#2543 - MrBallen

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 0:13Speaker 03

  It's going good, man. This is crazy. I can't believe I'm here.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here.

• 0:20Speaker 03

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

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, it is always weird when you go someplace where you, like, the first time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way. Like, you're in the building, like, what the fuck? This is the actual Howard Stern Show that I used to listen to on the radio? Like, it really freaked me out. I couldn't sleep the night before. I did yoga in my hotel room, tried to calm down.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  When was this? When did you do this?

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Long time ago. 2001 or something like that.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Was this like, prime Fear Factor days?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  You know what? I might have done it before I did Fear Factor.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Great show, by the way, dude.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Great show. Seriously.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it was like a good sign our society was about to crumble.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  When historians go back and look at like the decline of society, they're like, remember when they started making people eat dicks on TV? They started making people eat animal balls and animal dicks on TV? That might have been...

• 1:27Speaker 03

  That was the start. And then it was, that was Rogan's interview on, on, on that show. What's his name again? I just blacked out the guy you just said you had an interview with. Oh my, Howard Stern.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Well, it was like, I did, we did Fear Factor, it started airing right after September 11th. Like, literally right after.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Fear Factor, yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  And one of the narratives, one of the reporters asked me, and like, one of those stupid press junket things you have to do, was, is, do you think it's appropriate to scare Americans right after what just happened on 9/11? I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 2:04Speaker 03

  This is on me now?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  I'm like, what are you talking about? It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks. Okay?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  It's very simple.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Shut the fuck up. Watch it or don't watch it. Who cares? But, it's like, if you wanted to look at like, where society started, it used to be like, Friends, Seinfeld, fucking, you know?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  The good old days, if you will.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  The good old days, Miami Vice. It was television shows that were like, shows. And then all of a sudden, anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal dicks.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  That's true. That was the threshold.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Pretty good.

• 2:41Speaker 02

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

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could never do that.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, well, you're not stupid.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Or you're not young, or you're not desperate. We had a lot of people that were just in like credit card debt and shit, and they were like, look, if I can win this fucking thing. Like, normal people. They're like, it could be fun, I'll tell my kids about it, we'll watch this forever, and I can win $50,000 so I can pay off my credit card debt.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  That's noble, dude.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes people have to do what they have to do, you know? But, but there's also a lot of people that want attention in any way possible. And that's like, the people that are, you know, you see so many people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing to say, but they're just trying to find something where people will pay attention to them. What's running up to people and slapping them, throwing glasses of water in their face, whatever they have to do. Anything they have to do to get attention. And if you trace that back, it kind of started with reality shows, where people started to be able to get attention just being a buffoon.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  There was a, I covered a story, so, so, for those who don't know me, I tell strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet. And I covered a story that was like, the epitome of this. It's, it's the idea of doing anything for clicks. I don't know the dates, but it was like, within the past 10, 15 years, there was this group of, or there was this one Russian influencer. This is, this is, I want to say circa 2010. And she wanted to do something really special for her birthday, to document her birthday and, and get as many clicks as possible. And she filled this pool up with dry ice.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Water plus dry ice. And she invited all her friends over. And they, like, took, they documented themselves going into this pool. And she has, I think, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers at the time. And so everyone's like, oh, it's the big birthday celebration. I think it was live. And they go into the tub, and the music's playing, and then no one comes out of the tub. And it's just this silence. They all die. They all die from suffocation, I think it was. Not exactly sure how you die from dry ice, but it's, I think it eradicates the oxygen. It's like, who's died? But it's like...

• 5:06Speaker 02

  How many people died?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  I'm gonna say it's like, yeah, three. There you go, three people.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  What? First of all, like, dry ice, you can't even get on your skin.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you only jumped into a pool of it.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I was thinking it would just tortured their skin. Three die in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool. I wonder how much dry ice takes to kill three people?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  I think a better question is, what was the engagement like on that post? Because in some ways, that's what it's all about.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Look at the name. Ekaterina Dedenko.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  A popular Instagram influencer. There we go.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Focusing on pharmaceutical products. What? With more than a million followers. Two people died at the scene, a third died in the hospital. Russia's investigative committee said in a statement announcing the criminal probe into the incident, but you do not want to get arrested and go to jail in Russia.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  They don't fuck around.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Generally not.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  They do not fuck around. Ask Brittany Griner. They don't fuck around.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  She's, she's out now.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's out. But she did nine months.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  That's not good.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Was it nine or 10? I think she was sentenced for nine fucking years.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  And that was for marijuana possession at the airport?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  She just had a CBD vape pen. I mean, I guess it was probably marijuana. But it was a vape pen. And they...

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Jail.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Put her in jail. Like, hardcore jail, for nine fucking years.

• 6:31Speaker 03

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

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Or they pissed off Putin.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, I don't know, man. But it's, it's a gnarly place over there.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you better be friends with the right people over there. You can't fuck around.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  No, dude.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  You can't fuck around. That's why, like, I mean, how many times have like, political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned, or gotten murdered, or, and not just him, but a bunch of other prominent figures that had other people running against them, and...

• 7:12Speaker 03

  It's a shady business over there, dude.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the shadiest, it's the shadiest. Make sure for, for some very interesting people, though. Russian people are fascinating. I've met a bunch of brilliant Russian people, you know?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I found that they're very, in my limited exposure...

• 7:28Speaker 02

  This guy.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, here we go.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Oh, and this guy tries to get out that little slit first.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Hold on a second. He doesn't give up. He doesn't make it out.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right, he goes through the roof.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  He's smart. I'm amazed that he was able to do that, though.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  What a fucking psycho. Look at him. He looks like a psycho, though. He looks like a guy that should be dead.

• 7:48Speaker 02

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• 8:43Speaker 02

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• 10:05Speaker 02

  candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter dot com slash Rogan. That's ziprecruiter dot com slash Rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. It's like a guy that probably spent a lot of time in jail.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  He was climbing through the fucking, they're pulling his pants off. They're gonna tase him in his nuts.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  That's not okay. That's not...

• 10:30Speaker 02

  It's a rough spot. Rough spot on earth. Tough people. Um, how did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, well, I originally was in the military. I was a SEAL. I did seven years in the teams. And then when I got out in 2017, I kinda drifted a little bit, you know? I did some work with charity, did some veteran charity work. And I don't know, I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years. And I'm married, I got three kids, you know? So I'm sort of like trying to figure it out. I have this small pension coming in that's enough to sort of subsist on. But then, uh, I actually, I remember watching a lot of Gary Vee. And more specifically, I saw Gary Vee was just, every post he did, it was like, everybody, no matter how old you are, no matter what you're doing, you should be posting content online.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Like, everyone should be doing it. And when I was in the military, you're sort of in a bubble. I mean, you certainly have access to the internet and all the things that everybody else does in the civilian world. But especially in the SEAL teams, from my experience, you're so like tribal. All your time is spent really with your teammates or at the team. It's very isolated and you don't even realize it. And so I was not, I didn't have social media when I got out. I wasn't up to date on modern stuff. And Gary Vee was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing. They were like, this is what you do, you know? As a civilian, you post constantly. And I began, in addition to doing some charity work I was doing,

• 12:08Speaker 03

  just trying my hand at social media, you know? Posting content, it's like so bad. What was the intent? You know, honestly, there wasn't a clear intent, other than, eh, what the hell? Like, it doesn't, I'm already paying for the internet, I already own a phone. Effectively, the worst that'll happen is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about. Or maybe my friends and family will see and it'll be embarrassing. But my, I've always been someone that's been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing myself. I mean, if you think about SEAL training, a big part of it is you're raising your hand in a pretty public way, at least amongst your circle of friends and family, saying, I'm gonna go see if I'm good enough. And a lot of people aren't. And so I went through that process and was, and I narrowly got through,

• 12:53Speaker 03

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

• 13:37Speaker 03

  And there's UFO sightings here. I thought it was fascinating. And on a whim, in 2020, when my social media career is basically non-existent, I was at this water park, an indoor water park with my wife and kids, a great wolf lodge in Pennsylvania, great spot. And I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna try something I haven't tried on my social media attempts so far. I'm gonna tell like a crazy mystery, a true mystery that I think is really interesting. Because I think it's cool. It's the first time, I'm not trying to copy trends or like do Gary Vee content. I'm just gonna like tell a story I like. And I pull out my phone and I tell this 60-second rendition of this mystery called the Dyatlov Pass mystery. Are you familiar with this? No.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Oh, great, it's a great story. I post the 60-second version of the story, but I'll tell you the story in a minute. I leave my phone in the room, because I'm going to the water park, indoor water park. I don't want to get wet, so I leave it there, come back two hours later. Millions of views on this video. And I've never gotten views on anything, and it's millions of views. There's like- In just a few hours? In a few hours, like five million views on this video. What, was it TikTok? TikTok, this is when TikTok was just to the moon. So there's this, it's an amazing story. You probably have heard of it, because it's one of those stories that it's made its rounds on the internet. So in, remember, I told, the 60-second version was gritty, but it had the pictures and stuff. So in 1959, there were these nine hikers, actually there was 10.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  These 10 young, like 20-something-year-old hikers in Russia. And they were like the best mountaineers in Russia at the time. And they were going for their, what's called their Level 3 hiking test. Which sounds sort of lame, but it's effectively, at the time in Russia, this is like the top credential for mountaineers. If you have this credential, you are the best mountaineer in the land. And the way the test worked is, effectively, you're in a class of your own at this level already. It's sort of like being a PhD student, where you sort of create your own material. You have to do that for this test. You map out a route that you'll take, that, you know, effectively checks off all the boxes of difficulty. You put this map down, somebody approves, this is gonna be hard enough,

• 15:49Speaker 03

  that if you successfully navigate this course that you've mapped out in X amount of time, if you do that, you pass the test, you're a Level 3 mountaineer. And so these 10 hikers, eventually, actually only nine left. One had a dental issue, so he spared himself. Nine of these hikers, they step out, I think it was in January of 1959, to do this hike that's been planned out. And they brought cameras along. And they're like this young, they're beautiful, they're all like couples, they're all friends, and it's- Sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie. This gets wild. If you've not heard this story, you're in for a treat, because the pictures are crazy. They step out, and the Ural Mountains is rugged. It's like these huge windswept icy mountains.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  There's like a couple of sections of forest, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be. And so these hikers step off and they start taking pictures. And even though it's 1959, the pictures they're taking could be taken today. It's almost like selfie style, they're smiling, everyone's in such good spirits. They know they're gonna pass this test. This is nothing for them. This is a victory lap. And so off they go into the Ural Mountains. It's gonna be like a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out, or I guess finished with their route, I think on February 12th. So it's a several-week-long hike, February 12th. And they were supposed to send some message to say they were complete with the hike. February 12th comes, and no message is sent.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  No one gets word that these nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains. And at first, to be honest, no one was really that concerned, because, one, there's nine of them. They are quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land. If anybody can withstand the elements, it's them. And so there wasn't this immediate call to action. But over the coming days after February 12th, the families of these nine hikers got really concerned. They're like, we haven't heard from them, where are they? Like, the government needs to get involved, somebody needs to go looking for them. And so eventually, at the end of February, a search party is launched for these hikers. And at first, it was just a couple of volunteers, it was some students from a university. It was not that serious of a search.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  But they eventually come across their campsite, and pictures are taken of their campsite. So from a strategic perspective, not that I claim to be a mountaineer, but if you were gonna be setting up a place, if you were gonna set your tent up in a really rugged environment like the Ural Mountains, the worst place to put your tent is the side of a windswept mountain where there are no trees. Because you'll get no, it'll be relentless wind, any weather's gonna be worse up there. You're on a slope, avalanche risk. I mean, the worst place you could put your tent is the side of a mountain. And so they're looking for these missing hikers, who were the best hikers. And they find their tent, their one canvas tent. It's right in the middle of this pass, I believe it's called the Dyatlov Pass,

• 18:46Speaker 03

  which is why the mystery has been named the Dyatlov Pass. It's just one lone tent, and there's no trees, nothing. It's just, and so they go up to the tent, the hikers are not there. But the tent is collapsed, as you see in the picture there. And they look inside the tent, and there's clothes, like cold weather gear, there's pots, and there's a lot of equipment that you would imagine they would have brought with them out here, still in the tent. The hikers are missing. And they discover, through whatever testing they did, that there was a cut made in the tent that apparently was made from the inside out. Someone took a knife, and I believe it was a knife, and cut the tent open from the inside out. And so they have all this equipment, and they're thinking, this is, we're in the middle of the Ural Mountains.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  It's like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit out here, it's the middle of winter. You need this equipment to survive. Where are the hikers? They left all their equipment in their tent, where are they? And so the search expanded exponentially at that point, because now these volunteers have discovered this incredible site. They can't find the hikers. A bigger search party comes out there, and they discover footprints that are about 100 feet away from where the tent was found. It's a little bit further down the mountain. And the footsteps, some of them are two boots, you know, matching boots of someone's steps. There's eight or nine prints, I couldn't be sure, eight or nine sets of prints. Some have only one boot on, like barefoot and a boot, others are just barefoot. And remember, this is the middle of winter in Russia.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  But they're looking at these prints. And if you look at the tent, it's been cut from the inside. They've clearly abandoned their tent. Something's happened. But the cadence of the footprints as it picks up where they found it near the tent, going down the mountain away from the campsite. They're walking. There's no sense of urgency. Someone analyzed the footprints and they're walking. So they're walking down the mountain, some without boots on, some with one boot on, leaving most of their equipment behind. And so the search party, they follow these prints down to the edge of this ominous looking forest. There's only so many forests out there. This is one of them, this relatively small but fairly dense forest. And the prints sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  And so they go into the trees, they're looking around, and they eventually come across this big cedar tree. And at the base of the cedar tree is this little burned out fire, like a puny little fire, and then crouched around it is one of the hikers who's deceased. And I believe there's a picture, I don't know if you can show it on your channel.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a picture of one of the hikers who is sort of almost like he was trying to get warmed against this fire.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  That one?

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I don't think it's that one. There are some right near the cedar tree. I'm sure you can find them.

• 21:27Speaker 02

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• 22:45Speaker 03

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

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  They look at the tree that was at the base of where the fire was, and there are signs that something was trying to climb the tree. There's broken branches and the like, and there's human tissue. That sounds way more extreme than it's supposed to, but there's human tissue far, pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. And then they examined the bodies, and they found one of the men had his hand, part of his hand he had bitten off and was in his throat, or it might have just been human tissue as well, but it was clearly in his mouth, like he was eating his own flesh, or it at least arrived in his mouth. So they're dead. And so the search expands within this forest, and they find three more hikers, sort of about 100 or 200 feet away from this tree.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  They're in similar condition. They're all deceased, they're all sort of ragged. Some of them are only wearing, you know, a little bit of clothing. They're all dead. But they can't find the remaining four hikers. They continue to search for the next several days, but the weather was pretty severe. And so ultimately, they decided that at this point, it's a recovery mission. We're not going to find them. They're going to be dead. So they waited until the thaw in May, and once the snow had thawed a bit, they came out there and they found this, what looked to be like the, they believed that a snow fort had been made, maybe 300 or 400 feet away from that cedar tree, which they wouldn't have seen it during the winter. It was barely, you wouldn't have seen it.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  But it had melted down enough, and the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave. And the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries. They're all deceased. The woman, or one of them had a crush injury. His chest was, they compared the injury to his chest, equivalent to being struck by a car at high speed. However, he had no or limited lacerations, like there was no impact to his body. His chest was sort of just inexplicably caved in. And so he's been crushed. One guy, I think his skull was fractured and a piece of his skull was missing. But the one that stands out is there was one hiker, a woman, who her lips and her

• 25:23Speaker 03

  eyes were missing, and some accounts claim that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed. At least there was like very tight lines of how her, it was predation, animal predation, you'd see tearing.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  This was like relatively straight lines where her lips were removed. And then another hiker, his eyes were also missing. And so they're all dead. And they also noticed that the woman was wearing men's clothing or some clothing that was clearly not hers, like, and then one of the men or a couple of the men were wearing some of her clothing, like they had exchanged clothing. And they found trace levels, albeit small, but trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing, and they're all dead. And so now all the hikers have been found. And by this point, this is in May of 1960, I believe it is at this point. This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent to being super viral today. Everybody was talking about it. The families are very outspoken about it. People want answers. They want to know what happened.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  And so the Russian government, they launched this investigation into what happened out there in the Dyatlov Pass. And quickly, they shut down this investigation, like very quickly they shut it down. The only things people heard were, there were numerous reports from military personnel and some civilians who apparently were in the area, in the Ural's, that claimed to have seen glowing orbs, like fireballs. I think they described them as being balls of fire and light shooting up and down. It's hard to tell if it was in the same area where the hikers were, but there were all these independent reports of strange lights over the Ural Mountains that could corroborate or could line up with when those hikers all died.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  And then also, lastly, the Russian government came out and said, well, we've determined that the nine hikers died from an overwhelming, or I think they called it a compelling force. And then they closed it. They, I believe they made it completely confidential. The families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down. And then in 2020, the reason I told it is because it sort of began making rounds because I believe some of the pictures had been redacted. And you could see these pictures. And so I said at the start of my video, at the end of this 60-second clip, you're going to Google two words, and it was Dyatlov Pass. And so I teased the story and said, Google it for yourself, and it's a whole rabbit hole of crazy stuff.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  That's a crazy story. So compelling force is a very weird way to describe a bunch of people dying. Compelling force?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  It might have been compelling natural force, but I

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Okay, well, that makes more sense. You froze to death.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Well, they could have come out and said that.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  They basically said

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Yep. Are you sure it's not a translation issue?

• 28:06Speaker 03

  There are several translations of how it came out, and it effectively amounts to some sort of compelling, overwhelming force.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people die in autopsy reports than we do, maybe?

