EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,000 words- 0:00 – 0:02
Intro
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[upbeat music]
- 0:02 – 1:37
Welcome, fame surrealism, and Rogan’s “hallowed ground” feeling
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
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The Joe Rogan Experience.
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Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music]
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Joe, what's going on? [laughs]
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It's going good, man. This is crazy. I can't believe I'm here.
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I can't believe anybody can't believe they're here.
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Uh, I, I ... Dude, this is, like, hallowed ground. I mean, I've been watching you, like the rest of the world, for years. I mean, I've seen, I've seen so many clips of this space, so many, so many references to Jamie, and to be here right now is very cool. So I'm honored. Thank you for having me.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad you're here. Yeah, it i- it is always weird when you go someplace where you... Like, uh, first time I did Howard Stern, I felt the same way. Like, you're in the building like, "What the fuck? This is the actual Howard Stern Show-
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[laughs]
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... that I used to listen to on the radio?" Like, it really freaked me out. I couldn't sleep the night before. I did yoga in my hotel room to try to calm down.
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When was this? When did you do this?
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Long time ago. 2000, probably, 1 or something like that.
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Was this, like, prime Fear Factor days?
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You know what? I might've done it before I did Fear Factor.
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Great show, by the way, dude.
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Thank you.
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Great show. [laughs] Seriously.
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Yeah. It's, it was w- like, a good sign our society was about to crumble.
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[laughs]
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It's like the [laughs] when, when hi- when historians go back and look at, like, the decline of society, they're like, "Remember when they started making people eat dicks on TV? They started making people eat-
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[laughs]
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... animal balls and animal dicks on TV." That might've been-
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That was the start
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... but-
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And then it was, that was Rogan's interview on, on, on that show. On, what, what's his name again?
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I, I just blacked out the guy you just said you had an interview with. Oh, my... Howard Stern.
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Howard Stern, Howard Stern.
- 1:37 – 2:41
Fear Factor after 9/11 and the rise of spectacle entertainment
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Well, it was like, I did, uh, it, uh, we did Fear Factor, it started airing right after September 11th.
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Oh, wow.
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Like, literally right after.
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Fear Factor did.
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Uh-huh.
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Yeah.
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And the [laughs] one, one of the narratives f- one of the reporters asked me, in, like, one of those stupid press junket things you have to do, was, "Is it, do you think it's appropriate to scare Americans right after what just happened with 9/11?"
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[laughs]
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[laughs] I was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?"
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"This is on me now?" [laughs]
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I'm like, "What are you talking about? It's distraction, it's entertainment, and they're eating animal dicks, okay?"
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It's very simple.
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"Shut the, shut the fuck up."
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[laughs]
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Watch it or don't watch it.
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Oh, man.
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Who cares? But it's like, if you wanted to look at, like, where society start- It used to be, like, Friends, Seinfeld fucking-
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Fuck yeah
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... you know?
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The good old days, if you will.
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The good old days. Miami Vice.
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[laughs]
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[laughs] Just like, it was television shows that were, like, shows. And then all of a sudden anybody could be on TV if you're willing to eat the animal dicks.
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That's true. That was the threshold.
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Yeah.
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Pretty good.
- 2:41 – 5:47
Reality TV to social media: attention-seeking, pranks, and “anything for clicks”
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It's weird because that kinda 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-
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Oh, yeah
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... where you just live in a house with a bunch of people. Like, how fucking weird. You're just being filmed constantly in this pressure situation, and the producers are fucking, "You know, Mike's been talking a lot of shit behind your back. You might wanna get ahead of this." Like, "What? Mike?"
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Yeah, I could never do that.
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Yeah. No, well, you're not stupid. [laughs]
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[laughs] Yeah.
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Or you're not young, or you're not desperate. We had a lot of people that were just in, like, credit card debt and shit, and they were like, "Look, if I can win this fucking thing..." Like, normal people. They're like, "Look, it'll be fun. I'll tell my kids about it."
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Oh.
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"We've been able to watch this forever, and I can win $50,000 so I can pay off my credit card debt."
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That's noble, dude.
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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.
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Yeah.
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And that's, like, the people that are... You know, you see so many people online that are doing stuff that have fucking nothing to say, but they're just trying to find something where people will pay attention to them, whether it's running up to people and slapping them, throwing glasses of water in their face.
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Yeah, prank stuff.
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Whatever they have to do.
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Yeah.
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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.
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There was a, uh, I, I covered a story, so, so for those who don't know me, I, I tell strange, dark, and mysterious stories on the internet. Uh, and I covered a story that was, like, the epitome of this. It's, it's the idea of doing anything for clicks. Uh, I don't have 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 wanna say circa 2010. And she wanted to do something really special for her birthday to document her birthday and, and, and get as many clicks as possible, and she filled this pool up with dry ice.
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Oh, Jesus.
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Like, water plus dry ice, and she invited all her friends over. And they, like, took th- they documented themselves going into this pool. And she has, I think, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers at the time. And so everyone's like, "Oh, it's the big sur- birthday celebration." I think it was live.
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[sighs]
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And they go into the tub, and the music's playing, and then no one comes out of the tub. And it's just this silence. They all die. They all die from suffocation, I think it was. M- n- not exactly sure how you die from dry ice, but it's, it, I think it er- it, it, it eradicates the oxygen, and so they just died. But it's like-
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How many people died?
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I, I'm gonna say it was, like... Yeah, three. There you go. Three people.
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What? First of all, like, dry ice, you can't even get on your skin. It, it, you know-
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Yeah, you don't really jump into a pool of it
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... I, I was thinking it would've just tortured their skin. "Three die in Moscow party after dry ice thrown into pool." I wonder how much dry ice it takes to kill three people.
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I think a better question is what was the engagement like on that post?
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[laughs]
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Because in some ways that's what it's all about.
- 5:47 – 7:48
Russia as a “gnarly place”: courts, prisons, and political danger
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With more than a million followers. Two people died at the scene. A third died in the hospital. Russia's investigative committee said in a statement announcing a criminal probe into the incident. Boy, you do not wanna get arrested and go to jail in Russia. No They don't fuck around. [laughs] Generally not. They do not fuck around. Ask Brittney Griner, they don't fuck around. She's still-- She, she's out now. Yeah, she's out. Yeah. But she did nine months. That's not good. Was it nine or 10? I think she was sentenced for nine fucking years. And that was for marijuana possession at the airport? It was-- She just had a CBD vape pen. I mean, I guess it was probably marijuana. Yeah. But it was a vape pen, and they- Jail ... put her in jail. That's, that's nuts Like hardcore jail for nine fucking years. Periodically I'll see, like, images of, of Russian courtrooms, and I don't even know the stories, but always it's like the, the accused is sitting inside of, like, a jail cell that's in the middle of the courtroom. [laughs] Like iron bars. [laughs] And you know whatever they've done, it- they're facing the death penalty. They have to be. Or they pissed off Putin. 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. No, dude. You can't fuck around. That's why, like ... I mean, how many times have, like, political opponents of Putin gotten poisoned or gotten murdered or ... Yeah. And not just him, but a bunch of other prominent figures that had other people running against them and ... It's a shady business over there, dude. Oh, it's the shadiest. [laughs] It is the shadiest. Shady business, man. Makes for, for some very interesting people, though. Yeah. Russian people are fascinating. I've met a f- like a bunch of brilliant Russian people, you know? Yeah. I found that they're very, in my limited exposure- Look at this guy. Yeah, here we go. Oh, and this guy tries to get out that little slit first. Yeah. Oh, wow. Wait a second. He's, he doesn't give up. He doesn't make it out. Oh, that's right, he goes through the roof. [laughs] He's smart. Yeah. I'm amazed that he was able to do that, though. What a fucking psycho. Look at him. He looks like a psycho, though. He looks like an asshole. He looks like a guy that should be dead. [laughs] He
- 7:48 – 10:50
MrBallen’s origin story: SEAL career, drifting after service, and trying social media
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looks like a guy who probably spent a lot of time in jail. Yeah. Look, he was climbing through the fucking ... They're pulling his pants off. [laughs] They're gonna tase him in his nuts. [laughs] That's not okay. That's nuts. It's a rough spot. Rough spot on Earth. Tough people. Um, how did you get started in this whole creepy storytelling thing on YouTube? Yeah. Uh, well, I, I originally was in the military. I was a, I was a SEAL. I did seven years in the teams, and then when I got out in 2017, I kinda drifted a little bit, you know? Uh, I, I did some work with, with charity. I did some, did some veteran charity work, and I, I, I don't know, I just sort of floundered around for a couple of years. Um, and I'm, I'm married, I got three kids, you know, so I'm sorta like trying to figure it out. I have this small pension coming in that's enough to sort of s- subsi- subsist on. But then, uh, I actually, I remember watching a lot of Gary Vee. Um, 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, you, you certainly have access to the internet and all the things that everybody else does in the civilian world, but especially in the SEAL teams, from my experience, you're so, like, tribal. Y- your, all your time is spent really with your teammates or at the team. It's very isolated, and you don't even realize it. And so I was not, I didn't have social media when I got out. I, I wasn't up to date on modern stuff, and, um, Gary Vee was sort of the first sort of civilian person I was seeing that was like, "This is what you do." [laughs] You know? As a civilian, you post constantly. And I, I began, in addition to, to doing some charity work I was doing, just trying my hand at social media, you know? Uh, posting content that's, like, so bad. It was- What was the intent? You know, honestly, there, there wasn't a clear intent other than, "Ah, what the hell?" Like, it doesn't cost, I'm already paying for the internet, and I already own a phone. The- Right ... uh, effectively the worst that'll happen is I will embarrass myself by posting something that nobody cares about, or maybe my, 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, and was ... And I narrowly got through, but I sort of had it in my mind that, "What if I really try stuff?" And so social media, influenced heavily by Gary Vee, it was like- [laughs] ... "Why not? I'll, I'll post content. Maybe someone will be interested." Nothing worked. Nothing worked. I mean, i- i- it, 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, it is what it is." But then I, uh, on a whim, uh, I myself personally love
- 10:50 – 12:18
Viral breakthrough on TikTok: Dyatlov Pass in 60 seconds
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strange, dark, and mysterious content. I, I, I used to love going to, there's a YouTube channel, I think it's still around now. It's called Dark5. And all it is is just, like, crazy true mysteries around the world, you know, talking about how there's, like, s- you know, potentially military bases hidden in Antarctica, and there's- Yeah ... UFO sightings here. I thought it was fascinating. And on a whim in 2020, when my social media career is, is basically nonexistent, I was at this water park, an indoor water park with my wife and kids, uh, Great Wolf Lodge in Pennsylvania, great spot, and I was like, "Ah, you know what I'm gonna do? I, I'm gonna try something I haven't tried on, on my social media attempts so far. I'm gonna tell, like, a crazy mystery, a true mystery that I think is really interesting," because I think it's cool. It's the first time. I'm not, I'm not trying to copy trends or, like, do Gary Vee content. I'm just gonna, like, tell a, a story I like. And I pull out my phone and I tell this 60-second rendition of this, this mystery called the Dyatlov Pass 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, I'll tell you the story in a minute. I, I leave my phone in the room 'cause I'm going to the water park, indoor water park. I don't wanna get it wet, so I leave it there, come back two hours later and- ... millions of views on this, this video, and I've never gotten views on anything, and it's millions of views. There's like-
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In just a few hours?
