MrBallen Explains What Dying in War Feels Like

What's up everybody, welcome to Flagrant, it's your boy Schultz, I'm here with Alex Media, Marky Gagnon, Miles Media, and our guest today is one of the most compelling storytellers on the internet, maybe the most, okay? He's focusing on these dark, strange, mysterious stories, but he also has a whole other life as a kind of badass Navy SEAL. And you have a, and I want to get into a lot of these stories because there's a lot of things I'm very curious about, but there is one story that I've been edging myself on that you've told. Yeah. Okay. What type of edging? I've been, I've been edging to it, okay? This is, and I don't even know what it's called, a grenade attack, like someone threw a grenade at you and you're here, you have all your limbs and everything, but a grenade has exploded and hit you. That's right. So take us through that before you tell us about the dark, twisted stories on the internet. Okay. He had jumped right in. Yeah. So I, I should have died in 2014, like arguably should be dead at this point. So what a hook. That's how you know, I, it's, I, I often, I almost want to redo the interest. I often think about how much, how much I've done in my life since 2014 to now, anything like anything I've done from April 19th, 2014 to, to now, to now feels like I don't even know how I'm still here really. So I was, uh, I was a Navy seal before I was telling scary, scary stories on the internet. Um, I joined in 2010. It takes about two years to finish training. I was not good in training. I barely clawed my way through training, but I did it. You know, I passed the test, became a seal. Uh, and then in my first deployment, I had the, the it's, it's the good fortune. If, if you put yourself in the mindset of being a Navy seal, this is like 2012. I had the good fortune of joining a platoon that was slated to, to. Go to war because it's not always a guarantee at the time that you're going to actually go employ your skillset that you've been trained for years to do. Um, so, so we're all like jazzed up, like we're going to go to Afghanistan. Um, we go to Afghanistan and you're not where you could die. You're excited that you get to use your skills. That's the mentality of people in the military, especially the seals. Yeah. Well, I would say, you know, for those that don't like know what a Navy seal is beyond maybe just hearing about it on the internet or whatever. I mean, you're trained how to kill people. That's, that's the job. Yes. There's more to it, but like, that's the job pretty easy though. Right? Like how much training you're, you're trained, but it's like, I might have to move, but it's like, it's a level of, it's okay. So you, you have your target here. We're going to teach you how to get to that target and prosecute that target under virtually any scenario, whether it's cold, whether it's hot, whether it's via the air or. Sea air land, that's the acronym for seal. You know, obviously there's more to being a seal. I mean, there's, we do reconnaissance missions where you're just like gathering Intel. You'll do, you know, winning the hearts and minds. That's something that like green berets, the special forces in the army are known for, which is like village stability operations and working with local populaces to build up their infrastructure. But at the end of the day, there's this thing known as direct action, which is like DA's are doing raids or doing missions where it's kinetic and shooting is the killing is done. So when you go through training, a lot of the training, now I can say this confidently having been through it, it's not propaganda. Like you better be excited to go kill people. That's not how it's set up, but there's an entire world that you gradually are let into as you get through training. Cause there's so many test gates there. It's very gradual. Like you have to pass this test to get to this test and it's constant. So as you're like sort of earning your stripes, you're, you're sort of being more and more welcomed into the fold of this brotherhood of trained assassins, whatever you want to call it. And your instructors increasingly view you as you're going to not just be somebody I trained, but you're going to potentially be going out the door with me to do missions with me because you can't fuck up because you're being judged. Like you better be good at this because you're going to do it with me. I need to know you'll protect me on deployment. So it's like a very intense couple of years where there's this thrill. Of passing the tests. Cause some of them are like, I don't know if I can do that. And when you pass it, you're like, holy shit, I can't believe I made it. And so there's this incredible like sense of accomplishment. I mean, when you, when you get pinned, when you become a Navy SEAL, that's like this very low key ceremony, but it's like, there's only so many people that have ever not just been to a Navy SEAL graduation, but gotten a fucking gaudy gold trident pinned to their chest. It's just like, it's an incredible thing you're doing. And so when you finally, you cross the field. You cross the finish line and you're, you're a trained Navy SEAL and you get sent to your team. And I know I haven't gotten to the story yet, but this is what I do. I just talk. I'm in. I'm holding back asking you questions about the training, which we will get to later. But so I, we wrapped up and I became a Navy SEAL in September of 2012. And then I was told to go to my team. I was going to check into my team on the East coast by like that Christmas. And so there was a period of time where I had to go through language school and then I had to move from San Diego where the training was. To Virginia beach and I, because I knew I'd heard stories about like the check-in process at your team is it's like hazing on another level is sort of the idea. Cause it's like the SEAL teams. So you get to your, you get to the base where your team is and it's like, there's a big military base. So you have to get through that, which is, you know, it's a basic military base. And then like within the base, there's another base and you get through those fences. And then within that, there's another building with security access codes to get you into your. SEAL team, which is totally nondescript. Like there's barely any windows. Like it's this totally nondescript space that is the SEAL team. And inside it's like, that's it. You're surrounded by the active duty SEALs. And when you check into your team, you often have to check in when the active duty veteran SEALs are there. And they know when you're checking in, cause there's only a handful of you that are coming to the team at any given time. And so there's just all these stories about like what to expect when you check in. It's like pretty gnarly. It's like, you're the fucking. Brand new guy, you know, walk into the room filled with your, your seniors and introduce yourself. No one wants to do that. And so like, I decided I would, I would like, you know, jump ahead of the power curve and I would rush and get to Virginia as fast as I could, like drive there across country with my wife and my cats and the truck barreling across the country, get there as fast as I can so I can check in during break. Cause it was like winter break and all the guys they'd be gone and it would just, I just go in, like punch my papers. And then I could. I could then like a week later, yeah, I got to avoid the hazing. Not what happened. It wasn't too much hazing, but it was like super intense. I get to the team and my first exposure to like actual Navy SEALs beyond my instructors who are SEALs and whatever is I, I go through the first gate and then I get to the SEAL team gate. And then I finally, I finally get into the quarter deck of the SEAL team, SEAL team two. And there's this dude lumbering down the hallway and he's still wearing his like beat up camis from, they just got back from Afghanistan. And they had a very kinetic deployments, like lots, lots of gunfights. And this dude straight up has a scar from an IED blast that blew up in his face that runs the length of his face. Oh, so he has this vicious scar that looks like if you didn't, if you put this like on your main character in a movie, like here's the main character, here's their scar across their face. It'd be too unbelievable. Yeah, come on, it's too on the nose. So this dude's like fucking yoked with a scar across his whole face and he walks down the hall and looks at me and he goes, who the fuck are you? I'm Seaman Jonathan Allen. He just walks past me. And then I made my way up to my platoon and like the whole team has just gotten back and they're like bullshitting in the space. And like, they're all, they just got back from Afghanistan and I had to go in and be like, hey everyone, I'm the new Navy SEAL that's joining your team. Like, get the fuck out of here. And like, there's some stuff that happened in there, but you can't get into it. But yeah. Some gay stuff? No, I mean, all the fraternity. It's gay. It's white boy gay shit. Not all. Not all. Not all. You were in a fraternity? Yeah, barely any. Barely made out with straight. I was close. I thought you would see me. Okay, okay. So I check in and it was more than anything. It was like a, when you finish training in San Diego, there aren't really other competing SEALs. You're sort of like the top of the, it's like when you're in high school, you're like a senior in high school. You're like the coolest guy there, you know? And so that's what it was like graduating SEAL training. Those like few months where you're the top of the food chain. Everybody thinks you're so fucking cool. Now you're right back to freshman year. You're like pathetic. You're at the bottom of the barrel. But the cool thing was is, so again, coming back to like being excited about going to war, you check into your team, you find out effectively pretty early on where you're slated to go. And there's a workup cycle where you're preparing for this deployment. And you sort of slowly come to realize that as much as the guys that you're with are more experienced than you, if nothing else, they've done this. They've done this stuff in real life, but you realize you can keep up for the most part. And it's actually a little, little unknown fact is the brand new SEALs tactically are brilliant because they just left the schoolhouse shooting on point. Everything's on point, but you've never used it in real life. Yeah. And so you're really skilled, no experience. And so you're sort of realizing that these guys, some of them are great at hitting the pads. Yeah. That's probably true. And so the guys that you'd see some guys at the team, and I'm not casting shade at all, this is just true, who you're like, I don't know, like he's not like the best at this or he's not the most athletic or whatever then you deploy yeah and it's a different story like the the level of expertise was just unbelievable but by the time we were about to actually go to afghanistan it was like a year and a half of of training with this platoon and our guys and i felt like i was part of the gang now i'd like earn my stripes when did you think you won them over was there a moment you did something where you gained their respect you know what for me i think that i was i was pretty i was actually honestly i told a lot of stories my nickname was shakespeare in the team yeah uh just because that's not even really a fitting name for a storyteller kind of is but like i just like shut the fuck up shakespeare he's telling stories all the time in the platoon space uh but i was we used to do like uh skits for the older guys like out of nowhere they're like yo new guys do skits we'd be like in walls mississippi at like the shooting course off out in the backwoods and all the new guys had like 30 minutes to come up with skits about the older guys that was like sort of roasting them but like gently and like we would always go too far and like fully make fun of a senior guy who'd get like really fucking pissed but the other guys would think it was funny yeah so but uh it was just like uh you know by the time so skits i got pretty good doing skits i just was like kind of outspoken a little bit like uh i was comfortable talking back to some of the older guys not even i was i was not a dick at all but like there was this one guy who just he rode the like shut the fuck up new guy like too much like bro i've been on your fucking team for a year and a half i'm better at you than you at a lot of things at this point yeah we're about to deploy together like at this point i'd like to be viewed as your fucking teammate yeah i get it i'm still a new guy i get it but like stop acting like i'm a fake stuff like that uh but ultimately dude i definitely was not nearly like the best shot far from it like the most tactically sound far from it but i definitely had like an aptitude for aggression i suppose i would call it like i i was good i was good turning it on and i think the guy i think that the older guys saw that uh in country somebody who has an aptitude to be aggressive someone who's ready to be aggressive and who's ready to be aggressive then not for play but like like you're into it you can be a valuable asset you can be you can be you can be a liability too yeah so uh we find out we're going to afghanistan early in the workup cycle so right when i got to a team and then it was a little bit in flux we were at one point slated to go do maybe some some drug interdiction stuff in south america and then we're like shoot that's kind of a bummer and then we again we're told nope you're definitely going afghanistan like maybe six weeks before we actually went and it was like it was really exciting uh but i would say the first sort of eye-opening experience for me maybe the first time i realized the the seriousness of the job is there was this dude on my team this like jacked dude he looked like a professional like wwe wrestler like comically jacked guy couldn't have been more like intimidating he was on his fourth rotation which puts him at like pretty senior guy he's been to iraq and afghanistan like he's he's a combat vet through and through and he didn't speak much like he just kind of kept to himself he'd always had a fucking shawn this mouth it was like this big he just stayed away from that guy uh he was cool though but he was like really intense even the older guys were a little bit intimidated of him and uh we uh we were out in nevada we were doing some some training out there and one of a guy in another platoon was killed in training uh and we had a safety stand down we all went into the classroom and it was actually a guy who was in my class there was a rollover in kentucky and he was killed his name is jonathan calouse what does a rollover mean uh he was in a humvee and he was standing outside of the humvee now we have mostly covered humvees but he was standing outside of it and it flipped he couldn't get down in time and he was killed um and so that in and of itself was like really shocking i mean we're we're in the this classroom in the middle of like the the middle of nowhere nevada it's like a training place for seal teams and our troop commander came in and was like you know there was an accident last night in that's not that's not his name was killed and everyone's looking around like who's that and then it was a whole show that's that's that's calused he was killed and the first thing i noticed is the older guys in the room which comprised let's say of the you know 90 some odd seals that are in the room that we were just about to start training today we were all rushed in here everyone's like kitted out like ready to start the day everyone's solemn but like the 70 or so of the older guys they hear this news that someone's been like horribly killed this is like a horrible death um and they're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and no one was making light of it by any stretch but it was much more routine there was like a reaction to it that was like man that's a that's a real shame that's a shame and it was like okay now we need to move on and keep training because we're going to afghanistan in six weeks it wasn't like the way i just said it to you but the feeling in the room was not catastrophic yeah it was not all stop what do we do whereas like me and the other new guys were like well wait a minute what are we doing like we can't go out and train it just became very real to you guys whereas they're more accustomed to losing life one of the guys that that we was our one of our senior guys the platoon told me that by the end of your career you'll memorize the funeral procession for navy seals very specific order of things you do for a seal funeral that's a little bit of an exaggeration yeah it is the case that i've been to several and i only was in for the minimum amount of time but anyways we get out of this classroom in nevada and we're supposed to go out to our these 50 000 ton