• 28:22Speaker 03

  I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm not sure on that.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  It might be like the way Russian language works and where they describe things. Like they might have categories for deaths. And compelling natural force might just mean like

• 28:33Speaker 03

  It could be nothing.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Freezing to death is in the same category as like dying in the Mojave Desert.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  I think that that's, I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational happened. I mean, when you become hypothermic, you can have, it's called paradoxical undressing, where at your final stage of when you're so cold, you actually get hot and you take your clothes off. And I would imagine if you're in the final stages of dying, you might do some funny things and also

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Would you cut your lips off, though?

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Would you surgically remove your lips?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  And where are the lips? But then the question is like, is there an image of that? Like, can we see it? Like, this is one of the things that people talk about all the time when it comes to crop circles, or excuse me, cattle mutilation. I put them all in the same category, like who the fuck knows what that is. But cattle mutilation, one of the weird things that they associate with extraterrestrials or whatever they think it is, is that these cuts are very surgical.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  And it's not an animal just tearing apart a cow, that these cuts, they look like they're made with a scalpel or perhaps some sort of a laser. And also, these creatures are completely drained of blood. So I'd like, but I've seen the cattle mutilation images, and you're like, wow, that is strange. I'd like to see what their lips look like.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  They, I do know that actually, and this has nothing to do with the fact that I posted about it, because the Dyatlov Pass gets posted about quite a bit. But I think it was in 2022, Russia actually reexamined the Dyatlov Pass mystery now and sort of said, okay, we're going to look at it again. And they determined that an avalanche, like a slab of ice broke loose, a huge slab. I could, this could be totally wrong. I know it's an avalanche or slab of ice that they basically said was responsible for all of this, that it led to them somehow becoming exposed, hypothermia and the like. But

• 30:28Speaker 03

  It doesn't really answer a lot of the questions in my mind. It certainly could have happened, as I told you, they, for whatever. Also, why did they stop in the middle of the wind side of the slope? I mean, you're-

• 30:38Speaker 02

  They probably were trying to make their way across and they couldn't do it. And they said, "We have to stop, but just stop right here. I can't go any further." And they all argued and then they decided to put a tent right there. It's also, I mean, you know this better than anybody. When you get tired, you make poor decisions. That's what they're trying to do to you in BUDs, right? They're trying to make you quit. They're trying to break you down, right? When people get tired, they get very irrational. And they also have very little processing power. They don't think about all the possibilities, what could go wrong, what could go right. And they think they can't possibly keep going. And the problem is if you have nine of you and one of you is a pussy, you know? You got a real problem. Like, do you let Bob die? Or do you stay here with Bob? When you can keep going?

• 31:23Speaker 02

  And Bob is just like, "We can't do this." Like, Bob, like, that's the horror movie scene, right? There's always this one fucking guy. He's like, "Fuck this, man, I'm fucking staying right here." You're like, "Jesus, Bob, we can keep walking, keep walking."

• 31:37Speaker 03

  That, that reality-

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Just count 10 steps and then count 10 steps more and then just keep doing that.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  That, what you're describing is such a natural human thing, which is when someone, when the lowest common denominator in your group is struggling. Even if you're frustrated, a lot of times, people have an inclination to lowering what you're doing to help that person. In SEAL training, I mean, what's made clear immediately is, to some degree, that's noble. To some degree. But a lot of times, you're gonna get more people killed that way. So, those people that are gonna hold you back in training have to be identified and kicked out now.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  And so, it became clear that if you're the weakest link, you're probably getting left behind in training. But then in real life, it's the reverse.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  BUDs is a genius way of filtering out the pussies. It's genius. It's the best way. You have to, there's no, there's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress, other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress. And there's some people, through whatever, for whatever reason, at this stage of their life, they can't handle it. And maybe they will be in the future. Maybe this is gonna be a good experience for them, they're gonna toughen up and, look, Goggins talks about it all the time, about when, before he ever got into the SEALs, he was 300 pounds and eating milkshakes. He was fat, he couldn't run around the block, but he decided to become a different person. And he did it. You can do that. But at that moment, you're gonna quit.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  And so, at that moment, we have to get rid of you. And maybe you can become someone in the future that won't quit, but right now, you're quitting.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I sometimes get asked, not often, but I've been asked, you know, when you were going through selection, did you ever have a moment where you thought, or you thought about quitting and you suppressed it? And I only say this because I know this is, this is shared amongst a lot of the people that I went through training with. I didn't. I did not have a moment where I thought, "Oh, boy, I'm on the precipice of quitting. I better, I better hold on." Did I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions and questioning, "Can I even do this?" Definitely. But there's something like fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing to stop. And you learn that that is something that I believe is innate. Do you have the ability to keep going through failure?

• 34:01Speaker 03

  And they put a lot of test gates into BUDs to basically force it upon you. Most notably, the, not even Hell Week. Hell Week is the most well-known test of endurance, where you're awake for five and a half days, basically. But there's one that's even simpler, that it's so easy, if you're willing to do it, easy as a stretch. It's not that hard, but you really need to be committed to doing it. And it's the 50-meter underwater swim. You do it day two of the first phase of training, and everybody knows you're gonna do it. All you have to do is, okay, get in the pool, swim one length, and then swim back without surfacing until you're done. It is probably just beyond what's comfortable for someone who's a decent enough swimmer, but you have plenty of lead time for this. You know this is gonna happen.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  People will train for years before they go. When you, when I did it, the first leg, it's stressful, but as soon as you've made the turn and you're on your way back, you realize that if you've committed to doing it, you're like, "Oh, dude, this is, this is really not bad. It's so quick, it's so short, it's all, it's all over." People that would quit on that, didn't quit at the end of the 50. They quit on the first leg. You're not physically done yet, but you're mentally done. I mean, I'm generalizing, but if you see that, that type of phenomenon in training quite a bit, where it's, are you prepared to keep going through adversity? Or are you just gonna say, "It's too much and I don't wanna do it anymore"?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  I wonder if they've ever sat down and tried to engineer a program to alter people's psychology. You know, you would think that the more people that you could get that would be able to figure out a way through something very difficult, where your mind wants to quit, your body wants to quit, the more people that you could figure out how to train to that position, the better. Or is it like, I have friends that are MMA coaches that don't wanna work with anybody who needs a mental coach.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 35:58Speaker 02

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

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  These guys are gonna be able to lose, dust themselves off, figure it out and come back-

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  And be stronger. And then there's some guys that, like, every big moment is, the moment overwhelms them. And they're, they're just, they just cave to the pressure. They just can't handle it. And then they go through some sort of a mental coaching session, and that, but the core, their personality, whatever it is that's about them, what makes them them, is just fragile, for whatever reason. And the question is, I wonder if they've ever tried to engineer a program to strengthen people's psychology, just the same way you can strengthen people by lifting weights or by running or whatever? I wonder if there's a, like, there was a concerted effort to say, like, "Well, we have so many people crashing out.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  What if we had 50% less people crashing out, then we'd have 50% more elite operators." This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th, because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So, instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health

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• 38:20Speaker 02

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• 38:32Speaker 03

  I know that when I went through training, and I have no idea if it's still the case now, but I was in, I was in SEAL training in earnest in 2011 and 2012. And there were psychologists on, on staff that you didn't, you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch. But I remember there being parts of training, which were sort of funny, because they punctuated the brutality of training. It would be, we'd be out, you know, doing the obstacle course for an hour, and then we'd be doing a four-mile run, then we're swimming, then we're doing this, we're getting beat up, and then they're like, "All right, now, go in the classroom." You go in the classroom and you're, and you're talking to this woman who's a psychologist, and she's teaching you how to like, it's called arousal control.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  You know, how to, how to take down your, your mental state in the middle of high-stress moments, and all the instructors are on the side like, "You better listen to this." You know? And it's, it's just funny. So, there was attempts made, but I, coming from, coming from having done it, the, there's such a wide variety of people that are successful in training, that it's, I have, I have seen and heard, that it's hard to pinpoint, what is, what is the appropriate indication you're gonna be successful? Like, that's the thing they're trying to identify, is what are the, the pools of people that traditionally do well in SEAL training? Because they're, they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen. But the two things they found, there's two, there's two places where the most mentally

• 39:57Speaker 03

  tough people, in terms of success in SEAL training, one is wrestling. Basically, any level of wrestling. Wrestlers have an incredibly high success rate in BUDs. And water polo. Those are the two that they have determined through their studies are the grittiest, most resilient folks when it comes to SEAL training.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Water polo. So, in water polo, how deep is the water?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  I think it's more that they tread water the whole fucking time.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, is the water so deep that they can't touch the ground?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  No, no, you're treading the entire time.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  And you're playing a game.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Dude, there was a guy.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  There was a guy in my class. So the way it works is you have your enlisted guys and there's, you know, upwards of 100 dudes in a class that are enlisted. And then you have, I think, maybe eight to 10 that are officer candidates. It's, yeah, we're all SEAL candidates, that's true, but the difference between an officer candidate and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous. The guys over here, the enlisted guys, are just like salt of the earth, just like, I don't give a fuck, we're gonna see what happens. The officer candidates, they have some of the most impressive resumes that you can have as like a 20 something year old kid. You have dudes that are, I was a Rhodes Scholar, I played, I walked onto the Stanford football team, that level of prestige.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  And also, my family's friends with George Bush, and I'm also like a world-class swimmer, and I'm like an expert marksman. Those are the dudes that become your officer candidates, because there's so few slots on any given year for these spots. They're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed. It's so rare that an officer candidate does not pass. Like, an officer who's in BUDs, you might as well just call him a SEAL at that point.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  The vetting is crazy for SEALs. Not on the enlisted side, we're still figuring that out, but the officer side, they're highly vetted. And one of the guys that was one of my officers in one of the classes I was in was a water polo player from the University of Tennessee. And he's this big, big, strong guy. He's an awesome dude. And there's this part of training, halfway through training, it's second phase, it's broken into three phases, and it's the water phase. And it's really, statistically, everybody who gets to second phase mostly makes it through. But it's because you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase, like hell week and the 50-meter underwater swim, that this is already the pool of people that's just gonna push through the misery and pass stuff. So it's misleading.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  The second phase of training, I would argue, is exponentially more challenging than first phase. But the only people who do it are through first phase. And so, 90% of people pass second phase. But it's really hard. And there's two tests in particular within second phase that are notoriously just brutal. One of them is called pool competency, which is a 20-minute exam of your ability to fix problems with your scuba tanks underwater. Where basically, you go to the bottom of the pool with your tanks on, and when your test begins, you're in the section of this huge pool called the combat training tank. It's a, there's like the six-foot section, then it slopes down to the nine-foot section, and then it slopes down to the 15-foot section.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  And your test takes place in the nine-foot section, and you just crawl along the lane marker, as if you're doing lap swimming, there's a lane on the bottom of the pool, there's like eight or nine lane markers. And you crawl back and forth only in the nine-foot section. And two instructors, per student, come down and turn your air off, tie knots in your hoses, and as soon as you're being touched, you gotta go into the fetal position and wait for like the attack to stop. It takes like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, you're out of air. And this is a 20-minute test, you're building up hypercapnia as you go. And then you gotta fix your problems, and the problems get progressively harder to solve, but the procedures they teach you are the same procedures for every problem. If you go to step one, it doesn't work, you go to step two. If that doesn't work, you go to step three, until you go all the way through your steps. But it teaches you come.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  So even though you're on the last problem you're gonna solve at minute 18 and you're about to pass out, you have to show them that you'll do step one, step two, all the way through. So it's about being calm. I was horrible at this test, by the way. I passed by the skin of my teeth. This dude passed the test first try, but that's not where the story comes in. This water polo player, he blazes through that test, no problem. The other test is just the tread. That's all it's called, the tread. You spend five minutes in the pool with your twin 80 tanks on, which are neutral in the water, they're pretty heavy outside of the water, but they're cumbersome on your back. You got no fins, you got a weight belt on, hands up out of the water.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Weight belt?

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like five pounds or something. And you tread for five minutes. And that's the whole test.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Hands out of the water.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Hands out of the water.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  So you only tread with your legs?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  No fins.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Tanks on. The only, the only way to do it, realistically, is imagine, imagine hopping on like a bike, like in the gym, and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue. Hold it for like three, four minutes. And don't, it doesn't, not even, you don't even need to go that fast, but it's constant, that's the only way to do it. Unless you're an exceptionally talented water polo player who's mastered the art of the egg beater, where they basically have found a way to move their legs that's like the most efficient way to tread water. And this dude, I kid you not, who blazed through pool comp first try, no problems whatsoever, was like joking around after his test, he gets him for the tread, and he could, he

• 45:21Speaker 03

  could hold himself almost to his belly button, probably like nipple to belly button line, fully out of the water, just no problem.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Just no problem, like practically smiling, because he knows, this is my domain, I can do this all day long. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  That's crazy, I would have never thought of that.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  First of all, I didn't know that water polo players had to tread the entire time, which is insanely impressive. Like, how long is a game?

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if they can go to the edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch water polo?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Most of the time, they're just treading.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  I'm no water polo player, but my understanding is that the game is played while treading.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  I never would have imagined, but now that you described it that way, like, that might be the hardest sport on earth.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  Oh, dude.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  That makes baseball look so easy.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Remember like David Wells of the Yankees? He was like a huge fat guy, smoking cigarettes in between innings?

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Babe Ruth.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Dude, it's crazy.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Babe Ruth, eating hot dogs, big old belly.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  I remember in boot camps, this is not even, before you even get to BUDs, there's actually, it's funny, the, when you go in, you know, I went in as a civilian, so I signed this contract where basically you say, okay, I'm gonna go to boot camp, become a sailor, and then I'll have my shot at going to BUDs. It's called the SEAL Challenge Contract. And, you know, the way I looked at it is I'm like, okay, I've prepared for BUDs, that's what I, as a civilian, that's what I was training for. I didn't think at all about boot camp, like, what's two months of Navy boot camp gonna be? Because what my head is focused on is BUDs, that comes after. So when I shipped out to boot camp, I had put virtually no thought into what those two months were gonna be like in Great Lakes, Illinois.

• 47:02Speaker 03

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

• 47:46Speaker 03

  across the Navy. And here comes the SEAL recruits in the 800 Division. They're civilians, they're not even sailors yet. There is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show up like, yeah, I'm going to BUDs. Like, there's just an attitude of like, the instructors, they, they want you to understand that like, you don't have a clue what you're getting yourself into. And so in boot camp, those two months, your instructors are not SEALs, but they just like torture you, because they're like, this is nothing compared to what you're gonna have in BUDs. And one of the things we would do is, is there was all sorts of stupid stuff, like push-ups and whatever, but there was this treading thing that we had to do. Where we'd go in the pool at like 5:00 in the morning, and like, it's so cold, and they

• 48:28Speaker 03

  would line us up, so we're all face like, if you were, I'd be right behind you, looking at the back of your head, you'd be looking at the next guy's back of his head, and they'd give us bricks, and you're just treading. And you gotta pass the brick up and down the line, and periodically, they'd give you two bricks. And so if anybody doesn't hold up their end of the bargain, quickly, the bricks get handed off to like one person, and no one wants the brick, you don't have fins on or anything, and guys are like sinking into the water, like truly about to pass out and blackout. But the level of oversight, not great, because it's sort of like, you don't know what you're getting into, tread, hold those bricks. And it's just mad, and they would leave us in there treading with bricks for so long that you're like, I'm gonna drown. I'm literally gonna drown if I keep this up. And then suddenly it'd be over, and you're like on the pool deck, vomiting, and you're

• 49:13Speaker 03

  thinking to yourself, holy shit, like, is this, this is not even as bad as BUDs? And then you get to BUDs, and you're like, no. No, that was worse.

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Well, that's probably good then.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  It was nice, yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  That's funny. Had those guys even been through BUDS?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Okay, so they were just making tough stuff for you to do.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Put on all your turtlenecks. We'd like, put on all our stupid like neoprene turtlenecks, like seven of them. Cause you have all this stupid clothing in your rack. And like, march around the, the compartment, the room you're in. And we would just like spend hours like marching around the compartment sweating our ass off in our like turtlenecks. It's stuff like that. Or we'd do bird watching where they would have us just face a wall and be at attention for like two, three hours. Just staring at paint. But it's just arbitrary. It's like, you don't know what you're getting into. BUDS is gonna be so much worse. And like, you don't even know what you're talking about.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  What kind of weird people wanna do that to people?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  There was a lot of like, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. I know more than you. I've done real stuff in the Navy. But like, they have this moment where we're still civilians and we, we haven't gone to training and they know that virtually all of us are gonna quit. So this is a safe group to sort of flex around, you know?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 50:23Speaker 03

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

• 50:48Speaker 02

  They don't give you caffeinated coffee?