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In a few hours, like five million views on this video.
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What? Was it TikTok?
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TikTok. This is when TikTok [laughs] was just-
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Yeah
- 12:18 – 21:44
Dyatlov Pass mystery: the tent cut from inside and the first bodies
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... t- to the moon. So there's this ... It's an amazing story. You probably have heard of it, 'cause it's one of those stories that it's made its rounds on the internet. Um, so in, uh, in nine ... And remember, I told ... The 60-second version was gritty, but it had the pictures and stuff. So in 1959, there were these nine hikers. Actually, there was 10. These 10 young, like 20-something-year-old hikers in Russia, and they were, like, the best mountaineers in Russia at the time, and they were going for their, what's called their level three hiking test, which sounds sorta 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. Y- you have to do that for this test. You map out a, a route that you'll take that, you know, effectively checks off all the boxes of, of difficulty. You, 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, you, you pass the test. You're a level three mountaineer. And so these 10 hikers, um, eventually actually only nine left. One had a, a, a dental issue, so he s- 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. Um, and they're like this young ... They're, they're beautiful. They're all, like, couples. They're all friends, and it's-
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Sounds like an awesome opening to a horror movie.
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This, this gets wild. If you've not heard this story, you're in for a treat, 'cause the pictures are crazy. They step out, and, and the Ural Mountains is, is rugged. It's like these huge, wind-swept, icy mountains. There's, like, a couple sections of forest, but it's just as rugged as rugged can be.
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Oof.
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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 th- this is, this is nothing for them. This is, this is a victory lap. And so off they go into the Ural Mountains. It's gonna be, like, a multi-day hike, but they're expected to be out or, I guess, finished with their route, I think on February 12th. So it's a several-week-long hike. February 12th, and th- they were supposed to send some message to say they were complete with the hike. February 12th comes, and no message is 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. Wh- where are they?" Like, "The government needs to be, get involved. Somebody needs to go looking for them." And so eventually, at the end of February, a search party is launched for these hikers, and at first it was just a couple of volunteers. It was some students from a university. It was n- 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, uh, not that I claim to be a mountaineer, but if you were gonna be setting up a place to ... If you were gonna set your tent up in a really rugged environment like the Ural Mountains, the worst place to put your tent is the side of a wind-swept 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 who were the best hikers, and they find their tent, their one canvas tent that's right in the middle of this, this pass called the, I believe it's called the Dyatlov Pass, which is why the, the mystery has been named the Dyatlov Pass. It's just one lone tent, and there's no trees, nothing. It's just ... And so they go up to the tent. The hikers are not there, but the tent is, is, 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 the, a, a lot of equipment that you would imagine they would have brought with them out here is still in the tent. The hikers are missing. And they discover through whatever testing they did that there was a cut made in the tent that apparently was made from the inside out. Someone took a knife, and I believe it was a knife, and cut the tent open from the inside out. And so they have all this equipment, and they're thinking, "This is ... We're in the middle of the Ural Mountains. It's, like, -40 degrees Fahrenheit out here. It's, 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 the hikers. A bigger search party comes out there, and they discover footprints that are about 100 feet away from where the tent was found. It's a little bit further down the mountain, and the footsteps, some of them are two boots, you know, matching boots of someone's steps. There's eight or nine prints. They couldn't be sure. Eight or nine sets of prints. Some have only one boot on, like barefoot and a boot. Others are just barefoot. And remember, this is the middle of winter in Russia. But they're looking at these prints, and if you look at the tent, it's been cut from the inside. They've clearly abandoned their tent. Something's happened. But the, the cadence of the footprints as it, as it, uh, picks up where they found it near the tent going down the mountain away from the, 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, the hikers who's deceased. And there, I believe there's a picture. I don't know if you can show it on your channel, but-
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Sure
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... yeah. So there's a picture of one of the hikers who is sort of almost like he was trying to get warmth against this fire.
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That one?
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I don't think it's that one. There are some right near the cedar tree. I'm sure you can find them.
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- SPSpeaker
Um, one is dead, and then another one is, is sort of nearby as well. So there's two hikers that are both deceased from-- The initial thought is exposure, hypothermia exposure. But critically, there's a couple really weird things about it. One... Yeah, I think that's, that's gotta be the picture right there, and that does not show the bodies, but the bodies are, are, are near. I think that's one right there to the right of that.
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That one?
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That could be one of them. But picture two bodies sort of laying scattered nearby.
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Mm-hmm.
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They look at the tree that was at the base of the-- where the, the fire was, and there are, there are signs that something was trying to climb the tree. There's broken branches and the like, and there's human tissue. That sounds way more extreme than it's supposed to, but there's human tissue far-- pretty high up this tree that suggests somebody had climbed up the tree. Um, 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 just been human tissue as well, but it was clearly in his mouth, like he was eating his own flesh, or it at least arrived in his mouth. So they're dead. And so the search expands within this, this forest, and they find three more hikers sort of about 100 or 200 feet away from, from this tree. They're in similar condition. They, they, 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. Uh, but they can't find the remaining four hikers. Um, they continue to search for the next several days, but the, the weather
- 21:44 – 28:19
Dyatlov Pass escalates: snow-cave bodies, extreme injuries, radiation, and cover-up vibes
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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, they're gonna be dead. So they waited until the thaw in May, and once the snow had thawed a bit, they came out there and they found this, what looked to be like the-- They believe that a snow fort had been made maybe 300 or 400 feet away from that cedar tree, which they wouldn't have seen it during the winter. It was barely-- You wouldn't have seen it. But it had melted down enough, and the, the rest of the bodies were found in the remnants of the snow cave. And the, uh, the four hikers that were in there just had catastrophic injuries. Uh, they're all deceased. Uh, the woman-- Or one of them had a, a crush injury. His chest was-- They compared the injury to his chest equivalent to being struck by a car at, 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, he's been crushed. One guy, I think his skull was fractured and a piece of his skull was missing. But the one that stands out is there was one hiker, a woman, who her lips and her eyes were missing, and some accounts claim that the lips appeared to have been surgically removed. At least there was, there was, like, uh, very tight lines of how her-- It was predation, animal predation, you'd see tearing.
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Right.
- SPSpeaker
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 notice that the, the woman was wearing men's clothing or part-- some clothing that was clearly not hers, like sh- And then one of the men or a couple of the men were wearing some of her clothing, like they had exchanged clothing. And they found trace levels, albeit small, but trace levels of radiation on some of the clothing, and they're all dead. And so now all the hikers have been found, and by this point, this is in May of 1960, I believe it is, at this point. This is a huge story in Russia. This is equivalent to being super viral today. Everybody was talking about it. The families are very outspoken about it. People want answers. They wanna know what happened. And so the Russian government, they, they launched this investigation into what happened out there in the Dyatlov Pass. And- Quickly, they shut down this investigation. Like, very quickly they shut it down, 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, uh, and light shooting up and down. It's hard to tell if it was in the same area where the hikers were, but there were all these independent reports of strange lights over the Ural Mountains that could corroborate or could line up with when those hikers all died. Um, and then also lastly, the, the Russian government came out and said, "Well, uh, we've d- 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 o- the families didn't get access to it. It's completely shut down, and then, uh, in 2020, the reason I told it is because it sort of began making rounds because I believe some of the pictures had been redacted, and you could see these pictures. And so I said at the start of my video, "At the end of this 60-second clip, you're gonna Google two words," and it was Dyatlov Pass. And so I teased the story and said, "Google it for yourself," and it's a whole rabbit hole of crazy stuff.