up arm up armored vehicles that we're going to be driving around in afghanistan with and this terrain out in nevada is meant to sort of mimic the terrain in afghanistan so it's like really important training and i knew that but i was i mentioned before being a little bit outspoken i was sort of offended i guess i would say that we aren't at least taking today off this is a multi-week long block of training out here today's training is not crucial in and of itself why aren't we stopping confirming plans to go to the funeral talk to his family a lot of the guys in the classrooms were very close with him i mean i was i was close with him because there was only so many of us in the class but i know some of his best friends were in were next to me as we found out and i remember being really annoyed but like who do i even direct this at and so we leave the classroom and we're walking over to one of these huge vehicles they're all turned on so the diesel engines are like pumping you can barely hear anything and the dude i was telling you about the jacked guy he's he was going to be my the passenger seat i was going to be driving one of the positions called and i was basically bitching to him just in generalities like what the fuck dude like i can't believe john was killed like what are we doing here like we should be taken today off to like make plans or whatever and he goes dude shut the fuck up he was like what do you think we're gonna go do he's like what do you what do you think this deployment is about to be what do you what do you think's gonna happen in deployment like somebody here is gonna die if not more than one person like if we go to afghanistan which is what we're doing you better believe that at least one person in this group is going to die if not more than one person like if we go to afghanistan this group is going to get killed at least he's like so shut the fuck up he's like this is your job he's like pick with me i don't even want to go he's like fuck this like i don't want to go and like believe me this dude has every combat mission you could imagine but it was like oh shit like this isn't just like this cool thing you do it's like super hazardous you know why is he still in you think if he doesn't want to go it's a weird thing where i would say there's a there's a steep drop off there's sort of in my limited experience and this is probably heresy to some people it's sort of like you have the guys that join that view it as like this incredible challenge but of course there's some there's some element of wanting to serve you can't not want to serve to some degree but like if i just wanted to serve i could have just joined the military and just gone yeah this is a really intentional choice and so there's a group of guys that fall into the category of you get through the training you get to a team and being a seal is is so different than training to be a seal there's overlap i mean we do lots of tactical stuff in training and you learn how to do the job but the the application of the job is it's you don't spend every day just like shooting your gun there's so much administrative crap you get to do there's so there's like sexual harassment training there's sapper there's all these things that just come with the environment of you're sort of in corporate military if that makes sense and then also i would say that like the risk to life and limb is extremely high i mean we're doing probably the most hazardous thing i can recall doing i sometimes think about like what the fuck are we doing this is this is routine training guys we're going to go out out into the bay in virginia we're going to take a swick boat which are these these super high powered boats that they go so fast that there's no seats there's just boards put up that you get g forced against the board and we're going to pull up alongside an actual moving tanker ship that's a fucking huge ship yeah they know we're doing this this is they're not being surprised and we're going to they're called hook and ladders so if you look up special operations hook and ladder so that's a swick boat these boats go so fast like you hydroplane and you're going it's crazy but you need to match the speed of the boat yeah but when you look at a tanker from like the shore of a huge freighter ship it looks like it's going pretty slow yeah when you're next to a freighter ship yeah it is moving moving so much faster than you realize it creates all this weight yeah and we would take this this spanky homemade like a literal pool stick oh wow no this is high speed we did not do that so we would take this pool they're called uh hook and ladders i believe it's called like navy seal hook and ladder you have a a pool stick that you attach a a literal like coat hanger hook to a big hook and then inside of this tube that is the pool stick is a uh it's a ladder that unspools it's like spooled up inside of the stick and so you literally you extend this fucking huge like 15 20 foot long hook and ladder and you throw it over the edge of the moving vessel while you're on this unstable platform and you hook it you hope it's solid and then you yank the the tubing the actual like stick if you will off exposing the ladder which unspools and now you have this metal ladder that is hooked to the side of the ship and by the way this is literally how you board a ship you want to board a moving ship this is how you board a moving ship you want to board a moving ship this is how you do it and then you start climbing up and you're like you have a carabiner you got your kit that's it's sort of like that but imagine moving really really fast and then as soon as you board this vessel if you were to do this in real life i've never done this in real life although i know some guys that have done this in real life you're on a ship where like you have no fucking clue what you're getting yourself into and the first guy over the wall you're on your own dude yeah good luck so but one of the things that you train for is well what if you fall off the ladder as you're moving and in training unfortunately there's not really a good way to simulate it it's like you just gotta fall if you fall if you if you fall you fall and so this one kid on this really choppy day as in he lived but we were going up these these climbs doing iterations of circling around and hooking because a lot of it is just the teamwork of getting it hooked pulling it off stowing our gear climbing up it's not really even the clearance of the ship but this one dude he fell off the ladder because he got bounced from the wake he fell and he fell between the swick boat and the uh the the tanker the props on these ships are like i don't know 10 15 20 feet each and they're spinning at full tilt he survived because he's underwater being pulled into the props which was pretty far back towards the back of the ship and he said he opened his eyes and he's seeing the props he's being sucked into the props and he pulled at the last second his emergency inflatable device this little co2 cancer pumps it full real quick and it jettisoned him out the side of the ship like narrowly missing whoa the the props at the end but it's like when you're doing training and i'm this is obviously this is very dramatic the way i'm telling not everything it's like sometimes you just do dry runs with no bullets being fired and that's not dangerous but it's like you do you do stuff where the risk of of death and injury is really high like we would do the we would do these uh we'd learn how to do ambushes at night and out in like the where were we i think in nevada or somewhere out there where you know you train during the day you learn how to tactically set up who's going to be here who's going to be over here and with an ambush you basically set up an l ambush if you're if you're the enemy and i come at you like this you have every opportunity to like go in any other direction to avoid us but if i come over here and i have someone at like a lazy l over here and you're sitting in the middle if you come this way you get shot you come this way you get shot if you go in either directions out we have an angle on you so it's it's this is not this is not a seal team specific thing this is like wartime 101 but imagine trying to coordinate that in the dark on night vision in real time like how do you know where everybody else is because the beauty of an l ambush is that this guy over here and this guy over here on the outer ends of your l ambush they have to be able to shoot pretty aggressively in this direction to cover all each other oh my god you can't give up your position without giving up to the enemy where everybody holy and so we would train how there's ways to do it you know i honestly couldn't even remember exactly how we would communicate it but we would shoot not live rounds they're called serta rounds which are like i think they're like clay tipped rounds so you could feel it if it hit you oh you'd kill you but don't worry it's technically not around i mean what so but like there's a guy who was killed out there you know just because he got shot in the head doing an l ambush and so that's not to say they're like oh my god i can't believe this job is dangerous this is so eye-opening for me but you have a group of people that when they join it isn't that the hazards are suddenly apparent they were always apparent but it was masked behind this job you're doing it you're gonna make it like so few people get this far in training like you're so caught up and i can't believe i've gotten this far in the achievement yeah so that when you actually start doing it full time it's not a letdown it's more like what the fuck are we doing which group did you fall in i was in the first group i was in the like so there's two groups the group that is like i don't know if i want to do this in general like i don't know if this is for me not i don't want to do this but more like this is not the same thing as what i set out to do i just wanted to know if i could kind of do it right and then the other group to be honest is like the hardline dudes that are like this is what i do yeah and there are some ungodly talented people that fall into this group and those guys typically go to seal team six and that is a whole other world so i was never really the level it's like it's jv to varsity doesn't even cover it it's jv this is like you don't even know how to shoot a gun yeah professional level gun shooter wow it's it's how many people are in that i don't even know it's very small we're talking about like 50 i think it's a little more than that and there's a lot of support people that it's very difficult to get over there as well and they also i think they work closely with other special operations as well they are fucking unbelievable a guy like that walks into a restaurant i think you would know but like you would know let's say for example he needs to clear out the restaurant there's no there so like i give me the level of lethal force when people when people find out that i was a seal there is a there is an assumption that what you've described i'd be capable of of like oh like he can say he can survive in any environment and he can kill anybody no i mean there are things that i could do as a result of training but like put me up against like a decent mma fighter and i'm probably getting my ass kicked i'll fight until i die right like i'm prepared to do things that are sort of from training but like i don't possess some special ability to protect myself or i can do things with a weapon you know like right now can you take out all three of us i don't know probably not no he's been training pretty heavy lately i don't know if you're trying to size you up what would you do what would you do well the team six guys they train in like every discipline of war fighting right and it is it's a professional sport like i'm not saying that the they call it the white side and the dark side the white side is everything non-team six and team six is the dark side so on the white side the white side like there there is definitely a very serious attitude about doing the job but like the the dark side dude like you meet these guys and like there's one guy that is in my mind like and i'll name drop him because he's he's public now i can talk in the movie dj shipley Do you know who DJ Shipley is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so DJ Shipley is, he went over to DevGrew. I want to say when he was like, DevGrew is still Team 6. It's called Development Group is the name. I think he joined still Team 6 at like the youngest age anyone ever has. And so the gist is like you first have to go to the white side and do a certain number of rotations before you're even eligible to maybe try out for Team 6. And so he basically went over there at the start of the War on Terror. He's like at Team 6. Wow. And so this dude is like one of the most physically gifted people. Like he's just, he probably could have been a professional athlete. Like he's that level of physically gifted, just good at everything. And really he was in that camp of like this is my profession. I never served with him. I'm sort of inferring a lot of this stuff from other people who worked with him. And I know him now, but post-military. But like this guy has been on like all the missions. He's done all the stuff. And he knows everybody who's been on all the missions. And he looks like a G.I. Joe. I mean like I remember. I was at a Starbucks in Virginia. And like team guys come into the Starbucks all the time. And like he walked in. And I know who he is just by reputation when he was still active. But immediately you're like you're looking at him. There's something different about that person over there. He's also like completely covered in tattoos and just looks super intense. But like DJ comparing him to like a white side team guy. It isn't that one is better than the other. It's just that this guy has devoted his entire essence to being an operator. And he's doing it. And he's doing it around other people that have dedicated themselves at a level that's just not comparable. And their level of training is insane. Like these dudes, again, this is me. I don't even know. I've never even been in the building. So I am very hearsay-ish right now. But like I believe even now they have a pager system still where like you're periodically put on like I think it's called like notice or something where you literally have a pager that if you get paged, stop what you're doing. Time to go. Go time. And like they. But unlike the white side where we would periodically get like spun up for something and we wouldn't do anything. We like come in the team and they're like, what are we going to do? And they're like, ah, nothing. We're not going to go. These guys, it's like they're on a plane that night. And a lot of times, like they can't even necessarily tell anybody where they're going. And they don't know how long they're going for. Is there a part of them where it's like, hey, you're on a basis. I'm sure they I'm sure they're brought into the fold. But this is like that. Yeah. So just an extremely high level. And these guys, if you want to talk about who could like handle themselves in all environments. A SEAL Team 6 guy is that guy. There's a difference. Drop him in the woods. He can sell. shelter food he'll find a way to make a weapon like out of a movie type of survival he's making it back home yeah for sure so for me though when i finally go to afghanistan i was like so pumped that i got to go when i got the nod that you're going to go to afghanistan and i actually i did sort of fantasize a little bit about dying in combat like before i left which is it sounds really dark but how like uh how does it sound dark or how did i know like how did you fantasize doing i i thought that being a navy seal was the end all be all like so i i kick in bin laden's door his wives fuck you to death it was like the best outcome i could have dude as you guys already know we're back in the lab this fall getting this new hour ready houston we're here this weekend show sold out thank you guys so much west nyack next weekend show sold out thank you guys so much helium in indianapolis indiana october 23rd and 24th star wars our dome in birmingham alabama november 6th and 7th uh cleveland ohio november 13th 14th raleigh north carolina december 4th and 5th columbus ohio december 11th and 12th those are all these shows for the fall through the end of the year theandrewschultz.com for tickets if there are any tickets left there go grab them let's get back to the show this episode is brought to you by chat gpt hey it's bill simmons from the bill simmons podcast have you guys heard about chat gpt work it's the new way to use chat gpt for bigger multi-step projects and when you need more than just answers give chat gpt work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets slides and structured reports get started at chat gpt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans seer is something that loads of people in the military do it stands for survival evasion resistance and escape and it's there's a lot of there's different levels of training but within the military if you're a unit if you're attached to a unit that has the potential to be effectively captured by the enemy you are trained in advance by going to seer school and there's a bunch of different seer schools all over the country there's one in washington there's one in san diego and it's basically like how to survive captivity like the shitty parts of captivity so we went through seer training proper at the end the last block of training when you are about to become a seal you go through actual seer school and in virtue of being a seal you go through like the highest level of seer school because it's like you're you're gonna be behind enemy lines you have to know what to do and believe it or not there's there are tactics and strategies to how to basically look like a complete pussy and make people think that you're kind of worthless and you're not even worth interrogating and it's remarkably effective not that i've had it happen in real life could you share i i don't i don't think i can actually but you play possum a little bit yeah a little bit but they put you in these scenarios where it's like you know simulating torture and like one of them includes they put you in a closet things in your butt right yeah actually dude they give you to humiliate you to a prostate exam like you're right at the start and it's to humiliate you really oh yeah like in front of your your brethren that's one of the things during the was there a guy that like it just went in too easy it was just like that thing's deep come on dude it's also someone's job which is crazy yeah yeah like it's like okay you're the guy that does the exams but did one of your boys moan like when it was just like there were dudes fucking around this is guys being like come on do it again do it again but they put us in these closets in this dark like probably inside like a hangar or something so it's like pitch black and they put us in these closets like a broom closet but it was too short to stand up all the way yeah yeah it's like all the all the claustrophobia you're sort of like trapped but you can breathe you're good and they gave you a bucket and that's like your bathroom too and we were in there i i lost track of time i've heard as long as 10 hours 20 hours but like you're you're in there but the whole time the whole time you are listening to it's called boots boots boots this is worth listening to it's so fucked up it's a poem and it's definitely called boots boots boots and if you look up boots boots boots seer school somebody put a youtube video together that plays this song if you will uh red yard kipling that's the poet red yard kipling that's boots boots boots how the leopard got his spots listen to this it gets more and more intense and so it just goes in this loop and they play it at as loud as it would go and so is it meant to be like oh i don't know what this is but it was like that loop on repeat as loud as it could it interspersed with a uh a little girl crying and you're like okay this is sort of like on the nose of all you're like torturing us yeah you're in this little room it's pitch black you're like you're by this point you got to pee and shit in this bucket and like you're periodically being brought out to have your butthole examined and like that that's that's what you do for like 10 20 30 hours not 30 it's like 10 20 hours um anyway so i'm giving you a sense of how like intense seer school can be which is that's not even a seal broke that's not even a seal school that's like a military what are you wearing when you're in the closet i think it's like a military school it's like a military school it's like a i think you had like uh beat up bdus on they give you like a cami or whatever like one of the another one they had you do is you just had to like sit on a hardwood floor but you couldn't but you couldn't sit with your hands back you had to sort of sit on on the bone of your butt but for like 10 hours and then in the middle of the room is a single bucket and there's like 30 of us and you sat there for like 10 hours you gotta pee or poop you gotta do it in front of the whole group and then you go back to your sitting on the bone of your butt and you just sit there so a lot a lot of seer school is just being physically uncomfortable i say all this because then you get to a team and it's like hey we gotta be refreshed on seer school uh you can just do the digital version and so like you'd hop online and you'd get your little avatar and you'd march them around into the torture chambers but uh you know i don't even know how i got on the topic of that though you you go to afghanistan you're excited to be there excited to be there and then you almost die i did almost die i did yeah so we're finally getting to the opening question uh yeah so we get to afghanistan and i and and i had fantasized about dying you know before a little bit i even told my wife i was like dude honestly if i die over there that wouldn't be so bad like that's pretty fucking what did she say to that she's like just pissed like really thanks thanks for the send off there dude do you have kids at that point no we didn't we didn't we've been married for for several years though um but uh so i get to afghanistan and like even just the the arrival in afghanistan was it was jarring you know like anytime you expect like in my this i had one combat tour of my whole life i'm sure other guys that have done like 50 have a very different experience but with my singular deployment if you expected things to happen it usually didn't if you didn't expect things to happen if you're like oh there's nothing there's a dry hole as they call it invariably you're going to get shot at you know it's that's sort of how it went and and honestly over the course of our deployment there was not like a cascade of gunfights constantly but it happened but the thing about it is that it was it was it was the first time that i was able to get out of that environment i was able to get out of that environment it's it's sort of i don't know how to say it it's almost disturbing how easy it is to within a matter of weeks it was i was at peace in afghanistan like utterly at peace i practically blacked out everything going on at home not that there was anything going i was married and you know i'm sorry to my wife but like i just my mind was fully focused on afghanistan i mean we if you think about it we were living in this base that in theory could be overrun with a suicide attack at any moment it other bases while we were there that happened people were like blown up and killed it happened that's you're in a war zone right so we had like this thing that flew over the top of our base called a ptids blimp that's really its whole purpose was to look for suicide bombers and warn us before a fucking vehicle came up blew up a hesco and then a bunch of fighters rolled in here and killed us all and so at night you'd go to bed knowing that you might literally have to just wake up and grab your gun you have like seven guns next to your bedside rockets you name it and just run out and start shooting like that's the that's the environment you're in but because that's where you live your brain just simplifies it and makes it you it could it's i have not slept better in my entire life than i did in afghanistan that's no ask ask most people who have gone and spent any time in a war zone it's not you can't function unless you're able to sort of enter a primal state and that primal state effectively it's us versus them it's it's it couldn't be more simple holy shit it is us versus fucking everybody else and like you we would go on these operations and just seeing your teammates even now it gives me goosebumps like going into buildings in real time like when you're clearing a house for real like live rounds and you're watching your teammates like masterfully moving through the house and a lot of times nothing happened but you just feel fucking invincible nothing can touch us why the training is much better for this even the white side teams i've sort of degraded them relative to dev group but make no mistake like special operations and special operations like the training is immaculate our gear is exceptional we train as a unit a lot so like we would when you clear a building a lot of a lot of the clearance this is true at every level as far as i've heard and have seen a lot of clearing any structure being inside of any structure where there's potential bad guys it's watching other people and reading their body language because you don't have time to like hey andrew i'm gonna go left go right? Nope. It's little taps. It's flashes of your laser, which you can only see on infrared. It's literally getting to know your team so well and doing so many runs with them that you know what they're going to do before they do it. And also everyone's trained on how to do everybody else's job in the train, so to speak. So you enter a house, which is fluid, and you have no idea what's going to be in this building. You don't know if there's going to be obstructions like shooters. It doesn't matter, but you're trained for all of it. And so you go in in silence and everyone just peels off and does all the things they're trained to do. Seeing it in real life and being a part of that, it's like an adrenaline rush that's hard to match. And then when you get shot at, again, it hasn't happened an enormous amount, but it did enough. Seeing people react to it and like being able to respond to a threat and knowing that you're fucking winning is just, it's incredible. It's like you feel like a Navy SEAL. I guess that's the way it is. What's the first reaction when you hear a bullet whiz by? Do you remember your first? I remember the first time we got shot at, but only because it was sort of comical. They were shooting at us from a mile away. So level of effectiveness, zero. We can't even see you, but someone's shooting at us because we're up on this fucking ridge and some poor kids by firing his AK-47 at us from like a mile away. So like utterly ineffective. We'll never know who shot at us, but you sort of follow the protocol of like what to do, which is like you take cover and you figure out where it's coming from. And okay, now that we're being engaged, what can we do? Because now we have air assets that we can call in. We have all these things that open up to us because now we're in a tick. Troops in contact. Like now the rules of engagement are sort of out the door because we're defending ourselves. Survive. But honestly, the only other time that I would say I really remember the feeling is like early on, we would go into this village and this is where I nearly died. It's called Zarganshar. And it's like, it was right across the street from where we were actually based. So our HESCO barrier base was on one side of Utah. And you get a picture. It's like desolate wasteland in all directions, maybe a couple of mud huts here and there. But it's like a really wide open space where our base was situated. And we're on one side of the road. And Kabul is the direction the road is going. It's north of us like an hour. And that's like the one city in Afghanistan that gets bombed constantly. And then on the other side of the road from our base is Zarganshar. And it's like the one pretty heavily populated, you know, it's a town, I guess I would call it. It's not quite a city, but it's dense. You know, it's mud huts, but it's multi-story mud huts. They're right on top of each other. It's like you would look at it and you wouldn't think, oh, that's a little village. You'd think like that's a small city. And Zarganshar had been fighting with whoever was at the base we were at for years. And the base we were at was set up by special operations, either ODAs, which is Green Berets, or like the Polish Grom were out there. There's the Grom. There are special forces, SEAL teams. Like it's been a rotation of very high caliber war fighters that have been sitting here and in virtue of being right across the street from you. And we know you stage suicide bombers and there's gun caches over there. There was a steady stream of operators like going in there and stirring shit up with the fighters in there. And so now what you have is this group of people who have survived or it's their lineage who are hard as fuck. Don't give a fuck about getting in a gunfight with you. There's tunnels that like run out from the city that they just like escape into the tunnels, which by the way, sometimes they'll get trapped in those tunnels and they'd get them sealed off. And then it's like drop a grenade down there. It's like the horrible things are happening to these people, but they're totally battle hardened. And so every time, just about, not every time, most times if you went into Zarganshar, it was the one place where it was like they were okay. They being the combatants you'd run into, they were okay showing you that they were armed and they were ready to fight with you. And I say that because we went, if you brandish a gun and heaven forbid you shoot at us, we have immediately, I told you, rules of engagement are gone. We have targeting assets that can immediately find you. We have people all over the place. If you try to shoot at us, you're fucking dead. And the thing is, is like there was this one guy who shot at us one time and I'm in the, the up armored vehicle that has a 50 caliber machine gun on it. And it's, it's, it's a remote controlled 50 caliber machine gun. And it jams all the fucking time. It's called the crow's system. It was sort of a mess, but you have a video game screen. That's like every type of camera that's coming off the, this gun. And this guy like took like three pot shots at us. And it's like, I have a tracking device on the camera. I can lock it onto him and just let it aim at him and just hold the trigger and just, it would only fire if it saw him. And so it knows him. You, you basically, it's a little bit, you could potentially shoot some other people, but there's only one, but you basically that you, you lock it onto him, but he was running to get away after he shot at us. And it's just like, you lock it onto him. You pull the trigger back over. Yeah. I mean, he, I, I think he probably was killed, but he, he managed to run behind a house, but it's like a 50 caliber round could like blow you apart. And this is just belt fed 50 caliber. What does a 50 caliber look like? It's like a cigar bigger than a cigar. Yeah. It's it's, it's big. This is totally probably not the case, but I've heard that like even a 50 Cal going, even if it doesn't hit you, if it went near you, you could have like impact injuries from the round. That's that's probably some bullshit. Yeah. But 50 Cal is like closer to a very small rocket. Shit. Yeah. But it's just like, so as a result, if you're gonna take a shot at NATO, especially by the way, we found out from interacting with a lot of the folks that we would get in these gunfights with, cuz you'd, you'd finish, you'd, you'd finish prosecuting the target. Invariably there'd be people on target that we'd wrap up. We'd hand over to the police, whatever. And you'd talk to them and they knew you were special operations. Cuz you look different. Even at a distance, we drive different vehicles. We have different weapons. We literally physically look different. We, we move differently. And so if you're gonna brandish a weapon in front of any special operations, that is a fucking bold move because you, you basically said, go ahead, try it. Yeah. So that's the place that Zarganshah was dudes openly walking up and down the street with AK 47s, which I gotta be honest. I give an enormous amount of respect to the people, not respect for the things that they did, but the idea that, that you could do that. That's it. It was like our adversary in that village was formidable, at least from a mental perspective. That was scary. I'll just say it for what it is. I'm kitted up to the net. Now I'm dialed in by this point. Yeah. You know, I'm fully protected. I got, we have like 10 era, assets overhead, and this is a dude with AK 47 sandals probably. Yeah. And he's ready to jump into his tunnel and face death in the tunnels if he has to, but it's like, so, but the, one of the times we got shot at in a, in Zarganshah, I was the, at the time, because again, cuz of the rules of engagement, the first rounds that are shot at you are the most hazardous because you're, you're not engaging anyone you're waiting to get shot at. And so the first round typically, and also you have to understand at the time, the, the other side was aware of these rules of engagement. So they take their first shot really carefully, cuz it's usually the first one they're gonna get. Yeah. And so the first rounds are sort of the stressful ones. And then you just