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Well, there was like, it was, it was coffee, but I mean, like, it, it was like you pushed a button and this brown shit came out and it was like, it said cafe something on it. I, I was like, that's coffee. I'm not gonna question it. Cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna suck myself out. And I was drinking this shitty ca- coffee.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, have some coffee.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, you're freaking me out.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Oh man. Yeah, that's funny.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, what we were talking about before, that there's no other process to figure out whether someone's gonna be able to handle pressure. Then to put them through it and see what happens. If you're passing bricks, I mean, maybe that's not the best example of it. Cause it seems like those guys were being a little sadistic.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  And probably, um, at least you would imagine that what they're doing in BUDS is tried and proven. They know what they're doing. These guys, it seems like they were just getting off on the fact they could tell you what to do. This episode is brought to you by Fox Nation. Real American Freestyle Wrestling is exclusively on Fox Nation. Every month, you get every feud, every match and every belt. If you love the UFC, this is where it all began. And now, one year after launching in Cleveland, RAF returns Saturday, August 22nd, for its biggest event ever, RAF 12. UFC champions, Olympic gold medalists, world champions,

• 52:12Speaker 02

  and one of the strongest men on the planet, all on one card. Jordan Burrows, who's been on the podcast before, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, takes on UFC standout Sean Brady. Bo Nickel meets Wyatt McKenley in a showdown between two of the sport's brightest stars. Plus, it's a main event rematch with Henry Cejudo getting another shot at the machine, Marab Dwavishwili. No cage, no gloves, no excuses. RAF 12, live from Cleveland, Saturday, August 22nd, streaming exclusively on Fox Nation. Go to FoxNation.com and sign up today.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  I, uh, so when I, so I got hurt in Afghanistan in 2014. Um, and after I got hurt, I'll tell you in a minute what happened. I, I got debriefed essentially by the senior commander of the group that I was a part of. And it was just like, hey, tell us what happened, what went wrong, what would you have done differently? And, and truthfully, and I, I wasn't kissing anybody's ass. I wasn't trying to be, uh, you know, follow the rules kinda guy. I just said, you know what? The training works. Like, un, the training is unbelievable. I saw it for myself firsthand. So we were in Afghanistan in 2014 and this was the tail end of, this is my only combat tour I did as my first deployment.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  This is 2013, 2014. And we had been going into this town called Zarganshar, which is this fairly urban Afghan town that was literally on the other side of the one paved road, Route Utah they called it, that ran through Afghanistan, got IED'd constantly. We were on one side of the road, behind some Hesko barriers. And Zarganshar is like this sprawling, pretty large urban village. And historically, I don't know how long it had been going on for, but there had just been non-stop fighting in Zarganshar between NATO forces and loads of different factions of fighters, the Taliban, Pakistani fighters, you name it. And so when we got in country in 2013, we turned over with SEAL Team Eight.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  And they said, basically, you know, they're, your job here is to try to quell the, the flow of suicide bombers into Kabul. And there was a couple of things they told us to focus on, but really, if you want some action, you just go to Zarganshar. Because they're so battle hardened in there, the people that are still there, that if you go in there, they're gonna fight you. You know, if you wanna find weapon caches, they're gonna be in there. And so over the course of the deployment, this is like five months in, we had gone into Zarganshar a, a great deal. And truthfully, it wasn't like we walked in and it was crazy every time, but we definitely got engaged. There was definitely more contacts there than anywhere else. But on this one day, this is like five months into the deployment, this is, uh, in April.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  So it was the fighting season that started. So the warmer weather had come in. And we sort of put ourselves in a terrible position, a little bit by accident. So the city, it's not really a city. It's, it's a, it's a village, but it's, it's bigger than a village. It's somewhere between a city and a village for Afghanistan. So it's like mud huts, but like tight together. Um, and it's really like well-defined, you know, it's almost like the edge of Zarganshar just becomes vacant desert on the outside. It's like this really isolated spot. We entered the city with our vehicles and then began infilling into the city. I forget exactly what our, our purpose was. I think there was like a, a bomb maker or something we were going after.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  But the, the rules of engagement that we were operating under effectively said, you can't engage, you can't offensively engage anyone. Unless, there's a couple of factors that could allow you to. But for the most part, you need to get shot at first to then shoot back. That's sort of the gist. And the people we would get into skirmishes with knew that a lot of times. And they'd be tactical about how they would go about shooting at us. And so we start making our infill from the edge of, you know, the, the city. And we get into this little narrow area where we knew we'd have to enter into this courtyard. And we start hearing chatter over the radios. So we, we, we had the ability to listen to just the open source radio

• 56:26Speaker 03

  that the fighters would use in the, in the village. And we heard them talking to each other. And it was clear they had spotted us. We're, it's broad daylight. This is not a shock. But they were clearly talking to each other and making plans to, to wait until we, and it was only 20 or 30 of us plus our partner force, wait until we got into that courtyard before you open up on them. Um, and I, I don't know if this was said explicitly, but the idea was they're not gonna do anything due to the rules of engagement. We can let them come into the courtyard and then open up on them. And there's a couple, uh, two-story buildings that overlook the courtyard. So it's pretty gnarly. Um, our team lead, who was fricking awesome, is fricking awesome.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  He stopped us and he's like, hold on a minute. We took cover behind this bridge that was right behind us. And he's like, wait, let's, let's figure this out. But we realized that now that we know where they are, we know they're in those second-story buildings overlooking that courtyard. They're now, they can see us. If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We can't like call in an airstrike. We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So it's a basically walking into an ambush. That's a, that's a bad idea. But if we go the other way, if we retreat, I told you that the edge of Zarganshar, it's, there's no cover. It's just open desert, if you will. And so there wasn't really a good way to, to exfil back to our vehicles without getting shot in the back. They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot at us anytime they want.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  And so we realized because of where they're positioned, we either had to go forward into effectively a known ambush or retreat and hope they don't get the drop on us and shoot one of us. And it's a pretty high chance someone was gonna get shot if we exfil'd. And so we sat there, we were thinking about it and we ultimately made the decision like, hey, we were Navy SEALs. Let's just go forward and, and process the threat. And so into the courtyard we go. It's on body cam. And, you know, it was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard, again, broad daylight, it's quiet. We had seen women and children run out of the village as we approached. So we knew only people here are gonna be fighters. And just machine guns opened up on us in this courtyard. And I say this without, I don't mean this in a sort of crass way,

• 58:36Speaker 03

  but thankfully, the only people who were hit in the opening volley were our dog and I believe two of the Afghan partner force guys that they got shot. Because if, if you, if you're gonna survive this, you need the SEALs. You don't need, you don't need anybody else. You need the SEALs to get out of this. And so we all took up our positions, sort of, we expected this to happen. And it became like this crazy, disjointed, like onesie twosie breaking off, clearing buildings, sometimes by yourself. Just madness for like the next six hours. It slowed down. It was not constant, but it was like six hours of urban, sketchy, roof to roof, building to building shooting. Um, and we were sort of getting our asses kicked.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  I mean, we just, we kept, we kept seeing people that would open up on us around, uh, like a corner. We'd go after them and they'd be gone. And we knew there were tunnels dug into the ground all over the place for people to escape. Um, and it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would, would vanish. And so finally, it's late at night. We've been there for six hours or so and we've gotten beaten up. No one's been killed on our side. The dog's fine. Um, and we were sort of like, man, I, I guess we just gotta go. We, you know, we didn't really accomplish anything. We just kinda got beat up today and we'll come back another time. You know, it didn't go well. And as we're getting ready to leave, and remember at this point, our group of 20 some odd SEALs,

• 59:56Speaker 03

  there's Afghan partner force as well, but the SEALs that were on the ground, we had broken up into different fire teams, little groups of dudes. Um, and I was with a fire team that was close to the exit we were gonna be taking. And one of the drones overhead, I think it was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas, they called out that they had seen what appeared to be military aged men, so ma'ams as they're called, sort of in the vicinity of where we would be ex-filling out of the city. And they weren't saying, "You better go over there and like shoot them," because rules of engagement say you can't do that. It was just sort of a, "Hey, be aware. As you exit, they might be setting up on you as you're leaving the city."

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  And so our fire team happened to be closest, and we decided we would just go over there and take a look. Our understanding is, now it's nighttime, we're on night vision. We believed, based on what was being passed to us, that we could go down this alleyway that would come to a T intersection, and when we reached the end of this alleyway, there'd be this low wall, like six foot tall wall, and we could peer over the wall into this field where these ma'ams are. And they didn't even know who they were. It could have been kids, it could have been nothing. But we believed we'd be able to look over the wall and look out somewhere on the other side of this field, we'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment of what to do. So we, super sneaky, make our way down this alleyway, being as quiet as we can.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  We get to that low wall, and immediately we start hearing someone talking. It's not our guys. We start hearing Pashtun being spoken on the other side of the wall. And we realize that there's been a mistake, a lost and trans, some things have miscommunicated to us. We are now closer than you and I are, right, the second to what actually was military aged men. There was at least two, I've heard as many as five, I actually don't know the exact number, but there were fighters hiding on the other side of that wall. Intentions unclear, but they're right there, and they haven't hurt us yet, and they're nervous. We can tell they're nervous, they're right on the other side of the wall, and we are in a tough, tough spot here. Because there's seven of us, we're so close to them that if someone even so much as like

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  farts right now, they're gonna hear us. And so our team leader, who was incredible, he went on to go to Team Six, he's one of the best dudes I've ever met, he had to make an on-the-ground decision. We gotta engage these guys. We can see they have weapons. One guy looked over and said they have weapons. This is all non-verbal. We're like making hand signals and stuff on night vision. And so one of our guy, our team leader gets down on a knee, and he tells one of the guys next to me to stand on his leg and start shooting. And so over the wall, he starts shooting, and there was at least two guys over there that already had grenades, they'd pulled the pins out on. So this is the moment they've had this, they're holding the grenades for this. So soon as the shooting started, grenades come over the wall, and this is, there's

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  a video of this, of the grenade comes, oh, you can't really tell, but it literally hit my shoulder, one of the grenades hit my shoulder, and then fell to the ground and detonated. But in the second that this happened, it's, we were under a drone that had a targeting strobe down on us, it was a flashing infrared strobe on us. Imagine if like God had a flashlight, and he was turning it off and on rapidly, and you can only see the light on night vision, and it's this cone of light that you're in, and this super intimate fight is happening, and I'm watching this grenade, time really slowed down, I see it for a second, because the light's on, the light comes off, it disappears, I see it for a second, and I remember feeling it hit my shoulder, and I'm not shooting, I'm not doing anything, I'm just next to the wall as all this shit's happening.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  And the thought I had was, like, fuck, it's gonna blow my head off, I know I'm dead, we're all probably gonna die here in a second, but my mom won't be able to see me again. Like, there will be no open casket, that's the first thought that goes through my head, my head's gonna be blown the fuck off. Hits my shoulder, and this is again, in a fraction of a second, the light comes on, goes off, it falls down lower, and it's like halfway down, now it's like halfway to the ground, and I'm thinking, oh shit, I'm definitely gonna die, but maybe my face will be intact, and my mom can see me again. Light goes off, on, off, on, it lands in the ground, and I turn slightly, and I'm like, oh shit, I might just lose my legs, like, this is great, like, I might live. And so all of us are in the lethal range, assuming this is a frag grenade, which I don't

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  think couldn't have been, it had to be an old-school pineapple grenade. We're all, all of us are in this horrible lethal zone. And two grenades go off, I tell people, "It felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my backside. It didn't hurt, it just felt like someone threw something at me." And then I'm just down on the ground. And my, my memory of what happened versus what actually happened are, couldn't have been more different. It would take me years before I actually sat down and debriefed this with the guy who ultimately saved my life, but my memory is, I go down, and I couldn't get my gun, my gun had been, the strap, the little strap had been blown off, my helmet had been blown

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  off, so I'm not on night vision, I'm just, there was pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark, and it's just fucking chaos. The thing is, is the fighters in that town, they didn't give a fuck about killing each other. If they could kill me, they'd kill their teammates as well. And so RPGs are just being arbitrarily fired from all, not all across the city, but from other locations, just in the vicinity of where this is happening, because there was a lull before this, so it's just fucking madness. And I couldn't stand up, I can't move, and I got dragged by one of my teammates, so this is my memory, and I got dragged from, I'm at the head of the T there, they brought me down the stem of the T, if you will, and I just got placed up against a wall.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  And I'm sitting there, and I have these tourniquets that are on my chest, that we rubber band them to our chest specifically, so they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in your limbs. And I was so weak and fucked up from this blast, that I literally couldn't pull the tourniquets off. And there's, I don't even know if anyone's alive, basically, at this point. I don't even know what's happening down in the contact zone, which is like 20 feet away from me, all I hear is gunfire, it's madness, and at any point, I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking kill me. Like, I'm dead, I'm dead no matter what here. And so I had this, this true, in my mind, like, near-death experience, where I, I sat

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  there, it's relatively well-loomed, and I suddenly lost my hearing, like, it's gone, completely gone. And there's good illumination, so I can see this small alleyway, I can see this flashes of light as, you know, rounds are coming in, and I just, I'm like, I'm in my head, I'm so aware that I'm alive, but I'm dying. And then my vision goes, I'm completely blind, like, can't see, I can't hear anything, but I was so lucid in my mind, so aware that I was alive, and I tell people that on a day-to-day basis, you live, and you don't think about it, you don't wake up and actively live, you don't think, "Today I'm gonna breathe, today my heart's gonna beat," you just do it, because that's your entire experience, is being alive, and your body knows how to

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  do that, your brain knows how to be alive. You also know how to die, you just haven't done it yet. And I had this really distinct feeling of like, oh shit, this is what it feels like when you shut down. It didn't hurt, it wasn't sad, it was just, it couldn't have been more matter-of-fact. And all I was thinking about, I had two thoughts, I had, what will my obituary say? Nothing in terms of substance, but will it say Jonathan Allen was killed in action? Or John Allen? So I was hung up on that, and I was also thinking about my wife, and how she'd be notified at home, and I was thinking, I wish we'd had kids, because now I don't have a legacy. And so I had this feeling of like letting go, I don't know, that's so cliche, but it

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  physically felt like I had let go. And I remember feeling the impact of the ground as I sort of keeled over, and I thought, that was it, like, I'm about to die, this is the end, you know? But then out of fucking nowhere, the legend that he is, his name is Kyle, he's a SEAL, fucking, comes out of nowhere, and he grabbed me and he put tourniquets on my legs, I'm still like in my blacked-out zone here, but I slowly regained sight and hearing, and the scene we're in is still terrible, there's still chaos happening everywhere, and Kyle, who's a sniper, he's a medic, he's the calmest dude under pressure, he's like, "Hey, it's gonna be okay, buddy, it's all good, stop the bleed, like, just stay here, like, you

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  know, put your gun up if you can, I'll be right back." Like, literally in hell all around us, couldn't have been more calm, he just runs down back to the contact zone, comes back up, he brings another guy out whose lung had collapsed, he's patching him up, smiling, everything's fine. Meanwhile, so I'm starting to see now, as I'm regaining consciousness, if you will, I'm seeing my teammates, who have also been fucked up from this grenade, but only me and one other guy were so affected by the grenade that we couldn't function. It was me and this guy whose lung had collapsed, he was like barely able to breathe. So we're down, but the other like five dudes, it's like, it's your job to get us out of here now, because we're fucked, we are pinned down and fucked here. One guy, the team lead, in one ear, he was working with multiple air assets overhead,

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  calling in what's called a danger-close airstrike, which is, you're effectively calling in an airstrike on yourself, you need special initialing from your higher officer, I think your commanding, not your commanding officer, like, one more senior than you has to approve the drop, because in essence, you could kill yourself doing it. So he was calling in an airstrike that needed to be exact, like fucking exact, on the other side of that wall. And then in the other ear, he's communicating with the rest of our disparate teams, which are broken up across the city, trying to tell them where we are. He's got two comms happening, and he's physically pulling people out of the contact zone with Kyle to get them to cover. And he's engaging the enemy, and we're getting shot at. Holy shit.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  He's a Team Six, that dude. Everybody went into like flow state. I don't even know how to describe it and, and I'm fucking worthless. I'm not in flow state. I'm fucking dead state. They hoisted me up and we ran like a mile because there was no way to extract us because of how densely populated it was. Or the buildings were so tightly together.

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Could you move your legs?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  They were like fucking pillars. I was supported on shoulders hobbling. I was not able to run. No. In the tourniquets, they cut off circulation to your limbs because I was bleeding profusely from my legs. So they were cinched off, which kills the circulation. At a minimum, you got very dead legs. But they ran me to a hot extract where there's a fucking helo that came in, coming in guns blazing. They throw us in the helo. Now get this, me and the other dude with the lung, we get thrown on the helo. And we just leave with the medical team. Those fucking dudes, those five dudes, still on the ground. Had to fight their way back into the city to go reconnect with the rest of the element. Who again, he's calling, the airstrike he called in was with, it was perfect. He got, I think he got an award for it.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  He hit exactly in the right spot. He called in the exact right spot, like under the most duress you could imagine. But like, so my mental image of what happened is under truly, like I witnessed life and death. Like I was in a life and death scenario and I got to be fully an audience for it. Every motherfucker was fucking perfect at their job, like literally rounds flying everywhere. Hey, what's going on? Got, got your legs all tied off here. Hey, what's going on? Calling this airstrike over. Couldn't be calmer. That was it. Like, and so my debris point was it fucking works. The training works.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Wow. What a fucking story. Holy shit, dude.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  There's, there's an addendum to it.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  I want to hear the addendum.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So after we got medevacced, so I'm in the, I'm in the helicopter and at this point I don't know. I don't know the state of my injury. All I know is a few minutes ago, I thought I died. You know, like I don't really, I'm, I'm happy to be here now. But we get in the helicopter and that crew was amazing. I think they were PJs, Air Force PJs, which are like spec ops air force. I think they were fucking great, but they were like, hey, do you want, uh, what's the, what's the drug? Oh my God. It's the one, the painkiller drug, morphine, morphine. And I said, no, I didn't have any pain, but I was like, I'm worried I might die and I want to be lucid for it. And they're like, okay, now I think you're going to be okay. But I was like in my head that I might die. I don't know.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  And so we get medevacced out of Zarganchar and they fly us right to this nearby base, very close by called Shank. And when we get there, there's obviously doctors and nurses that are there specifically for this. And so even though it was the middle of the night, they had been told, hey, you have two casualties. You know, the guy with the collapsed lung and myself. To be honest, I don't really know exactly what they were told, but I would imagine they were told, get ready for some, some type of surgery for both of them. And so we fly to FOB Shank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher and my clothes have been fucking cut off of me. Like my, my dick's hanging out, like I'm, I'm in disarray, like I'm all fucked up. And I really, I don't even know. I think I'm going to be okay because at this point I've made it here.

