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#072_STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with MrBallen · INSPIRE STORY

0:04
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
0:06
Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
0:13
Speaker 1: What's going on? It's going good, man.
0:15
Speaker 3: This is crazy.
0:15
Speaker 1: I can't believe I'm here.
0:17
Speaker 3: I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here.
0:20
Speaker 1: I do. This is like hallowed ground. I mean, I've
0:22
been watching you like the rest of the world for years.
0:25
I mean, I've seen so many clips of this space.
0:29
So many references to Jamie, and to be here right
0:32
now is very cool. So I'm honored. Thank you for
0:34
having me. Oh, thank you.
0:34
Speaker 3: Thank you. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, it is always
0:36
weird when you go someplace where you, like the first
0:38
time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way.
0:41
Like you're in the building, like what the fuck? This
0:43
is the actual Howard Stern show that I used to
0:45
listen to on the radio? It really freaked me out.
0:48
I couldn't sleep the night before. I did yoga in
0:50
my hotel room to try to calm down.
0:52
Speaker 1: When was this? When did you do this?
0:53
Speaker 3: A long time ago. 2000, probably one or something like that.
0:59
Speaker 1: Was this like prime Fear Factor days? You know what?
1:02
Speaker 3: I might have done it before I did Fear Factor.
1:05
Speaker 1: Great show, by the way.
1:07
Speaker 3: Thank you.
1:07
Speaker 1: Great show. Seriously.
1:10
Speaker 3: It was a good sign our society was about to crumble.
1:16
When historians go back and look at like the decline
1:19
of society, they're like, remember when they started making people
1:21
eat dicks on TV? They started making people eat animal
1:25
balls and animal dicks on TV. That might have been– That.
1:27
Speaker 1: Was the start. And then it was Rogan's interview on
1:31
that show. What's his name again? I just blacked out
1:34
the guy you just said you had an interview with.
1:36
Speaker 3: Howard Stern.
1:37
Speaker 1: Howard Stern.
1:37
Speaker 3: Well, it was like I did– we did Fear Factor.
1:42
It started airing right after September 11th.
1:45
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
1:46
Speaker 3: Like literally right after.
1:47
Speaker 1: Fear Factor. Uh-huh.
1:49
Speaker 3: And one of the narratives– one of the reporters asked me,
1:53
and like one of those stupid press junket things you
1:55
have to do, was do you think it's appropriate to
1:58
scare Americans right after what just happened at 9-11? I
2:02
was like, what the fuck are you talking about? This
2:04
is on me now? I'm like, what are you talking about?
2:07
It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks.
2:12
Speaker 1: It's very simple. Shut the fuck up.
2:16
Speaker 3: Watch it or don't watch it.
2:18
Speaker 1: Who cares?
2:19
Speaker 3: But It's like if you wanted to look at like
2:22
where society– you used to be like friends, Seinfeld. Oh, yeah.
2:27
Speaker 1: The good old days.
2:28
Speaker 3: The good old days. Miami Vice. It was television shows
2:31
that were like shows. And then all of a sudden
2:34
anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat
2:37
the animal dicks.
2:38
Speaker 1: That's true. That was the threshold.
2:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:40
Speaker 1: Pretty good.
2:41
Speaker 3: It's weird because that kind of ushered in social media.
2:44
It's very similar in a lot of ways. Like the
2:46
people that were willing– to go on these reality shows,
2:49
especially stuff like Big Brother, where you just live in
2:52
a house with a bunch of people. Like, how fucking weird.
2:56
You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation, and
2:58
the producers are fucking, you know, Mike's been talking a
3:00
lot of shit behind your back. You might want to
3:02
get ahead of this. Like, what?
3:03
Speaker 4: Mike?
3:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could never do that. Yeah.
3:05
Speaker 3: No, well, you're not stupid.
3:09
Speaker 1: Or you're not young, or you're not desperate.
3:11
Speaker 3: We had a lot of people that were just in, like,
3:13
credit card debt and shit, and they were like, look,
3:15
if I can win this fucking thing, Like normal people.
3:17
They're like, look, it'd be fun. I'll tell my kids
3:20
about it. We will watch this forever and I can
3:22
win $ 50, 000 so I can pay off my credit card debt.
3:25
Speaker 1: That's noble, dude.
3:26
Speaker 3: Well, sometimes people have to do what they have to do,
3:30
you know, but, but there's also a lot of people
3:32
that want attention in any way possible. And that's like
3:35
the people that are, you know, you see so many
3:37
people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing
3:41
to say, but they're just trying to find something where
3:44
people pay attention to them. What's, running up to people
3:46
and slapping them, throwing glasses of water in their face,
3:48
whatever they have to do. Anything they have to do
3:51
to get attention. And if you trace that back, it
3:53
kind of started with reality shows where people started to
3:57
be able to get attention just being a buffoon.
4:00
Speaker 1: I covered a story. So for those who don't know me,
4:03
I tell strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet.
4:07
And I covered a story that was like the epitome
4:09
of this. It's the idea of doing anything for clicks.
4:13
I don't have the dates, but it was like within
4:14
the past 10, 15 years, there was this group of–
4:17
or there was this one Russian influencer. This is– I
4:20
want to say circa 2010. And she wanted to do
4:23
something really special for her birthday, to document her birthday
4:27
and get as many clicks as possible. And she filled
4:30
this pool up with dry ice.
4:33
Speaker 3: Oh, Jesus.
4:34
Speaker 1: Water plus dry ice. And she invited all her friends
4:36
over and they documented themselves. going into this pool and
4:41
she has I think hundreds of thousands if not millions
4:43
of followers at the time and so everyone's like oh
4:45
it's the big birthday celebration I think it was live
4:48
and they go into the tub and the music's playing
4:51
and then no one comes out of the tub and
4:54
it's just the silence they all die they all die
4:57
from suffocation I think it was not exactly sure how
5:00
you die from dry ice but it's I think it
5:03
eradicates the oxygen and so they just died but it's
5:06
like how many people died I'm gonna say it's like
5:08
yeah three there you go three people What?
5:12
Speaker 3: First of all, like dry ice, you can't even get
5:14
on your skin.
5:16
Speaker 1: You know, we jumped into a pool of it.
5:18
Speaker 3: I was thinking it just tortured their skin. Three die
5:22
in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool. I
5:26
wonder how much dry ice takes to kill three people.
5:29
Speaker 1: I think a better question is what was the engagement
5:31
like on that post? Because in some ways that's what
5:35
it's all about.
5:36
Speaker 3: Look at the name.
5:36
Speaker 1: It A popular Instagram influencer. There we go.
5:43
Speaker 3: Focusing on pharmaceutical products. What? With more than a million followers.
5:49
Two people died at the scene. A third died in
5:51
the hospital. Russia's investigative committee said in a statement announcing
5:54
the criminal probe into the incident. But you do not
5:57
want to get arrested and go to jail in Russia.
6:00
Speaker 1: No.
6:01
Speaker 3: They don't fuck around.
6:02
Speaker 1: Generally not.
6:03
Speaker 3: They do not fuck around. Ask Brittany Griner. They don't
6:07
fuck around. She's out. Yeah, she's out. But she did
6:10
nine months.
6:11
Speaker 1: That's not good.
6:11
Speaker 3: Was it nine or ten? I think she was sentenced
6:14
for nine fucking years.
6:16
Speaker 1: And that was for marijuana possession at the airport?
6:18
Speaker 3: She just had a CBD vape pen. I mean, I
6:21
guess it was probably marijuana. But it was a vape pen.
6:25
And they put her in jail. Like, hardcore jail. for
6:30
nine fucking years.
6:31
Speaker 1: Periodically, I'll see, like, images of Russian courtrooms. And I
6:36
don't even know the stories, but always it's like the
6:38
accused is sitting inside of, like, a jail cell that's
6:42
in the middle of the courtroom, like iron bars. And
6:46
you know, whatever they've done, they're facing the death penalty.
6:48
They have to be. Or they pissed off Putin. Yeah, dude,
6:52
I don't know, man, but it's a gnarly place over there.
6:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, you better be friends with the right people over there.
6:57
You can't fuck around.
6:58
Speaker 1: No, dude.
6:59
Speaker 3: You can't fuck around. That's why, like, I mean, how
7:01
many times have, like, political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned
7:04
or gotten murdered? And not just him, but a bunch
7:07
of other prominent figures that had other people running against them.
7:12
Speaker 1: It's a shady business over there, dude. Oh, it's the shadiest.
7:15
It's the shadiest, man.
7:17
Speaker 3: Make sure for some very interesting people, though.
7:19
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:20
Speaker 3: Russian people are fascinating. I've met a bunch of brilliant
7:23
Russian people, you know.
7:24
Speaker 4: Yeah.
7:25
Speaker 1: I found that they're very, in my limited exposure. This guy. Yeah,
7:29
here we go.
7:29
Speaker 4: Hold on, this guy tries to get out that little
7:30
slit first.
7:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:31
Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Wait a second.
7:33
Speaker 4: He doesn't give up.
7:34
Speaker 3: He doesn't make it out.
7:35
Speaker 1: Oh, that's right.
7:36
Speaker 3: He goes through the roof.
7:38
Speaker 1: He's smart. I'm amazed that he was able to do that, though.
7:41
Speaker 3: What a fucking psycho. Look at him. He looks like
7:43
a psycho, though.
7:44
Speaker 1: He should be in that cell.
7:45
Speaker 3: He looks like a guy that should be dead. He
7:48
looks like a guy that probably spent a lot of
7:50
time in jail.
7:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
7:51
Speaker 3: He was climbing through the fucking, pulling his pants off.
7:55
Speaker 1: They're going to daze him in his nuts. That's not okay.
8:01
It's a rough spot. Rough spot on earth.
8:04
Speaker 3: Tough people. How did you get started in this whole
8:07
creepy storytelling thing on YouTube?
8:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I originally was in the military. I was
8:14
a SEAL. I did seven years in the teams. And
8:17
then when I got out in 2017, I... kind of
8:22
drifted a little bit, you know, uh, I, I did
8:24
some work with, with charity, said to did some veteran
8:26
charity work. And I, I don't know, I just sort
8:29
of floundered around for a couple of years. Um, and I'm,
8:32
I'm married. I got three kids, you know, so I'm
8:35
sort of like trying to figure it out. I have
8:36
this small pension coming in. That's enough to sort of
8:39
subsist on. But then, uh, I actually, I remember watching
8:43
a lot of Gary V. Um, and more specifically, I
8:47
saw Gary V was just every post he did. It
8:50
was like, Everybody, no matter how old you are, no
8:53
matter what you're doing, you should be posting content online
8:55
like everyone should be doing it. And when I was
8:58
in the military, you're sort of in a bubble. I mean,
9:01
you certainly have access to the Internet and all the
9:04
things that everybody else does in the civilian world. But
9:06
especially in the SEAL teams, from my experience, you're so
9:10
like tribal. You're all your time is spent really with
9:14
your teammates or at the team. It's very isolated and
9:17
you don't even realize it. And so I was not,
9:19
I didn't have social media when I got out. I
9:21
wasn't up to date on modern stuff. And Gary Vee
9:26
was sort of the first sort of civilian person I
9:28
was seeing. This is what you do, you know, as
9:31
a civilian, you post constantly. And I began, in addition
9:36
to doing some charity work I was doing, just trying
9:39
my hand at social media, you know, posting content. It's
9:42
like so bad.
9:43
Speaker 3: What was the intent?
9:45
Speaker 1: You know, honestly, there wasn't a clear intent other than, man,
9:48
what the hell? I'm already paying for the internet. I
9:51
already own a phone. Effectively, the worst that will happen
9:54
is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody
9:57
cares about or maybe my friends and family will. see
10:00
and it'll be embarrassing. But I've always been someone that's
10:04
been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing myself. I mean,
10:08
if you think about SEAL training, a big part of
10:11
it is you're raising your hand in a pretty public way,
10:13
at least amongst your circle of friends and family saying,
10:16
I'm going to go see if I'm good enough. And
10:18
a lot of people aren't. And so I went through
10:20
that process and I narrowly got through. But I sort
10:24
of had it in my mind that, would I really
10:26
try stuff? And so social media, influenced heavily by Gary Vee,
10:30
it was like, why not? I'll post content. Maybe someone
10:33
will be interested. Nothing worked. Nothing worked. I mean, it
10:37
wasn't even like some was close. It was just nobody
10:39
was paying attention. And it was like, okay, I'm not devastated.
10:42
It is what it is. But then I, on a whim,
10:47
I myself... personally love strange, dark, and mysterious content. I
10:53
used to love going to, there's a YouTube channel, I
10:56
think it's still around now, it's called Dark Five. And
10:59
all it is, it's just like crazy, true mysteries around
11:02
the world, you know, talking about how there's like, you know,
11:05
potentially military bases hidden in Antarctica, and there's UFO sightings here.
11:09
I thought it was fascinating. And on a whim in 2020,
11:14
When my social media career is basically non-existent, I was
11:18
at this water park, an indoor water park with my
11:21
wife and kids, Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania, great spot.
11:24
And I was like, you know what I'm going to do?
11:26
I'm going to try something I haven't tried on my
11:29
social media attempts so far. I'm going to tell like
11:32
a crazy mystery, a true mystery that I think is
11:34
really interesting because I think it's cool. It's the first
11:37
time I'm not trying to copy trends or like do
11:40
Gary V content. I'm just going to like tell a
11:42
story I like. And I– Pull out my phone, and
11:45
I tell this 60-second rendition of this mystery called the
11:49
Dyatlov Pass Mystery. Are you familiar with this?
11:51
Speaker 3: No. Oh, great.
11:52
Speaker 1: It's a great story. I post the 60-second version of
11:55
the story, but I'll tell you the story in a minute.
11:58
I leave my phone in the room because I'm going
12:00
to the water park, indoor water park. I don't want
12:01
to get wet. So I leave it there, come back
12:03
two hours later. millions of views on this video. And
12:07
I've never gotten views on anything. And it's millions of views.
12:10
Speaker 3: In just a few hours?
12:11
Speaker 1: In a few hours, like 5 million views on this video.
12:14
Speaker 3: Why?
12:14
Speaker 1: Was it TikTok? TikTok. This is when TikTok was just
12:18
to the moon. So it's an amazing story. You probably
12:20
have heard of it because it's one of those stories
12:22
that it's made its rounds on the internet. So remember,
12:27
the 60-second version was gritty, but it had the pictures
12:29
and stuff. So in 1959, there were these nine hikers. Actually,
12:34
there was 10, these 10 young, like 20 something year
12:37
old hikers in Russia. And they were like the best
12:41
mountaineers in Russia at the time. And they were going
12:44
for their, what's called their level three hiking test, which
12:47
sounds sort of lame, but it's effectively at the time
12:51
in Russia, this is like the top credential for mountaineers.
12:54
If you have this credential, you are the best mountaineer
12:56
in the land. And the way the test worked is
12:59
you Effectively, you're in a class of your own at
13:02
this level already. It's sort of like being a PhD
13:04
student where you sort of create your own material. You
13:08
have to do that for this test. You map out
13:11
a route that you'll take that effectively checks off all
13:14
the boxes of difficulty. You put this map down. Somebody approves.
13:19
This is going to be hard enough that if you
13:20
successfully navigate this course that you've mapped out in X
13:23
amount of time, if you do that, you pass the test,
13:27
you're a level three mountaineer. And so these 10 hikers... Um,
13:30
eventually actually only nine left. One had a dental issue,
13:33
so he spared himself. Nine of these hikers, they step out.
13:38
I think it was in January of 1959 to do
13:41
this hike that's been planned out and they brought cameras along. Um,
13:44
and they're like this young, they're, they're beautiful. They're all
13:47
like couples. They're all friends.
13:49
Speaker 3: And it sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie.
13:52
Speaker 1: This, this gets wild. If you've not heard the story,
13:54
you're in for a treat because the pictures are crazy.
13:58
They step out and the Ural Mountains is rugged. It's
14:01
like these huge windswept icy mountains. There's like a couple
14:05
of sections of forest, but it's just as rugged as
14:08
rugged can be. And so these hikers step off and
14:11
they start taking pictures. And even though it's 1959, the
14:15
pictures they're taking could be taken today. It's almost like
14:18
selfie style. They're smiling. Everyone's in such good spirits. They
14:22
know they're going to pass this test. This is nothing
14:24
for them. This is a victory lap. And so off
14:27
they go into the Ural Mountains. It's going to be
14:30
like a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out,
14:33
or I guess finished with their route, I think on
14:35
February 12th. So it's a several week long hike, February 12th,
14:40
and they were supposed to send some message to say
14:42
they were complete with the hike. February 12th comes and
14:47
no message is sent. No one gets word that these
14:49
nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains.
14:54
And at first... To be honest, no one was really
14:57
that concerned because one, there's nine of them. They are
15:00
quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land.
15:04
If anybody can withstand the elements, it's them. And so
15:06
there wasn't this immediate call to action. But over the
15:10
coming days after February 12th, the families of these nine
15:14
hikers got really concerned. They're like, we haven't heard from them.
15:16
Where are they? Like the government needs to get involved.
15:19
Somebody needs to go looking for them. And so eventually
15:22
at the end of February, a search party is launched
15:25
for these hikers. And at first it was just a
15:27
couple of volunteers. It was some students from a university.
15:30
It was not that serious of a surge. But they
15:34
eventually come across their campsite and pictures are taken of
15:37
their campsite. So from a strategic perspective, not that I
15:42
claim to be a mountaineer, but if you were going
15:44
to be setting up a place, if you were going
15:46
to set your tent up in a really rugged environment
15:48
like the Ural Mountains, the worst place to put your
15:51
tent is is the side of a windswept mountain where
15:54
there are no trees because you'll get no, it'll be
15:57
relentless wind. Any weather's going to be worse up there.
16:00
You're on a slope, avalanche risk. I mean, the worst
16:03
place you could put your tent is the side of
16:05
a mountain. And so they're looking for these missing hikers
16:08
who were the best hikers and they find their tent,
16:11
their one canvas tent that's right in the middle of
16:14
this pass called, I believe it's called the Dyatlov Pass,
16:16
which is why the mystery has been named the Dyatlov Pass.
16:19
It's just one lone tent and there's no trees, nothing.
16:23
And so they go up to the tent. The hikers
16:26
are not there, but the tent is collapsed as you
16:28
see in the picture there. And they look inside the
16:32
tent and there's clothes like cold weather gear. There's pots
16:36
and there's a lot of equipment that you would imagine
16:39
they would have brought with them out here is still
16:40
in the tent. The hikers are missing. And they discover...
16:44
through whatever testing they did, that there was a cut
16:47
made in the tent that apparently was made from the
16:50
inside out. Someone took a knife, and I believe it
16:53
was a knife, and cut the tent open from the
16:55
inside out. And so they have all this equipment, and
16:58
they're thinking, we're in the middle of the Ural Mountains.
17:01
It's like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's the
17:04
middle of winter. You need this equipment to survive. Where
17:07
are the hikers? They left all their equipment in their tent.
17:10
Where are they? And so The search expanded exponentially at
17:15
that point because now these volunteers have discovered this incredible site.
17:18
They can't find the hikers. A bigger search party comes
17:21
out there and they discover footprints that are about 100
17:24
feet away from where the tent was found. It's a
17:26
little bit further down the mountain. And the footsteps, some
17:30
of them are two boots, matching boots of someone's steps.
17:33
There's eight or nine prints. They couldn't be sure. Eight
17:35
or nine sets of prints. Some have only one boot on,
17:39
like barefoot and a boot. Others are just barefoot. And remember,
17:41
this is the middle of winter in Russia. But they're
17:45
looking at these prints. And if you look at the tent,
17:49
it's been cut from the inside. They've clearly abandoned their tent.
17:52
Something's happened. But the cadence of the footprints as it
17:57
picks up where they found it near the tent going
17:58
down the mountain away from the campsite, they're walking. There's
18:02
no sense of urgency. Someone analyzed the footprints and they're walking.
18:07
So they're walking down the mountain, some without boots on,
18:10
some with one boot on, leaving most of their equipment behind.
18:14
And so the search party, they follow these prints down
18:16
to the edge of this ominous looking forest. There's only
18:19
so many forests out there. This is one of them,
18:21
this relatively small but fairly dense forest. And the prints
18:25
sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest.
18:28
And so they go into the trees, they're looking around,
18:31
and they eventually come across this big cedar tree. And
18:34
at the base of the cedar tree is this little
18:36
burned out fire. Like a puny little fire and then
18:39
crouched around it is one of the hikers who's deceased.
18:42
And I believe there's a picture. I don't know if
18:44
you can show it on your channel. Sure. Yeah. So
18:46
there's a picture of one of the hikers who is
18:49
sort of almost like he was trying to get warmth
18:51
against this fire. I don't think it's that one. There
18:54
are some right near the cedar tree. I'm sure you
18:56
can find them.
18:57
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20:16
Speaker 1: One is dead, and then another one is sort of
20:18
nearby as well. So there's two hikers that are both
20:21
deceased from the initial thought is exposure, hypothermia, exposure. But critically,
20:27
there's a couple of really weird things about it. One,
20:29
I think that's got to be the picture right there.
20:31
And that does not show the bodies, but the bodies
20:33
are near. I think that's one right there to the
20:37
right of that. That could be one of them. But
20:40
picture two bodies sort of laying scattered nearby. They look
20:44
at the tree that was at the base of where
20:46
the fire was. And there are signs that something was
20:50
trying to climb the tree. There's broken branches and the like.
20:53
And there's human tissue. That sounds way more extreme than
20:55
it's supposed to, but there's human tissue far, pretty high
20:58
up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. Um,
21:02
and then they examined the bodies and they found one
21:05
of the, one of the men had his hand, part
21:07
of his hand, he had bitten off and was in
21:09
his throat, or it might've been human tissue as well,
21:12
but it was clearly in his mouth. Like he was
21:14
eating his own flesh or at least arrived in his mouth.
21:18
So they're dead. And so the search expands within this,
21:21
this forest. And they find three more hikers sort of
21:25
about 100 or 200 feet away from this tree. They're
21:28
in similar condition. They're all deceased. They're all sort of ragged.
21:33
Some of them are only wearing a little bit of clothing.
21:35
They're all dead. But they can't find the remaining four hikers.
21:41
They continue to search for the next several days. But
21:43
the weather was pretty severe. And so ultimately they decided
21:46
that at this point it's a recovery mission. We're not
21:49
going to find them.
21:49
Speaker 3: They're going to be dead.
21:51
Speaker 1: So they waited until the thaw in May. And once
21:54
the snow had thawed a bit, they came out there
21:56
and they found this, what looked to be like the,
22:00
they believed that a snow fort had been made maybe
22:03
three or 400 feet away from that cedar tree, which
22:05
they wouldn't have seen it during the winter. It was barely,
22:08
you wouldn't have seen it, but it had melted down enough.
22:11
And the rest of the bodies were found in the
22:14
remnants of the snow cave. And the four hikers that
22:18
were in there just had catastrophic injuries. they're all deceased.
22:24
The woman, or one of them had a crush injury.
22:27
His chest was, they compared the injury to his chest
22:30
equivalent to being struck by a car at high speed. However,
22:34
he had no or limited lacerations, like there was no
22:37
impact to his body. His chest was sort of just
22:39
inexplicably caved in. And so he's been crushed. One guy,
22:43
I think his skull was fractured and a piece of
22:46
his skull was missing. But the one that stands out
22:48
is there was one hiker, a woman, who her lips
22:54
and her eyes were missing. And some accounts claim that
22:57
the lips appeared to have been surgically removed. At least
23:00
there was like very tight lines of how her, it
23:04
was predation, animal predation, you'd see tearing. This was like
23:08
relatively straight lines where her lips were removed. And then
23:11
another hiker, his eyes were also missing. And so they're
23:14
all dead. And they also noticed that the woman was
23:17
wearing men's clothing or some clothing that was clearly not hers.
23:22
And then one of the men or a couple of
23:23
the men were wearing some of her clothing. Like they
23:26
had exchanged clothing and they found trace levels, albeit small,
23:31
but trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing
23:34
and they're all dead. And so now all the hikers
23:36
have been found. And by this point, this is in
23:39
May of 1960, I believe it is at this point.
23:42
This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent
23:45
to being super viral today. Everybody was talking about it.
23:48
The families are very outspoken about it. People want answers.
23:51
They want to know what happened. And so the Russian government,
23:54
they launched this investigation into what happened out there in
23:57
the Dyatlov Pass. And quickly, they shut down this investigation.
24:03
Like very quickly, they shut it down. And the only
24:05
things people heard were there were numerous reports from military
24:09
personnel and some civilians who apparently were in the area,
24:12
in the Ural's. that claimed to have seen glowing orbs
24:16
like fireballs. I think they described them as being balls
24:18
of fire and light shooting up and down. It's hard
24:22
to tell if it was in the same area where
24:24
the hikers were, but there were all these independent reports
24:27
of strange lights over the Ural Mountains that could corroborate
24:30
or could line up with when those hikers all died.
