59:20Mark Gagnon?

  I think they have to. Cause it should have been her past couple of years, really. The biggest fucking tour.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  So you think white, if you were to put money?

• 59:30Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, cuz we got it for.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  You got a nice run.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a great run.

• 59:34Mark Gagnon?

  You guys had a good run.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Uh, I think it's probably gonna be white.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  I don't think Taylor. I think there's too much like, she just got married.

• 59:44Mark Gagnon?

  Like, she gotta keep it going. What's the next big thing?

• 59:47Speaker 00

  I mean, that is the biggest thing.

• 59:49Mark Gagnon?

  It's either that or a baby.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  The market is very split on this.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Kelsey has, like, the percentages are all over the place. Twenty percent Post Malone.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  I could see, I could see that.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Nineteen percent Morgan Wallen.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  That's, okay.

• 1:00:04Mark Gagnon?

  So everybody thinking white.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Twenty-four percent Lady Gaga. Twenty-seven percent L Langley. Ella Langley.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Oh, who's that? That's the one.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Choosing Texas, I can tell by the way he's just stumbling around the room.

• 1:00:20Mark Gagnon?

  I heard it, but I, that person's that big?

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  The song is the biggest song of the year.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  No, no, it's the biggest song in history. I think it's been in history. I think it's been number one longer than any other song in history. Look it up.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Have you heard of Thriller before?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Look it up right now.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  It hasn't been that long.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Look it up right now.

• 1:00:38Mark Gagnon?

  And if it is, that's bots. That's bullshit. It does, I haven't even, barely heard of this song. There's no way.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  If we play it right now, you would know it immediately.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  It's tied right now with All I Want for Christmas Is You.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Wow. For the longest run at number one, right?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  Two weeks.

• 1:00:55Mark Gagnon?

  Bots.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Two weeks.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  How much?

• 1:00:56Mark Gagnon?

  Bots.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Twenty-two weeks.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Twenty-two weeks. Bots maybe.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  And you haven't heard it once. It's shocking.

• 1:01:01Mark Gagnon?

  I know.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  It's a banger.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Oh, it's such a banger. You would love it.

• 1:01:04Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  But she's not even the number one. At forty-three percent, Luke Combs.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Luke Combs? This is what I'm saying. Like, I think that the NFL feels like they gotta overcorrect.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  Sixty-four percent Justin Bieber.

• 1:01:17Mark Gagnon?

  It's not overcorrect. It's just balancing.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  No, I mean, overcorrect what to white now.

• 1:01:22Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, it's not a correction, cuz that means they did something wrong previously.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, that's a good one. So you know what I'm saying?

• 1:01:28Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, I know what you're saying.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, correct is the wrong word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They got, yeah.

• 1:01:32Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, motherfucker.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  That's fair, that's fair. Uh, good point, good point. But, uh.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Sixty-six percent Miley Cyrus.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  She, she actually has, she actually has sufficient hits to do it.

• 1:01:47Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  She has sufficient, Justin? Does it go higher?

• 1:01:53Mark Gagnon?

  But goes higher.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  Oh, shit.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  There's one more at the top. Do you wanna guess?

• 1:01:58Mark Gagnon?

  Beyonce.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Jay-Z. That's the number one person.

• 1:02:03Mark Gagnon?

  So I was thinking that. He's on a run. There's rumors that he's dropping an album.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  But he can't hire himself.

• 1:02:09Mark Gagnon?

  Why not? The fuck?

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Nah, you can't hire yourself.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:02:13Mark Gagnon?

  You can't hire yourself, man. Can't hire yourself. There's gonna be too much scrutiny.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  So?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  How much, how much longer does he have as like the NFL's halftime guy?

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Lowkey?

• 1:02:23Mark Gagnon?

  He's doing the best job.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  But he's doing the venues that would prepare him for a halftime show.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  Doing baseball stadiums and shit, like he's filling the space.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  How hard is that job? Couldn't anyone do that?

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Be like the halftime person? It's like, yeah, this guy is the biggest person we should pick.

• 1:02:39Mark Gagnon?

  Yo, yo, yo. Shut up.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Is it hard to be like?

• 1:02:42Mark Gagnon?

  Nah, it is hard.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Who's the biggest person?

• 1:02:44Mark Gagnon?

  Yo, Jay-Z is interesting. And now they've had the best halftime show in, the best halftime show run in history.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Let me say this right now.

• 1:02:52Mark Gagnon?

  Every single one does better than the last. Come on.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  If, if Jay-Z wasn't the, the fucking boss of who does the halftime show? The right answer is probably Jay-Z, cuz you're gonna get free Beyonce with that.

• 1:03:08Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  You can't not like.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  And free Rihanna, probably. I mean, it basically would just be, it would basically just be the Yankee show.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  It's the most value. You're gonna get the most, and maybe if he could pull it off, free Eminem.

• 1:03:24Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, M did come out too, yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  So there is a world where they would be crazy to not do that show, cuz nobody, nobody on the planet, especially if M comes out, nobody on the planet would be upset at that halftime show afterwards.

• 1:03:39Mark Gagnon?

  It hurts me to say this. NFL's been trying to go more global, and Jay-Z's not as global.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  He is not. He is not.

• 1:03:49Mark Gagnon?

  Taylor or Justin.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  He is not, but he has enough global hits where he could do it.

• 1:03:55Mark Gagnon?

  He could do it, yeah.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  But if they wanna go with the moment, you get Ella to just do Choosing Texas and it goes crazy.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she got one song.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  No, be her. Be her.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  I wanna be her so bad, it hurts so bad. That's a banger. But I'm just saying, it's a little tough. It's a little tough, though. You know, you need others. I think she's got a feature. I think you gotta bring out Jay-Z and then he does a song with Ella Langley. Now we're talking.

• 1:04:22Mark Gagnon?

  Or maybe a tribute to the big titty bitch that just died.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. Dolly Parton.

• 1:04:26Mark Gagnon?

  Have a bunch of people do covers of her.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Morgan Wallen.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Morgan Wallen probably got a song with Ella, then Ella goes choosing Texas, and then, then they do a Dolly Parton tribute as well.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Miley Cyrus as Dolly Parton tribute. Yeah, take that, Jay-Z.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Yo, Jay-Z, this is the easiest job in the world. That's my boy.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  It's the easiest job in the world, bro.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Come on. We just did it for you. All right, let's get back to the show.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  But it was just like this, just totally chaotic, but at the same time, highly coordinated, several hours of not constant fighting. There was like the initial volley and our initial response, and then it was like quiet. But now, like, we had begun taking footholds. We, as in the SEALs, had broken up into what we call fire teams, which are just little, little groups of SEALs. And we had sort of begun taking footholds. We'd spread out, and there really wasn't good command and control. There wasn't good, there wasn't a, a central person who was really aware of exactly where everybody was. Now, there is someone who was in charge of that, but it was so fluid, and there were constantly little skirmishes popping up that it was like, it was nonsense to try to track every little detail. And so it's like, we're all sort of spaced out. It's nighttime.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  You know, we're on night vision by this point. And then after like six hours of just the skirmish fighting throughout the city, it, it sort of was like almost anticlimactic. It was like, suddenly the fighters are just now gone. And we're all spaced out across the city. And, and it was, if you, the only time you would have this experience probably is in like a wartime environment, but like, you're in a place that's normally like heavily populated, and it's like a ghost town. And it, it's just weird. Like, it's nighttime, and it's like there isn't a soul anywhere. And it's just this bizarre thing, and, and the feeling amongst us on the radio is like, we sort of just got our asses kicked, you know, in a way, like.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Did you guys feel like you were outmatched in that?

