Loading summary
Transcript463 lines
- [00:01]
Chris Williamson
You've done a lot of hard things in your life.
- [00:03]
DJ Shipley
Couple.
- [00:04]
Chris Williamson
Why was getting out of the military the hardest thing that you've had to do?
- [00:12]
DJ Shipley
No one ever prepared you for it. When you get in the teens, any military, especially special operations, it becomes your identity, it becomes the only thing you do. And it becomes a justification for everything you don't do. Why don't you do this? Because it'll affect the end state when you transition away from it. You never thought it was going to be hard. You thought you were going to transition, you were going to find that same love and passion, energy you had for being in the military. And then when you don't find it, it's a huge fall from grace. But I mean, you hear these fairy tales of this billionaire is going to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to live on his ranch and to do nothing but tell war stories and shoot coyotes and whatever, any place you want to go, they'll pick you up because of your background, because of your resume and all these different things. And when you get out, you quickly realize that's all a lie. No one's going to pay you to do a compound assault. No one's going to pay you to skydive. No one's going to pay you to assault a cruise ship or whatever else you did. They don't exist. So I've spent my entire adult life developing a skill set nobody wants. What am I supposed to do now? I don't know how to do anything. You want me to go to Home Depot? What am I supposed to do? I've avoided getting my picture taken for 20 years. I've avoided conversations with normal people. I don't have a Rolodex because I've never opened myself up to anybody who wasn't inside of that 12 man team. I don't have anybody. I don't know the CEO of Apple or Google. I don't know any of these people. There's nothing for me to do except contract. That's it.
- [01:38]
Chris Williamson
Which just keeps you in the same system.
- [01:40]
DJ Shipley
It's the exact same thing. You're with the same people, the same deployment schedules, same routine, and you just chip away until you're too old to do it anymore. And then you just fizzle out.
- [01:50]
Chris Williamson
That must feel to a lot of special operators like they basically can't ever leave.
- [01:55]
DJ Shipley
Exactly. Even the guys who do leave, the majority of them, they're either miserable or they transition to a job that's so similar to the military, it's like they're still in what like contracting agency work, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, stuff like that. You're basically doing a very similar job. Just you get paid a little bit more or the guys just come right back in. We've had guys get out and go to Goldman Sachs and try to reinvent themselves. They make it six months, three years. Nope. Right back in.
- [02:21]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [02:21]
DJ Shipley
Oh, yeah. They miss it that much.
- [02:26]
Chris Williamson
I mean, Wall street trading feels a lot. It's probably the closest thing that you can get to war in the finance world. But, yeah, if the adrenaline of million dollar movements every couple of seconds on a market isn't good enough for you, you got to get back into something with a bit more of a kinetic energy.
- [02:43]
DJ Shipley
Kinetic energy is what it is. You need something where you have a little bit of risk of dying. Right. You've never felt more alive than when you're right on the teetering edge of death. And once you feel that and you survive it. Okay, more of that, whatever that was, I need to feel that again. Didn't matter if it's skydiving, if it's combat, if it's whatever else you're chasing. The adrenaline dump. I need to feel the adrenaline. Whatever I'm doing, you don't feel it.
- [03:09]
Chris Williamson
What does that feel like?
- [03:12]
DJ Shipley
You ever been in, like, a bad car accident or almost in a bad car accident?
- [03:15]
Chris Williamson
Yes.
- [03:16]
DJ Shipley
When you get done, your hands shake a little bit. Oh, I can't believe I made it through that. It's one of those. And then it becomes, of course I made it through that. I've been training to make it through that. And then it's almost like an ego check, like, how close can I come? Or how successful can I be with everything you do? How much can I plan? How much can I dedicate my life to buy down as much risk as humanly possible, to be effective on the battlefield, whatever that battlefield might be.
- [03:42]
Chris Williamson
He's saying that being a soldier, being a special operator, is essentially a war equivalent of an extreme sport that people decide to do recreationally.
- [03:54]
DJ Shipley
Exactly, exactly. You'd be surprised how many guys do extreme sports while they're in. Or that was what they did when they came in. Like, mine was skateboarding. You got guys. Andy was big into skydiving, BASE jumping, wingsuiting, all of that. How many guys come from the MMA world, ultra competitive worlds, and when you get inside there, it's okay, well, if I mess this up, there is no bronze model. If I mess this up, I'm going to die. Or worse, you'll die.
- [04:19]
Chris Williamson
Other people, too.
- [04:20]
DJ Shipley
Other people die.
