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

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Allen. Yeah. Joined today by John Allen, who has many millions of YouTube subscribers, where he tells dark and mysterious stories. Many right in our wheelhouse of wilderness experiences, crazy stuff out in the woods, people vanishing. A lot of wild stories. You have a real penchant for wilderness wildness. Former Navy SEAL came out of that world and got into storytelling. We're going to talk a lot about his life, the stories he tells, the mysteries that kind of haunt him, the ones that you kind of know what's going on. I'd like to talk about a couple where you kind of know what's going on and some where you legitimately are perplexed. Yeah. Yeah. Before we get into that, though. I'm going to talk about a couple of things. We got our annual Christmas tour coming up. So me, the Lavian lover, Yanni's going to be there. Clay, Brent, Phil, the engineer is going to be there. Dr. Randall's going to be there. We're doing our annual Christmas tour. We've got six stops this year's Christmas tour. First, home state, going to Grand Rapids, Michigan, December 14th, 20 Monroe Live is the place. Tuesday, December 15th, we'll be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at Turner Hall. Wednesday, December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin at Barrymore. Bubbly Doug Dern is going to join us on that one. Thursday, December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa at Val Air Ballroom. Friday, December 18th, Minneapolis, Minnesota at Pantages Theater. And then, this is the first time we've ever done this town. Saturday, December 19th, Fargo at Fargo Theater. You are Gary. If you come to the live show, here's my guarantee to you, you will laugh your ass off. I would say, I guarantee you win something, but not everybody's going to win something, but you will laugh your ass off. You'll have a great time. Go find anybody that's come to the Christmas tour before, and they will tell you it's two thumbs up on all things Christmas tour. Can't wait to see you guys at those shows. Tickets aren't on sale yet, though. This is like a pre-deal. This is a pre-pre. So, this is the pre, and then the next pre is pre-sale, and then it's kind of dumb. Some day, you'll be able to buy tickets. When can they buy tickets, Nate? 16th. We're also going to interview at the Grand Rapids show. We're going to interview the last American smelt dipper who I grew up with. If that don't grab you by the boo-boo, we'll see you in Grand Rapids. What's a smelt dipper? Oh, dude. So, how familiar are you with the Great Lakes? You grew up in that neighborhood. I mean, I went to boot camp in the Great Lakes, but I was mostly indoors. Getting scolded by my drill sergeant equivalents. Okay. The Great Lakes is like America's experimental aquarium. You know, there's the stuff that was there originally, and some vestiges of it are still around, and there's all the stuff that's been released on purpose, on accident, into the Great Lakes. Like, the common carp was let go in the Great Lakes on purpose. They brought in these alewives came in there, and the alewives blew up, and millions of them are dead. So, they're like, we'll need to bring in something to eat the alewives. You know what I mean? We'll bring in something to consume the alewives. And it just goes on and on and on and on and on. And then ships come in, and they have ballasts, and so they release zebra mussels. And it's just insanity in the Great Lakes. Wow. Through the years, one thing they tried was they tried a, in a stroke of genius, they put in the rainbow smelt. Of course. Which is a great fish, though. Very popular fish. And I have. And my life coincided with the, like, great smelt blitz. Like, when smelt really took off. And you would go down, and they'd run in the spring. They're anadromous. They'd run the rivers in the spring. They're about finger length, two finger length. You eat them whole. Nice. Bones and all. Fried. So, I grew up during, like, it was, like, to the point where people would fill beds of trucks with smelt. They'd fertilize gardens with smelt. Like, you'd just eat, you'd freeze gallons of smelt. I even, I could say this now, I even, like, illegally sold smelt. Okay? So. Smelt dealer. Yeah. Well, we would get so many, you know, we'd sell the smelt. It was just, it was insanity. Yeah. And then, like, all things in the Great Lakes, you put it in, it goes nuts, and then it vanishes. It's just kind of a. That's a thing. That's how, that's how introduced species work. So, typically. And then they find some sort of. Some sort of equilibrium. So, this buddy of mine, Matt Drozd, who we were all smelt-dipping enthusiasts, he could never shed the lifestyle. He's a smelt guy. He's a smelt guy, and he has gone, he goes to incredible extremes to dip some smelt every spring. And so, I asked him when we were playing in the live tour, I said, you got to come on and we got to get a smelt update for you. Smelt update. What's going on? I don't know how to smelt. So, man, John Allen, tell me about getting into the military, man. Like, how did that shake out? Because I'm assuming you came in, like, post-9-11. I did. So, you knew it was going to be, you knew that it wasn't going to be just good times and hanging out. Like, you knew it was going to be, like, war. Yeah, no, for sure. I grew up in a town called Quincy, Mass., so just south of Boston, Mass. And, you know, I graduated high school in 2006, and a lot of my buddies in high school, when they graduated, they joined the Marines and the Army, and they went off to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I was always sort of inspired by that in and of itself. I had grown up playing with G.I. Joes. I thought the military was the coolest thing. But my family was these, they're just super smart people, like academics. Yeah, but like academics and writers and stuff. Brilliantly smart storytellers, you know, journalists. And so, it just was always a thing that I was going to go to college, even though I never really aspired. to go to college, it was just sort of part of my upbringing um and so i do go to college actually in park as my my mom who's a professional writer wrote my college essay that basically got me into school uh but i did graduate from college did you at least make a couple tweaks on it on your own no shameless just right out the door well said my uh my grades were terrible in high school and i so i applied to school out in university of massachusetts it's in western mass and so i send off my application and it's got bad high school grades yeah and this essay this poignant beautiful essay she wrote about the last time i saw my best friend she wrote it from my perspective the school got in touch with me and they're like well you know your grades not really what we're looking for but my goodness that essay you are in young man so i got in on the strength of her essay but anyways i graduate college and i've been telling my family all along that i was gonna i'm gonna go to law school i'm gonna go be a lawyer and i don't even know why i had that pegged as as my route i didn't want to do it at all um but really throughout college i couldn't stop thinking about those guys i knew from high school that you know went overseas and i didn't i didn't know if i really wanted to serve i just kept coming back to wanting to be in the military and then i had this this pivotal meeting if you will with these two family friends so there's two guys who i grew up knowing you know these two guys were just family friends they were the brothers of my mother's best friend just did cookouts and stuff i would see them totally non-descript typical dudes like 20 years older than me you know i didn't think much of them i knew they were in the military but i didn't really know what they did yeah and then sometime i was a sophomore in college um i found out that those two guys were on seal team six okay and they were just like super low-key about it but they were retiring and so people were gonna have to go to development group to go to the base for their retirement and it was like wait a minute like they were on team six like it blew my mind completely because you felt because you felt like if they're on it i could like i didn't even it was almost like i couldn't believe that the dudes that i basically had discounted as man whatever just those are just the two dudes i see at family cookouts and stuff yeah are like commandos you know fighting the war on terror overseas and it was it was it came at a time where i was already sort of thinking a lot about the fact that people my age were serving overseas and one thing led to another where i i decided to go visit with these two guys um who i already knew like it isn't like i'm meeting them i know them but now it feels like i i'm meeting them for the first time oh yeah and i hit them up and i'm like hey can i come see you guys like just talk to you about your military career and they're like yeah come out to this location and they give me this this location it's in new hampshire and it was like this kids camp and i knew that my mom's best friends these two guys it's their sister she ran a music and art camp for kids and i'm like that's weird i guess i guess i'm meeting them out of the art camp and so i drive my way to this this camp in like scenic rural new hampshire and i go through the gate and i see my mom's best friend and she's like oh yeah just go up that access road there they're up there they have a man cape up there you can you can go find my brothers up there and i'm like okay this is a little weird kids running around like there's art camp it's literally a kid's art camp and i take this access road up into the the backwoods a couple miles down the road and i come to this this shack that was just like two by fours and like plywood like a crudely made shack that was the size of a garage maybe and as soon as i get out of the car and it's like gravel so i pull up everybody can hear me pulling up i hear the sound inside there's no windows i just hear the sound of like grown men like belly laughing and with each other inside of this the shack and i get out of the car and i start walking over to the door which is just on you know hinges or whatever no windows and the talking inside the shack stops and i'm just like walking over to the door and then i like open it up i'm 19. i'm like this kid i look inside there's there's nothing inside there's no furniture it's not even like a building it's like literally someone set up a fort out here and there's something like 10 very burly intense looking men we've never seen before and the two brothers and they're all sitting on upturned like painters buckets and they're like chewing tobacco they're just sitting in a circle bullshitting and one of them looks at me and just goes who the fuck are you yeah yeah i was like oh my name is john i'm i'm the son of jesse and i was just kidding yeah and it turned out these are like a bunch of active duty team six guys who are training with my with the two brothers to get ready for deployment and so i had this amazing day of like almost meeting the two brothers for the first time in a sense where like wait a minute you're like commandos like what the hell is i i play video games with navy seals you're telling me that's what you do and they like brought me out shooting like we're like i just hung out with bros who were just active duty seal team six guys and then also these these two brothers which now they feel like heroes of mine and i i didn't even have like uh i'm gonna go be a navy seal moment it was i was just so fascinated with the fact that this is really what they did yeah it was almost like meeting a professional athlete or something it feels so disconnected from real life like you don't you don't know people that play shortstop for the red sox you don't know those people they exist but that's separate right and i i i asked them all some variation of like why did you do this why did you join and all of them had this sense of like i don't know i just kind of fucked everything else up and i uh i thought this was a pretty cool thing cool challenge you know i always wanted to serve to some degree but i wanted to see if i could if i could make it because the training for seal training it's it's you know it's famously open to the public in some ways you just got to send in decent enough shape you can go try out but very few people make it through it you don't need to be in the military to try out you well you do you do have to join the military but you can come off the street and raise your hand and say i want to go try out so you come off street and list like anyone that lists can start the process you can basically be ushered directly into training you go through boot camp first but it's set up to go to seal training and my takeaway from this this pivotal if you don't make it do you walk no you're still enlisted you become needs of the navy not enlisted but you're still enlisted you're still enlisted you're still enlisted you're still you're in the you're in you go chip chip paint off the side of ships in japan and you paint road markers you know in different it's it's terrible you don't want to gamble oh it's a big gamble it's not good it sort of pushes you to like try your best you know sure yeah but yeah i left that meeting feeling like i had aspirations to maybe join the military it was in the back of my mind and then i was just so impressed just so completely impressed with these guys and the sense i i really didn't know what they actually did my understanding of what navy seals do is the same as anybody else who you know was broadly aware of special operations was it wrong uh no actually it was pretty pretty close and so i i kind of flipped a switch for myself i i continued telling my family i'm gonna go be a lawyer uh but secretly began really training hard to as if i'm gonna go to seal training and then as soon as i graduated college i immediately like within a listing to sign up to go to buds yeah seal training yeah and it worked out but yeah it was a calling i would say did you did you did you feel like you breezed through all the trials not even close it was tough oh fuck no i i did not breeze through it at all i uh there were things i was good at i think that you have to have something going in you need to have you're either a good runner or you're a good swimmer or you're just really strong or you just there's something about you typically needs to carry the day i was a good runner um but man the uh there were just some tests that were just exceptionally stressful um i'd say most notably are like the underwater tests you do so so seal training it takes call it two years if you go the enlisted route you got to go to boot camp uh this is if you start as a civilian you go to boot camp that's in great lakes illinois you do two years uh two years two months of boot camp and then you i went to a prep school in chicago that is to get you ready for buds i don't think they do that anymore and then you go out to san diego for like the the famous part of training which you keep saying it it's buds which stands for basic underwater demolition seal school that is seal boot camp it's the it's the famous part of training and that's six months long and then if you graduate that statistically you're you're going to be a seal there is quite a bit of follow-on training it's advanced seal training where you're like actually taught what to do but the the make or break is the six months out in san diego and six months long and uh it's broken into three phases first phase second phase third phase the the most important thing is that you have to know what happens in that first phase because it's just physically brutal you're up all night you know you're getting beat up constantly it's just like you know whatever you think of as like brutal boot camp style training times 10 that's sort of what it is for first phase and if you make it through that you go to second phase which is the underwater phase that's that's what the stressful part was for me yeah i i was a good swimmer but i i discovered that i am prone to panic underwater and it's something that you have to figure out how to how to handle that so you have to figure out how to handle it so you have to figure out how to do it and it's it's some of the tests they give you including there's one um called pool competency where it's it's a 20 minute test pool competency not shooting pool not shooting pool maybe i'd be better at that you basically you go there's this thing called the combat training tank it's this huge pool it's got a six foot section that slopes down to the nine foot slopes down to the 15 and pool competency takes place entirely in the nine foot section of the pool you jump in the pool usually there's about eight students i think it's about eight students i think that are taking the test at any given time they start at different points you get in the pool and you get a picture when you're on the pool deck waiting for your test it's very stressful everyone's yelling at you you're getting hosed off you're not allowed to look at the pool you get your stupid tanks on but you get to sit on the ground facing away from the pool and it's just like they create very stressful environment it's all seals in the pool deck yelling at you but then you jump in the water and think about it your hearing is gone it's like silence been underwater before it's like peaceful and you sink down in this this huge wearing tanks oh yeah you scoop the tanks on and you just see in front of you because you jump in on the side of the pool you're looking essentially across perpendicular across the whole pool you see all the other guys who are testing and the test pool competency it basically is two instructors per student coming down and tying knots in your hoses turning your air off flipping you around literally like beating you up under water and each student we have the same set of effectively emergency procedures to recover your air source you know but they give you progressively harder challenges to overcome starting at the beginning of the test through 20 minutes the test is the procedures they give you you follow them in the same order every single time and if you do that you will eventually solve your problem whatever problem they've