- SPSpeaker
That's a crazy story. So compelling force is a very weird way to describe a bunch of people dying. Compelling force?
- SPSpeaker
It might have been compelling natural force, but I, I, I-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, well, that makes-
- SPSpeaker
It was a, it was a-
- SPSpeaker
... more sense
- SPSpeaker
... it was a- [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... you froze to death.
- SPSpeaker
Well, th- they, they could have come out and said that.
- SPSpeaker
Right. And they didn't.
- SPSpeaker
They, they basically said, "Ah."
- SPSpeaker
Are you sure it's not a translation issue?
- SPSpeaker
There are several translations of how it came out, and it effectively amounts to some sort of compelling, overwhelming force.
- SPSpeaker
W- d- does Russia have a different way of distinguishing how people die in autops- autopsy reports than we do maybe?
- SPSpeaker
I'm not sure, to be honest. I'm not sure on that.
- SPSpeaker
'Cause that, it might be, like, the way Russian language works and the way they describe things.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Like, they might have categories for deaths, and a compelling natural force might just mean, like-
- SPSpeaker
It could be nothing
- SPSpeaker
... freezing to death-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- SPSpeaker
... is in the same category as, like, d- dying in the Mojave Desert.
- SPSpeaker
I think that that's, that's... I- I've always assumed that probably what happened is something rational happened. I mean, when, when you become hypothermic, you can have, it's called paradoxical undressing, where-
- SPSpeaker
Right
- SPSpeaker
... at your final stage of when you're so cold, you actually get hot and you take your clothes off. Um, and y- I would imagine if you're in the final stages of dying, you might do some funny things, and also-
- SPSpeaker
Would you cut your lips off, though?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] W- would you surgically remove your lips? I don't know.
- SPSpeaker
And where are the lips?
- 28:19 – 34:31
From survival psychology to SEAL selection: quitting, gates, and “innate” grit
- SPSpeaker
It's, it's also, uh... I mean, you know this m- better than anybody. When you get tired, you make poor decisions.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- SPSpeaker
That's what they're trying to do to you in BUD/S, right? They're trying to make you quit. They're trying to-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... break you down, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
When people get tired, they get very irrational, and they also have very little processing power. They don't think about all the possibilities, what could go wrong-
- SPSpeaker
True
- SPSpeaker
... what could go right. And they think they can't possibly keep going. And the problem is if you have nine of you and one of you is an, is a pussy-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... you know, you got a real problem. Like, do you let Bob die, or do you-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... stay here with Bob when you can keep going? And Bob-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... is just like, "We can't do this." Like, "Bob." Like, that's the horror movie scene, right?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Bob.
- SPSpeaker
There's always this one fucking guy.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
He's like, "Fuck this, man. I'm fucking staying right here."
- SPSpeaker
Oh.
- SPSpeaker
You're like, "Geez, Bob, we can keep walking. Keep walking."
- SPSpeaker
That, that reality-
- SPSpeaker
Just count 10 steps, and then t- count 10 steps more-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... and then just keep doing that.
- SPSpeaker
That, uh, what you're describing is such a natural human thing, which is when someo- when the lowest common denominator in your group is struggling, even if you're frustrated, a lot of times people have an inclination to, to lowering what you're doing to, to-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... to, to help that person. In, in SEAL training, uh, 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.
- SPSpeaker
Hmm.
- SPSpeaker
So those people that are gonna hold you back in training have to be identified and kicked out now.
- 34:31 – 48:51
What predicts SEAL success: wrestlers, water polo, and brutal pool tests
- SPSpeaker
I know that when I went through training, and I, I've no idea if it's still the case now. But I was in, I was in SEAL training in earnest in 2011 and 2012, and there were psychologists on, on staff that you didn't, you did not go and frequently see them by any stretch. But I remember there being parts of training which were sort of funny, 'cause they punctuated the brutality of training. It would be, we'd be out, you know, doing the obstacle course for an hour, and then be doing a four-mile run, then we're swimming, then we're doing this, we're getting beat up. And then they're like, "All right, now go in the classroom." [laughs] Like 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, uh, it's called arousal control. You know-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... how to, how to take down your, your mental state in the middle of high-stress moments. And all the instructors are on the side like, "You better listen to this."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
You know? And it's, it's just funny. Uh, so there was attempts made. But I, I, I coming from s- coming from having done it, the, the, there's such a wide variety of people that are successful in training that it's, I have, I have seen and heard that it's hard to pinpoint what is, what is the appropriate indication you're gonna be successful. Like, that's the thing they're trying to identify is what are the, the pools of people that traditionally do well in SEAL training? 'Cause they're, they're trying to figure out ways to strengthen. But the two things they found, there's two, there's two places where the most mentally tough people in terms of success in SEAL training, uh, one is wrestling, basically any level of wrestling. Wrestlers have an incredibly high success rate in BUD/S 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.
- SPSpeaker
Interesting.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Water polo. So in water polo, how deep is the water?
- SPSpeaker
I think it's more that they tread water the whole fucking time.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like, is the water so deep that they can't touch the ground?
- SPSpeaker
No, no, you're treading the entire time.
- SPSpeaker
Whoa.
- SPSpeaker
There was-
- SPSpeaker
Like when you're playing a game.
- SPSpeaker
Dude, there was a guy-
- SPSpeaker
That's crazy
- SPSpeaker
... there was a guy in my class... So the, the way it works is you have your enlisted guys, and there's, you know, upwards of 100 dudes in a class that are enlisted, and then you have, I think, maybe eight to 10 that are officer candidates. It's, yeah, we're all SEAL candidates, that's true, but the difference between an officer candidate and an enlisted swine candidate is enormous. The guys over here, the enlisted guys, are just like [laughs] salt of the earth, just like, "I don't give a fuck. We're gonna see what happens." The officer candidates, they have some of the most impressive resumes that you can have as, like, a 20-something-year-old kid. Ru- y- you have dudes that are, "Oh, I was a Rhodes Scholar. Uh, I played, I walked onto the Stanford football team." Uh, y- like, that level of prestige, and also, "I'm, my family's friends with George Bush, and, uh, and I'm also, like, a world-class swimmer, and I'm, like, a, an expert marksman." Those are the dudes that become your officer candidates, 'cause there's so few slots on any given year for these spots, that 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 BUD/S, y- you might as well just call him a SEAL at that point 'cause he-
- SPSpeaker
Wow
- SPSpeaker
... the vetting is crazy for SE... 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, uh, 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, uh, second phase. It's broken into three phases, and it's the, it's the water phase, and it's, it's really, statistically, everybody who gets to second phase mostly makes it through. But it's because you've already passed through so many test gates in first phase, like Hell Week and the 50-meter underwater swim, that this is already the pool of people that's just gonna push through the misery and pass stuff. So it's misleading. The second phase of training, I would argue, is exponentially more challenging than first phase, but the only people who do it are through first phase. And so, oh, 90% of people pass second phase, but it's really hard. And there's two tests in particular within second phase that are notoriously just brutal. Uh, 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, where 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, then 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, tie knots in your hoses. And as soon as you're being touched, you gotta go into the fetal position and wait for, like, the attack to stop. It takes, like, 15 seconds, 30 seconds. You're out of air, and this is a 20-minute test. You're building up hypercapnia as you go. Um, and then you gotta fix your problems, and the problems get progressively harder to solve. But the procedures they teach you are the same procedures for every problem. If you go to step one and it doesn't work, you go to step two. If that doesn't work, you go to step three, until you go all the way through your steps, but it teaches you 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-
- SPSpeaker
Mm
- SPSpeaker
... all the way through. So it's, it's about being calm. I was horrible at this test, by the way. I passed by, by the skin of my teeth. This dude passes the test first try, but that's not where this story comes in. So this, 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 twin 80 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 weight belt on, hands up out of the water.
- SPSpeaker
Weight belt?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, it's, it's, like, five pounds or something, and you tread for five minutes, and that, that's the whole test.
- SPSpeaker
Hands out of the water.
- SPSpeaker
Hands out of the water.
- SPSpeaker
So you only tread with your legs.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] No fins.
- SPSpeaker
Whoa.
