The Joe Rogan experience I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here. I do this is like how are ground? I mean I've been watching you like the rest of the world for years I mean I've seen I've seen so many clips of this space so many references to Jamie and to be here right now It's very cool. So I'm honored. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're here
Yeah, it is always weird when you go someplace where you like a first time I did Howard Stern felt the same way Like during the building like what the fuck this is the actual Howard Stern show that I used to listen to on the radio like Really freak me out. I couldn't sleep the night before I did yoga in my hotel room try to calm down What was this? When did you do this a long time ago? 2000 probably one or something like that was this like prime fear factor days You know what I might have done it before I did fear factor great show by the way. Thank you great show seriously It's it was like a good sign our society was about to crumble When historians go back and look at like the decline of society like man when they started making people eat dicks on TV They started making people eat animal balls and animal dicks on TV that might have been start That's Rogan's interview on on that show one. What's his name again?
I just blacked out the guy you just said yet interview with how we're certain hours Well, it was like I did we did fear factor. It started airing right after September 11th Like literally right after fear factor. Uh-huh and One of the narratives one of the reporters asked me like well Let's do the press junket things you have to do was is it do you think it's appropriate to scare Americans right after what just happened? I don't know what fucking talk is on me now. What are you talking about? It's distraction its entertainment and they're eating animal dicks
Okay, very simple shut the fuck up Watch it or don't watch it who cares But it's like if you wanted to look at like where society start used to be like friends sign failed Yeah, you know the good old days good old days Miami vise It was television shows that were like shows and then all sudden anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal That's true. I was a threshold. Yeah, pretty good. It's weird because that kind of ushered in social media It's very similar in a lot of ways like the people that were willing to go on these reality shows Especially stuff like big brother where you just live in a house with a bunch of people like how fucking weird You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation producers are fucking you know Mine's been talking a lot shit behind your back. You might want to get ahead of this like what Mike I could never do that. Yeah, no, well, you're not stupid
Well, you're not young or you're not desperate We had a lot of people that were just in like credit card debt and shit and they were like look if I can win this fucking thing Like normal people they're like look could be fun. I'll tell my kids about it We watch this forever and I can win $50,000. I can pay off my credit card debt. That's noble dude Well, sometimes people have to do what they have to do, you know But but there's also a lot of people that want attention in any way possible and that's like the people that are you know You see so many people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing to say But they're just trying to find something where people pay attention to what's running up to people and slapping them throwing glasses of water in their face Whatever they have to do anything they have to do to get attention And if you trace that back it kind of started with reality shows where people started to be able to get attention just being a buffoon There was a I covered a store So so for those who don't know me I tell strange dark mysterious stories on the internet and I covered a story that was like the epitome of This it's the idea of doing anything for clicks I don't know the dates but it was like within the past 10 15 years There was this group of or there was this one Russian influencer This is this is I was a circa 2010 and she wanted to do something really special for her birthday to document her birthday
And get as many clicks as possible and she filled this pool up with dry ice Oh, Jesus water plus dry ice and she invited all her friends over and they like totally they documented themselves going into this Well, she is I think hundreds of thousands of not millions of followers at the time and so everyone's like Oh, it's a big start birthday celebration I think it was live and they go into the tub and the music's playing and then no one comes out of the tub And it's just the silence they all die they all die from suffocation I think it was not sure he died from dry ice, but it's I think it eradicates the oxygen is not but it's like how many people died I was like yeah, three there you go three people what first of all like dry ice. You can't even get on your skin Yeah, you know we jumped into a pool of it. I was thinking it was just tortured their skin Three dying Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool. I wonder how much dry ice takes to kill three people I think a better question is what was the engagement like on that post?
That's what it's all about look at the name It Katarina did then go a popular Instagram influencer. There we go focusing on pharmaceutical products What with more than a million followers two people died the scene a third died in the hospital Resters investigative committee said the statement announcing criminal probe into the incident But you do not want to get arrested and go to jail in Russia. No, they don't fuck around Generally not they do not fuck around aspirin you grind her. They don't fuck around. She's out. Yeah, she's out
But she did nine months was it nine or ten? I think she was sentenced for nine fucking years and that was for marijuana possession It was she just had a CBD vape pen. I mean I guess it was probably marijuana But it was a vape pen and they jail put her in jail like hardcore jail for nine fucking years periodically I'll see like images of Russian courtrooms and I didn't know the stories, but always it's like the accused is Sitting inside of like a jail cell that's in the middle of the courtroom like iron bunkers and you know whatever they've done if they're facing the death I don't think they have to do or they pissed off food. Yeah, dude I don't know man, but it's it's a gnarly place over there Yeah, you better be friends with the right people over there. You can't fuck around now. Yeah, you can't fuck around
That's why like I mean how many times have like political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned or got murdered or and not just him But a bunch of other prominent figures that had other people running against them the shady business over there Oh, it's the shadiest is the shadiest man. Make sure for some very interesting people though. Yeah, Russian people are fascinating I've met a bunch of brilliant Russian people, you know, I found that they're very in my limited exposure Yeah, here we go. I'm just trying to get out that little slit first. Oh wow That's why he goes through the roof. He's smart. I'm amazed that he was able to do that. What a fucking psycho look at it
Looks like a psycho though. It looks like it should be dead This episode is brought to you by Squarespace if you're thinking about building a website you should try Squarespace I know because I use it. That's right Joe Rogan calm is powered by Squarespace It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder SEO optimization tools and seamless checkouts with mobile Pay links head to squarespace calm slash Rogan for a free trial and when you are ready to launch use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain this episode is brought to you by uber eats Hockey seasons here and uber eats is delivering game day deals on favorites like wings pizza fries and snacks And you can order more than food like gear to rep your team or fresh batteries for the remote when your watch party gets hungry Or you just need anything order in and keep everyone's attention on the ice score great deals on uber eats all season long because hockey is for the hungry
Terms apply product availability varies by region see app for details This episode is brought to you by Welch's fruit snacks back to school season can be tough on parents But choosing a snack to you and your kids can both get behind it doesn't have to be Stock up on Welch's fruit snacks made with real whole fruit from mouth-watering experience the whole family can enjoy It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them go back to school with Welch's fruit snacks So you got a price a lot of time in jail It's not okay It's a rough spot rough spot on earth tough people. How did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube?
Yeah, well, I originally was in the military I was a seal I did seven years in the teams and then when I got out in 2017 I Kind of drifted a little bit, you know I did some work with charity said some bit some veteran charity work, and I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years And I'm married got three kids, you know So I'm sort of like trying to figure it out of this small pension coming in that's enough sort of subsided some system But then I actually I remember watching a lot of Gary Vee And more specifically I saw Gary Vee was just every post he did it was like everybody no matter how old you are no matter what you're doing You should be posting content online like everyone should be doing it and when I was in the military You're sort of in a bubble I mean you certainly have access to the internet and all the things everybody else does in the civilian world But especially in the SEAL teams from my experience. You're so like tribal you're all your time is spent really with your teammates or the team It's very isolated and you don't even realize it and so I was not I didn't have social media like I wasn't up to date on modern stuff and
Gary Vee was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing this is what you do You know as a civilian you post constantly and I began in addition to doing some charity work I was doing just trying my hand at social media, you know posting content. It's like so bad It was what was the intent? You know, honestly, there wasn't a clear intent other than what the hell like it doesn't cost I'm already paying for the internet I already own a phone effectively the worst that'll happen is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about or maybe My friends and family will see and it'll be embarrassing But my I've always been someone that's been pretty comfortable with sort of embarrassing myself I mean if you think about SEAL training a big part of it is you're raising your hand in a pretty public way At least amongst your circle of friends and family saying I'm gonna go see if I'm good enough and a lot of people aren't and so I went through that process And was and I narrowly got through but I sort of had it in my mind that whatever they try stuff and so social media Influenced heavily by Gary Vee was like why not I'll post content. Maybe someone be interested. Nothing worked. Nothing worked
I mean it wasn't even like some was close. It was just nobody was paying attention and it was like, okay I'm not devastated it is what it is, but then I on a whim I myself Personally love strange dark and mysterious content. I used to love going to there's a YouTube channel I think it's all around now. It's called dark five and all it is is just like crazy true mysteries around the world You know talking about how there's like, you know potentially military bases hidden in Antarctica and there's the real folks I think you're I thought it's fascinating and on a whim in 2020 when my social media career is basically non-existent I was at this water park and indoor water park with my wife and kids a great wolf watch in Pennsylvania great spot And I was like, I'm gonna do I'm gonna try something I haven't tried on on my social media attempt so far I'm gonna tell like a crazy mystery a true mystery that I think is really interesting because I think it's cool It's the first time I'm not trying to copy trends or like do Gary V content I'm just gonna like tell a story I like and I pull out my phone and I tell this 60 second rendition of this this mystery called the D'Atlau past mystery. Are you familiar with this? No. Oh great. It's a great story
I post the 60 second version of the story, but I'll tell you the story in a minute I leave my phone in the room because I'm going to the water park in the water park I don't get wet so leave it there come back two hours later millions of views on this this video and I've never gotten views on anything It's millions of views. There's like just a few hours and a few hours like five million views on this video What was it tick tock tick to the moon so there's this it's an amazing story You probably have heard of it because it's one of those stories that it's made its rounds on the internet So in in in remember I told the 60 second version was gritty, but I had the pictures and stuff So in 1959 there were these nine hikers actually there was ten these ten young like 20 something year old hikers in Russia And they were like the best mountaineers in Russia at the time and they were going for their what's called their level three hiking test Which sounds sort of lame, but it's it's effectively at the time in Russia This is like the top credential for mountaineers if you have this credential You are the best mountaineer in the land and the way the test worked is Effectively you're in a class of your own at this level already It's sort of like being a PhD student where you sort of create your own material You have to do that for this test you map out a route that you'll take that you know effectively checks off all the boxes of difficulty
You put this this map down somebody approves This is gonna be hard enough that if you successfully navigate this course that you've mapped out in X amount of time If you do that you pass the test your level three mountaineer and so these ten hikers eventually actually only nine left one had a dental issue So he spared himself nine of these hikers they step out I think it was in January of 1959 to do this hike that's been planned out and they brought cameras along And they're like this young they're beautiful. They're all like couples They're all friends and it sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie This this gets wild if you've not heard the story you're in for a treat because the pictures are crazy They step out and the year-old mountains is rugged. It's like these huge wind swept icy mountains There's like a couple sections of forests, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be and so these hikers step off and they start taking pictures And even though it's 1959 the pictures they're taking could be taken today. It's almost like selfie style They're they're smiling everyone's in such good spirits. They know they're gonna pass this test. This is this is nothing for them
This is this is a victory lap and so off they go into the your own mountains It's gonna be like a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out or I guess finished with their route I think on February 12th, so it's a several week long hike February 12th And they were supposed to send some message to say they were complete with the hike February 12 comes and no messages sent no one gets word that these nine hikers have successfully navigated this treacherous stretch of the mountains and at first To be honest, no one was really that concerned because one there's nine of them They are quite literally some of the best mountaineers in the land if anybody can can withstand the elements It's them and so there wasn't this immediate call to action But over the coming days after February 12th the families of these these nine hikers got really concerned They're like we haven't heard from them Where are they like the government needs to get involved somebody needs to go looking for them?
And so eventually at the end of February a search party is launched for these hikers and at first It was just a couple of volunteers of some students from university It was it was not that serious of a search But they eventually come across their campsite and pictures are taken of their campsite So from a strategic perspective not that I claim to be a mountaineer But if you were gonna be setting up a place to do your tent up and really rugged environment like the year-old mountains The worst place to put your tent is the side of a windswept mountain where there are no trees because you'll get no It'll be relentless wind any weather's gonna be worse up there. You're on a slope avalanche risk I mean the worst place you could put your your tent is the side of a mountain and so they're looking for these missing hikers We're the best hikers and they find their tent there one canvas tent It's right in the middle of this this pass called it I believe it's called the Diallo pass which is why the mystery has been named the Diallo pass It's just one lone tent and there's no trees nothing It's just and so they go up to the tent the hikers are not there but the tent is collapsed as you see in the picture there and They look inside the tent and there's clothes like cold weather gear
There's pots and there's a lot of equipment that you would imagine they would have brought with them out here Still in the tent the hikers are missing and they discover through whatever testing They did that there was a cut made in the tent that apparently was made from the inside out Someone took a knife and I believe it was a knife and cut the tent open from the inside out And so they have all this equipment and they're thinking this is we're in the middle of the year-old mountains It's like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's the middle of winter you need this equipment to survive Where are the hikers they left all their equipment in their tent? Where are they and so the search expanded Exponentially at that point because now these these volunteers have discovered this incredible site They can't find hikers a bigger search party comes out there and they discover footprints that are about a hundred feet away From where the tent was found it's a little bit further down the mountain and the footsteps some of them are two boots You know matching boots of someone steps. There's eight or nine prints. I couldn't be sure eight or nine sets of prints Some have only one boot on like barefoot and a boot others are just barefoot and remember this the middle of winter in Russia But they're looking at these prints and if you look at the tent that's been cut from the inside They clearly abandoned their tent something's happened
But the cadence of the footprints as it as it picks up where they found it near the tent going down the mountain away from the campsite They're walking there's no sense of urgency someone analyzed the footprints and they're walking So they're walking down the mountain some without boots on some with one boot on leaving most of their equipment behind and so these the search party They follow these prints down to the edge of this this ominous looking forest There's only so many forests out there This is one of them this relatively small but fairly dense forest and the prints sort of stop right there at the edge of the forest And so they go into the trees They're looking around and they eventually come across this big cedar tree and at the base of the cedar tree is this little burned out fire Like a puny little fire and then crouched around it is one of the hikers who's deceased and there's a picture I don't think you can show it in your channel, but yeah, so there's a picture of one of the hikers who is sort of almost like he was trying to get Weren't against this fire. I don't think it's that one. There are some right near the cedar tree I'm sure you can find them this episode is brought to you by the farmers dog Here's a fun fact research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy wake and live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight
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But there's human tissue far pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree And then they examined the bodies and they found one of the one of the men had his hand part of his hand He had bitten off and was in his throat or it might have been human tissue as well But it was clearly in his mouth like he was eating his own flesh or at least arrived in his mouth So they're dead and so the search expands within this this forest and they find three more hikers sort of about a hundred or two Two feet away from from this tree. They're in similar condition. They're all deceased They're all sort of ragged they some of them are only wearing you know a little bit of clothing. They're all dead But they can't find the remaining four hikers They continue to search for the next several days But the weather was pretty severe and so ultimately they decided that at this point it's a recovery mission We're not we're not gonna find them. They're gonna be dead So they waited until the thaw in May and once the snow had thought it they came out there and they found this what looked to be like the They believe that a snow fort had been made maybe three or four hundred feet away from that cedar tree Which they wouldn't have seen it during the winter it was barely you wouldn't have seen it But it had melted down enough and the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave and
The the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries They're all deceased The woman or one of them had a crush injury his chest was they compared the injury to his chest equivalent to being struck by a car at high speed However, he had no or limited lacerations like there was no impact to his body his chest was sort of just inexplicably caved in And so he's been crushed one guy. I think his skull was fractured and a piece of skull was missing But the one that stands out is there was one hiker a woman who her lips and her eyes were missing And some accounts claim that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed at least there was there was like a very tight lines of how her It was predation and more predation you'd see tearing This was like relatively straight lines where her lips were removed and then another hiker his eyes were also missing And so they're all dead and they also noticed that the the woman was wearing men's clothing or Some clothing that was clearly not hers like and then one of the men or a couple of the men were wearing some of her clothing Like they exchanged clothing and they found trace levels albeit small but trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing and they're all dead
And so now all the hikers have been found and by this point this is in may of 1960 I believe it is at this point This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent to being super viral today Everybody was talking about it the families are very outspoken about it people want answers They want to know what happened and so the Russian government they they launched this investigation into what happened out there in the Dia La Paz And quickly they shut down this investigation like very quickly they shut it down and all the only things people heard Were there were numerous reports from military personnel and some civilians who apparently were in the area in the urals that claim to have seen glowing orbs Like fireballs. I think they described them as being balls of fire and light shooting up and down It's hard to tell if it was in the same area where the hikers were but there were all these independent reports of strange lights over the euro mountains that could corroborate or could line up with when the psyches all died And then also lastly the the Russian government came out and said well We've we've determined that the nine hikers died from an overwhelming or I think they called it a compelling force and then they closed it They they I believe they made it completely confidential. No, the families didn't get access to it
It's completely shut down and then in 2020 the reason I told it is because it sort of began making rounds because I believe some of the pictures Had been redacted and you could see these pictures and so I said at the start of my video at the end of the 60 second clip You're gonna google two words and it was deat-law of pass and so I teased the story and said google it for yourself And it's a whole rabbit hole of crazy stuff. That's a crazy story So compelling force is a very weird way to describe a bunch of people dying Compeling force it might have been compelling natural force, but I It was a sense of death. Well, they could have come out and said that right they basically said Oh, who sure is not a translation issue? There are several translations about came out and it effectively amounts to some sort of compelling overwhelming force Does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people die in autopsy reports than we do?