sort of do your training and you, you fight, you, you, you, you fight. Uh, but I was walking through this little intersection and there was a little bell tower or something. I wouldn't even call it that. It was a tower in Zarganshah and there was a shooter up there that we didn't see. And he took shots. I believe at me, or at least the people I was with. And you know, the sound of the round happens. It's after the impact. And so I saw rounds. I saw what looked like rocks skittering around, like right next to me. And I was like, that's weird. And then it was like snap. Ooh. And then it was like immediate adrenaline dump where I actually felt like I had just sprinted a race. I was like suddenly out of breath dove behind cover and, and, you know, it was just, it is what it is, but it was on one of the days where in Zarganshah, um, at the end of deployment, this is April 19th, 2014. I, uh, by this point, our platoon was, was very battle tested for this deployment, you know, especially Zarganshah was almost, uh, it was the place you went and knowing what you're getting yourself into other places you go, it was a lot of nothing, but Zarganshah felt like a place you went and pretty good chance. Somebody was going to engage with you, especially by the spring, which was the fighting season. So there's more fighters that are in the town. Um, and the reason we would even go into Zarganshah beyond presence patrols was there were like, that was a staging spot for suicide bombers to go to Kabul. And there was known weapon caches over there. And so one of the things we were somewhat responsible for was stemming the tide of those things, making it up to Kabul. So there was like a reason to go in there, but we went in there and we ended up walking in on one side of this village in broad daylight, because there also were rules that said you couldn't operate at night. It was a whole ethical thing. So it's like broad daylight and it's like maybe 20 some odd seals or maybe like even less, 10 or 15 seals. And then all partner force, soy Afghans who, you know, God love them, but they were utterly useless from a tactical perspective. It was like the skill level was, was lower than amateur to professional. Um, but they were with us when we start making our infill into this village and we get into this alleyway that dumped out into a courtyard where there were these, I think one or two buildings that had two story, you know, windows to look down on the courtyard. And at the same time we began hearing chatter on the radios that were, you could listen to these, these radios, they were open source radios. And so we could hear chatter of the combatants in the city or in Zagarchar. When we had rolled up and our vehicles got out and began the infill on foot, we had seen women and children running out of the village, which is a clear sign that there are fighters that are now waiting for you. And so we know that there's definitely fighters here. We hear the chatter and we start to pick up that they're up in those windows in the second floor there. They're talking about things that suggest they can see us making our movement right now. And our team lead, who was one of the most brilliant dudes I met in the teams, he immediately stopped us. He pulled us back like maybe 20 or 30 yards. And we sort of ducked down in this little like ravine that was next to this bridge that gave us a little bit of cover from these buildings. And the reason he did that is he's like our vehicles were too far back and we couldn't really drive them up to then climb in and take the vehicles. So if we wanted to find another way in, we really had to do it on foot. There wasn't another way in to speak of. It was sort of go forward into the courtyard. Or retreat all the way back to our vehicles, but it was all exposed. And if these guys start shooting at us, like they have a really open shot at us if we retreat. And so we're sort of pinned down here. And I should have said this before. The guys in the windows were very aware of don't shoot until you have a great shot. It was like very clear. They're not just going to start spraying. Don't waste it. They know. They got one really good shot at us. And it's like they're saying their prayers and stuff on the radio. Like these are men preparing to die. And they're talking. They're talking about how they're going to go about trying to take out at least one of us. And I remember the predicament was it felt like we had really put ourselves in a bad way. You couldn't call in an airstrike. One, you'd be blowing up people that shouldn't be blown up to begin with. But it was like there's really not much you can do. You could wait indefinitely. But to be honest, that's not really an option because one of the things that happens if you stay out too long in an area is more fighters begin showing up. You run the risk of being overrun. So it's just it was a really bad idea. It was a really bad situation. And for maybe like 30 minutes or so, we just hunkered down in this ravine. And it was weirdly like calm. No one's like we're not hugging the wall. You know, oh, God, don't let them see me. They see us. They're talking about us. And our team lead, he comes around and just tells us all like, hey, take a piss. Like, get ready. You know, our best move here is just to go forward, like go through the alleyway. We're going to just prosecute the target. We're going to continue the mission. You know, we're Navy SEALs. We're here to do this. Like, be ready. Like, be ready. Be ready for whatever happens. And I remember like taking a piss in this ravine and wondering if it was the last piss I was ever going to take, you know. But it wasn't like, oh, my God. It was like, damn. Like, this is an unfortunate position we're in here. So we eventually begin making our movement through this alleyway. We leave the cover of this ravine. You know, the guys out in the vehicles, you know, several hundred yards back, they're sort of covering our infill, but they can't do much. It's sort of on us. And there were body cameras rolling. So I've seen the footage. Make sure. We have a platoon video from that deployment. And this is a big part of the video. But it's like eerie. I've seen it. It's like we're all walking in and it looks like nothing's happening. It's like it's daytime. Like, there's nobody out. And there's one row of guys on one side close to the wall. Another guy's on the other side of the courtyard. And we're like alternating onesie twosie and we're walking straight through. And when we got most of the way through the courtyard, machine guns opened up on us, which was expected. And it was just madness for like a few seconds. It was just it was hard to tell who was shooting at us from where granted we all were really expecting this to happen. So it wasn't really like shock and awe. It was more like, oh, my God, it's really happening. I usually preface this by saying I'm not trying to be to be crass, but the the people who were hit immediately were our dog and two Afghan partner force. And I think it was just sort of that was just the way the bullets landed. And that ended up probably. It ended up probably saving other people's lives. None of those people died. I believe the Afghans survived. The dog did survive. But if we're going to survive, what amounts to an ambush at this point? The only people that are getting us out of here are going to be the SEALs just based on skill alone. This requires like fighting your way out of this area and securing the area and then effectively getting out without getting fucking leveled in the process. And so the team guys, the SEALs, myself included, just jumped into action. You know, we began. It sort of clearing the nearby buildings because as soon as you can clear a building, you can take the roof. Yeah. And so like me and one guy, we went in one building and it's like the process of clearing a building is normally you go in with at least one other person. You're doing solo building entries. Fuck. And, you know, there are fighters here. You're just going in like every single room. You're kicking in a door. You're running. You're not even checking all the rooms. You're just running to get to the high ground because at this point it's like we don't know how many fighters there are. We don't know if other guys are down. Are you worried somebody's going to come? Come back up the building you're in and then tip you up? The first move is like get suppressive fire. Like figure out who's shooting at us and start shooting back. So that they stop and then you guys can start taking positions. And so like we ran up to this rooftop and there would be like me and my buddy. We like took a knee next to this low wall that looked down another alleyway that was sort of like an ambush. It would have been a good spot to set up an ambush on us. And there's a dude there. We start shooting at him. He's shooting at us. And suddenly we're pinned down on the roof. And like there's a video of him looking at me laughing hysterically as I ran. He was a fucking psychopath. All right, guys. Let's take a break for a second. We've been optimized. But does that mean we stop here? No. Your liver needs help too. Okay? Dose for your liver is a clinically backed liver health supplement. This isn't just another capsule of powder. Dose is a liquid supplement. It's taken in a daily two-ounce shot. And it tastes like fresh squeezed orange juice. Dose cleanses the liver of unwanted stressors. It's slowing your liver down. It promotes. It promotes daily liver function so your liver can do its job. Zero sugar, zero junk, zero calories. What does the liver even do? It's your body's filter. It processes everything that you consume. It performs 500-plus daily functions. Think energy, production, digestion, fat metabolism, vitamin storage. Yup, the liver helps make these processes happen every day. And when it's overworked, you'll feel it. What can you expect when drinking Dose daily? You're going to reduce sluggishness, get rid of those midday cravings. It supports your metabolism and even age your daily digestion. Why can you trust Dose? It's got real results with two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showing its positive impact on liver enzyme levels. Ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head to dosedaily.co slash flagrant or enter the code flagrant to get 35% off your first subscription. Your body does so much more for you. Let's do something for it. That's d-o-s-e-d-a-i-l-y dot c-o slash flagrant for $30. That's d-o-s-e-d-a-i-l-e dot c-o slash flagrant for $30. So you think white, if you were to put money, Yeah, because we got it for her. You got a nice run. Yeah, we had a great run. You guys had a good run. I think it's probably going to be white. I don't think Taylor. I think there's too much like, she just got married. Like, she got to keep it going. What's the next big thing? I mean, that is the biggest thing. It's either that or baby. The market is very split on this. Okay. Kelsey has, like, the percentages are all over the place. 20% Post Malone. I could see, I could see that. 19% Morgan Wallen. That's, okay. That's what everybody's thinking. 24% Lady Gaga. 27% Ella Langley. Ella Langley. Oh! Who's that? That's the one. White woman. I can tell by the way he's just dabbling around the room. I heard it, but that person's that big? It is. The song is the biggest song of the year. No, no, it's the biggest song in history. I think it's been in. History? I think it's been number one longer than any other song in history. Look it up. It hasn't even been that long. Have you heard of Thriller before? Look it up right now. It hasn't been that long. And if it is, that's bots. That's bullshit. I haven't even barely heard of this song. There's no way it's the biggest song in the world. If we play it right now, you would know it immediately. It's tied right now. With All I Want for Christmas Is You. Wow. For the longest run at number one, right? 22 weeks. 22 weeks. How much? Bots. 22 weeks. 22 weeks. I mean, bots maybe. And you haven't heard it once. It's shocking. I know. It's a banger. Oh, it's such a banger. I'm sure it is. You would love it. But she's not even the number one. At 43%, Luke Combs. Luke Combs? This is what I'm saying. I think that the NFL feels like they got to overcorrect. 64% Justin Bieber. It's not overcorrecting. It's just balancing. No, I mean overcorrect to white now. Yeah, it's not a correction because that means they did something wrong previously. Oh, yeah. It's a balance. But you know what I'm saying, my dude. I know what you're saying. Yeah, correct is the wrong word. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They got, yeah. Yeah, motherfucker. That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. Good point. Good point. But 66% Miley Cyrus. Oh. She actually has sufficient hits to do it. Yeah. She has sufficient. Justin? Does it go higher? It goes higher. Oh, shit. There's one more at the top. Do you want to guess? Beyonce. Jay-Z. That's the number one person. So I was thinking that. He's on a run. He's on a run. There's rumors that he's dropping an album. But he can't hire himself. Why not? The fuck? Nah, you can't hire yourself. Why not? Why not? You can't hire yourself, man. You can't hire yourself. There's going to be too much screwing me. So? How much longer does he have as like the NFL's halftime guy? Low key? He's doing the best job. But he's doing the venues that would prepare him for a halftime. Halftime show. Doing baseball stadiums and shit. Like, he's filling the space. Also, how hard is that job? Couldn't anyone do that? What? Be like the halftime person? It's like, yeah, this guy is the biggest person. Yo, yo, yo. Shut up. Is it hard to be like, oh, who's the biggest person? Yo, Jay-Z is interesting. Because he got the job and now they've had the best halftime show in the best halftime show run in history. Let me say this right now. Every single one does better than the last. Fair. Come on. Bitch. If Jay-Z wasn't the best halftime guy, he wouldn't be the best halftime guy. If Jay-Z wasn't the fucking boss of who does the halftime show, the right answer is probably Jay-Z. Because you're going to get free Beyonce with that. You can't not like. And free Rihanna, probably. I mean, it basically would just be the Yankee show. It's the most value. You're going to get the most. And maybe if he could pull it off free Eminem. Oh, and they come out too. Yeah. So there is a world where. It would be crazy to not do that show because nobody, nobody on the planet, especially if M comes out, nobody on the planet would be upset at that halftime show afterwards. It hurts me to say this. NFL has been trying to go more global and Jay-Z is not as global. He is not. He is not. As like a Taylor or a Justin. He is not. But he has enough global hits where he could do it. He could do it. Yeah. But. That hurt my heart. If they want to go with the moment, you get Ella to just do Choose in Texas and it goes crazy. Yeah, but she got one song. No. With all due respect. Be her. I want to be her so bad. It hurts so bad. That's a banger. But I'm just saying, it's a little tough. It's a little tough, though. You know, you need others. I think she's got a feature. I think you got to bring out Jay-Z and then he does a song with Ella Lange. Now we're talking. Or maybe a tribute to the big titty bitch that just died. Exactly. Dolly Parton. Oh. I have a bunch of people. Dolly Parton. I have a bunch of people who do covers of her. Morgan Wallen. Yeah. Morgan Wallen probably got a song with Ella. Then Ella goes Choose in Texas and then they do a Dolly Parton tribute as well. Miley Cyrus as Dolly Parton tribute. Yeah. Take that, Jay-Z. Yo, Jay-Z. This is the easiest job in the world. That's my point. It's the easiest job in the world, bro. Yeah. Come on. We just did it for you. All right. Let's get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard? Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. But it was just like this, just totally chaotic, but at the same time, highly coordinated, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a lot of fun, and it was like the initial volley and our initial response, and then it was like quiet. But now, like we had begun taking footholds, we as in the SEALs had broken up into what we call fire teams, which are just little groups of SEALs, and we had sort of begun taking footholds. We'd spread out, and there really wasn't good command and control. There wasn't a central person who was really aware of exactly where everybody was. Now, there is someone who was in charge of that, but it was so fluid. And there were constantly little skirmishes popping up that it was like, it was nonsense to try to track every little detail. And so it's like, we're all sort of spaced out. It's nighttime. You know, we're on night vision by this point. And then after like six hours of just the skirmish fighting throughout the city, it sort of was like almost anticlimactic. It was like suddenly the fighters are just now gone, and we're all spaced out across the city. And it was, if you, the only time you would have this experience probably is in like a wartime environment, but like you're. You're in a place that's normally like heavily populated, and it's like a ghost town, and it's just weird. Like, it's nighttime, and it's like there isn't a soul anywhere, and it's just this bizarre thing. And the feeling amongst us on the radio is like, we sort of just got our asses kicked, you know, in a way. Did you guys feel like you were outmatched in that? We did, and I think that it wasn't even that we were outgunned. It was more like they clearly had seen us, set up on us, took some really good shots, and then the fighting, I think we only ended up shooting maybe one of the guys or maybe a couple of the guys that were actually actively engaging us, but they mostly, I think, escaped via the tunnel system. And so when I say that the city went quiet, it was like they had escaped, and it was gone. There was a couple guys down, but that was about it. And so we now, this is late at night, we as in the whole group of guys, you know, we have air assets over, like at this point, like there are probably like seven air assets flying overhead, we have A-10s, we have fucking, we have a. We have everything you could imagine overhead. And also, when there's a big enough contact, or when there's a big enough tick, as they call it, a troops in contact, other operations by NATO in country wind down. Because basically, as something escalates and gets bigger and bigger, there's the opportunity that more people have to be sent to backfill to help to just track it. And so by this point in the night, according to some of my buddies who are also SEALs, they were like watching the live feeds from some of the cameras overhead at their. Their respective bases, because there were no operations that night, everything had been shut down, because of us. They're like, yeah, you guys are getting fucked up in Zarganshah, so we're all just like watching your operation. Oh, wow. And at some point, as we're getting ready, we as in the guys in the ground, we're getting ready to leave, one of the air assets overhead, I think it was a drone being flown by a guy in Las Vegas. He called out that he saw what he believed were MAMs, so military age men, or people at a minimum. And so we were like, okay, we're gonna go back to the ground, and we're gonna go back to the ground, and we're gonna go back to the ground, and we're gonna go back to the ground. And so when I was a part of, we were physically closest to where these MAMs presumably were, and you gotta remember that this is after effectively six hours of pretty intense urban combat. This is like, we're warmed up. I hate to say it that way, but we've been like, we're warmed up, we sort of felt like the night has been lost, and the idea that we have dudes setting up to take us out right now, it just made us all like, fuck this. these guys, let's go figure out Now, they could be kids. That's the other thing. Kids could have run back in and been hiding, waiting for us to leave, right? But we're like, let's go see if these are some of the dudes that have been shooting at us because we're in an engagement. We're in a tick right now. We can be offensive. We've been shot at. We don't have to wait to be shot. We can shoot you if you have a gun. So we decide that we're going to sneak our way over and we're going to look over this wall that was apparently at the end of this T intersection. We could look over this wall and we could look out onto this field and we would see this cluster of men or whoever they are and we could make a call about what we're going to do. And so my buddies who watched this live via the live feeds, they were watching it and they would later tell me they were like, I didn't understand what you guys were doing. Like it made no fucking sense what you guys were doing because he was watching the feed and what we were being told on the ground was not exactly what was happening in real life. So we sneak our way down this T intersection. It was like a… It was a sewage runoff. We're walking in like a half a foot of sewage, walking our way like quietly as we can. It's late. We're on night vision. And we get to the end of this intersection where there's this wall right in front of us that has openings on either side. And once you go out those openings, there's this huge field sort of straight up ahead of the T, right above the T. There's this big field. And we were operating on the idea that there would be MAMs on the other side of this field. So we could get to that wall that's like six, seven feet tall. Look over it like, oh, there they are. Let's get our glass out. Let's look. Let's see what they are and make a call. We sneak to this wall. We haven't prepared for any other, you know, like situation. And as soon as we reach the wall, the seven of us, we hear speaking. We hear talking. And it's Pashtun. It's not English. It's someone speaking Pashtun. And we realize that these people are on the immediate other side of the wall. And one of our guys who was like six foot three, he sort of… He peeked over the wall and he just like nodded. Like, those are MAMs. They have weapons, right? But they haven't heard us yet. And so now all of us are looking at each other almost like bracing for them to start shooting us. Because how have they not heard us? Like, we snuck down here. We're Navy SEALs. But like, give me a break. We definitely made noise. But they apparently didn't hear us. And so there's this really intense moment where we're looking at each other and we're all turning to our team lead who's really… He's like a tactical genius. Calm as can be under fire. Like, what do we do? Because it's sort of apparent that we can't really just leave. Because if we leave, there's the opportunity to hear us then. And then they have a better angle at shooting us that way. And so what do we do? And you got to remember, too, that we had that same drone or one of the drones overhead had an infrared spotlight that was being cast down on us. And it was flashing. So it's like imagine if God had a flashlight, a really powerful flashlight and was shining it straight down but was like flicking it on and off. And you can only see it on night vision. You're within that cone of light. And so it's like the strobe effect, which it shouldn't have been. That's typically if you're targeting something. It was like I don't even know why they were doing it, but I'm standing on a disco strobe. But only to you because you're on night vision. You would have seen nothing. Got it. And the ma'ams didn't see anything. And apparently they don't hear or see anything. It's like silence for them. And why is it advantageous to have the strobe effect? It's actually for aircraft to be able to shoot. It's like a way of marking targets for aircraft. They can see where things are being shot. It's called sparkling, I think it's called. All that they should have been doing was using an infrared spotlight to simply illuminate the space for us. But it was like on sparkle. So it was like a strobe light. And like at this point, there's so many other issues that no one's calling out to the aircraft. So in the strobe, I'm looking over at the team lead, and he just looks at the tallest guy. And the team lead gets down on one knee. And without making a sound, he just goes like this, like step on my knee and start engaging. And it was just like. Just like that. The dude stepped on his knee, put the gun over the wall, start shooting. And the MAMs, which we don't know how many there were. I think there were two, could have been as many as three or four. I don't know, but there was at least two. They were holding grenades with the pins pulled. They're holding the spoon down on the grenades. It's like a frag grenade. I don't know if it's a frag grenade, but the way a grenade works is there's a pin in it. You pull the pin out. But as long as your thumb is holding this. That little clip thing. Yeah, it's called a spoon. Nothing happens. You can hold this. It's for the rest of your life and nothing would happen. But once you release it, it doesn't instantly detonate. It flicks the spoon off and then it starts a timer. It detonates like five seconds later. So these grenades get chucked over the wall. The pins have been pulled. So now these are live grenades. And I'm not shooting. I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the guy who's actively shooting in those intimate environment you can imagine. And I remember in the strobe light, I watched this grenade come over the wall. And I see it for a second in the strobe. And then it disappears. Because the strobe goes off and then back on. And this was in a fraction of a second. It's like time slowed down. And I see this grenade coming toward me. And there's just nothing you can do. Like I'm so fucking dead, right? Like a grenade is coming over to my face. Like you're dead, right? And so time slows down. I felt it hit my shoulder. And I remember actually actively thinking, fuck, like it's going to blow up and blow my head off. My face off. And my mom's not going to get to see me again. And then like the strobe kicks on and the grenade now is. Falling to the ground. And I remember it reached like my waist. And I remember thinking, oh, shit, maybe my face will remain intact and my mom can see me again. And then it falls to the ground. And again, this is all in a fraction of a second. It detonates. And by the time I hit the ground, I thought maybe I'd have a fighting chance here. But it detonates. And it just felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at the back of my legs and my hip. It really didn't hurt at all. I would imagine there's an enormous amount of. Of like chemical dumping going on in your body when you're truly bracing for impact like that. So I didn't feel anything. My memory of what happened turned out to be a little bit wrong. I believed, this is my active memory, as I fall to the ground from this blast. It's fucking madness. Some of this is definitely true. The city just sort of erupted. There were fighters still in the city that now began arbitrarily firing rockets just generally in the direction. Because it's like, fuck it, we'll martyr ourselves as long as we take out one of you. It's just arbitrary gunfire being shot in our direction. And I have no idea the status of the rest of the team. I have no clue if I'm the only person alive at this point. I have no idea. And I also know that this intersection that I'm in, there were openings on either end of that T that fed out to this field. And so unless our guy was able to shoot all of them, and they're all incapacitated, they're coming around. And so I'm trying to move. I can't move. My helmet had been. Blown off. I think I didn't have the buckle on, so it just sort of fell off. So I have no night vision, but it was pretty well illuminated that night from the moon, so I could see reasonably well. My gun, the strap, had been blown off, which is a little piece of fabric, but it blew off. So I had no weapon. I have no night vision, and I couldn't stand up. I kept trying to stand. I couldn't stand. And I just, like, I didn't pass out. I was just like, I can't go anywhere, and I'm waiting to get shot. And then somebody picked me up and dragged me into the, like, the stands. The stem of the T, if you will, where there was a little wall. They put me up against it, and they went. This is one of my teammates. They went back down to continue the fight and rescue people. And I, on my kit, you have tourniquets, which are designed to stop the bleeding. You put it on your limb. You can stop the bleeding. The way we fasten them to our kit is specifically for if you're fucking dying, you want to be able to pull these off really easily and quickly, because it's like a life-saving mechanism. And I was too weak to pull them off of my kit. And so I had this realization of I can't stop the bleeding. I know I'm bleeding to death, and I'm just sitting in this alleyway. There's not really a good chance that someone's going to, like, oh, let me go help Alan real quick as we deal with this really intimate gunfight with who knows how many people. And I also know that at any point someone could come up the stem of the T from the main city, which is right there. We already know there's fighters everywhere. So it's just like a waiting game of how I'm going to die. The caveat is, I didn't clarify this on another interview I did. The whole thing is close to what I just said. It's that I was knocked unconscious pretty much immediately. I did lose the helmet, the gun. But our medic, who's a SEAL as well, he's a SEAL medic. They're known as an 18 Delta. He triaged me. He essentially looked around. He's one of the few guys not immediately incapacitated and saw what he thought was ice initially, even though someone tried to say this was not true because it was the springtime. But he thought there was ice under me and then realized it was blood. And he's like, oh. I can't save him. And so he left me thinking I need to save other people who have a better chance at survival. But it was somebody else, another one of my teammates down there who had been very badly concussed, who picked me up and brought me to the stem. So basically, I was left to die and was fully saved by a teammate who brought me down there. But then I and then reality still bleeding out, still bleeding out. And I'm up there in this memory of mine is accurate. Once I was sitting there because I thought I was lucid the whole time, I basically was just knocked unconscious immediately and didn't realize it. As I'm sitting there waiting to die, I my my hearing went completely like death. And I had I had had Peltor's, which are your headset that's connected to your radio. And those were off now. And so I'm just listening to the ambient noise, which is gunshots and fucking RPGs. And it just goes away like absolute fucking deafness, like silence. But I'm fully lucid. I'm totally alive. And I know almost instinctively that I'm. I'm shutting down, I'm dying. I haven't put tourniquets on, I'm dying. And then my vision went completely as well. So I'm blind, eyes open, blackness. But I have this weird, like super, like I was very aware of being alive. I'm definitely alive. I'm not dreaming. I'm not sleeping. I'm alive, but I'm dying. And the things that crossed my mind as I'm nearing death's door here were I wondered if they were going to say John Allen killed in action in Afghanistan or Jonathan Allen killed in action. Just how are they going to spell my name? That's a very important distinction. And then I also, I did think about my wife. We didn't have kids. And that was sort of on my mind that like we had actually said, well, we'll have kids later. And it was just sort of like, fuck, like I'm like 25, six, whatever I was, like I'm 24. I'm going to die. No kids. She's going to move on. Like she's going to have a family with someone else. And then I physically remember a sensation of letting go. This sounds cliche, but it actually felt like there was something in me that was like holding. And then I like let go. And then I felt the impact of my shoulder hitting the ground. And then it was like, and now I'm dying. This is it. And like seconds later, the 18 Delta, the medic comes running over under a fucking hail of gunfire. He pulls me up. He finds the bleed. He puts a tourniquet on my leg, puts them on both legs. And I slowly like, cause I'm no longer rapidly losing blood. I slowly get my vision back and I'm like sitting here looking up and my hearing comes back. And this medic of mine, uh, who's just the most, you would never think Navy SEAL, just the most normal looking dude is just like this highly trained Navy SEAL sniper medic. And I'm not kidding. There's literally like rounds impacting all around us. And he's the one guy. He's the one guy who can save us. He's the medic. Everyone else is fucked up. He's like, Hey, how's it going? Like, I got you. Get your tourniquets on. Hey, I think we're calling an airstrike here in a second. Just sit here. You got your gun. Here's your gun. Like, just, just hold on for a minute. We're gonna be out of here. No, no problem. You just hang tight right there. Bedside manner. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. And I'm like sitting here, like looking around, like what the fuck is going on? I just died in my head. And then dude, the team lead. And by this point they had, they had shot the guys on the other side of the wall, but there was now rounds sort of coming in the rest of the town. And we didn't really know if the guys on the other side of the wall were, were, if there was more coming, we didn't really know. And so I'm like sitting here and my team lead to give you a sense of, of like calm under, under fire. Not me. I was a fucking shit show. I was out. But like this dude, our team lead, he has his headset on and overhead, like in the sky, he, he, this guy was known as a JTAC. It's a joint terminal aircraft controller. You're in charge of calling in strikes from different air platforms and the liability for. Who gets hit, what gets hit is entirely on the JTAC. So if you tell a pilot to fucking drop a bomb over here and you kill fucking 50 people, not the pilot's fault. That's your fault. So the school, I went through that school, never used it in, in real life. In one of his years, he's listening to what must have been at least seven or eight different air aircraft, at least that are all literally flying overhead at different altitudes. They're called different blocks. And it's your job as the JTAC to know where they are because they don't really, they don't really pay attention. If they're going to do a gun run or something, they're coming in guns blazing at speed in the designated altitude block that you've given them. If you did not properly de-conflict with the other aircraft, it could be hitting absolutely hit another aircraft. So there's a huge amount of just organizational skill that goes into being a Jake JTAC, but he was, he had to call in an airstrike, but he had to call in what's known as a danger close airstrike, which is in the world of, of, of JTACery. This is the most sketchy thing you do. It's where you're calling in an airstrike that's effectively on your position. You're not trying to hit your own position, but we were so close to that wall where we believe these fighters still were that the only way to do it was to call in a hellfire missile, which is relatively precise, fairly small munition. But like we're talking from me to the cameras, like maybe even a little bit closer. And so you have to give a very precise description of what you want them to hit. And remember the pilot, they're using special devices and stuff. They're really looking out the window and they're trying to make sense of what you're telling them. And you're basically saying, Hey, you're going to see a T intersection and there's a group of guys on one side and a group of guys on the other, and everybody's fucking shooting at each other. We want you to hit those guys over there and don't fucking mess. So in one ear, he's de-conflicting the other aircraft to move to various air blocks to be clear. So the one pilot can come in and drop this precise airstrike, which you also need to get. That's called a commander's initialing. You need someone senior. Other than you to approve the drop, you don't do that for any other drop all while receiving gunfire and protecting the rest of the guys. So he was doing that his other ear. He's doing that with the commander on the ground saying, here's where we are. Here's what's going on. I need your initialing to get this drop. And he's trying to coordinate with everybody else who had told you we broke into fire teams. He is one of the most senior guys in the ground. He's trying to describe where we are and how best to move through the city to get to us. So that they're not part of the strike. Oh. Oh, man. And he's doing it literally while being shot at. And several of us are down. One guy, his lung had collapsed, and he needed what are called needle decompressions every few minutes. Which imagine taking a needle and putting it into your third and fourth intercostal space. And you just pull out the back of it, and it creates an air pocket. And you basically relieve the pressure in your lung, but you keep them in your side. So you have a porcupine of needles poking out of your-- and you have to keep doing it or else you'll suffocate. Oh, my God. So the medic is treating me, and he's putting more and more needles into the other guy. We're getting actively shot at, but he calls in this beautiful airstrike. He hits the guy on the other side. And then he called in an under-fire, like, hey, we need a medevac right now. But you can't come here. There's nowhere for the aircraft to land. And so he called in a medevac a mile away. But the crew coming in, they're coming into a context. And they're coming in not just to evacuate you, they're coming into an active gunfight where they can get shot down. They're really skittish. They want all the information on what the fuck they're getting themselves into. And so on the same year where he's dropping an airstrike, he's filtering on that year with the medevac platform, giving them what's called a nine line, which is like all the details of where we are, what you need to do, what you need to bring, what the mechanism of injury is. It was just fucking brilliant. So we call in this medevac. I'm back to life, sort of amazingly. And I was picked up on people's shoulders, and I sort of ran and ran, but held on to others. So I went to this medevac. And there wasn't a whole lot of shooting when we got there. But when we got there, these are the pararescue jumpers, the Air Force PJs, who were like, this is their job. It's special operations in the Air Force who do special rescues. And they're like cowboys, like fucking shooting their guns and shit as soon as we get there, flying like they would land their helo with one wheel touching the corner of a fucking wall so they can get a quick-- it was crazy shit. So we hop in the helicopter. And me and the other guy with the--. And the lung thing going on. We got dropped in the helicopter. But the other guys, there's no space for you. You're not leaving here. You've got to go back to your team. So all the dudes who weren't badly injured, but who had just been like, fragged and concussed and fucked up, now you have two less combatant-- two less people in me and the other guy. And you need to go all the way back through the hornet's nest to reconvene with the team and fight your way out. And so they're like, all right, bye, guys. And we fly off. And they just go running back into the contact zone. Fuck. All right, guys. Rock hard. 15 minutes or less. Do I need to say any more? Blue Chew's new product, Blue Chew Gold. You rock hard in 15 minutes or less. No other pill in the market is doing that. 15 minutes or less? Rock. That's it. OK? If you don't wait 40 minutes, do you know how much can change in that amount of time? She gets a fall from a friend. Fat girl. Fell into a sewer. She thought she saw a cannoli down there. Head first. Teeth. Teeth out. It wasn't that. Now she got to go scoop her out. We got to get the 3-1-1 involved. The whole city is trying to get this poor girl out of a gutter. 15 minutes or less, you're already doing the business while her friend is face down in a sewer trying to get a cannoli that's not even there. She had an illusion. It was like being in the desert. You think you saw water. This fat girl thought she saw a cannoli at the bottom of the sewer. We got a special deal for our listeners. Right now, when you buy two months of Blue Chew Gold. You get a third free with the promo code flagrant. That's promo code flagrant. You'll also receive an additional 10% off, plus free overnight shipping on your first order. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. We thank Blue Chew for sponsoring a pot in a bedroom. Also be honest. What is one money lesson you had to learn the hard way and wish you didn't have to? All parents are going to have tough money conversations with their kids at some point. I know I will someday. But luckily. Cash App has tools that can help. Cash App now offers managed accounts for kids ages 6 to 12 that grow with them all the way to adulthood. All with no subscription fees because building money habits shouldn't cost extra. The account runs through you. So you're not just watching from the sidelines. You're actually in it with them. That's what makes it a real teaching tool. Every time money comes in or goes out, it's a chance to talk about it together. They should probably set this up for wives. You set spending limits and you can lock or unlock their Cash App Visa card anytime from your own app. Automate their allowance and track the flow of money in and out together, kids can spend start building real saving habits early by earning interest on savings. So when you're explaining the difference between spending now for saving for later, they can actually see their money grow. Whether it's a birthday money from grandma, allowance for finally cleaning their room, or saving up for something they really want, you see it all and help guide the decisions along the way. Their savings habits and history carry forward every step of the way from a parent managed account at six to a teen account at 13 to a full account at 18. It's structured independence. They get real life practice with money and you're right there with them for every stage. So for a limited time, new Cash App customers who are parents can use our exclusive referral code FAMILY10 to earn $10. Download Cash App, enter your referral code in your profile, send $5 to a friend within 14 days and you will receive $10 terms. Apply. Download Cash App today and open a managed account for your child. Visit our link in bio. And when you need more than just data, you can use ChatGPT.com. Give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. And then on the helicopter, I didn't really know exactly how bad my injuries were because the adrenaline's flowing. I thought I just fucking died a second ago. And I tell people like the, you get up every day and you live and you don't really actively think about it. You don't really think about it. Well, today I'm going to breathe. Today I'm going to pump my heart. And it just happens. You just live. Your entire experience is living. You don't ever really think about it. You don't know it yet, but you're just as good at dying. It just, it hasn't happened yet. Your body is just as good at shutting down. When I was in the active stage of dying, it was just like, oh yeah, I'm dying now. Like that's it. Not sad, not bad, just is. And so I knew I had that experience. It didn't seem real that I hadn't. And I'm laying on this helicopter and we're flying out of this, this Zarganshah. It's like chaos. There's gunfire everywhere. And they asked me if I wanted morphine. And I said, no, because I was like, if I die, I want to feel it. I want to be aware. I don't want to be fucked up when I die. Again, I could have been completely stable. I probably was by this point, but we land at Fob Shank, the same place that I landed when I first got to Afghanistan. And by this point they had radioed to the people on staff. This is the middle of the night of all the nurses and doctors that were at Shank. And there was this medical tent that, you know, had all the equipment you could ask for. And we get off the chopper and they rush us in on, on like gurneys. And by this point, my clothes have been all clipped off of me. I'm like a fucking, I'm like half naked, like all fucked up. I got no idea what's going on. And I basically was under the impression that I'm, I'm okay. I'm going to, I've made it this far. I made it this long. I'm probably going to live. And so I'm feeling pretty confident, but we get wheeled in from like the dark outside to this really brightly lit up. Tent. And there's all these just like dozens of doctors and nurses that are just waiting for us because they're like, whatever surgery they need, we're going to give it to them. And that was a little alarming, but I'm like, okay, that's cool. Like, it's great. We have such great team here, but in the back corner of this tent waiting as well were a bunch of my teammates, other SEALs that were in country. They weren't at our station. They were basically stationed here at Fob Shank, but they're guys I trained with. Some of the guys were from team two. They were, like, you know, pretty, pretty, like my friends, I would call them. And they had on uniforms and like you were civilian clothes pretty much the whole time. And they had put on, I would, what I would call like their best uniforms. And they're standing in the corner, like solemnly, almost at attention watching as we come in. And so we have this tracker in country where you can see what's happening with, it's like a text thread of like all the call signs of who's doing what, where they are. And you can just sort of track an operation. And I told you that by this point, operations had really shut down in that part of Afghanistan. So, like, no one was doing anything. They were just watching the feed. And they saw us walk down that T intersection. And they're like, why are you walking right up on those fucking people on the other side of the wall? They didn't get it. And so they knew it had gone bad. They knew that they saw my call sign and the other of, you know, potential pretty serious injuries. And so they'd come into this tent in case we died. So, like, I'm basically being wheeled into the closest thing to my own funeral as you're going to get, because I don't know. For all, I'm getting in here realizing as I'm staring at my teammates who were like so serious and no one's serious at the fucking team. Everyone fucks around constantly. They're so serious that I'm like, wait a minute, like, am I about to die? Like, did I not realize that this was actually quite serious? And then they're like, all right, we're going to give you some ketamine. Good luck. Ketamine fucking out. And then I woke up in Germany. Actually, I was in another part of Afghanistan. Then I went to Germany like later that same day. And then I survived. And seven days later, I was back home in Virginia. No transition, just at Home Depot, pushing my cart down the aisle in Home Depot, hobbling, you know, a bleeding ass, you know, just just living my life. What were the injuries? Luckily for me, it was just like what amounted to just pretty serious flesh wound. You know, like I have a nice crater in my ass, like a nice fucking scoop taken out of it. And then the back of my leg as well. It's just shrapnel. I mean, effectively, I got really lucky. The thing that was actually the closest, thing to killing me that didn't actually hurt me at all, but it almost did was I almost had anal compromise, which would have been really bad. What is that? So the way the shrapnel shot into me, which is basically the grenade, it has a blasting cap in the middle of it. And when it detonates, the grenade body itself becomes the shrapnel. Exactly. And they're all different sizes and they're like jagged pieces of metal flying in every direction. When it goes into you, it sort of tumbles and like tumbles around inside of your body. And like goes zigzags. A piece went into me when they were debriding it. They saw it like went around. It went into my side of my ass and like narrowly missed my like my anal tract, if you will. If you lacerate your fucking your asshole septic. Yeah. Yeah. Your poop feces is going to get into your body. You're getting sepsis and you're done. Yeah. And they said it like pretty much across the board when they see dudes come in here with shrapnel injuries to their ass. That's usually fatal because of that. Exactly. And they're like, dude, it was a right past your fucking asshole. That's what they were training them in the Sears. That's right. They kept that asshole tight. Wow. A wise man once said that Navy SEALs performing a nighttime mission, the only way they can get out of there is if they do blackface. Is that true? Is that true? Is that true? Yeah. No, I don't know, dude. Would you guys get to put on the blackface? We we did put on lots of face face stuff. We definitely did. Was it fun? Like, would you guys goof around? There was this one time speaking of stupid face paint stuff. So when we got back from that deployment and I actually I did another tour, I went to South America for the next workup, but we had our own new guys. So suddenly I'm not a new guy anymore. And so the rite of passage belongs to these next to the next wave of new guys. And one of the things you do when you're a new guy is there's there's so many briefs that have to be given just stupid shit, like just like administrative crap that like somebody has to brief the platoon about, you know, today. Hey, guys, make sure we're down there. Like when you use your fucking ear protection at the shooting range. Yeah, it's like safety briefs and whatever. But periodically, there are these pretty serious briefs that have to be laughing thinking about this. There are these pretty serious briefs that have to be given at this other like command center on base to like visiting senior members of the. And the team guys, they're they're great at giving these briefs. And so like the SEALs would get tapped to like talk about the state of NSW, like little stupid stuff. But it was like we were great representatives and we would all take it like really seriously. But it was always the new guys when I was a new guy that would get tapped to like go give the fucking brief to the one star, like go do the talk about how NSW is doing whatever. And there was this one dude who was like the worst public speaker, just the fucking worst. And he hated it so much. And we're like, you're