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  We did, and I think that it wasn't even that we were outgunned. It was more like they clearly had seen us, set up on us, took some really good shots, and then the fighting, I think we only ended up shooting maybe one of the guys, or maybe a couple of the guys that were actually actively engaging us. But they mostly, I think, escaped via the tunnel system. And so when I say that the, the city went quiet, it was like they had escaped. It was gone. There was a couple of guys down, but that was about it. And so we now, this is late at night, uh, we, as in the whole group of guys, you know, we have air assets over, like at this point, like, there are probably like seven air assets flying overhead. We have eight tens, we have fucking, we have a, we have everything you could imagine overhead. And also, when there's a big enough, uh, contact,

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  or when there's a big enough tick, as they call it, a troops in contact, other operations by NATO in country wind down. Because basically, as something escalates and gets bigger and bigger, there's the opportunity that more people will have to be sent to, to backfill, to help, to just track it. And so by this point in the night, according to some of my buddies who are also SEALs, they were like watching the live feeds from some of the cameras overhead at their respective bases, cuz there was no operations that night. Everything had been shut down, cuz of us. They're like, yeah, you guys are getting fucked up in Zarganchar, so we're all just like watching your operation.

• 1:07:35Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And, uh, at some point, as we're getting ready, we, as in the guys on the ground, were getting ready to, to leave, uh, one of the air assets overhead, I think it was a drone being flown by a guy in Las Vegas. He called out that, that he saw what he believed were ma'ams, so military aged men, or people at a minimum crouched in this field that was in the direction we likely would be ex-filling. So we would pass by these guys on the way out. And remember, we're in up armored vehicles, you know, the, small arms fire is not gonna do much, but like an RPG or something like that theoretically could. So there's like, there's risk there to us on our ex-fill, and it just so happened that when this, this information came across the line.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  My fire team, I'm not in charge. I was the most junior guy within the fire team, but the one I was a part of, we were physically closest to where these ma'ams presumably were. And you gotta remember that this is after effectively six hours of pretty intense urban combat. This is like, we're warmed up. I hate to say it that way, but we've been like, we're warmed up. We sort of felt like the night has been lost and the idea that we have dudes setting up to take us out right now, it was, it just made us all like, fuck these guys. Let's go figure out, for, we have to go, they could be kids. That's the other thing. Kids could have run back in and been hiding, waiting for us to leave, right? But we're like, let's go see if these are some of

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  the dudes that have been shooting at us because we're in an engagement. We're in a tick right now. Like, we can be offensive. We've been shot at. Like, we don't have to wait to be shot. We can shoot you if you have a gun. So, uh, we decide that we're gonna sneak our way over and we're gonna look over this wall that was apparently at the end of this T intersection. We could look over this wall and we could look out onto this field. We would see this cluster of men, whoever they are, and we could make a call about what we're gonna do. And so, my buddies who watched this live via the live feeds, they were watching it and they were, they would later tell me, they were like, "I didn't understand what you guys were doing." Like, it made no fucking sense what you guys were doing because he was watching the feed and what we were being told on the

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  ground was not exactly what was happening in real life. So, we sneak our way down this T intersection. It was like, it was a sewage runoff, like walking in like a half a foot of sewage, walking our way like quietly as we can. It's, it's late, we're on night vision. And we get to the end of this intersection where there's this, this wall right in front of us that has openings on either side. And once you go out those openings, there's this huge field, sort of straight up ahead of the T, right above the T, there's this big field. And we were operating on the idea that there would be ma'ams on the other side of this field. So, we could get to that wall that's like six, seven feet tall, look over it, like, oh, there they are. Let's

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  get our glass out. Let's look. Let's see what they are and make a call. We sneak to this wall. We haven't, we haven't prepared for, for any other, you know, like, situation. And as soon as we reached the wall, the seven of us, we hear speaking, we hear talking, and it's Pashtun. It's, it's not English. It's someone speaking Pashtun. And we realized that these, these people are on the immediate other side of the wall. And one of our guys, who was, he was like six foot three, he sort of peeked over the wall and he just like nodded, like, those are ma'ams. They have weapons, right? So, but they haven't hurt us yet. And so, now, all of us are looking at each other, almost like bracing for them to start shooting us because how have they not hurt us?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Like, we're, we snuck down here. We're Navy SEALs, but like, give me a break. We definitely made noise. But they, they apparently didn't hear us. And so, there's this really intense moment where we're looking at each other and we're all turning to our team lead who's really, he's like a tactical genius, calm as can be under fire. Like, what do we do? Because it's sort of apparent that we can't really just leave. Because if we leave, there's the opportunity to hear us then. And then they have a better angle at shooting us that way. And so, what do we do? And you gotta remember too, that we had that same drone, or one of the drones overhead had a, an infrared spotlight that was being cast down on us. And it was, it was flashing. So, it's like, imagine if God had a flashlight, a really powerful flashlight, was shining it straight down, but was like flicking it on and off. And you can only see it on night vision, but you're within

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  that cone of light. And so, it's like the strobe effect, which it shouldn't have been. That's typically if you're targeting something. It was like, I don't even know why they were doing it, but I'm standing in like a disco strobe.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  But only to you because you're on night vision.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  You would have seen nothing.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Got it. And they, the ma'ams didn't see anything.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  And apparently, they don't hear or see anything. It's like silence.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  And why is it advantageous to have the strobe effect?

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  It's actually for aircraft to be able to shoot. And it's like a way of marking targets for aircraft. They can see where things are being shot. It's called sparkling, I think it's called. It, all that they should have been doing was using an infrared spotlight to simply illuminate the space for us. But it was like on sparkle. So, it was like a strobe light. And like, at this point, there's so many other issues that no one's calling out to the aircraft. So, in this strobe, I'm looking over at the team lead and he just looks at the tallest guy. And he, the team lead gets down on one knee and without making a sound, he just like goes like this, like, "Step on my knee." And like, start, start engaging. And, and it was just like, just

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  like that. The dude stepped on his knee, put the gun over the wall, start shooting. And the, the ma'ams, which we don't know how many there were, I think there were two, could have been as many as three or four, I don't know, but there was at least two, they were holding grenades with the pins pulled. They're holding the spoon down on the grenades. A frag grenade, I don't know if it's a frag grenade, but the way a grenade works is, there's a pin in it, you pull the pin out, but as long as your thumb is holding this.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  That little clip thing.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called a spoon. Nothing happens. You can hold this for the rest of your life and nothing would happen. But once you release it, it doesn't instantly detonate. It flicks the spoon off and then it starts a timer. It detonates like five seconds later. So, these grenades get chucked over the wall. The pins have been pulled. So, now these are live grenades. And I'm not shooting, I'm not doing anything. Like, I'm just next to the guy who's like actively shooting, like in those intimate environment you can, you can imagine. And I remember in the strobe light, I watched this grenade come over the wall and I see it for a second in the strobe and then disappears because the strobe goes off and then back on. And this was in a fraction of a second. It's like time slowed down and I see this grenade coming toward me. And there's just nothing you can do. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm so fucking dead,

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  right? Like a grenade is, it's coming over to my face. Like, you're dead, right? And, and so, time slows down. I felt it hit my shoulder. And I remember actually actively thinking, fuck, like, it's gonna blow up and blow my, my head off, my face off, and my mom's not gonna get to see me again. And then like the strobe kicks on and, and the grenade now is falling to the, to the ground. And I remember it reached like my, my waist. And I, I remember thinking, oh shit, maybe, maybe my face will remain intact and my mom can see me again. And then it falls to the ground. And again, this is all in a fraction of a second. It detonates. And by the time it hit the ground, I thought maybe I'd have, I have a fighting chance here. But it detonates and it, it, it just felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at the back of my

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  legs and my hip. It really didn't hurt at all. I would imagine there's an enormous amount of like chemical dumping going on in your body when you're truly bracing for, for impact like that. So, I didn't feel anything. My memory of what happened turned out to be a little bit wrong. I believed, this is my active memory, as I fall to the ground from this blast. It's fucking madness. Some of this is definitely true. The city just sort of erupted, like there were fighters still in the city that now began arbitrarily, you know, firing rockets, just generally in the direction. Because it's like, fuck it, we'll murder ourselves as long as we take out one of you. It's just arbitrary gunfire being fought, shot in our, our direction. And I, I have no idea