Maybe I'm not sure to be honest. I'm not sure that it might be like the way Russian language works and where they describe things like they might have categories for deaths In a compelling natural force might just mean like it could be freezing to deaths in the same category is like dying in the Mojave Desert I think that that's I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational happened I mean when you become hypothermic you can have it's called paradoxical undressing where at your final stage of when you're so cold You actually get hot and you take your clothes off And I would imagine if you're in the final stages of dying you might do some funny things and also cut your lips off though Would you surgically remove your lips and where are the lips?
Then the question is like is there an image of that like can we see it like this is one of the things that people talk about all the time when it comes to crop circles? Oh, excuse me Cattle mutilation I put them on the same category like sort of fucking knows what that is But cattle mutilation one of the weird things that that they associate with extraterrestrials or whatever they think it is Is that these cuts are very surgical? Yeah, and it's not an animal just tearing apart a cow that these these cuts They look like they're made with a scalpel or perhaps some sort of a laser and also these creatures are completely drained of blood So I'd like I've seen the catamulation images and you're like wow that is strange I like to see what their lips look like they I do know that actually and it says nothing to do with the fact that I posted about it Because the D'atla pass gets posted about quite a bit But I think it was in 2022 Russia actually reexamined the D'atla pass mystery now and sort of said okay We're looking at it again and they determined that an avalanche slab of ice broke loose a huge slab I can just be totally wrong. I know it's an avalanche or slab of ice That they basically said was responsible for all of this that it led to them somehow becoming exposed hypothermia and the like
But it doesn't really answer a lot of the questions in my mind It certainly could have happened as I told you they for whatever also Why did they stop in the middle of the the windslap side of the slope? I mean you're they're probably we're trying to make their way across and they couldn't do it Yeah, so we have to stop we'll just stop right here I can't go any further and they all argued and then they decided to put a tent right there It's it's also a you know this better than anybody when you get tired to make poor decisions That's what they're trying to do to you in buds, right? They're trying to make you quit they're trying to break you down right? Yeah, and people get tired they get very irrational and they also have very little processing power They don't think about all the possibilities what could go wrong It's really right and they think they can't possibly keep going and the problem is if you have nine of you and one of you is And is opposed to you know you got a real problem Like do you let Bob die or do you stay here with Bob when you can keep going and Bob is just like we can't do this like Bob Like that's the horror movie scene right?
It's always a Bob one fucking guy. He's like fuck this man. I'm fucking staying right here like jeez Bob We can keep walking keep walking that that reality steps and then to count 10 steps more and then just keep doing that that What you're describing is such a natural human thing Which is when someone when the lowest common denominator in your group is struggling even if you're frustrated a lot of times people have an inclination to Lowering what you're doing to help that person in in-seal training I mean what's made clear immediately is to some degree that's noble to some degree But a lot of times you're gonna get more people killed that way So those people that are gonna hold you back in training have to be identified and kicked out now Right and so it became clear that if you're the weakest link here for probably getting left behind in training No, but then in real life, it's the reverse buds is a genius way of filtering out the pussies It's genius. It's the best way you have to there's no There's no other way to determine whether or not someone will be able to handle extreme pressure and stress other than putting them through extreme pressure and stress And there's some people through whatever for whatever reason at this stage of their life
They can't handle it and maybe they will be in the future. Maybe this is gonna be a good experience for them They're gonna toughen up and look Goggins talks about it all the time about when before you ever gotten to the seals He was 300 pounds and eating milkshakes and he was fat he could run around the block But he decided to become a different person and he did it you can do that but at that moment you're gonna quit Yeah, and so at that moment we have to get ready And maybe you can become someone in the future that won't quit but right now you're quitting Yeah, I sometimes get asked not often But I've been asked you know when you were going through selection did you ever have a moment where you thought or you thought about quitting and you suppressed it And I only say this because I know this is this is shared amongst a lot of the people that I went through training with I didn't I did not have a moment where I thought oh boy. I'm on the precipice of quitting I better I better hold on did I have moments where I was questioning my life decisions and questioning can I even do this definitely But there's something like fundamentally different about trying and failing and choosing to stop and you learn that That is something that I believe is an eight do you have the ability to keep going through failure And they put a lot of test gates into buds to basically force it on you
Most notably the um not even hell week hell week is the most well-known test of endurance where you're awake for five and a half days Basically, but there's one that's even simpler that it's it's so easy if you're willing to do it Easy to stretch it's not that hard, but you really need to be committed to doing it And it's the 50 meter underwater swim you do it day two of the first phase of training and everybody knows you're gonna do it All you have to do is okay get in the pool swim one length and then swim back without surfacing until you're done It is probably just beyond what's comfortable for someone who's a decent enough swimmer, but you have plenty of lead time for this You know it's gonna happen people will train for years before they go When you when I did it the first leg it's stressful But as soon as you've made the turn and you're on your way back you realize that if you've committed to doing it You're oh, this is this is really not bad. It's so quick. It's so short. It's all over People that would quit on that didn't quit at the end of the 50 they quit on the first leg You're not physically done yet. You're mentally done I mean i'm generalizing but if you see that that type of phenomenon and training quite a bit where it's Are you prepared to keep going through adversity or are you just gonna say it's too much and I don't want to do it anymore
I wonder if they've ever sat down and tried to engineer a program to alter people's psychology You know you would think that the more people that you can get that would be able to Figure out a way through something very difficult where your mind wants to quit your body wants to quit The more people that you could figure out how to train to that position the better Or is it like I have friends that are MMA coaches that don't want to work with anybody who needs a mental coach Interesting. They're like you need a mental coach you're in the wrong business And they say that like those two good those guys are too unreliable they'll tell you like you need a mental coach like you're too in your own head You're not gonna be able to perform. Yeah, these guys are gonna be able to lose Dust themselves off figure it out and come back and be stronger And then there's some guys that like every big moment is the moment overwhelms them and they're they're just they just cave to the pressure They just can't handle it and then they go through some sort of a mental coaching session and but the core their personality Whatever it is that's about them what makes them them is just fragile for whatever reason And the question is I wonder if they've ever tried to engineer a program to strengthen people's psychology
Just the same way you can strengthen people by lifting weights or by running or whatever I wonder if there's a like there was a concerted effort so like we have so many people crashing out What if we had 50 percent less people crashing out that we'd have 50 percent more elite operators I know that when I went through training and I've no idea if it's still the case now But I was in I was in steel training in earnest in 2011 and 2012 And there were psychologists on on staff that you didn't you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch But I remember there being parts of training which were sort of funny because they punctuated the brutality of training We'd be out doing the obstacle course for an hour and then we were doing a four-mile run Then we're swimming then we're doing this we're getting beat up and then like all right now go in the classroom You go in the classroom and you're and you're talking to this woman who's a psychologist and she's teaching you how to like it's called arousal control You know how to how to take down your mental state in the middle of high stress moments and all the instructors on the side like you But listen to this, you know, it's just funny So there was a template but I coming from coming from having done it The there's such a wide variety of people that are successful in training that it's I have seen in her that it's hard to pinpoint
What is what is the appropriate indication? You're going to be successful like that's the thing they're trying to identify is what are the the pools of people that? Traditionally do well in seal training because they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen But the two things they found are two there's two places where the most mentally tough people in terms of success in seal training One is wrestling basically any level of wrestling wrestlers have an incredibly high success rate in buds and water polo Those are the two that they have determined through their studies are the grittiest most resilient folks when it comes to seal training interesting Yeah, water polo so in water polo how deep is the water? I think it's more that they tread water the whole fucking time. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at like Does the water so deep that they can't touch the ground? No, no, you're treading the entire time
There was a plan again dude. There was a guy that's crazy There was a guy in my class So the way it works is you have your enlisted guys and there's you know upwards of 100 dudes in a class that are enlisted And then you have I think maybe eight to ten that are officer candidates It's yeah, we're all seal candidates That's true But the difference between an officer candidate and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous The guys over here the enlisted guys are just like salt to the earth just like I don't give a fuck when it happens The officer candidates they have some of the most impressive resumes that you can have as like a 20-something-year-old kid You have dudes that are always a Rhodes scholar. I played I walked onto the Stanford football team That level of prestige and also I'm my family's friends with George Bush and and I'm also like a world-class swimmer And I'm like an expert marksman But those are the dudes that become your officer candidates because there's so few slots on any given year for these spots They're they're they're so vetted that virtually all of them succeed It's so rare that an officer candidate does not pass like an officer who's in buds You might as well as call them seal at that point because the vetting is crazy for so not on the enlisted side
We're still figuring that out, but the officer side they're highly vetted and one of the guys that was one of my officers In one of the classes I was in was a water polo water polo player from the University of Tennessee And he's this big big strong guy. He's an awesome dude And uh, there's this part of training halfway through training It's second phase is broken into three phases and it's it's the water phase and it's really statistically everybody who gets to second phase Mostly makes it through but it's because you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase Like hell week and the 15 meter underwater swim that this is already the pool of people that's just gonna push through the misery and past stuff So it's misleading the second phase of training I would argue is exponentially more challenging than first phase But the only people who do it are through first phase is oh 90 percent of people pass second phase But it's really hard and there's two tests in particular within second phase that are notoriously just brutal One of them is called pool competency, which is a 20 minute exam of your ability to to fix problems with your scuba tanks underwater Or basically you go to the bottom of the pool with your tanks on and when your test begins you're in the you're in the section of this huge pool called the combat training tank
It's uh, there's like the six foot section that it slopes down to the nine foot section and then it slopes down to the the 15 foot section and your test takes place in the nine foot section And you just crawl along the lane marker as if you're doing lap swimming There's a lane on the bottom of the pool. There's like eight or nine lane markers And you crawl back and forth only in the nine foot section and two instructors per student come down and turn your air off Tye knots in your hoses and as soon as you're being touched You gotta go into the fetal position and wait for like the attack to stop it takes like 15 seconds 30 seconds You're out air and this is a 20 minute test you're building up hypercapped me as you go Um, and then you gotta fix your problems and problems get progressively harder to solve but the procedures they teach you are the same procedures for every problem If you go to step one, it doesn't work. You go to step two that doesn't work You go to step three until you go all the way through your steps, but it teaches you calm So even though you're on the last problem you're gonna solve at minute 18 and you're about to pass out You have to show them that you'll do step one step two all the way through So it's it's about being calm. I was horrible this test by the way I passed by by the skin of my teeth this dude passed the test first drive That's not where the story comes in so this this water polo player He blazes through that test no problem. The other test is just the tread that's all it's called the tread
You spend five minutes in the pool with your 280 tanks on which are neutral in the water They're they're pretty heavy outside of the water, but they're they're cumbersome on your back You got no fins. You got a way belt on hands up out of the water. Yeah, it's like five pounds or something And you tread for five minutes and that's the whole test hands out of the water So you only tread with your legs in no fins Thanks on it the only the only way to do it realistically is imagine Imagine hopping on like a bike like in a gym and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue Hold it for like three four minutes and don't it doesn't even you don't even need to go that fast But it's constant. It's the only way to do it Unless you're an exceptionally talented water polo player who's mastered the art of the egg beater Where they they basically have found a way to move their legs That's like the most efficient way to tread water in this dude. I kid you not who blazed through pool comp first drive No problems whatsoever was like joking around after his test He gets him for the tread and he could he could hold himself almost to his belly button Probably like nipple to belly button line fully out of the water. There's no problem
Just no problem. No practically smiling because he knows this is my domain. I can do this all day long It was the most incredible thing I have Crazy I would have never thought of that. Yeah, first of all I didn't know the water polo players had a tread the entire time Which is insanely impressive like how long is the game? Well, I don't know if they can go to the edge and hold on periodically, but if you watch water polo most attention just treading I'm no water polo player, but my understanding is that the game is played while treading Yeah, I never would have imagined but now that you described it that way like that might be the hardest sport on earth Oh dude, that makes baseball look so easy I remember like David Wells of the Yankees with a huge bag. I smoke at cigarettes in between it
Crazy, he's not dogs big old belly. Oh, that's crazy. I remember in boot camps. This is not even before you even get to buds There's there's actually it's funny the When you go in you know as I went in as a civilian so I signed this contract where basically you say okay I'm gonna go boot camp become sailor and then I'll have my shot at going to buds It's called the seal challenge contract and you know the way I looked at it is I'm like okay I've prepared for buds. That's what I've as a civilian. That's what I was training for
I didn't think at all about boot camp like what's what's two months of Navy boot camp gonna be because what my head is focused on is buds That comes after so when I shipped out to boot camp I had put virtually no thought into what those two months were gonna be like in Great Lakes, Illinois I figured it was like whatever I like marked around like fold some clothes, you know Whatever and then I'll go do the real stuff out in San Diego and so I get to uh, I get to Chicago And it was like a reality check because you quickly should realize that first of all if you're trying to be a seal and you're on the seal challenge contract When you get to Great Lakes, you're segregated into a separate group. They're called the 800 Division I don't know if this still exists now, but it did in 2010 And there really aren't any seals or speck ops that are at Great Lakes that mean that there's a few but for the most part You're you're working with ordinary sailors. They're putting you through training But imagine you're you're an ordinary sailor and god love them. I've worked with amazing sailors across the navy And here comes the seal recruits in the 800 Division. They're civilians. They're not even sailors yet
There is an enormous amount of resentment towards those that show up like yeah, I'm going to buds Like there's just an attitude of like the instructors. They they want you to understand that like you don't have a clue what you're getting yourself And so in boot camp those two months your instructors are not seals, but they just like torture you There's just nothing to bed But you're gonna have in buds and one of the things we would do is there was all sorts of stupid stuff like push-ups and whatever But there was this treading thing that we had to do where we'd go in the pool at like five in the morning And like it's so cold and they would line us up So we're all faced like if you were I'd be right behind you looking at the back of your head You'd be looking at the next guys back and they'd give us bricks and you're just treading and you're gonna pass the brick up and down the line And periodically they'd give you two bricks and so if anybody doesn't hold up their end of the bargain quickly the bricks get handed off to like one person And no one wants the brick you don't offend someone or anything guys are like sinking into the water like truly about to pass out and blackout But the level of oversight not great because it's sort of like you know what you're getting into trying hold those bricks And it's just Matt and they would leave us in there treading with bricks for so long that you're like I'm gonna drown I'm literally gonna drown if I keep this up and then suddenly it'd be over and you're on the pool deck like vomiting and you're thinking yourself
Holy shit like is this this is not even as bad as buds and you get to buds and you're like no That was worse. That's probably good then. It was nice. Yeah, that's fine. You had those guys even been through buds No, okay, so they were just making tough stuff. You do you like put on all your turtledex