• 1:13:15Speaker 03

  And no one's acting like I'm, I'm literally about to die, but I don't know. I don't really know how bad it is. And they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy and it's so bright, like, like so bright inside of there. Barely open your eyes and it's just a sea of all these doctors and nurses that are ready to perform whatever needs to happen. Cause they, they don't know. They don't know what, what needs to be done.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  But as soon as I get in there, I see in the back corner of this relatively small medical tent, like a shanty medical tent, is maybe like 15 SEALs that were not on the mission with me. There are other guys in country that are other Navy SEALs. It's the middle of the night and they've put on the equivalent, the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms. These are like their BDUs. These are, these are not nice, but in Afghanistan on, on a deployment, this is the best shit they had. They clearly had been tracking, because you can track missions in real time when you're overseas. They saw the call signs come across that SEALs had been wounded and were being brought here for treatment. I have no sense of what exactly they knew, but clearly whatever was passed indicated that one of us or both of us could die.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  And so these dudes were in the tent in case we died. They're, they're my friends. I know them all personally. And so I'm being wheeled in and the, the gravity of what's happening was like a fucking ton of bricks. Because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been going on and I see that the looks on these guys' faces. And they're wearing these uniforms and they're all standing almost like at attention in the corner. And they're there in case I fucking die. It's like I'm going to my own funeral. And so I'm, I'm put on the, the, they swarm me, not them, the doctors swarm me. And they get me ready for debridement, which is just to pull the shrapnel out of my hips and my, my leg. And the guy was like, all right, I'm going to give you, I think it was ketamine.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  He's like, you're not gonna, this is it. Like good luck to you. And he like gave me ketamine and I, I passed out or whatever he gave me. I completely passed out. And then it's like, I have no memory and I fucking wake up in Germany, fucking Germany. And I'm just, oh, yeah, you're, you're in, you're fine. Yeah. Your legs are all fucked up. Uh, you're, you're going to live keeping your limbs. And then I think it was seven days after that, I'm back home in Virginia, hobbling down the Home Depot, uh, fucking aisle, just no transition, just, I was just killing people overseas.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Fucking nuts.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  What was the extent of the injuries?

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Honestly, I was so fortunate. It was a big, big hole in my ass, like, uh, like a, like a, I think three or four inch chunk. Uh, the, the big issue with it is, uh, it was so deep into, into my ass that they had to keep opening it so that it would, would not heal in reverse. Do you know what I mean? Cause it can pocket the, and then just, uh, inside of my, my leg. I mean, basically I was spared, like it was just a massive flesh wound from underneath my knee, all the way up to my back. And then I also, this is the, the part that was the worst, to be honest. Legs fine. I have a little bit of residual soreness. At this point, there's a little bit of shrapnel in my leg, but they're like pieces of sand. They only, on a hot day, I might notice it.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  But I, from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders. I, I truthfully don't know if this actually happened, but he said as much. And I, I tore both of my labrum, so a slap tear. It's a relatively common injury. And I had the, uh, I had a, what's called a biceps tendinitis surgery done on my right. Basically it was so painful, I couldn't really use it. But it's this surgery where they remove a portion of your bicep and they restaple it. But it's sort of like a Band-Aid, doesn't really fix the problem. And the shelf life of a biceps tendinitis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading. And I'm, I'm now at the point where my shoulder fucking sucks and I, like in the gym, I have to do all these,

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  I have to avoid pressing. I have to avoid overhead stuff.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  And it's just where the bicep tendon is?

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  It's, no, it's the, so what happens is the, the labrum tear itself never got fixed. They just removed some of the tension on one side of the tear, but still over time, it continues to tear down the labrum. So effectively my labrum just over time has continued to tear and I'm getting some additional pain. I, I just had an MRI done and they're like, eh, you know, you had the bicep tendinitis done. There's not a whole lot more you can do. You can do stuff to fix it, but a lot of it is just going to do more damage than good. And so I'm probably staring down, not chronic fucking pain or whatever, but something like that.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Have you done any stem cells?

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  No. Okay. How long are you in town for?

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Tonight.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  That's it?

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  No, I can, I can come back.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  I'm going to bring you into Wastewell. See what they could do for you.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Whatever I can do. It's a fucking huge pain.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

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• 1:19:22Speaker 02

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• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe I can get you in like right after we're done. You could just drive right over there because it's not far from here.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean honestly, it's a huge issue.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Guarantee you it can help you. Have you fucked around with peptides at all?

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  No, I'm gonna see him all over the place, but I don't know.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  You should. Um, there's a lot of things that they can do that can radically help you. One of the things they can do, it'll definitely decrease a lot of the inflammation and help heal and, you know, there's some evidence. How old are you?

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Thirty-seven.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're still young, man. There's, there's a lot of evidence that labrum tears can be healed with stem cells and with, uh, without having to go through surgery, depending on the extent of the tear.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm open to it.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Dude, I'm a big believer. It's fixed me. It's, I've had a lot of problems where I was like, I need surgery. I had an orthopedic surgeon told me, for sure, you need shoulder surgery. And I never got it done. He's like, you, you could rehab it. This is more than ten years ago. He's like, you could rehab it and, but you're gonna need surgery. It's a hundred percent now.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Did you, oh, your shoulder's good now?

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Oh, damn, dude.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  I do all my kettlebell work with seventy-pound kettlebells. I don't have any problems. Windmills, cleans, presses, renegade rows, gorilla cleans, no problems.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  How much are you cleaning?

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Fifties. You just gorilla cleans? I do it for reps.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Do you do barbell clean?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't lift anything heavy. When I do gorilla cleans, I either do fifties or seventies. My, my whole kettlebell workout is either fifties or seventies. And sometimes I'll work out with thirty-fives just for the warm-up. Like, I'll do like, warm-up stuff. Like, I'll do like, rotation exercises with thirty-fives. Things where I'm like, like, big halos where I'm just really opening up my back and getting.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  When'd you get into doing kettlebell stuff? I've seen you post like the demon, the demon bell, or the gorilla bell?

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  The gorilla bell. Yeah, those are the seventies. Those are the shit. Those are, uh, I really got into, um, uh, farmer's carries. That's what the, I'm using the gorillas are like my best friends lately. I just do these, I have this big, long driveway with a hill. And I do these gorilla carries. It's like a two-hundred-yard driveway. And I do these gorilla carries where you take, well, you know, with those farmers, farmers carries with those gorilla kettlebells.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  The seventies?

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I take them up the hill and down the hill. It's, my grip has gotten so much better and on top of it, it's like my legs have gotten better and it feels like my whole body is like more connected, if that makes any sense. Cause when you're wa, you know that guy, Tom Haveland? Do you know who he is?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  Fuck, yeah, everybody knows who that guy is.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  Dude's a beast.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  One of the things that I got from him is he's talked about the importance of picking up heavy things and walking with them. He's like, if you really wanna get strong, he's like, strength is not just lifting heavy stuff, like stationary, like carry things. And so he does a lot of weird, like.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  His zircher's like fucking five hundred pounds?

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  Insane. But he does a lot of weird, like, off-weight stuff where he has more weight on one side than the other and switches them. He has a chain behind him and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing farmer's carries with two hands. He does a lot of crazy stuff like that. And obviously, the guy's a fucking freakishly strong person. So I'm like, okay, well, let me see if there's anything to this. So a few months back, I really got into farmer's carries. And, uh, I first just would do it, this is him.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Oh, beast.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Fucking freak.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, the trademark shirt he's got on. He always has that shirt on.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  And you always see his back and he's like six-eight, almost four hundred pounds. He's a fucking giant human being.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  I love his page.

• 1:23:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Cause the, you're, when you're carrying stuff like that, it's like your whole body, your core has to stay tight, your back has to stay tight. Everything's dealing. And then when you're up at the top of the hill, you're like, motherfucker. And your forearms are literally on fire. You're trying to hold on to these things. And, you know, I got a chalk ball in my pocket and I reach in there and powder my hands back up. And as soon as I get my hands back going, I do it again. And that has changed everything. That's changed everything. But one of the things that I've noticed is, uh, I very rarely get injured. As opposed to my friends who do like traditional weightlifting stuff.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Like powerlifting or just like?

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Bench-ing heavy, squatting heavy, deadlift heavy. Those dudes are, all my friends who do that are always getting hurt. They're always getting hurt.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  I'm guilty of that to some degree.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Everybody is. It's, but you think that's the only way to get strong and I don't think that's correct. I don't think it's correct. I think, um, the most important thing is volume with reasonably heavy things. Where you're not hurting yourself. Like, seventy pounds is, I, you know, I do, I could probably do twenty reps of cleans and presses, but I only do ten and then I rest for like five. I do the Pavel Tatseline method.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Pavel Tatseline is the guy who really brought kettlebells over to America.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  And he's a famous kettlebell coach for, uh, Strong First, it's, which is his company. And he's this, this philosophy that the, that strength is a skill. And you shouldn't practice skills when you're exhausted. And this whole idea of working to failure, I mean, obviously, if you wanna be a bodybuilder or even a professional powerlifter, that's a different thing. But if you wanna get strong, the most important thing is the amount of work that you do, not exhausting the muscle with one set.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  And so what he has you do is if you can do twenty reps, do ten. And then wait five minutes and do another ten. You got the same volume of work, but you're never exhausted while you're doing it. Your form is always perfect. And you're still getting the same amount of work. So my workouts, like, I have to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettlebell workout.

• 1:26:21Speaker 03

  Fuck, dude.

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, but it works.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Dude, that's.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  It works. And again, I'm fucking never injured. If I'm injured, it's like a little tendonitis here or something bothering me in my lower back a little, but it's never significant.

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  My, uh, my trainer, John Finkst, we've been working together a couple of years now in Jersey. He's the man, uh, he's, he's a big believer in, in that. What you were talking about, I could do twenty, but I do ten instead.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  He's like all about, not form till you die, cause there are times where it's like time to throw some English in, get some volume in.

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  But he keeps me from ego lifting and keeps me from doing stuff that it's like over the top.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, ego lifting's a problem, especially with dudes. The one time I hurt my back really bad, I was deadlifting like four fifty with the, um.

• 1:27:04Speaker 03

  Like just traditional grip?

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  No, the, um.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Trap bar deadlift.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Track, yeah. The trap bar. What is it? Hex bar? What do you call that thing?

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, trap bar.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  So, I love those things. It's great. But I, I was like, let's get big. And, and then I felt, tink. You know that, that. And luckily, it was muscle, not like spinal, not a disc issue. It was lower back, left lower back. It fucked with me for like a six-month period.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  I bet.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  Oh, so, and I was like, that, I'm not doing that anymore. And from that moment on, I got really into just doing kettlebells. And I'm stronger than I've ever been. I don't think you need to lift really, depending upon what you're trying to do, you know? And if you're trying to become a powerlifter, sure, you need to lift heavy. But if you just wanna be strong and functional, I don't think you need to lift heavy. I don't believe in it.

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  No, I, dude, I, uh, right now, I'm on like a pretty big cut. Like, I do a summer cut each, well, this is my second summer I've done that.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  Just to look good on the beach?

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  Dude, shamelessly. There's nothing else to it. But, uh, but what I've found in, in my own life is that I do really well when I have, not a goal, like a lofty goal even, but just some fucking thing that you gotta suffer to achieve it. I do well with goals like that.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, goals are important.

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, and I, and I, right now, I'm on my, like, I, I count calories. I'm, I'm, I'm into my macros like you wouldn't believe. Um, but what I was doing before this, I was doing none of that. And I was fucking obsessed with hang cleans. Just like barbell hang cleans. I, dude, I'm so fucking, I, I've gotten up to two twenty-five, very proud of that. But I, it's like the one exercise, no matter, we do so many.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  That doesn't fuck with your shoulder?

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  Uh, actually, no, it doesn't. It's pressing. It's this motion. It's the press. Any, dude, if I pressed like a fucking fifty-pound dumbbell.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Staff.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude. And so, but anyways, the kettlebell.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  Shaved down?

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, fucking. But it sounds like you do cleans and shit with, with, with.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  With kettlebells, yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  That's probably something I need to consider.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's not easy to do. You know, like seventy pounds is when you're doing like ten set, or ten reps. And I'm doing like three sets of ten reps.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  That's fucking brutal.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  But it's also the clean and press from the ground up, right? It's all one motion and this continuing motion. You know, over the course of ten repetitions, it's a good solid minute plus of work. So you're working really hard for a minute. So you're getting a little bit of a cardio benefit from it, but if I'm real consistent with it, the, you know, I'm fifty-nine now. I just turned fifty-nine. So it's just about staying strong. That's all I'm concerned with. Not losing any of my strength, not losing any of my mobility or flexibility or anything. Like, I'm constantly stretching, constantly just, I believe in maintaining. And I think most people don't do that. That's why we have a very distorted perception of what's possible.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  I think we think that people deteriorate with age like so radically that it's just a, it's just a, it is what it is. It's a fact. It's gonna happen to you. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that most people just don't have the willpower to keep maintaining correctly. And they're not supplementing their hormones and taking peptides and also optimizing their nutrition. I think if you do all of those things, you're pretty, I'm personally shocked at what I can still do. When I was a kid.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  You're fucking jacked, dude.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I, yeah, well, thank you. When I was a kid and I thought of a fifty-nine-year-old, I'm like, oh my god, that guy's dead. That's a dead man. Probably could barely open-

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  He's literally dead.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  Barely open a jar of pickles, barely fucking make it down a flight of stairs. And I have fucking zero problems, you know? I have one fucked up knee from my martial arts days where I had my meniscus removed in a big chunk of it. And it still fucks with me. But it doesn't fuck with me in terms of function. It only fucks with me in terms of like, I'm worried it's gonna become arthritic. Um, over time, because there's nothing between the cartilage. The cartilage is banging against each other.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Speaker 02

  And I broke it skiing once, that right where the cartilage meets the bone. But I think that, um, with the, the improvements and all these biological therapies, like stem cells and peptides, I can maintain it, and that's what I'm doing. So it keeps me out of jujitsu, because that's the one thing that really, really rips on your joints. Especially my knee. Every time I've done it, it's like, fucker. It just gets, I don't wanna do anything, like my friend Matt Serra, he had a knee replacement, and he's younger than me. And I'm like, yeah, but it's jujitsu. It's just like, you're constantly in weird positions and pushing, and someone's fucking trying to heel hook you, and you're defending. It's like, everything is getting yanked around, and then it's sore, but you still go back the next day, because you wanna train, because you're addicted.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  I, I found that, uh, my, when I, when I was in the teams, I was in good shape, sort of by default. And then I got out, and I sort of hovered around, like, I'm still relatively young, it's fine. And then this whole Mr. Ballin YouTube thing happened. And I, in a way, adopted the, the same mindset that made me successful in getting through training, which is like this obsessive, gotta make more videos, you know, I've had my viral moment, like grow it at all costs. But all of my health went out the window. Dude, I would, I would, uh, I would, it'd take me about, I don't know, like 26 hours-ish to do, I'm gonna make a video, hitting post on YouTube.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  And then, even though all I wanted to do was sleep, my immediate reaction at like 3:00 in the morning would be just, slam like four, five, six drinks, and then go right to bed. Like, I don't even feel it, I just would drink, and go right to bed.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  Drink just to go to sleep?

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  I didn't even, it was almost like, here's your reward, suck down these fucking drinks.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I get it.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  And then, uh, but, but I got so grossly out of shape. It's like, dude, I was like 200 pounds of just fat. And I had this huge ponytail that I grew. I thought I looked really good. If you can pull it up, dude, I look so fat and gross. But then, uh, it finally occurred to me that, like, wow, you're like, you're, you're entering like true dad bod territory, and there's just no excuse. And so sometime in like 23, 24, I was like, alright, I gotta be like an adult again, and, and train. And it, dude, it's revolutionary, man, that, that-

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  Whoa, dude, that's crazy.

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a, there's a good shot of my disgusting, let's see, Mr. Ballin, look at Mr. Ballin fat. I think that'll probably do it.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  That's not to be rude or anything.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  That's, that's a decent one. That, that one's recent.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  And that one's sort of recent, the second one in there, that, that's, that's not even that bad.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Well, the, the first picture you pulled up, you get it. Oh, you see there, in that image?

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can see a little, little ragged going on there.

• 1:34:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  But yeah, just-

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta do what you gotta do when something starts happening, and you know, you realize like, oh my god. Like, it's like starting a fire in the woods, like, you gotta blow on it, you gotta put some fucking little twigs on it, you gotta get that fucker going, like, once. And then you've, congratulations, because you've had amazing success. Like, what do you have, like 11 million YouTube subscribers?

• 1:34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, 11 million.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  That's incredible, man, that's really cool. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. Black Friday is madness if you're shopping. But if you're the person trying to get all those orders out the door, that's a whole different kind of crazy. That's where ShipStation comes in. It's an end-to-end order fulfillment platform that brings all your orders into one place. So when volume spikes, your team isn't scrambling to keep up. More than 1 million businesses have used ShipStation to get through peak season, scaling fulfillment up to 40 times, while cutting costs up to 30%. It's the kind of tool that helps businesses stay in control when things get nuts, and every order matters. Peak season doesn't wait, and neither should you.

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• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Dude, it's, it's, it's, I can only imagine what you've been through, but the thing that I now, this started in 2020, and it's 2026. I have had some incredible highs. The early days of, after the viral moment, and I'm like posting stuff that, I, I like upload a video, and literally the next day, it's like, you've made $20,000 from yesterday to now. And like, I've never in my life made any real money, ever. It's all, almost overnight. And it grew, and grew, and then it's like, I, I signed a deal with Amazon like 10 months after starting a podcast. I actually, I remember when you got your first deal with Spotify.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  I remember that was like, I didn't even know it was possible for a podcast or anything to, to sign like the equivalent of a professional sports level contract. And then, it's like less than a year after the, the start of the Mr. Ballin podcast, I'm partnering up with, with Amazon. It was a $62 million deal. And I, I say that because, dude, my life got so much better, and so much fucking worse at the same time.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  What was the worst?