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  like the status of the rest of the team. There's, I have no clue if I'm the only person alive at this point. I have no idea. And I also know that the, this intersection that I'm in, there were openings on either end of that T that fed out to this field. And so, unless, you know, our guy was able to shoot all of them and they're all incapacitated, they're coming around. And so, I'm like trying to move. I can't move. My helmet had been blown off. I think I didn't have the buckle on, so it just sort of fell off. So, I have no night vision, but it was pretty well illuminated that night from the, the moon. So, I could see reasonably well. My, my gun, the strap had been blown off, which is, it's a little piece of fabric, but it blew off. So, I had no weapon. I have no night vision and I couldn't stand up. I kept trying to stand. I couldn't stand. And I

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  just like, I didn't pass out. I was just like, I, I can't go anywhere. And I'm waiting to get shot. And then somebody picked me up and dragged me into the, like the stem of the T, if you will, where there was a little wall. They put me up against it. And they went, this is one of my teammates. They went back down to, to continue to fight and rescue people. And I, on my kit, you have tourniquets, which are designed to stop the bleeding. You put it on your limb, you can stop the bleeding. There, we, the way we fasten them to our kit is specifically for if you're fucking dying, you want to be able to pull these off really easily and quickly because it's like a lifesaving mechanism. And I was too weak to pull them off of my kit. And so, I had this

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  realization of I can't stop the bleeding. I know I'm bleeding to that. And I'm just sitting in this alleyway. There's, there's not really a good chance that someone's gonna like, oh, let me go help Alan real quick as we deal with this really intimate gunfight with who knows how many people. And I also know that at any point, someone could come up the, up the stem of the T from the main city, which is right there. We already know there's fighters everywhere. So, it's just like a waiting game of how I'm gonna die. The caveat is, I didn't clarify this on another interview I did. The real thing is close to what I just said. It's that I was knocked unconscious pretty much immediately. I did lose the helmet, the gun. But our, our medic, who's a SEAL as well, he's a SEAL medic, they're known as an 18 Delta, he, he triaged me. He essentially looked around.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  He's one of the few guys not immediately incapacitated and saw what he thought was ice initially, even though someone tried to say this was not true because it was the springtime. But he thought there was ice under me and then realized it was blood, like, and sees like, oh, I can't save him. And so, he left me thinking I need to save other people who have a better chance at survival. But it was somebody else, another one of my teammates down there who had been very badly concussed, who picked me up and brought me to the stem. So, basically, I was left to die and was fully saved by a teammate who brought me down there. But then I, and then

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  They were still bleeding out.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Still bleeding out. And, and I'm up there. And this memory of mine is accurate. Once I was sitting there, because I thought I was lucid the whole time. I basically was just knocked unconscious immediately and didn't realize it. As I'm sitting there waiting to die, I, my, my hearing went completely like deaf. And I had, I had had peltors, which are your headset that's connected to your radio. And those were off now. And so, I'm just listening to the ambient noise, which is gunshots and fucking RPGs. And it just goes away, like absolute fucking deafness, like silence. But I'm fully lucid. I'm totally alive. And I know almost instinctively that I'm, I'm, I'm shutting down. I'm dying. I haven't put tourniquets on. I'm dying.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  And then my vision went completely as well. So I'm blind, eyes open, blackness. But I have this weird, like, super, like, I was very aware of being alive. I'm definitely alive. I'm not dreaming, I'm not sleeping. I'm alive, but I'm dying. And I, I, I, the things that crossed my mind as I'm nearing death's door here were, I wondered if they were gonna say, John Allen killed in action in Afghanistan? Or Jonathan Allen killed in action? Just how they're gonna spell my name? That's a, that's a very important distinction. And then I also, I did think about my wife. We didn't have kids, and that was sort of on my mind, that like, we had actually said, well, we'll have kids later.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  And it was just sort of like, fuck, like, I'm like, twenty-five, six, whatever I was, like, I'm, I'm twenty-four. I'm gonna die, no kids. She's gonna move on, like, she's gonna have a family with someone else. And then I, I physically remember a sensation of, of letting go. This, this sounds cliche, but it, it, it actually felt like there was something in me that was like, holding, and then I like, let go, and then I felt the impact of my shoulder hitting the ground. And then it was like, and now I'm dying. This is it. And like, seconds later, the eighteen delta, the medic comes running over, under a fucking hail of gunfire. He pulls me up, he finds the bleed, he puts a tourniquet on my leg, puts him on both legs,

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  and I slowly, like, as I'm no longer rapidly losing blood, I slowly get my vision back, and I'm like, sitting here, looking up, and my hearing comes back. And this medic of mine, uh, who's just the most, you would never think Navy SEAL, just the most normal-looking dude, is just like this highly-trained Navy SEAL sniper medic. And I'm not kidding, there's literally like, rounds impacting all around us, and he's the one guy who can save us. He's the medic. Everyone else is fucked up. He's like, hey, how's it going? Like, I, I got you, got your tourniquet, son? Hey, I think we're gonna call in an airstrike here in a second. Just sit here, you, you got your gun? Here's your gun. Like, just, just hold on for a minute, we're gonna be out of here. No, no problem, you just hang tight, right there.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  Bedside manner.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm like, okay. And I'm like, sitting here, like, looking around, like, what the fuck is going on? I just died in my head. And then, dude, the, the team lead, and by this point, they had, they had shot the guys on the other side of the wall, but there was now rounds sort of coming in.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  From the rest of the town, yeah.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  Uh, and we didn't really know if the guys on the other side of the wall were, were, if there was more coming, we didn't really know. And so I'm like, sitting here, and my team lead, to give you a sense of, of like, calm under, under fire. Not me, I, I was a fucking shitshow, I was out. But like, this dude, our team lead, he has his headset on, and overhead, like, in the sky, he, he, this guy was known as a JTAC, it's a Joint Terminal Aircraft Controller. You're in charge of calling in strikes from different air platforms. And the liability for who gets hit, what gets hit, is entirely on the JTAC. So if you tell a pilot to fucking drop a bomb over here and you kill fucking fifty people, not the pilot's fault, that's your fault. So the school, I, I went through that school, never used it in, in real life.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  In one of his years, he's listening to what must have been at least seven or eight different air aircraft, at least, that are all literally flying overhead at different altitudes. They're called different blocks. And it's your job as the JTAC to know where they are, cause they don't really pay attention. If they're gonna do a gun run or something, they're coming in guns blazing at speed in the designated altitude block that you've given them. If you did not properly de-conflict with the other aircraft-

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  It could be hitting the other one.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  You can absolutely hit another aircraft. So there's a huge amount of just organizational skill that goes into being a JTAC. But he was, he had to call in an airstrike. But he had to call in what's known as a danger-close airstrike, which is in the world of, of, of JTAC-ery, this is the most sketchy thing you do. It's where you're calling in an airstrike that's effectively on your position. You're not trying to hit your own position, but we were so close to that wall, where we believed these fighters still were, that the only way to do it was to call in a Hellfire missile, which is relatively precise, fairly small ammunition, but like, we're talking from me to the cameras, like, maybe even a little bit closer. And so you have to give a very precise description of what you want them to hit.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  And remember, the pilot, they're using special devices and stuff, but they're really looking out the window, and they're trying to make sense of what you're telling them. And you're basically saying, hey, you're gonna see a T-intersection, and there's a group of guys on one side, and a group of guys on the other, and everybody's fucking shooting at each other, we want you to hit those guys over there. And don't fucking miss.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  Shit.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  So, in one ear, he's de-conflicting the other aircraft to move to various air blocks to be clear, so the one pilot can come in and drop this precise airstrike-