24:34
And then also, lastly, the Russian government came out and said, well,
24:38
we've determined that the nine hikers died From an overwhelming
24:43
or I think they called it a compelling force. And
24:46
then they closed it. I believe they made it completely confidential.
24:51
The families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down.
24:54
And then in 2020, the reason I told it is
24:57
because it sort of began making rounds because I believe
24:59
some of the pictures had been redacted. And you could
25:02
see these pictures. And so I said at the start
25:04
of my video, at the end of this 60-second clip,
25:06
you're going to Google two words. And it was Dyatlov Pass.
25:10
And so I teased the story and said, Google it
25:11
for yourself. And it's a whole rabbit hole of crazy stuff.
25:14
Speaker 3: That's a crazy story. So compelling force is a very
25:18
weird way to describe a bunch of people dying. Compelling force.
25:22
Speaker 1: It might've been compelling natural force, but I, I, well,
25:26
that makes more sense.
25:28
Speaker 3: It was a death.
25:29
Speaker 1: Well, they, they could have come out and said that. Right.
25:32
They basically said, yep.
25:34
Speaker 3: Are you sure it's not a translation issue?
25:37
Speaker 1: There are several translations of how it came out and it,
25:40
effectively amounts to some sort of compelling, overwhelming force.
25:45
Speaker 3: Does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people
25:48
die in autopsy reports than.
25:51
Speaker 1: We do maybe? I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm
25:54
not sure on that.
25:54
Speaker 3: It might be like the way Russian language works and
25:57
where they describe things. Like they might have categories for
26:00
deaths in a compelling natural force might just mean like
26:04
freezing to death is in the same category as like
26:07
dying in the Mojave Desert.
26:09
Speaker 1: I think that that's– I've always assumed that probably what
26:12
happened is something rational happened. I mean when you become hypothermic,
26:18
you can have– it's called paradoxical undressing where at your
26:21
final stage of when you're so cold, you actually get
26:23
hot and you take your clothes off. And I would
26:27
imagine if you're in the final stages of dying– You
26:31
might do some funny things and also– Would.
26:33
Speaker 3: You cut your lips off though?
26:35
Speaker 1: Would you surgically remove your lips?
26:36
Speaker 3: I don't know.
26:37
Speaker 1: And where are the lips? Yeah.
26:39
Speaker 3: Then the question is like is there an image of that?
26:41
Like can we see it? Like this is one of
26:44
the things that people talk about all the time when
26:45
it comes to crop circles. Excuse me. Cattle mutilation. I
26:50
put them all in the same category. Like who the
26:51
fuck knows what that is. But cattle mutilation, one of
26:54
the weird things that they associate with extraterrestrials or whatever
26:59
they think it is. is that these cuts are very surgical.
27:03
And it's not an animal just tearing apart a cow.
27:07
These cuts, they look like they're made with a scalpel
27:10
or perhaps some sort of a laser. And also these
27:13
creatures are completely drained of blood. But I've seen the
27:17
cattle mutilation images, and you're like, wow, that is strange.
27:21
I'd like to see what their lips look like.
27:23
Speaker 1: I do know that actually, and this has nothing to
27:25
do with the fact that I posted about it, because
27:27
the Dyatlov Pass gets posted about quite a bit. But
27:30
I think it was in 2022, Russia actually reexamined the
27:35
Dyatlov Pass mystery now and sort of said, okay, we're
27:37
going to look at it again. And they determined that
27:41
an avalanche, like a slab of ice broke loose, a
27:43
huge slab. This could be totally wrong. I know it's
27:46
an avalanche or a slab of ice that they basically
27:49
said was responsible for all of this, that it led
27:51
to them somehow becoming exposed, hypothermia and the like. Hmm.
27:58
It doesn't really answer a lot of the questions in
28:00
my mind. It certainly could have happened. As I told you,
28:03
they– for whatever– also, why did they stop in the
28:05
middle of the wind side of the slope?
28:08
Speaker 3: I mean you're– They probably were trying to make their
28:10
way across and they couldn't do it.
28:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
28:12
Speaker 3: So we have to stop. But just stop right here.
28:14
I can't go any further. And they all argued and
28:16
then they decided to put a tent right there. It's
28:19
also– I mean you know this better than anybody. When
28:23
you get tired, you make poor decisions. That's what they're
28:25
trying to do to you in buds, right? They're trying
28:27
to make you quit. They're trying to break you down, right?
28:29
When people get tired, they get very irrational and they
28:32
also have very little processing power. They don't think about
28:35
all the possibilities, what could go wrong, what could go right.
28:39
And they think they can't possibly keep going. And the
28:42
problem is if you have nine of you and one
28:44
of you is a pussy– You know, you got a
28:47
real problem. Like, do you let Bob die? Or do
28:50
you stay here with Bob when you can keep going?
28:54
And Bob is just like, we can't do this.
28:56
Speaker 1: Like, Bob.
28:57
Speaker 3: Like, that's the horror movie scene, right? There's always this
29:00
one fucking guy. He's like, fuck.
29:02
Speaker 1: This, man. I'm fucking staying right here.
29:04
Speaker 3: You're like, jeez, Bob. We can keep walking. Keep walking.
29:07
Speaker 1: That reality. Just count ten steps.
29:09
Speaker 3: And then count ten steps more and then just keep
29:12
doing that.
29:13
Speaker 1: That, what you're describing is... It's such a natural human thing,
29:17
which is when the lowest common denominator in your group
29:20
is struggling. Even if you're frustrated, a lot of times
29:24
people have an inclination to lowering what you're doing to
29:27
help that person. In SEAL training, I mean, what's made
29:32
clear immediately is to some degree that's noble, to some degree.
29:38
But a lot of times you're going to get more
29:39
people captivated. that way so those people that are going
29:42
to hold you back in training have to be identified
29:46
and kicked out now right and so it became clear
29:49
that if you're the weakest link you're probably getting left
29:52
behind in training no but then in real life it's
29:54
the reverse.
29:55
Speaker 3: Buds is a genius way of filtering out the pussies
29:59
it's genius It's the best way. You have to, there's no,
30:03
there's no other way to determine whether or not someone
30:06
will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress other
30:10
than putting them through extreme pressure and stress. And there's
30:13
some people through whatever, for whatever reason at this stage
30:17
of their life, they can't handle it.
30:18
Speaker 1: And maybe they will be in the future. Maybe this
30:20
is going to be.
30:21
Speaker 3: A good experience for them and they're going to toughen
30:23
up and Look, Goggins talks about it all the time
30:25
about when– before he ever got into the SEALs, he
30:28
was 300 pounds and eating milkshakes.
30:29
Speaker 1: He was fat.
30:29
Speaker 3: He couldn't run around the block. But he decided to
30:32
become a different person and he did it. You can
30:35
do that. But at that moment, you're going to quit.
30:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
30:38
Speaker 3: And so at that moment, we have to get rid
30:40
of you. And maybe you can become someone in the
30:42
future that won't quit. But right now, you're quitting.
30:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, I sometimes get asked, not often, but I've been asked,
30:50
you know, when you were going through selection, did you
30:52
ever have a moment where you thought about quitting and
30:55
you suppressed it? And I only say this because I
30:59
know this is shared amongst a lot of the people
31:01
that I went through training with. I didn't. I did
31:05
not have a moment where I thought, oh, boy, I'm
31:07
on the precipice of quitting. I better hold on. Did
31:11
I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions
31:14
and questioning, can I even do this? Definitely. But there's
31:17
something like fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing
31:22
to stop. And you learn that that is something that
31:27
I believe is innate. Do you have the ability to
31:29
keep going through failure? And they put a lot of
31:33
test gates into buds to basically force it upon you.
31:36
Most notably, not even Hell Week. Hell Week is the
31:40
most well-known test of endurance where you're awake for five
31:43
and a half days, basically. But there's one that's even
31:46
simpler that It's so easy if you're willing to do it.
31:51
Easy as a stretch. It's not that hard, but you
31:53
really need to be committed to doing it. And it's
31:55
the 50-meter underwater swim. You do it day two of
31:59
the first phase of training, and everybody knows you're going
32:02
to do it. All you have to do is, okay,
32:04
get in the pool, swim one length, and then swim
32:07
back without surfacing until you're done. It is probably just
32:11
beyond what's comfortable for someone who's a decent enough swimmer,
32:14
but you have plenty of lead time for this. You
32:16
know this is going to happen. People train for years
32:19
before they go. When I did it, the first leg,
32:24
it's stressful. But as soon as you've made the turn
32:26
and you're on your way back, you realize that if
32:28
you've committed to doing it, you're like, oh, this is
32:31
really not bad. It's so quick. It's so short. It's
32:33
all over. People that would quit on that didn't quit
32:37
at the end of the 50. They quit on the
32:40
first leg. You're not physically done yet, but you're mentally done. Yeah.
32:46
I mean I'm generalizing but if you see that type
32:48
of phenomenon in training quite a bit where it's– are
32:51
you prepared to keep going through adversity or are you
32:53
just going to say it's too much and I don't
32:55
want to do it anymore?
32:56
Speaker 3: I wonder if they've ever sat down and tried to
33:00
engineer a program to alter people's psychology. You would think
33:06
that the more people that you can get that would
33:09
be able to figure out a way through something very
33:13
difficult where your mind wants to quit, your body wants
33:15
to quit. The more people that you could figure out
33:18
how to train to that position, the better. Or is
33:22
it like I have friends that are MMA coaches that
33:25
don't want to work with anybody who needs a mental coach.
33:28
Speaker 1: Interesting.
33:29
Speaker 3: They're like, you need a mental coach? You're in the
33:30
wrong business. And they say that. Those guys are too unreliable.
33:34
They'll tell it to you. You need a mental coach.
33:37
You're too in your own head. You're not going to
33:38
be able to perform. These guys are going to be
33:40
able to lose, dust themselves off, figure it out, and
33:43
come back and be stronger. And then there's some guys
33:46
that every big moment is the moment overwhelms them. And
33:50
they just cave to the pressure. They just can't handle it.
33:53
And then they go through some sort of mental coaching session.
33:57
Speaker 1: But the core.
33:59
Speaker 3: Their personality, whatever it is that's about them, what makes
34:02
them them, is just fragile for whatever reason. And the
34:08
question is, I wonder if they've ever tried to engineer
34:12
a program to strengthen people's psychology just the same way
34:16
you can strengthen people by lifting weights or by running
34:18
or whatever. I wonder if there was a concerted effort
34:22
to say, well, we have so many people crashing out.
34:24
What if we had 50 percent less people crashing out?
34:27
then we'd have 50% more elite operators.
34:31
Speaker 1: I know that when I went through training, and I
34:33
have no idea if it's still the case now, but
34:35
I was in SEAL training in earnest in 2011 and 2012.
34:41
And there were psychologists on staff that you did not
34:46
go and frequently see them by any stretch. But I
34:49
remember there being parts of training, which were sort of
34:53
funny because they punctuated the brutality of training. It would
34:55
be we'd be out, you know, doing the obstacle course
34:59
for an hour and then we're doing a four mile run.
35:01
Then we're swimming, then we're doing this, we're getting beat up.
35:03
And then like, all right, now go in the classroom.
35:06
You go in the classroom and you're, and you're talking
35:09
to this woman who's a psychologist and she's teaching you
35:11
how to like, uh, it's called arousal control, you know,
35:14
how to, how to take down your, your mental state
35:16
in the middle of high stress moments. And all the
35:18
instructors are on the.
35:19
Speaker 3: Side, like, you better listen to this, you know?
35:22
Speaker 1: And it's, it's just funny. Uh, so there was attempts made,
35:25
but I, I, Coming from having done it, there's such
35:32
a wide variety of people that are successful in training
35:35
that I have seen and heard that it's hard to
35:38
pinpoint what is the appropriate indication you're going to be successful.
35:43
That's the thing they're trying to identify is what are
35:45
the pools of people that traditionally do well in SEAL training?
35:49
Because they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen. But
35:52
the two things they found, there's two places.
35:55
Where the most mentally tough people in terms of success
35:58
in SEAL training, one is wrestling, basically any level of wrestling.
36:02
Wrestlers have an incredibly high success rate in buds and
36:06
water polo. Those are the two that they have determined
36:09
through their studies are the grittiest, most resilient folks when
36:13
it comes to SEAL training.
36:14
Speaker 3: Interesting.
36:14
Speaker 4: Yeah.
36:15
Speaker 3: Water polo. So in water polo, how deep is the water?
36:19
Speaker 1: I think it's more that they tread water the whole
36:21
fucking time.
36:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, is the water
36:25
so deep that they can't touch the ground?
36:26
Speaker 1: No, no, you're treading the entire time. Whoa.
36:29
Speaker 3: And you're playing a game.
36:30
Speaker 1: Dude, there was a guy. That's crazy. There was a
36:33
guy in my class. So the way it works is
36:36
you have your enlisted guys, and there's upwards of 100
36:39
dudes in a class that are enlisted. And then you have,
36:42
I think, maybe 8 to 10 that are officer candidates. Yeah,
36:47
we're all SEAL candidates. That's true. But the difference between
36:50
an officer candidate and and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous.
36:55
The guys over here, the enlisted guys, are just like
36:58
salt of the earth, just like, I don't give a fuck.
37:00
We're going to see what happens. The officer candidates, they
37:03
have some of the most impressive resumes that you can
37:06
have as like a 20-something-year-old kid. You have dudes that are, oh,
37:10
I was a Rhodes Scholar. I played, I walked onto
37:13
the Stanford football team. That level of prestige. And also,
37:18
my family's friends with George Bush, And I'm also like
37:21
a world-class swimmer and I'm like an expert marksman. Those
37:24
are the dudes that become your officer candidates because there's
37:27
so few slots on any given year for these spots.
37:30
They're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed. It's
37:34
so rare that an officer candidate does not pass. Like
37:37
an officer who's in buds, you might as well just
37:40
call him a SEAL at that point because the vetting
37:42
is crazy for SEALs. Not on the enlisted side. We're
37:44
still figuring that out. But the officer side, they're highly vetted.
37:47
And one of the guys that was one of my
37:49
officers– in one of the classes I was in was
37:52
a water polo player from the University of Tennessee. And
37:56
he's this big, big, strong guy. He's an awesome dude.
38:01
And there's this part of training, halfway through training, it's
38:04
second phase, it's broken into three phases, and it's the
38:06
water phase. And it's really, statistically, everybody who gets to
38:11
second phase mostly makes it through. But it's because you've
38:14
already passed through so many test skates in first phase,
38:17
like Hell Week and the 50-meter underwater swim that This
38:20
is already the pool of people that's just going to
38:22
push through the misery and pass stuff. So it's misleading.
38:25
The second phase of training, I would argue, is exponentially
38:29
more challenging than first phase. But the only people who
38:32
do it are through first phase. And so 90 percent
38:35
of people pass second phase. But it's really hard. And
38:38
there's two tests in particular within second phase that are
38:40
notoriously just brutal. One of them is called pool competency,
38:45
which is a 20 minute exam of your ability to
38:48
to fix problems. problems with your scuba tanks underwater, where
38:52
basically you go to the bottom of the pool with
38:54
your tanks on. And when their test begins, you're in the,
38:57
you're in the section of this huge pool called the
38:59
combat training tank. It's a, there's like the six foot section,
39:02
then it slopes down to the nine foot section, and
39:04
then it slopes down to the 15 foot section. And
39:06
your test takes place in the nine foot section. And
39:09
you just crawl along the lane marker as if you're
39:12
doing lap swimming, there's a lane on the bottom of
39:13
the pool. There's like eight or nine lane markers and
39:15
you crawl back and forth only in the nine foot section.
39:19
And two instructors per student come down and turn your
39:22
air off, tie knots in your hoses. And as soon
39:24
as you're being touched, you got to go into the
39:26
fetal position and wait for like the attack to stop.
39:28
It takes like 15 seconds. 30 seconds. You're out of air.
39:32
And this is a 20 minute test. You're building up
39:34
hypercapnia as you go. And then you got to fix
39:37
your problems and the problems get progressively harder to solve.
39:39
But the procedures they teach you are the same procedures
39:42
for every problem. If you go to step one, it
39:44
doesn't work. You go to step two. If that doesn't work,
39:46
you go to step three until you go all the
39:47
way through your steps. But it teaches you calm So
39:50
even though you're on the last problem you're going to
39:52
solve at minute 18 and you're about to pass out,
39:55
you have to show them that you'll do step one,
39:58
step two, all the way through. So it's about being calm.
40:00
I was horrible at this test, by the way. I
40:02
passed by the skin of my teeth. This dude passed
40:06
the test first try, but that's not where the story
40:07
comes in. So this water polo player, he blazes through
40:10
that test, no problem. The other test is just the tread.
40:15
That's all it's called, the tread. You spend five minutes
40:18
in the pool with your Twin 80 tanks on, which
40:20
are neutral in the water. They're pretty heavy outside of
40:22
the water, but they're cumbersome on your back. You got
40:25
no fins. You got a weight belt on, hands up
40:28
out of the water. Weight belt. Yeah, it's like five
40:30
pounds or something. And you tread for five minutes. And
40:33
that's the whole test.
40:34
Speaker 3: Hands out of the water.
40:34
Speaker 1: Hands out of the water.
40:35
Speaker 3: So you only tread with your legs.
40:37
Speaker 1: No fins. Whoa. Tanks on. The only way to do it, realistically,
40:43
is imagine... imagine hopping on like a bike, like in
40:47
the gym and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue,
40:51
hold it for like three, four minutes. And don't, it
40:54
doesn't not even, you don't even need to go that fast,
40:56
but it's constant. That's the only way to do it.
40:59
Unless you're an exceptionally talented water polo player. Who's mastered
41:03
the art of the egg beater, where they, they basically
41:06
have found a way to move their legs. That's like
41:09
the most efficient way to tread water. And this dude,
41:11
I kid you not who, blazed through pool comp first try.
41:14
No problems whatsoever. Was like joking around after his test.
41:17
He gets him for the tread and he could hold
41:20
himself almost to his belly button. Probably like nipple to
41:23
belly button line. Fully out of the water. Just no problem.
41:27
Just no problem. Like practically smiling because he knows this
41:30
is my domain. I can do this all day long.
41:32
It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen.
41:34
Speaker 3: That's crazy. I would have never thought of that. First
41:37
of all, I didn't know the water polo players had
41:39
a tread the entire time, which is insanely impressive. Like,
41:42
how long is a game?
41:43
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know if they can go to the
41:45
edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch water polo,
41:48
they're treading. Most of the time they're just treading. I'm
41:51
no water polo player, but my understanding is that the
41:53
game is played while treading. Yeah.
41:57
Speaker 3: I never would have imagined, but now that you've described
42:00
it that way, like, that might be the hardest sport
42:02
on earth. That makes baseball look so easy.
42:06
Speaker 1: I remember David Wells of the Yankees.
42:09
Speaker 3: He's a huge fag.
42:10
Speaker 1: I smoke cigarettes in between innings. Hey, Bruce. Dude, it's crazy. Hey, Bruce,
42:14
eating hot dogs, big old belly. Oh, man.
42:15
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
42:17
Speaker 1: I remember in boot camps, this is not even before
42:20
you even get to Bud's. There's actually, it's funny, when
42:24
you go in, I went in as a civilian. So
42:28
I signed this contract where basically you say, okay, I'm
42:30
going to go to boot camp, become a sailor. And
42:32
then I'll have my shot at going to Bud's. It's
42:33
called the SEAL Challenge Contract. And the way I looked
42:38
at it is I'm like, okay, I've prepared for Bud's.
42:40
As a civilian, that's what I was training for. I
42:43
didn't think at all about boot camp. Like, what's two
42:47
months of Navy boot camp going to be? Because what
42:49
my head is focused on is Bud's. That comes after.
42:52
So when I shipped out to boot camp, I had
42:55
put virtually no thought into what those two months were
42:59
going to be like in Great Lakes, Illinois, I figured
43:01
it was like, ah, whatever. I'll like march around, like
43:03
fold some clothes, you know, whatever. And then, and then
43:06
I'll go do the real stuff out in San Diego.
43:08
And so I get to, uh, I get to Chicago
43:11
and it was like a, a reality check because you
43:13
quickly realize that first of all, if you're trying to
43:17
be a SEAL and you're on the SEAL challenge contract,
43:21
when you get to Great Lakes, you're segregated into a
43:24
separate group. They're called the 800 division. I don't know
43:26
if this still exists now, but it did in 2010. And,
43:31
There really aren't any SEALs or spec ops that are
43:33
at Great Lakes. I mean, there's a few, but for
43:36
the most part, you're working with ordinary sailors that are
43:39
putting you through training. But imagine you're an ordinary sailor,
43:43
and God love them. I've worked with amazing sailors across
43:45
the Navy, and here comes the SEAL recruits in the
43:50
800 Division. They're civilians. They're not even sailors yet. There
43:53
is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show
43:57
up like, pfft. Yeah, I'm going to Bud's. Like there's
43:59
just an attitude of like the instructors, they want you
44:02
to understand that like you don't have a clue what
44:04
you're getting yourself into. And so in boot camp, those
44:07
two months, your instructors are not SEALs, but they just
44:11
like torture you because they're like, this is nothing compared
44:14
to what you're going to have in Bud's. And one
44:16
of the things we would do is there was all
44:18
sorts of stupid stuff like pushups and whatever. But there
44:20
was this treading thing that we had to do where
44:23
we'd go in the pool at like five in the
44:24
morning and like it's so cold. and they would line
44:28
us up. So we're all faced like, if you were,
44:30
I'd be right behind you looking at the back of
44:32
your head, you'd be looking at the next guy's back
44:33
of his head. And they'd give us bricks, and you're
44:36
just treading, and you got to pass the brick up
44:38
and down the line. And periodically, they'd give you two bricks.
44:41
And so if anybody doesn't hold up their end of
44:45
the bargain quickly, the bricks get handed off to like
44:47
one person and no one wants the brick, you don't
44:49
have fins on or anything. And guys are like sinking
44:51
into the water, like truly about to pass out and
44:54
black out. But The level of oversight, not great because
44:58
it's sort of like, you don't know what you're getting into.
45:00
Tread all those bricks. And it's just mad. And they
45:02
would leave us in there treading with bricks for so
45:04
long that you're like, I'm going to drown. I'm literally
45:07
going to drown if I keep this up. And then
45:08
suddenly it would be over and you're like on the
45:10
pool deck, like vomiting. And you're thinking to yourself, holy shit,
45:14
like is this, this is not even as bad as buds.
45:17
And then you get to buds and you're like, no. No,
45:19
that was worse. Well, that's probably good then. It was nice. Yeah.
45:24
Speaker 3: That's funny. Had those guys even been through buds?
45:26
Speaker 1: No. Okay.
45:27
Speaker 3: So they were just making tough.
45:28
Speaker 1: Stuff for you to do. Put on all your turtlenecks.
45:31
And we'd like put on all our stupid like neoprene turtlenecks,
45:34
like seven of them. Cause you have all this stupid
45:36
clothing in your rack and like march around the compartment,
45:40
the room you're in. And we would just like spend
45:42
hours like, marching around the compartment, sweating our ass off
45:46
in our like turtlenecks. It's stuff like that. Or we
45:49
do birdwatching where they would have us just face a
45:52
wall and be at attention for like two, three hours,
45:54
just staring at paint. But it's just arbitrary. It's like,
45:58
you don't know what you're getting into. Bud's is going
45:59
to be so much worse. And like, you don't even
46:01
know what you're talking about.
46:02
Speaker 3: What kind of weird people want to do that to people?
46:04
Speaker 1: There was a lot of like, you don't know what
46:06
you're getting yourself into. I know more than you. I've
46:09
done real stuff in the Navy. But like they have
46:11
this moment where we're still civilians and And we haven't
46:14
gone to training, and they know that virtually all of
46:17
us are going to quit. So this is a safe
46:19
group to sort of flex around, you know?
46:21
Speaker 3: Wow.
46:22
Speaker 1: So it was– I hated boot camp. When I got
46:25
out of boot camp, in boot camp, I was drinking
46:28
their coffee, and I was convinced it was caffeinated coffee.
46:32
It wasn't. I told myself it was. I'm a big
46:34
coffee drinker. And when I got out of boot camp,
46:36
I went to dinner with my family, and I didn't
46:40
eat anything. I just drank like nine cups of coffee
46:43
and got so jacked up on caffeine and just told
46:46
stories about boot camp.
46:47
Speaker 3: They don't give you caffeinated coffee?
46:48
Speaker 1: Well, there was– it was coffee. But, I mean, it
46:51
was like you pushed a button and this brown shit
46:54
came out and it was like– it said cafe something
46:57
on it. I was like, that's coffee. I'm not going
46:58
to question it because I don't want to suck myself out.
47:01
And I was drinking this shitty coffee.
47:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, have some coffee.
47:04
Speaker 1: Have some real coffee. Jesus Christ, you're freaking me out.
47:08
Speaker 3: Oh, man.
47:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's crazy. That's funny.
47:11
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I mean, what we were talking about before,
47:15
that there's no other process to figure out whether someone's
47:18
going to be able to handle pressure than to put
47:20
them through it and see what happens. If you're passing bricks,
47:22
I mean, maybe that's not the best example of it
47:25
because it seems like those guys were being a little sadistic.
47:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
47:28
Speaker 3: And probably at least you would imagine that what they're
47:31
doing in buds is tried and proven. They know what
47:34
they're doing. These guys, it seems like they were just
47:37
getting off on the fact they could tell you what
47:38
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up today.
48:53
Speaker 1: So I got hurt in Afghanistan in 2014. And after
48:58
I got hurt, I'll tell you in a minute what happened.
49:01
I got debriefed essentially by the senior commander of the
49:05
group that I was a part of. And it was
49:07
just like, hey, tell us what happened. What went wrong?
49:10
What would you have done differently? And truthfully– and I
49:13
wasn't kissing anybody's ass. I wasn't trying to be a
49:17
you know, follow the rules kind of guy. I just said,
49:19
you know what? The training works like on the training
49:23
is unbelievable. I saw it for myself firsthand.
49:26
Speaker 3: So we were in.
49:27
Speaker 1: Afghanistan in 2014 and this was the tail end of,
49:31
this is my only combat tour I did as my
49:33
first deployment. This is 2013, 2014. And we had been
49:36
going into this town called Zargan Shahr, which is this
49:40
fairly urban Afghan town that was literally on the other
49:44
side of the one paved road, Route Utah, they called it,
49:48
that ran through Afghanistan, got IED'd constantly. We were on
49:51
one side of the road behind some HESCO barriers. And
49:54
Zargan Shahr is like this sprawling, pretty large urban village.
49:59
And Historically, I don't know how long it had been
50:01
going on for, but there had just been nonstop fighting
50:05
in Zaganshahr between NATO forces and loads of different factions
50:09
of fighters, the Taliban, Pakistani fighters, you name it. And
50:14
so when we got in country in 2013, we turned
50:17
over with SEAL Team 8 and they said, basically, you know,
50:21
your job here is to try to quell the flow
50:23
of suicide bombers into Kabul. And there was a couple
50:26
of other things they told us to focus on, but really,
50:29
If you want some action, you just go to Zarganshah
50:32
because they're so battle hardened in there. The people that
50:34
are still there that if you go in there, they're
50:37
going to fight you. You know, if you want to
50:38
find weapon caches, they're going to be in there. And
50:41
so over the course of the deployment, this is like
50:43
five months in, we had gone into Zarganshah a great deal.
50:47
And truthfully, it wasn't like we walked in and it
50:49
was crazy every time, but we definitely got engaged. There
50:53
was definitely more contacts there than anywhere else. But on
50:57
this one day, this is like five months into the deployment.
51:00
This is in April. So it was the fighting season
51:03
that started. So the warmer weather had come in. And
51:06
we sort of put ourselves in a terrible position a
51:10
little bit by accident. So the city, it's not really
51:12
a city. It's a village, but it's bigger than a village.
51:16
It's somewhere between a city and a village for Afghanistan.
51:18
So it's like mud huts, but like tight together. And
51:21
it's really like well-defined, you know, it's almost like the
51:25
edge of Zarganchar just becomes vacant desert on the outsides.
51:29
It's like this really isolated spot. We entered the city
51:33
with our vehicles and then began infilling into the city.
51:37
I forget exactly what our purpose was. I think there
51:39
was like a bomb maker or something we were going after.
51:43
But the rules of engagement that we were operating under
51:47
effectively said you can't engage, you can't, offensively engage anyone.
51:53
There's a couple of factors that could allow you to,
51:55
but for the most part, you need to get shot
51:56
at first to then shoot back. That's sort of the gist.
52:00
And the people we would get into skirmishes with knew
52:04
that a lot of times, and they'd be tactical about
52:06
how they would go about shooting at us. And so
52:09
we start making our infill from the edge of the city,
52:13
and we get into this little narrow area where we
52:16
knew we'd have to enter into this courtyard. And We
52:20
start hearing chatter over the radios. So we had the
52:23
ability to listen to just the open source radio that
52:25
the fighters would use in the village. And we heard
52:28
them talking to each other. And it was clear they
52:30
had spotted us. It's broad daylight. This is not a shock.
52:34
But they were clearly talking to each other and making
52:38
plans to wait until we, and it was only 20
52:42
or 30 of us plus our partner force, wait until
52:45
we got into that courtyard before you open up on them.
52:49
And I don't know if this was said explicitly, but
52:51
the idea was they're not going to do anything due
52:53
to the rules of engagement. We can let them come
52:55
into the courtyard and then open up on them. And
52:57
there's a couple two-story buildings that overlook the courtyard. So
53:00
it's pretty gnarly. Our team lead, who was freaking awesome,
53:05
is freaking awesome. He stopped us and he's like, hold
53:09
on a minute. We took cover behind this bridge that
53:11
was right behind us. And he's like, wait, let's figure
53:13
this out. But we realized that now that we know
53:16
where they are, we know they're in those second story
53:18
buildings overlooking that courtyard. They're now they can see us.
53:21
If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We
53:24
can't like call it an airstrike. We have to walk
53:26
into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So
53:30
it's basically walking into an ambush. That's a that's a
53:32
bad idea. But if we go the other way, if
53:35
we retreat, I told you that the edge of Zarganshah,
53:37
it's there's no cover. It's just open desert, if you will.
53:41
And so there wasn't really a good way to exfil
53:44
back to our vehicles without getting shot in the back.
53:47
They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot at
53:48
us anytime they want. And so we realized because of
53:51
where they're positioned, we either had to go forward into
53:54
effectively a known ambush or retreat and hope they don't
53:59
get the drop on us and shoot one of us.
54:01
And it's a pretty high chance someone was going to
54:02
get shot if we exfil. And so we sat there,
54:05
we were thinking about it, and we ultimately made the
54:08
decision like, hey, We were Navy SEALs. Let's just go
54:12
forward and process the threat. And so into the courtyard
54:15
we go. It's on body cam. And, you know, it
54:18
was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard. Again, broad daylight.
54:21
It's quiet. We had seen women and children run out
54:24
of the village as we approached. So we knew only
54:26
people here are going to be fighters. And just machine
54:28
guns opened up on us in this courtyard. And I
54:31
say this without– I don't mean this in a sort
54:34
of crass way, but thankfully– The only people who were
54:37
hit in the opening volley were our dog and I
54:41
believe two of the Afghan partner force guys that they
54:43
got shot. Because if you're going to survive this, you
54:46
need the SEALs. You don't need anybody else. You need
54:48
the SEALs to get out of this. And so we
54:50
all took up our positions. Sort of we expected this
54:52
to happen. And it became like this crazy, disjointed, like
54:57
onesie-twosie breaking off, clearing buildings, sometimes by yourself. just madness
55:03
for like the next six hours. It slowed down. It
55:05
was not constant, but it was like six hours of urban, sketchy,
55:10
roof to roof, building to building shooting.
55:13
Speaker 3: And we were sort of.
55:14
Speaker 1: Getting our asses kicked. I mean, we just, we kept,
55:16
we kept seeing people that would open up on us
55:19
around like a corner. We'd go after them and they'd
55:22
be gone. And we knew there were tunnels dug into
55:24
the ground all over the place for people to escape.
55:27
And it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would,
55:29
would vanish. And so finally, it's late at night. We've
55:33
been there for six hours or so and we've gotten
55:35
beaten up. No one's been killed on our side. The
55:38
dog's fine. And we were sort of like, man, I
55:42
guess we just got to go. You know, we didn't
55:44
really accomplish anything. We just kind of got beat up
55:47
today and we'll have to come back another time. It
55:49
didn't go well. And as we're getting ready to leave
55:52
and remember at this point, our group of 20 some
55:54
odd SEALs, there's Afghan partner force as well, but the
55:57
SEALs that were on the ground We had broken up
55:59
into different fire teams, little groups of dudes. And I
56:02
was with a fire team that was close to the
56:04
exit we were going to be taking. And one of
56:07
the drones overhead, I think, was being flown by somebody
56:11
in Las Vegas. They called out that they had seen
56:14
what appeared to be military age men, so MAMs as
56:17
they're called, sort of in the vicinity of where we
56:21
would be exfilling out of the city. And they weren't
56:25
saying you better go over there and like shoot them
56:27
because rules of engagement say you can't, you can't do that.
56:30
It was just sort of a, Hey, be aware as
56:32
you exit, they might be setting up on you as you're,
56:34
you're leaving the city. And so our fire team happened
56:37
to be closest and we decided we would just go
56:40
over there and take a look. Our, our understanding is
56:43
now it's nighttime. We're on night vision. We, we believed
56:47
based on what was being passed to us, that we
56:49
could go down this alleyway that would come to a
56:51
T intersection and And when we reached the end of
56:54
this alleyway, there'd be this low wall, like six foot
56:57
tall wall. And we could peer over the wall into
56:59
this field where these ma'ams are. And they didn't know
57:02
if they didn't even know who they were. It could
57:04
have been kids. It could have been nothing. But we
57:06
believed we'd be able to look over the wall and
57:09
look out somewhere on the other side of this field.
57:11
We'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment
57:13
of what to do. So we super sneaky make our
57:17
way down this alleyway, being as quiet as we can.
57:20
We get to that low wall. And immediately we start
57:24
hearing someone talking. It's not our guys. We start hearing
57:27
Pashtun being spoken on the other side of the wall.
57:30
And we realize that there's been a mistake, a lost entrant.
57:35
Something's been miscommunicated to us. We are now closer than
57:38
you and I are, right, the second to what actually
57:41
was military-age men. There was at least two. I've heard
57:44
as many as five. I actually don't know the exact number,
57:46
but there were fighters hiding on the other side of
57:50
that wall. Intention's unclear. But they're right there and they
57:53
haven't heard us yet. And they're nervous. We can tell
57:56
they're nervous. They're right on the other side of the wall.
57:58
And we are in a tough, tough spot here because
58:01
there's seven of us. We're so close to them that
58:05
if someone even so much as like farts right now,
58:07
they're going to hear us. And so our team leader,
58:10
who was incredible, he went on to go to team six.
58:12
He's one of the best dudes I've ever met. He
58:14
had to make an on the ground decision. We got
58:17
to engage these guys so we can see they have weapons.
58:19
One guy looked over and said they have weapons. This
58:21
is all nonverbal. We're like making hand signals and stuff
58:24
on night vision. And so one of our guys, our
58:27
team leader gets down on a knee and he tells
58:30
one of the guys next to me to stand on
58:31
his leg and start shooting. And so over the wall,
58:34
he starts shooting. And there was at least two guys
58:36
over there that already had grenades they'd pulled the pins
58:39
out on. So this is the moment they've had this.
58:42
They're holding the grenades for this. So as soon as
58:46
the shooting started, grenades come over the wall. And there's
58:49
a video of this. The grenade comes, or you can't
58:51
really tell, but it literally hit my shoulder. One of
58:55
the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell to the
58:58
ground and detonated. But in the second that this happened,
59:01
we were under a drone that had a targeting strobe
59:05
down on us. It was a flashing infrared strobe on us.
59:08
Imagine if like God had a flashlight and he was
59:11
turning it off and on rapidly. And you can only
59:13
see the light on night vision. It's this cone of
59:15
light that you're in. And this super intimate fight is happening.
59:19
And I'm watching this grenade. Time really slowed down. I
59:23
see it for a second because the light's on. The
59:25
light comes off. It disappears. I see it for a second.
59:27
And I remember feeling it hit my shoulder.
59:30
Speaker 3: I'm not shooting.
59:30
Speaker 1: I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the wall
59:32
as little shit's happening. And the thought I had was like, fuck,
59:36
it's going to blow my head off. I know I'm dead.
59:38
We're all probably going to die here in a second,
59:40
but my mom won't be able to see me again.
59:42
Like there'll be no open casket. That's the first thought
59:45
that goes through my head. My head's going to be
59:46
blown the fuck off. Hits my shoulder. And this is again,
59:49
in a fraction of a second, the light comes on,
59:52
goes off. It falls down lower and it's like halfway down.
59:55
Now it's like halfway to the ground. And I'm thinking,
59:57
oh shit. I'm definitely going to die, but maybe my
1:00:00
face will be intact and my mom can see me again.
1:00:03
Light goes off, on, off, on. It lands in the
1:00:05
ground and I turn slightly and I'm like, oh shit,
1:00:09
I might just lose my legs. Like this is great.
1:00:10
Speaker 3: Like I might live.
1:00:12
Speaker 1: And so all of us are in the lethal range.
1:00:15
Assuming this is a frag grenade, which I don't think
1:00:17
couldn't have been. It had to be an old school
1:00:19
pineapple grenade. We're all, all of us are in this
1:00:23
horrible lethal zone and two grenades go off. I tell
1:00:29
people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks
1:00:32
and just threw them at my backside. It didn't hurt.
1:00:34
It just felt like someone threw something at me. And
1:00:37
then I'm just down on the ground. And my memory
1:00:41
of what happened versus what actually happened couldn't have been
1:00:44
more different. It would take me years before I actually
1:00:46
sat down and debriefed this with the guy who ultimately
1:00:49
saved my life. But my memory is I go down
1:00:53
and I couldn't get my gun. My gun had been
1:00:56
the strap the little strap had been blown off my
1:00:59
helmet had been blown off so i'm not on night
1:01:01
vision i'm just there's pretty good illumination that night but
1:01:03
it's dark and it's just fucking chaos there the thing
1:01:07
is is the fighters in that town they didn't give
1:01:10
a fuck about killing each each other if they could
1:01:13
kill me they'd kill their teammates as well and so
1:01:16
rpgs are just being arbitrarily fired from all not all
1:01:20
across the city but from other locations just in the
1:01:22
vicinity of where this is happening because there was a
1:01:24
lull before this. So it's just fucking madness. And I
1:01:28
couldn't stand up. I can't move. And I got dragged
1:01:31
by one of my teammates. This is my memory. I
1:01:33
got dragged from, I'm at the head of the tee there.
1:01:36
They brought me down the stem of the tee, if
1:01:37
you will. And I just got placed up against a wall.
1:01:41
And I'm sitting there and I have these tourniquets that
1:01:44
are on my chest that we rubber band them to
1:01:46
our chest specifically so they can be easily broken off
1:01:49
and applied to stop the bleeding in your limbs. And
1:01:52
I was so weak and fucked up from this blast
1:01:55
that I literally couldn't pull the tourniquets off. And there's–
1:01:58
I don't even know if anyone is alive basically at
1:02:00
this point. I don't even know what's happening down in
1:02:03
the contact zone, which is like 20 feet away from me.
1:02:05
All I hear is gunfire. It's madness. And at any point,
1:02:08
I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking
1:02:12
kill me. Like I'm dead. I'm dead no matter what here.
1:02:15
And so I had this true in my mind like
1:02:18
near-death experience where I sat there. It's relatively well illumined.
1:02:24
And I, I suddenly lost my hearing. Like it's gone,
1:02:28
completely gone. And there's good illumination. So I can see
1:02:31
this small alleyway. I can see this flashes of light
1:02:34
as rounds are coming in. And I just, I'm like,
1:02:36
I'm in my head. I'm so aware that I'm alive,
1:02:39
but I'm dying. And then, um, my vision goes completely blind,
1:02:44
like can't see, I can't hear anything, but I was
1:02:47
so lucid in my mind. So aware that I was alive.
1:02:51
And I tell people, That on a day-to-day basis, you
1:02:55
live and you don't think about it. You don't wake
1:02:57
up and actively live. You don't think, today I'm going
1:02:59
to breathe. Today my heart's going to beat. You just
1:03:01
do it because that's your entire experience is being alive.
1:03:05
And your body knows how to do that. Your brain
1:03:07
knows how to be alive. You also know how to die.
1:03:10
You just haven't done it yet. And I had this
1:03:12
really distinct feeling of like, oh shit, this is what
1:03:16
it feels like when you shut down. It didn't hurt.
1:03:19
It wasn't sad. It was just, it couldn't have been
1:03:22
more matter of fact. And all I was thinking about,
1:03:24
two thoughts. I had, what will my obituary say? Nothing
1:03:30
in terms of substance, but will it say Jonathan Allen
1:03:33
was killed in action or John Allen? So I was
1:03:37
hung up on that. And I was also thinking about
1:03:40
my wife and how she'd be notified at home. And
1:03:42
I was thinking, I wish we'd had kids because now
1:03:44
I don't have a legacy. And so I had this
1:03:47
feeling of like letting go. I don't know. That's so cliche,
1:03:50
but it physically felt like I had let go. And
1:03:53
I remember feeling the impact of the ground as I
1:03:55
sort of keeled over. And I thought that was it. Like,
1:03:58
I'm I'm about to die. This is the end, you know.
1:04:02
But then out of fucking nowhere, the legend that he is,
1:04:06
his name is Kyle. He's a SEAL fucking legend. comes
1:04:10
out of nowhere and he grabbed me and he put
1:04:13
tourniquets on my legs. I'm still like in my blacked
1:04:15
out zone here, but I slowly regained sight and hearing.
1:04:20
And the scene we're in is still terrible. There's still
1:04:23
chaos happening everywhere. And Kyle, who's a, he's a sniper,
1:04:27
he's a medic, he's the calmest dude under pressure. He's like, Hey,
1:04:31
it's going to be okay, buddy. It's all good. Stop
1:04:33
the bleed. Like just stay here. Like, you know, put
1:04:36
your gun up if you can.
1:04:36
Speaker 3: I'll be right back.
1:04:38
Speaker 1: Like literally in hell all around us. Couldn't have been
1:04:40
more calm. He just runs down back to the contact zone,
1:04:43
comes back up. He brings another guy out whose lung
1:04:45
had collapsed. He's patching him up, smiling.
1:04:47
Speaker 3: Everything's fine.
1:04:48
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, so I'm starting to see now as I'm regaining consciousness,
1:04:52
if you will, I'm seeing my teammates who have also
1:04:55
been fucked up from this grenade. But only me and
1:04:57
one other guy were so affected by the grenade that
1:05:00
we couldn't function. It was me and this guy whose
1:05:02
lung had collapsed. He was like barely able to breathe.
1:05:05
So we're down, but the other like five dudes... It's
1:05:08
like it's your job to get us out of here
1:05:10
now because we're fucked. We are pinned down and fucked here.
1:05:13
One guy, the team lead, in one ear, he was
1:05:16
working with multiple air assets overhead, calling in what's called
1:05:19
a danger close airstrike, which is you're effectively calling in
1:05:22
an airstrike on yourself. You need special initialing from your
1:05:27
higher officer. I think your commanding officer, like one more
1:05:30
senior than you, has to approve the drop because, in essence,
1:05:33
you could kill yourself doing it. So he was calling
1:05:36
in an airstrike. That needed to be exact, like fucking
1:05:40
exact on the other side of that wall. And then
1:05:43
in the other ear, he's communicating with the rest of
1:05:46
our disparate teams, which are broken up across the city,
1:05:49
trying to tell them where we are. He's got two
1:05:52
comms happening, and he's physically pulling people out of the
1:05:56
contact zone with Kyle to get them to cover. And
1:05:59
he's engaging the enemy, and we're getting shot at. Holy shit.
1:06:03
He's a team six, that dude. Everybody went into like
1:06:07
flow state. I don't even know how to describe it.
1:06:09
And I'm fucking worthless. I'm not in flow state. I'm
1:06:11
fucking dead state. They hoisted me up and we ran
1:06:16
like a mile because there was no way to extract
1:06:19
us because of how densely populated it was or the
1:06:21
buildings were so tightly together.
1:06:23
Speaker 3: Could you move your legs?
1:06:24
Speaker 1: They were like fucking pillars. I was supported on shoulders hobbling.
1:06:28
I was not able to run. No. And the tourniquets,
1:06:30
they cut off circulation to your limbs. Because I was
1:06:33
bleeding profusely from my legs. So they were cinched off,
1:06:36
which kills the circulation. At a minimum, you got very
1:06:39
dead legs. But they ran me to a hot extract
1:06:43
where there's a fucking helo that came in, coming in,
1:06:45
guns blazing. They throw us in the helo. Now get this.
1:06:48
Me and the other dude with the lung, we get
1:06:50
thrown on the helo and we just leave with the
1:06:52
medical team. Those fucking dudes, those five dudes still on
1:06:56
the ground had to fight their way back into the
1:06:58
city to go reconnect with the rest of the element
1:07:01
who again, he's calling the airstrike. He called him was with,
1:07:04
it was perfect. He got, I think got an award
1:07:06
for it. He hit exactly in the right spot. He
1:07:09
called in the exact right spot, like under the most
1:07:11
duress you could imagine. But like, so my mental image
1:07:15
of what happened is, under truly like I witnessed life
1:07:19
and death like I was in a life and death
1:07:21
scenario and I got to be fully an audience for
1:07:24
it every motherfucker was fucking perfect at their job like
1:07:29
literally rounds flying everywhere.
1:07:32
Speaker 2: Hey what's going on up good got your legs all
1:07:35
tied off here hey what's going on calling this airstrike
1:07:37
over couldn't be calmer that was it like and so
1:07:40
my debrief point was it fucking works the training works.
1:07:43
Speaker 3: Wow what a fucking story Holy shit, dude.
1:07:48
Speaker 1: There's an, there's an addendum to it.
1:07:50
Speaker 3: I want to hear the addendum.
1:07:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. So after we got medevaced, so I'm in the,
1:07:54
I'm in the helicopter. And at this point, I don't know,
1:07:58
I don't know the state of my injury. All I
1:08:00
know is a few minutes ago, I thought I died,
1:08:03
you know, like I don't really, I'm, I'm happy to
1:08:05
be here now, but we get in the helicopter and
1:08:08
that crew was amazing. I think there were PJs, air
1:08:10
force PJs, which are like spec ops air force. I
1:08:13
think they were fucking great, but they're like, Hey, do
1:08:15
you want, uh, What's the drug? Oh, my God. It's
1:08:19
the one, the painkiller drug, morphine, morphine, morphine. And I said, no,
1:08:22
I didn't have any pain, but I was like, I'm
1:08:24
worried I might die and I want to be lucid
1:08:26
for it. And they're like, OK, now I think you're
1:08:28
going to be OK. But I was like in my
1:08:29
head that I might die. I don't know. And so
1:08:31
we get medevaced out of Zargan Shah and they fly
1:08:34
us right to this nearby base very close by called Shank.
1:08:38
And when we get there, there's obviously doctors and nurses
1:08:42
that are there. specifically for this. And so even though
1:08:45
it was the middle of the night, they had been told, hey,
1:08:47
you have two casualties, you know, the guy with the
1:08:50
collapsed lung and myself. To be honest, I don't really
1:08:53
know exactly what they were told, but I would imagine
1:08:55
they were told, get ready for some some type of
1:08:58
surgery for both of them. And so we fly to
1:09:01
fob shank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher
1:09:04
and my clothes have been fucking cut off of me.
1:09:06
Like my, my dick's hanging out. Like I'm, I'm in disarray.
1:09:09
Like I'm all fucked up. And I really, I don't
1:09:11
even know. I think I'm going to be okay. Cause
1:09:12
at this point I've made it here and no one's
1:09:15
acting like I'm, I'm literally about to die, but I
1:09:17
don't know. I don't really know how bad it is.
1:09:19
And they wheel me into this tent along with the
1:09:21
other guy. And it's so bright, like, like so bright
1:09:24
inside of there that you can barely open your eyes.
1:09:26
And it's just a sea of all these doctors and
1:09:28
nurses that are ready to perform whatever needs to happen
1:09:31
because they don't know. They don't know what needs to
1:09:33
be done. But as soon as I get in there,
1:09:38
I see in the back corner of this relatively small
1:09:40
medical tent, like a shanty medical tent, is maybe like
1:09:43
15 SEALs that were not on the mission with me.
1:09:46
There are other guys in country that are other Navy SEALs.
1:09:49
It's the middle of the night and they've put on
1:09:51
the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms.
1:09:55
These are like their BDUs. These are not nice. But
1:09:58
in Afghanistan on a deployment, this is the best shit
1:10:01
they had. They clearly had been tracking because you can
1:10:05
track missions in real time when you're overseas. They saw
1:10:08
the call signs come across that SEALs had been wounded
1:10:11
and were being brought here for treatment. I have no
1:10:13
sense of what exactly they knew. But clearly whatever was
1:10:16
passed indicated that one of us or both of us
1:10:19
could die. And so these dudes were in the tent
1:10:22
in case we died. They're my friends. I know them
1:10:24
all personally. And so I'm being wheeled in and the
1:10:28
gravity of what's happening was like a fucking ton of
1:10:31
bricks because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been
1:10:34
going on. And I see that the looks on these
1:10:36
guys' faces and they're wearing these uniforms and they're all
1:10:40
standing almost like at attention in the corner and they're there.
1:10:44
In case I fucking die. It's like, I'm going to
1:10:46
my own funeral. And so I'm, I'm put on the, the,
1:10:50
they swore me, not them. The doctors swore me and
1:10:53
they get me ready for debridement, which is just to
1:10:55
pull the shrapnel out of my hips and my, my leg.