fucking doing this brief. And we painted his face. It was all green. But this just inexplicable black box over his eyes, like all the way over his mouth. And we were like, at no point can you reference it. So we went over and watched him do it. It's this huge auditorium, all these people. He comes out and like a superhero. He's such a moron in his dress uniform with his face paint. And they did ask. And we were like, don't you say it. Don't say it. Don't explain it. No way. That's probably helpful. And if you're doing public speaking, you're thinking about that the whole time. Yeah. Actually, he would later tell us that that destroyed his fear of public speaking, because he's like, I can't get worse than that. I got through that. So what happened to the guy with the lungs? He survived. Yeah, he. So for him, he had he had a collapsed lung. Actually, he and I, we had another really actually him more than me. We had another super close call earlier in the deployment. We went into this building that we had been trying. There was this metal door that was super loud and we're trying to breach the door and it clearly had woken everybody up this is like in the early morning hours and we knew there was somebody in there that was like a gun i figured what he like a bomb maker or something but he was a known bad guy right and so we're like making all this fucking noise and now we're like sort of pot committed we made a lot of noise out here we got to go in there and prosecute the target and so i was you know waiting we finally get the door open and we threw some crash crashes in there which are non-lethal concussion and then the way it works is everybody knows everybody's job you just sort of like if you go in as the one man and then you wind up being the two man like everybody can just pick up the pieces and it just worked out that i happened to stack on the door as like the two man and so we are yeah or actually i was the three man either way i wasn't the first guy in and so we make entry and there's a dog barking somewhere it's pitch black inside of this house and there's this little like foyer right as we walk in and there's a stairwell that cuts up to the right and there's a hallway straight ahead but we were on night vision and so when you're watching through your little tubes that stick off your helmet you have i think it's called parallax i forget the term for it we're like you think you're looking at this level but just given the way the the night vision sits on your head it's either slightly higher or slightly lower than how you perceive so basically you think that you're at this level but you're actually looking like an inch higher or an inch lower i forget the difference you're slightly off and there was a low ceiling and i start walking forward and i uh my nods they're like you know my nods because of this i thought i had to duck down enough that i'd clear this low ceiling and be able to walk down this out this hallway straight ahead of me but my nods clipped the overhang i walked this is a live clearance like you came oh hold on guys and i clipped the the overhang and you're taught anytime you have any sort of gear malfunction of any kind just get the out of the way somebody else behind you will see you pick up the spot and they'll continue on and so i turned and i realized right away it's because of my my i just the parallax and i begin making my way up the stairs because i turned i figured it out and i just start clearing up the stairs and like a second later not even there was just like it sounded like a bomb going off inside the house and it turned out it was there was a shooter at the end of the hallway laying down prone with a slug shotgun just and he fired one shot into into the breach into us in a row into where you were supposed to be yes into where we were supposed to be but literally where you were supposed to be before you turned to literally where i had been because the guy who followed behind you who was like six foot three get shot he got shot like here does he have a uh yes oh my god if he was a little shorter so if i stood where if i was standing next to him that's my shot yeah and the guy was shooting blind he was just waiting for a sound and shooting into the dark and so it it him up i mean the dude who got hit in the plates it shattered his plates it he had shrapnel in his neck and i mean he was compared to the collapse he's the same guy collapse his lung uh he's this poor guy he uh but yeah so like he and i had every time he's with you yeah dude did he get to go to home depot also like where's he at dude he he's an intimidating guy like he's he he looks he almost like feels like a navy seal just the way he carries himself he's like real big a big guy just like a mean dude and just he was so like bitter about getting shot more they hurt multiple times but uh do you think there's a kid we're now an adult in afghanistan that watches your youtube videos he's like dude i remember them up man yeah dude you gotta be right yeah i don't know man is it possible like you can see the youtube data yeah he loves the strange things like he's just watching and then he hears you tell this story he's like there's no way dude my past life is different too man yeah yeah i don't know man that's it's crazy though it's so weird now like being so removed from it now you know like it's so different in your life oh does it feel like a different person like when you think about it in fact now i've thought so much and talked so much about my past life if you will yeah that i almost can't quite separate like how i view it in story form like literally when i talk about me getting hurt i see it in the form of the way i tell the story but there's a lived experience yeah there's stuff that like happened that i don't often think about like smaller details but it just feels almost different than the way i tell the story but there's like a lived experience there's stuff that like happened that i don't often think about like smaller details but it just feels almost like i'm watching a movie in my head it doesn't feel like that was me but like i'll take a shower and be like oh yeah that huge scar on my ass so you still have all the scars yeah there's i mean they're little for a while there there was like little bits of shrapnel that felt like sand like coming out of my leg they worked themselves out but like the the main stuff was pulled out right away and then i i mean other than uh you know i i had to go to to wound care with the navy like i remember the thing is is i came back from that deployment and i thought i was the just the man just like i was but because it you spend so much time and energy like trying to become a seal and then like you're you're you're welcomed into this community this like elite community right and then you go to war like the thing that sort of separates the men from the boys at least in sort of the from from inside that community and i did that and now i i even have like a wound to show i was undeniably i was a part of it yeah and i i am not i hope i don't think i'm a i'm a very egotistical person but at the time i was like yeah like i'm a navy seal combat vega my purple heart everybody knows that i felt like really cool and especially so in the the weeks immediately after getting home i also there was no transition period yeah i was a lunatic when i first came home oh really you felt oh dude like i was still i was living in afghanistan not flashbacks like i had not regulated my ability to like not treat every single threat like it was a full-blown crisis oh sure how did that present itself uh i got home and my wife she's like oh the uh the homeowners association called uh our chimney caps a little rusted they needed to fix it fuck you , i call the fucking homeowners association you have any fucking clue where i've been the last fucking six months and they're like sir we have why would we know that yeah i don't have any idea about what you've been doing i was like that's fair that's a sketchy night for your wife the first night you get back oh yeah well she's pretending to my wound as well yeah so the thing about the in the house i got wheeled in to bethesda and maryland the hospital and she hasn't seen me and i'm like ragged looking i was i not even just from the injury like i got really lean like i a lot of guys like kind of just like they get jacked up i didn't i i worked out a lot but i got real skinny and like wiry and i had like this horrible facial hair i grow a real patchy beard i had like a combat mullet and like i i looked like i i wanted to be intimidating to locals i wanted to look not locals but to the people who were up against i wanted them to think like this dude's unhinged you know but i've done no that that's actually the day i got hurt that was pre-mohawk i cut it oh wow actually that's the day i got hurt so i didn't have the mohawk there is a mohawk picture of me but either way i was ragged when i got home and when i got wheeled in the doctor who was so callous he's like all right mrs allen go over here she's like hasn't seen me this is her first meeting and i'm laying on my stomach my ass is hanging out and she almost faints from seeing the wound and he's like i'm gonna go over here and so she's like no it doesn't get helped up she didn't faint but she's like really shocked by it and he's like you're gonna learn how to do this uh he needs to have this this packed with gauze twice a day because we can't have the the cavity forming inside like it needs to heal from the inside up and so her job was not just to clean it but it was to like open it up and like push gauze deep into this like hole in my ass oh no and so really initially that was that was her interaction but then it's like she's like caring for me like physically like cleaning me and taking care of me sort of a weird awful you know segue into civilian life and and i was like utterly ungrateful just like angry yeah still sort of harboring like i i it's almost like i had because the team that i was with they were all still in afghanistan desperately really desperately and it wasn't like i i felt like i had let them down or something it was like now what do i do i would have been okay leaving with them you know then it's like the natural time that it ends and you're like hey we're done we're gonna like decompress and go to but it was like wait a minute like i was there i was literally like doing a minute ago and now all i want to do is go back did you feel any like guilt like you let them down because you got hurt and you can't be out there with them i was worried somebody was going to get killed in the final month and and that i theoretically had i been there that you could have done something yeah yeah which is maybe a hero complex but it's just like logical like me not being there affects everything that's going to happen for them it has to yeah and so like it just made me feel worried that something bad would happen when they came home it was an enormous relief because it was like thank thankfully they're home but uh but yeah dude it was it was madness how do you transition to like being a youtuber and i don't mean that to be i'd be reductive but like it is so mind-bogglingly different from the life that you just described to us even though as you describe it is very similar to what you are doing right now you're telling these like insane crazy stories many of which are true stories some are like how would you say like um it's not that they're not true but urban legends or they're like pov like somebody's perspective exactly it's like this person said that the great story that you told about the uh the the what is it the canyon uh bell's canyon classic these different things so so like where does this happen yeah uh yeah dude it was so weird like i i got got medically retired in 2017 um so which so this got i got hurt in 2014 right i i ended up sort of fumbling my way into another rotation but physically like i i the blast dislocated both of my shoulders which sounds nasty but it just it gave me slap tears in both my labrums which is just sort of a nuisance so i had surgery on this this shoulder um i had shrapnel injuries which you know once they healed it was basically okay but i felt physically like i had really stepped backwards yeah like we had to do a stress a stress test one time which is just a shooting course where you're like doing push-ups and shit before and i like could not do a pull-up with my kid on and it's because of my shoulder yeah and i remember thinking like i'm like 26 25 and i'm yeah what the fuck is going on um so i ended up getting medically retired uh sort of a long story but made short i just was not fit for it i didn't want to do the teams anymore and i uh so i got retired. but when i got out i i had been told the way medical retirement works is you sort of artificially get the 20 years where you get a pension but you get it right now because it's like a medically you can't do it anymore so we're going to cut you off now but you get a pension as if you were fully retired so you got a couple bucks you can feed yourself it's pretty i mean the the pension is is it's a i'm not diminishing it but it's enough you could live on it for sure but not comfortably and not with kids i don't care where you live it's just not enough right but it's it's amazing it's tax-free and it's an incredible benefit and i'm very i was extremely grateful for it but i was told that i'd be exiting the military on one date and then i got moved way up which in a way was good because i was sort of in a holding period to a degree i was teaching uh some diving class to other seals and it was like what am i doing so it gets moved up but i'm sort of thrust into the civilian world a little bit earlier than i expected by my i have two kids living in virginia um and i didn't really even know what to do i went to the hospital and i ended up connecting with this dude in new york uh jordan selleck he was a former investment banker who's a very roundabout thing his buddy was a transitioning veteran as well a former fighter pilot connected with him and he's like oh dude you gotta like network with people to get a job because that's what i was trying to do like i have a pension but i need a job i ended up with jordan we put together this networking event that we called elite meet in new york uh where selfishly it was actually just so i could meet with potential partner like business partner or companies that might want to hire me like he jordan recruited companies who were hiring and might want to hire vets and i brought my buddies from the teams who were getting out and we like met and it was like here network get jobs uh this is a popular thing though in the community it's a great idea a lot of big uh corporations will specifically want to hire like elites you know seal guys rangers you know i don't know if that's because of a trust element or i i think there's a little bit of a a belief that in virtue of having been through something like that i'm going to or whatever selection course they went through that they must possess soft skills that are really hard to teach we can teach you the hard skills i think that's the the way it's described but anyways we have this really successful networking event but no one really none none on the the corporate side really approached me for a job because the assumption was my job is hosting an event like this and i sort of unintentionally pushed myself outside of the market uh but i sort of leaned into it and i turned it into a charity with the help of jordan and i was like doing a lot of fundraising and hosting the event and i was like doing a lot of these networking events i was like a vet who needed a job helping other vets get jobs for a while yeah and i were you looking for a job to get like back into action like those black sites not no not at all stuff that goes on some guys a lot of guys get out and they'll do something on like the civilian contracting side like blackwater or whatever that's even still a thing i didn't want to do that i actually what really excited me was like a corporate like nine to five i was like that sounds so fucking sick to just like go to your job and then like get to go home and be with your family i was like just really like i really wanted to do that but it was fun doing this this networking thing because i i liked raising money for a cause i believed in i knew personally the guys i was trying to get jobs for but the pitfall was i needed to advertise sort of what this even is to get donors to get companies to show up to build legitimacy and the issue i ran into in terms of marketing effectively the product which is the elite special operations guys is i need i need to talk about their experiences i need to talk about how they translate to the corporate world all that and so i ended up doing some content when i had no following nothing i was doing on linkedin just like little anecdotal stories that i would get from some of these guys about