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  Which you also need to get, it's called commander's initialing. You need someone senior than you to approve the drop. You don't do that for any other drop.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  All while receiving gunfire and protecting the rest of the guys.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  And, so he was doing that, his other ear, he's doing that with the, the commander on the ground, saying, here's where we are, here's what's going on, I need your initialing to get this drop. And he's trying to coordinate with everybody else, who I told you, we broke into fire teams. He is one of the most senior guys on the ground. He's trying to describe where we are, and how best to move through the city to get to us and where to provide contact.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  Strike, oh, man.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Dude, it was like, the most, and he's doing it literally while being shot at, and several of us are down, like, one guy, his lung had collapsed, and he needed what were called needle decompressions every like, few minutes. Which, imagine taking a needle and putting it into your third and fourth intercostal space, and it, it's like, you just pull out the back of it, and it creates an air pocket, and you basically relieve the pressure on your lung, but you keep them in your side. So you have like, a porcupine of, of needles poking out of your, and you have to keep doing it, or else you'll suffocate. And so like, the medic is like, treating me, and he's, he's putting more and more needles into the other guy, we're getting actively shot at, but he calls in this beautiful airstrike, he, you know, hits the guy on the other side, and then he called in the, uh, like, an under-fire, like, hey, we need, we need a medevac right now, but you can't come here, there's nowhere

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  for the aircraft to land. And so he called in a medevac like, a mile away, but like, the crew coming in, like, they're coming into a contact zone, they're coming in not just to evacuate you, they're coming into an active gunfight where they can get shot down. They're really skittish, they want all the information of what the fuck they're getting themselves into. And so, on the same ear where he's dropping an airstrike, he's filtering on that ear with the medevac platform, giving them what's called a nine-line, which is like, all the details of where we are, what you need to do, what you need to bring, what the mechanism of injury is. It was just fucking brilliant. So we call in this, uh, medevac, I'm back to life, sort of amazingly, and I was picked up on people's shoulders, and we sort of, I sort of ran, but held on to others, we ran

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  to this medevac, and, uh, like, there wasn't a whole lot of shooting when we got there, but when we got there, like, these are the pararescue jumpers, the Air Force PJs, who were like, this is their job, it's special operations in the Air Force who do special rescues, and they're like cowboys, like, fucking shooting their guns and shit as soon as we get there. Flying, like, they, they land their helo with like, one wheel, like, touching the corner of like, a fucking wall, so they can get a quick, it was crazy shit. So we hop in the, in the, uh, the helicopter, and, and me and the other guy with the, the lung thing going on, we got dropped in the helicopter, but like, the other guys, there's no, there's no space for you, you're not, you're not leaving here. You gotta go back to your team. So like, all the dudes who weren't badly injured, but who had just been like, fragged

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  and concussed and fucked up, now you have two less combat, two less people, in me and the other guy, and you need to go all the way back through like, the hornet's nest to reconvene with the team and fight your way out. And so they're like, alright, bye guys, and like, we fly off, and they just go running back into the contact zone.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  Fuck. Alright guys, let's take a break for a second. Um, rock hard, fifteen minutes or less. Do I need to say anymore? BlueChew's new product, BlueChew Gold, you're rock hard in fifteen minutes or less. No other pill on the market is doing that. Fifteen minutes or less, rock. That's it. Okay? If you had to wait forty minutes, do you know how much can change in that amount of time? She gets a fall from her friend, fat girl, fell into a sewer, she thought she saw a cannoli down there, head first, teeth out. It wasn't that. Now she gotta go scoop her out. We gotta get the, you know, three-one-one involved. The whole city is trying to get this poor girl out of a gutter. Fifteen minutes or less, you're already doing the business while her friend is face-down

• 1:27:34Speaker 00

  in a sewer trying to get a cannoli that's not even there. She had an illusion. It was like being in the desert, you'd think you saw water. This fat girl thought she saw a cannoli at the bottom of the sewer.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

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• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  And then on the helicopter, I didn't really know exactly how bad my injuries were because adrenaline's flowing. I thought I just fucking died a second ago. And I tell people like the, you get up every day and you live and you don't really actively think about like, well, today I'm going to breathe. Today I'm going to pump my heart and it just happens. You just live. Your entire experience is living. You don't ever really think about it. You don't know it yet, but you're just as good at dying. It just, it hasn't happened yet. Your body is just as good at shutting down. When I was in the active stage of dying, it was just like, oh yeah, I'm dying now. Like that's it. Not sad, not bad, just is. And so I knew I had that experience. It didn't seem real that I hadn't.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  And I'm laying on this helicopter and we're flying out of this, this Zargan char. It's like chaos. There's gunfire everywhere and they asked me if I wanted morphine. And I said, no, because I was like, if I die, I want to feel it. I want to be aware. I don't want to be fucked up when I die. Again, I could have been completely stable. I probably was by this point. But we land at Fob Shank, the same place that I landed when I first got to Afghanistan. And by this point, they had radioed to the, the people on staff. This is the middle of the night of all the nurses and doctors that were at Shank. And there was this medical tent that, you know, had all the equipment you could ask for. And we get off the chopper and they rush us in on, on like gurneys. And by this point, my clothes have been all clipped off of me.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  I'm like a fucking, I'm like half naked, like all fucked up. I got no idea what's going on. And I basically was under the impression that I'm, I'm okay. I'm gonna, I've made it this far. I made it this long. I'm probably going to live. And so I'm feeling pretty confident, but we get wheeled in from like the dark outside to this like really brightly lit up tent. And there's all these just like dozens of doctors and nurses that are just waiting for us. Cause they're like, whatever surgery they need, we're going to give it to them. And that was a little alarming, but I'm like, okay, that's cool. Like it's great. We have such great, you know, a team here. But in the back corner of this tent, waiting as well, were a bunch of my teammates, other SEALs that were in country. They, they weren't at our station. They were basically stationed here at Fob Shank, but they're guys I trained with.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Some of the guys were from Team Two. They were like, you know, pretty, pretty, like my friends, I would call them. And they had on uniforms and like you were civilian clothes pretty much the whole time. And they had put on, I would, what I would call like their best uniforms. And they're standing in the corner like solemnly, almost at attention, watching as we come in. And so we have this tracker in country where you can see what's happening with, it's like a text thread of like all the call signs of who's doing what, where they are. And you can just sort of track an operation. And I told you that by this point, operations had really shut down enough in that part of Afghanistan. So like, no one was doing anything. They were just watching the feed and they saw us walk down that T intersection. And they're like, why are you walking right up on those fucking people on the other side of the wall?

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  They didn't get it. And so they knew it had gone bad. They knew that they saw my call sign and the other of, you know, potential pretty serious injuries. And so they'd come into this tent in case we died. So like, I'm basically being wheeled into the closest thing to my own funeral as you're going to get. Cause I don't know. For all, I'm getting in here realizing as I'm staring at my teammates who were like so serious and no one's serious to the fucking team. Everyone fucks around constantly. They're so serious that I'm like, wait a minute, like, am I about to die? Like, did I not realize that this was actually quite serious? And then they're like, all right, we're going to give you some ketamine. Good luck. Ketamine fucking out. And then I woke up in Germany. Actually, I was in another part of Afghanistan. Then I went to Germany like later that same day. And then I survived and seven days later I was back home in Virginia.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  No transition, just at Home Depot, pushing my cart down the island, Home Depot hobbling. You know, a bleeding ass, you know, just, just living my life. Fuck.

• 1:34:03Mark Gagnon?

  What were the injuries?

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Luckily for me, it was just like what amounted to just pretty serious flesh wound. You know, like I have a nice crater in my ass, like a nice fucking scoop taken out of it. And then the back of my leg as well. It's just shrapnel. I mean, effectively I got really lucky. The, the, the thing that was actually the closest thing to killing me that didn't actually hurt me at all, but it almost did was, I almost had anal compromise, which would have been really bad. What is that? So the, the way the shrapnel shot into me, which is basically the grenade, it has, it has a blasting cap in the middle of it. And when it detonates, the grenade body itself. Becomes the shrapnel. Exactly. And they're all different sizes and they're like jagged pieces of metal flying in every direction.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  When it goes into you, it sort of tumbles, it like tumbles around inside of your body and like goes zigzags. A piece went into me when they were debriding it. They saw it like went around, it went into my side of my ass and like narrowly missed my, like my anal tract, if you will. If you lacerate your fucking, your asshole. Septic. Yeah, yeah. Your poop, feces is going to get into your body. You're getting sepsis and you're done. And they said it like pretty much across the board. When they see dudes come in here with shrapnel injuries to their ass, that's usually fatal because of that. Exactly. And they're like, you, it was like right past your fucking asshole.