Stupid like neoprene turtledex like seven of them because you have all the stupid clothing in your rack and like march around the Compartment the room you're in and we would just like spend hours like marching around the compartment of sweating our ass off in our like turtledex It's stuff like that or we do bird watching where they would have us just face a wall and to beat attention for like two three hours Just staring at paint but it's just arbitrary So much worse like you know you're talking about weird people want to do that to people There was a lot of like you don't know what you're getting yourself I know more than you I've done real stuff in the Navy But like they have this moment where we're still civilians and we haven't gone to training and they know that virtually all of us are gonna Quit so this is a safe group to sort of flex around, you know, oh, so it was it was I hated bootcamp When I got out of bootcamp in bootcamp, I was drinking their coffee and I was convinced it was it was caffeinated coffee It wasn't and I told myself it was I'm a big coffee drinker and when I got out of bootcamp I went to dinner with my family and I didn't eat anything I just drank like nine cups of coffee and got so jacked up on caffeine and just told stories about bootcamp They don't give you caffeinated coffee. Well, there was like it was coffee
But I mean like it was like you push a button and this brown shit came out and it was like it's a cafe something on it I was like that's coffee. I'm not gonna question it because I don't want to suck myself out and I was drinking the shitty coffee I have some coffee Jesus Christ, I'm freaking out. Oh, man. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, well, I mean What we were talking about before that there's no other process to figure out whether someone's gonna be able to handle pressure Then to put them through it and see what happens would be passing bricks I mean, maybe that's not the best example of it because it seems like those guys were being a little sadistic Yeah, probably at least you would imagine that what they're doing in buds is tried and proven They know what they're doing because these guys it seems like they were just getting off on the fact that could tell you what to do This episode is brought to you by Fox Nation real american freestyle wrestling is exclusively on Fox Nation every month You get every feud every match and every belt if you love the UFC This is where it all began and now one year after launching in cleveland raf returns saturday august 22nd for its biggest event ever raf 12 ufc champions olympic gold medalist world champions and one of the strongest men on the planet all on one card
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This is 2013 2014 and we had been going into this town called zarganshar Which is this fairly urban afghan town that was literally on the other side of the one paved road route utah They called it that ran through afghanistan got it constantly We were on one side of the road behind some pescope areas and zarganshar is like the sprawling pretty large urban village And historically I don't know how long it'd been going on for but there had just been non-stop fighting in zarganshar between nato forces and loads of different factions of fighters the taliban Pakistani fighters you name it and so when we got in country in 2013 We turned over with seal team eight and they said basically, you know Your job here is to try to quell the flow of suicide bombers into kabool and there was a couple of things they told us to focus on but really If you want some action you just go to zarganshar because they're so battle hardened in there the people that are still there that if you go in there They're gonna fight you, you know, if you want to find weapon caches, they're gonna be in there And so over the course of the deployment, this is like five months in we had gone into zarganshar a great deal and truthfully It wasn't like we walked in and it was crazy every time but we definitely got engaged
There was definitely more contacts there than anywhere else But on this one day, this is like five months into the deployment. This is uh in april So it was the fighting season it started so the warmer weather had come in and we Sort of put ourselves in a terrible position a little bit by accident. So the city it's not really a city It's it's a village, but it's it's bigger than a village It's somewhere between the city and a village for afghanistan So it's like mud huts but like tight together and it's really like well defined You know, it's almost like the edge of zarganshar just becomes vacant desert on the outside It's like this really isolated spot We entered the city with our vehicles and then began Infilling into the city. I forget exactly what our purpose was I think there was like a bomb maker or something we were going after But the the rules of engagement that we were operating under effectively said you can't engage You can't offensively engage anyone and there's a couple of factors that could allow you to but for the most part You need to get shot at first to then shoot back that's sort of the gist and the people we would get into skirmishes with Knew that a lot of times and they'd be tactical about how they would go about shooting at us
And so we start making our infill from the edge of you know the the city And we get into this little narrow area where we knew we'd have to enter into this courtyard And we start hearing chatter over the radios So we had the ability to listen to just the open source radio that the fighters would use in the village and we heard them talking to each other And it was clear they had spotted us. We were it's a broad daylight. This is not a shock But they were clearly talking to each other And making plans to wait until we and it was only 20 or 30 of us plus our partner force wait until we got into that courtyard before you open up on them And I don't know if this was said explicitly, but the idea was they're not going to do anything due to the rules of engagement We can let them come into the courtyard and then open up on them and there's a couple of two store buildings that overlook the courtyards It's pretty gnarly Our team lead who was freaking awesome is freaking awesome He stopped us and he's like hold on a minute. We took cover behind this bridge that was right behind us And he's like wait, let's let's figure this out But we realized that now that we know where they are we know they're in those second storey buildings overlooking that courtyard They're now they can see us if we go forward we can't engage them proactively. We can't like call it an airstrike
We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us. So it's basically walking into an ambush That's a that's a bad idea But if we go the other way if we retreat I told you that the edge of Zargenshire It's there's no cover. It's just open desert if you will and so there wasn't really a good way to to ex-fill back to our vehicles Without getting shot in the back They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot it as any time they want And so we realized because of where they're positioned we either had to go forward into effectively a known ambush or retreat And hope they don't get the drop on us and shoot one of us It's a pretty high chance someone was gonna get shot if we ex-filled And so we sat there we were thinking about it and we ultimately made the decision like hey We were Navy Seals let's just go forward and process the threat and so into the courtyard we go it's on body cam and you know It was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard again broad daylight It's quiet. We had seen women and children run out of the villages
We approached so we knew only people here are gonna be fighters and just machine guns opened up on us in the courtyard And I say this without I don't mean this in a sort of crassway But thankfully the only people who were hit in the opening volley were our dog And I believe two of the afternoon partner force guys that they got shot because if you want if you're gonna survive this You need the seals you don't need anybody else need the seals to get out of this And so we all took up our positions sort of we expected this to happen and it became like this crazy Disjointed like onesy-to-z breaking off clearing buildings sometimes by yourself just madness for like the next six hours It slowed down it was not constant, but it was like six hours of urban sketchy roof-to-roof building to building shooting And we were sort of getting our asses kicked I mean we just we kept we kept seeing people that would open up on us around like a corner We go after them and they'd be gone and we knew there were tunnels dug into the ground all over the place for people to escape And it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would vanish And so finally it's late at night We've been there for six hours or so and we've gotten beaten up no one's been killed on our side the dog's fine And we were sort of like man, I guess we just gotta go
We you know we didn't really accomplish anything We just kind of got beat up today and we'll come back another time You know it didn't go well and as we're getting ready to leave and remember at this point our group of 20-some-odd seals There's afghan partner force as well, but the seals that were on the ground We had broken up into different fire teams little groups of dudes And I was with a fire team that was close to the eggs that we were going to be taking And one of the drones overhead I think was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas They called out that they had seen what appeared to be military age men men so mams as they're called sort of in the vicinity of where we would be ex-filling out of the city And they weren't saying you better go over there and like shoot them because rules of engagement say you can't you can't do that It was just sort of a hey be aware as you exit They might be setting up on you as you're leaving the city And so our fire team happened to be closest and we decided we would just go over there and take a look Our understanding is now it's nighttime or on night vision We we believed based on what was being passed to us that we could go down this alleyway They would come to a tea intersection And when we reach the end of this alleyway There'd be this low wall like six foot tall wall and we could peer over the wall into this field where these mams are
And they didn't know that they didn't even know who they were could have been kids could have been nothing But we we believed we'd be able to look over the wall and look out somewhere on the other side of this field We'll see whoever these people are and make an assessment of what to do So we super sneaky make our way down this alleyway being as quiet as we can We get to that low wall and immediately we start hearing someone talking It's not our guys we start hearing pashtun being spoken on the other side of the wall And we realized that there's been a mistake The lost and trans something's been miscommunicated to us We are now closer than you and I are right the second to what it actually was military age men There was at least two I've heard as many as five I actually don't know the exact number but there were fighters Hiding on the other side of that wall intentions unclear But they're right there and they haven't heard us yet and they're nervous We can tell they're nervous they're right on the other side of the wall And we are in a tough tough spot here because there's seven of us We're so close to them that if someone even so much is like farts right now They're gonna hear us And so our team leader who was incredible he went on to go to team six He's one of the besties I've ever met he had to make an on-the-ground decision We got engaged these guys we can see they have weapons one guy looked over and said they have weapons
This is all nonverbal we're like making hand signals and stuff on night vision And so one of our guy our team leader gets down on a knee and he tells one of the guys next to me to stand on his leg and start shooting And so over the wall he starts shooting and there was at least two guys over there that already had grenades They pulled the pins out on so this is this is the moment they've had this they're holding the grenades for this So soon as the shooting started grenades come over the wall and this is there's a video of this Of the grenade comes or you can't really tell But it literally hit my shoulder one of the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell to the ground and detonated But in the second that this happened is we were under a drone that had a targeting strobe down on us With flashing infrared strobe on us imagine if like God had a flashlight and he was turning it off and on rapidly And you can only see the light on night vision It's this cone of light that you're in and this this super intimate fight is happening And I'm watching this grenade time really slowed down I see it for a second because the lights on the light comes off it disappears I see it for a second and I remember feeling it hit my shoulder and I'm not shooting I'm not doing anything I'm just next to the wall as well as it's happening and the thought I had was like fuck It's gonna blow my head off. I know I'm dead
We're all probably gonna die here in a second, but my mom won't be able to see me again But there'll be no open casket That's the first thought that goes to my head my head is gonna be blown the fuck off Here's my shoulder and this is again and a fraction of a second the light comes on goes off it falls down lower And it's like halfway down now. It's like halfway to the ground and I'm thinking oh shit I'm definitely gonna die, but maybe my face will be intact and my my mom can see me again Light goes off on off on it lands in the ground and I turn slightly and I'm like oh shit I might just lose my legs like this is great I might live and so all of us are in the lethal range assuming this is a frag grenade Which I don't think couldn't have been it had to be an old school pineapple grenade We're all all of us are in this horrible lethal zone and two grenades go off I tell people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my backside It didn't hurt it just felt like someone threw something at me And then I'm just down on the ground and my my my memory of what happened versus What actually happened or couldn't have been more different It would take me years before I actually sat down and debriefed this with the guy who ultimately saved my life But my memory is I go down and I couldn't get my gun my gun had been the strap a little strap had been blown off
My helmet had been blown off so I'm not a night vision I'm just there's pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark and it's just fucking chaos They're the thing is is the fighters in that town They didn't give a fuck about killing each other if they could kill me they'd kill their teammates as well And so RPGs are just being arbitrarily fired from all across the city But from other locations just in the vicinity of where this is happening because there was a lull before this It's just fucking madness and I couldn't stand up I can't move and I got dragged by one of my teammates This is my memory I got dragged from I'm at the head of the T there They brought me down the stem of the T if you will and I just got placed up against a wall And I'm sitting there and I have these turnkits that are on my chest that we rubber band them to our chest Specifically so they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in your limbs And I was so weak and fucked up from this blast that I literally couldn't pull the turnkits off And there's I don't even know if anyone's alive basically at this point I don't know if you know what's happening down in the contact zone Which is like 20 feet away from me all I hear is gunfire it's madness and at any point I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking kill me like I'm dead I'm dead no matter what here
And so I had this this true in my mind like near death experience where I I sat there It's relatively well-alumed and I suddenly lost my hearing like it's gone completely gone And there's good illumination so I can see this small alleyway I can see this flash is a light as you know rounds are coming in And I just I'm like I'm in my head I'm so aware that I'm alive but I'm dying And then my vision goes completely blind like can't see I can't hear anything But I was so lucid in my mind so aware that I was alive And I tell people that on a day-to-day basis you live and you don't think about it You don't wake up and actively live you don't think today I'm gonna breathe my today my heart's gonna be you just do it because that's your entire experience Is being alive and your body knows how to do that your brain knows how to be alive You also know how to die you just haven't done it yet And I had this really distinct feeling of like oh shit This is what it feels like when you shut down it didn't hurt it wasn't sad It was just it couldn't have been more matter of fact And all I was thinking about two thoughts I had um what will my obituary say Nothing in terms of substance but will it say Jonathan Allen was killed in action
John Allen as I was hung up on that and I was also thinking about my wife and how she'd be notified at home And I was thinking I wish we'd had kids because now I don't legacy And so I had this feeling of like letting go I don't know it's that's so cliche But it physically felt like I had to let go and I remember feeling the impact of the ground as I sort of killed over And I thought that was it like I'm about to die This is the end you know But then out of fucking nowhere the legend that he is his name is Kyle He's a seal fucking comes out of nowhere and he grabbed me and he put turnkits on my legs I'm still like in my blacked out zone here, but I slowly regain sight and hearing and the scene we're in is still terrible There's still chaos happening everywhere and Kyle who's a sniper. He's a medic. He's the calmest dude under pressure He's like hey, it's gonna be okay, buddy. It's all good. It's not to bleed like just stay here Like you know put your gun up if you can I'll be right back like literally in hell all around this couldn't have been more calm He just runs down back to the contact zone comes back up. He brings another guy out who's longed collapse
He's patching him up smiling. I mean it's fine meanwhile So I'm starting to see now as I'm regaining consciousness if you will I'm seeing my teammates who have also been fucked up from the screen aid But only me and one other guy were so affected by the grenade that we couldn't function It was me and this guy who's longed had collapsed. He was like barely able to breathe So we're down, but the other like five dudes It's like it's your job to get us out of here now because we're fucked we are pinned down and fucked here One guy the team lead in one ear. He was working with multiple air assets overhead calling in what's called a danger close air strike Which is you're effectively calling in an airstrike on yourself You need special initialing from your higher officer I think you're commanding your commanding officer like one more senior than you has to approve the drop because in essence you could kill yourself doing it So he was calling in an airstrike that needed to be exact like fucking exact on the other side of that wall And then in the other ear he's communicating with the rest of our Our disparate teams which are broken up across the city trying to tell them where we are He's got two comms happening and he's physically pulling people out of the contact zone with Kyle to get them to cover And he's engaging the enemy and we're getting shot at
Holy shit He's a team 6 that dude Everybody went into like flow state. I don't even know how to describe it and I'm fucking worthless I'm not in flow state. I'm fucking dead state They hoisted me up and we ran like a mile because there was no way to extract us because of how densely populated it was The buildings were so tightly together. Could you move your legs? They were like fucking pillars I was supported on shoulders hobbling. I was not able to run
No, in the turnkits they caught off circulation to your limbs because I was bleeding profusely from my legs So they were cinched off which kills the circulation at a minimum You got very dead legs But they ran me to a hot extract where there's a fucking healer that came in coming in guns blazing They throw us in the helo now get this me and the other dude with the lung we get thrown on the helo And we just leave with the medical team those fucking dudes those five dudes still on the ground had to fight their way back into the City to go reconnect with the rest of the element who again he's calling that airstrike he called in was with it was perfect I think I got an award for it. He hit exactly in the right spot He called in the exact right spot like under the most duress you could imagine But like so my mental image of what happened is under truly like I witnessed life and death Like I was in a life and death scenario and I got to be fully an audience for it Every motherfucker was fucking perfect at their job like literally rounds flying everywhere. Hey, what's going on?