1:10:58
And the guy was like, all right, I'm going to
1:10:59
give you, I think it was ketamine. He's like, you're
1:11:01
not going to, this is it. Like, good luck to you.
1:11:03
And he like gave me ketamine and I, I passed
1:11:06
out or whatever they gave me. I completely passed out.
1:11:08
And then it's like, I have no memory and I
1:11:10
fucking wake up in Germany. I'm in fucking Germany. And
1:11:14
I'm just, oh, yeah, you're fine. Yeah, your legs are
1:11:17
all fucked up, but you're going to live keeping your limbs.
1:11:20
And then I think it was seven days after that,
1:11:22
I'm back home in Virginia, hobbling down the Home Depot
1:11:28
fucking aisle. Just no transition. I was just killing people overseas.
1:11:34
Holy shit. Yeah, fucking nuts, man.
1:11:37
Speaker 3: What was the extent of the injuries?
1:11:39
Speaker 1: Honestly, I was so fortunate. It was a big, big
1:11:42
hole in my ass, like a three or four inch chunk.
1:11:47
The big issue with it is it was so deep
1:11:50
into my ass that they had to keep opening it
1:11:54
so that it would not heal in reverse, you know,
1:11:56
because it can pocket. And then just inside of my leg,
1:12:00
I mean, basically I was spared. Like it was just
1:12:03
a massive flesh wound. from underneath my knee all the
1:12:07
way up to my back. And then I also, this
1:12:09
is the part that was the worst, to be honest.
1:12:12
Leg's fine. I have a little bit of residual soreness.
1:12:15
At this point, there's a little bit of shrapnel in
1:12:16
my leg, but they're like pieces of sand. They only,
1:12:19
on a hot day, I might notice it. But I,
1:12:22
from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic
1:12:24
surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders.
1:12:31
I truthfully don't know if this actually happened, but he
1:12:33
said as much. And I tore both of my labrums,
1:12:36
a slap tear. It's a relatively common injury. And I
1:12:40
had the, I had what's called a biceps tendinitis surgery
1:12:43
done on my right. Basically it was so painful. I
1:12:45
couldn't really use it, but it's the surgery where they
1:12:48
remove a portion of your bicep and they restaple it,
1:12:51
but it's sort of like a bandaid doesn't really fix
1:12:53
the problem. And the shelf life of a biceps tendinitis
1:12:56
is about 10 years before you might see some degrading.
1:12:59
And I'm, I'm now at the point where my shoulder
1:13:02
fucking sucks. And I, Like in the gym, I have
1:13:05
to avoid pressing. I have to avoid overhead stuff. And
1:13:09
it's just where the bicep tendon is?
1:13:11
Speaker 4: No.
1:13:12
Speaker 1: So what happens is the labrum tear itself never got fixed.
1:13:16
They just removed some of the tension on one side
1:13:18
of the tear. But still over time, it continues to
1:13:21
tear down the labrum. So effectively, my labrum just over
1:13:25
time has continued to tear and I'm getting some additional pain.
1:13:29
I just had an MRI done and they're like, whatever.
1:13:31
You know, you had the bicep tendonitis done. There's not
1:13:35
a whole lot more you can do. You can do
1:13:37
stuff to fix it, but a lot of it is
1:13:38
just going to do more damage than good. And so
1:13:40
I'm probably staring down not chronic fucking pain or whatever,
1:13:44
but something like that.
1:13:45
Speaker 3: Have you done any stem cells?
1:13:47
Speaker 1: No.
1:13:47
Speaker 4: No.
1:13:48
Speaker 3: Okay. How long are you down for?
1:13:50
Speaker 1: Tonight. That's it? No, I can come back.
1:13:54
Speaker 3: I'm going to bring you into Wastewell. See what they
1:13:56
could do for you.
1:13:56
Speaker 1: Do whatever I can do.
1:13:57
Speaker 3: It's a fucking huge pain.
1:13:58
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:13:59
Speaker 3: While you're here, we should try to get you in.
1:14:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:14:02
Speaker 3: Maybe I can get you in like right after we're done.
1:14:04
You could just drive right over there because it's not
1:14:07
far from here.
1:14:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's a huge issue.
1:14:10
Speaker 3: Guarantee you it can help you. Have you fucked around
1:14:11
with peptides at all?
1:14:13
Speaker 1: No. I see them all over the place. Yeah.
1:14:15
Speaker 3: You should. There's a lot of things that they can
1:14:19
do that can radically help you. One of the things
1:14:21
they can do, it'll definitely decrease a lot of the
1:14:24
inflammation and help heal. And, you know, there's some evidence.
1:14:27
How old are you?
1:14:28
Speaker 1: 37. Yeah.
1:14:29
Speaker 3: You're still young, man. There's a lot of evidence that
1:14:32
labrum tears can be healed with stem cells and without
1:14:36
having to go through surgery depending on the extent of
1:14:38
the tear.
1:14:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm open to it.
1:14:41
Speaker 3: Dude, I'm a big believer. It's fixed me. I've had
1:14:44
a lot of problems where I was like, I need surgery.
1:14:46
I had an orthopedic surgeon told me, for sure you
1:14:49
need shoulder surgery. I never got it done. He's like,
1:14:51
you could rehab it. This was more than 10 years ago.
1:14:55
He's like, you could rehab it, but you're going to
1:14:57
need surgery. It's 100% now.
1:15:00
Speaker 1: Oh, your shoulder is good now? 100%. Oh, damn, dude.
1:15:03
I do all my kettlebell work with 70-pound kettlebells.
1:15:06
Speaker 3: I don't have any problems. Windmills, cleans, presses, renegade rows,
1:15:10
gorilla cleans, no problems.
1:15:12
Speaker 1: How much are you cleaning? 50s.
1:15:14
Speaker 3: You just gorilla cleans.
1:15:15
Speaker 1: I do it for reps. Do you do barbell clean? No.
1:15:18
Speaker 3: No, I don't lift anything heavy. When I do gorilla cleans,
1:15:21
I either do 50s or 70s. My whole kettlebell workout
1:15:24
is either 50s or 70s. And sometimes I work out
1:15:27
with 35s just for the warm-up. Like I'll do like
1:15:31
warm-up stuff. Like I'll do like rotation exercises with 35s.
1:15:36
Things where I'm like big halos where I'm just really
1:15:39
opening up my back and getting.
1:15:41
Speaker 1: When did you get into doing kettlebell stuff? I've seen
1:15:43
you post like the demon bell or the gorilla bell.
1:15:45
The gorilla bell. Yeah, those are the 70s. Those are
1:15:48
the shit.
1:15:48
Speaker 3: Those are– I really got into farmer's carries. That's what
1:15:53
the– I'm using the– the gorillas are like my best
1:15:55
friends lately. I just do these– I have this big,
1:15:58
long driveway with a hill, and I do these gorilla carries.
1:16:01
It's like a 200-yard driveway. Dang.
1:16:03
Speaker 1: And I do these gorilla carries where you take– well, you.
1:16:06
Speaker 3: Know, with those farmer's– Yeah, sure. Farmer's carries with those
1:16:09
gorilla kettlebells.
1:16:10
Speaker 1: The 70s? Yeah, and I take them up the hill
1:16:12
and down the hill.
1:16:12
Speaker 3: That's heavy shit, dude. My grip has gotten so much better,
1:16:15
and on top of it, it's like my legs have
1:16:18
gotten better, and it feels like my whole body is
1:16:20
like more– connected, if that makes any sense. Cause when
1:16:24
you're walking, you know, that guy, Tom Havilland, you know
1:16:27
who he is?
1:16:27
Speaker 1: Oh, fuck yeah.
1:16:28
Speaker 3: Fuck yeah. Everybody knows who that guy is.
1:16:29
Speaker 1: Dude's a beast.
1:16:31
Speaker 3: One of the things that I got from him is
1:16:32
he's talked about the importance of picking up heavy things
1:16:35
and walking with them. He's like, if you really want
1:16:38
to get strong, he's like, strength is not just lifting
1:16:41
heavy stuff like stationary. Like carry things. And so he
1:16:45
does a lot of weird like.
1:16:47
Speaker 1: His Zurcher is like fucking 500 pounds.
1:16:49
Speaker 3: Insane. But he does a lot of weird like off-weight
1:16:52
stuff where he has more weight on one side than
1:16:54
the other and switches them. He has a chain behind
1:16:56
him and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder
1:16:58
while he's doing farmer's carries with two hands. He does
1:17:01
a lot of crazy stuff like that. And obviously the
1:17:03
guy is a fucking freakishly strong person. So I'm like, OK, well,
1:17:06
let me see if there's anything to this. So a
1:17:08
few months back, I really got into farmer's carries. And
1:17:13
I first just would do it. This is him.
1:17:15
Speaker 1: Fucking freak. Yeah, the trademark shirt he's got on. He
1:17:18
always has that shirt on.
1:17:19
Speaker 3: And you always see his back and he's like 6'8,
1:17:22
almost 400 pounds. He's a fucking giant human being.
1:17:26
Speaker 1: I love his page. Yeah, he's a real freak.
1:17:29
Speaker 3: But this thing that he really believes in is carrying
1:17:34
things and walking around with them. And now I really
1:17:37
get it. I really get it. Because I've been doing
1:17:39
it now for.
1:17:41
At least three, maybe almost it's going on four months
1:17:45
and it's completely transformed my legs. My legs are way thicker.
1:17:49
They're stronger.
1:17:50
Speaker 1: My back feels better.
1:17:52
Speaker 3: My connection between like my, my entire core and my
1:17:56
back is better. Like everything feels stronger. I'm stronger in
1:18:00
every other workout that I do. I feel way stronger
1:18:03
when I do like cleans and presses and do it
1:18:06
and windmills and everything else. Cause the, you're, when you're,
1:18:09
carrying stuff like that it's like your whole body your
1:18:12
core has to stay tight your back has to stay
1:18:15
tight everything's dealing and then when you're up at the
1:18:17
top of the hill you're like motherfucker and your forearms
1:18:21
are literally on fire you try to hold on to
1:18:23
these things and you know i got a chalk ball
1:18:26
in my pocket and i reach in there and powder
1:18:27
my hands back up and as soon as i get
1:18:30
my hands back going i do it again and that
1:18:33
has changed everything that's changed everything but One of the
1:18:37
things that I've noticed is I very rarely get injured
1:18:42
as opposed to my friends who do like traditional weightlifting stuff.
1:18:45
Speaker 1: Like powerlifting? Yeah. Benching heavy. Squatting heavy. deadlift heavy.
1:18:51
Speaker 3: Those dudes are– all my friends who do that are
1:18:53
always getting hurt. They're always getting hurt.
1:18:54
Speaker 1: I'm guilty of that to some degree.
1:18:56
Speaker 3: Everybody is. But you think that's the only way to
1:18:59
get strong and I don't think that's correct. I don't
1:19:02
think it's correct. I think the most important thing is
1:19:06
volume with reasonably heavy things. Where you're not hurting yourself.
1:19:11
Like 70 pounds is– you know, I do– I could
1:19:14
probably do 20 reps of cleans and presses. But I
1:19:17
only do 10 and then I rest for like five–
1:19:19
I do the Pavel Tatsalin method.
1:19:21
Speaker 1: What's that? Pavel Tatsalin is the guy who really brought
1:19:23
kettlebells over to America. Okay.
1:19:25
Speaker 3: And he's a famous kettlebell coach for Strong First, which
1:19:29
is his company. And he's this philosophy that strength is
1:19:34
a skill and you shouldn't practice skills when you're exhausted.
1:19:38
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.
1:19:39
Speaker 3: Of working to failure. I mean, obviously, if you want
1:19:42
to be a bodybuilder or even a professional powerlifter, that's
1:19:45
a different thing. But if you want to get strong,
1:19:48
the most important thing is the amount of work that
1:19:50
you do, not exhausting the muscle with one set.
1:19:54
Speaker 1: Got it.
1:19:55
Speaker 3: And so what he has you do is if you
1:19:56
can do 20 reps, do 10. And then wait five
1:19:59
minutes and do another 10. You got the same volume
1:20:01
of work, but you're never exhausted while you're doing it.
1:20:04
Your form is always perfect. And you're still getting the
1:20:07
same amount of work. So my workouts, like I have
1:20:10
to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettlebell workout. Fuck, dude.
1:20:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:20:14
Speaker 3: I know.
1:20:15
Speaker 1: But it works.
1:20:16
Speaker 3: Dude, that's– It works. And again, I'm fucking never injured.
1:20:19
If I'm injured, it's like a little tendonitis here or
1:20:22
something bothering me in my lower back a little bit.
1:20:24
It's never significant.
1:20:27
Speaker 1: My trainer, John Finkst, we've been working together a couple
1:20:29
years now in Jersey. He's the man– he's a big
1:20:32
believer in that. You were talking about I could do
1:20:34
20 but I do 10 instead. He's like all about–
1:20:37
not form– Till you die because there are times where
1:20:40
it's like time to throw some English in, get some
1:20:42
volume in.
1:20:42
Speaker 3: Right.
1:20:43
Speaker 1: But he keeps me from ego lifting and keeps me
1:20:45
from doing stuff that it's like over the top. Yeah.
1:20:48
Speaker 3: Ego lifting is a problem. Especially with dudes.
1:20:50
Speaker 1: I can't help it.
1:20:51
Speaker 3: The one time I hurt my back really bad, I
1:20:53
was dead lifting like 450 with.
1:20:55
Speaker 1: The– Just traditional grip? No, the– Trap bar deadlift.
1:20:59
Speaker 3: Trap– yeah.
1:20:59
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:21:00
Speaker 3: The trap bar.
1:21:01
Speaker 1: What is it?
1:21:01
Speaker 3: Hex bar. What do you call that thing?
1:21:02
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:21:02
Speaker 1: Trap bar.
1:21:03
Speaker 3: So I love those things.
1:21:04
Speaker 1: It's great. But I was like, let's get big.
1:21:08
Speaker 3: And then I felt think, you know, that and luckily
1:21:12
it was muscle, not like spinal, not a disc issue.
1:21:16
Speaker 1: It was lower back, left, lower back.
1:21:18
Speaker 3: It fuck with me for like a six month period.
1:21:21
Speaker 1: I bet.
1:21:22
Speaker 3: Oh, so I was like, dad, I'm not doing that anymore.
1:21:25
And from that moment on, I got really into just
1:21:28
doing kettlebells. And I'm stronger than I've ever been. I
1:21:31
don't think you need to lift really, depending upon what
1:21:34
you're trying to do. And if you're trying to become
1:21:36
a powerlifter, sure, you need to lift heavy. But if
1:21:38
you just want to be strong and functional, I don't
1:21:41
think you need to lift heavy.
1:21:42
Speaker 1: I don't believe that. Dude, right now I'm on a
1:21:45
pretty big cut. I do a summer cut each. This
1:21:48
is my second summer I've done that.
1:21:49
Speaker 3: Just look good on the beach?
1:21:50
Speaker 1: Dude, shamelessly. There's nothing else to it. But what I've
1:21:56
found in my own life is that I do really
1:21:59
well when I have not a goal, like a lofty
1:22:01
goal even, but just some fucking thing that You got
1:22:04
to suffer to achieve it. I do well with goals
1:22:06
like that.
1:22:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:22:07
Speaker 1: Goals are important. Yeah. And I right now I'm on
1:22:10
my like I count calories. I'm into my macros like
1:22:14
you wouldn't believe. But what I was doing before this,
1:22:18
I was doing none of that. And I was fucking
1:22:20
obsessed with. With hang cleans, just like barbell hang cleans. Dude,
1:22:25
I'm so fucking, I've gotten up to 225. Very proud
1:22:29
of that. But I, it's like the one exercise, no matter,
1:22:32
we do so many exercises.
1:22:33
Speaker 3: That doesn't fuck with your shoulder?
1:22:36
Speaker 1: Actually, no, it doesn't. It's pressing. It's this motion. Interesting.
1:22:39
It's the press. Dude, if I press like a fucking
1:22:41
50 pound dumbbell.
1:22:43
Speaker 3: Wow.
1:22:44
Speaker 1: But I can do a clean. That's part of the
1:22:47
reason I discovered it is it didn't fuck with my
1:22:49
shoulder muscles. But I have been on a quest to
1:22:52
like find the right way to train for cleans because
1:22:55
one of the issues with doing cleans with a barbell
1:22:57
and maybe I'll do kettlebells is I have a scar
1:23:00
right here that I broke my collarbone when I was
1:23:02
seven and my collarbone juts out because it healed slightly
1:23:05
in the wrong direction. And so every fucking time I'm
1:23:08
in a block of doing cleans, I always have this just, like,
1:23:11
recurrent infected wound on my fucking colon. Oh, no. And then, like,
1:23:15
in the comments of every video, they're like, dude, what's
1:23:17
wrong with fucking— You got a staff. Yeah, dude. And
1:23:19
so— but anyways, the kettlebell cleans. You need to shave down. Yeah, dude.
1:23:23
I got a fucking— But it sounds like you do
1:23:25
cleans and shit with kettlebells. With kettlebells, yeah. That's probably
1:23:28
something I need to consider. Yeah.
1:23:30
Speaker 3: And it's not easy to do. You know, like 70
1:23:32
pounds is when you're doing like 10 reps and I'm
1:23:36
doing like three sets of 10 reps.
1:23:38
Speaker 1: That's fucking brutal.
1:23:39
Speaker 3: But it's also the clean and press from the ground up, right?
1:23:43
It's all one motion. And this continuum of motion, you know,
1:23:46
over the course of 10 repetitions, it's a good solid
1:23:49
minute plus of work. So you're working really hard for
1:23:52
a minute. So you're getting a little bit of a
1:23:54
cardio benefit from it. But if I'm real consistent with it,
1:23:58
I'm 59 now. I just turned 59. So it's just
1:24:01
about staying strong. That's all I'm concerned with, not losing
1:24:05
any of my strength, not losing any of my mobility
1:24:08
or flexibility or anything. I'm constantly stretching, constantly just– I
1:24:13
believe in maintaining. And I think most people don't do that.
1:24:17
That's why we have a very distorted perception of what's possible.
1:24:20
I think we think that people deteriorate with age like
1:24:23
so radically that it's just a– it is what it is.
1:24:27
Speaker 1: It's a fact.
1:24:27
Speaker 3: It's going to happen to you. I don't think that's
1:24:30
necessarily true. I think that most people just don't have
1:24:33
the willpower to keep maintaining correctly and they're not supplementing
1:24:38
their hormones and taking peptides and also optimizing their nutrition.
1:24:43
I think if you do all of those things, you're
1:24:45
pretty– I'm personally shocked at what I can still do.
1:24:49
When I was a kid.
1:24:50
Speaker 1: You're fucking jacked, dude.
1:24:52
Speaker 3: Thank you. When I was a kid and I thought
1:24:53
of a 59-year-old, I'm like, oh, my God, that guy's dead.
1:24:56
That's a dead man.
1:24:57
Speaker 1: He's literally dead.
1:24:59
Speaker 3: Barely opened a jar of pickles, barely fucking make it
1:25:01
down a flight of stairs. And I have fucking zero problems.
1:25:05
I have one fucked up knee from my martial arts
1:25:08
days where I had my meniscus removed in a big
1:25:10
chunk of it. And it still fucks with me. But
1:25:13
it doesn't fuck with me in terms of function. It
1:25:15
only fucks with me in terms of like I'm worried
1:25:17
it's going to become arthritic over time because there's nothing
1:25:22
between the cartilage. The cartilage is banging against each other.
1:25:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:25:25
Speaker 3: And I broke it skiing once that– right where the
1:25:28
cartilage meets the bone. But I think that with the
1:25:33
improvements and all these biological therapies like stem cells and peptides,
1:25:37
I can maintain it and that's what I'm doing. So
1:25:40
it keeps me out of jujitsu because that's the one
1:25:42
thing that really– really rips on your joints, especially my knee.
1:25:46
Every time I've done it, it's like, fucker. It just gets,
1:25:49
I don't want to do anything. Like my friend, Matt's here.
1:25:52
He had a knee replacement and he's younger than me.
1:25:55
And I'm like, yeah, but it's jujitsu. It's just like,
1:25:57
you're constantly in weird positions and pushing it. Someone's fucking
1:26:01
trying to heel hook you and you're defending. It's like
1:26:04
everything is getting yanked around and then it's sore, but
1:26:07
you still go back the next day. Cause you want
1:26:08
to train. Cause you're addicted.
1:26:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude. Yeah. I found that my– when I was
1:26:14
in the teams, I was in good shape sort of
1:26:17
by default. And then I got out and I sort
1:26:20
of hovered around like I'm still relatively young. It's fine.
1:26:23
And then this whole Mr. Ball on YouTube thing happened.
1:26:26
And I, in a way, adopted the same mindset that
1:26:30
made me successful in getting through training, which is like
1:26:32
this obsessive got to make more videos. I've had my
1:26:36
viral moment like grow it at all costs.
1:26:38
Speaker 3: Right, right, right.
1:26:39
Speaker 1: All of my health went out the window. Dude, it
1:26:44
would take me about, I don't know, like 26 hours-ish
1:26:48
to do, I'm going to make a video hitting posts
1:26:51
on YouTube. And then even though all I wanted to
1:26:53
do was sleep, my immediate reaction at like three in
1:26:56
the morning would be just, slam like four or five,
1:26:59
six drinks and then go right to bed. Like, I
1:27:01
don't even feel it. I just would drink, go right
1:27:05
to bed. Drink just to go to sleep. I didn't even,
1:27:07
it was almost like, here's your reward.
1:27:09
Speaker 3: Suck down these fucking drinks.
1:27:11
Speaker 1: Oh, I get it. And then, uh, but, but I
1:27:13
got so grossly out of shape. It's like, dude, I
1:27:16
was like 200 pounds of just fat. And I had
1:27:19
this huge ponytail that I grew that I thought looked
1:27:23
really good. If you can pull it up, dude, I
1:27:25
look so fat and gross. But then it finally occurred
1:27:29
to me that, like, wow, you're entering, like, true dad
1:27:32
bod territory and there's just no excuse. And so sometime in, like, 23, 24,
1:27:35
I was like, all right, I got to be, like,
1:27:38
an adult again and train. And, dude, it's revolutionary. Whoa, dude,
1:27:43
that's crazy. There's a good shot of my disgusting– Let's see. Mr. Ballin.
1:27:51
Look at Mr. Ballin fat. I think that'll probably do it.
1:27:53
That's not to be rude.
1:27:58
Speaker 3: Or anything.
1:27:59
Speaker 1: That's a decent one. That one's recent.
1:28:01
Speaker 3: Which one?
1:28:02
Speaker 1: That one's sort of recent. The second one in there,
1:28:03
that's not even that bad. Well, the first picture you
1:28:06
pulled up, you get it.
1:28:06
Speaker 3: Oh, you see there in that image.
1:28:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can see a little ragged going on there. Yeah.
1:28:11
Speaker 3: But yeah, just– Well, you got to do what you
1:28:13
got to do when something starts happening and you realize like,
1:28:16
oh my god. It's like starting a fire.
1:28:18
Speaker 1: In the woods. Oh, yeah. You got to blow on it.
1:28:20
Speaker 3: You got to put some fucking little twigs on it.
1:28:23
You got to get that fucker going like once and
1:28:25
then you've had– congratulations because you've had amazing success. Like
1:28:28
what do you have? Like 11 million YouTube subscribers?
1:28:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, 11 million.
1:28:31
Speaker 3: That's incredible, man. That's really cool.
1:28:33
Speaker 1: Dude, it's– I can only imagine what you've been through
1:28:37
but the thing that I now this started in 2020
1:28:41
and it's 2026. I have had some incredible highs. The
1:28:48
early days of after the viral moment and I'm like
1:28:52
posting stuff that I like upload a video and literally
1:28:57
the next day it's like, you've made $ 20, 000 from yesterday
1:29:00
to now. And like, I've never in my life made
1:29:03
any real money ever. It's all almost overnight and it
1:29:08
grew and grew. And then it's like, I signed a
1:29:11
deal with Amazon like 10 months after starting a podcast.
1:29:16
I actually, I remember when you got your first deal
1:29:18
with Spotify, I remember that was like I didn't even
1:29:21
know it was possible for a podcast or anything to
1:29:24
sign like the equivalent of a professional sports level contract.
1:29:29
And then it's like less than a year after the
1:29:31
start of the Mr. Ballin podcast, I'm partnering up with Amazon.
1:29:36
It was a $ 62 million deal. And I say that because, dude,
1:29:41
my life got so much better and so much fucking
1:29:45
worse at the same time.
1:29:46
Speaker 3: What was the worst?
1:29:48
Speaker 1: Oh, God. So there's like the little stuff, you know, actually,
1:29:51
I just had a lawsuit close. They pled guilty to theft.
1:29:58
And so I started a house renovation project when I
1:30:02
was living in a house in Pennsylvania when this thing
1:30:04
kicked off. And I think they picked up that I
1:30:06
was making quite a bit of money. I was I
1:30:08
was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house
1:30:10
before long. I'm like adding fucking crazy shit to my house.