given you but they know some of the problems problems take longer to fix than others by the time you get to them you you're out of air you're hyper you're totally hypoxic you're so it's a test of you're you're basically out of air towards the end of the test you're barely hanging on but in that state of near passing out can you still follow steps one two three four five six seven eight nine ten knowing at this point they're not going to fix your problem so you're not going to get air but you have to systematically showcase that you can do all these procedures and eventually when you're like chicken necking to barely breathe you fix your stupid air source which sometimes might even be where your head's cocked to the side because there's still a knot but it's a breathable air source where it's there's not a perfect seal and so every breath you take requires drinking pool water to get a little breath of air and that's the rest of the test you'll be tested on that so it's like you're looking out across the pool and it's just a sea of chaos but it's silence and you're like i'm about to do this for 20 minutes and it's just the whole test is just you're you're progressively becoming more and more you're like hyperventilating they come down to like turn your air off and they watch when your bubbles are exhaling so you're like on an exhale as the as each of these breath holds begin and it's just like breath holding and stress induced situations for 20 minutes i mean it's sort of been uh the the test pool comp is is it's likened to simulated drowning like can you handle simulated drowning uh and it's like such a gut check and i was horrible at it but i a and i was horrible at it but i was horrible at it but i was horrible at it but by the skin of my teeth some guys are phenomenal and they can just go look at the whole hawaiian surfer guys they'll go in there they can hold their breath for five minutes the panic's low i had a buddy of mine explain it to me he's like he's like they use the thing that struck him most he's like they use cold water yeah to like break you down oh yeah and i remember thinking well i'm already done because if i can bring my wetsuit yeah dude if i can bring my wetsuit i might have a good time because i don't the water doesn't stress me but the cold water i can't like the cold water i can't handle no i mean i can handle like long hikes no food but cold water my kids laugh about it cold water is tough my kids want me to get into a pool with them i'm like let me put my wetsuit out we uh i mean basically every day in the early part of seal training when you get when you get to the compound to start your day at you know four or five in the morning like every day begins with jumping in the ocean which is sort of like not a big deal but psychologically you know the whole day is going to be awful you're already pretty much sleep deprived to begin with and every day starting with go get wet and the water is not even that cold it's not it's cold it's not frigid yeah but every day began with that like i don't want to get in the water and that's the first thing i'm going to do and all day i'm going to be cold it's it's a mental it's it's difficult it's difficult to handle where did you wind up getting deployed uh i deployed to afghanistan the first tour uh and then i went to south america peru the second one um and actually your question was like you know if you want to get into a pool you're going to have to go to afghanistan you're going to have to go to afghanistan you're going to have to go to afghanistan and you're going to have to go to afghanistan you're going to have to go to afghanistan you're going to have to go to afghanistan yeah and i uh it's weird like in many ways the experience i had in afghanistan was exactly what i expected it to be in terms of combat it by no means did we get to afghanistan and we're like shooting off the plane but you know it's not like that but i mean it was fairly routine you know that we would get into a gunfight no and some of these gunfights to be clear were like someone shot us from a a mile away and we have no idea where if they even were shooting at us but we definitely heard the snap of a round like you're not a snap we heard the the gunshot like someone's probably shooting at us and we'd like take cover and try to figure out where they where they were and then you never find them like that's a gunfight nothing really happened no one got hurt okay but then alternatively we would have not a lot but you'd have like very intimate uh very close quarters gun fighting where uh i mean my experience was you just sort of default to your training i mean there's nothing else you can do when you're when you're when you're running down an alleyway or you're turning a corner and you're looking at the end of the alleyway and you know there's like someone with a gun is trying to kill you there isn't you're not really able to to think that hard about it and you'll think about it years later but in the moment it's survival and what you do when you're trying to survive is you just do the things that are just ingrained and one of them is just like target recognition like trigger discipline like you know listening to the commands of your team you know just doing what you've been trained to do you know is the second time way different than the first time the third time way different than the second time yeah um but it's all mental um because functionally i was just as talented at handling a gunfight on the first volley as i was on the end of the deployment i'd actually make the case i was worse by the end of deployment because you're more complacent but when i oh you're just like i guess what i'm getting at when i say that is in terms of um you know if you experience like a super high stress situation be the let's say you're driving on the highway and all of a sudden you're doing 360s on the ice like my understanding of there's people that everything slows down yep there's people everything's that that everything speeds up there's people that become fixated on a certain detail right and then undoubtedly there's people that are just like you know they're just like you know they're just like you know they're just like i'm spinning down the road i need to do this right did did did you find that that sort of thing changed yes like that the holy of it wore off maybe i don't know how to put it no no it's a good question i i would say that when i when i first got to afghanistan uh i was brand new guy you know i'm completely well trained i mean i've done all the training as anybody else i'm ready for this deployment i've just never employed my skill set in real life but i'm so green you know i've never done anything combat related i've only done training and that really hits you hard when you at least for me when i got in country it was like holy like i'm really gonna do this now whatever this is i'm gonna go do it for real now and i remember when we touched down i was part of the the early group that arrived in country you you don't it isn't like your whole seal team just like goes at once and you show up and just start doing stuff it's it's like a rotation of people that go in sometimes you go in weeks ahead of the rest of your team and you typically get to wherever you're going to be stationed and which for seals is a lot of times like in these sort of outstations that are out in the middle of nowhere you you turn over with the team that's currently there who's been doing this now for months and so we turned over with seal team eight and so i got in country with i think two other new guys and two other senior guys like five of us arrived in country and my understanding is we're gonna we're gonna get to our outstation we're gonna land at the big base travel our way out like an hour to our outstation which is like out in the sticks sort of and you know we'll have a couple of weeks at least to learn the ropes talk to seal teammate we'll wait for our team to get here we'll sort of you know get our bearings and then i'll go do navy seal stuff that was that was my mental map yeah completely not accurate we're all saving for something whether it's a trip a concert or upgrading your car one pay is the banking app that gives you more for what matters earn three percent cash back on up to 150 dollars in monthly spending when you choose categories like walmart gas or dining so you're 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so we we land in afghanistan and i remember we had to sign this uh i i joked that it was like a permission slip you get there in the jag who's the the navy uh lawyer they have you like sign a document saying like you you understand that you're going to be leaving the wire and you could be like killed or maimed yep totally get it like signing my permission slip to go to war on the you there i forget what it was but it was some goofy like legal understanding of what you're getting yourself into and i'm like all right i guess this is weird but then we drive out like as if it wasn't abundantly clear this entire process just right one last check in here and so we we hop in these up armored vehicles they're called m wraps and they're like 60 000 pound huge like ied proof vehicles and i remember i had meticulously arranged all my equipment and i'd put it in the in the i su the big shipping container that got sent ahead of us but something i didn't even consider is that i would potentially need to arrive in afghanistan and immediately put my kit on and go use it yeah and so i have all the things that i might want to molly onto my kit you know all the different holsters and all the different mag pouches and all the that i was going to put together because remember my head is like i'm going to get there i'm going to have at least a few days to think about what i want to put on my kit how i want to arrange it but as soon as we get there the team eight guys like dude let's get the out of here come on guys like the five of you let's go hop in the m rap we're just gonna go and let's just knock out a mission tonight so you guys can kind of like break it in because there's so many missions you have to do until they can go home like you turnover ops have to happen and so i'm like rummaging through the isu i'm the brand new guy the the m rap is literally idling waiting for me and i'm like trying to find my my pelican case to like put my kit together it's all new so it's like nothing's been frayed everything's brand new and i'm piecing together this whole thing and i'm like oh my god i'm going to get this kit and then i'm running over to the m rep all my my bdus are completely brand i look so pathetic i'm like the greenest of green guys and the dudes in the vehicle they they had hit an ied on the same route we're going on the day before and one of them has this like huge cut across his face and he has like a mohawk and he's wearing a cut off shirt and he's like as hardened as it gets and i'm running in like straps hanging off of my stupid kit that i didn't put together and i jump inside the m rap and they seal the door and they're they're just like they don't give a like they're just so checked out checked out like don't want to be here anymore and we drive out of where we were it's called fob shank it was this big you know established nato base and they put like the jammers on the the vehicle can project a radio frequency that keeps any radio uh ied from blasting yeah and so like they're like our jammers are on and it's like oh that oh that's right we're in a place where like explosions happen and like this is an ied proof vehicle but you'll still get fucked up inside of this thing if you hit an ied and we're going to be driving around and we're driving on the only paved road in afghanistan 45 minutes to our site and i'm looking out the window and the windows are like you know three inches thick because they're super bulletproof and i'm surrounded in in my vehicle there's a bunch of vehicles by only teammate guys who are like hardened jacked just been doing combat for the last six months and i'm like the newest of nugo they're not even talking to me this is like a staple of vietnam movies i want you to know the scene you're laying out i'm a great connoisseur of vietnam movies and like the new guys oh i felt so pathetic and so we rolled through these bazaars these you know these afghan bazaars and this is in 2013 at this point nato has been in afghanistan for a while and there's this weird almost deference that the locals tend to pay to nato nato's like these massive 60 000 ton like war machines are roaring through their bazaar these narrow streets these people out everywhere and people like barely get out of your way they don't get it's like you don't even exist at this point but we had this thing where we couldn't slow down to us we couldn't go below a certain speed going through these bazaars because the jammers that were designed to protect us in case there's a radio ied that's going to be detonated near us if we went too slow it wouldn't protect us so you had to go a certain speed through these bazaars and so you're looking it's like imagine if you drove 20 miles an hour too fast through a but you're looking out the window you're like oh my god we're gonna we're the driver's blasting through just like weaving through these bazaars and uh you know we get to these mountain passes and this road route utah it's it's the only paved road in afghanistan at the time it was the target of ied ied attacks all the time and so there were pockets of the road that would be badly damaged from ied blasts but what are you gonna do stop and like fix the road to keep driving no you got to just drive over it and so we would be driving along the side of these mountains where the mountain it's practically a cliff face the road even if it was in great condition was so narrow and it wasn't designed for 60 000 ton m-raps it was designed for little toyotas and they'd be barely hanging on so we'd have to turn these corners where the wheels literally are hanging a couple of inches off the road no guardrail it's pure death if you go down below and like there's all these pockets in the road from blasts so it's just like this crazy thing there's 45 minute like white knuckling ride i'm thinking if we get engaged while we're out here and they kept saying yeah if we get engaged we'll stop we'll pop out we'll just like take some shots we'll call in an airstrike whatever they're just talking about like yeah here's what we're gonna do if we get engaged and i'm thinking like my mags are all over the place i don't even know if my gun will work right now like i put my gun together like on the fly and so i i'm so stressed we finally get to our base which is just this fob but not a fob it was like a little outstation just hesco it looks like out in the middle of nowhere it was on the leading edge of sort of the nato war effort it was it was one of the last spots before cobble cobble was i think about an hour away from us but this is sort of the last established area for spec ops and it's it's sort of a staging point to go out and try to stop the the flow of suicide bombers and weapon caches and so we get to this this rugged not even a base it's like just hescos and some shacks and stuff and like this is where you're going to live for the next six months as we deploy as we do combat ops out of here and we get there and it's like the evening and i can hear out in the mountains the sound of like an a-10 warthog it's like doing a gun run over a village that's like right over there and it's too dark you can only see the tracers and it's just it sounds you're like you're in a war zone that's what it feels like i mean and so anyways that night i'm thinking they can't be serious that we're like gonna gonna gonna go on a mission tonight i mean give me a break like we just got here they must know that i'm i'm green like they're gonna give me a little bit of time here no so as soon as we get there uh after like 30 minutes or so and i'm hearing the a-10 out in the distance having this gun run the marines were getting contacted or something uh the guy who was running the platoon for seal team eight grabbed me and the other guys who had just shown up from my platoon they're like hey we're gonna have a little brief we're just gonna go out tonight and do a quick quick patrol and i'm like all right and so i go into the briefing room which is just a shack this like metal tin like imagine a garage that's been gutted i have everything there's just a couple of tables and like fold out chairs and the team eight guys they are cowboys like first just all of them are jacked just like there's they're all wearing like shorts and like they have mohawks they got beards they've been deployed all this time they are like the coolest and most intimidating group and they've been doing this for months now they're used to what we're about to do and i've never done a combat operation and i walk in there and uh the main guy i forget his name now but he's like he's a really smart i think he's a road scholar and he's like this brilliant guy who became a seal and he's like all right guys so we got to do some turnover operations he's talking to the teammate guys and now me and the four other new seals that have come from team two and he's like all right so we're just gonna head up to like this mountain range that's near us we'll just drive up there the the new guys you guys can just drive like just to get get the ropes you're gonna drive these mraps the 60 000 ton vehicles and there's some caves up there and we're pretty sure there's some fighters up there so we're gonna go in there uh you know definitely bring bring your silencers like we want to make sure your guns are silenced but more than that just bring it bring a good knife we're gonna keep it nice and quiet we're gonna go up in the mountains and we'll see what happens like that's the whole briefing and he's like here's a map you know we're gonna we're just gonna go up there see what happens and they're like all right cool then they do is like yeah let's go play video games for the next 20 minutes before we go out and i'm like okay and i go back to my room and i'm finishing putting my kit together because it's not even set up yet and and i remember thinking like what the have you gotten yourself into like i obviously know this is the job i've been training for yeah i obviously know