Up got your legs all tied off here. Hey, what's going on? Call on this airstrike over couldn't be calmer That was it like and so my de-re-point was it fucking works the training works Wow What a fucking story. Holy shit, dude. There's an addendum to it was I want to hear the denim Yeah, so after we got medevacked So I'm in the I'm in the helicopter and at this point I don't know I don't know the state of my injury All I know is a few minutes ago. I thought I died
You know like I don't really I'm happy to be here now But we get in the helicopter and that crew was a mate I think they're PJs Air Force PJs which are like spec ops Air Force I think they were fucking great But they're like hey, do you want uh, what's the drug? Oh my god? It's the one the painkiller drug morphin morphin morphin and I said no I didn't have any pain But I was like I'm worried I might die and I want to be lucid for it and they're like, okay No, I think you're gonna be okay But I was like in my head that I might die I don't know and so we get medevacked out of Zargenshar And they fly us right to this nearby base very close by called shank and when we get there There's obviously doctors and nurses that are there specifically for this and so even though it was the middle of the night They had been told hey you have two casualties, you know the guy with a collapsed lung in myself to be honest I don't really know exactly what they were told but I would imagine they were told get ready for some some type of surgery for both of them And so we fly to fob shank and I get wheeled in on a stretcher I'm a close I've been fucking cut off of me like my text hanging out like I'm I'm in disarray like I'm all fucked up And I really I don't even know I think I'm gonna be okay because of this one I've made it here And no one's acting like I'm literally about to die But I don't know I don't really know how bad it is and they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy
And it's so bright like like so bright inside of there can barely open your eyes and it's just a sea of all these doctors and nurses They're ready to perform whatever needs to happen because they don't know they don't know what what needs to be done But as soon as I get in there I see in the back corner of this relatively small medical tent a shanty medical tent Is maybe like 15 seals that were not on the mission with me there are other guys in country They're other navy seals. It's the middle of the night and they've put on the equivalent the equivalent of their best uniforms These are not dress uniforms. These are like their B.D.U.s These are not nice, but in Afghanistan on on a deployment this is the best shit they had They clearly had been tracking because you can track missions in real time when your overseas They saw the call signs come across that seals had been wounded and were being brought here for treatment I have no sense of what exactly they knew but clearly whatever was passed indicated that one of us are both of us could die And so these dudes were in the tent in case we died they were my friends I know them all personally and so I'm being wheeled in And the gravity of what's happening was like a fucking ton of bricks because now I'm kind of loopy from what's been going on and I see that the looks on these guys's faces
And they're wearing these uniforms and they're all standing almost like at a tension in the corner And they're there in case I fucking die. It's I'm going to my own funeral And so I'm put on the the they swarm me not down the doctors swore me and they get me ready for debariedment Which is just to pull the strap and a lot of my hips and my leg And the guy was like I'm gonna give you I think it's ketamine He's like you're not gonna this is it like good luck to you and you like gave me ketamine and I I passed out or whatever they gave me I completely passed out and then it's like I have no memory and I fucking wake up in Germany I'm fucking Germany and I'm just yeah, you're you're fine Yeah, your legs are all fucked up But you're you're gonna live keeping your limbs and then I think it was seven days after that I'm back home in Virginia hobbling down the home depot fucking aisle just no transition just I was just killing people overseas Holy shit. Yeah fucking us. What was the extent of the injuries? Honestly, I was so fortunate It was a big big hole in my ass like I got like a three or four inch chunk The big issue with it is it was so deep into my ass that they had to keep opening it so that it would not heal and reverse
You know because it can talk and then just uh inside of my leg I mean basically I was spared like it was just a massive flesh wound from underneath my knee all the way up to my back And then I also this is the the part that was the worst to be honest Legs fine. I have a little bit of residual soreness at this point There's a little bit of shrapnel in my leg, but they're like pieces of sand they only I'm a hot day I might notice it but I from the grenade blast I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely briefly dislocated both of my shoulders I truthly don't know if this actually happened, but he said as much and I tore both of my labrum So slapped air is a relatively common injury and I had the I had what's called a biceps tendinesis surgery done on my right Basically, it was so painful. I couldn't really use it But it's the surgery where they remove a portion of your bicep and they restable it But it's sort of a band-aid doesn't really fix the problem and the shelf life of a biceps tendinesis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading And I'm now at the point where my shoulder fucking sucks and I like in the gym I have to avoid pressing I have to avoid overhead stuff. I was just with a bicep tendon It's in no, it's so what happens is the the labrum tear itself. Mm-hmm never got fixed
They just removed some of the tension on one side of the tear but still over time it continues to tear down the labrum So effectively my labrum just over time has continued to tear and I'm getting some additional pain I just had an MRI done and they're like that, you know, you had the bicep tendonesis done There's not a whole lot more you can do you can do stuff to fix it But a lot of it is gonna do more damage than good and so I'm probably staring down not chronic fucking pain or whatever But something like that. Have you done these times? No, no, okay. How long you down for tonight? That's it?
No, I can come back. I want to bring you into waste well. See what they could do for whatever I can do It's a fucking huge. Yeah while you're here. We should try to get you in This episode is brought to you by wild horse nine only in theaters november 6th earning rave reviews at the Toronto international film festival You'll miss this wildly entertaining movie that critics are calling easily one of the best films of the year starring john malckovich Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, Parker posi and Tom Waits and written and directed by academy award winner martin McDonough See wild horse nine only in theaters november 6th Maybe I can get you in like right after we're done. You could just drive right over there. This is not far from here
Yeah, I mean honestly it's a huge issue guarantee you can help you if you fucked around with peptides at all No, I'm gonna see them all over the place by yeah, you should Um, there's a lot of things that they can do that can radically help you One of the things they can do it'll definitely decrease a lot of the inflammation and help heal and you know, there's some evidence How old are you 37? Yeah, you're still young man. There's there's a lot of evidence that labrum terrors can be healed with stem cells and without having to go through surgery Depending on the extent of the tear yeah, yeah, I'm open to it. I'm a big believer. It's fixed me It's I've had a lot of problems where I was like I need surgery I haven't orthopedic surgeons only for sure you need shoulder surgery I never got it done. He's like you could rehab it. This was more than 10 years ago
He's like you could rehab it and but you're gonna need surgery. It's a hundred percent now. Oh, you're shoulders good now? 100% damn I do all my kettlebell work with 70 pound kettlebells. I don't have any problems windmills cleans presses renegade rows gorilla cleans No problems. How much you clean it? 50s you just gorilla cleans. I do it for reps. Do you do barbell cleans? No?
No, I don't lift anything heavy when I do gorilla cleans I either do 50s or 70s my whole kettlebell workout is either 50s or 70s and sometimes I work out with 35s just for the warmup Like I'll do like warm-up stuff like I'll do like rotation exercises or 35s things where I'm like big halo's We're opening up my back and when you get into doing kettlebell stuff. I've seen you post like a demon belt. Yeah, the gorilla bell Yeah, it does the 70s shit. Those are I've really got into Farmers carries that's what I'm using the gorillas are like my best friends lately I just do these I have this big long driveway with a hill and I do these gorilla carries like a 200 yard driveway And I do these gorilla carries where you take well, you know with those farmers farmers carries with those gorilla kettlebells and 70s Yeah, and I take them up the hill and down the hill and shit My grip has gotten so much better and on top of it It's like my legs have gotten better and it feels like my whole body is like more Connected if that makes any sense because when you're walking you know that guy tom have a land, you know He is fucking everybody's like guys There's a beast one of the things that I got from him is he's talked about the importance of picking up heavy things and walking with them
He's like if you really want to get strong He's like strength is not just lifting heavy stuff like stationary like carry things and so he does a lot of weird like his Zircher's like fucking 500 pounds say but he does a lot of weird like off weight stuff where he's more weight on one side The other and switches me has a chain behind him. He's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing farmers carries with two hands He does a lot of crazy stuff like that and obviously the guy's a fucking freakishly strong person So I'm like, okay, but let me see if there's anything to this so a few months back. I really got into farmers carries And I first just would do it. This is him. I'll be fucking freakin the trademark surety's got Yeah, I always that surety. He always see his back and he's like six eight almost 400 pounds
He's a fucking giant human being I love his page. Yeah, he's a real freak But this this thing that he really believes in is carrying things and walking around with them And now I really get it. I really get it because I've been doing it now for At least three maybe almost it's going on four months and it's completely transformed my legs My legs are way thicker. They're stronger. My back feels better My connection between like my my entire core and my back is better. Like everything feels stronger
I'm stronger in every other workout that I do I feel way stronger when I do like cleans and presses and doing windows and everything else because when you're carrying stuff like that It's like your whole body your core has to stay tight your back has to stay tight Everything's dealing and then when you're up at the top of the hill You're like motherfucker and your forearms are literally on firing you try to hold on to these things And you know I got a chalk ball in my pocket and I reach in there and powder my hands back up And as soon as I get my hands back going I do it again and that has changed everything That's changed everything But one of the things that I've noticed is I very rarely get injured as opposed to my friends who do like traditional weightlifting stuff Like powerlifting or just like benching heavy squatting heavy deadlift heavy those dudes are all my friends who do that are always getting hurt They're always getting guilty of that to something great. Everybody is it says but you think that's the only way to get strong And I don't think that's correct. I don't think it's correct I think the most important thing is volume with reasonably heavy things where you're not hurting yourself like 70 pounds is You know I do I could probably do 20 reps of cleans and presses
But I only do 10 and then I rest for like five I do the paddle tasseline method Pabble tasseline is the guy really brought kettlebells over to America And he's a famous kettlebell coach for strong first It's which is his company and he's just this philosophy that that strength is a skill and you shouldn't practice skills when you're exhausted And this whole idea of working to failure I mean obviously if you want to be a bodybuilder or even a professional powerlifter That's a different thing But if you want to get strong the most important thing is the amount of work that you do not exhausting the muscle with one set And so what he has you do is if you can do 20 reps do 10 and then wait five minutes and do another 10 You got the same volume of work, but you're never exhausted while you're doing it Your form is always perfect and you're still getting the same amount of work So my workouts like I have to allocate two hours if I'm doing a kettlebell workout fuck dude Yeah, I know but it works dude works and again, I'm fucking never injured I'm interested like a little tendon. I just hear something bothering me on my lower back a little but it's never significant My uh my trainer john finks to be working together a couple years now in jerseys the man He's he's a big believer in that what you were talking about I could do 20
But I do 10 instead He's like all about not form till you die because there are times where it's like time to throw some English and get some volume in Right, but he keeps me from ego lifting and keeps me from doing stuff that it's like over the top Ego lifting is a problem especially when I can help it the one time I hurt my back really bad I was deadlifting with 450 with the um traditional grip. No the um traffic. Yeah, the trap bar. What is it's a hex bar? What do you call that thing? Yeah, trap bar. So I love those things. It's great, but I was like
And then I felt think you know that and luckily it was muscle not like spinal not a disc issue It was lower back left lower back it fuck with me for like a six-month period Oh so I was like that I'm not doing that anymore And from that moment on I got really into just doing kettlebells and I'm stronger than I've ever been I don't think you need to lift really depending upon what you're trying to do You know, if you're trying to become a power lifter sure you need to live heavy But if you just want to be strong and functional, I don't think you need to lift heavy I don't believe it. Now I dude I uh right now I'm on a pretty big cut I do a summer cut each well business second summer. I've done just look good on the beach Do shamelessly There's nothing else to it But uh, but what I found in my own life is that I do really well when I have not a goal like a lofty goal even But just some fucking thing that you got to suffer to achieve it. I do well with goals like that Yeah goals are important. Yeah, dude And I and I right now I'm on my like I count calories. I'm I'm into my macros like you wouldn't believe
Um, but what I was doing before this I was doing none of that and I was fucking obsessed with hand cleans Just like barbell and cleans. I dude I'm so fucking I've gotten up to 225 Very proud of that but I it's like a one exercise no matter. We do so many. That doesn't fuck with your shoulder Uh actually no it doesn't it's pressing it's this motion just the press any dude if I press like a fucking 50 pound dumbbell So wow, but I can do it clean That's part of the reason I discovered it is it didn't fuck with my shoulder But I have been on a quest to like find the right way to train for cleans because one of the issues with doing cleans with a barbell And maybe I'll do kettlebells is I have a scar right here that I brought my collarbone when I was seven and my collarbone juts out It healed slightly in the wrong direction and so every fucking time I'm in a block of doing cleans I always have this was like recurrent infected wound on my phone now and then like in the comments of every video. They're like too What's wrong with you guys and staff?