• 1:35:28Mark Gagnon?

  That's what they were training them in the Sears.

• 1:35:32Mark Gagnon?

  Get that asshole tight.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude. Wow.

• 1:35:35Mark Gagnon?

  You know, a wise man once said that Navy SEALs performing a nighttime mission, the only way they can get out of there is if they do blackface.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Is that true? Is that true?

• 1:35:48Mark Gagnon?

  Is that true?

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't know, dude. Would you guys get to put on the blackface? We, uh, we did put on lots of face, face stuff. We definitely did, did do that. Was it fun? Like, would you guys goof around? There was this one time, speaking of stupid face paint stuff. So when we got back from that deployment and I actually, I, I did another tour. I went to South America for the next workup. We had our own new guys. So like suddenly I'm not a new guy anymore. And so the rite of passage belongs to these next, the next wave of new guys. And one of the things you do when you're a new guy is there's, there's so many briefs that have to be given, just stupid shit, like, just like administrative crap that like somebody has to brief the platoon about, you know, today, hey guys,

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  make sure when we're down there, like when you use your fucking ear protection at the shooting range. Yeah. It's like safety briefs and whatever, but periodically there are these pretty serious briefs that have to be given, but laughing, thinking about this. There are these pretty serious briefs that have to be given at this other like command center on base to like visiting senior members of the military. And for, they, all the team guys, they're, they're great at giving these briefs. And so like the SEALs would get tapped to like talk about the state of NSW, like little, like stupid stuff. But it was like, we were great representatives and we would all take it like really seriously. But it was always the new guys, when I was a new guy, that would get tapped to like, go give the fucking brief to the, to the one star, like go do the talk about how NSW is doing whatever.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  And there was this one dude who was like the worst public speaker, just the fucking worst. And he hated it so much. And we're like, you're fucking doing this brief. And we painted his face. It was all green, but this just inexplicable black box over his eyes, like all the way over his mouth. Yeah, yeah. And now we were like, no point. Can you reference it?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  So we went over and watched him do it. It's this huge auditorium, all these people. He comes out.

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  Like a superhero.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  And dude was such a moron, he was in his dress uniform with his face paint. And they did ask, and we were, don't you say it, don't say it, don't explain it.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  No way. That's probably helpful. Then if you're doing public speaking, you're thinking about that the whole time?

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, he would later tell us that that destroyed his fear of public speaking, because he's like, it can't get worse than that. I got through that, so.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  What happened to the guy with the lungs?

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  He survived. Yeah, he, so for him, he had a collapsed lung. Actually, he and I, we had another, really, actually him more than me, we had another super close call earlier in the deployment. We went into this building that we had been trying to, uh, we went, like, there was this metal door that was super loud, and we were trying to breach the door, and it, like, clearly it woken everybody up. This is like in the early morning hours, and we knew there was somebody in there that was of a gun. I forget what he, like a bomb maker or something, but he was a known bad guy, right? And so, we're like making all this fucking noise, and now we're like sort of pot committed, we made a lot of noise out here, we gotta go in there and prosecute the target.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  And so I was, you know, waiting. We finally get the door open, and we threw some crash, crashes in there, which are non-lethal concussion. And then, the way it works is, everybody knows everybody's job. You just sort of like, if you go in as the one man, and then you wind up being the two man, like, everybody can just pick up the pieces. And it just worked out that I happened to stack on the door as like the two man. And so, we are, yeah, or actually, I was the three man. Either way, I wasn't the first guy in. And so we make entry, and there's a dog barking somewhere, it's pitch black inside of this house, and there's this little, like, foyer, right as we walk in, and there's a stairwell that cuts up to the right, and there's a hallway straight ahead. But we were on night vision, and so when you're watching through your little tubes that stick off your helmet,

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  you have, I think it's called parallax, I forget the term for it, where like, you think you're looking at this level, but just given the way the, the night vision sits on your head, it's either slightly higher or slightly lower than how you perceive. So basically, you think that you're at this level, but you're actually looking like an inch higher or an inch lower. I forget the difference. You're slightly off, and there was a low ceiling. And I start walking forward, and I, uh, my nods because of this, I thought I had to duck down enough that I'd clear this low ceiling and be able to walk down this, out, this hallway straight ahead of me. But my nods clipped the overhang. Like, I walked, and this is a live clearance, like, you came, oh, hold on, guys!

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  And I clipped the, the overhang, and you're taught, anytime you have any sort of gear malfunction of any kind, just get the fuck out of the way. Somebody else behind you will see you, pick up the spot, and they'll continue on. And so I turned, and I realized right away, it's because of my, my, I just, the parallax, and I begin making my way up the stairs, because I turned, I figured it out, and I just start clearing up the stairs, and like a second later, not even, there is just like, it sounded like a bomb going off inside the house. And it turned out, it was, there was a shooter at the end of the hallway, laying down, prone, with a slug shotgun, just, and he fired one shot into, into the breach, into us, in a row.

• 1:40:51Speaker 00

  Into where you were supposed to be?

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Yes, into where we were supposed to be.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  But literally where you were supposed to be before you turned to go upstairs?

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Literally where I had been.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  And the guy who followed behind you?

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Who was like six foot three.

• 1:41:01Speaker 00

  Get shot?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  He got shot like here.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  Does he have a, uh?

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  But if he was a little shorter.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  So if I stood where, if I was standing next to him, that's my, that's my headshot. Yeah, and the guy was shooting blind. He was just waiting for a sound and shooting into the dark. And so it, it fucked him up. I mean, the dude who got hit in the plates, it shattered his plates, it, he had shrapnel in his neck, and I mean, he was, compared to the collapse, he's the same guy who collapsed his lung.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  Jesus, poor guy.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  He, uh, but yeah, so like, he and I had gone through that.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Every time he's with you.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, fuck dude.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Did he get to go to Home Depot also? Like, was he scared? Where's he at?

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Dude, he, he's an intimidating guy. Like, he's, he, he looks, he almost like feels like a Navy SEAL, just the way he carries himself. He's like real big, a big guy, just like a mean motherfucker dude, and just, he was so like bitter about getting shot, more than hurt multiple times, but, uh,

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  Do you think there's a kid, or now an adult in Afghanistan that watches your YouTube videos, who's like, dude, I remember fucking them up, man?

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  Dude, he got it, right?

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, man.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  Is it possible?

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  You can see the YouTube data.

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  He loves the scary stories, he loves the strange things, like, he's just watching, and then he hears you tell this story, he's like, there's no way, dude, my past life was different too, man.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know, man. That's, it's crazy, though. It's so weird now, like, being so removed from it now, you know, like,

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  It's so different, your life.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Does it feel like a different person, like, when you think about it?

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  In fact, now, I've thought so much and talked so much about my past life, if you will,

• 1:42:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  that I almost can't quite separate, like, how I view it in story form. Like, literally, when I talk about me getting hurt, I see it in the form of the way I tell the story, but there's a lived experience there. There's stuff that, like, happened that I don't often think about, like, smaller details, but it just feels almost like I'm watching a movie in my head. It doesn't feel like that was me. But like, I'll take a shower and be like, oh yeah, that fucking huge scar on my ass.

• 1:42:58Speaker 00

  So you still have all the scars?

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, I mean, they're little. For a while there, there was like little bits of shrapnel that felt like sand, like, coming out of my leg.