- SPSpeaker
Tanks on. It, the only, the only way to do it realistically is imagine, imagine hopping on, like, a, a bike, like in the gym, and just sprinting until you have full muscle fatigue. Hold it for, like, three, four minutes, and don't s- it, it doesn't, not even, you don't even need to go that fast, but it's constant. That's the only way to do it, unless you're an exceptionally talented water polo player who's mastered the art of the eggbeater, where they, they basically f- have found a way [laughs] to move their legs that's, like, the most efficient way to tread water. And this dude, I kid you not, who blazed through pool comp first try, no problems whatsoever, was, like, joking around after his test. He go- he gets in 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, just no problem. Just-
- SPSpeaker
Whoa
- 48:51 – 1:07:48
Afghanistan firefight and grenade injury: near-death experience and training validated
- SPSpeaker
I, uh, so when I, so I got hurt in Afghanistan in 2014, um, and after I got hurt, yeah, I'll tell you in a minute what happened. I, I got debriefed essentially by the senior commander of the group that I was a part of. And it, it was just like, "Hey, tell us what happened, what went wrong, what would you have done differently?" And, and truthfully, and I, I wasn't kissing anybody's ass, I wasn't trying to be a, you know, a follow the rules kind of guy. I just said, "You know what? The training works." Like un- the training is unbelievable. I saw it for myself firsthand. So we were in Afghanistan in 2014, and this was the tail end of, this is my only combat tour I did. It was my first deployment. This is 2013, 2014. And we had been going into this town called Zargunshar, which is this fairly urban Afghan town that was literally on the other side of the one paved road, Route Utah they called it, that ran through Afghanistan, got IED constantly. We were on one side of the road behind some Hesco barriers, and Zargunshar is like this sprawling, pretty large urban village. And historically, I don't know how long it had been going on for, but there had just been nonstop fighting in Zargunshar 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 8, and they said basically, you know, their, "Your job here is to try to quell the, the flow of suicide bombers into Kabul." And there was a couple other things they told us to focus on, but really, if you want some action, you just go to Zargunshar 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 Zargunshar a, a great deal. And truthfully, it wasn't like we walked in and it was crazy every time, but we definitely got engaged. There was definitely more contacts there than anywhere else. But on this one day, this is like five months into the deployment, this is, uh, in April, so it was the fighting season had started, so the warmer weather had come in, and we sort of put ourselves in a terrible position a little bit by accident. So the city, it's not really a city, it's, it's a, it's a village, but it's, it's bigger than a village. It's somewhere between a city and a village for Afghanistan. So it's like mud huts, but like tight together. Um, and it's really like well defined. You know? It's almost like the edge of Zargunshar just becomes vacant desert on the outsides. It's like this really isolated spot. We entered the city with our vehicles and then began infilling into the city. I forget exactly what our, our purpose was. I think there was like a, a, 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 enga- you can't offensively engage anyone unless, there's a couple of factors that could allow you to. But for the most part, you need to get shot at first to then shoot back. That's sort of the gist. And the people we would get into skirmishes with knew that a lot of times, and they'd be tactical about how they would go about shooting at us. And so we start making our infill from the edge of, you know, the, the city, and we get into this little narrow area where we knew we'd have to enter into this courtyard, and we start hearing chatter over the radios. So we, we, we had the ability to listen to just the open source radio that the fighters would use in the, in the village, and we heard them talking to each other, and it was clear they had spotted us. We're, we're, it's broad daylight. This is not a shock. But they were clearly talking to each other and making plans to, to wait until we, and it was only 20 or 30 of us plus our partner force, wait until we got into that courtyard before you open up on them. Um, and I, I don't know if this was said explicitly, but the idea was they're not gonna do anything. Due, 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, a two-story buildings that overlook the courtyard, so it's pretty gnarly. Um, our team lead, who was fricking awesome, is fricking 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-story buildings overlooking that courtyard, they're now, they can see us. If we go forward, we can't engage them proactively. We can't like call in an airstrike. We have to walk into a courtyard that has angles down on us, so it's like 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 Zargunshar, it's, there's no cover. It's just open desert, if you will. And so there wasn't really a good way to, to exfil back to our vehicles without getting shot in the back. They don't have rules of engagement. They can shoot at us anytime they want. And so we realized because of where they're positioned, we either had to go forward into effectively a known ambush or retreat and hope they don't get the drop on us and shoot one of us, and it's a pretty high chance someone was gonna get shot if we exfilled. And so we sat there, we were thinking about it, and we ultimately made the decision like, "Hey, we, we're Navy SEALs. Let's just go forward and, and process the threat." And so into the courtyard we go. It's on body cam. And you know, it was eerie. I remember walking into this courtyard. Again, broad daylight, it's quiet. We had seen women and children run out of the village as we approached, so we knew only people here are gonna be fighters. And just machine guns opened up on us in this courtyard. And I say this without, I don't mean this in a sort of crass way, but thankfully the only people who were hit in the opening volley were our dog and I believe two of the Afghan partner force guys, that they got shot. Because if, if you, if you're gonna survive this, you need the SEALs. You don't need, you don't need anybody else. You need the SEALs to get out of this. And so we all took up our positions, sort of we expected this to happen, and it, it became like this crazy disjointed like onesie-twosie breaking off, clearing buildings, sometimes by yourself, just madness. For like the next six hours, it slowed down. It was not constant, but it was like six hours of urban, sketchy, roof to roof, building to building shooting. Um, and we were sort of getting our asses kicked. I mean, we just, we kept, we kept seeing people that would open up on us around, uh, like a corner. We'd go after them and they'd be gone, and we knew there were tunnels dug into the ground all over the place for people to escape. Um, and it just seemed like everyone we were shooting at would, would vanish. And so finally it's late at night, we've been there for six hours or so, and we've gotten beaten up. No one's been killed on our side. The dog's fine. Um, and we were sorta like, "Man, I, I guess we just gotta go. We, you know, we didn't really accomplish anything. We just kinda got beat up today and we'll have to 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. Um, and I was with a fire team that was close to the exit we were gonna be taking. And one of the, the drones overhead, uh, I think was being flown by somebody in Las Vegas, they called out that they had seen what appeared to be military age ma- men, so MAMs as they're called, sort of in the vicinity of where we would be exfilling 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, 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, our understanding is, is now it's nighttime, we're on night vision. We, we believed based on what was being passed to us that we could go down this alleyway that would come to a, a T intersection, and when we reached the end of this alleyway, there'd be this low wall, like six foot tall wall, and we could peer over the wall into this field where these MAMs are. And they didn't know if they... They didn't even know who they were. It could've been kids. It could've 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, it's not our guys. We start hearing Pashtun being spoken on the other side of the wall, and we realize that there's been a mistake, uh, uh, a t- a, a lost in trans- something's been miscommunicated to us. We are now closer than you and I are right this second to what ap- 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, we're so close to them that if someone even so much as 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 best dudes I've ever met. He, he, he had to make an on the ground decision. We gotta engage these guys. We can see they have weapons. One guy looked over and said, "They have weapons." This is all non-verbal. We're like making hand signals and stuff on night vision. And so one of our guy- our, the 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 the, there was at least two guys over there that already had grenades they had pulled the pins out on. [explosion] So they're, this is, this is the moment they've had this... They're holding the grenades for this. So as 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. Uh, but it literally hit my shoulder. One of the grenades hit my shoulder and then fell to the ground and detonated, but in the, in the second that this happened, it's, we were under, uh, a drone that had a, a targeting strobe down on us. It was a flashing infrared strobe on us. Imagine if like God had a flashlight and he was turning it off and on rapidly, and you can only see the light on night vision, and it's this cone of light that you're in, and this, this super intimate fight is happening, and I'm watching this grenade. Time really slowed down. I see it for a second 'cause the light's on. The light comes off, it disappears. I see it for a second, and I remember feeling it hit my shoulder. And I'm j- I'm not shooting. I'm not doing anything. I'm just next to the wall as all this shit'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. Like, there, there will be no open casket." That's the first thought that goes through my head. My head's gonna be blown the fuck off. Hits my shoulder, and this is again in, in a fraction of a second the light comes on, goes off, it falls down lower, and it's like halfway down. Now it's like halfway to the ground and I'm thinking, "Oh shit, I'm definitely gonna die, but maybe my face will be intact and my, 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. [laughs] Like, I might live." And so all of us are in the lethal range. Uh, assuming this is a, 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, I, I, I tell people it felt like someone took a handful of rocks and just threw them at my backside. It didn't hurt. It just felt like someone threw something at me, and then I'm just down on the ground. And my, my... ... memory of what happened versus what actually happened are, couldn't have been more different. It would take me years before I actually sat down and debriefed this with the guy who ultimately saved my life. But my memory is I go down and I couldn't get my gun. My gun had been, the strap, the, the little strap had been blown off. My helmet had been blown off. So I, I, I'm not on night vision, I'm just... There was pretty good illumination that night, but it's dark, and it's just fucking chaos. There... The