this is i was i was excited to go to afghanistan as everybody else in my platoon was but it i had that stupid mental model that i was going to have this transitional period you're going to get there you're going to slow roll your way into combat and you'll figure it out no it's like you're going to arrive and go to war and i remember dropping to my knees before we were supposed to go out that night and praying that we did not go out like and i'm not religious please you weren't a regular not really you didn't hold counsel with god on a regular basis this is like i don't know what else to do and so we we ended up actually not going out the night we went the next day and i was like very thankful to have a little bit of a breathing room and then you know we we go out the next day and nothing happens. Like, as I discovered in Afghanistan, it's pretty typical. Oh, we're going to go into this village. We hear there's, like, 75 fighters and there's bomb makers. There's going to be this. And you get there, nothing happens. It's like friendly villagers. Like, nothing happens. But then conversely, it was fairly common to be like, ah, we're going to go out. Like, this is nothing. We don't expect anything. And you get killed, like, just destroyed by whoever's out there. But so that operation that we ultimately did, the first one, I basically wished we, I didn't want to do it. I was scared. I'm like, I don't know if I'm ready to do, I've been trained, but I don't know if I'm going to be capable of walking into a cave with my knife out and potentially going hand to hand and killing somebody with a knife. I don't know if I can do that. I'm sure I would be capable of doing it, but it's just, it's such a departure from your civilian life. Even in training, we would do really intense training stateside for the SEAL teams. Like, really intense. Like, role players. I mean, we would do, like, there's a training you go through where you basically prep for what it would be like to be in captivity, and it's very hands-on. I mean, you're effectively tortured and put through the ropes for a long period of time. So I'm used to training that's extremely intense. Nothing beats actually mortal combat, because that's what it is. Well, I can imagine that, man. Like, the training thing, in the back yard, you know you're not in captivity. Yeah. I mean, it's probably better than no training, but, I mean, it's got to be totally different, man. It's crazy. And also, I would say, and maybe it was something that we all sort of intentionally did to make the situation feel better or something, but very quickly, very quickly, I would say within maybe two to three weeks of being in country, I went from being the guy who was scared to go on the operation to being not excited to go, but utterly indifferent. Utterly indifferent. Really? That's where you landed? All of us did. The only thing we would be concerned about would be, like, are we doing something that needlessly risks the lives of our team? Because there were definitely times where in order to try to capture someone or go after some known bad guy, the only way to do it was to do it in a way that was sort of risky to the team. Now, obviously, there's quite a bit of risk every time you go out, but the only time that people had real gripes was if it's, like, why are we seemingly needlessly risking our lives here? We're okay with the baseline risk. But yeah, I never slept better in my life than I did in Afghanistan, minus the first few days. That was the worst sleep in my life. And I tell people that you enter into this state of you're not literally in survival mode all the time. I mean, you're not. Every second of every day in Afghanistan, fending for your life, but you live with a pretty constant state of, at any point, we could get attacked here. The base where we were was sort of always potentially vulnerable to a suicide attack. And those happened across the country. And with enough regularity that we had some mitigating things in place to try to protect ourselves. But, I mean, to be honest, if fighters decided to overrun where we were, they'd probably. They'd probably be able to do it. Even if we were ready and saw them coming. And so you lived with a baseline understanding that for sure people could die here. It's part of the deal. And that's not revelatory. You go into the war zone knowing that. But you enter into a sort of a weird zen place where I don't think I ever really. And this is bad in a way. I didn't really think about my wife back home beyond like I would talk to her periodically. But I couldn't. I wasn't really capable of thinking about anything other than my current existence. You were married to the same person than you're married to now. Correct, yeah. She met me when I was talking about becoming a SEAL. I met her in college. And she's been with me to today. Amanda. Good for you. Yeah, so it's just weird. You end up becoming very primal, I would say, where you'd go out and a lot of times rounds would start. Being shot at you and your team. And the scariest point in my limited. Because it is a limited combat exposure. I didn't do a million combat ops. I've done a few. But in the ones that I was in, the first few rounds that come in are the scariest, at least when we were there, because our rules of engagement said that we couldn't proactively shoot anyone. You had to be shot at first. And so when I talked about why are we needlessly risking our lives, some of the operations we would plan for, because we did all our planning ourselves, sort of invited people to shoot at you in order to then be able to be on the offensive or respond to the threat. So we would literally design operations where we want to go here because if we get shot at here, we can defend ourselves. But think about what that really means. You're the bait. You're going in there and you don't know where the first round's going to hit. And so when the first rounds come in, a lot of times no one knows where they're coming from, unless they're super effective and then you do. But I remember there was one particular, particular engagement in this town called Zargan Shah, this pretty urban, tightly compacted Afghan village where I'm pretty sure the first few rounds were fired at me. I don't know for sure, but I know it was very early in the engagement where I was, I walked across this like four-way intersection where there's low walls across the entire intersection. But when you walk across the middle, there's no cover, there's no anything. You're just sort of exposed for a second. And there was like a tall tower that sort of overlooked it. And there was a shooter up there who fired several rounds. And I was the one that had just walked past the intersection. He missed me. And this was deep into the deployment. I remember being instantly out of breath. And I'm-- Oh, is that right? Yeah. Like immediately, it was as if I had sprinted 10 miles. I like fell to the ground because it wasn't immediate because the rounds hit, then you hear the snaps. It doesn't, you know how it works. Yeah, it's already done. It's already done. Yeah, you're fucking dead or you're not. You already got missed. And so I like dove behind the wall and I was like, "What the fuck is going on here?" And I was like, "What the fuck is going on here?" a low wall and it the weight of what had just happened was like so intense my body's reaction was like some sort of cortisol dump or adrenaline dump but it was like i was out of breath but then training kicks in and you just you just go for it um you eventually got injured though right i did i did yeah actually that same town i uh we this is at the tail end of the deployment we were there we were going to be there for six months i ended up getting medevaced out at five months um there was this one town zarganshah what i was just telling you about it was it was just it was a it was a very hectic place lots of lots of fighters in there uh it's also a place historically that it was so close to where our base was where we stayed for the deployment and so many teams had rotated through where we were it was not just teammate before us before them it was like any number of spec ops guys that were there and the the number one place that you would typically go was zarganshah it's literally across the road from where the space was and a big reason for that is zarganshah was as i recall it was one of the last known staging points for suicide bombers before they'd make their way along route utah right up to kabul and they'd blow themselves up okay and so there was some there's a basic understanding that the dudes that were at our base whatever unit you were with some part of your job was trying to identify and stop the flow of suicide bombers which meant going into zarganshah and literally looking for them okay and so um we went in there a fair amount but it was it was a lot of times it was the only place that we we went in any of the missions we did where the fighters were very brazen the there were these long stretches in zarganshah where it was almost like the the village or the town was built sort of haphazardly but there were these almost like long roads where from certain angles you could see down almost like the entire length of this huge village um but at other points everything is obscured but there were these few vantage points where you could basically see like over a mile down down the city and we'd we'd drive into the city and women and children would run out into the the desert because they'd see the nato trucks approaching we only could do operations during the daytime due to rules of engagement in the town and yeah pretty much everywhere with with rare exceptions sometimes we'd go like super early hours that technically was the morning but it was still dark out but we would roll into zarganshah and you'd see people running away and it's all way around the town so it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's away and it's all women and children so you know whoever's left is going to be military aged men um but we would look down these so we'd see the women and children run and we'd pull on to one of those roads we'd look down the road and the new guys would drive the vehicles so i'd be like driving sometimes and you'd see like you know half a mile away standing in the road be a dude with an ak-47 and he's he's showing you like i don't care that you're here this is utterly not the jargon char okay the a big reason for it's it's it's very simple if you're identified as as a combatant and you're threatening a nato force you're dead and it's not there's so many things that can get you killed at that point if you brandish a weapon or do something sort of threatening to nato we have the most air assets available to us we have targeting systems we have and this is not even to be braggadocious it's like we can we can practically point to a map and say hey we know there's a guy right there and whether it takes us five minutes or five hours we'll find you and kill you yeah we'll capture you so like to brandish a weapon like that to an an entire convoy of by the way we would roll in with special equipment we had certain vehicles they knew we were spec ops we would we would oftentimes talk to some of the people we would capture after a gunfight who had survived and they knew when spec ops was showing up so they knew the difference to have someone standing there brandishing a weapon i mean that's a level of confidence that you only saw in zargon char and i i admit and i give credit where credit's due it was intimidating because their equipment is terrible they don't have really any of the resources we do but they're prepared to go toe-to-toe with the strongest military and some of the best war fighters in the world no problem we're all saving for something whether it's a trip a concert or upgrading your car one pay is the banking app that gives you more for what matters earn three percent cash back on your car and you can't afford to pay for it and you can't afford to pay for your car and you can't afford to pay for it and you can't afford to pay for it and you can't 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community bank or lead bank members fdic cashback is earned as one pay points redeemable into a one pay deposit account or other available options individual reward details can be found in the one pay app see one pay rewards terms at onepay.com forward slash rewards dash terms one of the things i love about turkey hunting is it is a game of cat and mouse the whole thing comes down to the setup you get that wrong turkey nuggets are not on your menu that is why i use the on x hunt app when i'm hunting turkeys i think of it like an old victor mousetrap you use it right it works when you hear a gobbler like sound off in the dark you can open up the map on on x and try to get a good sense of where he is and you can use the compass mode on there if you really want to figure out where he is then you can take a look around the landscape and build a setup that's going to put you where that bird wants to be at the same time i know with certainty where i'm going to be when i'm hunting turkeys i think of it like an old victor public ground ends and private ground begins so i'm not guessing or second guessing or worrying about where i am and getting in trouble with somebody i like to just hunt knowing i'm in the right spot if spring turkey season puts you in the woods download the on x hunt app and set your trap right life moves fast at american military university they're ready to help you keep up am use flexible affordable online programs and cyber security it space studies and more are designed for service members veterans and their families amu provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you american military university made for what's next learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military so we went in one day and we this is the day i got hurt i wasn't the only one we went into the village and the way the rules of engagement worked is i mentioned to mention this to you before you needed to be shot at in order to shoot back in essence there were some rare situations that would allow you to be offensive but for the most part you needed to be responding that was sort of the gist and it also had to be daytime so we we we go into zargan char we begin our infill and zargan char is like it's a really urban environment like everything's really tight and it's really hard to get in and out of the house it's a really tight on top of each other and we began making our infill and we stopped because we realized there was a courtyard we were in an alleyway between a couple of buildings and we would be walking into a courtyard and there were two-story buildings on either side and you know from a strategic standpoint you don't want to walk into an alley you don't want to walk into a courtyard where there's multiple angles on you in case there's shooters in the second floor and we knew given the fact that we rolled up saw women and children leave you know we also earlier had heard some chatter on the open source radios there were fighters in town guys are brandishing weapons like they're here and so we stopped no one had shot at us at this point broad daylight uh and our team lead he's like hey uh hold on a minute let's take some covers we backed up we got behind this bridge and he's like wait a minute if we go forward i think we're going to walk into an ambush it seems like based on the chatter we're hearing on the radio that it it very much appears like there are fighters in those second floors and they're going to shoot they know the rules of engagement they know they get one shot they're going to shoot they're going to shoot they're going to shoot they're going to shoot they're going to shoot they're going to shoot one shot to knock off a few of us with that first volume and you could hear it on the radio they were talking about like when to shoot but if we go back if we retreat the way zarganshar was built is it's like this again very urban very tightly packed pretty sprawling town but then just outside of the city walls it's like there's no infrastructure no buildings nothing it's just desert so it's like this really densely populated space and then nothing to the outside and so if you think about trying to retreat trying to exfil out of zarganshar you're exfilling into an open area where you're sort of exposed and so we found ourselves in this position where either we had to go forward into the courtyard knowing very likely there'd be an ambush or retreat because we put ourselves in a bad tactical spot but from the second floor windows we we saw they would have the drop on us as we as soon as we exit it so there's a period of time where invariably we're going to be our backs are going to be exposed you know fire an rpg at us one of us is getting killed and we're going to be exposed we're going to be exposed we're going to be exposed at least and you even even though we're in this bad of a situation you can't call in an airstrike you can't be like we're in we're in a bad way we got to get out of this can't do it and so we sat there for like 20 30 minutes and my team lead he's amazing um very stoic guy he's he's currently over at team six one of the best guys i've ever met he finally just went up and down the line and we're all hiding sort of behind this this bridge and we're listening periodically to the chatter coming through of these fighters talking about you know getting ready to shoot us and uh he's like take take one last piss like have a sip of water like we're navy seals we're gonna we're gonna go forward if we're gonna get shot we're gonna get shot in the chest you know we're gonna go forward into the city and conduct this mission and so i remember taking a piss like kneeling and taking a piss behind this wall and thinking is this the last time i'm gonna pee this is it like this is the end and so we get our together but it was like motivating in a way we weren't like bloodthirsty it was like it dude like this is this is what we came here for and so we walk through this alleyway and it brings us out to this courtyard it's a pretty big courtyard again broad daylight it's eerily quiet you know the women and children are gone it's like just like it's a ghost town and then at some point machine guns open fire on us this is on body cam we've watched