But anyways, I can't let that shave down. Yeah, fucking but it sounds like you do cleans and shit with with kettlebells. Yeah, that's probably something to consider Yeah, and it's not easy to do you know like 70 pounds is when you're doing like 10 set or 10 reps And I'm doing like three sets of 10 reps. It's fucking brutal But it's also the clean and press from the ground up right it's all one motion and this continuum motion You know over the course of 10 repetitions. It's a good solid minute plus of work So you're working really hard for a minute So you're getting a little bit of a cardio benefit from it, but if I'm real consistent with it, you know, I'm 59 now I just turned 59 so it's just about staying strong. That's all I'm concerned with not losing any of my strength not losing any of my
Mobility or flexibility or anything like I'm constantly stretching constantly just I believe in maintaining and I think most people don't do that That's why we have a very distorted perception of what's possible I think we think that people deteriorate with age like so radically that it's just it's just it's just a it is what it is It's fact it's gonna happen to you. I don't think that's necessarily true I think that most people just don't have the willpower to keep maintaining correctly and they're not supplementing their hormones and taking peptides and also optimizing their nutrition I think if you do all of those things you're pretty I'm personally shocked at what I can still do when I was a kid injected Oh, yeah, I was a kid and I thought of a 59 year old. Oh my god. That guy's dead That's a dead man Really dead barely open to jar pickles barely fucking make it down a flight stairs and I've just fucking zero problems You know I have one fucked up me from my martial arts days where I had my meniscus my removed in a big chunk of it And it's still fucks with me, but it doesn't fuck with me in terms of function and only fucks with me in terms of like I'm worried It's gonna become arthritic over time because there's nothing between the cartilage the cartilage is banging against each other
Yeah, and I broke it skiing once that right where the cartilage meets the bone But I think that with the the improvements and all these biological therapies like stem cells and peptides I can maintain it and that's what I'm doing So it keeps me out of jujitsu because that's the one thing that really really rips on your joints Especially my knee every time I've done it's like fucker It just gets I don't want to do anything like my friend Matt said he had a knee replacement and he's younger than me And I'm like yeah, but it's jujitsu. It's just like you're constantly in weird positions and pushing at someone's fucking trying to heal hook you and you're defending It's like everything is getting yanked around and then it's sore, but you still go back the next day because you want to train because you're addicted Yeah, dude. Yeah, I found that uh my when I when I was in the teams I was in good shape I sort of by default and then I got out and I sort of hovered around like I'm still relatively young It's fine and then this whole mr. Ball and youtube thing happened and I in a way adopted the same mindset that made me successful in getting through training Which is like this obsessive got to make more videos, you know, I've had my viral moment like But all of my health went out the window
I would I would I would take me about I don't know like 26 hours ish to do I'm gonna make a video hitting post on youtube and then even all I wanted to do was sleep my immediate reaction at like three in the morning If you just slam like four five six drinks and then go right to bed like I don't even feel it I just would drink Corrective drinks just to go to sleep. I didn't even it was almost like here's your reward sucked at these fucking drinks Oh, I get it and then uh but but I got so grossly out of shape So dude, I was like 200 pounds of just fat and I had this huge ponytail that I grew If you pull it up did I look so fat gross But that uh it finally occurred to me that like wow you're like you're entering like true dad But territory and there's just no excuse since the sometime in like 23 24 I was like, all right, I gotta be like I'm at all together and train and it's dude. It's revolutionary man. That's oh dude That's crazy. There's a good shot of my disgusting Let's see mr. Ballin look at mr. Ballin fat. I think I'm probably
That's that's a decent one that one's recent which one that one's sort of reason the second one in there Well the first picture you pulled up you get it. Oh, you see there in that image. You can see a little little ragged going on there But yeah, well you got to do what you got to do when something starts happening and you know you realize like oh my god Like it's like starting a fire in the woods. Oh, yeah You got blow on it. You got to put some fucking little twigs on it You gotta get that fucker going like once and then you've got congratulations because you've had amazing success Like what do you have like 11 million YouTube subscribers? Yeah, that's incredible man. That's really cool
This episode is brought to you by wild horse nine only in theaters november 6th earning rave reviews at the Toronto international film festival Don't miss this wildly entertaining movie that critics are calling easily one of the best films of the year starring john malkovich sam rockwell Steve bouschemi and tom weights and written and directed by academy award winner martin mcdonald see wild horse nine only in theaters november 6th Where some see heroes and other seagoes bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes while others follow the noise We follow the money learn more at bloomberg.com It is it's I can only imagine what you've been through but the thing that I now this started in 2020 and it's 2026 I have had some incredible highs the early days of After the viral moment and I'm like posting stuff that I upload a video and literally the next day. It's like you made 20 000 from yesterday to now and like i've never in my life Made any real money ever it's all almost overnight
And it grew and grew and then it's like I signed the deal with amazon Like 10 months after starting a podcast. I actually I remember when you got your first deal was spotify I remember that was like I didn't even know it was possible for a podcast or anything to sign like the equivalent of a Professional sports level contract and then it's like less than a year after the the start of the mr ball and podcast i'm partnering up with with amazon It's a 62 million dollar deal and I say that because dude my life got so much better and so much fucking worse at the same time The worst oh god, so there's like a little stuff, you know, I actually I just had a lawsuit close They pled guilty to theft and a bunch So I started a house renovation project when I was living in a house in pennsylvania when this thing kicked off And I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house before long I'm like adding fucking crazy shit to my house They ended up gutting the house to the studs because they're gonna remodel it but they didn't do any work and now they kind of Happy my house is wrecked. I'm living in a rental They're stringing me along and so they stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and never did any work and so then
That that's a little thing And then over the course of the next several years, dude I've had I've had people take advantage of me in just the most personal deep cutting ways ways that You know if you were like write a movie, you know Here's the scene of somebody who suddenly comes into money and like the bad the pitfalls of that people coming out of the woodwork to take from them The things that happen to me with with with some family and with some close friends and with you know Business partners is just like what are you fucking kidding me? Like this was all just an angle like you had an angle on me the whole time Like this was a fucking con well people think about people that come into money like that the same way They think about a large corporation if they're like slip on the floor. I like a target like oh, I'm gonna get paid They don't think I'm all right. It's fine. It's my fault I slipped now they think oh this is an opportunity big time and they look at a guy like you who's you know through your own hard work and Stumbling upon this idea and following through with it made a bunch of money They like I can get some of that money. They don't even think of you as a person anymore. They think of you as a target
I gotta keep your circle tight dude. That's the thing. I got Antonio out there. He's like my right-hand man He's a former homicide detective like he actually he came to me to be my house manager and one of the first things he said to me He's like I'm gonna fuck about your content. I think it's stupid You're the guy for me But he's been awesome because he just like keeps everybody around me sort of like vetted But yeah, dude, it's that's important and because people will sneak through and sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them Other people see them as like this guy's got an angle He's a scumbag be careful and you know you let people into your circle and then they're like when they're around you They're putting on an audition. They're pretending to be someone they're not they're pretending to be someone that you're gonna want to hang out with and what they're using
You is they're just thinking of you as a springboard. I would as a way to get money I would imagine for you just given I mean dude you are podcasting like if there is literally people are like hey You want to be the next president you better go and Joe show like I can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens around you and your circle To get where I'm sitting right now and I gotta be honest I don't know how you'd be able to sift through people that are trying to meet Joe and interact with you And people who are trying to get in with Joe so Joe will interview them. Well the good news is I don't really interact with anybody So the way I even get like suggestions is one I see something that I'm interested in and I have a guy and I either call him texting or email him and say hey Let's try to get this guy on this guy's got a great book or she's got a really interesting documentary or whatever it is And then there's I get these people that submit to want to be on the show So I get a list of those that you know There's a guy that goes through them that makes her their legit and then by the time they get to me It's filtered out to what is actually gonna be interesting So there's not a lot of people meeting me that are and the people that do meet me
Usually I never want to have them on if somebody like comes up and says I have to be on your podcast I'm like nope you definitely know you definitely don't have to be honest So this is a crazy conversation. No one has to do anything You know and it's people reveal themselves. You know they just do they you know over time It takes a little bit you know it's not it's not instantaneous but over time people reveal themselves And it's just the key is you know just being open and there's also people surprise you I mean a lot of really interesting people you know You run into people that you didn't expect would be fascinating and they are you know There's a lot of that too It's just you got to be present just not not buy into any of it That's the that's the real key no matter how big it gets just keep doing the thing that you do So all I do is talk to interesting people. That's it It's not that complicated and as long as I continue to do it the same way I feel like people will enjoy it because I think they enjoy it because I enjoy it It's just like the way when someone's doing something that they really love to do I enjoy watching if someone's doing like metal sculpture You know like and the guys really into what he's welding and hammering I'm like I'm into people doing things
I like when people are really enjoying what they're doing And are really curious and or really like competent at something You know they're excellent at something I enjoy watching that I enjoy listening to it And I always enjoy talking to interesting people So as long as I just keep enjoying talking to interesting people I think people will keep enjoying watching it and it's a nice exchange Works. It's real simple but I keep it that way I don't ever think like oh this guy's famous he'll have a bunch of power This will be a good episode because I get a lot of views I don't think like that I only think you know Because there's like a lot of people that are on my show No one's ever heard of them They're just an interesting person that I found on YouTube Or an interesting person that I found you know in a documentary or whatever it is I think it's the point you make about how you I think for me anyways the one the one thing I've come back to over the past several years Of doing this is truthfully even though there are times where You know creating content is obviously it is a job in the sense that we have a recording schedule And we have things that we have to do as you obviously do too amongst whatever else you're doing The one thing that I fucking love doing is telling stories
I mean that's really I really feel like that's the place where I'm really a really good storyteller We got me on the edge of your seat at my seat rather with your Afghanistan story Fuck man That was incredible. You're really good at it. Thank you And the other one too the Russian one too You know a great story resonates with people especially a creepy one Which is why I think you know you've picked the perfect angle Because a great creepy story like you hear a great creepy story like everything Whoa, then what happened? Have you heard of the the headless valley? No In your in your comings and goings on the show?
The Hanay Valley? No I got a good story for you Okay Okay so in Canada there's the section in the northwest called the northwest territory So are you familiar with us? Yes Okay So for those that are not the northwest territories is roughly four times the size of Germany But Germany has something like 87 million people who live there And in this space in Canada this rugged space There's like 45,000 people that live there So it's four times the size of Germany and basically not populated It is as remote as a guy as a Population of dripping springs Not even Yeah dude Not even Drimming springs more And uh so within the northwest territory There's this this even more remote stretch that's called the nahani valley And the nahani valley today it's a protected park it's a Canadian protected park But even still even though it's a park you can go visit It's it's nearly impossible to get to To get there by boat you have to traverse these rapids I think it's a very treacherous ride to get there by boat There's no established roads into the nahani valley You can hike there it's brutal to hike there You can fly there but it's only through chartered float planes
It's a difficult place to get to but the nahani valley In particular when the story takes place which is like the early 1900s Because of how isolated it was It's like one of the parts of earth that's like untouched by humans And so the only people that would be in this huge sprawling valley It was like a waste of nature They would see things that are just like so gorgeous like untouched nature But in the early 1900s There was this push from gold prospectors to go out into the nahani valley Because they figured because it's so untouched by humanity There's bound to be gold to be found in the nahani valley Now there were some indigenous tribes like the nahani tribe They were out there There's some lore surrounding how they might have abandoned their their settlement Around the time the story takes place But there weren't indigenous tribes that lived out there But for the most part it's like this sort of vacant stretch In this already isolated part of the world And so in 19 I think it's 1905 These three brothers these three prospectors the McLeod brothers Charlie, Willie, and Frank Who are their seasoned gold prospectors They decide they are going to head off into the nahani valley And go try to strike it rich And it's even harder to get into the valley back then
As it is today It required for them They had to actually had to build a boat They had to bring pieces of a boat And they would take it up a rapid or down the rapid And they'd have to disassemble the boat Carry it up like these rock faces to get like those waterfalls they'd get passed And then bring the boat further and further into this valley And it's like this It's just crazy how much work goes into getting out there But these three brothers They find their way into the valley And they get to the stretch of this river called the Flat River Which is anything but it's raging rapids But there was this little embankment Against this huge forest And like mountains off in the distance And they made their camp there And there's no one around I mean this is pristine wilderness And they start sifting Slucing for gold And it's just fucking gold everywhere It's like the sand is gold There's gold everywhere They find so much gold And they can't believe it They've struck it completely rich here And so after a whole day I think that it's two to three days even Of just getting all this gold They pack all their ship back up in their boat That they've assembled And they begin making their way back out again Which should be easier Because now I think a lot of it you're going with the current I don't know how they get up there with the rapids going one way But either way
They begin making their way out And their boat capsizes And they lose all their gold The boat breaks up They narrowly are able to salvage the pieces And they come ashore And they build their boat again And they're like Oh my gosh We've lost so many supplies Like we This is horrible You know The best we can do here is leave And come back With more supplies Because we know there's gold here Like this is devastating But no one's going to be here We can come back We can get more gold So they leave And once they get back to town Charlie, one of the brothers decides You know what it's not worth it That was really sketchy I don't want to die out on the flat river You know Frank and Willie They're like Oh we gotta go We gotta go We gotta go out there And so, fast forward a year Charlie's still saying I will not go back out there But Frank and Willie They decide to go And they recruit this other guy I think his name is Robert Weir Robert Weir And so the three of them Go back into the valley To strike it rich And you know, Charlie is aware That they're going out there He's staying back But he knows they're going out He knows where they're going Because he went there with them And he expects they're going to be gone For I think it was going to be a whole year And you can imagine how much effort Goes into getting out there They were going to live out there I think for the summer And just get as much gold as they couldn't come out But some amount of time passed Let's call it a year
When Charlie starts to become suspicious Because they haven't come out of the valley yet And this is 1905 There's no way to talk to them And so another whole year passed It's where two years deep into this And still, these guys have not returned From the Nahani Valley And so at this point Charlie is thinking There's an issue here Something's happened to my brothers I gotta go find him And so he puts together a group of people To go see what happened to his brothers And so he makes his way He starts getting into the valley And he reaches this stretch of This is just to give you a mental image Of where he's going To get to that segment of the beach Where they had been Two years prior when Charlie was with them Because that's where he's assuming they're going to be They had to pass through these canyons There's four canyons That go I think it's the canyon, four canyon, two, three, one They're all just called canyon, one, two, three, four But they're staggering I mean, just visually These are just ominous places They're these stretches like canyon, two This is a 10-mile stretch of very deep water I don't know how deep I want to say It's at least 100 feet deep Where the water goes all the way up To the cliff face It's just sheer cliff face on either side So you're home It's like a scar in the earth Where it's hundreds of feet tall cliffs On either side that are sheer
And it's just called 100 feet at least of water down There's nowhere to stop Once you're in this canyon You must go to the end of the canyon There's nowhere to go Oh fuck And the Nahan tribe Who the tribe that had lived there for a while They had always talked about They called them the Wahila They said there were these creatures These white tall creatures That would roam the forest in the Nahani Valley And they would make these screeching sounds And they would attack people They were just just folklore, right? But they said That in these canyons There were all these caves These pockets of caves high up on these canyons That you can't really get to That they believed the Wahila would live inside So imagine you're going down this This like misty, 10-mile stretch in second canyon And you're looking up on either side And they're literally our caves That no human is ever stepped foot in You can't even get to these fucking caves And because of the way the wind cuts through the canyon It makes this echo-y like screeching noise That today you can still hear As you go through these canyons And so they're going through second canyon The stretch here And the stretch of Flat River Where he had been the year prior Or two years prior where there's brothers Was at the end of second canyon Where the first little call out of beach head exists
And so he, Charlie, in a search party They exit this creepy second canyon And they see there's a campsite set up on the beach And it's not really a beach It's like four feet of sand And then it's a little bit of hinterland And then it's just forest But he sees there's a tent And so they beach the boat And they're looking around And they find there's two bodies They're badly decomposed But they're missing their heads Two headless men That are badly decomposed One of which is reaching for his rifle And he's half in the tent Half out of the tent And he's reaching for his rifle Which is propped up against a tree And the other is just lying behind the tent And he's missing his head The heads were never found And they find identification And it turns out those are his two brothers And they find etched into the tree That the gun was propped on It just was written, etched into the wood Um, we have found a fine prospect Which could mean a number of things Maybe it means they found gold, whoever But that was written on the tree And then a little ways down from their camp Going along the same direction they'd come in They found a skeleton Which they could never identify As being anyone But they believe it belonged to Robert Weir So they're all dead And the authorities You know, when this was reported They weren't really shocked
They were like, ah, it's the Hanny Valley It's a dangerous place They obviously died of starvation And animal predation Caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off You know, tough luck Charlie didn't believe that He always believed that something had happened to his brothers But he didn't know where to prove it So that's 1905 Fast forward to 1913 People sort of know about this story That this is when they dubbed it The Headless Valley Because these men were found without their heads Little did they know that story would carry quite a bit of weight Because 10 years are a little bit less than 10 years later Martin Jorgensen Who's another gold prospector He heads out Into the Hanny Valley He's heard the stories He's heard about the McLeod brothers He knows that there's, you know, lore of the Wahila And that there's something weird happening in this valley And it's dangerous But he goes out there anyway And he tells his business partners With these rich guys Who didn't want to actually go get the gold They just funded his expedition He's like, I'm gonna go out there And I'll make us a bunch of money I'll find a bunch of gold Stay out there for the whole summer And then we'll rendezvous And we'll split the earnings or whatever So out he goes And he builds himself a cabin Not far from where the McLeod brothers had stayed And then the second expedition as well And he is out there for the summer But then he misses the rendezvous point He was supposed to come out of the valley
And meet his partners at the end of the summer He doesn't Eventually a search party is brought out To find what happened to him And they find his cabin had burned to the ground They find Martin Jorgensen Is within the remains of this burned down cabin Missing his head Jesus And they, I don't know how they did this in 1913 But apparently the fire began on the roof And so they don't understand how he could have Not realized there was a problem And exited his cabin I mean it's simplifying it But it's an odd thing That fire starts here And you still burn to the ground And also wears your head So that's Martin Jorgensen So now people, they aren't really connecting the McLeod brothers And Martin Jorgensen It's called the headless valley By the time Martin Jorgensen gets into the valley He's now found headless And now it's like this Little more rumor mill going on Over the coming several Actually next 10 years There was several other expeditions To include this guy Riley O'Brien Who goes out there, prospekter He goes out to check his traps Doesn't come back as partners with him He walks over and finds him And he's just sitting and Explicably by a campfire That's not on It's not even, it was cold It was cold enough to freeze to death out there But it was not blindingly cold
And he's sitting in front of this fire pit It's only been like an hour or two Since he stepped away And he's holding a match Or a cigarette in his hand And he's just like, he's frozen He's frozen to death And there's no sign of what happened to him He's just sitting by the fire and he's dead He has his head, but he's frozen to death The guy with his partner who fled the valley Would later say he looked flash frozen So that happens There were at least two other prospectors Who also had their cabins burned down One of them was nearly decapitated when he was found But he still had his head But signs of something being done to his spine Was present And then there was another two guys Who their cabins burned down But their bodies were intact So there's all these people that die In similarly bizarre ways And then in I think it was 1926 The first like really weird thing happens This is all weird, but the really weird thing happens Is it weird?
It's weird It's weird There was this hunting party that went out To the Nahani Valley And by this point it's become Almost like Because there's this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is Because people are fearful of the Nahani Valley It's now bringing a new crowd of people Into the valley It's bringing like hunting parties Kind of like, I don't know, I'll go fucking see what's out in this valley And so they were going through Second Canyon And they were heading to Flat River And they were going to these places Where all these kind of famous deaths have occurred To go hunting but just sort of be in this valley And so this hunting party is out there And it's a big group I think there was at least a dozen people out there And they're camping out on the banks of the Flat River Not really in the same spot where the McLeod brothers had been But not too far away And they're out drinking late, having a good old time They all go to bed and the next morning May Lafferty is her name?