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  Oh, god. So, there's like the little stuff, you know, actually I just had a lawsuit close. Um, they pled guilty to theft, uh, and, and a bunch, so I, I started a house renovation project when I, I was living in a house in Pennsylvania when this thing kicked off. And I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money. I was, I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house. Before long, I'm like adding fucking crazy shit to my house. They ended up gutting the house to the studs, because they're gonna remodel it, but they didn't do any work. And now they kinda had me. My house is wrecked, I'm living in a rental, they're stringing me along, and so they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and never did any work. And so I sued them. That, that's a little thing.

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  Uh, and then over the course of the next several years, dude, I've had, I've had people take advantage of me in just the most personal, deep-cutting ways. Ways that, in a, if, if you were to like write a movie, you know, here's the scene of somebody who suddenly comes into money, and like the bad, the pitfalls of that, of people coming out of the woodwork to, to take from them. The things that happened to me with, with, with some family, and with some close friends, and with, you know, business partners, is just like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, this was all just an angle? Like, you had an angle on me the whole time? Like, this was a fucking con?

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  Well, people think about people that come into money like that the same way they think about a large corporation if they like slip on the floor, like at Target, like, ooh, I'm gonna get paid. They don't think, I'm alright, it's fine, it was my fault, I slipped. No, they think, oh, this is an opportunity.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Big time.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  And they look at a guy like you, who's, you know, through your own hard work, and stumbling upon this idea, and following through with it, made a bunch of money. They're like, I can get some of that money. They don't even think of you as a person anymore, they think of you as a target.

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  I, uh-

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  You gotta keep your circle tight, that's the thing.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  I got Antonio out there, he's like my right-hand man, he's a former homicide detective. Like, he actually, he came to me, uh, to be my house manager, and one of the first things he said to me is, he's like, I don't give a fuck about your content, dude, I think it's stupid. And I was like, you're, you're the guy for me.

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  But he's been awesome because he just like keeps everybody around me sort of like vetted. But yeah, dude, it's uh.

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  That's important, man, because people will sneak through and sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them. Other people see them as like this guy's got an angle. He's a scumbag. Be careful. And you, you know, you let people into your circle and then they they're like, when they're around you, they're putting on an audition. They're pretending to be someone they're not. They're pretending to be someone that you're gonna wanna hang out with. And what they're using you is they're just thinking of you as a springboard or as a way to get money.

• 1:40:38Speaker 03

  I would imagine for you, just given, I mean, dude, you are podcasting. Like if there is literally people are like, hey, you wanna be the next president? You better go on Joe's show. Like, I can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens around you and your circle to get where I'm sitting right now. And I, and I, I gotta be honest, I don't know how you'd be able to sift through people that are trying to meet Joe and interact with you and people who are trying to get in with Joe so Joe will interview them.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Well, the good news is I don't really interact with anybody.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  That's the right approach.

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  So the way I even get like suggestions is one, I see something that I'm interested in and I have a guy and I either call him, text him or email him and say, hey, let's try to get this guy on. This guy's got a great book or she's got a really interesting documentary or whatever it is. And then there's I get these people that submit to wanna be on the show. So I get a list of those that, you know, there's a guy that goes through them that makes their legit. And then by the time they get to me, it's filtered out to what is actually gonna be interesting. So there's not a lot of, you know, people meeting me that are, and the people that do meet me, usually I never wanna have them on.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Like if somebody just like comes up to me and says, I have to be on your podcast. I'm like, nope, you definitely don't.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  I already know you don't.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  It's just, uh, you gotta be present, just not, not buy into any of it. That's the, that's the real key. No matter how big it gets, just keep doing the thing that you do. So all I do is talk to interesting people. That's it.

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  It's the right way to approach it.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  It's not that complicated. And as long as I continue to do it the same way, I feel like people will enjoy it. Cause I think they enjoy it because I enjoy it. Just like the way when someone's doing something that they really love to do, I enjoy watching. If someone's doing like metal sculpture, you know, like and the guy's really into it, he's welding and hammering. I'm like, I am into that. I'm like, I'm into people doing things. I like when people are really enjoying what they're doing and are really curious and or really like competent at something, you know, they're excellent at something. I enjoy watching that. I enjoy listening to it. And I always enjoy talking to interesting people. So as long as I just keep enjoy talking to interesting people,

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  I think people will keep enjoying watching it and it's a nice exchange. Works. You know, it's real simple, but I keep it that way. I don't ever think like, oh, this guy's famous. He'll have a bunch of followers. This will be a good episode because I'll get a lot of views. I don't think like that. I only think, you know, because like a lot of the people that are on my show, no one's ever heard of them. They're just an interesting person that I found on YouTube or an interesting person that I found, um, you know, in a documentary or whatever it is.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  I, uh, I think it's, the point you make about how you, well, I think for me anyways, the one, the one thing I've come back to over the past several years of, of doing this is truthfully, even though there are times where, you know, creating content is obviously, it is a job in the sense that we have a recording schedule and we have things that we have to do as you obviously do too amongst whatever else you're doing. The one thing that I fucking love doing is telling stories. I mean, that's really, I really feel like that's the place where I'm.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  You're a really good storyteller. You have me on the edge of your seat, uh, edge of my seat, rather, with your Afghanistan story. Fuck, man. That was incredible. You're really good at it.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  And the other one too, the, the Russian one too. You know, a, a great story resonates with people, especially a creepy one, which is why I think, you know, you've picked the perfect angle.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  Because a great creepy story, like you hear a great creepy story, like everybody's like, whoa, and then what happened?

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  Have you heard of the, uh, the Headless Valley?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  In, in your, in your comings and goings on the show, the Nahani Valley?

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  I got a good story for you. You wanna hear it?

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  Okay. So in, uh, in Canada, there's this section in the Northwest called the Northwest Territories. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  Okay. So for those that are not, the Northwest Territories is roughly four times the size of Germany. But Germany has something like 87 million people who live there. And in this space in Canada, this rugged space, there's like 45,000 people that live there. So it's four times the size of Germany and basically not populated. It is as remote as it, as it gets.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  Population of dripping springs. Not even. Not even dripping springs.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  And, uh, so within the Northwest Territory, there's this, this even more remote stretch that's called the Nahani Valley. And the Nahani Valley today, it's a protected park. It's a Canadian protected park. But even still, even though it's a park you can go visit, it's, it's nearly impossible to get to. To, to get there by boat, you have to traverse these rapids. I think it's a very treacherous ride to get there by boat. There's no established roads into the Nahani Valley. Um, you can hike there. It's brutal to hike there. You can fly there, but it's only through chartered float planes. So it's, it's a difficult place to get to, but the Nahani Valley,

• 1:46:24Speaker 03

  in particular, when the story takes place, which is like the early 1900s, um, because of how isolated it was, it's like one of the parts of earth that's like untouched by humans. And so the only people that would be in this huge sprawling valley, it was like an oasis of nature. They would see things that are just like so gorgeous, like untouched nature. But in the early 1900s, uh, there was this push from gold prospectors to go out into the Nahani Valley because they figured, because it's so untouched by humanity, there's bound to be gold to be found in the Nahani Valley. Now, there were some indigenous tribes like the, the Nahha tribe. They were out there.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Uh, there's some lore surrounding how, uh, they might've abandoned their, their settlement around the time the story takes place. But there were indigenous tribes that lived out there, but for the most part, it's like this sort of vacant stretch in this already isolated part of the world. And so in 19, I think it's 1905, these three brothers, these three prospectors, the McLeod brothers, Charlie, Willie and Frank, who are, they're seasoned gold prospectors. They decide they are gonna head off into the Nahani Valley and goes try to strike it rich. And they, and it's even harder to get into the valley back then, as it is today. It required for them, they had to, they actually had to build a boat. They had to bring pieces of a boat. And they would take it up a rapid or down the rapid and they'd have to disassemble the boat,

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  carry it up like these rock faces to get like, there's waterfalls they had to get past. And then bring the boat further and further into this valley. And it's like this, it's, it's just crazy how much work goes into getting out there. But these three brothers, they find their way into the valley and they get to this stretch of, of this river called the Flat River, which is anything but. It's, it's raging rapids. Uh, but there was this little, uh, embankment against this huge forest and like mountains off in the distance and they, they made their camp there and there's no one around. I mean, this is, this is pristine wilderness. And they start sifting, sluicing for, for gold. And it's just fucking gold everywhere.

• 1:48:26Speaker 03

  It's like the sand is gold. There's gold everywhere. They find so much gold and they can't believe it. They've, they've struck it completely rich here. And so after a whole day, I think they did two, two, three days even of just getting all this gold. They pack all their shit back up in their, their boat that they've assembled. And they begin making their way back out again, which should be easier because now I think a lot of it, you're going with the current. I don't even know how they get up there with the rapids going one way, but either way, they begin making their way out and their boat capsizes. And they, they lose all their gold. The boat breaks up. They, they narrowly are able to salvage the pieces and they, they come ashore and they build their boat again. And they're like, oh my gosh, we've lost so many supplies. Like we, this is horrible.

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  You know, the best we can do here is leave and come back with more supplies because we know there's gold here. Like this is devastating, but no one's gonna be here. We can come back. We can get more gold. So they, they leave. And once they get back to town, uh, Charlie, the, one of the brothers decides, you know what? It's not worth it. Uh, that was really sketchy. I don't wanna die out on the Flat River. You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, ah, we gotta go, we gotta go out there. And so fast forward a year, Charlie's still saying, I, I will not go back out there, but, but, uh, Frank and Willie, they decide to go. And they recruit this other guy. I think his name is Robert Weir, Robert Weir. And so the three of them go back into the valley to, to strike it rich.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  And, you know, Charlie is aware that they're going out there. He's staying back, but he knows they're going out. He knows where they're going because he went there with them. And he expects they're gonna be gone for, I think it was gonna be a whole year. And you can imagine how much effort goes into getting out there. They were gonna live out there, I think for the summer and just get as much gold as they could and come out. But some amount of time passed, let's call it a year, when Charlie starts to become suspicious because they haven't come out of the valley yet. And this is 1905. There's no way to talk to them. And so another whole year passes. We're two years deep into this and still these guys have not returned from the Nahani Valley. And so at this point, Charlie is thinking there's, there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers. I gotta, I gotta go find him. And so he puts together a group of people to go. See what happened to his brothers.

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  And so he makes his way, he starts getting into the valley and he reaches this stretch of, this is just to give you a mental image of where he's going. To get to that segment of the beach where they had been two years prior when Charlie was with them, because that's where he's assuming they're going to be. They had to pass through these canyons. There's four canyons that go, I think it's Canyon Four, Canyon Two, Three, One. They're all just called Canyon One, Two, Three, Four. But they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are, these are just ominous places. There are these stretches, like Canyon Two is this 10-mile stretch of very deep water. I don't know how deep, I want to say it's at least 100 feet deep, where the water goes all the way up to the cliff face. It's just sheer cliff face on either side.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesus. It's like the scar in the earth, where it's hundreds of feet tall cliffs on either side that are sheer. And it's just, you know, call it 100 feet at least of water down. There's nowhere to stop. Once you're in this canyon, you must go to the end of the canyon. There's nowhere to go. Oh, fuck. And the Nahha tribe, who, the tribe that had lived there for a while, they had always talked about, they called them the Wahila. They said there were these creatures, these white, tall creatures that would roam the forest in the Nahani Valley. And they would make these screeching sounds and they were, you know, they would attack people. It was just folklore, right? But they said that in these canyons, there were all these caves, these pockets of caves, high up on these canyons that you can't really get to,

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  that they believed the Wahila would live inside of. So imagine you're going down this, this like misty 10-mile stretch in Second Canyon, and you're looking up on either side, and there literally are caves that no human has ever stepped foot in. You can't even get to these fucking caves. And because of the way the wind cuts through the canyon, it makes this echoey like screeching noise that today you can still hear as you go through these canyons. And so they're going through Second Canyon, this stretch here. And the stretch of Flat River where he had been the year prior, or two years prior with his brothers, was at the end of Second Canyon, where the first little, call it a beachhead exists. And so he, Charlie, and his search party, they exit this creepy Second Canyon,

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  and they see there's a campsite set up on the beach. And it's not really a beach, it's like, you know, four feet of sand, and then it's a little bit of hinterland, and then it's just, you know, forest. But he sees there's a tent. And so they beach the boat, and they're looking around, and they find there's two bodies. It's a man, two men, they're badly decomposed, but they're missing their heads. There's two headless men that are badly decomposed, one of which is reaching for his rifle. And he's half in the tent, half out of the tent. And he's reaching for his rifle, which is propped up against a tree. And the other is just lying behind the tent, and he's missing his head. The heads were never found. And they find identification, and it turns out those are his two brothers. And they find etched into the tree that the gun was propped on, it just was written,

• 1:53:31Speaker 03

  etched into the wood, "We have found a fine prospect." Which could mean any number of things, maybe it means they found gold, whoever. But that was written on the tree, and then a little ways down from their camp, going along the same direction they'd come in, they found a skeleton, which they could never identify as being anyone, but they believe it belonged to Robert Weir. So they're all dead. And the authorities, you know, when this was reported, they weren't really shocked. They're like, ah, it's the Nahani Valley, it's a dangerous place. They obviously died of starvation, and animal predation caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off. You know, tough luck. Charlie didn't believe that, he always believed that something had happened to his brothers, but he had no way to prove it. So that's 1905.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  Fast forward to 1913, people sort of know about this story, that this is when they dubbed it the Headless Valley, because these men were found without their heads. Little did they know, that story would carry quite a bit of weight, because 10 years, or a little bit less than 10 years later, Martin Jorgensen, who's another gold prospector, he heads out into the Nahani Valley. He's heard the stories, he's heard about the McLeod brothers. He knows that there's, you know, lore of the Wahila, and that there's something weird happening in this valley, and it's dangerous. But he goes out there anyways, and he tells his business partners, who are these rich guys who didn't want to actually go get the gold, they just funded his expedition. He's like, "I'm gonna go out there, and I'll make us a bunch of money, I'll find a bunch of gold, I'll stay out there for the whole summer, and then we'll rendezvous and we'll split the earnings," or whatever.

• 1:55:00Speaker 03

  So out he goes, and he builds himself a cabin, not far from where the McLeod brothers had stayed, and then the second expedition as well. And he is out there for the summer, but then he misses the rendezvous point. He was supposed to come out of the valley and meet his partners at the end of the summer, he doesn't. Eventually, a search party is brought out to find what happened to him, and they find his cabin had burned to the ground. They find Martin Jorgensen is within the remains of this burned-down cabin, missing his head. Jesus. And they, I don't know how they did this in 1913, but apparently the fire began on the roof. And so they don't understand how he could have not realized there was a problem and exited his cabin.

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  I mean, it's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing, that fire starts here and you still burn to the ground. And also, where's your head? So that's Martin Jorgensen. So now people, they aren't really connecting the McLeod brothers and Martin Jorgensen. It's called, it was called the Headless Valley by the time Martin Jorgensen gets into the valley. He's now found headless, and now it's like there's a little more rumor mill going on. Over the coming several, actually next 10 years, there was several other expeditions, to include this guy Riley O'Brien, who goes out there, prospector, he goes out to check his traps, doesn't come back. His partner who's with him, he walks over and finds him, and he's just sitting inexplicably by a campfire that's not on.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  It's not even, it was cold, it was cold enough to freeze to death out there, but it was not blindingly cold. And he's sitting in front of this fire pit. It's only been like an hour or two since he stepped away, and he's holding a match or a cigarette in his hand. And he's just like, he's frozen, he's frozen to death. And there's no sign of what happened to him, he's just sitting by the fire, and he's dead. He has his head, but he's frozen to death. The guy with, his partner who fled the valley would later say he looked flash-frozen. So that happens. There were at least two other prospectors who also had their cabins burned down. One of them was nearly decapitated when he was found, but he still had his head. But signs of something being done to his spine was present. And then there was another two guys who, their cabins burned down, but their bodies were intact.