the video back it's it's theory it's like silent and it's it's an ambush um i say this and i usually try to be careful how i say it but the people who got shot off the jump in this initial volley were afghan partner force who were with us and our dog um which was a blessing because this was a situation where it wasn't just a couple people in the windows there was fighters all over the village like waiting for us and as soon as the the shooting began you know we were probably outnumbered pretty significantly but you don't know where anybody is this is a very guerrilla warfare very urban warfare and if we're going to survive this the people that are going to get us out of the situation are the navy seals just because from a skill perspective a weapons perspective we we were able to get out of this if seals were getting shot in that initial volley i got to be honest i don't know how it would have gone so fortunately and that's where i'm trying not to be crass the partner force and the dog get hit seals take our positions up against walls and one of the things that we're great at uh really special operations generally but seals in particular is you're trained how to do basically everybody's job like uh for example when you go into a building it there's it's a highly choreographed thing with when you're clearing a building it's extremely choreographed but the only way it can work is if you've trained so much with your team that in the dark on night vision you can read everybody's body language because you don't have time to communicate back and forth and so everybody knows everybody's job and how to do it and you can just visually understand the tendencies of your teammates when you're clearing a building to include if somebody gets shot you know exactly to step over them and take up their position i mean it's unbelievable and so we all just began clearing buildings like immediately uh because there's buildings everywhere but there wasn't the luxury of having a lot of people to do it with it was like onesie twosie going into buildings you know a lot of people weren't in buildings but it was like intimate you know door-to-door fighting for the next six hours or so um at one point i was up on a rooftop with another guy and he was filming from his body cam and we're laying down on the on the roof and there's like maybe a foot tall lip that sort of the wall extended a foot higher than the actual flat of the roof yeah so we're like laying down and rounds are impacting right there because there's a guy in the alley who can see us and we're like dude like what are we gonna do like we're pinned down it was just it was this crazy thing so we were fighting our way we managed to roll off the roof and get out of there um but for the next six hours or so it was just intimate sporadic gunfighting um but by the time it got dark that night even though we had in many ways sort of survived the initial volley the dog survived the the afghans who were shot they survived as well uh we had medevaced them out like we were we were sort of on our toes now we now were cleared to We've been engaged, so now we're able to sort of-- the rules of engagement are off. And-- But the night, really, it just-- it didn't really amount to much. We-- The people that were shooting at us, they would just vanish. And there were known tunnels that were dug under the city for these fighters for years they've been fighting. For years and years and years. There's like secret tunnels to escape the town. And so, it's like somebody would be shooting at you, and then they just vanish, and you wouldn't be able to find them. And so, it sort of just felt like we were getting our butts kicked all day. We were able to, you know, survive, but it didn't go well. It just was like, "Wow." So, we walked in here, they got the drop on us, we sort of were able to keep our wits about us, but we didn't find a bomb maker, suicide bomber, weapon cache, we just got shot a bunch, narrowly survived, and here we are. Now, it's like, you know, 10 o'clock at night or whatever it is, and it's-- the city's kind of gone quiet again. And so, by this point, you know, our team lead reminded us, like, our job now is not just to stay here and try to shoot something, you know? Like, we didn't accomplish what we wanted to do, it didn't go well, let's get out of here. But as we're getting ready to leave, and by this point, we've all broken up across the city. You know, we're in these disparate little fire teams that are spaced out pretty far away from each other. And we had these maps that were printed out, like an overhead view that showed each building. We had numbers for each building. You know, it's like, we sort of knew where everybody else was, the different fire teams, but for the most part, you're sort of on your own, like five, six, seven dudes at a clip. And so, there's like this effort to try to figure out where's the best place for us to meet up, for us to then exfil and get out of the city without getting killed. And so, as the team leads are doing that, our fire team overhears one of the drones overhead that's being flown by someone, I think, in Las Vegas. They were flying around. By this point, there's air assets stacked over us. Because once an engagement starts, you got everything known to man at your disposal. And they told us over the radio, not our fire team, but we heard it over the radio, that there were these potential military-aged men that were set up near the exit of the village. So, they knew the route we were likely gonna take on the exfil, because you plan a bunch of stuff and you give all the potential routes you'll use to go in and out, and you give it up to your higher command. And so, as you leave, you can call in, like, "Hey, we're gonna exfil. We're taking this route." And they know to follow you, to basically protect you on the way out. And so, knowing we were likely gonna be taking this exfil route, this drone operator spotted what they thought was military age men set up behind a wall, or in this field. Maybe they're gonna shoot at you guys when you leave. And so, it was not like you better go prosecute them, but just be aware. Our fire team happened to be physically closest to where those potential military-aged men, or "mams," as they're called, were. And so, we decided we would just go look. We would go over there. They told us there was this T-intersection. You could walk down the stem of the T, and you could look over this wall, and there'd be this field, and you'd see them in this field. You know, and we would be able to make a decision about what to do. Are they military-aged men? Are they kids? Are they women and children who have come back? Is it nothing? We don't know. But because it represented a risk to the entire convoy, we went over to look. So, we sneaked down this alleyway. It's dark. It's dark enough. We're on night vision. It's been quiet for a while. There's been a big lull. And so, me and the-- I think it was six other guys that I was with, we make our way down this-- the stem of the T to the T-- the head of the T. And when we get there, we realize there's been some sort of miscommunication, because we snuck down this alleyway very quietly. So, like, we've made no noise. Here we are. And we start hearing talking. And it's not English. It's Pashtun. It's-- it's on the other side of this wall. It's on the immediate other side of the wall that we're right next to, the six-foot-high wall, seven-foot-high wall. The-- it turned out there were military-aged men that were in this field. But we were of the belief we'd get to the wall, look over, and they'd be somewhere out there. Out yonder. Yeah. But they weren't. They were on the immediate other side, and they haven't heard us yet. And now we're in a similar position as when we first got into the city, where, well, we're less-- we're closer than you and I are right now, physically, to these people who don't see us. Either we engage with them, and it's as intimate as it gets, besides the wall being between us, it might as well be hand-to-hand, or we try to get out of here and figure out another way to handle this, but they're gonna hear us, probably. I mean, it's amazing they haven't heard us yet. Uh-huh. And so, without saying anything, 'cause there was-- you couldn't make any answers or any noise, the team lead, the same guy who I-- such a high opinion of, the guy who was in charge of the whole movement that night, he knew that, you know, even though, realistically, it'd be tough to defend immediately engaging with them, just 'cause we weren't entirely sure if they had guns or not. We looked over the wall, we could see that it looked very much like they had weapons. It was like, if we don't engage with them right now, there's a very high chance that this is gonna turn bad for one of us, we're gonna get shot and killed. And so the decision was made to, "Let's start shooting." And so he got down on a knee, another guy stepped on him, stepped onto his knee, and began engaging. And these-- there was at least two. I've heard as many as five. I don't really know. Two of them had, uh, grenades that they had pulled the pins out of. They were holding, like, a booby trap in case they were discovered. - Got it. -Unclear what their intentions were generally, but they were fighters, and they had grenades ready to go. And the way a grenade works is you pull the pin, you hold the spoon down, and until you release the spoon, it doesn't detonate. But imagine you get shot, and you drop the grenade, well, now you booby-trapped your body. It's a way to ensure your, you know, whoever you're up against gets hurt in the process. As soon as the shooting began, they threw those grenades over the wall, and one of them hit my shoulder and landed on the ground, and we're all very tightly -together. - Yeah. And I-- I-- I tell people that, you know, we were in the drone overhead that had spotted this. They had a targeting infrared spotlight on us. It's almost like, uh, imagine a flashlight shining down from God, but you can only see the light on-- on night vision. But it was flashing in and out, like you're in a strobe. And when the grenade came over the wall, I was not one of the people shooting. I was, like, sort of holding my position next to the guy shooting, and I see this grenade come over the wall. And what happened in the blink of an eye felt like it took ten minutes. I see it for a second in the light, and then it disappears. I see it for a second in the light, it's getting closer and closer to me, and by the time it's hitting my shoulder, I was super aware that I'm about to die. Like, full stop. There was a grenade about to kill me, and all I thought when it landed here was it's gonna blow my head off, and my mom won't be able to have an open casket, 'cause my head's gonna be fucking gone. Light goes off, light goes on again. The grenade's now falling to the ground, 'cause again, this is the fraction of a second that feels like it took ten minutes. Light on, light off, light on, and as it's falling, it got to, like, my hip level, and I'm like, "Oh, maybe, maybe I'll survive. Maybe it'll blow my legs off, and I'll get out of here alive." It finally hits the ground, and I-- it blows up, and to be honest, I was shocked at how it felt, 'cause it-- no pain whatsoever. It just felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just sort of threw it at the back of my leg. Um, I fell to the ground. It was absolute madness. I mean, the-- the thing is, is even though there had been this lull in the fighting, there were loads of fighters still in the village, in the-- in Zarganshah. And one of the things is, a lot of these fighters are-- they want to be martyrs, and they're perfectly fine with sort of dying in an effort to kill one of us, or potentially killing their own people in an effort to kill one of us. And so, as soon as the explosions and gunfighting began in this little intimate alleyway here, fighters were just firing RPGs arbitrarily in our direction, knowing full well they could be striking their own people. But it didn't matter, 'cause this is smarterdom. And so, it's like, tracers and-- and RPGs are sort of periodically being fired into this area. I'm down, my gun's falling off of me, my helmet's come off. There's pretty good a loom from the-- the moonlight, but I-- I-- I-- my vision's pretty bad. I tried to move, I couldn't move. There's just constant gunfighting happening. I have no idea the state of the people around me. I end up getting pulled. I was effectively, like, on the-- the hat of the-- of the T. I was up there. I got pulled down to the stem of the T, which was a narrow alleyway. I was dragged down there and put up against a wall. And then, whoever did that went back down to the contact zone. Just more gunfighting back and forth. And we had these, uh, tourniquets to stop the bleeding on our kit that were put on with rubber bands that were set to be quick-release, specifically, so if you're bleeding to death, -you can still quickly pull these off. -That's a good idea. You know? And I, uh, I was so weak from blood loss and just-- I was so shocked from, like-- like, actually in trauma from the shock, I couldn't break the-- the elastic band. I couldn't do it. And as I'm, like, trying to pull it off, I'm sitting with my back against this wall. To my right is, like, the bottom of the T. And that's, like, the main of Zargan Shahr. And we know there are fighters here. And I'm thinking, any moment now, fighters are gonna run down this alleyway. I'm the first thing they're gonna see. I'm gonna get shot and killed if I don't bleed to death by then anyways. And so, I can't get the tourniquet off. I'm bleeding to death. I'm looking down the alleyway. I'm like, "Well, any minute now, and I'm also-- I'm hearing the chaos at the head of the T, which is more shooting and explosions and whatnot between my team or the guys I was with and the guys on the other side of the wall. And then, all of a sudden, as I'm having this moment of knowing death is coming, my hearing completely goes, like, absolutely deaf, but I can see. And then my vision goes. But I'm totally lucid. I'm very aware that I'm alive, but I can't see and I can't hear. I'm just in this darkness in my head. And I know, for a fact, I knew this is dying. Dude, yeah, you're like Helen Keller all of a sudden. Yeah. I, uh, I tell folks, it was so matter of fact, the, um, I say, you know, in virtue of being a human, your entire life has been existence. Everything you-- Every-- Everything you've done, everything you can remember, your entire life is existing. You don't think about it. You don't wake up and think, "Today, I'm gonna exist. Today, I'm gonna breathe. Today, my heart's gonna pump." You just do it. do the things that allow you to be alive and exist. But the same way your body is very capable of seamlessly, every day, allowing you to exist and live, it's also ready to shut down. Like, you're ready to die, you just don't know it yet. It's just as familiar, but you only do it once. And I'm sitting in this void, and I know that's what's happening. And I'm like, "Fuck, like, this is it. I'm dying." It wasn't even sad, it was just like, "Fuck." - I was hung up on-- - Were you having, like, - "Wish I would, uh. " - A little. Well, I had one that was sort of funny. I was caught up on, "Will my name be in the paper for my obituary? Will it be, 'John Allen was killed in action' or 'Jonathan Allen was killed in action?'" - You thought about that. - Hung up on that. And then I also thought about the fact that I hadn't had kids yet. And I was like, "Nah, it's a bummer, like, no legacy." But then I remember this feeling of almost letting go. It felt physically like I was letting go. Um, and I just remember the feeling of hitting the dirt next to me, 'cause I was sitting, I slouched over. - Oh. - And it's like, "That's it. I'm dead. I'm very-- I'm about to die." And then, out of nowhere, my medic, who's a SEAL as well, calm as can be, he apparently came charging down the stem of the T, saw me, leaned over, pulled my tourniquets off, he managed to stop the bleed in my leg, and as I'm laying there, I, like, come to, my vision comes back, my hearing comes back. I'm still very fucked up, but I'm aware that I'm coming back to life in a way. And here's Kyle. Madness all around us. He's like, "Hey, what's going on, buddy? Uh, yep, stop the bleed. Just, uh, you know, put your gun up and, uh, just stay right there." "Just stay right here. We're gonna be just fine. Like, we're not gonna be fine. Like, it's-- it couldn't be clearer that we're not gonna be fine." But he and-- so one other guy had a collapsed lung. Did it strike you like a hallucination? Or was it, like, clear that you were co-- that you were fine, or fine-ish, and he was there? You know, it felt lucid. It did. - I think-- - It was like, it felt real. - It felt real. - Yeah, yeah. But what didn't feel real is that the experience I just had felt so real. It was like, "I'm dying now. This is-- I'm not-- I'm for sure I'm dying." And so, to open my eyes, it wasn't like, "Am I in heaven or something?" It was like, "Wait a minute. What's-- did I-- did I hallucinate that?" Um, and so, the-- the team were-- they were incredible. I mean, the blast fucked all of them up. Uh, one guy, uh, the shrapnel went into his lung and collapsed his lung. We all survived, but he-- he could-- he was basically unable to breathe. And then every breath he took, it's like his lung-- his other lung is, like, filling with blood. It's like this horrible thing. So he's getting constant needle decompressions where the medic is putting a-- a needle into his intercostal space, like, driving a needle with an opening on the back that relieves pressure in your lung. And so, he's like a porcupine with all these needles, 'cause you have to keep doing it to keep the pressure from not fully collapsing your lung. So it's just where this ragtag group-- I can't walk. There's-- they managed to call in-- they-- one of the-- the team lead, he managed to call in an airstrike on the dudes on the other side of the wall. And we managed to-- to run out of there. I-- I was hoisted up and carried. I sort of half ran. My legs are trash. I was put in a helicopter. Uh, we had a hot extract. These pararescue jumpers, these Air Force spec ops guys, they came in and they, um, they took me and the guy with the collapsed lung away. They flew us