thing is, is the fighters in that town, they didn't give a fuck about killing each, each other. If the, if they could kill me, they'd kill their teammates as well. And so RPGs are just being arbitrarily fired from all ac- not all across the city, but from other locations just in the vicinity of where this is happening, 'cause there was a lull before this. So it's just fucking madness. And I couldn't stand up, I can't move, and I got dragged by one of my teammates. So this is my memory. And I got, 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 tourniquets that are on my chest, that we, we rubber band them to our chest specifically so they can be easily broken off and applied to stop the bleeding in, in your limbs. And I was so weak and fucked up from this blast that I literally couldn't pull the tourniquets off. And there's, I don't even know if anyone's alive, basically, at this point. I don't even know what's happening down in the contact zone, which is, like, 20 feet away from me. All I hear is gunfire. It's madness. And at any point I'm expecting fighters to run down the alleyway and fucking kill me. Like, I'm dead. I'm dead no matter what here. And so I had this, this true, in my mind, like, near-death experience where I, I sat there. It's relatively well illumed, and I, 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 just flashes of light as, you know, rounds are coming in, and I just, I'm like, I'm in my head. I'm so aware that I'm alive, but I'm dying. And then, um, my vision goes. I'm completely blind. Like, can't see, I can't hear anything, but I was so lucid in my mind, so aware that I was alive. And I tell people that on a day-to-day basis you live and you don't think about it. You don't wake up and, and actively live. You don't think, "Today I'm gonna breathe. Uh, my, today my heart's gonna beat." You just do it, because that's your entire experience is being alive, and your body knows how to do that. Your brain knows how to be alive. You also know how to die, you just haven't done it yet. And I had this really distinct feeling of like, "Oh, shit, this is what it feels like when you shut down." It didn't hurt. It wasn't sad. It was just, it couldn't have been more matter-of-fact. And all I was thinking about, I had two thoughts. I had, um, what will my obituary say? Nothing in terms of substance, but will it say Jonathan Allyn was killed in action?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Or John Allyn? Uh, so I was hung up on that, and I was also thinking about my wife and how she'd be notified at home, and I was thinking I wish we'd had kids, 'cause now my, I don't have a legacy. And so I had this feeling of, like, letting go. I don't know. It, it, 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 keeled over, and I thought that was it. Like, I'm d- I'm about to die. This is the end, you know? But then out of fucking nowhere, the legend that he is, um, his name is Kyle. He's a SEAL. Fucking comes out of nowhere, and he grabbed me, and he put tourniquets on my legs. I'm still, like, in my blacked out zone here, but I slowly regain sight and hearing, and the scene we're in is still terrible. There's still c- chaos happening everywhere. And Kyle, who's a, he's a sniper, he's a medic, he's a sea... He's m- the calmest dude under pressure. He's like, "Hey, it's gonna be okay, buddy. It's all good. Stopped the 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 us. Couldn't have been more calm.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
He just runs down, back to the contact zone. He comes back up. He brings another guy out whose lung had collapsed. He's patching him up, smiling. "Everything's fine." Meanwhile, so I'm starting to see now as I'm regaining consciousness, if you will, I'm seeing my teammates who are, have also been fucked up from this grenade, but only me and one other guy were so, uh, affected by the grenade that we couldn't function. It was me and this, this guy whose lung had collapsed. He was, like, barely able to breathe. So we're down, but the other, like, five dudes, it's like y- it's your job to get us out of here now, 'cause 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 airstrike, which is you're effectively calling in an airstrike on yourself. You need special, uh, i- initialing from your higher officer. I think, I think your command... not your commanding officer. Like, one more senior than you has to approve the drop, because i- 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. So he's got two comms happening, and he's physically pulling people out of the contact zone with Kyle to get them to cover.
- SPSpeaker
Holy shit.
- SPSpeaker
And he's engaging the enemy, and we're getting shot at.
- SPSpeaker
Holy shit.
- SPSpeaker
Comm- He's a, he's just, he's a Team Six, that dude. Everybody went into, like, flow state. I don't even know how to describe it. And, and I, I'm fucking worthless. I'm, I'm not in flow state. I'm fucking dead state. Uh, they hoisted me up, and we ran, like a mile, 'cause there was no way to extract us because of how densely populated it was, or the, the buildings were so tightly together j-
- SPSpeaker
Could you move your legs?
- SPSpeaker
They were like fucking pillars. I was supported on shoulders, hobbling. I was not able to run, no. And the tourniquets, they cut off circulation to your limbs, 'cause I was bleeding profusely from my legs, so they were cinched off, which kills the circulation. At a minimum, you got very dead legs But they ran me to a hot extract where there's a fucking helo that came in, coming in, guns blazing. They throw us in the helo. Now get this, me and the other dude with the lung, we get thrown on the helo, and we just leave with the medical team. Those fucking dudes, those five dudes, still on the ground, had to fight their way back into the city to go reconnect with the rest of the element, who again, he's calling ... That airstrike he called in was with, it was perfect. He got, I think he 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, I was in a life and death scenario, and I got to be fully in audience for it. Every motherfucker was fucking perfect at their job. Like literally rounds flying everywhere. "Hey, what's going on? Oh, got, got your legs all tied off here. [laughs] Hey, what's going on? Calling this airstrike over." Couldn't be calmer. That was it. Like, and so my debrief point was it fucking works. The training works.
- SPSpeaker
Wow. What a fucking story. Holy shit, dude.
- 1:07:48 – 1:15:41
Aftermath: medical chain, injuries, and Rogan’s recovery toolkit (stem cells/peptides)
- SPSpeaker
There's an, there's an addendum too.
- SPSpeaker
What, what was ... I wanna hear the addendum.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, so after we got medevaced, 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, a few minutes ago, I thought I died. You know? Like, I don't really ... I'm, I'm happy to be here now. But we get in the helicopter, and that crew was ama- I think they were 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, what's the, the drug? Oh my God, it's the one, the painkiller drug. Morphine.
- SPSpeaker
Oxy?
- SPSpeaker
Morphine.
- SPSpeaker
Morphine.
- SPSpeaker
Morphine. And I said, "No," I didn't have any pain, but I was like, "I'm worried I might die, and I wanna 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 medevaced out of Zargun Shar, and they fly us right to this nearby base, very close by, called Shank. And when we get there, there's obviously doctors and nurses that are there specifically for this. And so even though it was the middle of the night, they had been told, "Hey, you have two casualties," you know, the guy with the collapsed lung and myself. To be honest, I don't really know exactly what they were told, but I would imagine they were told, "Get ready for some, some type of surgery for both of them." And so we fly to FOB Shank, and I get wheeled in on a stretcher. And my clothes have been fucking cut off of me. You know, like my, my dick's hanging out. Like I'm, I'm in disarray. Like I'm all fucked up. And I really, I don't even know. I think I'm gonna be okay, 'cause at this point I've made it here. And no one's acting like I'm, I'm literally about to die. But I don't know. I don't really know how bad it is. And they wheel me into this tent along with the other guy, and it's so bright. Like, like so bright inside of there that you can barely open your eyes. And it's just a sea of all these doctors and nurses that are ready to perform whatever needs to happen, 'cause they, they don't know. They don't know what, what needs to be done. But as soon as I get in there, I see in the back corner of this relatively small medical tent, like a shanty medical tent, is maybe like 15 SEALs that were not on the mission with me. They're other guys in country that are other Navy SEALs. It's the middle of the night, and they've put on the equivalent, the equivalent of their best uniforms. These are not dress uniforms. These are like their BDUs. These are, these are not nice. But in Afghanistan on, on a deployment, this is the best shit they had. They clearly had been tracking, 'cause you can track missions in real time when you're overseas. They saw the call signs come across that SEALs had been wounded and were being brought here for treatment. I have no sense of what exactly they knew, but clearly whatever was passed indicated that one of us or both of us could die. And so these dudes were in the tent in case we died. They, they're my friends. I know them all personally. And so I'm being wheeled in, and the, the gravity of what's happening was like a fucking ton of bricks. Because now I'm kinda loopy from what's been going on, and I see the, the looks on these guys' faces. And they're wearing these uniforms, and they're all standing almost like at attention in the corner. And they're there in case I fucking die. It's like I'm going to my own funeral.
- SPSpeaker
Whoa.
- SPSpeaker
And so I'm, I'm put on the, the ... And, and they swarm me. Not them, the doctors swarm me, and they get me ready for debridement, which is just to pull the shrapnel out of my hips and my, my leg. And the guy was like, "All right, I'm gonna give you," I think it was ketamine. He's like, "You're not gonna, this is it. Like, good luck to you." [laughs] And he, 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. Like I'm in fucking Germany. And I'm just, "Up. Yeah, you're, you're in, you're fine. Yeah, your legs are all fucked up. Uh, 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, uh, [laughs] fucking aisle. Just no transition, just, I was just killing people overseas [laughs] and then now you're-
- SPSpeaker
Holy shit.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, dude. Yeah. Fucking nuts, man.
- SPSpeaker
What was the extent of the injuries?
- SPSpeaker
Uh, honestly, I was so fortunate. It was a big, big hole in my ass, like, uh, like a [laughs] like it was I think three or four inch chunk. Uh, the, the big issue with it is, uh, it was so deep into, into my ass that they had to keep opening it so that it would, it would not heal and reverse. Do you know? Like, 'cause it can pocket the-
- SPSpeaker
Oh.
- SPSpeaker
And then just, uh, i- inside of my, my leg, I mean, basically I was spared. Like it was just a massive flesh wound from underneath my knee all the way up to my back. And then I also, this is the sh- the part that was the worst, to be honest. Leg's fine. I, I have a little bit of residual soreness. At this point there's a little bit of shrapnel in my leg, but they're like pieces of sand. They only, on a hot day I might notice it. But I, from the grenade blast, I was told by my orthopedic surgeon that the blast likely re- ... briefly dislocated both of my shoulders.
- SPSpeaker
Whoa.