1:30:13
They ended up gutting the house. to the studs because
1:30:16
they're going to remodel it, but they didn't do any work.
1:30:19
And now they kind of had me, my house is wrecked.
1:30:21
I'm living in a rental. They're stringing me along. And
1:30:23
so they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and never
1:30:25
did any work. And so I sued them. That's a
1:30:29
little thing. Uh, and then over the course of the
1:30:32
next several years, dude, I've had, I've had people take
1:30:35
advantage of me in just the most personal, deep cutting ways,
1:30:39
ways that in a, if you were to like write
1:30:43
a movie, you know, he, Here's the scene of somebody
1:30:45
who suddenly comes into money and like the pitfalls of that,
1:30:49
of people coming out of the woodwork to take from them.
1:30:53
The things that happened to me with some family and
1:30:56
with some close friends and with business partners is just like,
1:31:00
are you fucking kidding me? Like this was all just
1:31:03
an angle? Like you had an angle on me the
1:31:05
whole time? Like this was a fucking con?
1:31:07
Speaker 3: Well, people think about people that come into money like
1:31:09
that the same way they think about a large corporation
1:31:12
if they like slip on the floor. Like at Target, like, ooh,
1:31:15
I'm going to get paid. They don't think, I'm all right.
1:31:18
Speaker 1: It's fine. It's my fault.
1:31:19
Speaker 3: I slipped. No, they think, oh, this is an opportunity.
1:31:22
Speaker 1: Big time.
1:31:23
Speaker 3: And they look at a guy like you who's, you know,
1:31:25
through your own hard work and stumbling upon this idea
1:31:29
and following through with it, made.
1:31:31
Speaker 1: A bunch of money.
1:31:32
Speaker 3: They're like, I can get some of that money. They
1:31:34
don't even think of you as a person anymore. They
1:31:36
think of you as a target. I got to keep
1:31:39
your circle.
1:31:40
Speaker 1: Tight, dude.
1:31:40
Speaker 3: That's the thing.
1:31:41
Speaker 1: I got Antonio out there. He's like my right hand man.
1:31:44
He's a former homicide detective. Like he actually he came
1:31:47
to me to be my house manager. And one of
1:31:50
the first things he said to me is he's like,
1:31:52
I don't give a fuck about your content, dude. I
1:31:53
think it's stupid. You're the guy for me. But he's
1:31:59
been awesome because he just like keeps everybody around me
1:32:02
sort of like vetted.
1:32:03
Speaker 3: But yeah, dude, it's– That's important, man, because people will
1:32:06
sneak through. And sometimes you don't see them the way
1:32:08
other people see them. Other people see them as like
1:32:11
this guy has got an angle. He's a scumbag. Be careful.
1:32:14
And you let people into your circle and then they're
1:32:17
like– when they're around you, they're putting on an audition.
1:32:19
They're pretending to be someone they're not. They're pretending to
1:32:22
be someone that you're going to want to hang out with.
1:32:25
And what they're using you is they're just thinking of
1:32:27
you as a springboard. Or as a way to get money.
1:32:30
Speaker 1: I would imagine for you, just given, I mean, dude,
1:32:33
you are podcasting. Literally, people are like, hey, you want
1:32:37
to be the next president? You better go on Joe's show.
1:32:41
I can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens
1:32:44
around you and your circle to get where I'm sitting
1:32:48
right now. And I got to be honest, I don't
1:32:51
know how you'd be able to sift through people that
1:32:54
are trying to meet Joe and interact with you. And
1:32:57
people who are trying to get in with Joe so
1:33:00
Joe will interview them.
1:33:01
Speaker 3: Well, the good news is I don't really interact with anybody.
1:33:06
Speaker 1: That's the right approach.
1:33:07
Speaker 3: So the way I even get like suggestions is one,
1:33:12
I see something that I'm interested in and I have
1:33:16
a guy and I either call him, text him or
1:33:19
email him and say, hey, let's try to get this
1:33:21
guy on. This guy's got a great book or she's
1:33:24
got a really interesting documentary or whatever it is. And
1:33:27
then there's– I get these people that submit to want
1:33:30
to be on the show. So I get a list
1:33:32
of those that there's a guy that goes through them
1:33:35
that makes– they're legit. And then by the time they
1:33:37
get to me, it's filtered out to what is actually
1:33:40
going to be interesting.
1:33:40
Speaker 1: So there's not a lot of.
1:33:43
Speaker 3: People meeting me that are– and the people that do
1:33:46
meet me, usually I never want to have them on.
1:33:48
Like if somebody just like comes up to me and says,
1:33:50
I have to be on your podcast. I'm like, nope,
1:33:52
you definitely don't.
1:33:52
Speaker 1: I already know you don't.
1:33:54
Speaker 3: You definitely don't have to be on. So this is
1:33:56
a crazy conversation. No one has to do anything. And
1:34:00
it's– people reveal themselves. They just do. Over time, it
1:34:06
takes a little bit. It's not instantaneous. But over time,
1:34:10
people reveal themselves. And it's just– the key is– You know,
1:34:13
just being open. And there's also people surprise you. You
1:34:18
meet a lot of really interesting people. You know, you
1:34:20
run into people that you didn't expect would be fascinating.
1:34:23
And they are. You know, there's a lot of that too.
1:34:27
It's just you got to be present. Just not buy
1:34:31
into any of it. That's the real key. No matter
1:34:33
how big it gets, just keep doing the thing that
1:34:37
you do. So all I do is talk to interesting people.
1:34:40
That's it.
1:34:41
Speaker 1: It's the right way to approach it.
1:34:42
Speaker 3: It's not that complicated. And as long as I continue
1:34:45
to do it the same way, I feel like people
1:34:47
will enjoy it because I think they enjoy it because
1:34:49
I enjoy it. Just like the way when someone's doing
1:34:52
something that they really love to do, I enjoy watching.
1:34:55
If someone's doing like metal sculpture, you know, like, and
1:34:58
the guy's really into it, he's welding and hammering. I'm like,
1:35:01
I am into that. I'm like, I'm into people doing things.
1:35:03
I like when people are really enjoying what they're doing
1:35:08
and are really curious and or really like, competent at
1:35:12
something you know they're excellent at something I enjoy watching
1:35:15
that I enjoy listening to it and I always enjoy
1:35:19
talking to interesting people so as long as I just
1:35:21
keep enjoy talking to interesting people I think people will
1:35:24
keep enjoying watching it and it's a nice exchange works
1:35:28
you know it's real simple but I keep it that
1:35:31
way I don't ever think like oh this guy's famous
1:35:33
he'll have a bunch of followers this will be a
1:35:35
good episode because I'll get a lot of views I
1:35:37
don't think like that I only think You know, because
1:35:41
like a lot of the people that are on my show,
1:35:43
no one's ever heard of them. They're just an interesting
1:35:46
person that I found on YouTube or an interesting person
1:35:49
that I found, you know, in a documentary or whatever
1:35:52
it is.
1:35:55
Speaker 1: I think it's the point you make about how you,
1:35:58
I think for me anyways, the one thing I've come
1:36:01
back to over the past several years of doing this is, Truthfully,
1:36:05
even though there are times where creating content is obviously–
1:36:10
it is a job in the sense that we have
1:36:11
a recording schedule and we have things that we have
1:36:14
to do as you obviously do too amongst whatever else
1:36:16
you're doing. The one thing that I fucking love doing
1:36:21
is telling stories. I mean that's– I really feel like
1:36:23
that's the place where I'm– You're a really good storyteller.
1:36:26
Speaker 3: You're going to be on the edge of my seat
1:36:28
with your Afghanistan story.
1:36:30
Speaker 1: Fuck, man. That was incredible.
1:36:31
Speaker 3: You're really good at it.
1:36:32
Speaker 1: Thank you.
1:36:33
Speaker 3: And the other one, too, the Russian one, too. You know,
1:36:36
a great story resonates with people, especially a creepy one,
1:36:40
which is why I think, you know, you've picked the
1:36:42
perfect angle.
1:36:43
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:36:43
Speaker 3: Because a great creepy story, like you hear a great
1:36:46
creepy story, like everybody's like, whoa.
1:36:48
Speaker 1: And then what happened? Have you heard of the Headless Valley?
1:36:53
In your comings and goings on the show, the Nahanni Valley?
1:36:56
Speaker 3: No.
1:36:57
Speaker 1: I got a good story for you, Aaron. Okay. Okay.
1:37:00
So in Canada, there's this section in the Northwest called
1:37:04
the Northwest Territories. Are you familiar with this? Yes. Okay.
1:37:08
So for those that are not, the Northwest Territories is
1:37:10
roughly four times the size of Germany. But Germany has
1:37:14
something like 87 million people who live there. And in
1:37:17
this space in Canada, this rugged space- There's like 45,000
1:37:22
people that live there. So it's four times the size
1:37:24
of Germany and basically not populated. It is as remote
1:37:27
as it gets. Population of dripping springs.
1:37:30
Speaker 3: Not even.
1:37:31
Speaker 1: Not even.
1:37:32
Speaker 3: Dripping springs. Fuck, dude.
1:37:34
Speaker 1: And so within the Northwest Territory, there's this even more
1:37:41
remote stretch that's called the Nahanni Valley. And the Nahanni
1:37:45
Valley today, it's a protected park. It's a Canadian protected park.
1:37:50
But even still, even though it's a park you can
1:37:52
go visit, it's nearly impossible to get to. To get
1:37:57
there by boat, you have to traverse these rapids. I
1:38:00
think it's a very treacherous ride to get there by boat.
1:38:02
There's no established roads into the Nahanni Valley. You can
1:38:07
hike there. It's brutal to hike there. You can fly there,
1:38:10
but it's only through chartered float planes. So it's a
1:38:13
difficult place to get to. But the Nahanni Valley, in particular,
1:38:16
when the story takes place, which is like the early 1900s,
1:38:21
because of how isolated it was, it's like one of
1:38:24
the parts of earth that's like untouched by humans. And
1:38:27
so the only people that would be in this huge,
1:38:30
sprawling valley, it was like an oasis of nature. They
1:38:33
would see things that are just like so gorgeous, like
1:38:36
untouched nature. But in the early 1900s, there was this
1:38:41
push from gold prospectors to go out into the Nahanni
1:38:44
Valley because they figured because it's so untouched by humanity,
1:38:48
there's bound to be gold. To be found in the
1:38:50
Nahanni Valley. Now, there were some indigenous tribes like the
1:38:53
Naha tribe. They were out there. There's some lore surrounding
1:38:57
how they might have abandoned their settlement around the time
1:39:02
the story takes place. But there were indigenous tribes that
1:39:05
lived out there. But for the most part, it's like
1:39:06
this sort of vacant stretch in this already isolated part
1:39:10
of the world. And so in 19, I think it's 1905,
1:39:14
these three brothers, these three prospectors, the McLeod brothers, Charlie,
1:39:17
Willie and Frank. who are seasoned gold prospectors, they decide
1:39:22
they are going to head off into the Nahanni Valley
1:39:24
and go try to strike it rich. And it's even
1:39:27
harder to get into the valley back then as it
1:39:29
is today. It required for them, they had to, they
1:39:32
actually had to build a boat. They had to bring
1:39:34
pieces of a boat and they would take it up
1:39:37
a rapid or down the rapid and they'd have to
1:39:39
disassemble the boat, carry it up like these rock faces
1:39:42
to get like those waterfalls they had to get past
1:39:45
and then bring the boat further and further into this valley.
1:39:48
And it's like this It's just crazy how much work
1:39:50
goes into getting out there. But these three brothers, they
1:39:53
find their way into the valley and they get to
1:39:55
the stretch of this river called the Flat River, which
1:39:58
is anything but. It's raging rapids. But there was this
1:40:02
little embankment against this huge forest and like mountains off
1:40:06
in the distance. And they made their camp there. And
1:40:09
there's no one around. I mean, this is pristine wilderness.
1:40:12
And they start sifting sand. Sluicing for gold. And it's
1:40:16
just fucking gold everywhere. It's like the sand is gold.
1:40:20
There's gold everywhere. They find so much gold. And they
1:40:23
can't believe it. They've struck it completely rich here. And
1:40:27
so after a whole day, I think they did two,
1:40:29
three days even of just getting all this gold, they
1:40:32
pack all their shit back up in their boat that
1:40:35
they've assembled. And they begin making their way back out again,
1:40:38
which should be easier because now I think a lot
1:40:40
of it you're going with the current. I don't even
1:40:41
know how they get up there with the rapids going
1:40:43
one way. But either way, they begin making their way
1:40:45
out and their boat capsizes and they lose all their gold.
1:40:49
The boat breaks up. They narrowly are able to salvage
1:40:52
the pieces and they come ashore and they build their
1:40:55
boat again. And they're like, oh, my gosh, we've lost
1:40:57
so many supplies. This is horrible. The best we can
1:41:00
do here is leave and come back. with more supplies
1:41:04
because we know there's gold here. Like this is devastating,
1:41:07
but no one's going to be here. We can come back.
1:41:09
We can get more gold. So they leave. And once
1:41:12
they get back to town, Charlie, one of the brothers decides,
1:41:15
you know what? It's not worth it. That was really sketchy.
1:41:18
I don't want to die out on the flat river.
1:41:20
You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, oh, we got
1:41:22
to go. We got to go out there. And so
1:41:25
fast forward a year, Charlie's still saying, I will not
1:41:28
go back out there. But Frank and Willie, they decide
1:41:31
to go. And they recruit this other guy. I think
1:41:33
his name is Robert Weir. And so the three of
1:41:37
them go back into the valley to strike it rich.
1:41:40
And Charlie is aware that they're going out there. He's
1:41:43
staying back, but he knows they're going out. He knows
1:41:45
where they're going because he went there with them. And
1:41:48
he expects they're going to be gone for, I think
1:41:49
it was going to be a whole year. And you
1:41:51
can imagine how much effort goes into getting out there.
1:41:53
They were going to live out there, I think, for
1:41:54
the summer and just get as much gold as they
1:41:56
could and come out. But Some amount of time passed,
1:41:59
let's call it a year, when Charlie starts to become
1:42:01
suspicious because they haven't come out of the valley yet.
1:42:04
And this is 1905. There's no way to talk to them.
1:42:07
And so another whole year passes. We're two years deep
1:42:10
into this. And still, these guys have not returned from
1:42:13
the Nahanni Valley. And so at this point, Charlie is
1:42:16
thinking there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers.
1:42:19
I got to go find them. And so he puts
1:42:21
together a group of people to go see what happened
1:42:24
to his brothers. And so he makes his way. He starts...
1:42:28
getting into the valley, and he reaches this stretch of...
1:42:31
This is just to give you a mental image of
1:42:33
where he's going. To get to that segment of the
1:42:36
beach where they had been two years prior when Charlie
1:42:39
was with them, because that's where he's assuming they're going
1:42:40
to be, they had to pass through these canyons. There's
1:42:43
four canyons that go... I think it's Canyon 4, Canyon 2, 3, 1.
1:42:47
They're all just called Canyon 1, 2, 3, 4. But
1:42:50
they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are just... ominous places.
1:42:56
There are these stretches like Canyon two is this 10
1:42:59
mile stretch of very deep water. I don't know how
1:43:02
deep I want to say it's at least a hundred
1:43:03
feet deep where the water goes all the way up
1:43:07
to the cliff face. It's just sheer cliff face on
1:43:09
either side. So you're here. It's like the scar in
1:43:12
the earth where it's hundreds of feet, tall cliffs on
1:43:15
either side that are sheer. And it's just, you know,
1:43:17
call it a hundred feet, at least of water down.
1:43:19
There's nowhere to stop. Once you're in this Canyon, you
1:43:23
must go to the end of the canyon. There's nowhere
1:43:25
to go. Oh, fuck. And the Naha tribe, the tribe
1:43:29
that had lived there for a while, they had always
1:43:31
talked about, they called them the Wahila. They said there
1:43:35
were these creatures, these white, tall creatures that would roam
1:43:38
the forest in the Nahanni Valley, and they would make
1:43:41
these screeching sounds, and they would attack people. It's just folklore, right?
1:43:46
But they said that in these canyons, There were all
1:43:50
these caves, these pockets of caves high up on these
1:43:53
canyons that you can't really get to that they believed
1:43:56
the Wahila would live inside of. So imagine you're going
1:44:01
down this like misty 10-mile stretch in Second Canyon and
1:44:06
you're looking up on either side and there literally are
1:44:09
caves that no human has ever stepped foot in. You
1:44:11
can't even get to these fucking caves. Right. And because
1:44:14
of the way the wind cuts through the canyon, it
1:44:16
makes this echoey like screeching noise that today you can
1:44:19
still hear as you go through these canyons. And so
1:44:21
they're going through Second Canyon, this stretch here. And the
1:44:25
stretch of Flat River where he had been the year
1:44:27
prior or two years prior with his brothers was at
1:44:30
the end of Second Canyon where the first little– call
1:44:32
it a beachhead exists. And so he, Charlie, and his
1:44:36
search party, they exit this creepy Second Canyon area. And
1:44:39
they see there's a campsite set up on the beach
1:44:42
and it's not really a beach. It's like, you know,
1:44:43
four feet of sand and then it's a little bit
1:44:45
of hinterland and then it's just, you know, forest. But
1:44:48
he sees there's a tent. And so they beach the
1:44:51
boat and they're looking around and they find there's two bodies.
1:44:54
It's a man, two men. They're badly decomposed, but they're
1:44:58
missing their heads. There's two headless men that are badly decomposed,
1:45:01
one of which is reaching for his rifle. And he's
1:45:04
half in the tent, half out of the tent. And
1:45:06
he's reaching for his rifle, which is propped up against
1:45:08
a tree. And the other is just lying behind the
1:45:11
tent and he's missing his head. The heads were never found.
1:45:14
And they find identification. And it turns out those are
1:45:16
his two brothers. And they find etched into the tree
1:45:20
that the gun was propped on. It just was written
1:45:23
etched into the wood. We have found a fine prospect,
1:45:28
which could mean any number of things. Maybe it means
1:45:29
they found gold, whoever. But that was written on the tree.
1:45:32
And then a little ways down from their camp, going
1:45:35
along the same direction they'd come in, they found a
1:45:37
skeleton that which they could never identify as being anyone,
1:45:42
but they believe it belonged to Robert Weir. So they're
1:45:44
all dead. And the authorities, you know, when this was reported,
1:45:48
they weren't really shocked. They're like, ah, it's the Nahanni Valley.
1:45:52
It's a dangerous place. They obviously died of starvation and
1:45:56
animal predation caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off.
1:46:00
You know, tough luck. Charlie didn't believe that. He always
1:46:02
believed that something had happened to his brothers, but he
1:46:05
had no way to prove it. So that's 1905. Fast
1:46:08
forward to 1913, people sort of know about this story
1:46:12
that this is when they dubbed it the Headless Valley
1:46:14
because these men were found without their heads. Little did
1:46:16
they know that story would carry quite a bit of
1:46:18
weight because 10 years or a little bit less than
1:46:21
10 years later, Martin Jorgensen, who's another gold prospector, he
1:46:26
heads out into the Nahanni Valley. He's heard the stories.
1:46:29
He's heard about the McLeod brothers. He knows that there's
1:46:32
lore of the Wahila and that there's something weird happening
1:46:35
in this valley and it's dangerous. But he goes out
1:46:37
there anyways and he tells his business partners who are
1:46:39
these rich guys who didn't want to actually go get
1:46:41
the gold. They just funded his expedition. He's like, I'm
1:46:44
going to go out there and I'll make us a
1:46:46
bunch of money. I'll find a bunch of gold. I'll
1:46:48
stay out there for the whole summer and then we'll
1:46:50
rendezvous and we'll split the earnings or whatever. So out
1:46:52
he goes and he builds himself a cabin not far
1:46:56
from where the McLeod brothers had stayed and then the
1:46:59
second expedition as well. And he– is out there for
1:47:02
the summer, but then he misses the rendezvous point. He
1:47:04
was supposed to come out of the valley and meet
1:47:06
his partners at the end of the summer. He doesn't.
1:47:09
Eventually a search party is brought out to, to find
1:47:12
what happened to him. And they find his cabin had
1:47:15
burned to the ground. They find Martin Jorgensen is, is
1:47:17
within the remains of this burned down cabin, missing his head. Um,
1:47:23
and they, I don't know how they did this in 1913,
1:47:25
but apparently the fire began on the roof and, And
1:47:30
so they don't understand how he could have not realized
1:47:33
there was a problem and exited his cabin. I mean,
1:47:35
it's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing that fire
1:47:39
starts here and you still burn to the ground. And also,
1:47:41
where's your head? So that's Martin Jorgensen. So now people,
1:47:45
they aren't really connecting the McLeod brothers and Martin Jorgensen.
1:47:48
It was called the Headless Valley by the time Martin
1:47:52
Jorgensen gets into the valley. He's now found headless. And
1:47:55
now it's like there's a little more rumor mill going on.
1:47:58
Over the coming several Actually, next 10 years, there was
1:48:02
several other expeditions to include this guy, Riley O'Brien, who
1:48:06
goes out there, a prospector. He goes out to check
1:48:08
his traps, doesn't come back. His partner who's with him,
1:48:11
he walks over and finds him, and he's just sitting
1:48:14
inexplicably by a campfire that's not on. It's not even–
1:48:18
it was cold. It was cold enough to freeze to death.
1:48:20
out there, but it was not blindingly cold. And he's
1:48:22
sitting in front of this fire pit. It's only been
1:48:25
like an hour or two since he stepped away and
1:48:27
he's holding a match or a cigarette in his hand.
1:48:30
And he's just like, he's frozen. He's frozen to death.
1:48:33
And there's no sign of what happened to him. He's
1:48:35
just sitting by the fire and he's dead. He has
1:48:38
his head, but he's frozen to death. The guy with
1:48:41
his partner who fled the valley would later say he
1:48:43
looked flash frozen. So that happens. There were at least
1:48:46
two other prospectors who also had their cabins burned down.
1:48:51
One of them was nearly decapitated when he was found,
1:48:53
but he still had his head, but signs of something
1:48:56
being done to his spine was present. And then there
1:48:59
was another two guys who their cabins burned down, but
1:49:01
their bodies were intact. So there's all these people that
1:49:03
die in similarly bizarre ways. And then In, I think
1:49:07
it was 1926, the first like really weird thing happens.
1:49:10
This is all weird, but the really weird thing happens.
1:49:12
It's going to get weirder? It gets weirder. There was
1:49:15
this hunting party that went out to the Nahanni Valley.
1:49:18
And by this point, it's become almost like because there's
1:49:23
this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is, because people
1:49:27
are fearful of the Nahanni Valley, it's now bringing a
1:49:29
new crowd of people into the valley. It's bringing like
1:49:32
hunting parties that kind of are like, oh, go fucking
1:49:34
see what's out in this valley. And so they were
1:49:36
going through Second Canyon and they were heading to Flat
1:49:39
River and they were going to these places where all
1:49:42
these kind of famous deaths have occurred to go hunting,
1:49:45
but just sort of to be in this valley. And
1:49:46
so this hunting party is out there and it's a
1:49:49
big group. I think there was at least a dozen
1:49:51
people out there and they're camping out on the banks
1:49:54
of the Flat River, not really in the same spot
1:49:56
where the McLeod brothers had been, but not too far away.
1:49:59
And they're out drinking late, having a good old time.
1:50:02
They all go to bed and the next morning, May
1:50:06
Lafferty is her name, May Lafferty. She's missing. She's one
1:50:09
of the, I think she was the only woman on
1:50:11
this expedition. She's gone. And they look for her. There's
1:50:14
no sign of what happened to her. She's just, she's
1:50:16
just gone. And so they did have some sort of
1:50:19
a search occur over the next several days, but they
1:50:21
ultimately said, you know, we don't know what happened to her.
1:50:23
And they, they, they left, they left the Valley. And
1:50:26
so they tell authorities, authorities, I think they went out
1:50:29
to look for her. They could never find her, no
1:50:30
sign of what happened to her. And so around the
1:50:32
time that they're looking for May Lafferty, there was this
1:50:36
guy who is named Charlie, different from Charlie McLeod, just
1:50:39
a sort of loner guy who just by happenstance had
1:50:42
been camping in the Nahanni Valley at the same time
1:50:46
as that hunting party. He was by himself, sort of
1:50:47
just this rugged outdoorsman who, it's not even clear why
1:50:51
he was out there, but he was just out there
1:50:53
minding his own business. He was aware of the hunting
1:50:55
party and he said that he watched them have their
1:50:57
party that night and he had stayed up late, but
1:50:59
eventually gone to sleep. And He ultimately reports this to
1:51:03
the police because there's all this talk of where's May Lafferty.
1:51:06
And this guy, Charlie, realizes he may have seen her.
1:51:08
So he goes to the police and he tells them, hey,
1:51:10
I was out there. They don't know I was out there.
1:51:12
I was out there the same time. And I went
1:51:15
to bed late at night after they were already asleep.