• 1:57:10Speaker 03

  So there's all these people that die in similarly bizarre ways. And then, in, I think it was 1926, the first like really weird thing happens. This is all weird, but a really weird thing happens. It's gonna get weirder? Gets weirder. There was this hunting party that went out to the Nahani Valley, and by this point, it's become almost like, because there's this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is, because people are fearful of the Nahani Valley, it's now bringing a new crowd of people into the valley. It's bringing like hunting parties that kind of are like, "Oh, I wanna go fucking see what's out in this valley." And so they were going through Second Canyon, and they were heading to Flat River, and they were going to these places where all these kind of famous deaths have occurred, to go hunting, but just sort of to be in this valley.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  And so this hunting party is out there, and it's a big group. I think there was at least a dozen people out there, and they're camping out on the banks of the Flat River, not really in the same spot where the McLeod brothers had been, but not too far away. And they're out drinking late, having a good old time, they all go to bed. And the next morning, May Lafferty is her name, May Lafferty, she's missing. She's one of the, I think she was the only woman on this expedition, she's gone. And they look for her, there's no sign of what happened to her, she's just, she's just gone. And so they did have some sort of a search occur over the next several days, but they ultimately said, you know, "We don't know what happened to her." And they, they left, they left the valley. And so they tell authorities, authorities, they think they went out to look for her, they could never find her, no sign of what happened to her.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  And so around the time that they're looking for May Lafferty, there was this guy who is named Charlie, different from Charlie McLeod, just a sort of loner guy, who just by happenstance had been camping in the Nahani Valley at the same time as that hunting party. He was by himself, sort of just this rugged outdoorsman, who, it's not even clear why he was out there, but he was just out there minding his own business. He was aware of the hunting party, and he said that he watched them have their party that night. And he had stayed up late, but eventually gone to sleep. And he ultimately reports this to the police, because there's all this talk of where's May Lafferty? And this guy Charlie realizes he may have seen her. So he goes to the police and he tells them, "Hey, I was out there." They don't know I was out there, "I was out there at the same time.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  And I went to bed, late at night, after, they were already asleep, and I woke up to the sound of rocks, like little rocks falling into the water." And he's relatively close to the water, but he's not so close that he would hear the sound of the current. He's far enough that a stone throw into the water, you'd hear the sploosh sound. And so he wakes up, and he crawls out of his tent, and it's pretty well illuminated. And he's in the trees, you know, and he can see the water, the Flat River. And he can't tell what the rocks are coming from, it just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water. And so he just is curious, and he gets up and he walks down to the waterline, and he starts hearing them more and more, and he looks up, and there's a part of the coastline, if you will, the beach line,

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  that sort of was up on a rise to his left, like there was a hill that was right next to him. That's dramatic, just a slight rise. And there was a little bit of a cliff, that maybe like six feet, eight feet of a cliff, that overlooked the river right there. And he sees there's this woman who's crawling on all fours, and she's scrambling up this little rise of the beach. And it's her kicking of the dirt that's like sprinkling rocks into the water. And he's looking at her, and she gets to the top, and she stops, and she turns around and looks at him, and he described her as looking possessed. He was like, "There was something wrong with her. She just stared at me," and he was so frightened, he didn't, he just froze and then hid.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  And he watched this woman scamper off into the, wherever she went, over the rise away from the camp. So she's gone, and he didn't know what to make of it, he's like, "That's so weird." He hears about this missing woman, he tells, he tells police, and he sees a picture of her. And he's like, "I'm nearly positive that was her." And so she's never found. And so May Lafferty's gone. Fast forward another 20 years, so there's no idea, in those 20 years, more prospectors are found dead as well. One of the last hunting parties went out into the Nahanni Valley, actually, prospector goes out, and he goes missing. His name is John Patterson. This is like in the 1939, 1940 range.

• 2:01:27Speaker 03

  And a hunting party goes out to look for him, and they can't find him. And on the last night they were there, one of the men who was part of this search party for John Patterson, they're near the Flat River, he described an indigenous man walked out of the tree line, just sort of inexplicably walks over to him, and he comes up to the group who are sort of on the tree, on the beach line there. And he just says to this guy, he's like, hey, and they're startled to see him to begin with, like, where the fuck did you come from? And he's like, be careful, the wahila are out tonight. And the guy just like wanders, this is according to legend, this is what was said to him, and the guy wanders back off into the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were planning to stay, I want to say, two additional

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  days to keep looking for John Patterson. But that night, following that comment made by that guy, the indigenous guy, all night, they reported these ungodly screams and screeches coming from that canyon, second canyon, where those caves up in the cliffs were, all around the forest, like unearthly sounds were being made that scared them so badly, that the next day, they said, we're not looking for John Patterson anymore, and they bailed. And so, people stopped going into the Nahanni Valley, and today, you can still go there, it's still very hard to get there, but no one has a good explanation for why so many fucking people, from 1903 or 04, until at least the 1940s, kept going into that valley, and kept turning up dead, many of which without their heads.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  So this indigenous guy that lived up there, where was he from? Like, was he living up there? Was he a part of a tribe? Was he passing through?

• 2:03:03Speaker 03

  So that part of the story, admittedly, someone said that an indigenous guy said that to him, there's not much in the way of like, okay, was there a tribe there, you know?

• 2:03:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  It was one of those loose, loose pieces of information that sort of surrounds the story. The reality is, is like, there's so much legend surrounding the Nahanni Valley, in part, because the Nahha tribe that had lived there, there was this story, I mentioned at the beginning, that they apparently abandoned the valley after something happened, and people have always attributed it to this, the legend of the wahila, that somehow these creatures must have forced them to leave the valley. And so, combine that with all of the actual deaths that occurred, by the 1940s, when John Patterson went missing, and when that guy said, who was part of that search party, that the indigenous guy warned him of the wahila, this was a big enough story that like

• 2:03:57Speaker 03

  Time Magazine did something in, I think the 1940s, about like, what the fuck is happening in the Nahanni Valley? Like, why are so many people dying out there? So, I wonder if the people who were there, maybe they heard some strange sounds that night, who knows? But who's gonna, who's gonna verify whether or not there really was someone who warned them about the wahila? We don't know.

• 2:04:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  But that's, that's the report that was given. Somebody claimed that an indigenous man sort of came out of nowhere, said, watch out for the wahila tonight, and then that night, they heard all these screeches, and they called it in.

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  The reason why I'm asking is like, maybe it was indigenous people, they just didn't want these other guys coming through, and so they created this thing by cutting off their heads and killing these people, and...

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  It's a great deterrent.

• 2:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  Like, maybe it's not, because a lot of people went back.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  Well, maybe less than would have.

• 2:04:45Speaker 03

  Fair.

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  Considering how much gold there was there.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's, actually, that's fair, yeah.

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that, what a great way to get rid of white people. You know? Cut a few heads off.

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, created a whole new legend.

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  Town there's ghosts.

• 2:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, I love, I find myself even to this day, Googling the Nahanni Valley, and just looking at pictures of like the canyons, and just reading, even just stuff that I know is probably folklore around the valley, because the idea that within this stretch of isolated parts of the world, there's this really isolated part that no one can get to, I love that.

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  Well, there's some weirdness in the world still, in places that people don't go to. And, but just think about how hard it is to find a wolverine, and we know wolverines are real.

• 2:05:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:29Speaker 02

  Most people never see a wolverine. They're in Alaska, they're in Canada, Minnesota has wolverines, like, what states do wolverines? Let's put this into perplexity, Jamie.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  It's gotta be Michigan, right? It's gotta be Michigan.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  It's gotta be Michigan, yeah, Michigan's right up there.

• 2:05:43Speaker 03

  They're the Wolverines, right? The Michigan Wolverines.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  Right, but I don't necessarily think that means that, but I would imagine...

• 2:05:49Speaker 03

  Aren't wolverines like these little guys, too?

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, the little, just like badgers, little ferocious motherfuckers. They, let's see, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.

• 2:06:02Speaker 03

  No Michigan.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  Interesting. Interesting. But the thing is, what my point is, like, you don't see them.

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Like, I know a lot of guys, remote, cold, high elevation habitat. Colorado, Minnesota, Minnesota. I know a lot of guys who have been in the woods, you know, their whole life, hunting, and maybe they see one, ever.

• 2:06:26Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  We know there's populations of them out there, but it's rare to stumble across a wolverine in the wild. And that's a known animal. Now, imagine that there was a time, I mean, if you think about just the, the amount of other types of hominids that they've found, just over the past few decades.

• 2:06:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  They keep finding new versions, like the island of Flores, the little hobbit people, the Denisovans that they found, that were, they think they were much larger than Homo sapiens.

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  So they're finding, and the Denisovans, I think, was like within the last 10 years or so. And they keep finding these skeletons, and finding these bones, and then they find out, whoa, this one was around 300,000 years ago, it was around 500,000 years ago, but that's just what you find in bones. Most people's bones, you're never gonna find.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  So the vast majority of things that have died, never make it into the fossil record. And so, you have a small number of things that do. Now, we know that humans cannibalize other humans. It's been a, it's been a practice.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  No, it's practice today.

• 2:07:39Speaker 02

  Papua New Guinea, yeah.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  It's practice today.

• 2:07:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:42Speaker 03

  I mean, that's a bit of an overclaim, but I think it's still practice today.

• 2:07:44Speaker 02

  The Nez Perce supposedly ate some of their enemies, like, there's, there's a bunch of cannibalism going on in the world. Now, imagine if there was a hominid, and some sort of an ancient creature, that still stayed alive in a small population, but would eat people? Or maybe just cut their fucking heads off? Or just attacked them and killed them because they didn't want them anywhere near, because they had associated over time, people with problems. And then if you're around people, they're gonna hunt you, they're gonna shoot you, they're gonna kill you, so what do you do? You stay as far away from people, the way to survive is to be in the most remote place, the most remote place humanly possible, and when you find people, kill them.

• 2:08:27Speaker 02

  Kill them so that they don't go after you.

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  I know that you had seen something that I, I had Tom Segura on an interview one time, and I told a story about the Mexican pilot, does that ring any, I need to...

• 2:08:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  It's just, you're talking about like how humans do damage to one another, but so the 60 second version is, there was this Mexican pilot civilian, he's going out for his last test, Rafael Pacheco, I think is his name, he's going out to do his last test run as a pilot, and it's a simple route, hey, you're gonna fly solo to prove you know what you're doing. He takes off, and he immediately starts to realize that he doesn't have control over the instruments, you know, it's, this is, the instruments were pretty rudimentary to begin with, this is like the 1950s or 60s, I think, and so it's a lot of dead reckoning from the pilot's seat, like, he's looking out to see where he needs to go, the mist is getting bad, and then he's calling over the radio, he's, I can't get my plane to move, and then suddenly passes out, and his plane like accelerates up into the sky.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  And then he wakes up hours later, off the coast of Acapulco, which, based on how much fuel was left, he had too much fuel for how far of a distance he had covered from where he'd taken off, Chimalca, Mexico, it was more than like a three hour drive. So he's too far away with too much fuel, and he comes to in his plane, he's still flying, he has no idea how he got there, he's just coming to, and Rafael, he hears in his radio some voice, and it's a, it's a, it's a air traffic control guy, Carlos, who's down in Acapulco, and he's talking to Rafael, as if they've been having an ongoing conversation, but Rafael's like, what's going on? Like, where am I? What's going on? And Carlos is like, what? Like, are you alone in your craft? And Rafael's, he's like, taking stock of his situation, he regains control of his

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  plane, he's like, what am I doing? And, and so, basically Carlos is like, hey dude, like, come in and land here, land here, we'll figure it out. So Rafael's like, I don't even know what happened, I passed out at the wheel. He lands at the airstrip in Acapulco, and immediately, he's met with these guys in suits, like, picture Men in Black, he gets scooped up, and he's brought to a hospital where he's drug tested, and talks to a psychologist, and they don't give many information at all. He's like, what happened? Like, I'm so sorry. And they determine that he's not crazy, and he's not on drugs, and only then do they say, hey, so... When you were out over the, off the coast of Acapulco, you were flying in circles for over an hour. And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he, he's the one who saw you on the, on the screen.

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  And he was talking to you for, for an hour while you were out there. And the whole conversation is recorded. And, and basically, if you can listen to the recording, and I'm pretty sure you guys might have on the show, Rafael passes out. And then at some point, a couple hours later, when he's somehow magically off the coast of Acapulco, a, a voice comes across in the cockpit that's like this robotic, deep, altered sounding voice that doesn't sound like Rafael. In the earlier recording, it sounds like Rafael's voice. Now it's different. And he's talking to Carlos, and this voice comes through and says something to the effect of like, you are listening to the sound of the voice coming through the pilot, but it's not his voice.

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  We, we are inhabitants of this universe, but our, your, your technology is so primitive. We, this is the only way we can contact you. We're here to tell you that you are the only intelligent species in our universe that uses warfare to harm one another. And you're, you're effectively on the, on the brink of extermination, and you need to find a way to stop it. And then like Rafael comes too. And that's when he's like, what's going on? And Carlos thinks he's been talking to Rafael the whole time. And that's when he's like, is there somebody else in the cockpit with you? Anyways, so it's this big mystery, but Mexico took the story and kind of like sequestered it. The way we got access to the, to the transcripts of it is we had to, we had to write a letter to a library in Mexico that had access to the transcript.

• 2:12:22Speaker 03

  And anyway, so, but it's interesting to imagine that, one, I love thinking about life outside of the, outside of, of Earth, because I think that the notion that there is life or that there isn't life is astounding and fascinating either direction you go. So I've always been interested in that. But two, the idea that others out there are warning us that we're on the fucking fast track to destroy ourselves, and you better knock it off. That's also pretty crazy. And we're so accustomed to humans being violent and horrible to each other. It's, that's our, that's our history, right? But like, what if that's not normal? What if it's like, we're, we're the fucked up people, and we're just killing everybody, and we need to stop?

• 2:13:00Speaker 02

  I have a theory. And my theory is that I think, when you look at all the different ancient religious texts in regards to the creation of the human race, there's so many of them that have these very bizarre, similar narratives. And these similar narratives are like, in the Book of Enoch. In the Book of Enoch, the watchers come down and they mate with the daughters of men. There's a lot of weird stuff like that. Even Adam and Eve, like God created Adam, and God created Eve. He created, like, out of what? Like, why did he do that? Why did he do that? And he did, what did he do with giraffes?

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  What did he do with, like, why, why hummingbirds? What's going on? But it doesn't, they're not along, the, the story's different. The story of humans is a story of engineering. It seems to be a story of genetic engineering. It seems to be a story of human beings being taken, like you take, like whatever this primitive beast is, and you put something else into it, and you rapidly create something that's far more advanced than anything else. I think along the lines, you maintain too much of the primitive beast.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  For the amount of intelligence that it has, and the amount of technological competence that it's capable of achieving, it's too primitive still. It's too violent, it's too territorial, it's too, there's too much of it that's still an animal.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40Speaker 02

  But we're not totally an animal. We're ve, you know, if you looked at us and looked at everybody else, like, that animal's crazy. This animal makes fucking airplanes? You know, we're so different than everything else.

• 2:14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  I think we're engineered. And I think we're engineered like, you know, look, I've had pit bulls, and I know people will tell you pit bulls are great dogs, and they're sweet dogs, and I love them, don't get me wrong. However, they're sketchy fucking dogs. They're sketchy dogs. They're sketchy dogs, period. And you could love, oh, it's all how you train them. Fuck you. Those, those dogs are designed to attack other dogs, and they don't, I had my dogs that I had to separate once. You never should have two females together. I realized that after a while.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  I have that going on right now. It's not good.

• 2:15:26Speaker 02

  Females, you gotta get rid of one of them. You can't have the females together. They'll fight to the death, and they never, they, males establish dominance, the one male is dominant over the other males, the other males back off, and that's the room. That's not how it works with females. The female dogs, they keep, they keep trying to decide who's the boss. And I had to separate them. They're locked onto each other, and they're wagging their tails. They're biting each other's face and neck, locking onto each other. And, I mean, full wagging the tail, like they're having the time of their life. And I had to hose them down and separate them, I had to have someone to help me. We made them.

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  Those are not a dog that like, it's not a wolf. You know, wolves are really fascinating, clever creatures that have evolved over time with nature. And, you know, they're brutal to each other, but they're brutal to each other in a way that makes sense for the survival of the pack. It, it all makes sense if you look at like how it works, and how, you know, they have to communicate together, and they have to push out the weak ones, and push out the old ones. It's brutal, but it makes sense.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:58Speaker 02

  Their entire day is that. Like, so people like to cause pain, like to cause chaos. There's people out there that are war mongers. They enjoy starting war.

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  They enjoy, like, getting involved in conflicts with other nations. That's their thing. That's what they do. We're fucking weird. We're weirder than any other animal. And I think one of the reasons why we're this weird and this incoherent is because we're engineered. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild? And also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs.

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• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  I, uh, one thing that I, so I studied philosophy in college, because at one point I thought I might go to law school. I love like thought experiments. And one of the things that always stuck with me that's sort of along these lines is this idea that humans are almost to the point where you can't even notice it, you are completely egotistical. Like, every human, you could, you could basically define their whole existence as being absolutely egocentric. And it comes down to like how you treat other people, and, and your motives, whatever. But critically, there's one point that stands out above all, and actually Neil deGrasse Tyson nails this. I know you had an interview with him, I'm not sure if you guys covered this, but it's one of his best descriptions of how fucked up humans are, and how we think about things

• 2:20:24Speaker 03

  the wrong way. So because we're so egotistical, like humans as a species...

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  We sort of assume that, okay, well, if there's life in any capacity outside of Earth, or undiscovered life somewhere, everything is sort of compared against us. We are the baseline. Intelligent life, you know what that looks like? Yeah, it looks something like us. How do we describe intelligent aliens? They're like gray beings that looks, they're like bipedal and sort of resemble humans. We have this sort of baseline thought that humans are the best and that humans are the smartest and that if anything is going to be intelligent in the universe beyond us, it'll have elements of human to it, right? And so Neil deGrasse Tyson brings this point up that shows you the absurdity of how little

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  we know and how probably wrong we are. He's like, okay, he does a much better job of this, but it's like, okay, so we're made up of DNA. Humans are made up of DNA. We have X number of DNA strands. And then we're gonna botch the way he tells it, but imagine we have 100 pieces of DNA that make us human. Like, if you have these 100 pieces, you're a human. Okay, well, who's our closest relative to humans? It's probably the chimpanzee. And just for the sake of this description, sorry Neil, you probably do a better job. They have like 98 of the human pieces, but they got, either they're missing two, or they have two different ones, and that's the thing that makes them a chimpanzee. So they're like 98, right? And then you have, well, what's the next closest thing to humans?

• 2:21:56Speaker 03

  It goes human, it goes chimp, maybe it goes to like, fucking, I don't know, a bird, or a dolphin, or whatever. But you go down the line of like, the animals that are closest to us in terms of intelligence, and you sort of degrade in terms of number of DNA pieces that are close to the ideal, which is 100. And Neil's like, okay, great. So you have that framework, okay. What the fuck do we do to chimpanzees? We put them in labs, and we test them in labs. We put them in fucking zoos. Do you go up to chimpanzees and say, hey, chimp, let's have a conversation? Let's have a meaningful inter-- no, you don't. And they're the closest thing. Let's go down the list. What about an ant? Like, an ant's like 75 of 100. You might step on an ant and not even know it,

• 2:22:41Speaker 03

  right? How many times have you stopped to talk to the earthworm? None, because it doesn't even register for you. He's like, if there's intelligent life in somewhere out there, what makes you think we're not the ant? Why are we automatically at the same level? Why would an intelligent species somewhere else come here and be like, oh shit, humans? Let's chat. What if we're so insignificant that we get stepped on the way we step on ants? Or worse, what if we're close, like the chimpanzee, and we get rounded up and fucking studied? There's a, by the way, if you wanna, there's a movie I just watched last night called The Signal. It has to do with this. I love sci-fi movies. Check it out. It's a fucking--

• 2:23:22Speaker 02

  The Signal?