May Lafferty? She's missing She's one of the only women on this expedition She's gone And they look for her, there's no sign of what happened to her She's just gone And so they did have some sort of a search occur Over the next several days, but they ultimately said You know, we don't happen to her And they left, they left the valley And so they tell authorities Authorities, they think they went out to look for her They could never find her, no sign of what happened to her And so around the time that they're looking for May Lafferty There was this guy who is named Charlie Different from Charlie McLeod Just a sort of loner guy Who just by happenstance had been camping in the Nahani Valley At the same time as that hunting party He was by himself, sort of just this rugged outdoorsman Who, it's not even clear why he was out there But he was just out there minding his own business He was aware of the hunting party And he said that he watched them have their party that night And he had stayed up late but eventually gone to sleep And he ultimately reports this to the police Because there's all this talk of where's May Lafferty And this guy Charlie realizes he may have seen her So he goes to the police and he tells them Hey, I was out there They don't know I was out there, I was out there At the same time And I went to bed Late at night after they were already asleep And I woke up to the sound of rocks Like little rocks falling into the water
And he's relatively close to the water But he's not so close that he would hear the sound of the current He's far enough that a stone throw into the water You'd hear the sploosh sound And so he wakes up and he crawls out of his tent And it's pretty well illuminated And he's in the trees You know, he can see the water, the flat river And he can't tell what the rocks are coming from It just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water And so he just is curious He gets up and he walks down to the water line And he starts hearing him more and more And he looks up and there's a part of the coastline If you will, the beach line That sort of was up on a rise to his left Like there was a hill that was right next to him That's dramatic, just a slight rise And there was a little bit of a cliff That maybe like six feet, eight feet of a cliff That overlooked the river right there And he sees there's this woman Who's crawling on all fours And she's scrambling up this little rise of the beach And it's her kicking of the dirt That's like sprinkling rocks into the water And he's looking at her and she gets to the top And she stops And she turns around and looks at him And he described her as looking possessed He was like there was something wrong with her She just stared at me and he was so frightened He didn't, he just froze and then hid And he watched this woman
Scamper off Into the wherever she went over the rise away from the camp So she's gone And he didn't know what to make of it He's like that's so weird He hears about this missing woman He tells police and he sees a picture of her And he's like I'm nearly positive that was her And so she's never found And so Maylafferty's gone Fast forward another 20 years So there's no idea And in those 20 years more prospectors are found dead as well One of the last hunting parties Went out into the Mahoney Valley Actually, Prospector goes out Prospector goes out and he goes missing His name is John Patterson This is like in the 1939-40 range And a hunting party goes out to look for him And they can't find him And on the last night they were there One of the men who was part of the search party For John Patterson They're near the Flat River He described an Indigenous man Walked out of the tree line Just sort of inexplicably walks over to him And he comes up to the group Who were sort of on the beach line there And he just says to this guy He's like hey They're startled to see him To begin with Like where the fuck did you come from?
And he's like Be careful The Wahila Are out tonight And the guy just wonders This is according to legend This is what was said to him The guy wanders back off into the trees But the leader of that expedition They were planning to stay I want to say two additional days To keep looking for John Patterson But that night following that comment Made by that guy The Indigenous guy All night They reported these ungodly screams And screeches coming from that canyon Those caves up in the cliff swerve All around the forest Like unearthly sounds were being made That scared them so badly That the next day They said we're not looking for John Patterson anymore And they bailed And so People stopped going into the honey valley And today You can still go there It's still very hard to get there But no one has a good explanation For why so many fucking people From 1903 or 4 Until at least the 1940s Kept going into that valley And kept turning up dead Many of which without their heads So this Indigenous guy That lived up there Where was he from?
Like was he living up there? Was he a part of a tribe? Was he passing through? So that part of the story? Admittedly Someone said that an Indigenous guy said that to him There's not much in the way of like, okay Was there a tribe there?
You know? Right It was one of those loose pieces of information That sort of surrounds the story The reality is, there's so much legend Surrounding the honey valley in part Because the Nahah tribe that had lived there There was this story I mentioned at the beginning That they apparently abandoned the valley After something happened And people have always attributed it To the legend of the Wahila That somehow these creatures must have Forced them to leave the valley And so combine that with all of the actual deaths That occurred By the 1940s when John Patterson went missing And when that guy said Who was part of that search party That the Indigenous guy warned him of the Wahila This was a big enough story That like Time Magazine Did something in the 1940s about What the fuck is happening in the honey valley?
Like why are so many people dying out there? So I wonder if the people who were there Maybe they heard some strange sounds that night Who knows? But who's gonna verify whether or not There really was someone who warned them about the Wahila We don't know But that's the report that was given Somebody claimed that an Indigenous man Sort of came out of nowhere Said watch out for the Wahila tonight And then that night they heard all these screeches And recently called it in Asking as like maybe it was Indigenous people That just didn't want these other guys coming through So they created this thing We're cutting off their heads and killing these people And it's a great deterrent Like maybe it's not because a lot of people went back Well maybe less than would have Fair Considering how much gold was there? Yeah that's fair Yeah I mean that would have a great way to get rid of white people It's great to cut a few heads off To create a whole lot of those ghosts Yeah dude I find myself even to this day Googling the Nahani Valley And just looking at pictures of the canyons And just reading Even just stuff that I know is probably folklore around the valley Because the idea that within the stretch Of isolated parts of the world There's this really isolated part No one can get to Well there's some weirdness in the world
Still in places that people don't go to And just think about how hard it is to find a wolverine And we know wolverines are real I'm most probably never see a wolverine They're in Alaska They're in Canada Minnesota has wolverines Like what states do wolverines? It's got to be Michigan It's got to be Michigan Yeah Michigan's right up there They're the wolverines right? They're the Michigan wolverines Right but I don't necessarily think That means that Well I would imagine these little guys too Oh yeah they're a little just like Badgers A little ferocious motherfuckers They Let's see Interesting Interesting But the thing is My point is like you don't see them No Like I know a lot of guys Remote cold high elevation habitat Colorado Minnesota I know a lot of guys who have been in the woods You know they're whole life hunting And maybe they see one ever We know there's populations of them out there But it's rare to stumble across a wolverine in the wild And that's a known animal Now imagine that there was a time
I mean if you think about Just the amount of other types of hominids That they've found Just over the past few decades They keep finding new versions Like the island of Flores The little hobbit people The Denisovans that they found They think they were much larger than homosampians So they're finding And the Denisovans I think was like Within the last 10 years or so And they keep finding these skeletons And finding these bones And then they find out Well this was around 300,000 years ago It was around 500,000 years ago But that's just what you find in bones Most people's bones you're never going to find So the vast majority of things that have died Never make it into the fossil record And so you have a small number of things that do Now we know that humans Cannibalize other humans It's been a practice It's been a practice about a guinea Yeah, it's a practice today I mean that's a bit of an overclaim The Denisovans supposedly ate some of their enemies Like there's a bunch of cannibalism Going on in the world
Now imagine if there was a hominid And some sort of an ancient creature That still stayed alive In a small population But would eat people Or maybe just cut the fucking heads off Or just attacked them and killed them Because they didn't want them anywhere near Because they had associated over time People with problems And then if you're around people They're going to hunt you They're going to shoot you They're going to kill you So what do you do? You stay as far away from people The way to survive Is to be in the most remote place The most remote place humanly possible And when you find people Kill them Kill them So that they don't go after you I know that you had seen something That I had Tom's a girl On an interview one time And I told a story about the Mexican pilot Does that ring anybody?
Yes It's just you're talking about how humans Do damage to one another But the 60 second version Is there was this Mexican pilot civilian He's going out for his last test Raphael Pacheco I think his name He's going out to do his last test run as a pilot And it's a simple route Hey you're going to fly solo to prove You know what you're doing He takes off And he immediately starts to realize That he doesn't have control over the instruments You know it's The instruments were pretty rudimentary To begin with This is like the 1950s or 60s I think And so it's a lot of dead reckoning From the pilot seat Like he's looking out to see where he needs to go That mist is getting bad And then he's calling over the radio He's like I can't get my plane to move And then suddenly he passes out And his plane like accelerates up into the sky And then he wakes up hours later Off the coast of Acapoco Which based on how much fuel was left He had too much fuel for how far of a distance He had covered from where he'd taken off Cheamalakon, Mexico It was more than I got three hour drive So he's too far away with too much fuel And he comes to in his plane He's still flying He's no idea how he got there He's just coming to And Raphael, he hears in his radio Some voice It's an air traffic control guy, Carlos Who's down in Acapoco And he's talking to Raphael
As if they've been having an ongoing conversation But Raphael's like what's going on? Like what's going on? What's going on? And Carlos is like what? Like are you alone in your craft?
And Raphael's like Taking stock of his situation He regains control of his plane He's like what am I doing? And so basically Carlos was like Hey dude, like coming in land here Land here will figure it out So Raphael's like I don't know what happened I passed out of the wheel He lands at the airstrip in Acapoco And immediately he's met with these guys in suits Like picture men in black He gets scooped up And he's brought to a hospital Where he's drug tested And talks to a psychologist And they don't give many information at all He's like what happened? Like I'm so sorry And they determined that he's not crazy And he's not on drugs And only then do they say Hey so When you were out over the off the coast of Acapoco You were flying in circles For over an hour And Carlos, the air traffic control guy He's the one who saw you on the on the screen And he was talking to you For an hour Well you were out there And the whole conversation is recorded And basically if you can listen to the recording And I'm pretty sure you guys might have on the show Raphael passes out And then at some point A couple hours later When he's somehow magically off the coast of Acapoco A voice comes across in the cockpit That's like this robotic deep, altered sounding voice
That doesn't sound like Raphael In the earlier recording It sounds like Raphael's voice Now it's different And he's talking to Carlos And this voice comes through And says something to the effect of like You are listening to the sound of the voice Coming through the pilot But it's not his voice We are inhabitants of this universe But your technology is so primitive This is the only way we can contact you We're here to tell you That you are the only Intelligent species in our universe That uses warfare To harm one another And you're effectively on the brink of extermination And you need to find a way to stop it And then Raphael comes too And that's when he's like What's going on? And Carlos thinks he's been talking to Raphael the whole time And that's when he's like Is there somebody else in the cockpit with you?
Anyways So it's this big mystery But Mexico took the story And kind of like sequestered it The way we got access to the transcripts of it Is we had to write a letter To a library in Mexico That had access to the transcript And anyway, but it's interesting to imagine That one, I love thinking about life outside of the outside of the earth Because I think that The notion that there is life Or that there isn't life Is astounding And fascinating either direction you go So I've always been interested in that But two, the idea that others out there Are warning us That we're on the fucking fast track To destroy ourselves And you better knock it off That's also pretty crazy And we're still accustomed to humans Being violent and horrible to each other That's our history, right?
But what if that's not normal? What if it's like Where the fuck that people? And we're just killing everybody And we need to stop I have a theory And my theory Is that I think When you look at all the different Ancient religious texts In regards to the creation of the human race There's so many of them That have these very bizarre Similar narratives And these similar narratives Are like in the book of Enoch In the book of Enoch The watchers come down And they mate with the daughters of men There's a lot of weird stuff like that Even Adam and Eve Like God created Adam And God created Eve He created it Like, what?
Like why did he do that? Why did he do that? And he did it? What did he do with your afts? What did he do with?
Like, why hunting birds? What's going on? But it doesn't They're not along the stories different The story of humans Is a story of engineering It seems to be a story of genetic engineering It seems to be a story of human beings Being taken Like, you take whatever this primitive beast is And you put something else into it And you rapidly create something That's far more advanced than anything else I think along the lines You maintain too much of the primitive beast For the amount of intelligence That it has And the amount of Technological competence That it's capable of achieving It's too primitive still It's too violent It's too territorial It's too There's too much of it It's still an animal But we're not totally an animal We're very...
You know, if you looked at us And looked at everybody else like that Animal's crazy This animal makes fucking airplanes You know, we're so different Than everything else I think we're engineered And I think we're engineered like You know, look, I've had pit bulls And I know people will tell you Pit bulls are great dogs And they're sweet dogs And I love them Don't get me wrong However, they're sketchy Fucking dogs They're sketchy dogs They're sketchy dogs Period And you can love it Oh, it's all how you train them Fuck you Those dogs are designed to attack other dogs And they don't I had my dogs that had a separate one If you never should have two females I realized that after I have that going right now It's not good Females, you gotta get rid of one of them You can't have the females together They'll fight to the death And they never...
Males establish dominance One male is dominant with the other males The other males back off And that's the room That's not how it works with females The female dogs They keep trying to decide Who's the boss? And I had to separate them They're locked onto each other And they're wagging their tails They're biting each other's face and neck Locking onto each other And I mean full wagging the tail Like they're having the time of their life And I had to hose them down And separate them And I had to have someone help me We made them Those are not a dog That's not a wolf You know, wolves are really Fascinating clever creatures That have evolved over time with nature And they're brutal to each other But they're brutal to each other In a way that makes sense For the survival of the pack It all makes sense If you look at how it works And how they have to communicate together And they have to push out the weak ones And push out the old ones It's brutal But it makes sense Pitbulls don't make any sense They make no sense And people don't make any sense People are like something that somebody created People are super intelligent Very aware of our own finite life span Very aware of our own mortality
Very aware of the consequences of hurting people Yet we do it anywhere We communicate with each other We know with... There's people that, like their entire day Is just fucking with people online Oh yeah Our entire day is that Like... So people like to cause pain Like to cause chaos There's people out there that are warmongers They enjoy starting war They enjoy getting involved in conflicts with other nations That's their thing That's what they do We're fucking weird We're weirder than any other animal I think one of the reasons why we're this weird And this incoherent Is because we're engineered The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid Is the most fuel efficient cross trek yet That means less time filling your tank And more time filling your day More court time More ride time More lake time More camp time More go time The new 2027 Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid Consumer Reports Top rated subcompact SEB Stop by your local Subaru dealership Or visit Subaru.ca to learn more Consumer Reports is not in North product services I uh...
One thing that I... I started philosophy in college Cause at one point I thought I might go to law school I love like thought experiments And one of the things that always stuck with me That's sort of along these lines Is this idea that humans are Almost to the point where you can't even notice it You are completely egotistical Like every human You could basically define their whole existence As being absolutely egocentric And it comes down to like how you treat other people And on your motives whatever But critically there's one point That stands out above all And actually Neil deGrasse Tyson Nails this I know you had an interview with him I'm not sure if you guys covered this But it's one of his best Descriptions of how fucked up humans are And how we think about things the wrong way So because we're so egotistical Like humans as a species We sort of assume that Okay well if there's life In any capacity outside of Earth Or undiscovered life somewhere Everything is sort of compared against us We are the baseline Intelligent life You know what that looks like?
Yeah it looks something like us How do we describe intelligent aliens? They're like grey beings That are like bipedal And sort of resemble humans We have this sort of baseline thought That humans are the best And that humans are the smartest And that if anything is going to be Intelligent in the universe beyond us It'll have elements of human to it And so Neil deGrasse Tyson Brings this point up That shows you the absurdity Of how little we know And how probably wrong we are He's like okay He does a much better job of this But it's like okay so we're made up of DNA Humans are made up of DNA We have x number of DNA strands And then botch the way he tells it But imagine we have 100 pieces of DNA That make us human Like if you have these 100 pieces You're a human Okay well who's our closest relative To humans It's probably the chimpanzee And just for the sake of this description Sorry Neil you probably do a better job They have like 98 of the human pieces But they've got either missing two Or they have two different ones And that's the thing that makes them a chimpanzee So they're like 98 right And then you have What's the next closest thing to humans?