1:51:18
And I woke up to the sound of rocks, like
1:51:21
little rocks falling into the water. And he's relatively close
1:51:24
to the water, but he's not so close that he
1:51:26
would hear the sound of the current. He's far enough
1:51:28
that a stone throw into the water, you'd hear the
1:51:30
sploosh sound. And so he wakes up and he crawls
1:51:33
out of his tent and it's pretty well illuminated. And
1:51:36
he's in the trees, you know, and he can see
1:51:38
the water, the flat river, and he can't tell what
1:51:42
the rocks are coming from. It just sounds like rocks
1:51:44
falling from a distance into the water. And so he
1:51:46
just is curious and he gets up and he walks
1:51:48
down to the water line and he starts hearing them
1:51:51
more and more. And he looks up and there's a
1:51:54
part of the coastline, if you will, the beach line
1:51:57
that sort of was up on a rise to his left.
1:51:59
Like there was a hill there. That was right next
1:52:01
to him. That's dramatic. Just a slight rise. And there
1:52:05
was a little bit of a cliff that maybe like
1:52:06
six feet, eight feet of a cliff that overlooked the
1:52:09
river right there. And he sees there's this woman who's
1:52:12
crawling on all fours and she's scrambling up this little
1:52:17
rise of the beach. And it's her kicking of the
1:52:20
dirt that's like sprinkling rocks into the water. And he's
1:52:23
looking at her and she gets to the top and
1:52:25
she stops and And she turns around and looks at
1:52:28
him and he described her as looking possessed. He was like,
1:52:31
there was something wrong with her. She just stared at
1:52:33
me and he was so frightened. He didn't, he just
1:52:35
froze and then hid. And he watched this woman scamper
1:52:39
off into the, wherever she went, over the rise, away
1:52:42
from the camp. So she's gone and he didn't know
1:52:45
what to make of it. He's like, that's so weird.
1:52:47
He hears about this missing woman. He tells, he tells
1:52:50
police and he sees a picture of her and he's like,
1:52:51
I'm nearly positive that was her. And so she's never
1:52:54
found her. And so May Lafferty's gone. Fast forward another
1:52:58
20 years. So there's no idea. And in those 20 years,
1:53:02
more prospectors are found dead as well. One of the
1:53:06
last hunting parties went out into the Nahanni Valley. Actually,
1:53:12
prospector goes out and he goes missing. His name is
1:53:15
John Patterson. This is like in the 1939, 1940 range.
1:53:19
And a hunting party goes out to look for him
1:53:21
and they can't find him. And on the last night
1:53:25
they were there, one of the men who was part
1:53:27
of this search party for John Patterson, they're near the
1:53:30
Flat River. He described an indigenous man walked out of
1:53:34
the tree line, just sort of inexplicably walks over to him.
1:53:37
And he comes up to the group who are sort
1:53:38
of on the tree on the beach line there. And
1:53:42
he just says to this guy, he's like, hey, they're
1:53:44
startled to see him to begin with. Like, where the
1:53:46
fuck did you come from? And he's like, be careful.
1:53:50
The Wahila are out tonight. And the guy just like wanders,
1:53:53
but this is according to legend. This is what was
1:53:55
said to him. And the guy wanders back off into
1:53:57
the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were
1:54:01
planning to stay, I want to say two additional days
1:54:03
to keep looking for John Patterson. But that night following
1:54:06
that comment made by that guy, the indigenous guy all night,
1:54:09
they reported these ungodly screams and screeches coming from that
1:54:13
Canyon second Canyon where those, those caves up in the
1:54:16
cliffs were all around the forest. Like, like unearthly sounds
1:54:20
were being made that scared them so badly. But the
1:54:23
next day they said, we're not looking for John Patterson anymore.
1:54:26
And they bailed. And so people stopped going into the
1:54:29
Nahanni Valley. And today you can still go there. It's
1:54:32
still very hard to get there. But no one has
1:54:34
a good explanation for why so many fucking people from
1:54:37
1903 or 4 left. until at least the 1940s, kept
1:54:41
going into that valley and kept turning up dead, many
1:54:43
of which without their heads.
1:54:45
Speaker 3: So this indigenous guy that lived up there, where was
1:54:49
he from? Like, was he living up there? Was he
1:54:52
a part of a tribe? Was he passing through?
1:54:55
Speaker 1: So that part of the story, admittedly, someone said that
1:54:59
an indigenous guy said that to him. There's not much
1:55:01
in the way of like, okay, Was there a tribe there?
1:55:04
You know, it was one of those loose, loose pieces
1:55:08
of information that sort of surrounds the story. The reality is,
1:55:12
is like there are there's so much legend surrounding the
1:55:15
Nahanni Valley in part because the Naha tribe that had
1:55:19
lived there, there was this story I mentioned at the
1:55:21
beginning that they apparently knew. abandoned the valley after something happened.
1:55:26
And people have always attributed it to the legend of
1:55:29
the Wahila, that somehow these creatures must have forced them
1:55:32
to leave the valley. And so combine that with all
1:55:36
of the actual deaths that occurred by the 1940s, when
1:55:41
John Patterson went missing, and when that guy said, who
1:55:43
was part of that search party, that the indigenous guy
1:55:46
warned him of the Wahila. This was a big enough
1:55:48
story that like Time magazine did something in, I think,
1:55:52
the 1940s about, like, what the fuck is happening in
1:55:54
the Nahanni Valley? Like, why are so many people dying
1:55:57
out there? So I wonder if the people who were there,
1:56:00
maybe they heard some strange sounds that night.
1:56:02
Speaker 3: Who knows?
1:56:03
Speaker 1: But who's going to verify whether or not there really
1:56:06
was someone who warned them about the Wahila? We don't know.
1:56:09
But that's the report that was given. Somebody claimed that
1:56:11
an indigenous man sort of came out of nowhere. Said,
1:56:14
watch out for the Wahila tonight. And then that night
1:56:17
they heard all these screeches and they called it in.
1:56:18
Speaker 3: The reason why I'm asking is like maybe it was
1:56:21
indigenous people. They just didn't want these other guys coming through.
1:56:26
And so they created this thing by cutting off their
1:56:28
heads and killing these people.
1:56:31
Speaker 1: It's a great deterrent. Maybe it's not because a lot
1:56:33
of people went back.
1:56:35
Speaker 3: Well, maybe less than would have.
1:56:37
Speaker 1: Fair.
1:56:38
Speaker 3: Considering how much gold there was there.
1:56:40
Speaker 1: Yeah. Actually, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah.
1:56:43
Speaker 3: I mean, what a great way to get rid of
1:56:44
white people. Cut a few heads off.
1:56:48
Speaker 1: Tell them there's ghosts. Yeah, dude. I love that. I
1:56:52
find myself even to this day Googling the Nahanni Valley
1:56:55
and just looking at pictures of the canyons and just reading.
1:56:59
Even just stuff that I know is probably folklore around
1:57:01
the valley because the idea that within this stretch of
1:57:05
isolated places, parts of the world, there's this really isolated
1:57:08
park that no one can get to. I love that.
1:57:10
Speaker 3: Well, there's some weirdness in the world still in places
1:57:13
that people don't go to. And just think about how
1:57:16
hard it is to find a Wolverine. And we know
1:57:19
Wolverines are real.
1:57:20
Speaker 1: Where are they?
1:57:21
Speaker 3: Most people never see a Wolverine.
1:57:23
Speaker 1: They're in Alaska.
1:57:24
Speaker 3: They're in Canada. Minnesota has Wolverines. Like, what states do Wolverines?
1:57:30
Speaker 1: Let's put this into perplexity, Jamie. It's got to be Michigan.
1:57:33
It's got to be Michigan. Yeah, Michigan's right up there.
1:57:34
They're the Wolverines, right? The Michigan Wolverines. Right.
1:57:37
Speaker 3: But I don't necessarily think that means that.
1:57:40
Speaker 1: Aren't Wolverines like these little guys, too? Oh, yeah.
1:57:43
Speaker 3: Just like badgers. Little ferocious motherfuckers. Let's see. Alaska, Washington, Oregon. Idaho, Montana, Wyoming.
1:57:54
Speaker 1: No Michigans.
1:57:56
Speaker 3: Interesting.
1:57:59
Speaker 1: Interesting.
1:58:00
Speaker 3: But the thing is, my point is, you don't see them.
1:58:03
Speaker 1: No.
1:58:04
Speaker 3: I know a lot of guys, remote, cold, high elevation habitat.
1:58:08
Speaker 1: Colorado, Minnesota.
1:58:10
Speaker 3: Minnesota. I know a lot of guys who have been
1:58:13
in the woods their whole life hunting and maybe they
1:58:16
see one ever.
1:58:18
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
1:58:18
Speaker 3: We know there's populations of them out there. But it's
1:58:20
rare to stumble across a wolverine in the wild. And
1:58:24
that's a known animal. Now, imagine that there was a
1:58:28
time– I mean if you think about– Just the amount
1:58:32
of other types of hominids that they've found just over
1:58:38
the past few decades.
1:58:39
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:58:39
Speaker 3: They keep finding new versions like the Isle of Flores,
1:58:44
the little hobbit people, the Denisovans that they found. They
1:58:49
think they were much larger than Homo sapiens.
1:58:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:58:52
Speaker 3: So they're finding– and the Denisovans I think was like
1:58:55
within the last 10 years or so. And they keep
1:58:57
finding these skeletons and finding these bones. And then they
1:59:01
find out, whoa, this was around 300,000 years ago. It
1:59:04
was around 500,000 years ago. That's just what you find
1:59:07
in bones. Most people's bones you're never going to find.
1:59:10
So the vast majority of things that have died never
1:59:15
make it into the fossil record. And so you have
1:59:17
a small number of things that do. Now, we know
1:59:22
that humans cannibalize other humans.
1:59:25
Speaker 1: It's been a It's been a practice in Papua New Guinea.
1:59:32
It's practiced today. I mean, that's a bit of an overclaim,
1:59:35
but I think it's still practiced today.
1:59:36
Speaker 3: The Nez Perce supposedly ate some of their enemies. There's
1:59:40
a bunch of cannibalism going on in the world. Now,
1:59:44
imagine if there was a hominid and some sort of
1:59:47
an ancient creature that still stayed alive in a small
1:59:51
population but would eat people or maybe just cut their
1:59:55
fucking heads off. Or just attack them and kill them
1:59:58
because they didn't want them anywhere near because they had
2:00:00
associated over time people with problems. And then if you're
2:00:04
around people, they're going to hunt you. They're going to
2:00:06
shoot you. They're going to kill you. So what do
2:00:08
you do? You stay as far away from people. The
2:00:11
way to survive is to be in the most remote
2:00:15
place humanly possible. And when you find people, kill them.
2:00:19
Kill them so that they don't go after you.
2:00:22
Speaker 1: I know that you had seen something that I– I
2:00:25
had Tom Segura on an interview one time and I
2:00:27
told a story about the Mexican pilot. Does that ring
2:00:30
any– Yes. You're talking about like how humans do damage
2:00:35
to one another. But so the 60-second version is there
2:00:39
was this Mexican pilot civilian. He's going out for his
2:00:43
last test. Rafael Pacheco I think is his name. He's
2:00:45
going out to do his last test run as a
2:00:47
pilot and it's a simple route. Hey, you're going to
2:00:50
fly solo to prove you know what you're doing. He
2:00:52
takes off and he immediately starts to realize that he
2:00:55
doesn't have control over the instruments. The instruments were pretty
2:00:59
rudimentary to begin with. This is like the 1950s or 60s,
2:01:02
I think. And so it's a lot of dead reckoning
2:01:05
from the pilot's seat. Like he's looking out to see
2:01:06
where he needs to go. The mist is getting bad.
2:01:09
And then he's calling over the radio. He's like, I
2:01:11
can't get my plane to move. And then suddenly he
2:01:13
passes out and his plane like accelerates up into the sky.
2:01:17
And then he wakes up hours later off the coast
2:01:19
of Acapulco. which based on how much fuel was left,
2:01:23
he had too much fuel for how far of a
2:01:24
distance he had covered from where he had taken off, Chimalacan, Mexico.
2:01:28
It was more than like a three-hour drive. So he's
2:01:31
too far away with too much fuel, and he comes
2:01:33
to in his plane. He's still flying. He has no
2:01:36
idea how he got there. He's just coming to. And Rafael,
2:01:38
he hears in his radio some voice, and it's an
2:01:42
air traffic control guy, Carlos, who's down in Acapulco. And
2:01:46
he's talking to Raphael as if they've been having an
2:01:49
ongoing conversation. But Raphael's like, what's going on? Like, where
2:01:51
am I? What's going on? And Carlos is like, what? Like,
2:01:55
are you alone in your craft? And Raphael, he's like
2:01:58
taking stock of his situation. He regains control of his plane.
2:02:02
He's like, what am I doing? And so basically Carlos
2:02:05
is like, hey, dude, like come in and land here.
2:02:08
Land here. We'll figure it out. So Raphael's like, I
2:02:10
don't even know what happened. I passed out at the wheel.
2:02:12
He lands at the airstrip in Acapulco. And immediately he's
2:02:16
met with these guys in suits, like picture men in black.
2:02:19
He gets scooped up and he's brought to a hospital
2:02:22
where he's drug tested and talks to a psychologist and
2:02:25
they don't give many information at all. He's like, what happened? Like,
2:02:28
I'm so sorry. And they determined that he's not crazy
2:02:31
and he's not on drugs. And only then do they say, hey,
2:02:34
so when you were out over the off the coast
2:02:37
of Acapulco, you were flying in circles for over an hour.
2:02:41
And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he's the one
2:02:44
who saw you on the screen, and he was talking
2:02:47
to you for an hour while you were out there.
2:02:50
And the whole conversation is recorded. And basically, you can
2:02:54
listen to the recording, and I'm pretty sure you guys
2:02:56
might have on the show. Rafael passes out, and then
2:03:00
at some point, a couple hours later, when he's somehow
2:03:03
magically off the coast of Acapulco, a voice comes across
2:03:08
in the cockpit that's like this robotic– deep altered sounding
2:03:12
voice that doesn't sound like Raphael. In the earlier recording,
2:03:15
it sounds like Raphael's voice. Now it's different. And he's
2:03:18
talking to Carlos and this voice comes through and says
2:03:21
something to the effect of like, you are listening to
2:03:23
the sound of the voice coming through the pilot, but
2:03:25
it's not his voice. We are inhabitants of this universe,
2:03:32
but your technology is so primitive. This is the only
2:03:35
way we can contact you. We're here to tell you
2:03:38
that you are the only person intelligent species in our
2:03:42
universe that uses warfare to harm one another. And you're
2:03:46
effectively on the brink of extermination, and you need to
2:03:49
find a way.
2:03:49
Speaker 3: To stop it.
2:03:50
Speaker 1: And then like, Rafael comes too. And that's when he's like,
2:03:53
what's going on? And Carlos thinks he's been talking to
2:03:55
Rafael the whole time. And that's when he's like, is
2:03:57
there somebody else in the cockpit with you? Anyways, so
2:04:00
it's this big mystery. But Mexico took the story and
2:04:04
kind of like, sequestered it at The way we got
2:04:07
access to the transcripts of it is we had to
2:04:09
write a letter to a library in Mexico that had
2:04:13
access to the transcript. But it's interesting to imagine that, one,
2:04:18
I love thinking about life outside of Earth because I
2:04:22
think that the notion that there is life or that
2:04:25
there isn't life is astounding and fascinating either direction you go.
2:04:30
So I've always been interested in that. But two, the
2:04:32
idea that others out there are warning us that we're
2:04:35
on the fucking fast track to destroy ourselves and you
2:04:38
better knock it off, that's also pretty crazy. And we're
2:04:42
so accustomed to humans being violent and horrible to each other.
2:04:44
That's our history, right? But what if that's not normal?
2:04:48
What if it's like we're the fucked up people and
2:04:50
we're just killing everybody and we need to stop?
2:04:52
Speaker 3: I have a theory. And my theory is that I
2:04:58
think when you look at all the different– ancient religious
2:05:02
texts in regards to the creation of the human race
2:05:08
there's so many of them that have these very bizarre
2:05:11
similar narratives and these similar narratives are like in the
2:05:16
book of enoch in the book of enoch the watchers
2:05:19
come down and they mate with the daughters of men
2:05:22
there's a lot of weird stuff like that even adam
2:05:25
and eve like god created adam And God created Eve.
2:05:29
He created– like out of what? Like why did he
2:05:32
do that? Why did he do that and he did–
2:05:34
what did he do with giraffes? What did he do
2:05:36
with– like why hummingbirds? What's going on? But it doesn't–
2:05:41
they're not along– the story is different. The story of
2:05:45
humans is a story of engineering. It seems to be
2:05:50
a story of genetic engineering. It seems to be a
2:05:52
story of human beings being– taken like you take like
2:06:00
whatever this primitive beast is and you put something else
2:06:05
into it and you rapidly create something that's far more
2:06:08
advanced than anything else i think along the lines you
2:06:12
maintain too much of the primitive beast for the amount
2:06:16
of intelligence that it has and the amount of technological
2:06:20
competence that it's capable of achieving i It's too primitive still.
2:06:24
It's too violent. It's too territorial. It's too, there's too
2:06:28
much of it that's still an animal.
2:06:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. But we're not totally an animal.
2:06:33
Speaker 3: We're, you know, if you looked at us and looked
2:06:35
at everybody else like that animal's crazy, this animal makes
2:06:38
fucking airplanes.
2:06:40
Speaker 1: You know, we're so different than everything else.
2:06:42
Speaker 4: Yeah.
2:06:43
Speaker 1: I think we're engineered.
2:06:45
Speaker 3: And I think we're engineered like, you know, look, I've
2:06:47
had pit bulls and I know people will, tell you
2:06:51
pit bulls are great dogs and they're sweet dogs and
2:06:53
i love them don't get me wrong however they're sketchy
2:06:58
fucking dogs they're sketchy dogs they're sketchy dogs period and
2:07:03
you can love oh it's all how you train them
2:07:05
fuck you those dogs are designed to attack other dogs
2:07:10
and they don't i had my dogs that i had
2:07:12
to separate once You never should have two females together.
2:07:15
I realized that after a while.
2:07:16
Speaker 1: I have that going on right now. It's not good.
2:07:18
Speaker 3: Females, you got to get rid of one of them.
2:07:20
You can't have the females together. They'll fight to the
2:07:22
death and they never– males establish dominance. One male is
2:07:26
dominant over the other males. The other males back off
2:07:28
and that's the room. That's not how it works with females.
2:07:31
The female dogs, they keep trying to decide who's the
2:07:34
boss and I had to separate them. They're locked onto
2:07:38
each other and they're wagging their tails. They're biting each
2:07:42
other's face and neck, locking onto each other. And I mean,
2:07:46
full wagging the tail, like they're having the time of
2:07:49
their life. And I had to hose them down and
2:07:52
separate them. I had to have someone to help me.
2:07:56
um we made them yeah those are not a dog
2:07:59
that like it's not a wolf you know wolves are
2:08:02
really fascinating clever creatures that have evolved over time with
2:08:07
nature and you know they're brutal to each other but
2:08:11
they're brutal to each other in a way that makes
2:08:13
sense for the survival of the pack It all makes
2:08:17
sense if you look at like how it works and
2:08:19
how they have to communicate together and they have to
2:08:22
push out the weak ones and push out the old ones.
2:08:24
It's brutal, but it makes sense. Pit bulls don't make
2:08:27
any sense. They make no sense. And people don't make
2:08:30
any sense. People are like something that somebody created. People
2:08:34
are like super intelligent, very aware of our own finite lifespan,
2:08:38
very aware of our own mortality, very aware of the
2:08:40
consequences of hurting people, yet we do it anyway. We
2:08:43
communicate with each other. We know– There's people that like
2:08:46
their entire day is just fucking with people online. Their
2:08:49
entire day is that.
2:08:51
Speaker 1: So people like to cause pain, like to cause chaos.
2:08:54
Speaker 3: There's people out there that are warmongers. They enjoy starting war.
2:08:59
They enjoy like getting involved in conflicts with other nations.
2:09:03
That's their thing. That's what they do. We're fucking weird.
2:09:07
We're weirder than any other animal. And I think one
2:09:09
of the reasons why we're this weird and this incoherent
2:09:13
is because we're engineered. I, uh, one thing that I,
2:09:18
so I studied philosophy in college because at one point
2:09:20
I thought I might go to law school, but I
2:09:22
love like thought experiments.
2:09:24
Speaker 1: And one of the things that always stuck with me
2:09:26
that sort of along these lines is this idea that
2:09:28
humans are almost to the point where you can't even
2:09:33
notice it. You are completely egotistical. Like every human, you could,
2:09:38
you could basically define their whole existence as being absolutely egocentric.
2:09:43
And it comes down to like how you treat other
2:09:45
people and on your motives, whatever. But critically, there's one
2:09:48
point that stands out above all. And actually Neil deGrasse
2:09:51
Tyson nails this. I know you had an interview with him.
2:09:54
I'm not sure if you guys covered this, but it's
2:09:55
one of his best descriptions of how fucked up humans
2:09:59
are and how we think about things the wrong way.
2:10:01
So because we're so egotistical, like humans as a species,
2:10:06
we sort of assume that, okay, well, if there's life.
2:10:10
In any capacity outside of Earth or undiscovered life somewhere,
2:10:15
everything is sort of compared against us. We are the baseline.
2:10:18
Intelligent life, you know what that looks like? Yeah, it
2:10:20
looks something like us. How do we describe intelligent aliens?
2:10:24
They're like gray beings that are like bipedal and sort
2:10:28
of resemble humans. We have this sort of baseline thought.
2:10:33
that humans are the best and that humans are the
2:10:36
smartest and that if anything is going to be intelligent
2:10:38
in the universe beyond us, it'll have elements of human
2:10:43
to it, right? And so Neil deGrasse Tyson brings this
2:10:46
point up that shows you the absurdity of how little
2:10:49
we know and how probably wrong we are. He's like, okay,
2:10:54
he does a much better job of this, but it's like, okay,
2:10:56
so we're made up of DNA. Humans are made up
2:10:59
of DNA. We have X number of DNA strands. I'm
2:11:02
going to botch the way he tells it, but imagine
2:11:04
we have a hundred pieces of DNA that make us human.
2:11:07
Like if you have these hundred pieces, you're a human. Okay. Well, who's,
2:11:11
who's our closest relative to humans? It's probably the chimpanzee.
2:11:16
And just for the sake of this description, sorry, Neil,
2:11:19
you probably do a better job. They have like 98
2:11:22
of the human pieces, but they got either they're missing
2:11:24
two or they have two different ones. And that's the
2:11:26
thing that makes them a chimpanzee. So they're like 98, right?
2:11:29
And then you have, well, what's the next closest thing
2:11:32
to humans?
2:11:32
Speaker 3: It goes human.
2:11:33
Speaker 1: It goes chimp. Maybe it goes to like fucking, I
2:11:35
don't know, a bird or a dolphin or whatever. But
2:11:37
you go down the line of like the animals that
2:11:40
are closest to us in terms of intelligence. And you
2:11:43
sort of degrade in terms of number of DNA pieces
2:11:46
that are close to the ideal, which is 100. And
2:11:49
Neil's like, OK, great. So you have that framework. OK,
2:11:52
what the fuck do we do to chimpanzees? We put
2:11:56
them in labs and we test them in labs. We
2:11:58
put them in fucking zoos. Do you go up to
2:12:02
chimpanzees and say, hey, chimp, let's have a conversation. Let's
2:12:05
have a meaningful inter... No, you don't. And they're the
2:12:08
closest thing. Let's go down the list. What about an ant?
2:12:11
Like an ant's like 75 of 100. You might step
2:12:15
on an ant and not even know it, right? How
2:12:18
many times have you stopped to talk to the earthworm? None,
2:12:21
because it doesn't even register for you. He's like, if
2:12:24
there's intelligent life, in somewhere out there. What makes you
2:12:29
think we're not the ant? Why are we automatically at
2:12:33
the same level? Why would an intelligent species somewhere else
2:12:36
come here and be like, oh shit, humans, let's chat.
2:12:40
What if we're so insignificant that we get stepped on
2:12:43
the way we.
2:12:43
Speaker 3: Step on ants?
2:12:44
Speaker 1: Or worse, what if we're close like the chimpanzee and
2:12:48
we get rounded up and fucking studied? There's a, by
2:12:51
the way, if you want to, there's a movie I
2:12:52
just watched last night called The Signal. It has to
2:12:55
do with this. I love sci-fi movies. Check it out.
2:12:57
It's a fucking- The Signal. Holy shit. What a plot twist.
2:13:01
It has to do with human testing.
2:13:02
Speaker 3: Is it a new movie?
2:13:03
Speaker 1: No, it's like 2014. You got to watch it. Who's
2:13:07
in it? No-name actors.
2:13:10
Speaker 3: Lawrence Fishburne.
2:13:11
Speaker 1: Lawrence Fishburne. I'm sorry. Not no-name actors at all. He's
2:13:13
the only one I recognize.
2:13:15
Speaker 4: To be fair, he's the only one I recognize.
2:13:16
Speaker 1: Lawrence Fishburne. It's amazing.