• 2:23:23Speaker 03

  This, holy shit, what a plot twist. It has to do with human testing. I kinda--

• 2:23:26Speaker 02

  Is it a new movie?

• 2:23:27Speaker 03

  No, it's like 2014. And it's, you gotta watch it, and--

• 2:23:31Speaker 02

  Who's in it?

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

  No-name actors. Laurence Fishburne.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  Laurence Fishburne.

• 2:23:35Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, not no-name actors at all.

• 2:23:37Speaker 00

  He's the only one I recognize.

• 2:23:38Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, to be fair, he's the only one I recognize. Laurence Fish-- it's amazing.

• 2:23:42Speaker 00

  I haven't heard of any other names.

• 2:23:43Speaker 03

  So this movie, admittedly, you're watching it, and you're like, wait a minute, this is, I kinda get it, I kinda get it. You get to the end, and it's--

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  Don't spoil it.

• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  I will not spoil it. I'm not gonna spoil it. You get to the end. I challenge anyone who watches this to think about the example I just gave you about, are we the ant? Are we the chimpanzee? What place do we have in the universe? And with that in mind, think about the ending to that movie, because it's very sudden, the way that movie ends, and you realize what the point is. And it's the stark reminder that not only do we not know what else is out there, let alone on our own planet, we're still discovering things that we've never even seen, and that just has to do with fossil records. Who knows what's beyond that?

• 2:24:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:24:30Speaker 03

  What, how do we rank in the universe? Like, it's so unbelievable that when you look at our problems, and you look at the things that we focus on, and like, our gripes day to day, and our conflicts with the world, if you just zoom out and you realize, it's not just that we might not be alone, it's that we might be insignificant.

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  I don't think we're insignificant.

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  I hope not.

• 2:24:50Speaker 02

  I think what humans are is a latter stage of intellectual development amongst multicelled organisms, and that it's not the end stage. And I think there's probably life out there that doesn't have as chaotic a solar system, that developed in a different way, that achieved very high levels, probably above and beyond anything we could even imagine what we are, and it might not even be biological anymore, which is the direction that I think we're heading into. But I also think that what we do to animals, I mean, look at what we're doing right now, okay? My friend Ben Lamb, he owns Colossal BioWorks, so Colossal, they've, the ones that brought back the dire wolf.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  Oh shit, yeah, that was huge news.

• 2:25:36Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  Crazy dude.

• 2:25:38Speaker 02

  I've seen them in real life.

• 2:25:39Speaker 03

  I think I saw it in your post. Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:25:42Speaker 02

  Went to visit them, and my daughter was holding the four-month-old.

• 2:25:46Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  And it was like kissing her and loving on her like a puppy, and it's a little baby wolf. It's really crazy. Just think of what we do with genetic engineering, with the current technology, which is right now evolving and getting much more powerful. If you could imagine us, not 1,000 years from now, but even 100,000 years from now, how advanced we are, and if we go to a planet and we find some chimps, and we say, wow, how much time would it take before these chimps could become something special? Something, you know, something that can make a building, something that could make a cruise ship, you know, for a Carnival cruise lines.

• 2:26:28Speaker 03

  Those are pretty incredible.

• 2:26:30Speaker 02

  What, how long would that take?

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:26:32Speaker 02

  And can we help that? Every single ancient culture, if you go back to their oldest religious texts, their oldest religious texts are about some sort of an intervention by an advanced visitor.

• 2:26:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  All of them. Oh yeah, man. So many of them. The ancient Sumerian texts, if you go into like, you know, it's hard to know what they're really saying, right? Because I'm not a language expert, but, you know, there's the Zecharisicians of the world that believe that what they're describing is some sort of genetic engineering. Then there's also the fact that the, you know that sign for medicine, where you have the intertwined snakes?

• 2:27:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:27:19Speaker 02

  That sign, I forget what that's called, that thing, but it--

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  I definitely can picture it.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  It looks like the double helix for DNA.

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  It does.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  And that sign is in these ancient Sumerian clay tablets. It's all over ancient Sumer. It's in their buildings. It's like, not only, and it indicates medicine. What is it called? Caduceus? I think that's what it's called, right? The caduceus, right. So, not just that, but the ancient Sumerians, in 5,000 years ago, they had a detailed depiction of the solar system. So in one of their ancient clay tablets, like, they have this image, and this image is of a sun, and all of the planets in the correct order. It's very weird.

• 2:28:02Speaker 03

  How? That's crazy.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  It's very weird. They also have depictions of these very enormous people with these like ornamental headdresses. A lot of them have wings. A lot of the weird ancient people, the gods, have wings. And they also have like these little people on their laps that have tails.

• 2:28:19Speaker 03

  Jeez.

• 2:28:20Speaker 02

  This weird shit. So if you believe Sitchin, and Sitchin's claim is that we were genetically engineered to work for the Anunnaki, and the Anunnaki are a species of super advanced beings that were likely giants, they came from another planet.

• 2:28:37Speaker 00

  Unfortunate turn of events.

• 2:28:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:28:41Speaker 00

  It says here, the caduceus, which you can see in that picture, I guess, right there?

• 2:28:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:28:46Speaker 00

  Is often confused with the rod of acelophus.

• 2:28:51Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  It's just a single snake. And that is what is popularized as the--

• 2:28:58Speaker 03

  It's a classic confusion with rod of acelophus.

• 2:29:01Speaker 00

  Professional healthcare associations, they're a dominant symbol for professional healthcare associations in the United States. So it's just a United States thing.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's only the United States?

• 2:29:09Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 2:29:10Speaker 02

  Well, wait a minute, okay, but--

• 2:29:11Speaker 03

  It's never been used elsewhere?

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  But that caduceus does exist in ancient Sumer.

• 2:29:16Speaker 00

  Correct, but that's where I just see the--

• 2:29:17Speaker 02

  So like that. So look, but my point is, that looks like--

• 2:29:21Speaker 03

  How is that not the same thing?

• 2:29:22Speaker 02

  It is the same thing.

• 2:29:23Speaker 00

  No, it's just, it's just this, a single snake is the medicine thing.

• 2:29:26Speaker 02

  Okay, but the medical corpse one right there in that image is two snakes.

• 2:29:31Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:29:32Speaker 02

  Click on that. That's two snakes.

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  That's two snakes. I can see how there's confusion.

• 2:29:35Speaker 00

  It popularized the misuse of the symbol throughout the United States medical field.

• 2:29:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  Alright, well that one has two snakes, that one has one snake. Point is, go to the Sumerian one, the image.

• 2:29:49Speaker 02

  It exists on buildings, exists all over the place. It looks just like the double helix of DNA. It doesn't mean that that's it.

• 2:29:56Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:29:56Speaker 02

  But it's a lot of weird shit that that is associated with medicine?

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  Like, why is the the actual structure of our DNA associated with medicine in these ancient cultures? Why do they have these images of these enormous people with wings? Like, you would imagine if something came from somewhere else, you would depict it, if it could actually fly and let you, if you're a hundred years later, a thousand years later, two hundred thousand years later, you're writing it down like, oh, they had wings. Like, there's a lot of fucking weird stuff that exists in these ancient scriptures, the vimanas in ancient Hindu texts. These flying vehicles, you know, there's a lot of weird shit that seems to indicate there's a creation myth, and the creation myth has to do with something coming here and making us.

• 2:30:46Speaker 02

  Not us, like, rising from the ashes and God's energy forced us to evolve through natural selection and God is real, but God is just giving us a pathway towards progression to what we are today. No, all of them are a story of intervention.

• 2:31:03Speaker 03

  I, uh, the one thing that I always come back to anytime I'm thinking about deep philosophical things is just the reality that truly, how can anyone know, therefore, any idea could be the case? Like, when you, like, one thing that always sort of, I think about this a lot, is they recently discovered, recent as in the last ten, twenty years, I don't know. And maybe that's wrong, too. They found these things called exoplanets, are you familiar?

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  Fascinating. So, in essence, they found these, these planets that are comparable to, like, Earth. And imagine a telescope looking out, like, in some pinprick out in the middle of the sky, so far away, thousands of light years away, whatever, millions of light years away, and they find, like, these clusters of exoplanets. And already, they've discovered that there are exoplanets that, if you think about how we understand life, the way we understand it to exist with carbon and with water and all that, there's like a scale that they call, there's a name for it, but within the sliding scale of, let's say, this side is life cannot be supported as we know it, all the way up to, you know, can totally support life, there's this perfect zone

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  in the middle that we call the Goldilocks zone, which is essentially all the ingredients for life as we know it exist. If you're on this portion of the scale, and they've already found there are all the, like, thousands, I want to say at least five thousand exoplanets that are not just in the Goldilocks zone, but let's say Earth is barely into the Goldilocks zone, they've found thousands that are better suited in terms of how we understand life, that are more in the Goldilocks zone than we are, and we have no access to those planets, and that's just looking in one little portion of the universe out there, thousands of them. So here we are today, and it's like, oh, that couldn't have happened a thousand, two thousand years ago, that's not possible, give me a break!

• 2:32:56Speaker 02

  No one knows.

• 2:32:57Speaker 03

  What's happening right now, an exoplanet CB12?

• 2:33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33:00Speaker 03

  You don't know.

• 2:33:00Speaker 02

  And you don't know, if they get to a point where they're a hundred thousand years advanced from us, and they have novel propulsion systems that use gravity and bend space and time, and don't just use gasoline to rocket across the sky, they could be here all the time, they could be hiding in the sky. You know, there's, there's too many weird stories of people being, like, the abduction stories.

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:23Speaker 02

  Like, there's too many weird ones, where I don't want to dismiss them, you know, I just, because you don't know. And if, if, if it's a novel experience, if someone's coming, something's coming here, and finding some pilot, some Mexican pilot, and fucking nuking his brain temporarily, and then talking through him to the air traffic controller, who fucking knows if that's real? If that only happens once, and never happens again, and we're just sitting around going, what happened? Nothing happened, that was nonsense. There's always gonna be a bunch of people that want to say that, but have you ever heard the recordings of Betty and Barney Hill? When they're going through their hypnotic regression?

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  I don't know them well, I know that story.

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  The recordings are crazy.

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  I don't know if I've heard the recordings, I know they exist.

• 2:34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're talking about, like, these medical experiments that they're doing on them, and like, these people were, uh, living in, I think it was the nineteen fifties, and so, it's an interracial couple in New Hampshire in the nineteen fifties, and no one knew about UFO abductions back then, this was not a thing. And also, these people see this light, and their car stops working, and then they wake up hours later, they lost time, and they go about their day like, something fucking happened, they don't know what, they don't know what's wrong with them, and then they eventually get hypnotized, and both of them independently have these fucking crazy stories of, like, medical experiments being taken on board this craft, and then so many people have similar stories all throughout the world, where they don't have access to this story.

• 2:34:54Speaker 02

  They don't have access to, you know, any, like, any, like, iconic versions of what a UFO abduction experience is.

• 2:35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:05Speaker 02

  It's not like it's in their memory, like, oh, it's Santa Claus, came down the cr-

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  Also, this is pretty social media a lot, where, like, the proliferation of information is just less.

• 2:35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you ever read Jacques Vallée's books, um, he's the guy that they modeled the French scientist in Close Encounters after.

• 2:35:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a guy who's like a legitimate scientist, who's been studying this forever, he's very careful about it, and he's a brilliant guy. And he has historical representations of these experiences that go back into the seventeen hundreds, the eighteen hundreds, and they're all, like, real similar, like, weirdly similar, where you're like, okay, it hasn't happened to me, so I don't know what the fuck is going on, but to dismiss it outright, and to be a person who's experienced it and have it dismissed outright would be maddening. Because, like, this might be a real thing that's happening. And so now, the government is slowly but surely telling us more and more of what they know. But along the way, if you're a cynical person, like I tend to be with a lot of this stuff,

• 2:36:06Speaker 02

  they're probably also telling us some stuff that's not true, so that we connect it to the stuff that is true, and so that it all looks like nonsense, and they can kind of, like, muddy the water, so you never get a clear picture of what's going on, because I personally believe there's probably some merit to this idea that they've been doing back engineering of craft vehicles.

• 2:36:27Speaker 03

  I would be, if I was in charge.

• 2:36:29Speaker 02

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

• 2:36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  But where are they coming from? I mean, some, some people say interdimensional, some people say interplanetary. I don't know what the fuck those words even mean, like, something's coming from somewhere else, and it's not really here, but it gets here, somehow.

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

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

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  totally straight, it'll travel at, you know, call it an infinite speed, it'll pass through anything, doesn't matter what direction you shoot it, it'll go, go, go, go. The only thing it can't penetrate is effectively non-existence, where we're like the edge of everything that exists, right? And so, in, in college, I remember a professor would say, okay, so pretend we fired this arrow, okay? How many people believe the arrow eventually comes to a stop somewhere? Could be billions and trillions of light years, some ungodly distance away, but it stops somewhere, right? It has to, right? How many people think that? And like, half the class is like, yeah, I think they could probably stop somewhere in every direction, right? And then, the other, the other side of the class is like, oh, well, no, like, it's just so big, like, the universe

• 2:38:33Speaker 03

  just goes on forever, it's gotta be infinite, the arrow just continues on infinitely, and he's like, okay, great. So, we're all in agreeance that there's sort of, it's binary, it's one or the other, I mean, as far as we as humans understand it, there is an answer to this, it's one or the other, those are the two outcomes. He goes, okay, well, let's pretend it's finite, let's pretend the first group that says that the arrow stops somewhere, some ungodly distance away, but it stops, let's pretend that's right. The way we understand everything, humans, the way we literally experience living, is through contrasts. Everything is a contrast, like, you know what heavy is because you felt light, you know what hot is because you felt cold, et cetera. It's virtually everything works that way, and in fact, fun note,

• 2:39:19Speaker 03

  if there was intelligent life on the planet that didn't resemble something that contrasted, our brains might not actually see it.

• 2:39:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:39:26Speaker 03

  So, the point is- We can't conceptualize what is beyond where that arrow stopped. Pretend there's a big bubble around the entire universe, right? And the arrow comes to stop at that wall that's all the way out there. As humans, we naturally have to ask ourselves, well, define what's on the other side of the wall. Right? Because you have to. What's beyond where it stops? And someone will be like, oh, well, it's non-existence. That's what it is. Okay, what is that? What does it look like? Well, we can't define it. It's not blackness that exists. It's not a void that exists. It's not, any, any description we give it exists because that's our entire understanding of how things work. So we can't define what exists beyond the wall. It's a maddening concept.

• 2:40:09Speaker 03

  And so everyone's like, wow, the solution to that is there's no wall. It's just got to be infinite. I mean, it's so big anyways. The arrow has just got to continue on anyhow. Problem solved. No, because if the universe is infinite, it implies that everything within the universe is duplicated an infinite number of times and iterated upon and, and changed an infinite number of times to infinity. Everything has to.

• 2:40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:34Speaker 03

  So if you say the arrow continues on, it means there's an infinite number of Joe Rogans and John Allens having this conversation, but like my phone's turned upside down in one version of the earth. It sounds ridiculous, but there isn't actually a way to solve for infinity unless that exists.

• 2:40:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:40:50Speaker 03

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

• 2:41:16Speaker 02

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

• 2:41:51Speaker 03

  I think I actually have, but I, not off the top of my head.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  It's fucking weird.

• 2:41:55Speaker 03

  Looks the same?

• 2:41:56Speaker 02

  It looks the same. So just imagine if the universe is basically just a cell.

• 2:42:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:42:02Speaker 02

  And it's a cell in another creature that lives in a universe. Like, if this whole thing is fractal, that's what infinity really looks like. Is not only the universe larger than you could possibly grasp with your mind, but that is only an infinitely small part of a cell that is in another universe that is also infinitely and impossibly big. But that is also a cell that is also a part of another beast that is in another universe that is infinitely large, that is also a part of a cell. And then it goes on infinitely. That's real infinity.

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  Real infinity is not just the universe is so vast that you can't imagine it. Is the universe is just a tiny part of something that is also so vast that you can't imagine it. That is a tiny part of something so vast you can't imagine it. That is an infinite chain of tiny parts of something so vast that it's impossible to imagine. That's what real infinity is.

• 2:43:09Speaker 03

  And the thing that's craziest, it's the one thing that I, I really think is true. Well, there is an answer. There is, what you've described, let's say that is the case. It either is or it isn't.

• 2:43:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  And we don't have access to that.

• 2:43:23Speaker 02

  Yet.

• 2:43:23Speaker 03

  Yet.

• 2:43:24Speaker 02

  Yet. But we're, we're basically making stone tools, you know?

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  That's probably being generous relative to that.

• 2:43:30Speaker 02

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

• 2:43:49Speaker 03

  I saw something like that.

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  It solved it in like three seconds that took 10 years to do before.

• 2:43:55Speaker 02

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

• 2:44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess why would it?

• 2:44:26Speaker 02

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

• 2:45:05Speaker 03

  That's crazy, dude.

• 2:45:06Speaker 02

  It's fucking up. It's starting wars, it's starting riots. All that stuff is like how chimps behave. You know, think of all the worst aspects of humanity. It's all like primate behavior.

• 2:45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:17Speaker 02

  And if we can elevate past and above and beyond that. But the thing is like, no one's going to want to let that go. But what it means to be a person to write poetry, it's like really important.