their experience and i would like wordsmith it to be like and that's why as a as a comms guy he'd be great at sales in fucking tech or whatever and it just wasn't very effective and i'm like dude i know these dudes have fucking experience and i'm like dude i know six stories that are totally G-rated, can be used to strengthen their case, can make everybody look really elite. Because right now, all we're saying is, oh, veterans. What I want to do is be like, no, these are really special people that went through specialized training. Let's highlight that stuff. But no one wanted to give me their stories. I felt uncomfortable asking. And so I was like, oh, I know. I'll tell my own stories. I'll tell my Navy SEAL stories that are all sort of tailored towards being a description of the whole community at large. I'm not saying I'm so great, hire me. I'm sort of now saying, look, I represent this group of people. Here's an experience that happened to me. It's all written form. I'd write it up. And it was designed to be like, through this situation, here are the things that I learned. And everyone at Elite Meat has skills like these. That was sort of the gist. And it started with good intentions. But it got a lot of buzz, not anywhere near like Mr. Ballin, but like in the world of, I don't know, corporate recruiting. This became somewhat noteworthy in the northeast of the United States. And there was like quite a bit of traction on these LinkedIn posts. And I was like, great, I'll do more posts about my experience. And I was like super fucking blunt about my experience. It was, at least I thought I was being, I wasn't telling stories that were out of control. It was like stupid shit, like things about bootcamp and whatever. But it rubbed people the wrong way in the SEAL teams, big time. Why? There is a, there is a thing that I totally understand. And I knew I was doing, but I was sort of acting like I was better than it a little bit, which is, even though it is the case that there is SEAL stuff everywhere. If you Google Navy SEAL, there's no shortage of pictures, movies, books, video games. That's all true. And I am clearly in the group of people that is part of the proliferation of the SEAL brand. But there is a far greater number of people that are in the SEAL teams proper or who have gotten out, who have extraordinary stories to tell, extraordinary experiences that if they were to share with the world, likely would get quite a bit of notoriety, quite a bit of, you know, like affection from the world could probably have pretty incredible opportunities. But there is a silent professional ethos that definitely exists in the, in special operations. And since Bin Laden happened till now, that has gotten really gray in the teams where there's a, there's a group of people and I'm one of them that talks openly about their experiences. And I was sort of going from being an active duty guy who's, oh, he's helping out. He's getting guys jobs to like more and more of my anecdotes were becoming a little bit more like making me out to have my own brand, making me out as like the face of elite meat. And it was sort of frustrating that nobody else would give me their stories. And I was like, fuck it. I'll just tell my own. And I was becoming the guy that's like, look at me. Like I'm a Navy SEAL. This is again, from the active cardinal sin in the teams. It's actually, it's unforgivable. Oh yeah. You are, you're, you're disowned basically. And what is the logic behind that? There is a pack mentality when you're in the teams that I think is, it's necessary. That's what probably makes it so prolific and deadly. You are, everyone talks about when you're in the teams that it's all about your reputation. That your reputation is all that matters. And that sounds sort of top level, but that really is the case. Your currency everywhere you go in the teams is what do people think about you when you're not there? And if you have a great reputation, you get the best jobs, you get the best mission sets, you'll get promoted more frequently. You're well-liked. The world is your oyster within the world of special operations. If you are viewed as a liability, as a piece of shit in the teams, there's like a process to kick you out based on just your reputation. We would have like peer evaluations periodically at the team. Like we've all done selection. We're at the team. Like this is our job, right? And they're like, yeah, we're going to do a peer evaluation. You have to score every single person on your team from one to 10 or whatever, in terms of how they performed, either in terms of how they conducted themselves or skill set at the last training block. You put your name on the evaluation and everybody's name is being evaluated and the team is being evaluated. And you're like, yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. But yeah, you're not a SEAL anymore. Go fuck yourself. So there's like a very intense, you're always trying to prove to your teammates that you belong. And as soon as you leave the teams, it isn't that you're disowned in general, but you're not part of the pack anymore. I felt it right away when I left that even though I was like working closely with guys who were trying to leave the military and get jobs, I was interfacing with guys at the active duty level a lot. It already felt like, wow, even just a month or two. And I already feel like I'm a total outsider because it's just this, it's this hive mind. They're completely of their own accord. Also, there's just like a desire to like go to war. There's a desire to go do the job. and when you're when you're actively employed you're not doing social media like I you'd be I don't think right now it exists that there is an active duty seal talking about their experience act I don't I don't think it exists because I don't think it can so when you don't need a job because you are an active duty Navy SEAL and you're in the pack and you're doing your thing like of course it's it's so easy to chastise and view anybody who talks about their experience who's out there as having done something wrong because one you don't need to talk about your experience right now you're in the pack yeah you're in you're accepted and you're gainfully employed you you know exactly what you're gonna do next week in two weeks in a year you everything's mapped out for you the team is the only thing that matters only thing that if it seems like you're doing something for yourself and it's like fuck you wait hold on this is about the team and so when I started getting bigger again on a very small scale a bigger within that small recruiting scale I began receiving just the worst messages from not anonymous people people you know teammates work with senior I got a Medal of Honor recipient who wrote me like a fucking long message because I had done a post about someone who he personally knew who had been killed there's a there's a tradition where when you graduate from SEAL training to give you a k-bar knife with a teammate of a fallen SEAL and mine was Louie Langless who was this prolific SEAL team six guy who I didn't know him all I have is his knife I have his knife I have his name when he was killed I think it was in Kandahar I'm not sure but he was like beloved this is like one of the most beloved people in the teams he had a family like he was sort of like the the all-american the perfect Navy SEAL and I did a post where I took a picture of the blade in a shadow box and it was on my LinkedIn and by this point I'm sort of I'm hamming up being mr. Navy SEAL and I can totally see how it's like oh I see you're just putting Louie Langless and the fucking blade there on your LinkedIn to make yourself look promote you yeah and so I got you know very stern talking to you from from him I but I have people that approached me in real life in Virginia it's like I became persona non grata that's what it's called do you regret it yes and no I think that I know that when I was doing it I knew what I was doing I'm not I was in the pack I know what it feels like I remember hating dudes who wrote books and did shit and then and then honestly what happens is you get out of the military and it isn't like oh fuck I better cash in my SEAL equity that's not that's not really it it's more like it is probably the case that in virtue of having gone through this training and had these experiences that I probably possess a lot of things that maybe companies would would want to hire me for I'm sure there's opportunities out there the problem is is okay how are they gonna know unless you tell them or are able to explain what you bring to the table like just because I walked out of the teams and I'm mr. Navy so who the fuck's gonna know oh shit there's John Allen yeah I I know his resume just from looking at no you have to share it with the world and and the way I was doing it was was a little bit too much I would I would definitely say that but there's this when you're active you there's no reason for you to be sharing anything about who you are what you've done with anyone no one has social media no one even has a fucking email account for the most part you have like your fucking bullshit military email account like you're you're in a bubble you know and then what really has begun happening is guys get out social media exists the internet exists they're like fuck what do I do with my life I can either go right into contract work which is sort of readily available to you like go you know be security on a cargo ship and in Djibouti or something or I can create a brand around but the grit and determination and all this stuff so I see it from both sides I think that the upshot of that is I got a message from a friend of mine who was like I don't know I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it I don't even know what to do with it he got a message from a guy that I trained with a lot before I joined the Navy and I don't begrudge him for this but I trained with him a lot he was a close friend of mine and I had had a really just bad day of lots of messages from I had guys like messaging me who were like I'm a fucking new guy at seal team blah and you're a joke at the team like I don't even know you we're just shitting all over you in the platoon space and signed like their name their cell phone number like they want you to get in touch with them that's right that's right that's right that's right that's right that's right you know and it's and so I'm having a bad day and this one dude text me and I hadn't heard from him in a long time and he had gone over to the team six and he just wrote you suck and it's like a small thing of all the things but it's that is like I know what you're really saying what you're really saying is I don't respect you I see what you're doing and I this guy is at the pinnacle of the Navy SEAL hierarchy and he's like I basically I do not respect you and it like hurts so bad and I don't respect you and I don't respect you and I don't everything heard and i got a long message that same same guy i was taking fire with uh in the the yeah he wrote me a message too that was very deep cutting again signed you know fucking come to my house if you want to talk about it like no one's avoiding conflict with me i'd go to the gym and like dudes are mean mugging me from across the gyms that see in the these are trained killers like they're ready for conflict it's also something interesting which is like you go through this process probably on some level for the validation and the respect of these people yeah you know it's like you're submitting yourself to the toughest training that exists in the united states of america arguably and it proves that you're a badass and your acceptance from these other individuals who have already went through that training are the ones that are validating you yeah and then losing that validation yeah it was a tough blow and i got i did i was so out of shape to and then you just made so much money dude i can't imagine the boys are swinging around like actually no you're sick again yeah dude by the way bro they found out millions you're like hey man dude it was crazy so like i i mean mr ball and like it came into existence because of how i realized if i'm gonna do anything on the internet yeah it has to be completely divorced from being a seal because i at the time this is like you know when i when i posted for the first time and sort of went viral this was like right before kovat happened and i was still doing my i was doing even though i was facing the ire of the community i was hosting events with the guys who hated me to try to get the jobs it was something else but the events they shut down because of kovid but kovid really wasn't a thing yet it was like oh this will be two weeks you know we'll just stop events for now but i was like you know what i'm not gonna just give up on using the internet because i saw i had raised you know i think in the span of a couple years like several hundred thousand dollars on micro donations via linkedin like i was getting people to donate 30 bucks 50 bucks 100 bucks but it was all i did and i'm like i've seen the strength of the internet to some degree i don't want to just bail on it but i don't want to do seal stuff it it's so bad it hurts so much it's not worth it and so i began experimenting with other types of content that were not worth it and i was like we're like divorced as if you had no idea that i had anything to do with the military and all of it was fucking horrible oh so bad the worst i did this one do any get ready with me no i didn't i should have those would be better i did some dancing ones those have been eradicated from a couple dancing ones there but i sort of brought in like a nerf gun to it somehow and then i did uh there was a trend on uh you sure they didn't send you the you suck email but i i did some cringy stuff like that but then i remember on my computer i had i had these two documents that were like my ideas my things that i could do on the internet that are again divorced from the teams and on one of them it was like every trend that i had seen i was like studying social media like is there something i can do um actually i think you were at one point one of the reference points because you had like biting commentary that was really good i didn't nail it so that didn't work for me and then uh the other one it was just all i wrote was diatlov pass yes and it's this this fabulous story that i find myself doing and i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm like oh my god i'm myself, I am so interested in true or purported to be true, strange, dark, mysterious stories. And I had just, for whatever reason, never even considered what if you just told one of those stories you really liked to the camera. And I am someone who tells stories. I knew I was. And it never really clicked. And then I was at this water park with my family in Pennsylvania, this indoor water park, Great Wolf Lodge. And I was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do a quick 60-second version of the Dyatlov Pass mystery. And I have no followers. It's TikTok. TikTok before people even were really using TikTok in the US. And I tell this story, and I post it. And I really wasn't like, oh, boy, I nailed it. This is it. I finally figured it out. It was like, oh, cool. It's something new. It's totally different. It's not SEAL-related. And then I left my phone in the room to go down to the water park with my wife and kids. I came back, and there's 5 million views. And I couldn't even open my phone. There were so many notifications. So it was like, wow. Are you familiar with the story, Al? Can we? Okay, hold on. I got to use the bathroom. But then can we do like, this is, it's pretty. It's a great story. I think it's good entryway into a lot of the other content, which I'm sure we have a bunch of questions specifically on. It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi. step projects and when you need more than just answers give chat gpt work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets slides and structured reports get started at chat gpt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans fan duel is now available everywhere in the u.s so you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are including these places make this your most rewarding season ever with fan duel age and location restrictions apply product availability varies by market see fanduel.com for eligibility gambling problem call 1-800-GAMBLER and we're back streaming on peacock may i present to you the award-winning staff of the toledo truth teller slap me let's jar something loose yes i like that the certified fresh series returns your boss you always like this or is this just an act oh no this isn't it oysters everybody there's a certain satisfaction when you work with someone maybe we could be a family you sadistic pig the paper new season streaming september 9th only on peacock this show gives me a reason to live