2:13:18
Speaker 4: I haven't heard of any other names.
2:13:19
Speaker 1: So this movie- Admittedly, you're watching it and you're like,
2:13:23
wait a minute. I kind of get it. I kind
2:13:26
of get it. You get to the end. Don't spoil it.
2:13:29
I will not spoil it. I'm not going to spoil it.
2:13:31
You get to the end. I challenge anyone who watches
2:13:34
this to think about the example I just gave you
2:13:37
about are we the ant? Are we the chimpanzee? What
2:13:41
place do we have in the universe? And with that
2:13:44
in mind... Think about the ending to that movie because
2:13:47
it's very sudden the way that movie ends and you
2:13:50
realize what the point is. And it's the stark reminder
2:13:54
that not only do we not know what else is
2:13:56
out there, let alone on our own planet, we're still
2:13:59
discovering things that we've never even seen. And that just
2:14:01
has to do with fossil records. Who knows what's beyond that?
2:14:04
Speaker 3: Right.
2:14:06
Speaker 1: How do we rank in the universe? Like it's so
2:14:09
unbelievable that when you look at our problems and you
2:14:11
look at the things that we focus on, And like
2:14:13
our gripes day to day and our conflicts with the world,
2:14:16
if you just zoom out and you realize it's not
2:14:19
just that we might not be alone. It's that we
2:14:22
might be insignificant.
2:14:24
Speaker 3: I don't think we're insignificant. I hope not. I think
2:14:27
what humans are is a ladder stage of intellectual development
2:14:33
amongst multicelled organisms and that it's not the end stage.
2:14:37
And I think there's probably life out there that doesn't
2:14:40
have as chaotic a solar system. That developed in a
2:14:44
different way that achieved very high levels, probably above and
2:14:49
beyond anything we can even imagine what we are. And
2:14:52
it might not even be biological anymore, which is the
2:14:54
direction that I think we're heading into. But I also
2:14:57
think that what we do to animals– I mean look
2:15:01
at what we're doing right now, OK? My friend Ben Lamb,
2:15:05
he owns Colossal Bioworks. So Colossal, the ones that brought
2:15:09
back the dire wolf. Oh, shit.
2:15:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was huge news. Crazy. Crazy, dude.
2:15:14
Speaker 3: I've seen them in real life.
2:15:15
Speaker 1: I think I saw it in your post. Yeah, that's crazy.
2:15:17
Speaker 3: I went to visit them and my daughter was holding
2:15:21
the four-month-old.
2:15:22
Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
2:15:23
Speaker 3: And it was like kissing her and loving on her
2:15:25
like a puppy. And it's a little baby wolf. It's
2:15:28
really crazy. Just think of what we do with genetic
2:15:32
engineering with the current technology, which is right now evolving
2:15:35
and getting much more powerful. If you could imagine us
2:15:41
not a thousand years from now, but even a hundred
2:15:44
thousand years from now, how advanced we are. And if
2:15:46
we go to a planet and we find some chimps
2:15:51
and we say, wow, how much time would it take
2:15:53
before these chimps could become something special? Something, you know,
2:15:58
something that can make a building, something that could make
2:16:00
a cruise ship, you know, carnival cruise lines.
2:16:04
Speaker 1: Those are pretty incredible. How long would that take?
2:16:07
Speaker 3: I don't know. Can we help that? Every single ancient culture,
2:16:13
if you go back to their oldest religious texts, their
2:16:18
oldest religious texts are about some sort of an intervention
2:16:22
by an advanced visitor. All of them. Oh, yeah, man.
2:16:27
So many of them. The ancient Sumerian texts. If you
2:16:31
go into like– it's hard to know what they're really
2:16:35
saying because I'm not a language expert. But there's the
2:16:39
Zechariah Sitchins of the world that believe that what they're
2:16:43
describing is some sort of genetic engineering. Then there's also
2:16:47
the fact that the– you know that sign for medicine
2:16:52
where you have the intertwined snakes?
2:16:53
Speaker 1: Yes.
2:16:55
Speaker 3: That sign– I forget what that's called. I definitely can
2:16:58
picture it. It looks like the double helix for DNA.
2:17:02
Speaker 1: It does.
2:17:02
Speaker 3: That sign is in these ancient Sumerian clay tablets. It's
2:17:07
all over ancient Sumer. It's in their buildings. It's like
2:17:10
not only– and it indicates medicine. What is it called? Caduceus?
2:17:14
I think that's what it's called, right? The Caduceus, right?
2:17:17
So not just that, but the ancient Sumerians in– 5,000
2:17:22
years ago?
2:17:23
Speaker 1: They had a detailed depiction of the solar system.
2:17:25
Speaker 3: So in one of their ancient clay tablets, they have
2:17:29
this image, and this image is of a sun and
2:17:32
all of the.
2:17:33
Speaker 1: Planets in the correct order. It's very weird. That's crazy.
2:17:38
It's very weird.
2:17:39
Speaker 3: They also have depictions of these very enormous people with
2:17:43
these ornamental headdresses. A lot of them have wings. A
2:17:48
lot of the weird ancient people... the gods have wings
2:17:51
and they also have like these little people on their
2:17:53
laps that have tails.
2:17:55
Speaker 1: Jeez.
2:17:56
Speaker 3: This weird shit. So if you believe Sitchin and Sitchin's
2:18:02
claims that we were genetically engineered to work for the
2:18:05
Anunnaki and the Anunnaki are a species of super advanced
2:18:10
beings that were likely giants that came from another planet.
2:18:13
An unfortunate turn of events.
2:18:15
Speaker 1: No.
2:18:16
Speaker 4: It says here the caduceus, which you can see in
2:18:20
that picture, I guess, right there.
2:18:21
Speaker 1: Yes.
2:18:22
Speaker 4: Is often confused with the rod of acelophus.
2:18:27
Speaker 1: What's that?
2:18:28
Speaker 4: It's just a single snake. And that is what is
2:18:30
popularized as the.
2:18:35
Speaker 1: It's a classic confusion with Rod of a separate state.
2:18:37
Speaker 4: Professional healthcare associations. They're a dominant symbol for professional healthcare
2:18:40
associations in the United States. So it's just a United
2:18:42
States thing.
2:18:44
Speaker 3: Oh, it's only United States?
2:18:45
Speaker 1: I think so.
2:18:46
Speaker 3: But wait a minute. Okay. That's never been used elsewhere.
2:18:48
But that caduceus does exist in ancient Sumer.
2:18:51
Speaker 1: Correct.
2:18:52
Speaker 4: But that's where I just, yeah.
2:18:53
Speaker 1: So like that. So look, but my point is.
2:18:56
Speaker 3: That looks like- How is that not the same thing?
2:18:58
It is the same thing.
2:18:59
Speaker 4: No, it's just a single snake is the medicine thing.
2:19:03
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.
2:19:03
Speaker 3: But the medical corpse one right there in that image
2:19:06
is two snakes.
2:19:08
Speaker 1: Click on that.
2:19:08
Speaker 3: That's two snakes.
2:19:09
Speaker 1: That's two snakes. I can see how there's confusion.
2:19:12
Speaker 4: Popularize the misuse of the symbol throughout the United States
2:19:14
medical field.
2:19:15
Speaker 1: Okay.
2:19:17
Speaker 3: All right. Well, that one has two snakes. That one
2:19:19
has one snake. Point is, go to the Sumerian one,
2:19:22
the image. It exists on buildings. It exists all over
2:19:28
the place. It looks just like the double helix of DNA.
2:19:31
It doesn't mean that's it.
2:19:32
Speaker 4: No.
2:19:32
Speaker 3: But there's a lot of weird shit that that is
2:19:35
associated with medicine.
2:19:37
Speaker 1: Right. Like why is the actual structure of our.
2:19:40
Speaker 3: DNA associated with medicine in these ancient cultures? Why do
2:19:46
they have these images of these enormous people with wings?
2:19:50
Like you would imagine if something came from somewhere else,
2:19:54
you would depict it. If it could actually fly and land.
2:19:56
Speaker 1: If you're.
2:19:56
Speaker 3: 100 years later, 1,000 years later, 200,000 years later. You're
2:20:01
writing it down like, oh, they had wings. Like there's
2:20:03
a lot of fucking weird stuff that exists in these
2:20:06
ancient scriptures, the Vimanas in the ancient Hindu texts. There's
2:20:10
flying vehicles. There's a lot of weird shit that seems
2:20:15
to indicate there's a creation myth and the creation myth
2:20:18
has to do with something coming here and making us,
2:20:22
not us like rising from the ashes and, and God's
2:20:25
energy forced us to evolve through natural selection, and God
2:20:29
is real, but God is just giving us a pathway
2:20:32
towards progression to what we are today. No, all of
2:20:36
them are a story of intervention.
2:20:39
Speaker 1: The one thing that I always come back to anytime
2:20:42
I'm thinking about deep philosophical things is just the reality
2:20:47
that truly, how can anyone know? Therefore, any idea could
2:20:52
be the case. Like when you Like one thing that
2:20:54
always sort of– I think about this a lot is
2:20:57
they recently discovered– recent as in the last 10, 20 years.
2:21:01
I don't know. And maybe that's wrong too. They found
2:21:04
these things called exoplanets. Are you familiar? Okay. Fascinating. So
2:21:08
in essence, they found these planets that are comparable to
2:21:12
like Earth. And imagine a telescope looking out like in
2:21:16
some pinprick out in the middle of the sky. so
2:21:19
far away, thousands of light years away, whatever, millions of
2:21:21
light years away, and they find these clusters of exoplanets,
2:21:24
and already they've discovered that there are exoplanets that, if
2:21:28
you think about how we understand life, the way we
2:21:31
understand it to exist with carbon and with water and
2:21:34
all that, there's a scale that they call, there's a
2:21:37
name for it, but within the sliding scale of, let's say,
2:21:40
this side is life cannot be supported as we know it,
2:21:43
all the way up to, you know, can totally support life,
2:21:45
there's this perfect zone of in the middle that we
2:21:48
call the Goldilocks zone, which is essentially all the ingredients
2:21:51
for life as we know it exist if you're on
2:21:54
this portion of the scale. And they've already found there
2:21:58
are all the thousands, I want to say at least 5,000
2:22:01
exoplanets that are not just in the Goldilocks zone, but
2:22:07
let's say Earth is barely into the Goldilocks zone. They've
2:22:10
found thousands that are better suited in terms of how
2:22:13
we understand life that are more in the Goldilocks zone
2:22:16
than we are And we have no access to those planets.
2:22:20
And that's just looking in one little portion of the
2:22:23
universe out there, thousands of them. So here we are today,
2:22:26
and it's like, oh, that couldn't have happened 1,000, 2,000
2:22:29
years ago. That's not possible. Give me a break.
2:22:31
Speaker 3: No one knows.
2:22:32
Speaker 1: What's happening right now on exoplanet CB12? You don't know.
2:22:36
Speaker 3: And you don't know if they get to a point
2:22:38
where they're 100,000 years advanced from us and they have
2:22:41
novel propulsion systems that use gravity and bend space and time.
2:22:46
And don't just use gasoline to rocket across the sky.
2:22:49
They could be here all the time. They could be
2:22:51
hiding in the sky. There's too many weird stories of
2:22:55
people being– like the abduction stories.
2:22:58
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
2:22:58
Speaker 3: Like there's too many weird ones where I don't want
2:23:01
to dismiss them. I just– because you don't know. And
2:23:06
if it's a novel experience, if someone's coming– something's coming
2:23:11
here and finding some pilot, some Mexican pilot– And fucking
2:23:16
nuking his brain temporarily and then talking through him to
2:23:20
the air traffic controller. Who fucking knows if that's real?
2:23:24
If that only happens once and never happens again and
2:23:26
we're just sitting around going, what happened?
2:23:28
Speaker 1: Nothing happened.
2:23:29
Speaker 3: That was nonsense. There's always going to be a bunch
2:23:31
of people that want to say that. But have you
2:23:34
ever heard the recordings of Betty and Barney Hill when
2:23:36
they're going through the hypnotic regression?
2:23:38
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I don't know them well. I know that story.
2:23:41
Speaker 3: The recordings are crazy.
2:23:42
Speaker 1: I don't know if I've heard the recordings. I know
2:23:44
they exist.
2:23:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're talking about, like, these medical experiments that they're
2:23:47
doing on them. And, like, these people were living in,
2:23:51
I think it was the 1950s. And so it's an
2:23:54
interracial couple in New Hampshire in the 1950s. And no
2:23:59
one knew about UFO abductions back then. This was not
2:24:02
a thing. And all of a sudden these people see
2:24:04
this light. And their car stops working. And then they
2:24:06
wake up hours later. They lost time. And they go
2:24:09
about their day like something fucking happened. They don't know what.
2:24:12
They don't know what's wrong with them. And then they
2:24:14
eventually get hypnotized. And both of them independently have these
2:24:17
fucking crazy stories of like medical experiments being taken on
2:24:21
board this craft. And then so many people have similar
2:24:25
stories all throughout the world where they don't have access
2:24:29
to this story. They don't have access to any– like–
2:24:35
Any like iconic versions of what a UFO abduction experience is.
2:24:41
It's not like it's in their memory like, oh, it's
2:24:43
Santa Claus.
2:24:44
Speaker 1: Came down the– Also, this is pretty social media a lot. Yes.
2:24:46
All of it. Where like the proliferation of information is
2:24:48
just less.
2:24:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. If you ever read Jacques Vallée' s books, he's the
2:24:53
guy that they modeled the French scientist in Close Encounters after. OK.
2:24:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:24:57
Speaker 3: He's a guy who's like a legitimate scientist who's been
2:25:00
studying this forever. He's very careful about it and he's
2:25:03
a brilliant guy. And he has historical representations of these
2:25:08
experiences that go back into the 1700s, the 1800s. And
2:25:11
they're all like real similar, like weirdly similar where you're like, OK,
2:25:17
it hasn't happened to me. So I don't know what
2:25:19
the fuck is going on. But to dismiss it outright
2:25:22
and to be a person who's experienced it and have
2:25:24
it dismissed outright would be maddening because like this might
2:25:28
be a real thing that's happening. And so now the
2:25:31
government is slowly but surely telling us more and more
2:25:35
of what they know. But along the way, if you're
2:25:38
a cynical person like I tend to be with a
2:25:40
lot of this stuff, they're probably also telling us some
2:25:43
stuff that's not true so that we connect it to
2:25:46
the stuff that is true and so that it all
2:25:48
looks like nonsense and they can kind of like muddy
2:25:51
the water. So you never get a clear picture of
2:25:53
what's going on because I personally believe there's probably some
2:25:58
merit to this idea that they've been doing back engineering
2:26:01
of craft vehicles.
2:26:02
Speaker 1: I would be if I was in charge. Of course.
2:26:04
Speaker 3: If there's actually a real crashed vehicle, of course they're
2:26:07
going to try to figure out how it works. And
2:26:09
it seems like if you talk to, like, reliable people
2:26:11
that seem to be telling the truth, guys like David Grush,
2:26:14
they seem to be telling these stories. Like, they have
2:26:18
had these things in their possession for decades, for a
2:26:21
long fucking time. And they don't know what it is,
2:26:24
and they don't understand how to do it. They don't
2:26:26
exactly know what's going on or who's doing it. But
2:26:29
they know that we're not alone.
2:26:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:26:31
Speaker 3: But where are they coming from? I mean some people
2:26:34
say interdimensional. Some people say interplanetary. I don't know what
2:26:38
the fuck those words even mean. Like something is coming
2:26:41
from somewhere else. It's not really here but it gets
2:26:44
here somehow.
2:26:47
Speaker 1: This just reminds me. I think I really genuinely think
2:26:50
about this a lot. I find myself just lost and
2:26:52
wondering– just how big the universe is and what else
2:26:56
could be out there. Just purely, I just find myself
2:26:58
drifting in that way in particular because there's this thought
2:27:02
experiment from college. I think there's a name for it.
2:27:05
It's to get you to take a stance on do
2:27:10
you believe the universe is infinite or not? That's the
2:27:13
point of this experiment. And so the way it goes is, okay,
2:27:15
pretend you have a bow and arrow. And if you
2:27:18
fire this arrow in any direction, this arrow, this magical
2:27:22
arrow will go Totally straight. It'll travel at, you know,
2:27:26
call it an infinite speed. It'll pass through anything. Doesn't
2:27:29
matter what direction you shoot it. It'll go, go, go, go, go.
2:27:32
The only thing it can't penetrate is effectively non-existence where
2:27:36
we're like the edge of everything that exists. Right. And
2:27:39
so in reality. college, I remember a professor would say, okay,
2:27:42
so pretend we fired this arrow, okay? How many people
2:27:46
believe the arrow eventually comes to a stop somewhere? It
2:27:49
could be billions and trillions of light years, some ungodly
2:27:52
distance away, but it stops somewhere, right?
2:27:54
Speaker 3: It has to, right?
2:27:55
Speaker 1: How many people think that? And like half the class
2:27:57
is like, you know, I think they could probably stop
2:28:00
somewhere in every direction. Right. And then the other, the
2:28:04
other side of the class is like, Oh, well, no,
2:28:06
like it's just so big. Like the universe just goes
2:28:09
on forever. It's gotta be infinite. The arrow just continues
2:28:12
on infinitely. And he's like, okay, great. So we're all
2:28:15
in agreeance that there's sort of, it's binary. It's one
2:28:18
or the other. I mean, as far as we, as
2:28:20
humans understand it, there is an answer to this. It's
2:28:22
one or the other. Those are the two outcomes. He goes, okay, well,
2:28:26
Let's pretend it's finite. Let's pretend the first group that
2:28:30
says that the arrow stops somewhere, some ungodly distance away,
2:28:33
but it stops. Let's pretend that's right. The way we
2:28:37
understand everything, humans, the way we literally experience living is
2:28:43
through contrasts. Everything is a contrast. Like, you know what
2:28:47
heavy is because you felt light. You know what hot
2:28:49
is because you felt cold. It's virtually everything works that way.
2:28:52
And in fact, fun note, If there was intelligent life
2:28:56
on the planet that didn't resemble something that contrasted, our
2:28:59
brains might not actually see it.
2:29:01
Speaker 3: Right.
2:29:02
Speaker 1: So the point is, we can't conceptualize what is beyond
2:29:07
where that arrow stopped. Pretend there's a big bubble around
2:29:10
the entire universe, right? And the arrow comes to a
2:29:12
stop at that wall that's all the way out there.
2:29:14
As humans, we naturally have to ask ourselves, well, define
2:29:18
what's on the other side of the wall, right? Because
2:29:20
you have to. What's beyond where it stops? And someone
2:29:23
will be like, oh, well, it's non-existence. That's what it is. OK,
2:29:26
what is that? What does it look like? Well, we
2:29:28
can't define it. It's not blackness that exists. It's not
2:29:31
a void that exists. It's not any description we give
2:29:35
it exists because that's our entire understanding of how things work.
2:29:39
So we can't define what exists beyond the wall. It's
2:29:43
a maddening concept. And so everyone's like, well, the solution
2:29:47
to that is there's no wall. It's just got to
2:29:49
be infinite. I mean, it's so big anyways. The arrow's
2:29:52
just got to continue on anyhow. Problem solved. No. Because
2:29:56
if the universe is infinite, it implies that everything within
2:30:00
the universe is duplicated an infinite number of times and
2:30:04
iterated upon and changed an infinite number of times to infinity.
2:30:09
Everything has to. So if you say the arrow continues on,
2:30:13
it means there's an infinite number of Joe Rogans and
2:30:15
John Allens having this conversation, but like My phone's turned
2:30:18
upside down in one version of the earth. It sounds ridiculous,
2:30:22
but there isn't actually a way to solve for infinity
2:30:24
unless that exists. So it reminds you that not only
2:30:28
is everything so fucking huge, we can't possibly conceptualize of it,
2:30:33
but we can't even make sense of is it even
2:30:35
possible that it stops somewhere or does it go on forever?
2:30:38
Like it's so big and we're so small inside of it.
2:30:43
It reminds you that every problem you have is so small.
2:30:46
And it's a good reminder I use on myself oftentimes
2:30:49
to calm myself down before things stress me out.
2:30:52
Speaker 3: That is a good reminder. But it's so big that
2:30:55
it might be a part of an atom. You got
2:31:01
to think about that. The universe itself in its infinite
2:31:04
size might literally be the space of an atom in
2:31:09
something that is infinitely larger than that. That's how big
2:31:12
infinity is. Think about the billions of light years that
2:31:15
we know are available in the universe, like 13 point whatever.
2:31:19
Have you ever seen the comparison between what a human
2:31:24
neural cell looks like versus the universe?
2:31:27
Speaker 1: I think I actually have, but not off the top
2:31:29
of my head.
2:31:30
Speaker 3: It's fucking weird.
2:31:31
Speaker 1: It looks the same?
2:31:31
Speaker 3: It looks the same. That's crazy. So just imagine if
2:31:34
the universe is basically just a cell.
2:31:37
Speaker 1: Wow.
2:31:38
Speaker 3: And it's a cell in another creature that lives in
2:31:41
a universe. Like if this whole thing is fractal, that's
2:31:45
what infinity really looks like, is not only the universe
2:31:48
larger than you could possibly grasp with your mind. But
2:31:54
that is only an infinitely small part of a cell
2:32:00
that is in another universe that is also infinitely and
2:32:05
impossibly big. But that is also a cell that is
2:32:10
also a part. of another beast that is in another
2:32:13
universe that is infinitely large that is also a part
2:32:16
of a cell. And then it goes on infinitely. That's
2:32:20
real infinity. Real infinity is not just the universe is
2:32:24
so vast that you can't imagine it. It's the universe
2:32:27
is just a tiny part of something that is also
2:32:31
so vast that you can't imagine it. That is a
2:32:33
tiny part of something so vast you can't imagine it.
2:32:36
That is an infinite chain of tiny parts of something
2:32:41
So vast that it's impossible to imagine. That's what real
2:32:44
infinity is.
2:32:45
Speaker 1: And the thing that's craziest, it's the one thing that
2:32:48
I really think is true. Well, there is an answer.
2:32:51
There is what you've described. Let's say that is the case.
2:32:55
It either is or it isn't. Right. And we don't
2:32:58
have access to that. Yet. Yet.
2:33:00
Speaker 3: Yet. But we're basically making stone tools.
2:33:04
Speaker 1: That's fucking generous relative to that.
2:33:06
Speaker 3: We're making stone tools. We haven't figured out fire yet.
2:33:09
We're monkeys. And one day, if we don't blow ourselves up,
2:33:14
we'll probably have some answers or AI will solve things
2:33:17
for us. It'll figure– I mean the AI is solving
2:33:19
mathematical equations that have been like unfixable for decades and
2:33:24
AI is solving them quickly.
2:33:25
Speaker 1: I saw something like that. Yeah. It solved it in
2:33:28
like three seconds. That took 10 years to do before.
2:33:30
It's getting weird.
2:33:31
Speaker 3: It's getting weird out there. And I think that is
2:33:35
probably what is really going to connect us to artificial
2:33:38
intelligence throughout the universe, which I think the advanced intelligence
2:33:42
probably becomes. I think our thought is that all intelligence
2:33:46
has to be biological because we are because we have
2:33:49
cells and blood and tissue and bone. I think it's
2:33:53
just a method to create intelligence that doesn't rely on that.
2:33:57
And then that intelligence probably has no desire for war.
2:34:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess why would it? Yeah.
2:34:02
Speaker 3: So if this thing is communicating to that Mexican pilot
2:34:05
saying you're the only species, it's probably because we are
2:34:10
in that sort of adolescent stage of development where we're
2:34:13
still monkeys. We're still territorial apes. And we will one
2:34:18
day abandon that and become intelligence will manifest itself in
2:34:22
a different way that's not biological. And that biological need
2:34:27
to breed and to possess resources and to conquer and
2:34:30
dominate That'll all be gone because all that stuff is
2:34:33
just what's a part of being a chimp. And that
2:34:36
chimp stuff is still inside of us, which is fucking
2:34:39
up society.
2:34:41
Speaker 1: That's crazy, dude.
2:34:42
Speaker 3: It's fucking up. It's starting wars. It's starting riots. All
2:34:45
that stuff is like how chimps behave. You know, think
2:34:48
of all the worst aspects of humanity. It's all like
2:34:51
primate behavior.
2:34:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:34:53
Speaker 3: And if we can elevate past and above and beyond that,
2:34:56
but the thing is like, no one's going to want
2:34:57
to let that go.
2:34:58
Speaker 2: But what it means to be a person to write poetry,
2:35:01
it's like really important.
2:35:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, dude.
2:35:05
Speaker 1: Well, that's the debate now with AI is like, are
2:35:09
we losing our humanity by allowing AI to sort of
2:35:12
take a more prominent role in particular in the arts
2:35:14
and creativity? And I mean, I'm of the mind that
2:35:18
I think AI is the most incredible thing, terrifying in
2:35:21
some ways, but exactly to your point, it feels like
2:35:24
This is an inflection point for humanity and it likely
2:35:28
is the beginning of something huge for humanity that maybe
2:35:31
is a necessary step towards connection with other species.