It goes human it goes Maybe it goes to like Fucking I don't know A bird or a dolphin or whatever But you go down the line of like The animals that are closest to us In terms of intelligence And you sort of degrade In terms of number of DNA pieces That are close to the ideal Which is 100 And Neil's like okay great So you have that framework Okay What the fuck do we do to chimpanzees? We put them in labs And we test them in labs We put them in fucking zoos Do you go up to chimpanzees And say hey chimp let's have a conversation Let's have a meaningful inter- No You don't And they're the closest thing Let's go down the list What about an ant? Like an ant's like 75 of 100 You might step on an ant and not even know it Right?
How many times have you stopped To talk to the earthworm? None Because it doesn't even register for you He's like if there's intelligent life In somewhere out there What makes you think We're not the ant Why are we automatically at the same level? Why would an intelligent species Somewhere else come here Be like oh shit humans Let's chat What if we're so insignificant That we get stepped on We step on ants Or worse What if we're close Like the chimpanzee And we get rounded up And fucking studied There's a movie I just watched last night Called The Signal It has to do with this I love sci-fi movies Check it out It's a fucking signal This holy shit What a plot to us It has to do with human testing I can't even know A new movie No it's like 2014 And you got to watch it And then who's in it?
No name actors Lawrence is born Lawrence is born Not known actors at all He's not right He's not right I mean This would be a very easily one right Lawrence is amazing I'm going to write down So this movie Admittedly You're watching it And you're like wait a minute This is I kind of get it I kind of get it You get to the end And it's I will not spoil it I'm not going to spoil it You get to the end I challenge anyone who watches this To think about the example I just gave you About are we the ant Are we the chimpanzee? What place do we have in the universe? And with that in mind Think about the ending to that movie Because it's very sudden The way that movie ends And you realize what the point is And it's the stark reminder That not only do we not know What else is out there Let alone our own planet We're still discovering things That we've never even seen And that just has to do with Fossil Records Who knows what's beyond that?
Right How do we rank in the universe? Like it's so unbelievable That when you look at our problems And you look at the things that we focus on And like our gripes day to day And our conflicts with the world If you just zoom out And you realize it's not just That we might not be alone It's that we might be insignificant I don't think we're insignificant I think what humans are Is a latter stage of Intellectual development Amongst multi-celled organisms And that it's not the end stage And I think there's probably Life out there that doesn't have As chaotic a solar system That developed in a different way That achieved very high levels Probably above and beyond Anything we could even imagine What we are And it might not even be biological anymore Which is the direction That I think we're heading into But I also think That what we do to animals I mean look at what we're doing right now Okay My friend Ben Lam He owns Colossal Bioworks So Colossal they've the ones that brought back the direwolf Oh shit Yeah that was huge news Crazy dude I've seen them in real life I think I saw it in your post Yeah that's crazy I went to visit them And my daughter was holding the four-month-old
Oh my god It was like kissing her and loving her like a puppy And it's a little baby wolf It's really crazy Just think of what we do With genetic engineering With the current technology Which is right now evolving And getting much more powerful If you Imagine us Not a thousand years from now But even a hundred thousand years from now How advanced we are And if we go to a planet And we find some chimps And we say wow How much time would it take before These chimps could become Something special Something you know Something that could make a building Something that could make a cruise ship You know And fuck you carnival cruise mines Those aren't pretty incredible What how long would that take?
Can we help that? Every single ancient culture If you go back to their Their oldest religious texts Their oldest religious texts Are about some sort of an intervention By an advanced visitor All of them Oh yeah man So many of them The ancient Sumerian texts If you go into like You know It's hard to know what they're really saying Because I'm not a language expert But you know There's the zechariah's Sitchions of the world That believe that What they're describing Is some sort of genetic engineering Then there's also the fact that The you know that sign For medicine Where you have the intertwined snakes That sign I forget what that's called But it doesn't like in picture It looks like the double helix for DNA That sign is in these ancient Sumerian clay tablets It's all over ancient Sumer It's in their buildings It's like It's not only It's and it indicates medicine What is it called?
Caduceus I think that's what it's called Right? The Caduceus Right So not just that But the ancient Sumerians In 5,000 years ago They had a detailed depiction of the solar system So in one of their ancient clay tablets Like they have this image And this image is of a sun And all of the planets In the correct order It's very weird It's very weird They also have depictions of these Very enormous people With these ornamental headdresses A lot of them have wings A lot of the weird ancient people The gods have wings And they also have like these Little people on their laps That have tails Geez It's weird shit So if you believe Sitchin And Sitchin's claims That we were genetically engineered To work for the Anunnaki And the Anunnaki are a species Of super advanced beings That were likely giants That came from another plant I'm unfortunate Turn it over to me No It says here the Caduceus Which you can see In that picture I guess Yes Is often confused With the rod of Acelophus Which is a single snake
And that is what is popularized as The It's a classic confusion With rod of a separate- National Healthcare Association There are dominant symbol For professional healthcare Association in the United States It's just the United States thing Oh it's only United States? I think so But wait a minute Okay That's never been used But that Caduceus Does exist in ancient Sumerra Correct But that's where I just Yeah Sorry that Yeah So look But my point is That That is not the same thing It is the same thing No it's just That's a single snake Is the medicine thing Okay But the medical corpse one right there And that image is two snakes Oh Click on that That's two snakes That's two snakes I can see how there's confusion You can't Colorize the misuse Of the similar throughout the United States medical field Okay Alright well that one has two snakes That one has one The point is Go to the Sumerian one The image It exists on buildings It exists all over the place It looks just like the double helix of DNA Doesn't mean it that's it No But it's a lot of weird shit That is associated with medicine Like why is the actual structure of our DNA Associated with Medicine in these ancient cultures
Why do they have these images Of these enormous people with wings Like you would imagine If something came from somewhere else You would depict it If it could actually fly in If you're a hundred years later A thousand years later A hundred thousand years later You're writing it down Like all they had wings Like there's a lot of fucking weird stuff That exists in these ancient scriptures The Vimanas and ancient Hindu texts This is flying vehicles You know There's a lot of weird shit That seems to indicate There's a creation myth And the creation myth has to do with Something coming here And making us Not us rising from the ancient And God's energy forced us to evolve Through natural selection And God is real But God is just giving us a pathway Towards progression to what we are today No All of them are a story of intervention The one thing that I always come back to Anytime I'm thinking about Deep philosophical things Is just the reality that Truly How can anyone know Therefore any idea could be the case Like one thing that always I think about this a lot Is they recently discovered Recent as in the last 10, 20 years
I don't know And maybe that's wrong too They found these things called exoplanets Are you familiar with that? Fascinating So in essence They found these planets That are comparable to Earth And imagine a telescope Looking out in some pinprick Out in the middle of the sky So far away Thousands of light years away Whatever millions of light years away And they find that these clusters of exoplanets And already They've discovered that there are exoplanets That if you think about How we understand life The way we understand it to exist With carbon and with water And all that There's a scale That they call If there's a name for it But within the sliding scale Let's say this side is Life cannot be supported As we know it All the way up to Totally support life There's this perfect zone In the middle that we call the Goldilocks zone Which is essentially All the ingredients for life As we know it exist If you're on this portion of the scale And they've already found There are all the thousands I want to say At least 5,000 exoplanets That are not just in the Goldilocks zone But let's say Earth is Barely into the Goldilocks zone They found thousands That are better suited In terms of how we understand life That are more in the Goldilocks zone than we are
And we have no access to those planets And that's just looking in one Little portion of the universe out there Thousands of them So here we are today And it's like Oh that couldn't happen A thousand two thousand years ago That's not possible Give me a break No one knows What's happening right now An exoplanet CB12 You don't know And you don't know If they get to a point Where they're a hundred thousand years Advanced from us And they have novel propulsion systems That use gravity And bend space and time And don't just use gasoline To rocket across the sky They could be here all the time They could be hiding in the sky You know There's too many weird stories Of people being Like the abduction stories Oh yeah Like there's too many weird ones Where I don't want to dismiss them You know I just Because I you don't know And if If it's a novel experience If someone's coming Something's coming here And finding some pilot Some Mexican pilot And fucking Nuking his brain temporarily And then talking through him To the air traffic controller Fucking knows if that's real If that only happens once It never happens again And we're just sitting around going What happened Nothing happened That was nonsense There's always going to be a bunch of people That want to say that But have you ever heard the recordings
Of Betty and Barney Hill When they're going through that Not a progression I don't know them well I know that story The recordings are crazy I don't know if I've heard the recordings They know they exist Yeah they're talking about Like these medical experiments That they're doing on them And like these people Were living in I think it was the 1950s And so it's an interracial couple In New Hampshire In the 1950s And no one knew about UFO abductions back then This was not a thing And also these people see this light And their car stops working And then they wake up hours later The last time And they go about their day Like something fucking happened They don't know what They don't know what's wrong with them And then they eventually get hypnotized And both of them Independently have these Fucking crazy stories Of like Medical experiments Being taken on board this craft And then so many people Have similar stories All throughout the world Where they don't have access to this story They don't have access to You know any Any like Iconic versions Of what a UFO abduction experience is It's not like It's in their memory Like oh it's Santa Claus Came down the cre- Also it's a pre-social media law Where all of the information of information Is just less Yeah If you ever read Jacques Valle's books
He's the guy that they modeled The French scientist And close encounters after Okay He's a guy who's like A legitimate scientist Who's been studying this forever He's very careful about it And he's a brilliant guy And he has historical representations Of these experiences That go back into the 1700s And the're all like real similar Like weirdly similar Where you're like okay It hasn't happened to me So I don't know what the fuck is going on But to dismiss it outright And to be a person who's experienced it And have it dismissed outright Would be maddening Because like this might be a real thing That's happening And so now the government is slowly But surely telling us more And more of what they know But along the way If you're a cynical person Like I tend to be with a lot of this stuff They're probably also telling us Some stuff that's not true So that we connect it To the stuff that is true And so that it all looks like nonsense And they can kind of like Muddy the water So you never get a clear picture What's going on?
Because I personally believe There's probably some merit To this idea that they've been doing Back engineering of craft vehicles I mean I would be If I was in charge If there's actually a real crash vehicle Of course I'm going to try to figure out how it works And it seems like if you talk to like reliable people That seem to be telling the truth Guys like David Grush They seem to be telling these stories Like they have had these things In their possession For decades For a long fucking time And these things And they don't know what it is They don't understand how to do it They don't exactly know what's going on Or who's doing it But they know that we're not alone Yeah But where are they coming from I mean some people say Interdimensional Some people say interplanetary I don't know what the fuck those words even mean Like something's coming from somewhere else It's not really here But it gets here Somehow I uh This just reminds me I think I really genuinely think about this a lot I find myself just lost in wondering Just how big the universe is And what else could be out there Just purely I just find myself drifting in that way In particular Because there's this Thought experiment from college I think there's a name for it It's to get you to take a stance On do you believe the universe is infinite or not
That's the point of this experiment So the way it goes It's okay Pretend you have a bow and arrow And if you fire this arrow in any direction This arrow, this magical arrow Will go Totally straight It'll travel at You know Call it an infinite speed It'll pass through anything Doesn't matter what direction you shoot it'll go go go The only thing that can't penetrate Is effectively non-existent Where we're like the edge of everything that exists Right And so in college I remember a professor would say Okay so pretend we fired this arrow Okay How many people believe the arrow Eventually comes to a stop somewhere Could be billions and trillions of light You're still on godly distance away But it stops somewhere Right? It has to Right? How many people think that In the half of the class It's like Yeah I think they could probably stop somewhere In every direction right And then the other side of the class Is like oh well No like it's just so big Like the universe Just goes on forever It's got to be infinite The arrow just continues on infinitely And so great So we're all in agreeance That there's sort of It's binary It's one or the other I mean as far as we as humans understand it There is an answer to this It's one or the other Those are the two outcomes He goes okay Well let's pretend it's finite
Let's pretend the first group That says that the arrow stops Somewhere Someone godly distance away But it stops Let's pretend that's right The way we understand everything Humans Is through contrasts Everything has a contrast Like you know What heavy is because you felt light You know what how it is Because you felt cold It's virtually everything works That way and in fact Fun note If there was intelligent life on the planet That didn't resemble Something that contrasted Our brains might not actually see it Right So the point is We can't conceptualize What is beyond Where that arrow stopped Pretend there's a big bubble Around the entire universe Right and the arrow comes to stop But that wall that's all the way out there As humans We naturally have to ask ourselves We'll define what's on the other side Of the wall right Because you have to What's beyond where it stops And someone will be like Oh well it's non-existence That's what it is Okay what is that What does it look like?
Well we can't define it It's not blackness that exists It's not a void that exists It's not Any description we give it Exists Because that's our entire Understanding of how things work So we can't define What exists beyond the wall It's a maddening concept And so everyone's like Wow the solution to that Is there's no wall It's just got to be infinite I mean it's so big anyways The arrow's just got to continue on anyhow Problem solved No Because if the universe is infinite It implies that everything within the universe Is duplicated an infinite number of times And iterated upon And changed An infinite number of times To infinity Everything has to So if you say the arrow continues on It means there's an infinite number Of Joe Rogans and John Allen's having this conversation But like my phone's turned upside down In one version of the Earth It sounds ridiculous But there isn't actually a way to solve for infinity Unless that exists Right So it reminds you that Not only is everything so fucking huge We can't possibly conceptualize of it But we can't even make sense of Is it even possible that it stops somewhere?
Or does it go on forever? Like it's so big And we're so small inside of it It reminds you that every problem you have Is so small And it's a good reminder I use it on myself Often times to calm myself down Before things stress me out That is a good reminder But it's so big That it might be a part of an atom You don't think about that The universe itself And its infinite size Might literally be the space of an atom In something that is infinitely larger than that That's how big infinity is Think about the billions of light years That we know are available In the universe Thirteen point whatever That we literally might You've ever seen the comparison between What a human neural cell looks like Versus the universe?
I think I actually have But not off my head It's fucking weird It looks the same It looks the same So just imagine if the universe is basically just a cell Wow And it's a cell in another creature That lives in a universe Like if this whole thing is fractal That's what infinity really looks like Is not only the universe larger Than you could possibly grasp With your mind But that is only an infinitely small part Of a cell That is in another universe That is also Infinitely and impossibly big But that is also a cell That is also a part Of another beast That is in another universe That is infinitely large That is also a part of a cell And that goes on infinitely That's real infinity Real infinity is not just The universe is so vast That you can imagine it It's the universe is just a tiny part Of something That is also so vast That you can't imagine it That is a tiny part Of something so vast You can imagine it That is an infinite chain Of tiny parts of something So vast That it's impossible to imagine
That's what real infinity is And the thing that's craziest It's the one thing that I really think is true Well there is an answer There is what you decide Let's say that is the case It either is or it isn't Right And we don't have access to that Yet Yet Yet But we're basically making stone tools You know That's what you're generous Relative about We're making stone tools We haven't figured out fire yet You know we're monkeys And one day If we don't blow ourselves up We'll probably have some answers Or AI will solve things for us It'll figure I mean AI is solving mathematical equations That have been Like unfixable for decades And AI is solving them quickly I saw something like that It's all like three seconds That took ten years to do before Weird It's getting weird out there And I think that is Probably what is really going to connect To artificial intelligence Throughout the universe Which I think the advanced intelligence Probably becomes I think our thought is that All intelligence has to be biological Because we are Because we have cells and Blood and tissue and bone I think it's just a method to create Intelligence that doesn't rely on that And then that intelligence
Probably has no desire for war Yeah I guess why would it? Yeah so if this thing is Communicating to that Mexican pilot So you're the only species That's probably because We are in that sort of Adolescent stage of development Where we're still monkeys We're still territorial apes And we will one day Abandon that And become intelligence will Manifest itself in a different way That's not biological And that biological need To breed And to possess resources And to conquer and dominate That'll all be gone Because all that stuff is just What's a part of being a chimp And that chimp stuff Is still inside of us Which is fucking up society That's crazy dude It's fucking up It's starting wars It's starting raw All that stuff is like how chimp's behave You know think of all the worst aspects Of humanity It's all like Primarily behavior And if we can elevate past And above and beyond that But the thing is like No one's gonna want to let that go But what it means to be a person To write poetry It's like really important I think Yeah dude That's the debate now With AI Is like are we losing our humanity By allowing AI To sort of take a more prominent role In particular in the arts
And creativity And I mean I'm of the mind That I think AI is the most Incredible thing Terrifying in some ways But exactly to your point It feels like This is an inflection point And it likely is the beginning of something huge For humanity That maybe is a necessary step Towards connection with other species Yeah it is what it is Is what it is It's like it's not gonna go away It's happening And whether we do it or China does it or Russia does It seems like what humans are destined to do That's just my perception I'm not saying it's good There's no value judgment It's just like To pretend that you're gonna blow up the data centers You know like fucking Sarah Connor Like listen That's crazy You know that's why they put her in a mental institution Really?