to-- to a-- a shank, the place I originally landed when I first arrived in Afghanistan for treatment. And the other five guys that were down there, like, they're-- they're broken off from the main group. They're badly beaten up. It isn't like they were unhurt. But they had to fight their way back into the city to reconnect with the rest of the SEAL team. Like, what they did was incredible. But then I got brought to a medical tent and I, uh, was wheeled in. And I-- I remember on the-- on the flight over to-- to shank, I didn't know the state of my injuries. I-- I figured I was gonna be okay at this point, but I didn't really know. And they had asked me, the PJs on the flight, like, "Hey, do you want morphine?" And I was like, "No, I don't, because in case I die, I wanna be lucid. I wanna be aware that I'm dying, you know?" Get to the medical tent, and when we're wheeled into the tent, there's all these doctors and nurses. It's a big, white, bright tent inside. They're, like, ready to do whatever surgery's required. I still didn't really know if I was okay or not. Figured I was at this point. It's been, you know, 20 minutes of riding in the helo. No one's acting like, "Oh, my God, he's dying." - Yeah. - But I just don't know. And it's just very hazy. And when I got brought in there, the SEALs that were stationed at Fob Shank, who I know all of them, um, they had been tracking that mission. There's a way to track each mission in real time when you're overseas. And they had seen that there were two SEALs who were hurt. And I guess whatever was passed to them suggested they could be catastrophic injuries that some-- both, maybe one, could die. - Mm-hmm. - And so they were in the tent. There was, like, 12 or 15 of them, like, in the back corner. They put on their best uniforms. And they were just standing there with these solemn looks on their faces as me and the guy with the lung are wheeled in, because they're basically there in case we die. - Yeah. - They're there to support us. And so I went from thinking, "I'm okay," to being wheeled into that tent and seeing them in the corner. - And it, like, hit me. - Oh, yeah. "Oh, fuck, are we, like, about to die here?" - Yeah. - And then they, like-- - Like, "This don't look good." - "Yeah, dude." - The guy gave me-- the nurse or doctor gave me ketamine, I think it was. He said, "All right. You're not gonna remember anything." Gave me ketamine, and then I-- I passed out. They did the debridement, got all the shit out of my legs. And then I-- it's-- I have no memory. I wake up, like, 20 hours later or whatever later in Germany. And it's like, "Yeah, you're fine. Bad flesh wound, but you're okay. Like, we're gonna manage your wounds, but you'll be all right." And then, like, a week after that, I was back home in Virginia, pushing a shopping cart down the aisle of Home Depot. Just back to-- back to life. - Seriously? - Yeah. - Man. - So that's-- that-- so I got medevaced from there. And then, uh, I did deploy a second time, uh, to South America years-- years later. But there's just residual physical issues, mental issues. That was a fucking shit show by the end of that deployment, um, that I was ultimately medically retired after that. - Yeah. - Yeah. - At what point did you, um, coming out of that-- like, you'd already gone to college. - Mm-hmm. - See, that opens up all kinds of opportunities, as we've been trying to explain to our 16-year-old. Um, that opens up opportunities that you may or may not want. So you'd been to college, you had military. At what point did you start conceptualizing, like, what you would-- what you do now? - Mm. Yeah. - Because it wasn't-- like, being a lawyer, so, like, I get it, you go to regular college, you go to law school, you take the bar exam. Like, I get it. - Yep. - You know? There's probably books about how to do that. - Yeah. - But then you kind of hit on this deal that isn't, uh-- that there's no blueprint. - No. - Like, do what you do now. You know? - Yeah. - So, like, what-- at what point did you start to-- to think, like, man, I'm gonna, like-- - I tell scary stories on TikTok. - Yeah, I'm gonna, like, tell scary stories. - - You know, I-- - I haven't just been through one. I might traffic in these someday, right? - Yeah, you know, it was my-- I left the military at the end of 2017, and even though I was aware I was gonna be medically retired, it doesn't happen immediately. There's a process to it. Uh, it was sort of abrupt when I finally got the orders to-- to leave, and I didn't really have a plan. I had-- - Was it unexpected? Was it-- was it, like, unwanted? - No, um, I-- I was probably gonna get out of the team. - Okay. - The truth is, is I-- I-- I was certainly, skill-wise, capable of doing the job. I think ideologically, I think I began to wonder what we were doing, why we were doing it, and I-- I honestly felt like I was a detriment to the team. I felt like I-- I wasn't a-- like, I'm a pretty outspoken person, and I remember our second rotation. So we-- our first rotation-- a rotation is your training-- a rotation is a two-year block in the teams where it's like you get ready for deployment for a year and a half with the same guys, and then you deploy for six months. So it's a two-year block called a rotation. Um, my second rotation, when I came back from Afghanistan, you know, when I have a new group of guys that I'm with, a new platoon, um, I was just such a negative Nancy. - Mm. - Like, so-- so cynical, to the point where it wasn't even funny. It was just-- I fucking hated the job. - I think I had a lot of-- - Got it, got it. A lot of resentment, a lot of just-- I don't even-- it's hard to even classify exactly why. I just was bitter about everything, and I fucking hated our leadership at SEAL Team 2, to the point where I got in open conflict with some of the very senior people who were way, way more important than me. - Yeah. - I just-- I-- I strayed away from it, and I felt like it wasn't a good-- And you recognized that the solution was to get out. So I would've gotten out. The-- part of the reason I was medically retired is I was espousing these, like, very dark views about how I felt about stuff to people around me, and they're like, "You better ought to-- - I understand. - --see somebody." Understood. If you're looking to build your credit, the OnePay Builder Card is a simple place to start. There's no credit check and no monthly or annual fees. 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And every hunt that doesn't produce because you were in the wrong spot, that's a cost you can't get back. Build a real plan before opening day with the OnX Hunt app because hope is not a strategy. Life moves fast at American Military University. They're ready to help you keep up. AMU's flexible, affordable online programs in cybersecurity, IT, space studies, and more are designed for service members, veterans, and their families. AMU provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you. American Military University, made for what's next. Learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military. Can I ask you one? I know I was asked, I wanted to get into your career now. But maybe it's not possible to answer this quickly. During that really chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, I texted a buddy of mine who'd spent many years there, in and out of there. I was like, man, what's your take on what's going on? This is just a text exchange. Sure. Should have happened a long time ago, which seems so weird to hear from someone that had so much invested in it and also that it left friends dead there. Yep. I don't know. What did you feel watching that? Truthfully, I had already had a little bit of a recognition that I didn't necessarily agree with what we did, sort of on the ground, literally what we did on deployment in Afghanistan and more broadly, the U.S. in general. So by the time the withdrawal happened, it was just sad for so many reasons and not so much because of all, you know, of course I feel bad for, a lot of the people, the civilians that got caught in the chaos of this in Afghanistan, but all the people on the NATO side that were killed in the line of duty and people that were maimed along the way. So it was like sad, you know? And I think there's no way to look at that withdrawal and feel like, oh, we won, you know? Yeah. There was no win. It was like we were there and there was a whole bunch of reasons we should or shouldn't have been there, but we were there for a long time. A lot of horrible things happened and now we're out. It was, and this is not even me trying to say, we didn't lose or something. It's more like no one really even knows what was gained or lost. It just was this tragic 20 plus years of fighting. I found that I had already begun to wonder, like there's so much, and this is important. And I say this in a, in order to be, for example, a Navy SEAL and to do a good job. If you think about what a Navy SEAL is, a Navy SEAL, and you could really make the same comparison, to any special operations with any military, you are the best warfighters that your country has to offer. And whether you like it or not, humans, they need warfighters. Even though we live in a civilized society here in the West, the reality is warfighters are going to exist, whether you agree with that or not. In order to be really good at fighting wars, you need to have a particular mindset to do it. And it's not something that you necessarily have innately. A lot of times in my exposure to having gone through the training, you're given the mindset of how to be a warfighter. You are literally trained in words and in actions by the senior people that put you through training how to be a warfighter. And a big part of it is killing is something you're going to be doing. Killing and being around death is simply a part of this job. It's not even something that we push to the side or we push to the side. Or we talk up like it's something great. It simply is a part of what you're going to be doing and it has to be normalized. It must be normalized. It's not about creating the boogeyman in the people you're going to go attack or you'll go to war with. It's about understanding that your country needs you to do this. You must be comfortable with it. And when you go through the pipeline of becoming a Navy SEAL, you are around men, because it's only been men who have been SEALs so far, who have realized that they're not going to be SEALs and they've really done and seen the worst of the worst. They've been in the thick of it and they're here to talk to you and it's so motivational. And honestly, a lot of times, the talks we would get from these grizzled veterans were never to talk about how great it was to go employ your skill set. It was like, what an honor to be the person who got to do that. Like, someone's going to do this for our country. Why not you? You should take pride in being the best at this. So then by the time you go to war, if you're. And I hate to say it this way, but it's the way it's framed. If you're lucky enough to go to war as a Navy SEAL, it's the place where your skill set is designed for it. That's what it's for. You get there and you're so ready. Mentally, I told you, that experience of being scared about that first exposure to combat, I know it's not uncommon. I don't know if a lot of people have that experience, but I know it's not uncommon. But you know what else is not uncommon? It's how quickly you completely adapt and become extremely, extremely good at being in war. Extremely good. To the point where it is fun, in a way, to go out and be, you know, to be playing, like, the most dangerous game, you know? But what ends up happening, and it's something that's taken me years to understand, is you go, you have this exposure to the thing you've been trained to do, the thing that you've built an identity around. Think about the way the world, for the most part, the way, I'm sorry, the way that I've been trained to do, is to be a Navy SEAL. And I'm not saying that I'm a Navy SEAL. I'm not saying that I'm a Navy SEAL. He had a shitty shotgun with slug rounds. He fired like one slug round. And then he gets obliterated because you can't do that. We also came into his house in the middle of the night. Now, we had intelligence that said that there was something in there worth going for. But what would happen if someone barged into your house in the middle of the night? Is it possible you might defend yourself? Yeah. Especially if your kids are there. And so those are the things that as a human being, it's hard not to be like, fuck, man, I have kids. You know? Yeah. But this is the sacrifice, in my mind, that soldiers, military folks make that go in harm's way. Of course, there's the physical sacrifice. Of course, you might die. Of course, you might get maimed. And that is an enormous sacrifice, undeniably. But there's also this other part that's described as moral injury, where you do things that you were trained to do, that you were encouraged to do, that is part of the geopolitics. This is what we're doing as a country. And you did those things. But now you've got to live with the fact that you did them. And no one's going to tell you they were wrong. You've just got to literally live with them. And that's difficult, especially when you watch that sort of half-assed exit from Afghanistan. You're like, great. Yeah. When you see other guys from your community, I mean, is there like a, I don't know, man, do you, well, let me put it this way. I got a handful of friends that were like career firefighters. Yeah. Totally different. But just the things that they have to deal with. Oh, yeah. I mean, you do that shit 20 years. I mean, the stuff that you see, the stuff that you have to deal with. Yeah. If you're a little kid, you think it's cool. Oh, yeah. Running into burning buildings, whatever. Kids want to be firefighters. You get a sense, like over time, when I'm talking to my friends, I get the sense of being like, almost like, man, I'm like, sorry, man. Do you know what I mean? I'm sorry that like all that went on. Yeah. You got to feel that way with your colleagues. You know, the one person. The person that you got to, I guess I should ask you, is that like a. No. Does that feeling pop up? You know, what's interesting about that is I'm describing effectively like the second order effects of having gone to war. And again, this is not even me trying to be humble. I just think it's important for perspective that we have been at war, you know, decades. There's been decades of war fighting and there have been so many people. That have dealt with so many combat tours in a row, like some of the Marines and the army infantry that we would see overseas. These guys are doing nine, 12 month deployments multiple times. Like these are guys that have terrible support and they're getting effed up. Their friends are dying left and right. Like there's, there's a huge amount of, of like trauma and, and, you know, problems that arise from that for sure. And I've only really gotten a little taste of that myself, but I wrong, not ironically, but there's this, there's a flip side to the coin, which is. Not equally bad, but it's bad for certain people. And that is, uh, it's referred to as chasing the dragon in, in, at least in my limited exposure to the teams, you get to a SEAL team, you don't really have a say in where you go. You get, you, you have some level of say, you know, in what platoon you get put into to a degree, but you sort of get sent off to a SEAL team. You basically get placed in a platoon of 25 guys and where you end up deploying to is. Dependent on so many different factors, but none of them are, boy, I'd really like to go to war. That's what I want to do. Like you, who can ever, everybody wants to go to war sort of how it works, but you don't really have a say in it. You just go wherever your platoon is attached to. And so there have been guys I know personally who went through all the same training as me that literally were in my graduating class that went to the same SEAL team as me that in virtue of just the, the way the cards were dealt, they never went and saw combat as nothing. Nothing to do with capacity at all. It's just your platoon didn't go. That creates enormous problems for guys that do all the training to go be in a VC. Really? Oh yeah. It's called chasing the dragon. As you keep reenlisting, you keep staying in because you hope you get to go to war soon. But then what if you never do? It's like you've, you've chased that thing you never got to do. And so those guys, they struggle with like imposter syndrome, like big time imposter syndrome. And so that, that's an issue that I definitely see as well. But in terms of like, there's another one, survivor's guilt. It's a big one. There's, there's the literal survivor's guilt where, you know, somebody died, you live there. You see that I, I've seen it firsthand with some people that I know, but actually the, one of the guys that helped save my life, the, the medic, he, uh, so he, from an injury perspective, physical injury perspective, the grenade blast, I don't think it actually physically harmed him that he was concussed by it. He was every bit. It is affected by it, but from a, a like mechanical injury perspective, he was not really injured and he saved my life. He, he, he did all these things that saved people's lives. I mean, you can, you can point to the people that are alive because of him, the rotation before that. So when I was not at a team, I was in training. He was, he's older than me. He did a rotation to Afghanistan on the previous tour. And he as well was a medic on the ground. And he was involved in a couple of, I think there was an IED blast where one person, uh, he had his leg. He survived, but you know, like he was, uh, the medic was a part of saving his life. I think there was another guy who, another IED blast where the medic is close to both of these things, but never actually got hurt. He saved their lives completely, but this person, he developed this, this feeling that somehow he was like lucky, but in like a, in a bad way that like, ugh, like I'm the guy that never really got hurt. Everybody else is getting hurt. Everybody else is bleeding for their country. And I'm, I'm just in the right place at the right time. And it became like a big problem for him that he felt bad because it's hard to imagine that, but the, the way the, the men, frankly, that I've seen in, in special operations, it's so like you want so badly to be somebody that the others rely on and trust. It's like reputation is everything. And that anything that could potentially damage the way you view yourself, if you think your reputation is damaged, it's, it's crushing. So like the guys chasing the dragon, they worry that frankly, guys like myself, even though I've had again, the one combat tour that I somehow think less of them because they haven't seen combat. I don't, not at all. I'm, I'm like, I've done one tour, similarly, guys that have been close to tragedy, close to death and destruction, but they themselves never were hurt. They as well suffer from this idea of do other people think that I just got really lucky, even though you saved these people's lives, like you're winning awards for saving people's lives, dude. So it's just like, it's a big mind fuck, to be honest. There's just so much identity wrapped up in it. And I think I struggle with it a lot on the way out. You, you have kids, you got a boy? I do have a boy, I have a son who's about to be six and two, and two girls who are older. Would you let him do what you did? Like if you, if you had a say in it? I don't know. I mean, would I want him to be a SEAL? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. You know, Bo Jackson told me that he wouldn't let his kid play football. No kidding. Wow. What did he say? Did he give a reason? Yeah. Head. I can't remember the details, but yeah, banging your head. I think that in a way, the becoming a SEAL and going through the experience that I had, there, there are many things about it that I, you know, I don't, I don't regret it. I don't regret it. I feel, you know, like there are some issues with what I did. Me, personally, internally, I struggle with some stuff that, that happened and how I conducted myself, but it taught me so much about resilience. It taught me so much about accountability, even if it's just my own accountability. It also, frankly, in a weird way, set me up to be really able to handle the, the pressure of being a YouTuber. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, yeah, yeah, because, I mean, don't get me wrong. It's gotta seem like child's play, man. It, it does and it doesn't, you know, it's, it's weird. Yeah, so I, I leave the military and I end up, by happenstance, I posted something on TikTok that went viral. It was me telling a story about these missing hikers. It was this mystery. It goes super viral and I've always loved telling stories. I didn't really have a, a clear career path and I was like, "Well, what the hell? I'll tell more stories. I like telling stories." Okay, hang tight for a second because I wanna, I wanna understand, like, a, a transition piece here. Yeah. Like, I'm sitting where I am because I've always made minor turns. Yep. Very minor turns and none of them were a question. Mm. Like, I was gonna be a writer from a young age. Yep. And, like, I've just made minor swerves. Yep. And here I sit, okay, but you went, you went, like, um, like, solid, solid 90. Yeah. Okay, um, was it, were you sort of, like, did you have a, "What do I do now?" Or did you have a, "I know exactly what I'm gonna do now"? You know, I've discovered that I do well with not-slight turns. I do well with, like, 180s or 90s, not 180s, 90s. Um, when I, you know, growing up, I was around very smart people, my parents, my sisters, like, brilliant minds, like, academically very successful. And I certainly had the aptitude to, to probably be as successful as they were academically, but I just wasn't really interested in it. I, I preferred to go drink in the woods with my friends and not go to school. Um. But then, uh, I went to college because my mom wrote my college essay, got me into school, and I immediately, after one semester, effectively flunked out. I technically withdrew, but bad behavior, you know, horrible grades, it was clear that I was not cut out for college, so in order to avoid expulsion, I came back home, uh, to live in my mom's basement and figure out my life. And it was in the moment when I came home that I realized what a mess I had made of my life. You know, like I've had all these things handed to me. I shouldn't even have been allowed to go to college. I had bad grades. If it weren't for that essay, I wouldn't have gotten in. I wasn't paying for college. My parents were. And so I had a, probably the first time at the age of 18, you know, I'm in my mom's basement being like, huh. So it's not really cool that I've rebelled from not being a, an academic, like my family. I've just become a loser. You know, I shit the bed in high school, college, and now what? And my, my mom, God love her. She was ruthless. And I came, when I came home, she's like, cool. You want to go to college? You figure it out. You pay for it. You do it yourself. Uh, you're going to pay rent, you know, you're going to get a job and you're, you're an adult. Like you figure it out. And I needed that. But I found that I, I thrived when it was like, well, I better, better make a drastic change in my life. Got it. And I decided I would go to school locally. I went to UMass Boston, which was not a community college, but you could basically get in if you're from Massachusetts. I got a job at a gym scanning ID cards at like 5am to let people in. I'd ride my bike there at like five in the morning and I'd scan ID cards and I'd go to the school and I'd study philosophy because I thought I'd go to law school. But, um, I sort of, it was the first time I'm like, wow, I'm taking my life. Into my own hands and doing something on my own. And it was like really powerful. And then it was around the time that I'm realizing the power of, I'm going to be an adult. I'm going to go to school. I'm going to have a job that I have that not chance encounter, but that really intense encounter with the two brothers where I'm discovering that these guys I had written off as just random dudes at cookouts to like Navy SEAL commandos. And I was so taken with what they did. And they all talked about it being this calling to go be a SEAL. They talked about how, No. You know, I screwed a bunch of stuff up, but I decided, you know what? I want to see if I can do this because I just want to see. And they, they went off to SEAL training and I'm like, that kind of fits my mold. You know, like I've kind of fucked some things up. I'm on the straight and narrow now, but I don't know if I want to be a lawyer. I kind of liked the idea of the survey going to the military. And so I didn't really tell my parents. They knew that I was considering the SEAL teams, but not, they didn't know how committed I was to it. But in my mind, I was like, I'm going to graduate college. Cause I felt, I feel like I want to finish the thing I said I was going to do. I'm going to graduate college and then I'm going to go be a SEAL. That's my new thing. And so I began training for that. I graduate college. I go, go to SEAL training. It's such a departure from academia. It's the opposite. It might as well, might as well be. Uh, I, I did well with like sudden and complete change, but I think I've also done well when there's something on the line, you know, with, uh, with becoming a good student and graduating college. I think what drew me to that is it's binary. Either you'll do it and you'll, you'll prove everybody, everybody wrong, or you won't. And you'll be the loser that, you sort of have become now, the guy in his basement with no, no future. And then with SEAL training, it was like, you'll either succeed or you won't. And if you don't, people are going to know. They're going to be like, man, you didn't make it. Not, not shocked. Right. And you'll be chipping paint on the side of the USS, you know, whatever in Japan. And, and so when I got through SEAL training, I actually realized that I think I'm someone who does well with big, huge life changes. And so part of the reason I think I soured on the SEAL team so much when I was in, after I came back from Afghanistan, and I was negative Nancy, I think it's in part because it's like, all right, I became a SEAL, like I kind of over this, you know, I'm struggling with, with doing the same thing. And so I, again, I recognize that I probably was not an asset. I was a detriment. And then when I got out, it was like, okay, now what? And I floundered around a little bit. I started a charity that helped veterans get jobs. It was a small time thing. I did some consulting work, but I didn't get paid. I was following Gary Vaynerchuk and Gary V. You know, he's, he's, he's a, he's an older guy who he's been like on social media since before social media, he's like an early influencer. And he, um, his message, if you were to distill it down to one thing is everybody should make content because the barrier to entry is near zero. Pretty much everyone's got a phone and an internet connection. And if it doesn't work, you don't lose much other than maybe you embarrass yourself online. But if it works, you can build brands. You can, there's all this opportunity. Right now, you know, with social media, with content creation. And so I was like, oh, fuck it. I'm okay with embarrassing myself that way. But yeah. And I, uh, I began posting content. This is like 2019. I'm out of the military. Don't know what I'm going to do. Uh, and this is actually a part of my chapter of my life that was so painful. I initially began making content around being a seal because like, what else is there to talk about? And I don't really know what else I would talk about. And it was, I would call it pretty benign. I was very cognizant of not sharing anything sensitive. It isn't like I'm sharing details that you're not supposed to hear, but it was sort of a, Hey, look at me. I'm a Navy seal was definitely the vibe. And I attracted the ire of the entire active duty community. I was disowned, like aggressively disowned. People thought that I was like, who's this fucking dude. This one two platoon wonder thinks he's the man like talking about, I was hated reviled. And you know, it's funny. There's so many seals. There's content everywhere about Navy. There may be still movies, Navy seal books like that's everywhere. And, um, but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that, and I'm part of this in some ways, but it's really the minority of seals are actually part of the loud Navy seal stuff. That's, that's the thing I've wondered about. Like, is the, what is the, how, what is the ratio equivalent to the media politics? Is it that there's so that it's not a higher than the normal public or it's, but it's gotta be higher than the normal public to be in high profile positions coming out of the seals. It's, it's, it's weird how many seals are, are like in public doing stuff, whether it's creating politics, they're everywhere. And, and God love them. Like I, I pretty much know all of them at this point, the guys that are out and they're awesome dudes. And then trust me, like how people perceive them is often very different than they really are. Um, so, uh, there, there is a huge contingent of active duty seals that really look at anybody who goes out in public and talks about being a seal in any capacity as like, that's not allowed. That's not allowed. But then they can't go on social media to say it. It's very true. But you know what you end up getting is you end up getting like phone calls and emails and you, you get people that are private communications. People are, these are, they are not afraid of conflict. Like think about it. Imagine, imagine being actively detested by a police officer. You can't go, go to war. And so I was living in Virginia beach and I was aware that there was a growing feeling of disdain towards me. And I noticed it because guys I served with in Afghanistan were sending me messages, be like, bro, I do not agree with what you're doing online. Like it's a fucking embarrassment. Go fuck yourself. And, and truthfully, I was, I felt like I was conducting myself in a way that was not sellout, so to speak. But now looking back at it, I was totally being like, Hey, I'm a Navy seal. me on the internet you know um no matter how i dressed it up that's that's effectively what it was and if i was active duty and i saw me doing the things i was doing i would have a similar opinion who the is this dude like he's you did like one tour to afghanistan and now you're gonna represent the seal teams meanwhile all the guys inside the teams they know in virtue of my limited experience that i am fully aware there are dudes in the teams who are active who've done 15 combat tours yeah that will never say a word got it and i know they exist but by going out in public and talking about my experience i'm sort of allowing the public to sort of wow like this guy he he's the top of the top wow but the guys in the community are like you know what you're doing you're allowing civilians to view you in a really high way um and so it got to a point where i i did grow i mean a modest following i think there was like 50 000 people total that followed my content uh about seals um and it was devastatingly painful it was not worth any of it because i'd open up my dms and it's like just a list of people that they want me to know who they are this is not anonymous this is like this is my name here's my phone number here's my email here's where i live and here's how i feel about you and it was like deep cutting and it was like every little thing i said on the internet it would be they would examine it and they would say here here are the details about this particular incident in afghanistan here's what really happened and it would be you know some absolutely fine nuanced issue that sure technically i'm wrong but the whole point is you're you're up for doing this and it was devastating and i did mr ballen didn't exist i don't have oh i'll just go tell scary stories everything will be fine i i don't really have anything i don't i don't really have a meaningful career i'm sort of starting social media if you will and i made the decision to just delete it all i was like this is oh really simply no and it wasn't now i'll get my friends back gone bridges are burned you know it's not it's not going to be damage control it's protect my mental health really we're all saving for something whether it's a trip a concert or upgrading your car one pay is the banking app that gives you more for what matters earn 3 cash back on up to 150 in monthly spending when you choose categories like walmart gas or dining so you're rewarded for what you already buy plus with high yield savings your money keeps growing you can even turn on roundups with your one pay builder card to save a little more with every purchase one pay is the banking app trusted by millions of americans download the one pay app or visit onepay.com and sign up for free today one pay is a financial technology company not a bank banking services provided by coastal community bank or lead bank members fdic cashback is earned as one pay points redeemable into a one pay deposit account or other available options individual reward details can be found in the one pay app see one pay rewards terms at onepay.com forward slash rewards dash terms spring turkey season is one of the best times to hand the hunt over to your kid part of the problem hunting turkeys with kids is a lot of the pre-game stuff is all happening in the dark they can't really visualize what you're talking about but with onyx hunt you can show them what you're talking about on your phone and make the whole thing real let them learn why their moves work and why they don't you can show them exactly where you're allowed to hunt you can decipher directions and you can show them exactly where you're allowed to hunt you can decipher directions and judge distance on a gobbler with waypoints in compass mode and build a setup together instead of just telling them what to do it turns a morning in the woods into a lesson they'll carry the rest of their hunting life download the onx hunt app and use spring turkey season to make better hunters one spring morning at a time life moves fast at american military university they're ready to help you keep up amu's flexible affordable hunting app is a great way to keep up with your hunting programs and cyber security it space studies and more are designed for service members veterans and their families amu provides the support you need to take the next step wherever life takes you american military university made for what's next learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military and so i just want to say thank you so much for joining me today and i'll see you next time i delete everything and i didn't you know reach out i never tried to get mad at anybody i i for the most part just accepted that people felt a type of way about me and then in my now what do i do not just oh god what content do i make no more broadly like what do i do with my life now i uh i did experiment a little bit with social media not seal stuff at all didn't go anywhere very cringy just like stupid shit no one was paying attention to it i was still sort of doing uh consulting and doing some charity work but i didn't really have a purpose and then it was just i i i've always been a huge fan of strange dark and mysterious true stories just personally i love mysteries not like not like murder mysteries i'm talking like world mysteries like crazy stuff like people going missing in the woods and crazy evidence found about them stuff like that and there's this one story that always fascinated me about these hikers that go off into the russian mountains in the 50s and they vanish and tell me tell me a quick version of the story so these these nine hikers this is this is the this is your breakout this is the breakout yeah so in 1959 this is something you're already aware of or you find out yeah no this is a story you already liked i love this story i thought it was fascinating and i had i've been again doing stuff with social media but at this point i don't view it as the thing i'm going to be doing yeah you know the the seal stuff i'm never doing that again it's been it's gone from the internet so i don't have a presence at all and i was like you know just i'll try telling the story because i think it's really cool like i personally love scary real stories