- SPSpeaker
I, I truthfully don't know if this actually happened, but he said as much. And I, I tore both of my labrums, a sl- a SLAP tear. It's a relatively common injury. And I had the, uh, I had a, what's called a biceps tendinosis surgery done on my right. Basically, it was so painful I couldn't really use it. But it's this surgery where they remove a portion of your bicep and they re-staple it. But it's sort of like a Band-Aid. It doesn't really fix the problem, and the shelf life of a biceps tendinosis is about 10 years before you might see some degrading. And I'm, I'm now at the point where [laughs] my shoulder fucking sucks, and I, like in the gym, I, I have to do all these... I c- I have to avoid pressing, I have to avoid overhead stuff. Um, I went and-
- SPSpeaker
And it's just where the bicep tendon is?
- SPSpeaker
It's, no, it's the... So what happens is the, the labrum tear itself-
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm
- SPSpeaker
... never got fixed. They just removed some of the tension on one side of the tear, but still over time it continues to tear down the labrum. So effectively my labrum just over time has continued to tear, and I'm getting some additional pain. I, I just had an MRI done and they're like, "Eh, you know, you had the biceps tendinosis done. There's not a whole lot more you can do. You can do stuff to fix it, but a lot of it is just gonna do more damage than good." And so I'm probably staring down, not chronic fucking pain or whatever, but something like that, which is-
- SPSpeaker
Have you done any stem cells?
- SPSpeaker
No.
- SPSpeaker
No.
- SPSpeaker
No.
- SPSpeaker
Okay. How long you in town for?
- SPSpeaker
Tonight. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
That's it?
- SPSpeaker
No, I c- I can come back.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, I'm gonna bring you into Wasterwell, see what they could do for you.
- 1:15:41 – 1:28:31
Kettlebells, farmer’s carries, and training philosophy: volume without injury
- SPSpeaker
When'd you get into doing kettlebell stuff? I've seen you post-
- SPSpeaker
Oh, quite a long time ago
- SPSpeaker
... like, the demon, the demon bell. The, or the-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... gorilla bell?
- SPSpeaker
The gorilla bell. Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, dude. That's sick.
- SPSpeaker
Those are the 70s.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Those are the shit. Those are, uh, I've really got into, um, uh, farmer's carries. That's what the, I'm using the g- the gorillas are, like, my best friends lately. I just do these... I have this big long driveway with a hill, and I do these gorilla carries. It's, like, a 200-yard driveway.
- SPSpeaker
Dang.
- SPSpeaker
And I do these gorilla carries where you take, uh, well, you know, with those farmer's-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah, sure
- SPSpeaker
... farmer's carries with those gorilla kettlebells. And I-
- SPSpeaker
The 70s?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. And I take them up the hill and down the hill.
- SPSpeaker
That's heavy as shit, dude. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
It's, my grip has gotten so much better, and on top of it, it's like my legs have gotten better, and it feels like my whole body is, like, more connected, if that makes any sense. 'Cause it, when you're wa- you know that guy Tom Haviland? You know who he is?
- SPSpeaker
Oh, fuck yeah, dude.
- SPSpeaker
Fuck yeah. Everybody knows who that guy is.
- SPSpeaker
Dude, dude's a beast.
- SPSpeaker
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.
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
He's like, "If you really wanna get strong," he's like, "strength is not just lifting heavy stuff, like, stationary. Like, carry things." And so he does a lot of weird, like-
- SPSpeaker
His zercher's, like-
- SPSpeaker
Oh-
- SPSpeaker
... fucking 500 pounds
- SPSpeaker
... insane.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
But he does a lot of weird o- like, off-weight stuff where he has more weight on one side than the other, and he switches them. He has a chain behind him, and he's dragging the chain with his right shoulder while he's doing-
- 1:28:31 – 1:36:49
Sudden creator wealth: health decline, scams, betrayal, and keeping the circle tight
- SPSpeaker
That's incredible, man. That's really cool. Dude, it's, it's, it's-- I'm, I can only imagine what you've been through, but the thing that I now-- This started in 2020, and it's 2026. I have had some incredible highs. The early days of after the viral moment, and I'm, like, posting stuff that... I, I, like, upload a video, and literally the next day it's like, "You've made $20,000 from yesterday to now." And, like, I've never in my life made any real money ever. It's al- almost overnight, and it grew and grew, and then it's like I, I signed a deal with Amazon, like, 10 months after starting a podcast. I actually-- I remember when you got your first deal with Spotify. I remember that was like, I didn't even know it was possible for a podcast or anything to s- 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. Ballen podcast, I'm partnering up with, with Amazon. It was a $62 million deal. And I, I say that because, dude, my life got so much better and so much fucking worse at the same time.
- SPSpeaker
What was the worse?
- SPSpeaker
Oh, God. So there's, like, the little stuff. You know, actually, I just had a lawsuit close. Um, they pled guilty to theft, uh, and, and a, a bunch... So I, I, I started a, a house renovation project when I... I was living in a house in Pennsylvania when this thing kicked off, and I think they picked up that I was making quite a bit of money. I was, I was adjusting how much I wanted done to my house. Before long, I'm, like, adding fucking crazy shit to my house. They ended up gutting the house to the studs 'cause they're gonna remodel it, but they didn't do any work, and now they kinda had me. My house is, 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.
- SPSpeaker
Oh.
- SPSpeaker
And so I sued them. That, that's a little thing. Uh, and then over the course of the next several years, dude, I've had, I've had people take advantage of me in just the most personal, deep-cutting ways. Ways that in a-- If, if you were to, like, write a movie, you know, y- here's the scene of somebody who suddenly comes into money, and, like, the bad, the, the pitfalls of that, of people coming out of the woodwork to, to take from them. The things that happened to me with, with, with some family, and with some close friends, and with, you know, business partners is just like, "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?"
- SPSpeaker
Well, people think about people that come into money like that the same way they think about a large corporation if they, like, slip on the floor, like, at Target.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Like, "Ooh, I'm gonna get paid." They don't think, "I'm all right. It's fine. It was my fault."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
"I slipped." No, they think, "Oh, this is an opportunity."
- SPSpeaker
Big time.
- SPSpeaker
And they look at a guy like you who's, you know, through your own hard work and stumbling upon this idea, and following through with it, made a bunch of money. They're like, "I can get some of that money." They don't even think of you as a person anymore. They think of you as a target.
- SPSpeaker
I, uh, I-
- SPSpeaker
You gotta keep your circle tight, dude
- SPSpeaker
... I-
- SPSpeaker
That's the thing
- SPSpeaker
I got Antonio out there. He's, like, my right-hand man. He's a former homicide detective. Like, he actually, he came to me, uh, to be my house manager, and one of the first things he said to me is, he's like, "I don't give a fuck about your content, dude. I think it's stupid." And I was like-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... "You're, you're the guy for me." [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
But he, he's been awesome 'cause he just, like, keeps everybody around me sort of, like, vetted. But yeah, dude, it's, uh-
- SPSpeaker
That's important, man, because people will sneak through, and sometimes you don't see them the way other people see them.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
Other people see them as, like, "This guy's got an angle. He's a scumbag. Be careful."
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
And you, you know, you let people into your circle, and then they, they're like, when they're around you, they're putting on an audition. They're pretending to be someone they're not. They're, they're pretending to be someone that you're gonna wanna hang out with. And they're, what they're using you is they're just thinking of you as a springboard-
- SPSpeaker
I would-
- SPSpeaker
... or as a way to get money.
- SPSpeaker
I would imagine for you, just given... I mean, dude, you are podcasting. Like, if it, there is, it literally, people are like, "Hey, you wanna be the next president? You better go on Joe's show." Like, I can only imagine the amount of auditioning that happens around you and your circle to get where I'm sitting right now, and I, and I, I gotta be honest, I don't know how you'd be able to sift through people that are trying to meet Joe and interact with you, and people who are trying to get in with Joe so Joe will interview them.
- SPSpeaker
Well, the good news is I don't really in- interact with anybody. [laughs]
- 1:36:49 – 2:00:22
Headless Valley (Nahanni): wilderness horror, decapitations, and folklore vs. deterrence
- SPSpeaker
Have you heard of the, uh, the Headless Valley?
- SPSpeaker
No.
- SPSpeaker
In, in, in your, in your comings and goings on the show-
- SPSpeaker
No
- SPSpeaker
... the, the Nahanni Valley?
- SPSpeaker
No.
- SPSpeaker
I got a good story for you. You wanna hear it?
- SPSpeaker
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
Okay. So in, uh, in Canada, there's this section in the, the northwest called the Northwest Territories. Are you familiar with this?
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
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, as a g- as it gets
- SPSpeaker
Population of Dripping Springs.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] Exactly.
- SPSpeaker
Not even.
- SPSpeaker
Dripping Springs. Yeah, dude.
- SPSpeaker
Not even. Dripping Springs has more.