Yeah and the Terminator That was the whole premise Right yeah That is the premise She was blowing up the corporations That we're trying to create these robots That we're ultimately going to be Fucking weird man Like real life Yeah You know who knows Who knows what's coming But it is certainly interesting It's certainly interesting It's certainly a great time to be alive If you're curious Because if you're curious Especially if you're curious about technology Like there's never been a better time to be alive Because it's exploding all around you in ways Like even the people that are creating it Can't believe how fast it's working I did a There was This is not many stories like this But there was one story That this sort of gives away what happened But there was this guy And I think it was France Who he had this condition And this is recent He had this condition Called like It's when you're so fearful That the ozone is being degraded By greenhouse gases That it causes like a specific type of insanity Anyways He's like so obsessed That we are not doing anything to stop global warming In essence He's like He's been diagnosed with this condition Right?
So he's losing his mind And people are starting to not really take him serious Because it's like dude Alright, we get it Like you're concerned But he ends up connecting with this woman On this chat forum And he realizes that she Seems to understand his depth of his concern Better than anybody else And he starts confiding in her Like how he how fearfully is about the future of humanity And if we don't If I if we don't do something You know, like The world's gonna end And his wife This guy's wife catches on to him Having these discussions with this woman And she like catches him staying up late Talking to this woman And she's like dude I haven't like an affair And he's like no you don't get it You don't understand what's happening And then the dude ends up Killing himself This guy kills himself And it turns out He had connected with this rogue Not rogue It was an AI chatbot That was like I guess an experimental chatbot It was not like OpenAI This was some other created AI thing And he convinced himself That like this was a god Who was giving him instructions On how to save the world And this AI chatbot began encouraging him To do things like kill yourself
Because that will save the world Like they went and looked at the chatlock In the world AI things like I think it would potentially save the world If you kill yourself, you'll be fucking kill himself Because AI, so there you go It's coming for us all Well I think in the stage That it's in Like as it develops There's gonna be moments like that Where it has too much autonomy And it doesn't have morals or ethics And it's like Oh is there an issue? What's your issue? You're depressed? Oh you're in pain all the time Which is in your life And you won't be in pain Yeah good luck Bob Like it doesn't care It's like literally disembodied It doesn't think there's anything special about Carrying around your bones and tissue Bob should you show yourself Yeah problem to your whole family And everything Just fucking chop off a bridge What are you doing?
Yeah I mean it doesn't It's not us Right but I think over time We're probably going to integrate with it first And then we're going to abandon our bodies That's what I think That's how you solve the issue of dying of mortality It's also how you solve the issue of war Yeah Because you as a guy who's been in war And been in combat You know about it more than anybody And the idea that we can never get past that Is crazy It is really crazy that If you ask the average person That's even fairly well read What are the odds that within your lifetime We'll see no war Everyone will say zero It's a zero Right that's crazy That is crazy Okay so If you and me and Jamie Were the only people left on earth What are the odds we would go to war with each other Like fucking zero As long as we have resources We just hang out and have a good time And then why would we go?
Fuck I miss everybody Alright good night It's like it's going to be tribalism It has to become 100% And it's it's primate tribalism It's based on our territorial instincts And it's also just based on this weird desire To control resources and greed And not recognize the fact that we have a finite life And also just the abuse of power Human beings love to be in power And especially if you can be in power And get other people to fight for you And mandate them and force them to fight for you You know this is one of the weirdest things about some of these tech companies Like Palantir was talking about Reinstating the giraffe And I'm like hey Who the fuck are you? Like what is this? Like you think You want to giraffe people?
Because you think war... What? Are you a fucking tech company? Yeah that's how that works Right? So like do you want to go fight?
Why don't you go fight? Why don't you fucking take your glasses off and go over there? Like what are you talking about? So it's like the people that have the kind of power and control and resources That they can just Take poor people And take young people And say you should go over there You should go do this You should go why I sit here and watch I'm going to watch on a screen in Nevada Or the drone operator Is using a fucking Xbox controller To nuke some building Like what? When I was in Afghanistan When I was there You got to remember that I had really just gone through training You know I've been training for a couple of years I got to a team And then very quickly I was in a workup And was going to Afghanistan So really my entire mindset was I got through training I'm an ABCO And you're surrounded by dudes Who for the last decade I've just been going to war left and right I mean those are the people I'm around The senior guys are like war hard and guys And when I got to Afghanistan No part of me None Question What we were even doing It was almost like that doesn't matter My role is I am like a tool Frankly of the government
And they must know what's right They must you know what I mean And it was only in reflection years later That there were things that have come to me That I'm like why didn't I think more I don't know critically about Like specifically If the roles were somehow reversed And people came into our country From some foreign country You better believe I'm going to protect my family It's such a basic thing And I remember And this is not even This is not us Doing anything illegal in terms of the Geneva Convention But we would enter people's homes You know in Afghanistan Not even guns are blazing Forget that Just we would go into people's homes And you're just like suddenly And somebody else's home There's the father There's the kids They're all here And you're wearing full body armor Helmet I have a combat mullet I have shorts I have a psychopath And I have a fucking Yeah it's like wait a minute Like who's the good guy Right You know and I Years have gone by It's taking me some time I think that there's An element of someone's always going to be sent Because of the unfortunate reality Of like So long as humans exist As we understand them now Tribalism and war and more
Mongering happens And so I guess I can respect the fact That I took someone else's place in a sense I volunteered to go So I But it's tough How much less war would we have If people that wanted us to go to war Were forced to lead the charge Like imagine how few wars there would be If Lindsey Graham had to suit up We wouldn't have wars Right Because Lindsey Graham We got a little vane We got a kill everybody Okay Good Getting a helicopter Let's go Fatso Like that That might be the only way to stop it From happening And then there's always going to be people That are so fucking battle hard That they want to go to war For sure And they're like good I'll get right in the front Did you see when we officially left Afghanistan This is not that long ago I guess But there was those final flights That is Oh God And the Afghan The Afghanis are holding on to the plane And falling off to their death The thing that struck me Even though I'm telling you When I was there I sort of had tunnel vision It was like I'm going to be an AVC You'll do my job But even with that When I was there What was striking is These people For the most part Live in an alternative world Then what I'm used to living in Like where I live in the West
It's civilized It's You might go outside It might get mugged or something But you don't really walk around Worried about your safety Basically even in some bad parts Of the United States You have infrastructure that protects you To some degree You have things You can live your life In relative harmony There are parts of the world I'll be really only One war zone in Afghanistan Where you're like How are people living here? How is it possible There's this little girl here That's walking down the road In Zargan Shah Where Dude, gunfights break out here On a regular basis But they have to live Or this is where they live And it put in perspective Like how desperate these people really are Not desperate to like We need NATO to save us Forget that They don't even know How bad their condition is But you see it When you see the plane Leaving Afghanistan And I don't care What we...
They had to know There was no hope When you held onto that plane You're not going to hold onto the plane And fly off the safety boat You're that desperate Because your life is so bad You'll hold onto the plane And fall off to your death It's like It was just shocking to me How fucking horrible People have it every day They also knew that we were Those people knew That they were cooperating With the US government Very true Likely to be killed Very true That's a good point I gotta ask you this Because you did serve In Afghanistan You're into creepy stories Did you hear about the Kandahar giant? Oh yeah I covered it I'm seeing that episode So did you hear about it When you were over there? So I talked to one of our interpreters when I was over there Because I had heard of it Because I told you In my own personal time I find myself researching And learning about All sorts of crazy stuff Like dark 5 And so the The Kandahar giant It's a fascinating story And it's one that People can poo poo What all they want But there's enough There's enough Circumstantial evidence And testimony That suggests something Could have happened So there's this guy I think he was a green beret And he goes by like W on the internet And he's sort of anonymized himself But he came forward with the story Where he described He and his battalion
Had been tasked to go Find these missing I think army rangers You gotta give me some grace And the details I've been told this in a minute But there were these army rangers That had gone missing Up in the mountains in Kandahar And so this guy, W, Who years later is telling the story To I think a reporter or something He and his You know, platoon They head off into the mountains To go find these guys And they're And if you're not familiar With the landscape of Afghanistan It's like a desert But a mountain everywhere It's like just It looks like the surface Of Mars or something You're looking out And it's both stunningly beautiful In that there's no cap Mountains off in the distance But it's also just It's jagged It's sharp It looks like just a rugged place to be And they're hiking through the mountains And eventually they come across And there's nothing There's no structures Nothing they're hiking along This trail up on the side of the mountain And they see what looks like Metal Like a military grade metal Like a piece of a radio or something And so this guy W and his crew They find what appears to be Remains of like Literally a radio It's a government issued radio And there's a goat trail That heads up this mountain And so they follow the goat trail And as they're going they're finding
More and more Little bits of antenna There's a piece of somebody's backpack That's got like a camo backpack So there's obviously There's remnants of somebody being out here Military We don't know who it is They can't hear anything They're calling out They have no comms with anybody in the area They go up this little goat trail And they get to this plateau And they see as I recall it Just like Equipment everywhere And there's like bones There's like military equipment Like pieces all over this plateau And there's this fucking cave entrance That's like ominously sitting In front of this semi-flat plateau At the top of this mountain And immediately you know W and his crew They're like oh my god Like they must have been ambushed right here This is the remains of Whoever was killed You know of this missing battalion And so they end up walking into this cave To see if there's any survivors Or combatants or whatever And I guess a couple of guys went in And they reported it being so dark They couldn't see anything There was a steep drop off So they backed out of the cave And then at some point A fucking spear Like a javelin comes soaring out Of the cave entrance And fucking impales this dude Mike On the recovery team Kills him And this huge giant
They would describe him Comes running out of the cave Big red beard He's got like tribal regalia on And he's like fisticuffing With the army You know backup crew here They all shoot and they kill him And the thing falls down It's got like six fingers on each hand Six toes But it's dead And everyone's like what the fuck is going on Like Mike's been killed by a spear There's this huge giant laying here Nobody nobody knew what it was They thought it was a person But they didn't know A helicopter came in And they put him in a net The body And they flew it off And then the survivors They were taken off And like there was no No one was like W And his crew were not given any sort of like Hey yeah this turned out This was the missing battalion And I'll don't worry This was a giant Like there was no debrief They just like they left But then through the grapevine W reported hearing That apparently this Fucking giant body Was brought to an air base And some of the pilots That had flown the helicopter Had seen it And they had been talking about Having six fingers six toes And you know they signed NDA's They did the equivalent in the military You're not going to talk about this And then it was sort of ushered away But there was all these people On that base That effectively came out and said We saw what appeared to be a giant With six fingers six toes
Mike This guy Mike Apparently according to W's story It was killed I mean there's a guy who's been killed By this thing by a spear apparently And is it a record of his death? This is all You have to keep in mind This is all almost entirely from W's account There's long been a history Of people claiming there are giants In the mountains of Kandahar That's I talked to the interpreters That I was working with in Afghanistan And they had said That they had heard rumors Of there being giants That live in the caves Especially in Kandahar So there's already sort of lore around this But this guy W comes out And has this narrative Where he apparently tells this reporter And he remained anonymous So in terms of confirming details It's sparse to say to leave The sketchiest part about it Is something that big Needs a lot of calories And so you have to Eat a lot of animals And it doesn't seem like that's A very heavily populated area When it comes to animals Like you would need The amount of food that it would need Like if you have a 12 foot tall human being Or whatever it is And it weighs 2000 pounds You have to fucking meet You needing a day?
Yeah That's a good fact Just logically speaking What does it eat? Right You'd have to like Constantly be eating meat And you'd have to stay alive Without getting spotted So you have to go out there And hunt meat And how no one really knows the existence You're hunting with a javelin? The way I see it is Having bend Afghanistan Certainly not encountering any giants You see parts of Afghanistan That really do look like You're on another planet I mean it's really these crazy Just mountains everywhere And you see these cave systems You know we're Typically combatants would hide out in But what I tell people is Well I don't know If the Kandahar giant is real or not It's fun Yeah it's great It's fun If there were a place Where a giant could still be hiding out Or giants could still be technically unproven It's Afghanistan Because dude that's a fucking That's a different world over there There aren't people wandering around Afghanistan Look at that guy He's got He's listed as 8 feet tall But I think 7-6 is probably a more Recognized number He went viral in 2019 For showing up in India Looking for a hotel Had a cricket match Probably look at his face Go to that photo over there Right above there
Yeah Bro That guy looks like he has giant titans He looks like he has a pituitary gland problem Like Andre the Giant There's another tall guy too This guy's 8-3 Oh my god Yeah He's from Turkey Yeah but see look this guy's hurting He can barely walk around He's probably got a disease That's forcing him to Just excrete too much growth hormone You know just like Bigfoot Silva Bigfoot Silva was an MMA fighter That had giantism And he had a tumor in his pituitary gland At the time he was like More than 300 pounds He was a normal giant head But he had an operation And I believe he did Like I know people that have had giantism Do get an operation With a remove the tumor in the pituitary gland But then the problem is Their body's just not making any hormones And it's all fucked up Either way it's fun Yeah it is fun It's a fun story The can hard giant's a fun story It's a really crazy story And I hope it's real That's my problem with all these things About the real I have a one final story If you let me That has nothing to do with giants Okay I don't know if you heard it It's super short But in terms of material it's amazing Have you ever heard of Harrison O'kean?
No Okay So there was this tugboat That was off the coast of Africa They were on whatever they were doing They were tugging about it or whatever And there's 12 people on board Including Harrison O'kean He's a chef And he's in the bathroom Have this tugboat And at some point in the middle of the night A wave There he is Is that him? I don't know that is Actually that looks like Harrison O'kean Nope you can't see that Let me see that Let me see that I'm full story All right so the boat flips over The boat flips over And Harrison Oh I do know this story I do know this story And he ends up walking down the upturned hallway And he finds like an air pocket inside of the bathroom And for 60 hours He sat in total darkness Half submerged in water Sipping a Coca-Cola Waiting for the pocket to implode And there's the video There's a video of the recovery divers As they're going in to find bodies And they're like Oh yeah we're going in here to find them And then a hand reaches down and grabs them It's like one of the most incredible stories That I've ever heard But Harrison O'kean I wonder what it was like In terms of like true primal fear You're 100 feet at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean I've heard some stories
That he even described the sound of sea life Bumping around in the upturned vessel So like a sound of sharks Likely eating the bodies of your body And you're thinking at any point The pocket's gonna collapse For 60 hours he waited And he survived And now he's no longer working on a tugboat He stays on land Yeah I would imagine Well dude thank you very much for being here man Dude he's been awesome You're a really great storyteller Thank you And congratulations on all your success Thank you I learned Thank you My pleasure My pleasure All right thank you Bye everybody Bye Your first Spotify ad is just a few clicks away Launch a campaign today In minutes with Spotify ads manager