- [04:22]
Chris Williamson
How Much of a different energy does it give things. If you're someone that's an adrenaline junkie that's happy to do dangerous things for yourself, but your decisions and your actions are almost going to put somebody else in danger too. Does that make it more exciting when
- [04:43]
DJ Shipley
you're putting your friends lives in danger? That's where it's not exciting. You're trying to buy down as much of that as possible. And it's really what they want you to do is just obsess over your craft, where you can control all the variables because it makes it safer. And that's where a lot of the leadership really don't buy off on that. If you want to make skydiving safer, make it mandatory to skydive more. Like, right. Andy will tell you the same thing. The most dangerous person in the military is a skydiver with 180 jumps that thinks he is a ninja. He's not. If you want to make it safe, have thousands of skydives and jump every single week, jump every single month and stack those years over years and then you buy down the majority of the risk. Same thing with CCB shooting, I think
- [05:23]
Chris Williamson
3,000, something like that, maybe more.
- [05:25]
DJ Shipley
He's got to have more than that. I'm at 4,000. He's been jumping longer than May. Yeah, I mean, but that's how you bite on the risk. Gotta do it more, you gotta fight more, you gotta shoot more, gotta jump more, gotta operate more. So me and him, we had this conversation two days ago and he goes, do you think if we limited how much combat people saw, you wouldn't have such a huge fall from grace? You know, anxiety, suicide, ideation, all those things when they leave it. If you could compartmentalize them and not let them burn the candle at both ends, do you think that would be better off for them? I said absolutely no, they need it. That's how you get really, really good. Could you imagine if I locked you in a room? I'd never let you play another team. And then you just played on the Super Bowl. But in this super bowl, if you lose, you die. That's not very good. I want to play every single day. We're doing two a day's the entire time. Getting ready to go buys down the risk and it increases your confidence and the confidence of the entire team. That's where you see level two unlock. When everybody truly believes that you have covered all your bases. I couldn't burn another rep, I couldn't spend another. We are as good as you could Humanly be, we're good, we're unstoppable.
- [06:32]
Chris Williamson
How many times have you been on deployment and seen somebody that shouldn't have been there based on expertise or disposition? You know, Andy came through and explained an awful lot about what his selection was like. And then he went back and was the guy with the bullhorn as opposed to facing it. And you think, well, this is supposed to weed out people that aren't supposed to be there. It's incredibly rigorous, but it can't be perfect. It simply can't be perfect because it's unable to replicate what you're actually there to do. So, yeah. Have there been any times when you've got out there and thought, that guy's not. You shouldn't be here with us?
- [07:12]
DJ Shipley
There's definite times where you get people inside the team you wish were not there. You just do like, you get there and you're like, man. But it goes back to, you know, I had a mentor. He used to talk about being cloneable. Would we be better off if I had five of you? If the answer is not yes, then you shouldn't be here at all. I don't even want one of you. So why they might not be the best guy for the job. If you can compare them to all the other guys you've worked with, they're so much better that it doesn't really matter the group and, you know, the strength of the overall collective is going to make up for whatever deficiency he might have. If it's a cultural thing or personality trait, those are harder to navigate, believe it or not, because everybody can perform. You're not going to find a guy that can't shoot, move, communicate, skydive, dive, do all the things. He might not be a 10 where this guy is, but he's a solid 8. No matter what his personality, I just don't like and nobody else does either.
- [08:05]
Chris Williamson
So I was learning about the way that bands form. I've been thinking a lot about music over the last couple of years, and many times you might have someone that's a savant guitarist or an unbelievable bassist, but they're a shit hang on the tour bus. And what you don't see. I suppose the job is not finished in the bounds of what you do professionally. It's, well, how do you impact the morale of the team and what's the energy that you bring when you're on your way to a job and on your way back from a job? And how do the debriefs? Are you keeping in touch when you're not on tour, whether you're a musician or a comedian or a special operator. Like are you whatsapping every so often? Are you kind of keeping that connection and what's the sort of vibe that you get? Or do you just low key irritate everybody? Or is it just a mismatch of this one particular type of personality? Maybe if you were with a different group, your annoyances wouldn't annoy quite so much. You know, you could have people. There are certain people that are universally annoying and there are some people that are specifically annoying, like idiosyncratically annoying. But whatever it is, it's like, hey, this particular node doesn't slot into this particular network.
- [09:19]
DJ Shipley
You get that at a certain level we do a draft. So when you get to the tier one organizations, they draft you. No disadvantage in football or anything else, they rake you off performance, performance, culture, trust, all those different things. And you might get a guy that checks into your team. He's there for six months, 10, two years, whatever, it's just not working. Sometimes they will lateral transfer him to a different team. Perfect, like his personality is perfect. The cultural doesn't clash and just everything makes sense for them. You see that. I won't say often, but often enough the way you remember it.
- [09:53]
Chris Williamson
Can you explain how the different tiers and things work? I have an understanding of this from the British side, but I've never really learned it when it comes to very similar. Okay,
- [10:04]
DJ Shipley
so you think baseline and everybody will say they are higher tier than they actually are. Right. So a lot of people say that the SEAL teams are tier two. They're not, it's a tier three. It's a lot of it's based off your parent unit and your response times to catastrophic things.