so these nine hikers they're the most experienced hikers in russia in 1959 and they were going out to do what's called their level three hiking test which is like the the top mountaineering certification you could do in russia at the time so if you pass this test you are like the top mountaineer in the land and the way it works is it's sort of like when you get your phd you do your own research you sort of present your own stuff you you build new information into the zeitgeist well with this it's so this this this test is so advanced you plan the route and you show with how how hard it is to do this route that if you can complete this you are a level three hiker and so you map it out and you give it to the whoever's administering the test i think it's a university and then you go out and you do it and if you successfully navigate the route you've given then oh you're a level three hiker and so these hikers they they go out and they've given their route to the university and they have these rendezvous points and and how long it's going to take them and they set out and they bring cameras along and these these are like nine young fit like happy just like beautiful young people a lot of them are dating each other and they're like taking selfies it's 1959 like i mean it's almost odd the pictures they're taking because they seem so current how many miles they hiking we can look it up but it's it's a decent distance this is going to take weeks to hike through the year old mountains this is a big hike this is a multi week long not running up a peak or something now this is this is serious like an excursion like a like an expedition i got yeah and so they often into the mountains they go and the year old mountains are these huge windswept just like snow and ice there's little pockets of forest down below but it's mostly like just jagged ice just peaks everywhere and so into the mountains they go and then they don't turn up for their they they don't finish the route on time i don't know if they hit one or two of their rendezvous points but i think it was february 12th of 1959 they were supposed to be in the mountains and they were supposed to be in the mountains and they weren't and remember the people that are that are overseeing this test they're talking about these are like the best mountaineers and so if they're delayed no one's like oh my god we need to go get them it's more like all right something happened they'll be out of here so a little bit time passes uh and they're they're waiting to hear from them and they still don't come out of the out of the mountains no one so a month goes by and they haven't turned up and the families of these nine hikers are really they're concerned and they're getting in touch with the university and police and finally they they're getting in touch with the university and police they launch this pretty lame search for the for the hikers um it's just like students and teachers and a few police i think went out as well and they hike their way up to the this this huge mountain face they're down in this valley looking up at this mountain face and it's all snow and ice and they see there's this one canvas tent that's just conspicuously located on the side of this mountain like in a really strategically nasty spot to put your tent it's very sloped it's windswept like it's an awful place to be camping out and they're like oh my god i don't know what to do they don't see any people and they they walk up and they find the tent is is vacant and the hikers are gone and the tent is it's collapsed there's some snow on top of it but they open it up and inside is a lot of the equipment that the hikers had left behind you know cold weather equipment is in there and um also they noticed that the tent on one of the sides of the tent it had been cut open and they were able to determine it had been cut open from the inside out so someone had cut the tent open from inside and they were able to determine that they at this point the search got much bigger because now they're like something obviously has happened it's like negative 40 degrees out here they've been missing for a month here's their abandoned campsite something's off here a bigger search goes out there and they end up picking up footprints that were near the campsite that are going down the mountain sort of on the far side of the mountain and the footprints are some are two boots some are one boot and a barefoot some are two bare feet and they're making their way down the mountain they find at least eight sets of prints and the cadence of the tent is like it's like it's like it's like it's like it's like the steps was walking pace so they're not running so they're starting to put together this mental picture of like okay wait a minute so these hikers all the tracks are the same vintage what do you mean like they feel they were all sets of tracks or travel at the same time yes okay all the same time and so they're like all right so they cut the tent open left their stuff behind exited the tent with one boot on no boots on in negative 40 degrees and they're walking not running walking down the side of the mountain and they don't know that's all seen so far they follow the tracks down and at the base of these this mountain it brings them to this forest and the the the prints sort of disappear into the forest they go in the forest and they find uh three of the hikers they're deceased there's a big cedar tree that is uh it's in this clearing and at the base of the clearing is this burned out little fire like a puny fire wouldn't have been enough to keep you warm and one of the hikers one of the men is curled around it like he was trying to get warm and he's got tattered clothing on and he's died of hypothermia and then it's the tree there was signs that one of them or multiple of these hikers had tried to climb the tree there were broken branches pretty high up and there was human tissue pretty high up on the tree but no one's in the tree and the other two hikers are found nearby in similar states of decomposition they're down they're died of hypothermia and their clothes are pretty ragged but like they've hiked down here and they've died so three of the nine hikers have been found they also find that one of the hikers i think it was the one who was near the fire actually had flesh from his hand that was in his mouth as if he was eating his hand and i'm actually i don't know if it was hand but it was definitely his flesh so they they look and they can't find the rest of the oh i'm sorry they find uh two other hikers nearby so five have been found four are missing so five sort of scattered around in this forest starting with this tree unclear what happened to them all died of exposure and they are indeed missing boots and missing their equipment so it's like okay i don't know what brought them down here but they died of exposure thus they they found it was too hard to look for the remaining four hikers so it's like okay i don't know what brought them down here but they four because the weather was quite bad it's the winter and so they waited until may because at this point the search party's like probably the other four are dead there's no way you know they're alive and so sure enough in may so a couple months later they go back out there to look when the snow's melted a bit and they find this collapsed snow cave that they hadn't seen in february and they find the other four hikers that are in this this collapsed snow cave they're dead uh but their injuries are catastrophic uh one one man he had a crush injury that that was consistent with being struck by of a speeding train or a speeding car, but he had little to no lacerations or bruising on his chest. Like, his chest was caved in, but missing was, like, the mechanism -by which this happened. - Yeah. Um, the woman-- Oh, there was a man who was missing his eyeballs. Could have been predation, though. So, at first, they're like, "Okay." And then the woman, she was-- Her lips were missing, and they looked like they had been surgically removed. And her eyelids and her eyeballs were also missing. But again, they sort of chalked it up -to this is potentially predation. - Yeah. Um, but it was noted that the lines of-- of, like, the lips being gone were-- were fairly neat. Almost like what you see with cattle mutilations. Yeah, this got cattle mutilation vibes to it. - Big time. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, the woman had on men's clothing, or some-- some men's clothing, and the men had some of the women's clothing on. No one was dressed appropriately. And there were trace levels of radiation-- small-- but trace levels of radiation on the clothing. So, they're all dead. And so, all nine hikers are now accounted for. The-- the best malware of all the mountaineers in the land have all died under this totally bizarre condition. And the families were outraged, you know? 'Cause it just seemed like, "Okay, well, what-- you have to get to the bottom of this." -Like, something obviously happened out there. - Yeah. And so, the-- the government, they did launch a-- initially, pretty hardy investigation. Uh, by this point, it was sort of a known, uh, drama unfolding in Russia. People were aware of this story. Uh, but then, Russia quickly shut the investigation down and said, "Okay, we're-- we're done investigating it." They said a-- an-- an unknown-- no, no, I'm sorry. They said a compelling force was what-- what was responsible for their deaths. And then they-- The ones in the snow cave. A com-- all of them. All of them, their deaths were because of a compelling-- or either compelling or overwhelming force. And there was no further explanation. What the hell does that mean, though? No one knew. And the case was-- They don't mean, like-- they don't mean. exposure. No, they didn't say they died from exposure. They said they died from-- they died from a compelling or overwhelming force. But would exposure be bucketed under compelling force or not? You know what I'm saying? Like-- I don't know. I mean, the-- the thing is, is you gotta figure that, by now, I'm sure there's some issue with translation, you know? But the-- the-- the reason this story took on a life of its own is because they sh-- they-- they-- the-- the case itself, at the time, was made confidential. - Yeah. - And so, years later, this is actually the reason I told it at the time. This is in 2020, I told that story. Uh, the pictures were redacted. Some of the pictures were redacted. You can go for yourself and see pictures from not just the-- the ones the-- the hikers took before whatever happened to them happened, and they're very eerie. I mean, like I said, there's selfies. Everyone's so happy. This is so great. This is like a-- you know, a-- a formality doing this test. Even though it was hard, they knew what they were doing. They were gonna ace this test. And there's, like, a couple pictures taken at the tent, the one that they would ultimately find. And everyone's fine. They're getting ready for bed. And then something happens. And then the next pictures you see are of their bodies being found, and they're, like, in various stages of decay. -You can-- you know. - Yeah, yeah. It's eerie. And then on top of that, there was multiple reports from military and civilians in Russia that reported seeing what they called fireballs over the Ural Mountains. Hard to say what these were, if they really coincided with where these hikers were in the mountains. The Ural Mountains are huge. But there were numerous independent reports of around the same timeframe that those hikers were out there, there were fireballs shooting up and down up into the sky, including a senior military official said as much. But it was never-- no one figured out what it was. And so it's just this big mystery. Years later, I would tell a 60-second version of that story, thinking, "I think that's really fascinating." And the way I told it, it was on TikTok, when TikTok had really just begun its thing. And I-- and I also thought it was safe to post on TikTok, because no SEALs are gonna be on TikTok. Like, I can do the new thing over there, and no one's gonna be mad at me. And I told the story, and I said, "At the end of this story, you're gonna Google two words, and the words are, 'Dyatlov Pass,' because that's the name of this mystery." - Okay. - And if you Google it, you can see pictures. So I-- and then I tell this quick version, and I ended it on, "You should Google Dyatlov Pass. It's fascinating." And I was at this water park in Pennsylvania in 2020 with my family, Great Wolf Lodge, this indoor water park. - Oh, no, yeah. - Love 'em. - I've been to one of those with my kids. - Huge water park family. And I tell it, and then I left my phone in the room, 'cause I'm going down the water park with my wife and kids, and I don't want my phone wet. I'm like, I'm never away from my phone. But I left my phone in the room, and I came back, a couple hours later, and there was over five million views on that video. And I've never gotten any attention on the internet ever, besides negative attention, really. Um, and I was like, "Wow, this is something that's divorced from being a SEAL. I'm fascinated by it. I love telling stories." And, uh, I wasn't like, "Boy, here's a career." But it was like, "Oh, here's a spark. I don't know what this is. Like, I'll tell more stories." I love telling stories. And TikTok wasn't even monetized, really, at the time at all. It was just like, "Cool, someone's paying attention." And so I went into a flurry of, just telling every story I could find about missing lighthouse keepers, and aliens, and all the stuff I could find. But you're doing-- Are you doing original research and chasing things back to sort of like primary source? Or are you just kind of reading people's work and delivering stories? I think I-- So the way that I've done it is definitely of the latter variety, where I'm not pretending that I've discovered these stories. Oh, boy, look what I found out. It's more like, I'm gonna tell you a story that you might have heard of, but you've not heard of it -the way I'm gonna tell it. - Yeah, got it. And the way I typically tell stories is, I am really good at holding information until the end. So there's always something to wait for, -a plot twist or a reveal. - Yeah. Not to the point where it's like, "Come on, bro. We know the thing that you've hid, the obscurity thing that you did. We know what it is." It's like, I told a story, well, as an example, there was this couple in Utah in the '70s. They're out on their first date. It's not going well. They're at a diner. There's no chemistry. They both know it's not going well. They know at the end of this, you know, diner date, they're just gonna go home and probably never see each other again. And so the guy, who's not normally a particularly adventurous guy, he says to the girl at the end, he's like, "Hey, you wanna, like, just ditch this thing and go for a hike with me right now?" Like, it's nighttime, you know? And she would later say she was so caught off guard by it, and he seemed so like-- he knew it was an awkward request. It was almost like they both recognized, "This date ain't shit. This isn't going anywhere. We got nothing to lose." And she's like, "You know what? Yeah, let's do it. Let's go on a hike together." "In the middle of the night. Whatever. Let's go." And so suddenly, the date is really exciting. It went from, "This is gonna be nothing," to like, "Great. Oh, my God." Their chemistry's picking up. They go outside. They hop in the car. They drive over to this canyon where this guy apparently went hiking all the time, and he reassured her, like, "It's a known trail. We'll just go up this overlook. It's a beautiful site. The moon's out. We'll come back, and that'll be it." So, like, now it's exciting. This date's going great. And so they start hiking into the woods. You know, it's dark out, but decent illumination. And as they're walking, they're hoping and they're holding hands. There's nobody out. And they both would later say that for some reason, as they're walking, it just started feeling like something was wrong. There was something off. They couldn't place it, but they don't know each other. They don't have the ability to be like, "Hey, do you feel something weird here?" It was like, they don't have a history with each other. So they both quietly are feeling like this sense of dread come over them as they walk deeper and deeper into this forest, which again, it's a marked trail, but it's nighttime. Who's going hiking in the canyon at night? And so deeper and deeper into the woods they get. And they both, at some point, are, like, speed walking 'cause they had to go to a turnaround point that was gonna be, "That's where we're gonna go. We're gonna look out over the canyon, then we're gonna turn and come back." And so as their dread is building, they're, like, naturally speeding up, like, "Let's just get there, turn around, come back." They stop talking to each other. It's no longer fun. They're just silently maneuvering into the woods. And at some point, the guy, he steps on something that he remembers thinking it felt soft. And he's looking straight ahead. He's not looking down. He steps on something. He steps on something soft, and he stops. And he's holding the girl's hand, and she feels him stop, and she stops, too. She doesn't step on anything. And the two of them, without saying anything, without investigating, without doing anything, they just instantly-- they have not reached the turnaround. They turn, and they leave the canyon. Boom, they leave the canyon, right? And by the time they get out of the canyon, like, they didn't really even talk about what happened. They're both, like, so relieved to be out of the canyon, like, "Oh, my God, that was kind of scary out there. Like, oh, man, I don't know if I want to do that again. Ha ha ha." So they end up leaving. And this experience, even though they have no idea what that was, it meant really not much to them. It was like they spooked themselves. That's what they thought it was. It ended up bonding them, and they got married. This couple ends up getting married because of this weird first date that, like, sort of went badly and good at the same time. Yeah. Years later, they're at home, and the TV's on. And one of them, the husband or the wife, is in the kitchen. The other is watching