- SPSpeaker
Far, dude. And, uh, so within the Northwest Territory, there's this, this Even more remote stretch that's called the Nahanni Valley. And the Nahanni Valley today, it's a protected park. It's a Canadian protected park. Um, but even still, even though it's a park you can go visit, it's, it's nearly impossible to get to. Uh, 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 Nahanni Valley. Um, you can hike there. It's brutal to hike there. Uh, you can fly there, but it's only through chartered float planes. So it's a, it's a difficult place to get to. But the Nahanni Valley in particular when the story takes place, which is like the early 1900s, um, because of how isolated it was, it's like one of the parts of Earth that's like untouched by humans. And so the only people that would be in this huge sprawling valley, it was, it was like an oasis of nature. They would see things that are just like so gorgeous, like untouched nature. But in the early 1900s, uh, there was this push from gold prospectors to go out into the Nahanni Valley because they figured because it's so untouched by humanity, there's bound to be gold to be found in the Nahanni Valley. Now, there were some indigenous tribes like the, the, the Naha tribe. They were out there. Uh, there's some lore surrounding how, uh, they might have abandoned their, their settlement around the time the story takes place, but there were ind- 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, the McLeod brothers, Charlie, Willie, and Frank, who are... They're seasoned gold prospectors. They decide they are gonna head off into the Nahanni Valley and go try to strike it rich. And they-- And it's even harder to get into the valley back then as it is today. It required for them, they had to-- they actually had to build a boat. They had to bring pieces of a boat, and they would take it up a rapid or down the rapid, and they'd have to disassemble the boat, carry it up like these rock faces to get like-- 'cause there's waterfalls they had to get past, and then bring the boat further and further into this valley. And it's like this... It's, it's just crazy how much work goes into getting out there. But these three brothers, they find their way into the valley, and they get to this stretch of, of this river called the Flat River, which is anything but. It's, it's [chuckles] raging rapids. Uh, but there was this little, uh, embankment against this huge forest in the like mountains off in the distance, and they, they made their camp there, and there's no one around. I mean, this is, this is pristine wilderness, and they start sifting, sluicing for, for gold. And it's just fucking gold everywhere. It's like the sand is gold. There's gold everywhere. They find so much gold, and they can't believe it. They've, they've struck it completely rich here. And so after a whole day, I think they did two, two, three days even of just getting all this gold, they pack all their shit back up in their, their boat that they've assembled, and they begin making their way back out again, which should be easier 'cause now I think a lot of it you're going with the current. I don't even know how they get up there with the rapids going one way. But either way, they begin making their way out, and their boat capsizes, and they, they lose all their gold. The boat breaks up. They, they narrowly are able to salvage the pieces, and they, they come ashore and they build their boat again, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, we've lost so many supplies. Like we... This is horrible. You know, the best we can do here is leave and come back with more supplies 'cause we know there's gold here. Like this is devastating, but no one's gonna be here. We can come back. We can get more gold." So they, they leave, and once they get back to town, uh, Charlie, the-- one of the brothers decides, "You know what? It's not worth it. Uh, that was really sketchy. I don't wanna die out on the Flat River." You know, Frank and Willie, they're like, "Ah, we gotta go. We gotta go out there." And so fast-forward a year, Charlie's still saying, "I, I will not go back out there." But, but, uh, Frank and Willie, they decide to go, and they recruit this other guy. I think his name is Robert Weir. Robert Weir. And so the three of them go back into the valley to, to strike it rich. 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 'cause he went there with them, and he expects they're gonna be gone for I think it was gonna be a whole year. I mean, you can imagine how much effort goes into getting out there. They were gonna live out there I think for the summer and just get as much gold as they could and come out. But some amount of time passed, let's call it a year, when Charlie starts to become suspicious 'cause they haven't come out of the valley yet, and this is 1905. There's no way to talk to them. And so another whole year passes. We're two years deep into this, and still these guys have not returned from the Nahanni Valley. And so at this point, Charlie is thinking, "There's, there's an issue here. Something's happened to my brothers. I gotta, I gotta go find them." 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, um... 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, 'cause that's where he's assuming they're gonna be, they had to pass through these canyons. There's four canyons that go... I think it's canyon four, canyon two, three, one. They're all just called canyon one, two, three, four, but they're staggering. I mean, just visually, these are, these are just ominous places. There, there are these stretches. Like canyon two is this 10-mile stretch of very deep water. I don't know how deep. I, I wanna 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, you're-
- SPSpeaker
Oh, Jesus
- SPSpeaker
... it's like this scar in the earth where it's hundreds of feet tall cliffs on either side that are sheer, and it's just, you know, call it 100 feet at least of water down. There's nowhere to stop. Once you're in this canyon, you must go to the end of the canyon. There's nowhere to go.
- SPSpeaker
Oh, fuck.
- SPSpeaker
And the Naha tribe, who-- the, the, the tribe that had lived there for a while, they had always talked about, uh, they called them the Wahila. They said there were these creatures, these white, uh, tall creatures that would roam the forest in the Nahanni Valley, and they would make these screeching sounds, and they were-- you know, they would attack people. They was j- it's just folklore, right? But they said That in these canyons there were, there were all these caves, these pockets of caves high up on these, these canyons that you can't really get to, that they believed the, the, the wi- the Wahilla, Wahilla would, would live inside of. So imagine g- you're going down this, this like misty 10-mile stretch in Second Canyon, and you're looking up on either side, and there literally are caves that no human has ever stepped foot in. You can't even get to these fucking caves. And because of the way the wind cuts through the canyon, it makes this echoey like screeching noise that today you can still hear as you go through these canyons. And so they're, they're going through Second Canyon, this stretch here, and the, the stretch of Flat River where he had been the year prior or two years prior with his brothers was at the end of Second Canyon, where the first little call it a beachhead exists. And so he, Charlie, and his search party, they exit this, this creepy Second Canyon and they see there's a campsite set up on the, on the beach. And it's not really a beach. It's like, you know, four feet of sand, and then it's a little bit of hinterland, and then it's just, you know, forest. But he sees there's a tent, and so they, they beach the boat, and they're looking around and they find there's, there's two bodies. It's, it's a, a man, two men. They're, they're badly decomposed, but they're missing their heads. So there's two headless men that are badly decomposed, one of which is reaching for his rifle, and he's half in the tent, half out of the tent, and he's reaching for his rifle, which is propped up against a tree, and the other is just lying behind the tent, and he's, he's missing his head. The heads were never found. Uh, and they find identification, and it turns out those are his two brothers. And they find etched into the tree that the, the gun was propped on, it just was written, etched into the wood, um, "We have found a fine prospect," which could mean any number of things. Maybe it means they found gold, whoever. But that was written on the tree, and then a little ways down from their camp, uh, going along the same direction they'd come in, they found a skeleton which they could never identify as being anyone, uh, but they believe it belonged to Robert Weir. So they're all dead. And the authorities, you know, when this was reported, th- they weren't really shocked. They were like, "Ah, it's, it's the Nahanni Valley. It's a dangerous place. They obviously died of starvation, and animal predation caused, you know, their heads to be ripped off. You know, tough luck." Charlie didn't believe that. He always believed that something had happened to his brothers, but he had no way to prove it. So that's 1905. Fast-forward to 1913, people sort of know about this story, that, that this is when they dubbed it the Headless Valley 'cause these men were found without their heads. Little did they know that story would, would carry quite a bit of weight because 10 years or a little bit less than 10 years later, um, Martin Jorgenson, who's another gold prospector, he heads out into the Nahanni Valley. He's heard the stories. He's heard about the McLeod brothers. He knows that there's, you know, lore of the Wahilla and, and that there's something weird happening in this valley, and it's dangerous. But he goes out there anyways, and he tells his business partners, who are these rich guys who didn't wanna actually go get the gold, they just funded his expedition. He's like, "I'm gonna go out there and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll make us a bunch of money. I'll find a bunch of gold. I'll stay out there for the whole summer, and then we'll rendezvous and, and we'll split the earnings or whatever." So out he goes, and he builds himself a cabin, uh, not far from where the McLeod brothers had stayed and then the, 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, to find what happened to him, and they find his cabin had burned to the ground. They find Martin Jorgenson is, is within the remains of this burned down cabin, missing his head.
- SPSpeaker
Jesus.
- SPSpeaker
Um, 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, that's simplifying it, but it's an odd thing that fire starts here and you still burn to the ground, and also where's your head? So that's Martin Jorgenson. So now people, they aren't really connecting the McLeod brothers and Martin Jorgenson. It's called the N- it, it was called the Headless Valley by the time Martin Jorgenson gets into the valley. He's now found headless, and now it's like there's a little more rumor mill going on. Over the coming several, actually next 10 years, there was several other expeditions to include this guy Riley O'Brien, who goes out there, a prospector. He goes out to check his traps, doesn't come back. His partner who's with him, he walks over and finds him, and he's, he's just sitting inexplicably by a, a campfire that's not on. It's not even... It, 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. Uh, the guy would, the, 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. Uh, 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. Um-
- SPSpeaker
It's gonna get weirder?