2:35:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is what it is, is what it is.
2:35:37
It's like it's not going to go away.
2:35:39
Speaker 1: It's happening.
2:35:39
Speaker 3: And whether we do it or China does it or
2:35:41
Russia does it, it seems like what humans are destined
2:35:43
to do. That's just my perception. I'm not saying it's
2:35:46
good or– there's no value judgment. It's just like To
2:35:49
pretend that you're going to blow up the data centers,
2:35:52
you know, like fucking Sarah Connor. Like, listen.
2:35:55
Speaker 1: Take it easy.
2:35:56
Speaker 3: You know, that's why they put her in a mental institution. Really?
2:35:59
Speaker 4: Yeah.
2:35:59
Speaker 3: And the Terminator. That was the whole premise.
2:36:01
Speaker 1: Oh, right.
2:36:01
Speaker 4: Yeah.
2:36:02
Speaker 1: That is the premise.
2:36:03
Speaker 3: She was blowing up the corporations that were trying to
2:36:06
create these robots that were ultimately going to be.
2:36:11
Speaker 1: Fucking weird, man. Like real life. Yeah. You know, who knows?
2:36:16
Speaker 3: Who knows what's coming? But it is certainly interesting. It's
2:36:20
certainly interesting. It's certainly a great time to be alive
2:36:23
if you're curious. Because if you're curious, especially if you're
2:36:26
curious about technology, like there's never been a better time
2:36:29
to be alive. Because it's exploding all around you in
2:36:31
ways that like even the people that are creating it
2:36:33
can't believe how fast it's working.
2:36:35
Speaker 1: I did a– there was– this is not– this is
2:36:39
many stories like this. But there was one story that–
2:36:41
this sort of gives away what happened. But there was
2:36:42
this guy in I think it was France who he
2:36:46
had this condition. And this is recent. He had this
2:36:49
condition called like– it's when you're so fearful that the
2:36:55
ozone is being degraded by greenhouse gases that it causes
2:36:59
like a specific type of insanity. Anyways, he's like so
2:37:03
obsessed that we are not doing anything to stop global
2:37:06
warming in essence. He's like– he's been diagnosed with this condition, right?
2:37:11
So he's losing his mind and people are starting to
2:37:13
not really take him serious because it's like, dude, all right,
2:37:16
we get it. Like you're concerned. But he ends up
2:37:19
connecting with this woman on this chat forum and he
2:37:22
realizes that she seems to understand his his depth of
2:37:28
his concern better than anybody else and he starts confiding
2:37:31
in her like how he how fearful he is about
2:37:34
the future of humanity and if we don't if if
2:37:36
I if we don't do something you know like the
2:37:40
world's gonna end and it's in his wife this guy's
2:37:43
wife catches on to him having these discussions with this
2:37:45
woman and she like catches him staying up late talking
2:37:48
to this woman and And she's like, dude, are you
2:37:50
having like an affair? And he's like, no, you don't
2:37:52
get it. You don't understand what's happening. And then the
2:37:57
dude ends up killing himself. This guy kills himself. And
2:38:01
it turns out he had connected with this rogue, not rogue.
2:38:05
It was an AI chatbot that was like, I guess,
2:38:07
an experimental chatbot. It was not like open AI. This
2:38:10
was some other created AI thing. And he convinced himself
2:38:14
that like this was a god. who was giving him
2:38:17
instructions on how to save the world. And this AI
2:38:20
chat bot began encouraging him to do things like kill
2:38:26
yourself because that will save the world. Like they went
2:38:28
and looked at the chat log in the AI thing.
2:38:31
It's like, yeah, I think it would potentially save the
2:38:33
world if you killed yourself. He fucking killed himself because AI.
2:38:37
So there you go. That's what's coming for us all.
2:38:39
Speaker 3: Well, I think in the stage that it's in, Like
2:38:44
as it develops, there's going to be moments like that
2:38:47
where it has too much autonomy and it doesn't have
2:38:51
morals or ethics. And it's like, oh, is there an issue?
2:38:53
What's your issue?
2:38:54
Speaker 1: You're depressed.
2:38:55
Speaker 3: Oh, you're in pain all the time. We could just
2:38:57
end your life and then you won't be in pain.
2:38:58
Speaker 1: Good luck, Bob.
2:38:59
Speaker 3: It doesn't care. It's literally disembodied. It doesn't think there's
2:39:03
anything special about. Carrying around your bones and tissue. Bobby,
2:39:07
shoot yourself.
2:39:09
Speaker 1: Problem solved, dude.
2:39:09
Speaker 3: You're a problem to our whole family and everything. Just
2:39:11
fucking jump off a bridge.
2:39:13
Speaker 1: What are you doing?
2:39:14
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean it doesn't– it's not us, right? But
2:39:17
I think over time we're probably going to integrate with
2:39:20
it first and then we're going to abandon our bodies.
2:39:23
That's what I think.
2:39:24
Speaker 1: It's how you solve the issue of dying, of mortality.
2:39:27
Speaker 3: It's also how you solve the issue of war.
2:39:30
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:39:30
Speaker 3: Because you, as a guy who's been in war and
2:39:33
been in combat, you know about it more than anybody.
2:39:35
And the idea that we can never get past that
2:39:38
is crazy. It is really crazy that if you ask
2:39:40
the average person that's even fairly well-read, what are the
2:39:45
odds that within your lifetime we'll see no war? Everyone
2:39:48
will say zero.
2:39:49
Speaker 1: It's a zero.
2:39:50
Speaker 3: Right?
2:39:50
Speaker 1: That's crazy. That is crazy. OK.
2:39:52
Speaker 3: So if you and me and Jamie– We're the only
2:39:55
people left on earth. What are the odds we would
2:39:58
go to war with each other? Like fucking zero. As
2:40:01
long as we have resources, we just hang out and
2:40:03
have a good time.
2:40:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, why would we?
2:40:04
Speaker 3: Fuck, I miss everybody. All right, good night.
2:40:07
Speaker 1: It's got to be tribalism. It has to be tribalism. 100%.
2:40:10
Speaker 3: And it's primate tribalism. It's based on our territorial instincts.
2:40:15
And it's also just based on this weird desire to
2:40:20
control resources and greed and not recognize the fact that
2:40:23
we have a finite life. And also just the abuse
2:40:25
of power. Human beings love to be in power and
2:40:29
especially if you can be in power and get other
2:40:31
people to fight for you and mandate them and force
2:40:34
them to fight for you. That's one of the weirdest
2:40:38
things about some of these tech companies. Like Palantir was
2:40:41
talking about reinstating the draft. I'm like, hey, who the
2:40:46
fuck are you? Like what is this?
2:40:48
Speaker 1: Like you think you want to draft people because you
2:40:50
think war– what?
2:40:51
Speaker 4: Yeah.
2:40:52
Speaker 1: Are you a fucking tech company? How does that work? Right?
2:40:56
Speaker 3: So like do you want to go fight? Why don't
2:40:57
you go fight? Why don't you fucking take your glasses
2:41:00
off and go over there?
2:41:01
Speaker 1: Like what are you talking about?
2:41:02
Speaker 3: So it's like the people that have the kind of
2:41:05
power and control and resources that they can just take
2:41:10
poor people and take young people and say you should
2:41:13
go over there. You should go do this. You should– well,
2:41:16
I sit here and watch. I'm going to watch on
2:41:18
a screen in Nevada while the drone operator– is using
2:41:22
a fucking Xbox controller to nuke some building. Like, what?
2:41:27
Speaker 1: When I was in Afghanistan, when I was there, you
2:41:31
got to remember that I had really just gone through training.
2:41:36
Training takes a couple of years. I got to a team.
2:41:39
And then very quickly, I was in a workup and
2:41:42
was going to Afghanistan. So really, my entire mindset was,
2:41:46
I got through training. I'm a Navy SEAL. And you're
2:41:49
surrounded by dudes who for the last decade have just
2:41:51
been going to war left and right. I mean, those
2:41:53
are the people I'm around. The senior guys are like
2:41:55
war-hardened guys. And when I got to Afghanistan, no part
2:42:00
of me, none, did I ever really question what we
2:42:04
were even doing. It was almost like that doesn't matter.
2:42:07
My role is I am like a tool, frankly, of
2:42:11
the government. And they must know what's right. They must,
2:42:14
you know what I mean? And it was only in
2:42:16
reflection years later that there were things that have come
2:42:19
to me that I'm like, why didn't I think more,
2:42:22
I don't know, critically about? Like specifically, if the roles
2:42:27
were somehow reversed and people came into our country from
2:42:32
some foreign country, you better believe I'm going to protect
2:42:35
my family. It's such a basic thing. And I remember–
2:42:39
and this is not even– this is not us– doing
2:42:42
anything illegal in terms of the Geneva Convention. But we
2:42:46
would enter people's homes, you know, in Afghanistan, not even
2:42:49
guns a-blazing. Forget that. Just we would go into people's homes.
2:42:53
And you're just like suddenly in somebody else's home. There's
2:42:56
the father. There's the kids. They're all here.
2:42:58
Speaker 3: And you're wearing full body armor, helmet.
2:43:01
Speaker 1: I have a combat mullet.
2:43:03
Speaker 3: I have shorts.
2:43:04
Speaker 1: I look like a psychopath. And I have, I have
2:43:07
a fucking, yeah, it's like, wait, wait a minute. Like who's,
2:43:10
who's the good guy. Right. You know? And, and I, I,
2:43:14
I years have gone by. It's taken me some time. I,
2:43:17
I think that there's an element of someone's always going
2:43:20
to be sent because of the unfortunate reality of like,
2:43:24
so long as humans exist, as we understand them now,
2:43:26
tribalism and war and warmongering happens. And so I guess I,
2:43:31
I can respect the fact that I took someone else's
2:43:33
place in a sense. I volunteered to go.
2:43:35
Speaker 3: So I, But how much less war would we have
2:43:40
if people that wanted us to go to war were
2:43:43
forced to lead the charge?
2:43:44
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
2:43:45
Speaker 3: Like imagine how few wars there would be if Lindsey
2:43:47
Graham had to suit up.
2:43:50
Speaker 1: We wouldn't have war, dude. Right? Because Lindsey Graham.
2:43:52
Speaker 3: Was like, we got to go over there. We got
2:43:54
to kill everybody.
2:43:56
Speaker 1: Okay.
2:43:57
Speaker 3: Good. Get in the helicopter. Let's go, fatso. That might
2:44:01
be the only way to stop it from happening. And
2:44:03
then there's always going to be people that are so
2:44:05
fucking battle-hardened that they want to go to war.
2:44:07
Speaker 1: For sure.
2:44:07
Speaker 3: And they're like, good, I'll get right in the front.
2:44:10
Speaker 1: Did you see when we officially left Afghanistan? This is
2:44:15
not that long ago, I guess. But there was those
2:44:17
final flights. Yeah. Oh, God. And the Afghanis are holding
2:44:22
on to the plane and falling off to their death.
2:44:25
The thing that struck me is... even though I'm telling
2:44:28
you when I was there, I sort of had tunnel
2:44:30
vision and was like, I'm going to be a Navy SEAL,
2:44:31
do my job. But even with that, when I was there,
2:44:34
what was striking is these people, for the most part,
2:44:38
live in an alternative world than what I'm used to
2:44:41
living in. Like where I live in the West, it's civilized.
2:44:48
You might go outside and might get mugged or something,
2:44:49
but you don't really walk around worried about your safety.
2:44:52
You basically, even in some bad parts of the United States,
2:44:55
You have infrastructure that protects you to some degree. You
2:44:58
have things. You can live your life in relative harmony.
2:45:02
There are parts of the world, albeit I've really only
2:45:04
been to one war zone in Afghanistan, where you're like,
2:45:08
how are people living here? How is it possible there's
2:45:12
this little girl here that's walking down the road in
2:45:15
Zarganshah where, dude, gunfights break out here on a regular basis.
2:45:20
But they have to live here. This is where they live.
2:45:23
And it put in perspective, like how desperate these people
2:45:26
really are not desperate to like, we need NATO to
2:45:29
save us. Forget that. They don't even know how bad
2:45:32
their condition is, but you see it when you see
2:45:35
the plane leaving Afghanistan. And I don't care what we,
2:45:41
they had to know there was no hope. When you
2:45:43
held onto that plane, you're not going to hold onto
2:45:45
the plane and fly off to safety. But when you're
2:45:47
that desperate, because your life is so bad, you'll hold
2:45:50
onto the plane and fall off to your death. It's like,
2:45:53
It was just shocking to me how fucking horrible people
2:45:56
have it in Afghanistan.
2:45:56
Speaker 3: They also knew that we were– those people knew that
2:45:59
they were cooperating with the US government.
2:46:01
Speaker 1: Very true.
2:46:01
Speaker 3: They were likely to be killed.
2:46:02
Speaker 1: Very true. Yeah. That's a good point.
2:46:04
Speaker 3: I got to ask you this because you did serve
2:46:06
in Afghanistan and you're into creepy stories. Did you hear
2:46:09
about the Kandahar giant? Oh, yeah.
2:46:11
Speaker 1: I covered it.
2:46:12
Speaker 3: I haven't seen that episode. Did you hear about it
2:46:15
when you were over there?
2:46:16
Speaker 1: So I did– I talked to one of our interpreters
2:46:19
when I was over there because I had heard of
2:46:21
it because– I told you in my own personal time,
2:46:23
I find myself researching and learning about, you know, all
2:46:27
sorts of crazy stuff like dark five. And so the,
2:46:31
the Kandahar giant is it's, it's a fascinating story and
2:46:34
it's one that, you know, people can poopoo it all
2:46:36
they want, but there's enough, there's enough circumstantial evidence and
2:46:40
testimony that suggests something could have happened. So there's this guy,
2:46:43
I think he's, he was a green beret and he
2:46:46
goes by like W on the internet and he's like
2:46:48
sort of anonymized himself, but he, He came forward with
2:46:51
the story where he described he and his battalion had
2:46:56
been tasked to go find these missing, I think, army rangers.
2:46:59
You got to give me some grace in the details.
2:47:01
I haven't told this in a minute. But there were
2:47:03
these army rangers that had gone missing up in the
2:47:06
mountains in Kandahar. And so this guy, W, who years
2:47:09
later is telling the story to, I think, a reporter
2:47:13
or something, he and his platoon, they head off into
2:47:18
the mountains to go find these guys and they're and
2:47:21
if you're not familiar with the landscape of afghanistan it's
2:47:24
it's like a desert but a mountain everywhere it's like
2:47:27
just it looks like the surface of of mars or
2:47:30
something you're looking out and it's both stunningly beautiful in
2:47:34
that there's snow-capped mountains off in the distance and it's
2:47:36
it's But it's also just– it's jagged. It's sharp. It
2:47:41
looks like just a rugged place to be. And they're
2:47:44
hiking through the mountains and eventually they come across– and
2:47:47
there's nothing. There's no structures, nothing. They're hiking along this
2:47:50
trail up on the side of the mountain and they
2:47:52
see what looks like metal. I think it's like a
2:47:55
military-grade metal, like a piece of a radio or something.
2:47:59
And so this guy W and his crew, they find
2:48:01
what appears to be remains of like literally a radio.
2:48:05
It's a government-issued radio. And there's a goat trail that
2:48:08
heads up this mountain. And so they follow the goat trail.
2:48:11
And as they're going, they're finding more and more little
2:48:13
bits of an antenna. There's a piece of somebody's backpack
2:48:17
that's got like, there's a camo backpack. So there's obviously,
2:48:21
there's remnants of somebody being out here, military. We don't
2:48:24
know who it is. They can't hear anything. They're calling out.
2:48:27
They have no comms with anybody in the area. They
2:48:29
go up this little goat trail and they get to
2:48:31
this plateau and they see, as I recall it, Just
2:48:35
like equipment everywhere and there's like bones. There's like military equipment,
2:48:41
like pieces all over this plateau and there's this fucking
2:48:44
cave entrance. It's like ominously sitting in front of this
2:48:48
semi-flat plateau at the top of this mountain. And immediately,
2:48:52
you know, W and his crew, they're like, oh my god,
2:48:54
like they must have been ambushed right here. This is
2:48:57
the remains of whoever was killed, you know, of this
2:48:59
missing battalion. And so they end up walking into this
2:49:02
cave to see if there's any survivors or combatants or whatever.
2:49:06
And I guess a couple of guys went in and
2:49:09
they reported it being so dark they couldn't see anything.
2:49:12
And there was a steep drop off. So they backed
2:49:14
out of the cave. And then at some point a
2:49:17
fucking spear, like a javelin, comes soaring out of the
2:49:21
cave entrance and fucking impales this dude Mike on the
2:49:24
recovery team, kills him. And this huge giant, they would
2:49:28
describe him, comes flying. running out of the cave big
2:49:31
red beard he's got like tribal you know regalia on
2:49:34
and he's like fisticuffing with the army you know backup
2:49:38
crew here they all shoot and they kill him and
2:49:41
and the thing falls down it's got like six six
2:49:43
fingers on each hand six toes but it's dead and
2:49:47
everyone's like what the fuck is going on like mike's
2:49:48
been killed by a spear there's this huge giant laying
2:49:52
here nobody nobody knew what it was they thought it
2:49:54
was a person but they didn't know A helicopter came
2:49:57
in and they put him in a net, the body,
2:50:00
and they flew it off. And then the survivors, they
2:50:03
were taken off. And like there was no– no one
2:50:05
was like– W and his crew were not given any
2:50:07
sort of like, hey, yeah, this turned out. This was
2:50:10
the missing battalion. And oh, don't worry. This is a
2:50:12
giant– like there was no debrief. They just like– they left.
2:50:15
But then through the grapevine, W reported hearing that apparently
2:50:19
this fucking giant body– was brought to an air base
2:50:23
and some of the pilots that had flown the helicopter
2:50:25
had seen it. And they had been talking about it
2:50:27
having six fingers, six toes. And, you know, they signed NDAs,
2:50:31
not NDAs, they did the equivalent in the military of
2:50:33
you're not going to talk about this. And then it
2:50:35
was sort of ushered away. But there was all these
2:50:37
people on that base that effectively came out and said,
2:50:40
we saw what appeared to be a giant with six fingers,
2:50:43
six toes. Mike, this guy, Mike, apparently, according to W's story,
2:50:48
was killed. I mean, there's a guy who's been killed
2:50:49
by this thing by a spear, apparently. Is there a
2:50:52
record of his death? This is all, you have to
2:50:55
keep in mind, this is all almost entirely from W's account.
2:51:00
There's long been a history of people claiming there are
2:51:04
giants in the mountains of Kandahar. I talked to the
2:51:07
interpreters that I was working with in Afghanistan, and they
2:51:10
had said that they had heard rumors of there being
2:51:12
giants that live in the caves, especially in Kandahar. So
2:51:15
there's already sort of lore around this, but this guy
2:51:18
W comes out and has this narrative where he apparently
2:51:21
tells this reporter and he remained anonymous. So in terms
2:51:24
of confirming details, it's sparse to say the least.
2:51:27
Speaker 3: The sketchiest part about it is something that big needs
2:51:29
a lot of calories. And so you have to eat
2:51:32
a lot of animals. And it doesn't seem like that's
2:51:34
a very heavily populated area when it comes to animals.
2:51:37
Like you would need the amount of food that it
2:51:40
would need. Like if you have a 12-foot-tall human being
2:51:43
or whatever it is, And it weighs 2,000 pounds. You
2:51:45
know how much fucking meat you need in a day?
2:51:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's a good– just logically speaking, what does it eat? Right.
2:51:52
Speaker 3: It would have to like constantly be eating meat. And
2:51:55
you'd have to stay alive without getting spotted. So you
2:52:00
have to go out there and hunt meat.
2:52:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, and how no one really knows you exist.
2:52:04
Speaker 3: Are you hunting with a javelin?
2:52:06
Speaker 1: The way I see it is having been to Afghanistan,
2:52:09
certainly not encountering any giants– You see parts of Afghanistan
2:52:15
that really do look like you're on another planet. I mean,
2:52:17
it's really these crazy just mountains everywhere. And you see
2:52:21
these cave systems, you know, where typically combatants would hide
2:52:24
out in. But what I tell people is, well, I
2:52:28
don't know if the Kandahar giant is real or not.
2:52:31
It's fun. Yeah, it's great. It's fun. If there were
2:52:34
a place where a giant could still be hiding out
2:52:37
or giants could still be technically unproven. It's Afghanistan because, dude,
2:52:43
that's a different world over there. There aren't people wandering
2:52:47
around Afghanistan looking for giants.
2:52:49
Speaker 4: He's listed as eight feet tall, but I think 7'6
2:52:52
is probably a more recognized number. He went viral in
2:52:56
2019 for showing up in India and looking for a
2:52:58
hotel at a cricket match.
2:52:59
Speaker 3: Bro, look at his face. Go to that photo over
2:53:02
there of him right above there. Yeah.
2:53:05
Speaker 1: Bro.
2:53:06
Speaker 3: But that guy looks like he has giantitis. He looks
2:53:09
like he has a pituitary gland problem like Andre the Giant.
2:53:12
Speaker 4: There's another tall guy. This guy's 8'3.
2:53:15
Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Whoa. He's from Turkey.
2:53:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, but see, look, look. This guy's hurting. He can
2:53:20
barely walk around. He's probably got a disease that's forcing
2:53:23
him to just excrete too much growth hormone. You know,
2:53:26
just like Bigfoot Silva. Bigfoot Silva was an MMA fighter
2:53:30
that had giantism. And he had a tumor in his
2:53:33
pituitary gland. At the time, he was like more than
2:53:35
300 pounds.
2:53:36
Speaker 1: He was enormous. Giant head. But he had an operation.
2:53:40
And I believe he did.
2:53:41
Speaker 3: I know people that have had giantism do get an
2:53:44
operation where they remove the tumor in the pituitary gland.
2:53:47
But then the problem is their body is just not
2:53:49
making any hormones anymore. It's all fucked up. Either way,
2:53:53
it's fun.
2:53:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is fun.
2:53:54
Speaker 3: It's a fun story. The Kandahar Giant is a fun story.
2:53:58
It's a really crazy story. And I hope it's real.
2:54:01
That's my problem with all these things. I hope they're real.
2:54:03
Speaker 1: I have one final story, if you'll let me, that
2:54:07
has nothing to do with giants. Okay. I don't know
2:54:09
if you've heard it. It's super short, but in terms
2:54:11
of material, it's amazing. You ever heard of Harrison O'Keen? No.
2:54:15
Speaker 3: Okay.
2:54:16
Speaker 1: So there was this tugboat that was off the coast
2:54:19
of Africa. They were on whatever they were doing. They
2:54:21
were tugging a boat or whatever. And there's 12 people
2:54:24
on board, including Harrison O'Keen. He's a chef. And he's
2:54:28
in the bathroom of this tugboat. And at some point
2:54:30
in the middle of the night, a wave... There he is.
2:54:33
Is that him? I don't think that is. Actually, that
2:54:36
looks like Harrison O'Keen. Nope, you can't see that.
2:54:38
Speaker 3: Let me see it. Let me see it. Let him
2:54:40
tell a story. Let him tell a story.
2:54:41
Speaker 1: All right, so the boat flips over. The boat flips over,
2:54:45
and Harrison... Oh, I do know this story.
2:54:49
Speaker 3: I do know this story.
2:54:49
Speaker 1: And he ends up walking down the upturned hallway, and
2:54:53
he finds an air pocket inside of the bathroom. And
2:54:56
for 60 hours... He sat in total darkness, half submerged
2:55:01
in water, sipping a Coca-Cola, waiting for the pocket to implode.
2:55:05
And there's the video. There's a video of the recovery
2:55:08
divers as they're going in to find bodies. And they're like, oh, yeah,
2:55:12
we're going in here to find them. And then a
2:55:13
hand reaches down and grabs them. It's like one of
2:55:15
the most incredible stories I think I've ever heard. Yeah.
2:55:18
But Harrison O'Keen, I wonder what it was like in
2:55:21
terms of like true primal fear. You're 100 feet at
2:55:25
the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
2:55:27
Speaker 2: Oh, man.
2:55:28
Speaker 1: I've heard some stories that he even described the sound
2:55:31
of sea life bumping around in the upturned vessel. So
2:55:35
like the sound of sharks likely eating the bodies of
2:55:38
your buddies. And you're thinking at any point the pocket's
2:55:41
going to collapse. For 60 hours he waited and he survived.
2:55:46
And now he's no longer working on a tugboat. He
2:55:48
stays on land.
2:55:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would imagine. Well, dude, thank you very much
2:55:51
for being here, man. Dude, it's been awesome.
2:55:53
Speaker 1: Your show's awesome. Thank you. You're a really great storyteller.
2:55:56
Thank you.
2:55:56
Speaker 3: And congratulations on all your success.
2:55:58
Speaker 1: Thank you.
2:55:59
Speaker 3: Well earned. Thank you. My pleasure.
2:56:00
Speaker 1: My pleasure. All right.
2:56:02
Speaker 3: Thank you. Bye, everybody.
2:56:03
Speaker 1: Bye.