• 1:43:05Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  They worked themselves out, but like, the, the main stuff was pulled out right away, and then I, I mean, other than, uh, you know, I, I had to go to, to wound care with the Navy, like, I remember, the thing is, is I came back from that deployment, and I thought I was the fucking, just the man. Just like, I was a man. Well, because it, you spend so much time and energy, like, trying to become a SEAL, and then like, you're, you're, you're welcomed into this community, this like elite community, right? And then, you go to war. Like, the thing that sort of separates the men from the boys, at least in sort of the, from, from inside that community, and I did that. And now, I even have like a wound to show.

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  I was in it.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  Undeniably, I was a part of it.

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  And I, I am not, I hope, I don't think I'm a, I'm a very egotistical person, but at the time, I was like, fuck yeah, like, I'm a fucking Navy SEAL combat veteran, my fucking purple heart, everybody fucking knows that. I felt like really cool, and especially so in the, the weeks immediately after getting home. I also, there was no transition period.

• 1:44:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  I was a fucking lunatic when I first came home.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  Oh, really? You felt it?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Oh dude, like, I was still, I was living in Afghan, not, not flashbacks, like, I had not regulated my ability to like, not treat every single threat like it was a full-blown crisis.

• 1:44:27Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. How did that present itself?

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Uh, I got home, and my wife, she's like, oh, the, uh, the homeowners association called, our chimney cap's a little rusted, they need us to fix it.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  Fuck, call them to strike, you fucking, call them in!

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  I call the fucking homeowners association, like, do you have any fucking clue where I've been the last fucking six months? And they're like, sir, we have, why would we know that? Why would they have any idea about what you've been doing? I was like, that's fair.

• 1:44:54Speaker 02

  That's a sketchy night for your wife, the first night you get back?

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, what is she thinking? She's tending to my wound as well.

• 1:44:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  So the thing about, so I got wheeled into Bethesda in Maryland, the hospital, and she hasn't seen me, and I'm, I'm like ragged looking, I was, I, not even just from the injury, like, I got really lean, like, a lot of guys, like, kind of just, like, they get jacked up. I didn't, I, I worked out a lot, but I got real skinny and like wiry, and I had like this horrible facial hair, I'd grow a real patchy beard. Like a combat mullet, and like, I, I looked like, I, I wanted to be intimidating to locals. I wanted to look, not locals, but to the people I was up against. I wanted them to think, like, this dude's unhinged, you know? But I've done no, that, that, that's actually the day I got hurt, that was pre Mohawk. I cut it.

• 1:45:40Speaker 00

  Oh wow.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Actually, that's the day I got hurt, so I didn't have the Mohawk. There is a Mohawk picture of me, but either way, I was ragged when I got home. And when I got wheeled in, the doctor, who was so fucking callous, he's like, alright, Mrs. Allen, go over here. She's like, hasn't seen me, this is her first meeting, and I'm laying on my stomach, my ass hanging out, and she almost faints from seeing the wound, and he's like, I'm gonna go over here! And, and she's like, no, it doesn't get helped up. She didn't faint, but she's like really shocked by it, and he's like, you're, you're gonna learn how to do this. Uh, he needs to have this, this packed with gauze twice a day, because we can't have the, a cavity forming inside, like, it needs to heal from the inside up. And so her job was not just to clean it, but it was to like, open it up, and like, push gauze deep into this like hole in my ass.

• 1:46:26Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  And so, really, initially, that was, that was her interaction with it. It's like, but then it's like, she's like caring for me, like, physically, like, cleaning me and taking care of me. It was like, sort of a weird, awful, you know, segue into civilian life, and, and I was utterly ungrateful, just like angry, still sort of harboring, like, I, I, it's almost like I had, because the team that I was with, they were all still in Afghanistan. I got sent home. Desperately.

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  Desperately. And it wasn't like I, I felt like I had let them down or something. It was like, now what do I do? I would have been okay leaving with them, you know, then it's like the natural time that it ends, and you're like, okay, we're done, we're gonna like decompress and go to, but it was like, wait a minute, like, I was there. I was literally like doing shit a minute ago, and now all I want to do is go back.

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  Did you feel any like guilt? Like, you let them down because you got hurt and you can't be out there with them?

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  I was worried somebody was gonna get killed in the final month, and, and that I, theoretically, had I been there, that wouldn't have happened.

• 1:47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is maybe a hero complex, but it's just like logical, like, me not being there affects everything that's gonna happen for them. It has to.

• 1:47:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  And so like, it just made me feel worried that something bad would happen. When they came home, it was an enormous relief, because it was like, thankfully they're home. But, uh, but yeah, dude, it was, it was fucking madness.

• 1:47:43Speaker 00

  How do you transition to like being a YouTuber? And I don't mean that to be, I'd be reductive, but like, it is so mind-bogglingly different from the life that you just described to us, even though, as you describe it, is very similar to what you are doing right now. You're telling these like insane, crazy stories, many of which are true stories, some are like, how would you say, like, um,

• 1:48:10Speaker 00

  It's not that they're not true, but urban legends.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Or they're like POV, like somebody's perspective.

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's like this person said, the great story that you told about the, uh, the, what is it? The canyon.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Bell's Canyon.

• 1:48:22Speaker 00

  Bell's Canyon, like these different things. So like, where does this happen?

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, dude, it was so fucking weird. Like I, I got medically retired in 2017. Um, so which, so this got, I got hurt in 2014.

• 1:48:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  I, I ended up sort of fumbling my way into another rotation. But physically, like I, I, the blast dislocated both of my shoulders, which sounds nasty, but it just, it gave me slap tears in both my labrum. Which is just sort of a nuisance. So I had surgery on this, this shoulder. Um, I had shrapnel injuries, which, you know, once they healed, it was basically okay, but I felt physically like I had really stepped backwards.

• 1:48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Like we had to do a stress, a stress test one time, which is just a shooting course where you're like doing pushups and shit before. And I like could not do a pull up with my kid on, and it's because of my shoulder.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking like, I'm like 26, 25 and I'm like, yeah, what the fuck is going on? Um, so I ended up getting medically retired. Uh, sort of a long story, but made short. I just was not fit for it. I didn't want to do the teams anymore. And I, uh, so I got medically retired. But when I got out, I, I had been told the way medical retirement works is you sort of artificially get the 20 years where you get a pension, but you get it right now. Cause it's like medically, you can't do it any worse. We're going to cut you off now, but you get a pension as if you were fully retired.

• 1:49:44Speaker 00

  So you got a couple bucks, you can feed yourself.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  It's pretty, I mean, the pension is, is it's a, I'm not diminishing it, but it's enough. You could live on it for sure. But not comfortably and not with kids. I don't care where you live. It's just not enough. But it's, it's amazing. It's tax free and it's an incredible benefit. And I was very, I was extremely grateful for it. But I was told that I'd be exiting the military on one date and then I got moved way up, which in a way was good. Cause I was sort of in a holding period to a degree. I was teaching, uh, some diving class to other SEALs and it was like, what am I doing? So it gets moved up, but I'm sort of thrust into the civilian world a little bit earlier than I expected. But I, I have two kids living in Virginia. Um, and I didn't really even know what to do. I wound up connecting with this dude in New York, uh, Jordan Selick.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  He was a former investment banker who's very roundabout thing. His buddy was a transitioning veteran as well, a former fighter pilot. Connected with him and he's like, oh dude, you gotta like network with people to get a job. Cause that's what I was trying to do. Like I have a pension, but I need a job. I ended up with Jordan. We put together this networking event that we called Elite Meet in New York. Uh, where selfishly, it was actually just so I could meet with potential partner, like business partner or like companies that might want to hire me. Like he, Jordan recruited companies who were hiring and might want to hire vets. And I brought my buddies to the teams who were getting out. And we like met and it was like, here, network, get jobs.

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  This is a popular thing though, in the veteran community.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  It's a great idea.