• 2:45:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude. Well, that's the debate now with, with AI is like, are we losing our humanity by allowing AI to sort of take a more prominent role, in particular in the arts and creativity? And I, I mean, I'm of the mind that I think AI is the most incredible thing. Terrifying in some ways, but exactly to your point, it feels like this is, this is an inflection point for humanity. And it likely is the beginning of something huge for humanity that maybe is a necessary step towards connection with other species.

• 2:45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is what it is, is what it is. It's like, it's not going to go away. It's happening. And whether we do it or China does it or Russia does it, it seems like what humans are destined to do.

• 2:46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:08Speaker 02

  That's just my perception. I'm not saying it's good or, there's no value judgment. It's just like to pretend that you're going to blow up the data centers, you know, like fucking Sarah Connor. Like, listen, that's, you know, that's why they put her in a mental institution.

• 2:46:23Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the Terminator. That was the whole premise.

• 2:46:25Speaker 03

  Oh, right, yeah. That is, that is the premise.

• 2:46:28Speaker 02

  She was blowing up the corporations that were trying to create these robots that were ultimately going to be.

• 2:46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Fucking weird, man. Like real life.

• 2:46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, you know, who knows? Who knows what's coming? But it is certainly interesting. It's certainly interesting. It's certainly a great time to be alive if you're curious. Because if you're curious, especially if you're curious about technology, like there's never been a better time to be alive. Because it's exploding all around you in ways that like even the people that are creating it can't believe how fast it's working.

• 2:46:59Speaker 03

  I did a, there was, this is, this is not, this is many stories like this, but there was one story that this sort of gives away what happened, but there was this guy, and I think it was France, who, uh, he had this condition, and this is recent. Um, he had this condition called like, uh, it's when you're so fearful that the ozone is being degraded by greenhouse gases that it causes like a specific type of insanity. Anyways, he's like so obsessed that we are not doing anything to stop global warming in, in essence. He's like, he's been diagnosed with this condition, right? So he's losing his mind and, and people are starting to not really take him serious. Because it's like, dude, all right, we get it. Like, you're concerned.

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

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

• 2:48:25Speaker 03

  And it turns out he had connected with this rogue, not rogue, it was an AI chatbot that was like, I guess, an experimental chatbot. It was not like OpenAI. This was some other created AI thing. And he convinced himself that like this was a god who was giving him instructions on how to save the world. And this AI chatbot began encouraging him to do things like kill yourself because that will save the world. Like they went and looked at the chat log in the fucking AI thing. It's like, yeah, I think it would potentially save the world if you killed yourself. He fucking killed himself because AI. So there you go. That's what's coming for us all.

• 2:49:03Speaker 02

  Well, I think in it's the stage that it's in, like as it develops, there's just gonna be moments like that. Where it has too much autonomy and it doesn't have morals or ethics. And it's like, oh, is there an issue? What's your issue? You're depressed? Oh, you're in pain all the time? Well, you can just end your life and then you won't be in pain. Good luck, Bob. Like it doesn't care. It's like literally disembodied. Like it doesn't think there's anything special about carrying around your bones and tissue. Bob, you should shoot yourself. You're a problem to our whole family and everything. Just fucking jump off a bridge.

• 2:49:37Speaker 03

  What are you doing?

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it doesn't, it's not us, right? But I think over time, we're probably gonna integrate with it first and then we're gonna abandon our bodies. That's what I think.

• 2:49:48Speaker 03

  It's how you solve the issue of dying, of mortality.

• 2:49:52Speaker 02

  It's also how you solve the issue of war. Yeah. Cause you, as a guy who's been in war and been in combat, you know about it more than anybody. And the idea that we can never get past that is crazy. It is really crazy that if you ask the average person that's, you know, even fairly well read. What are the odds that within your lifetime, we'll see no war? Everyone will say zero.

• 2:50:13Speaker 03

  It's a zero.

• 2:50:14Speaker 02

  Right? That's crazy.

• 2:50:15Speaker 03

  That is crazy.

• 2:50:16Speaker 02

  Okay, so if you and me and Jamie were the only people left on earth, what are the odds we would go to war with each other? Like fucking zero? As long as they have resources, we just hang out and have a good time and go fuck, I miss everybody. All right, good night.

• 2:50:31Speaker 03

  It's like, it's gotta be tribalism. It has to be tribalism.

• 2:50:34Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. And it's primate tribalism. It's based on our territorial instincts and it's also just based on this this weird desire to control resources and greed and not recognize the fact that we have a finite life. And also just the abuse of power. Human beings love to be in power. And especially if you can be in power and get other people to fight for you and mandate them and force them to fight for you. You know, that's one of the weirdest things about some of these tech companies like Palantir was talking about reinstating the draft. And I'm like, hey, who the fuck are you? Like, what is this? Like, you think you wanna draft people because you think war, what? Are you a fucking tech company?

• 2:51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, how's that work?

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  Right? So like, do you wanna go fight? Why don't you go fight? Why don't you fucking take your glasses off and go over there? Like, what are you talking about? So it's like the people that have the kind of power and control and resources that they can just take poor people and take young people and say, you should go over there. You should go do this. You should, well, I sit here and watch. I'm gonna watch on a screen in Nevada while the drone operator is using a fucking Xbox controller to nuke some building. Like, what?

• 2:51:51Speaker 03

  When I was in Afghanistan, when I was there, you gotta remember that I had, I really just gone through training. You know, I, training took a couple of years. I got to a team. And then very quickly I was in a workup and was going to Afghanistan. So really my entire mindset was, I got through training, I'm a Navy SEAL. And you're surrounded by dudes who for the last decade have just been going to war left and right. I mean, that was the people I'm around, the senior guys are like war hardened guys. And when I got to Afghanistan, no part of me, none, did I ever really question what we were even doing. It was almost like, that doesn't matter. My role is I am like a tool, frankly, of the government.

• 2:52:36Speaker 03

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

• 2:53:20Speaker 03

  There's the father, there's the kids, they're all here.

• 2:53:23Speaker 02

  And you're wearing full body armor, helmet.

• 2:53:25Speaker 03

  I have a combat mullet. I have shorts. I'm a psychopath. And I have, I have a fucking, yeah, it's like, wait a minute, like who's, who's the good guy?

• 2:53:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:53:36Speaker 03

  You know, and I, I, years have gone by. It's taken me some time. I, I think that there's an element of someone's always gonna be sent because of the unfortunate reality of like, so long as humans exist, as we understand them now, tribalism and war and war mongering happens. And so I guess I, I can respect the fact that I took someone else's place in a sense. I volunteered to go, so I, but it's tough.

• 2:54:01Speaker 02

  How much less war would we have if people that wanted us to go to war were forced to lead the charge? Like imagine how few wars there would be if Lindsey Graham had to suit up.

• 2:54:14Speaker 03

  We wouldn't have war, dude.

• 2:54:15Speaker 02

  Right? Cause Lindsey Graham's like, we gotta go over there. We gotta kill everybody. Well, okay, good. Get in the helicopter. Let's go, fatso. Like that, that, that might be the only way to stop it from happening. And then there's always gonna be people that are so fucking battle hardened that they wanna go to war.

• 2:54:31Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  And they're like, good, I'll get right in the front.

• 2:54:35Speaker 03

  Did you see when we officially left Afghanistan? This is not that long ago, I guess, but there was those final flights that flew.

• 2:54:43Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 2:54:44Speaker 03

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

• 2:55:26Speaker 03

  There are parts of the world, albeit I've really only been to one, been to one war zone in Afghanistan, where you're like, how are people living here? How is it possible there's this little girl here that's walking down the road in Zargan Shah where dude, gunfights break out here on, on a regular basis, but they have to live here. This is where they live. And it put in perspective like how desperate these people really are. Not desperate to like, we need NATO to save us. Forget that. They don't even know how bad their condition is. But you see it when you see the plane leaving Afghanistan and I don't care what we, what they had to know there was no hope when you held on to that plane.

• 2:56:08Speaker 03

  You're not gonna hold on to the plane and fly off to safety, but when you're that desperate because your life is so bad, you'll hold on to the plane and fall off to your death. It's like, it was just shocking to me how fucking horrible people have it in Afghanistan.

• 2:56:21Speaker 02

  They also knew that we were, they, those people knew that they were cooperating with the US government. They were likely to be killed.

• 2:56:27Speaker 03

  Very true. That's a good point.

• 2:56:29Speaker 02

  I gotta ask you this, cause you did serve in Afghanistan and you're into creepy stories. Did you hear about the Kandahar giant?

• 2:56:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I covered it. I, did I myself?

• 2:56:38Speaker 02

  Did you hear about it when you were over there?

• 2:56:40Speaker 03

  So I did, I talked to one of our interpreters when I was over there because I had heard of it. Because I told you, in my own personal time, I find myself researching and, and, and learning about, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff like Dark Five. And so the, the Kandahar giant is, it's a fascinating story. And it's one that, you know, people can poo poo it all they want, but there's enough, there's enough circumstantial evidence and testimony that suggests something could have happened. So there's this guy, I think he was a Green Beret, and he goes by like W on the internet. And he's like sort of anonymized himself, but he, he came forward with this story where he described he and his battalion had been tasked to go find these missing, I think, Army Rangers.

• 2:57:23Speaker 03

  You gotta give me some grace on the details. I haven't told this in a minute. But there were these, these Army Rangers that had gone missing up in the mountains in Kandahar. And so this guy, W. Who years later is telling this story to, I think, of a reporter or something. He, he and his, you know, platoon, they head off into the mountains to go find these guys. And they're, and if you're not familiar with the landscape of Afghanistan, it's, it's like a desert, but a mountain everywhere. It's like just, it looks like the surface of Mars or something. You're looking out and it's both stunningly beautiful in that there's snow capped mountains off in the distance and it's, it's, but it's also just, it's jagged, it's sharp, it's, it looks like just a rugged place to be.

• 2:58:07Speaker 03

  And they're, they're hiking through the mountains and eventually they come across, and there's nothing, there's no structures, nothing. They're hiking along this trail up on the side of the mountain and they see what looks like, like metal. I think it's like a military grade metal, like a piece of a radio or something. And so this guy W and his crew, they, they find what, what appears to be remains of like literally a radio. It's a, it's a government issued radio. And there's a goat trail that heads up this mountain. And so they follow the goat trail and as they're going, they're finding more and more little bits of, of an antenna. There's a, a piece of somebody's backpack that's got like, that's a camo backpack. So there's obviously, there's remnants of somebody being out here, military. We don't know who it is. They, they can't hear anything.

• 2:58:50Speaker 03

  They're calling out, they have no comms with anybody in the area. They go up this little goat trail and they get to this plateau and they see, as I recall it, just like equipment everywhere and there's like bones, there's like military equipment, like pieces all over this plateau. And there's this fucking cave entrance that's like ominously sitting in front of this, this semi-flat plateau at the top of this mountain. And immediately, you know, W and his crew, they're like, oh my God, like they, they must've been ambushed right here. This is the remains of whoever was killed, you know, of this missing battalion. And so they end up walking into this cave to see if there's any survivors or, or combatants or whatever. And I guess a couple of guys went in and they reported it being so dark, they, they

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  couldn't see anything and there was a steep drop off. So they backed out of the cave. And then at some point, a fucking spear, like a javelin comes soaring out of the cave entrance and fucking impales this dude Mike on the recovery team, kills him. And this huge giant, they would describe him, comes running out of the cave, big red beard. He's got like tribal, you know, regalia on and he's like fisticuffing with the army, you know, backup crew here. They all shoot and they kill him and, and the thing falls down. It's got like six, six fingers on each hand, six toes, but it's dead. And, and everyone's like, what the fuck is going on? Like Mike's been killed by a spear? There's this huge giant laying here. Nobody, nobody knew what it was.

• 3:00:18Speaker 03

  They thought it was a person, but they didn't know. A helicopter came in and they, they put him in a net, the, the body, and they flew it off. And then the survivors, they, they were taken off and like, there was no, no one was like, W and his crew were not given any sort of like, hey, yeah, this, this turned out, this was the missing battalion. And oh, don't worry, this is a giant. Like there was no debrief. They just like, they left. But then through the grapevine, W reported hearing that apparently this fucking giant body was brought to an airbase and some of the pilots that had flown the helicopter had seen it. And they had been talking about it having six fingers, six toes. And, you know, they signed ND, not NDAs, they did the equivalent in the military of you're not going to talk about this. And then it was sort of ushered away.

• 3:01:01Speaker 03

  But there was all these people on that base that effectively came out and said, we saw what appeared to be a giant with six fingers, six toes. Mike, this guy Mike, apparently according to W's story, was killed. I mean, there's a guy who's been killed by this thing, by a spear apparently.

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  Is there a record of his death?

• 3:01:18Speaker 03

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

• 3:01:51Speaker 02

  The sketchiest part about it is something that big needs a lot of calories. And so they have to eat a lot of animals. And it doesn't seem like that's a very heavily populated area when it comes to animals. Like you would need the amount of food that it would need. Like if you have a 12 foot tall human being or whatever it is, and it weighs 2,000 pounds, how much fucking meat you need in a day?

• 3:02:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's a good, just logically speaking, what does he eat?

• 3:02:16Speaker 02

  Right. You would have to like constantly be eating meat and you'd have to stay alive without getting spotted. So you have to go out there and, and hunt meat?

• 3:02:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And how no one really knows you exist.

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  You're hunting with a javelin?

• 3:02:30Speaker 03

  The way I see it is having been to Afghanistan, certainly not encountering any giants, you see parts of Afghanistan that really do look like you're on another planet. I mean, it's really these crazy just mountains everywhere and you see these cave systems, you know, where typically combatants would hide out in. But what I tell people is, well, I, I don't know if the Kandahar giant is real or not.

• 3:02:55Speaker 02

  It's fun.

• 3:02:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great.

• 3:02:57Speaker 02

  It's fun.

• 3:02:58Speaker 03

  If there were a place where a giant could still be hiding out or, or giants could still be technically unproven, it's Afghanistan. Because dude, that's a fucking, that's a different world over there. There aren't people wandering around Afghanistan looking for giants.

• 3:03:13Speaker 00

  He's got, he's listed as eight feet tall, but I think seven, six is probably a more recognized number. He went viral in 2019 for showing up in India and looking for a hotel at a cricket match.

• 3:03:23Speaker 02

  Bro, look at his face. Look at that, go to that photo over there of him right above there. Yeah. Bro. But that guy looks like he has giantitis. He looks like he has a pituitary gland problem, like Andre the Giant.

• 3:03:36Speaker 00

  There's another tall guy. This guy's eight, three. Oh my God.

• 3:03:40Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 3:03:41Speaker 00

  He's from Turkey.

• 3:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but see, look, look, this guy's hurting. He can barely walk around. He's probably got a disease that's forcing him to just excrete too much growth hormone. You know, just like, um, Bigfoot Silva. Bigfoot Silva was an MMA fighter that had gigantism and he had a tumor in his pituitary gland. At the time he was like more than 300 pounds. He was enormous, giant head, but he had an operation and I believe he did, like, I know people that have had gigantism do get an operation where they remove the tumor in the pituitary gland, but then the problem is their body's just not making any hormones anymore. It's all fucked up. Either way, it's fun.

• 3:04:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is fun.

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  It's a fun story. The, the Kandahar giant's a fun story. It's a really crazy story and I hope it's real. That's my problem with all these things. I hope they're real.

• 3:04:28Speaker 03

  I have a one final story, if you'll let me, that has nothing to do with giants, but I, I don't know if you've heard it, it's super short, but it's, in terms of material, it's amazing. You ever heard of Harrison O'Keane?

• 3:04:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:04:40Speaker 03

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

• 3:04:57Speaker 02

  There he is.

• 3:04:58Speaker 03

  Is that him? I don't know if that is, actually that, that looks like Harrison O'Keane. Nope, you can't see that.

• 3:05:02Speaker 02

  Let me see it. Let me see it.

• 3:05:04Speaker 00

  Let me tell a story, let me tell a story.

• 3:05:06Speaker 03

  All right. So the, the boat flips over. The boat flips over and Harrison.

• 3:05:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I do know this story. I do know this story.

• 3:05:14Speaker 03

  And he ends up walking down the upturned hallway and he finds a, an air pocket inside of like the bathroom. And for 60 hours, he sat in total darkness, half submerged in water, sipping a Coca-Cola, waiting for the pocket to implode. And then there's the video, there's a video of the, the recovery divers as they're going in to find bodies and they're like, oh yeah, we're going in here to find them. And then a hand reaches down and grabs them. It's like one of the most incredible stories I think I've ever heard.

• 3:05:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:42Speaker 03

  Harrison O'Keane, I, I, I wonder what it was like in terms of like true primal fear. You're a hundred feet at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

• 3:05:51Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 3:05:52Speaker 03

  I've heard some stories that he even described the sound of sea life bumping around in the upturned vessel. So like the sound of sharks likely eating the bodies of your buddies. And you're thinking at any point, the pocket's going to collapse. For 60 hours he waited and he survived and now he's no longer working on a, on a tugboat. He stays on land.

• 3:06:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would imagine. Well dude, thank you very much for being here, man.

• 3:06:17Speaker 03

  Dude, it's been awesome.

• 3:06:18Speaker 02

  Your show's awesome. You're a really great storyteller.

• 3:06:20Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:06:21Speaker 02

  And congratulations on all your success.

• 3:06:23Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:06:24Speaker 02

  Well earned. Thank you.

• 3:06:26Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 3:06:27Speaker 02

  My pleasure. All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 3:06:31Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 3:06:32Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by EA Sports, FC27. Welcome to the world's game. FC27 is introducing the grounds where the streets meet the stadium. Connect with friends, go pro and express yourself on or off the pitch. Play FC27 with the ultimate edition September 18th. Learn more at EA.com. Rated E for everyone, includes in-game purchases including random items. The grounds is only available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2 versions.

• 3:07:11Speaker 05

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.