the TV. And there's a reporter who's on the TV, and they're talking about this interview they've just conducted with this death row inmate. And, like, apparently, this inmate had given their tell-all before they are gonna get executed. And they cut to the interview with this person. And it's the journalist and the death row inmate. And the journalist says something to the effect of, "Was there ever a time before you got caught that you almost got caught? Like, was there ever a time it almost happened before the jig really was up?" And this death row inmate's like, "Actually, yeah. I was out in Provo Canyon one night in the night in 1970, whatever it was, and I had just killed this girl. And I was dragging her across the road to hide her off the side of the trail. And this couple, out of nowhere, comes bombing around the corner, and the guy stepped on the body. Oh, yeah. And I thought I'd have to kill him. But for some reason, they just turned around and they left. That was the only time. It turned out that the couple had accidentally walked into Ted Bundy, the most infamous serial killer -of all time. -Oh, your kid was Ted Bundy. There you go. We-- we had this serial killer. a series we were doing called Close Calls. There's a story about, we interview a game warden at length who was working a serial poacher case. Never got anywhere on it, but one night he trailed him for a long time, following his truck and lost him. He got out to look at a mud puddle and determined that his truck hadn't gone through the mud puddle because the mud wasn't stirred up the way he thought it would be. So he goes off in a different direction. Oh, boy. But he got out and examined the mud puddle. And he's like, no, he didn't go this way, and takes off. Later, there's a guy, I can't remember what event he got caught for, but there's a guy in for something much more serious than serial poaching. And he's telling a guy a story. He's telling a story. One night, I was being trailed by a game warden. And I drove through a big puddle, parked my truck behind a juniper, and got out with my rifle. And I was going to hose him with my rifle the minute he crossed in front of me. And he goes, and that lucky son of a bitch got out, stared into that mud puddle, and drove off in a different direction. And then this guy went and met with him and talked to him. So yeah, very similar story where this guy realized he was later. This game warden realized. Dang. Stories like that are crazy. No, it's wild, man. So how many? Do you have now? Like, how many stories do you have? I mean, I know you got like, you got like millions of people that tune into your stories. I mean, so the way we structure the stories, a lot of times are like per episode on YouTube, there'll be like two or even three individual stories that are within the episode. They're not connected. It's just individual stories. And so if you look at each story individually, not total of uploads, because our total uploads on YouTube is like five or 600 or something. We're probably north of 1,000 or 1,200. And in the early days, it was just me Googling, finding stuff, writing it, and doing it. Now we have a team of people. Ironically, my sister, she's brilliant. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She came over from the Boston Globe. She's my chief creative officer. She heads the writing room up for me. And my mom, who's also a professional writer who wrote my college essay, she's written for me. So she's writing for you again. Yeah. But we have a great writer's room. A lot of care has gone into figuring out how to find people. And people that can really write in my voice. And then even though we have a great system of creating scripts, invariably, I think one of the things that I've just gotten good at doing is we tell the story. But I will often riff and sort of take the story as it needs to go on days we film. But yeah, 1,000 plus stories easily. Yeah. That's crazy. It's so weird. I mean, that one viral moment on TikTok. What year was that? That was in 2020. What year did you get injured? Well, I got injured in 2014. I finally was officially discharged end of 2017. Okay. And so I'm a civilian again, January 2018. Okay. So you were cast about two years. I was an outcast. Then you found your Russian hikers. Yeah, dude. And I'll say this about the people that had the most negative things to say to me from the teams. It took time. But I mean, after I fully changed and was doing this new venture, two things. One, I've never once. Publicly bad mouthed or in any way insinuated that anything those guys did was wrong, but rather it was just really painful and that in many ways I brought it on myself. I know the culture of the teams. I was a seal. I know how people view that stuff. Um, so I think like the fact that I wasn't making excuses and sort of said, okay, this isn't working, I don't want to do this anymore. And then I started doing something new that is, you know, it's a new venture has nothing to do with being a seal. Um, I think that that in many ways it didn't get. It didn't get me back in by any stretch, but I think people respected and appreciated that I saw what I was doing, stopped it and did something new. And I've, I've gotten loads of messages from people that are now very supportive, which is nice to see. Yeah, yeah. It's great to see. Yeah. It's not like, Hey, we're cool now. It's more like, I respect that. I respect that you heard it and you changed. That's cool. Yeah. Tell me about the book you got there. Yeah. So actually I brought this one for you. Uh, this is our third book. Uh, it's called the terror within. Um, it's a graphic novel. It's nine stories. Uh, each of them can live on their own. Uh, it basically is like us, you know, we do the strange, dark and mysterious as sort of our, our, our genre. And so we've chosen stories that intentionally sort of touch on each of those genres as we see them. Uh, it's beautifully illustrated. You can pick it up and just grab one story and just go for it. Um, but yeah, that's our third one. So it's called the terror within the theme. The through line of this one is, uh, it's sort of like, you don't know who. You never know who's walking down the street near you. Like you don't know what people are really capable of, like the terror within all of us. Yeah. Um, there was some crazy statistic, even though this is really nothing to do with serial killers, but right now, and this is going to be, someone's going to fact check me and say I'm wrong, but the gist is there. There's something like several thousand right now in the United States, uncaught serial killers. Sure, man. And it's like, that could be your barber. That could be the person at the grocery store with you. And so this is sort of. Poking at this idea that there's, there could be darkness and people that you just don't know about. So it's, it's a great story. It comes out October 6th and you can pre-order it right now. Terror within finding an Amazon or whatever. Yep. Pretty much anywhere you get your books. And so this is actually for you. I'll sign it and give you a whole merch box for you, including I got, I wear flannels in all of my, in everything I do. And I got you a sick flannel as well. Pass that along to you. Let me hit you with a couple of quick ones. Yeah. This is simple as yes or no, or you can get a little more if you need to. Are you like a. Bigfoot guy. Cause you like the occult and you like the unexplained. Like you, are you a legitimate bigfoot guy? I wouldn't say, oh, so I can't do short answer. I'll give the shortest answer. I wouldn't say I'm a true bigfoot guy, but I am definitely open to the idea of it. Okay. Okay. Do you feel that there are like, um, aliens running around right now, um, in, in, in, um, planet earth? I think that the chance that there's life outside of human and the life that we know, uh, I think it's high, uh, I would say, I don't know. I, I, yeah. Life, life. Sure. Somewhere I think is extraordinarily high. Are they chilling here? I think, no, me, that's me. That's me. I'm not the guest. If I'm being super pointed about it, I'm gonna be cynical and say no. Yeah. But I, I would say the reason I say no is I am of the belief that if there's life out there, I have this analogy. That's not mine. It's, it's one Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist gives where it's like, we, we're comprised of X number of DNA strands, like let's call it a hundred DNA strands make us human chimpanzees are like 98 of the human 100, but two are different. Carrots are 67. You get the idea. And it's like, we automatically assume that you will think of how do we treat chimpanzees? How do we treat carrots? Well, chimpanzees, we put in zoos and we, we test. We eat, I made some pickled carrots on my garden last night. Or like earthworms. You don't stop and chat with an earthworm. You step on an earthworm and don't, don't even notice it. And, and so. When I think about life outside of planet earth, I wonder, sometimes are we wrong for assuming that we automatically are like equal to the other life out there? What if we're the earthworm? What if we're the ant, are we so insignificant that they wouldn't even notice us? And so my cynical mind says that that's why I don't think there's very likely aliens. Just boy, I can't wait to talk to these humans. These guys are great. Yeah. What, what I don't, what, what I don't get, what I don't accept is that they would, that whatever life is out there, molds, bacteria, some, some thing, um, that humans have this thing where we want them to like kind of resemble us and share our motivations. Yes. But there are, there have been millions. There have been millions of species on earth. There are currently tens of millions of species on earth. Only one shares our motivations. Right. That's true. Yeah. That's shocking. And we've only been transmitting electronic signals for a hundred years. So you have a 4 billion year old planet. You have 75,000 years of modern humans. You have a hundred years of transmitting signals and you think that in some other planet, that shit's going to line up. It seems farfetched to say the least. Yeah. And I'm a big star wars guy. Yeah. I hear you, man. I wouldn't know. Okay. So do you think evil is personified or do you think it's like just scattered around? Like, do you think there's an evil source? Oh man. Cause you deal a lot in evil stuff. Good question. Like evil people. Man. What's your perception of evil? Well, evil's tough because not to get too deep into it, but I think that, uh, we are all actually to reference the book, the terror within, I think people, not just that there are people that have done terrible things that we don't know about like serial killers who are uncaught. But I think that we are all as humans. Yeah. Capable of doing pretty brutal things, uh, when put in the right environment. And I can actually pretty much speak to that in real, real life. I mean, if you think about what it means to go to war on some level, you need to be brought into this mindset of being ready to, to commit violence. Right. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's evil. Plenty of people would say this. Yeah. You don't view it as it it's, or I shouldn't say you don't, but I'm reading what you're saying is it's not handed out. It's just there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. It comes forth. Yeah. I think that evil exists. Yeah. capable of it I think that systems like social systems are what prevent us from committing you know I I imagine it that way I imagine that it's not distributed it's not assigned no but it rises forth yeah I think we all got it and it's controlled through society badly yeah that might be the first thing we disagree on here but uh so okay uh when you go when you when you sleep in the woods because you like to go backpack and hike and stuff when you see more in the Navy but sure yeah when you sleep in the woods is it spooky or peaceful for you I mean the last time I did that uh actually let me think it probably probably pretty peaceful but but I I would say there are certain places I wouldn't necessarily go based on my own research I wouldn't go to like uh there's this notoriously haunted Forest in Connecticut like I would probably avoid that place even the um when I was in in the Navy we did some cool stuff out in Alaska we like hiked up and built little snow caves and slept in snow caves it was like awesome I'm like by myself in an Alaskan Forest it's awesome so but you know some people become I guess what I'm getting at on that one is that you could like almost bifurcate people there's people that when they're like way out in the woods like way up in the mountains in their head is like this litany of things like the person like the crazy axe murderer guy being like high on the list animals what they feel like I am now in a place of risk true there are other people that be like I am now in a place free of risk oh man then no one knows I'm here do you mean like in their mind like this is relaxing how do you not within the chaos of I'm not within the chaos of all these people around me how do you feel about it you've got to be a piece chill yeah I bet much more I wouldn't keep doing it but I don't lay in my bed like I don't lay in my bed at night at home with my wife feeling like like you know who's going to come through the door yeah but I just it's just like it's I don't know I'm in a place of greater peace away from there and I think that really probably what's going on is my my chore list the buzz in my head yeah has less components to it yeah I dig that I think there's just not as much things I could do I think that people represent bigger threats to us than I mean I say this not having had tons of experience in the wild like you have but generally speaking people are a bigger threat than environment obviously you can go into a of an environment and not be prepared for it and it'll kill you in a heartbeat but if you're prepared for an environment and you're smart I think that you're probably in a more peaceful and safe environment than being in a city where frankly there are people that are physically willing to let the the terror within them come free yeah and you might be caught in the crossfire uh one last one for you if you look like the the hiking disasters the Wilderness disasters the not the National Park disasters whatever missing people trips gone awry right do you have a little do you have a bit of advice where you're like if blank happens blank or no matter what happens don't oh man honestly a lot of the stories that it goes really bad for people have to do with either really poor communication to people that are not like their loved ones and friends okay uh or worse like overconfidence combined with that like telling someone that you're you're more prepared for something than you really are got it there's this horrible case this is the very short version is this guy he was a big outdoor enthusiast he was a uh he was a big outdoor photographer this is in like the 1990s or 80s and he goes out into the Alaskan Wilderness he does it every uh summer he goes out for like two three months at a time by himself and just takes pictures of this particular bird or something but he loves it and he's like pretty much broke and he raises enough money each year to go on this trip yeah um and so he'd done it like several times over and he goes out this one year and he tells his family where he's going to go yeah I'll see you in like two months or whatever um but uh the uh the guy that he had asked to pick him up at the end of the summer had apparently just not gotten the memo that he was being asked to get picked up and so at the end of the summer he didn't have a ride and unfortunately this is where I think the communication part is important this guy I think his name is Charles he had had he had had this experience like two three years earlier where he had been late coming out of a trip into the wild and his family had been worried about him and they had called the authorities and they had gone out looking for him he had come out on his own strength but he was really embarrassed that there was the search that was launched for him because it made him look like he didn't know what he was doing and so he made his family swear that if he ever was late coming out don't panic don't you dare panic don't you call it in don't you do anything uh and and so basically he ends up being in this terrible position where he doesn't have the equipment the food or anything to survive the winter and he's admonished his family not to do anything about it no one's calling it in and finally uh a search is launched for him he's barely hanging on it's it's winter time now and uh this plane comes swooping in uh over this Lake where he was camped out near and it's it's an Alaska State Trooper plane and they see him and he raises one hand up and he's waving but he doesn't realize that the this in in this part of Alaska if you put two hands up it means you're in distress and you want to get picked up and he put one hand up and he basically signaled I'm okay don't pick up and the trooper was like here's a dude out in the middle of nowhere in Alaska he's got a camp set up he's just smiling and waving and so he didn't get picked up he ends up he ends up dying out no really yeah he ends up dying out there but it's just sort of like you probably should say hey to a degree don't call it in but if it's like you know several weeks into the winter maybe come get me yeah so tell people where you're going all right great uh Mr ball and you can find him on YouTube find him where else it's Mr ball no matter where you go search Mr ballin we have a podcast YouTube books we have some live dates that have probably be coming up but just yeah search Mr ballin everywhere you at the live shows you tell some good Rippers tell some good stories I have a live story yeah one coming up in in New York and Comic-Con coming up in October oh excellent man excellent thanks for coming on the show buddy thank you very much I appreciate it thank you take care if you're thinking about building your credit the one pay Builder card might be one of the smartest ways to start one pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans and with the one pay Builder card there's no credit check and no monthly or 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