• 1:51:13Speaker 00

  A lot of big corporations will specifically want to hire like elites, you know, SEAL guys, Rangers, you know? I don't know if that's because of a trust element or.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  I, I think that there's a little bit of a, a belief that in virtue of having been through selection or whatever selection course they went through, that they must possess soft skills that are really hard to teach. We can teach you the hard skills. I think that's the, the way it's described. But anyways, we have this really successful networking event, but no one really, none, none on the, the corporate side really approached me for a job. Cause the assumption was my job is hosting an event like this.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  And I sort of unintentionally pushed myself outside of the market. Uh, but I sort of leaned into it and I turned it into a charity with the help of Jordan. And I was like doing a lot of fundraising and hosting these networking events. I was like a vet who needed a job, helping other vets get jobs for a while.

• 1:52:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  And I.

• 1:52:02Mark Gagnon?

  Were you looking for a job to get like back into action? Like those black sites?

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Not, no, not at all. Uh, some guys, a lot of guys get out and they'll do something on like the civilian contracting side, like Blackwater or whatever. That's even still a thing. I didn't want to do that. I actually, what really excited me was like a, a corporate, like nine to five. I was like, that sounds so fucking sick to just like go to your job and then like get to go home and be with your family. I was like, it was really like, I really wanted to do that. But it was fun doing this, this networking thing. Cause I, I liked raising money for a cause I believed in. I, I knew personally the guys I was trying to get jobs for. But the pitfall was I needed to advertise sort of what this even is to get donors, to get companies to show up, to build legitimacy.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  And the issue I ran into in terms of marketing effectively, the product, which is the elite special operations guys. Is I need, I need to talk about their experiences. I need to talk about how they translate to the corporate world, all that. And so I ended up doing some content when I had no following, nothing. I was doing on LinkedIn, just like little anecdotal stories that I would get from some of these guys about their experience. And I would like wordsmith it to be like, and that's why as a, as a comms guy, he'd be great at sales in fucking tech or whatever. And it just wasn't very effective. And I'm like, dude, I know these dudes have fucking sick stories that are totally G rated, can be used to strengthen their case, can make everybody look really elite. Cause right now, all we're saying is, oh, veterans.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Like what I want to do is be like, no, these are like really special people that went through specialized training. Let's highlight that stuff. But no one wanted to give me their stories. I felt uncomfortable asking. And so I was like, oh, I know. I'll tell my own stories. I'll tell my Navy SEAL stories that are all sort of tailored towards being a sort of a, a, a description of the whole community at large. I'm not saying I'm so great, hire me. I'm sort of now saying, look, I represent this group of people. Here's an experience that happened to me. It's all written form. I'd write it up. And it was designed to be like, through this situation, like here are the things that I learned and everyone at Elite Meet has skills like these. That was sort of the gist.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  And it started with good intentions, but it got a lot of buzz, not anywhere near like Mr. Ballin. But like in the world of, I don't know, corporate recruiting, this became somewhat noteworthy in, in the, in the Northeast of the United States. And there was like quite a bit of traction on these LinkedIn posts. And I was like, great. I'll do more posts about, you know, my experience. And I was like super fucking blunt about my experience. It was, at least I thought I was being, I wasn't telling stories that were out of control. It was like stupid shit, like things about bootcamp and whatever. But it rubbed people the wrong way in the SEAL teams, big time.

• 1:54:49Mark Gagnon?

  Why?

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  Uh, there is a, there is a thing that I totally understand and I knew I was doing, but I was sort of acting like I was better than it a little bit, which is even though it is the case that there is SEAL stuff everywhere. If you Google Navy SEAL, there's no shortage of, of pictures, movies, books, video games. That's all true. And I, I am clearly in the group of people that is part of the proliferation of the SEAL brand. Uh, but there is a far greater number of people that are in the SEAL teams proper, or who have gotten out, who have extraordinary stories to tell, extraordinary experiences that if they were to share with the world, likely would

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  get quite a bit of notoriety, quite a bit of, of, you know, like affection from the world, could probably have pretty incredible opportunities. But there is a silent professional ethos that definitely exists in the, in special operations. And since Bin Laden happened till now, that has gotten really gray in the teams where there's a, there's a group of people, and I'm one of them, that talks openly about their experiences. And I was sort of going from being an active duty guy who's, oh, he's helping out. He's getting guys jobs. To like more and more of my anecdotes were becoming a little bit more like making me out to have my own brand, making me out as like the face of Elite Meet. And it was sort of frustrating that nobody else would give me their stories. And I was like, fuck it. I'll just tell my own.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  And I was becoming the guy that's like, look at me, like I'm a Navy SEAL. This is again, from the active duty.

• 1:56:19Speaker 00

  Cardinal sin in the teams?

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  It, it's actually, it's unforgivable.

• 1:56:23Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. You are, you're, you're disowned basically.

• 1:56:26Speaker 00

  And what is the logic behind that?

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  There is a pack mentality when you're in the teams that I think is, it's necessary.

• 1:56:35Speaker 00

  What probably makes it so prolific and deadly?

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  You are, everyone talks about when you're in the teams, that it's all about your reputation, that your reputation is all that matters. And that sounds sort of top level, but that really is the case. Your currency, everywhere you go in the teams is what do people think about you when you're not there? And if you have a great reputation, you get the best jobs, you get the best mission sets, you'll get promoted more frequently, you're well-liked. You're, the world is your oyster within the world of, of special operations. If you are viewed as a liability, as a piece of shit in the teams, there's like a process to kick you out based on just your reputation. We would have like peer evaluations periodically at the team. Like we've all done selection. We're at the team. Like this is our job, right? And they're like, yeah, we're into a peer evaluation.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  You have to score every single person on your team from one to 10 or whatever, in terms of how they performed. Either, either in terms of how they conducted themselves, their skill set at the last training block. You put your name on the evaluation and everybody's name is being evaluated and the results are public. And at the end, those who are the lowest of the low can be kicked out of the team. She'll still be in the Navy, but it'd be like, yeah, you're not a SEAL anymore. Go fuck yourself.

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  Oh my.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  So there's like a very intense, you're always trying to prove to your teammates that you belong. And as soon as you leave the teams, it isn't that you're disowned in general, but you're, you're not part of the pack anymore. I felt it right away when I left. That even though I was like working closely with guys who were trying to leave the military and get jobs. I was interfacing with guys at the active duty level a lot. It already felt like, wow, even just a month or two, and I already feel like I'm, I'm a total outsider. Because it's just this, it's this hive mind. They're completely of their own accord. Also, there's just like a desire to like go to war. There's a desire to go do the job. And when you're, when you're actively employed, you're not doing social media like you'd be.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  I don't think right now it exists that there is an active duty SEAL talking about their experience. I don't, I don't think it exists because I don't think it can. So when you don't need a job because you are an active duty Navy SEAL and you're in the pack and you're doing your thing, like of course it's, it's so easy to chastise and view anybody who talks about their experiences out there as having done something wrong because one, you don't need to talk about your experience right now. You're in the pack.

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  You're in, you're accepted and you're gainfully employed. You, you know exactly what you're going to do next week and two weeks and a year. Everything's mapped out for you.

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  The team is the only thing that matters.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  Only thing that matters.

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  And if it seems like you're doing something for yourself, then it's like,

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Fuck you.

• 1:59:18Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on. This is about the team.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  And so when I started getting bigger, again, on a very small scale, but bigger within that small recruiting scale, I began receiving just the worst messages from not anonymous people.

• 1:59:33Speaker 00

  People you know.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Teammates.

• 1:59:34Speaker 00

  You worked with.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Senior people. I got a Medal of Honor recipient who wrote me like a fucking long message because I had done a post about someone who he personally knew who had been killed. There's a, there's a tradition where when you graduate from SEAL training, they give you a K-bar knife with a teammate of, of a fallen SEAL and mine was Louis Langlis, who was this prolific SEAL Team Six guy, who I didn't know him. All I have is his knife. I have his knife. I have his name, when he was killed. I think it was in Kandahar. I'm not sure. But he was like beloved. This is like one of the most beloved people in the teams. He had a family. Like he was sort of like the, the all American, the perfect Navy SEAL. And I did a post where I took a picture of the blade in a shadow box and it was on my LinkedIn.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  And by this point, I'm sort of, I'm hamming up being Mr. Navy SEAL and I can totally see how it's like, oh, I see. You're just putting Louis Langlis and the fucking blade there on your LinkedIn to make yourself look.