- SPSpeaker
It gets weirder.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
There was this hunting party that went out to the Nahanni Valley, and by this point it's become a- almost like, uh, because there's this lore surrounding how dangerous this place is, because people are fearful of the Nahanni Valley, it's now bringing a new crowd of people into the valley. It's, it's bringing like hunting parties that kinda are like, "I wanna go fucking see what's out in this valley." And so they were going through Second Canyon, and they were heading to Flat River, and they were going to these places where all these kind of famous deaths have occurred to go hunting, but just sort of to be in this valley. And so this, this hunting party is out there, and it's a big group. I wa- I think there was at least a dozen people out there, and they're, 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, uh, May Lafferty is her name, May Lafferty, she's missing. She's one of the... I think she was the only woman on this expedition. She's gone. And they look for her. There's no sign of what happened to her. She's just, she's just gone. And so they did have some sort of a search occur over the next several days, but they ultimately said, "You know, we don't know what happened to her." And they, they, they left. They left the valley. And so they tell authorities. Authorities, I 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 Nahanni 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 the same time, and I went to bed late at night after they, they were, they were already asleep, and I woke up to the sound of rocks, like little rocks falling into the water." And he's, 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, he crawls out of his tent, and it's pretty well illuminated, and he's in the trees, you know, and he can see the water, the Flat River, and he can't tell what the, the rocks are coming from. It just sounds like rocks falling from a distance into the water. And so he just is curious, and he gets up and he walks down to the, to the waterline, and he starts hearing them more and more, and he looks up and there's a part of the, 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. Not... 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, 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, the wherever she went, over the rise, away from the camp. So she's gone, and he didn't know what to make of it. He's like, "That's so weird." He hears about this missing woman. He tells, he tells police, and he sees a picture of her, and he's like, "I'm nearly positive that was her." And so she's never found. [laughs] And so May Lafferty's gone. Fast-forward another 20 years, so there's no idea... Uh, in, in, in, in those 20 years, more prospectors are found dead as well. Uh, one of the last hunting parties went out into the Nahanni Valley, um, and actually prospector goes out into the h- prospector goes out and he goes missing. His name is John Patterson. This is like in the 1939, 1940 range. And a, a hunting party goes out to look for him, and they can't find him. Uh, and on the last night they were there, one of the men who was part of this search party for John Patterson, they're near the Flat River, he described, uh, an indigenous man walked out of the tree line, just sort of inexplicably walks over to him, and he comes up to the group who are sort of on the tree, on, on the, the beach line there. And he just says to this guy, he's like, "Hey," and they're startled to see him to begin with. Like, "Where the fuck did you come from?" And he's like, uh, "Be careful. The, the Wahila are out tonight." And the guy just like wanders. But this is, according to legend, this is what was said to him, and the guy wanders back off into the trees. But the leader of that expedition, they were planning to stay, I wanna 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, second canyon, where those, those caves up in the cliffs were. All around the forest, like, like unearthly sounds were being made that scared them so badly that the next day they said, "We're not looking for John Patterson anymore," and they bailed. And so people stopped going into the Nahanni Valley, and today you can still go there. It's still very hard to get there. But no one has a good explanation for why so many fucking people from 1903 or 4 until at least the 1940s kept going into that valley and kept turning up dead, many of which without their heads.
- SPSpeaker
So this indigenous guy that lived up there, w- where was he from? Like, is, was he living up there? Was he a part of a tribe? Was he, was he passing through?
- SPSpeaker
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?
- SPSpeaker
Right.
- 2:00:22 – 2:26:45
Aliens, human violence, and engineered origins: exoplanets to ancient texts
- SPSpeaker
I, I know that you had seen something that I, I s- I sp- I had Tom Segura on a interview one time, and I told a story about the Mexican pilot. Does that ring any... I need vi-
- SPSpeaker
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
It just-
- SPSpeaker
Yes
- SPSpeaker
... you're, you're talking about, like, how humans do damage to one another. But so the, the s- the 60-second version is there was this Mexican pilot, civilian. He's going out for his, his last test. Rafael Pacheco, I think is his name. He's going out to do his last test run as a pilot, and it's a simple route. "Hey, you're gonna f- you're gonna fly solo to prove you know what you're doing." He takes off, and he immediately starts to realize that he, he doesn't have control over the instruments. It, you know, it's... This is, this... The instruments were pretty rudimentary to begin with. This is, like, the 1950s or '60s, I think, and so it's a lot of dead reckoning from the pilot's seat. Like, he's looking out to see where he needs to go. The mist is getting bad, and then he's calling over the radio. He's, "I can't get my plane to, 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 Acapulco, uh, 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 had taken off, Chimalacán, Mexico. It was more than, like, a three-hour drive. So he's too far away with too much fuel, and he comes to, in his plane... He's still flying. He has no idea how he got there. He's just coming to. And Rafael, he hears in his radio some voice, and it's a c- it's, uh, it's a, it's a air traffic control guy, Carlos, who's, who's down in Acapulco. And he's talking to Rafael as if they've been having an ongoing conversation, but Rafael's like, "What's going on?" Like, "Where am I? [laughs] What's going on?" And Carlos is like, "What?" Like, "Are you alone in your craft?" And, and Rafael's, he's, like, taking stock of his situation. He, he regains control of his plane. He's like, "What am I doing?" And, and so basically Carlos is like, "Hey, dude," like, "Come in and land here. Uh, land here. We'll figure it out." So Rafael's like, "I don't even know what happened. I passed out at the wheel." He lands at the airstrip in Acapulco, and immediately he's met with these guys in suits. Like, picture Men in Black. He gets scooped up, and he's brought to a hospital where he's drug tested and talks to a psychologist, and they don't give him any information at all. He's like, "What happened?" Like, "I'm so sorry And they determine that he's not crazy and he's not on drugs, and only then do they say, "Hey, so when you were out over the, off the coast of Acapulco, you were flying in circles for over an hour. And Carlos, the air traffic control guy, he, he's the one who saw you on the, on the screen, and he was talking to you for, for an hour while you were out there. And the whole conversation is recorded." And, and basically, if you can listen to the recording, and I'm pretty sure you guys might have on the show, Rafael passes out, and then at some point when... A couple hours later when he's somehow magically off the coast of Acapulco, a, a voice comes across in the cockpit that's like this robotic, deep, altered sounding voice that doesn't sound like Rafael. In the earlier recording, it sounds like Rafael's voice. Now it's different, and he's talking to Carlos, and this voice comes through and says something to the effect of like, "You are listening to the sound of the voice coming through the pilot, but it's not his voice. Um, we, we are inhabitants of this universe, but our te- your, your technology is so primitive, we, this is the only way we can contact you. We're here to tell you that you are the only, uh, intelligent species in our universe that uses warfare to harm one another, and you're, you're effectively on the, on the brink of extermination, and you need to find a way to stop it." And then, like, Rafael comes to, and that's when he's like, "What's going on?" And Carlos thinks he's been talking to, to Rafael the whole time, and that's when he's like, "Is there somebody else in the cockpit with you?" Anyways, so it's this big mystery, but Mexico took the story and kind of like sequestered it. The way we got access to the, to the transcripts of it is we had to, we had to write a letter to a library in Mexico that had access to the transcript. And anyway, so but it's interesting to imagine that, one, I love thinking about life outside of the, outside of, of Earth, because I think that the notion that there is life or that there isn't life is astounding and fascinating either direction you go, so I'm, 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 [laughs] to destroy ourselves, and you better knock it off, that's also pretty crazy. And we're so accustomed to humans being violent and horrible to each other. It's, that's our hi- that's our history, right? But like, what if that's not normal? What if it's like we're, we're the fucked up people, and we're just killing everybody, and we need to stop?
- SPSpeaker
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, uh, in the Book of Enoch. In the Book of Enoch, the watchers come down, and they mate with the daughters of men. There's a lot of weird stuff like that. Even Adam and Eve, like God created Adam, and God created Eve. He created, like out of what?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
Like why did he do that? Why did he do that, and he did... What did he do with giraffes? What did he do with like-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- SPSpeaker
... why, why hummingbirds? What's going on? But it doesn't, they're not along the s- the story's different. The story of humans is a story of engineering. It seems to be a story of genetic engineering. It seems to be a story of human beings being taken, like you take like whatever this primitive beast is, and you put something else into it, and you rapidly create something that's far more advanced than anything else. I think along the lines, you maintain too much of the primitive beast.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
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.
- SPSpeaker
Mm.
- SPSpeaker
It's too territorial. It's too, there's too much of it that's still an animal.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
But we're not totally an animal. We're ve- you know, if you looked at us and looked at everybody else, you're like, "That animal's crazy. This animal makes-"
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
"... fucking airplanes." You know, like we're so different than everything else.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- SPSpeaker
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.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
They're sketchy dogs. They're sketchy dogs, period. And, and you could love, "Oh, it's all how you train them." Fuck you. Those, those dogs are designed to attack other dogs, and they don't... I had my dogs that I had to separate once. You never should have two females together. I realized that after a while.
- SPSpeaker
I, I have that going on right now. It's not good.
- SPSpeaker
Females, you gotta get rid of one of them. You can't have the females together. They'll fight to the death, and they never, they n-
- SPSpeaker
Oh
- SPSpeaker
... males establish dominance. One male is dominant over the other males. The other males back off, and that's the room. That's not how it works with females. The female dogs, they keep, they keep trying to decide who's the boss, and uh, 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.
- SPSpeaker
Ugh.
- SPSpeaker
And I had to hose them down and separate them.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
I had to have someone help me. Um, we made them.
Episode duration: 2:56:17
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Transcript of episode fddF7pRu9Fs