• 2:00:27Speaker 00

  To promote you.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I got, you know, a very stern talking to from, from him. I have people that approached me in real life in Virginia. It's like, I became persona non grata. That's what it's called.

• 2:00:38Speaker 00

  Do you regret it?

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I, I think that, I know that when I was doing it, I knew what I was doing. I'm not, I, I was in the pack. I know what it feels like. I remember hating dudes who wrote books and did shit. And then honestly, what happens is you get out of the military and it isn't like, oh, fuck, I better cash in my SEAL equity. That's not, that's not really it. It's more like, it is probably the case that in virtue of having gone through this training and had these experiences that I probably possess a lot of things that maybe companies would, would want to hire me for. I'm sure there's opportunities out there. The problem is, is okay, how are they gonna know unless you tell them or are able to explain what you bring to the table? Like just because I, I walked out of the teams and I'm Mr. Navy SEAL,

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  who the fuck's gonna know? Oh shit, there's John Allen. Yeah, I, I know his resume just from looking at. No, you have to share it with the world. And, and the way I was doing it was, was a little bit too much. I would, I would definitely say that. But there's this, when you're active, you, there's no reason for you to be sharing anything about who you are, what you've done with anyone. No one has social media. No one even has a fucking email account for the most part. You have like your fucking bullshit military email account. Like you're, you're in a bubble.

• 2:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  And then what really has begun happening is guys get out, social media exists, the internet exists. They're like, fuck, what do I do with my life? I can either go right into contract work, which is sort of readily available to you. Like go, you know, be security on a cargo ship in, in Djibouti or something. Or I can create a brand around the grit and determination and all this stuff. So I see it from both sides. I think that the upshot of that is I got a message from a guy that I trained with a lot before I joined the Navy. And I don't begrudge him for this, but I trained with him a lot. He was a close friend of mine and I had had a really just bad day of lots of messages from, I had guys like

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  messaging me who were like, I'm a fucking new guy at SEAL Team blah, and you're a joke at the team. Like I don't even know you. We're just shitting all over you in the platoon space and signed like their name, their cell phone number. Like they want you to get in touch with them.

• 2:02:48Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  You know, and it's, and so I'm having a bad day and this one dude texted me and I hadn't heard from him in a long time. And he had gone over to, to Team Six. And he just wrote, you suck. And it's like a small thing of all the things, but it's, that is like, I know what you're really saying. What you're really saying is I don't respect you. I see what you're doing and I, this guy is at the, the pinnacle of the Navy SEAL hierarchy. And he's like, I, I basically, I do not respect you. And it like hurts so bad. Everything hurt. And I got a long message. That same, same guy I was taking fire with in the, the, he, he wrote me a message too, that was very deep cutting. Again, signed, you know, fucking, come to my house if you want to talk about it. Like no one's avoiding conflict with me.

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  I go to the gym and like dudes are mean mugging me from across the gym. These are trained killers. Like they're ready for conflict.

• 2:03:40Speaker 00

  It's also something interesting, which is like you go through this process, probably on some level for the validation and the respect of these people.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Speaker 00

  You know, it's like you are submitting yourself to the toughest training that exists in the United States of America, arguably. And it proves that you're a badass and your acceptance from these other individuals who have already went through that training are the ones that are validating you.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Speaker 00

  And then losing that validation.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was a tough flow. And I got, dude, I was so out of shape too.

• 2:04:13Speaker 00

  And then you just made so much money, dude.

• 2:04:17Speaker 01

  Dude, it's turned around.

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  You made so much money, dude.

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  Doesn't help though. Can't imagine that, that, I can't imagine the boys are slaying around like, actually no, you're sick again.

• 2:04:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude. By the way, bro. When they found out millions, you're like, hey, man.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  Dude, it was crazy. So like I, I mean, Mr. Ballin, like it came into existence because of how I realized if I'm going to do anything on the internet.

• 2:04:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:40Speaker 01

  It has to be completely divorced from being a SEAL. Cause I, at the time, this is like, you know, when I, when I posted for the first time and sort of went viral, this was like right before COVID happened and I was still doing my, I was doing, even though I was facing the ire of the community, I was hosting events with the guys who hated me to try to get the jobs. It was something else. But the events, they shut down because of COVID. But COVID really wasn't a thing yet. It was like, ah, this will be two weeks. You know, we'll just stop events for now. But I was like, you know what? I'm not going to just give up on using the internet. Cause I saw, I had raised, you know, I think in the span of a couple of years, like several hundred thousand dollars on micro donations via LinkedIn. Like I was getting people to donate 30 bucks, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks,

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  but it was all I did. And I'm like, I've, I've seen the strength of the internet to some degree. I don't want to just bail on it, but I, I don't want to do SEAL stuff. It, it, it's so bad. It hurts so much. It's not worth it. And so I began experimenting with other types of content that were like divorced, as if you had no idea that I had anything to do with the military. And, and all of it was fucking horrible.

• 2:05:44Speaker 00

  What was, what was?

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Oh, so bad.

• 2:05:46Speaker 00

  What was the worst?

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  I did this one.

• 2:05:47Speaker 00

  Did you do any get ready with me's?

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I should have. Those would have been better. I did some dancing ones. Those have been eradicated from the internet.

• 2:05:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  There was a couple of dancing ones. There, but I, I sort of brought in like a Nerf gun to it somehow. And then I did, uh, there was a trend on, uh,

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  You sure they didn't send you the you suck email for that?

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I did this, uh,

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  We did a dance.

• 2:06:09Speaker 00

  We did a dance.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  We did a dance.

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  Everybody goes to the dance.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Speaker 00

  But we were, we weren't Navy SEALs.

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. But you were treating it like the SEALs. He was very serious. If anybody was fucked up in the dance, he's like, dude, you're getting it wrong.

• 2:06:20Speaker 00

  What was the dance? It was in the old studio.

• 2:06:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:23Speaker 00

  It was in quarantine. Yeah.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  He put titties in the background and shit.

• 2:06:27Speaker 00

  Well, you guys were crushing it.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  We did all right. We did all right.

• 2:06:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  But I, I, I did some cringey stuff like that. But then I remember on my computer, I had, I had these two documents that were like my ideas, my things that I could do on the internet that are again divorced from the teams. And on one of them, it was like every trend that I had seen. I was like studying social media. Like, is there something I can do? Actually, I, I think you were at one point, one of the reference points because you had like biting commentary. That was really good. I didn't nail it. So that didn't work for me. And then, uh, the other one, it was just, all I wrote was Dyatlov Pass.

• 2:07:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  And, and it's this, this fabulous story that I find myself, I am so interested in, in true or purported to be true, strange, dark, mysterious stories. And I had just, for whatever reason, never even considered, what if you just told one of those stories you really liked to the camera? And, and I am someone who tells stories. I knew I was.

• 2:07:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  And it never really clicked. And then I was at this water park with my family in Pennsylvania, this indoor water park, Great Wolf Lodge. And I was like, fuck it. I'm just gonna do a quick 60 second version of the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And, you know, I have no followers. It's TikTok, you know, TikTok before people even were really using TikTok in the US. And I tell this story and I post it and I really wasn't like, oh boy, I nailed it. This is it. I finally figured it out. It was like, oh, cool. It's something new. It's totally different. It's not SEAL related. And then I left my phone in the room to go down to the water park with my wife and kids. I came back and there's five million views, like, and I couldn't even open my phone. There were so many notifications. So it was

• 2:08:04Speaker 00

  Are you familiar with the story, Al? Can we, okay, hold on. I gotta use the bathroom. But then can we do like, uh, this is, it's pretty.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  It's a great story.

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  I think it's good entryway into a lot of the other content, which I'm sure we have a bunch of questions specifically on.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  Nice.

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