- [10:22]
Chris Williamson
So if you're anywhere on the planet within 36 hours, you're quite high.
- [10:26]
DJ Shipley
Yep. Or sometimes you're on a 30 minute recall and that's where you live for months throughout the year. 30 minute recall, that page goes off, that text goes off. You were on an airplane in 30 minutes, you've got to go, no fucking way. Oh yeah, anxiety just boosts. But I mean like, you know, really it isn't much. And I was just talking about this not too long ago. It you get more funding. But really what they do is for the tier one organizations, they cover all the logistics, they put you inside of Disneyland, all the ranges, all the assets, all the intelligence folks, the human performance, the best gyms, everything you could imagine is inside of a compound. They stick you inside it and they Try to lock you inside it. Just come here and only focus on the craft. Because as soon as we tell you to go, you're going to have to go at 100%. Go. Get ready to go the other ones. It's a very similar workup routine. It'll be a year, two years long sometimes, and then you'll forward deploy, do operation for X amount of months, 3, 6, 9, 12, whatever the unit deployment cycle is, you come back, rinse and repeat Tier one organizations. If just a constant revolution over and over and over again. It's amazing.
- [11:32]
Chris Williamson
How long were you doing that?
- [11:34]
DJ Shipley
I joined Navy in 2002 and I retired in August of 2019. So. Right, at 17 years.
- [11:41]
Chris Williamson
And how long?
- [11:43]
DJ Shipley
Tier one side, 2010 till 2019.
- [11:46]
Chris Williamson
So you did nine years of being on call within 30 minutes. Basically.
- [11:50]
DJ Shipley
Not the entire time, but every year you spend a significant block of that on the alert schedule.
- [11:54]
Chris Williamson
Right.
- [11:55]
DJ Shipley
It's amazing.
- [11:56]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [11:58]
DJ Shipley
Because you matter. You wake up every day, you're watching the news, you're hearing all the intel breeze, and you have a dude stuck up in your locker up in the team room that you're actively just hunting with your friends all day long. And you're just waiting for some dude to send out a text and you're gonna go, yes. So, you know, have little code words with the wife, like going fishing with the boys. Where are you going fishing at? I have no idea. Take off and go. That is the coolest thing you can do in the military.
- [12:24]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [12:25]
DJ Shipley
Because it's just like in the movies. You've seen the greatest war movie ever made. Navy SEALs in the middle of that wedding. That's what everybody wants. I want to be in the middle of that. The pager goes off. Gotta go right now. Right now. Leave.
- [12:38]
Chris Williamson
And three people from the party leave.
- [12:40]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, it's a lot of pressure, but it gives you a reason why on those days you don't want to get up. You're going to get up. The team deserves it. The mission deserves it. The nation deserves it. Get up and go. And now that I'm out, I get to see these savants throughout their craft. I got to go down and talk to Houston Rock. It's Kevin Durant over there, and you get four gold medals. I mean, one of the greatest is the greatest scorer in Olympic basketball history. And you get to see what they do day in and day out. The Steph Currys of the world, the LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Tiger woods, all those people.
- [13:13]
Chris Williamson
Do you see parallels between what was constructed for you guys and what is constructed for them too.
- [13:18]
DJ Shipley
They just self made it. They live in isolation. They broke out a routine that just super exceeds everybody else's minimum standard because nobody else can maintain it. So if you, if I drop Steph Curry in on that table right there and I was like, walk me through a typical day in the life of Steph Curry. He's got a minimum shot routine. He's got his warmups, his workouts, his massage therapy, the cold plunges. Like whatever he does, he just does it unbroken for so much longer than everybody else. That's why he's able to hit that level and maintain it for a 20 year career where the average lifespan of NBA guy is four and a half years. Coming up on 20. It's not a fluke, that's not luck and it's not genetics. Yeah, like at a certain point, like people want to say, must be nice. There ain't nothing nice about his schedule. Nothing. He's been leaving that unbroken. That's why you know his name. But I also say, like Michael Phelps, he's a freak. He's a freak. Genetically gifted for sure. His discipline is why he has all the silver medals. If I would have given him a baseball bat at 8 years old and never put him in a swimming pool, you'd still know the name. That's why you see, when they transition out, you're like Michael golfing. He's an amazing golfer. Just imagine if he was doing it since he was 4, he'd be Tiger Woods. The work ethic, the discipline and the passion it takes to hit that level, It's a universal.
- [14:32]
Chris Williamson
There's a cool thought experiment. Brian Klass wrote a book called Fluke, and he's talking about realities that are convergent or coincident. And he's basically saying, if you were to run reality back a thousand times in all of the other universes, in how many of them would you have got an extraordinary outcome for? Talking about this, I get the sense that someone like Michael Phelps is like 900 of the thousand universes. He becomes world class in a thing. And the goal, I think should be to try and construct a life where in as many universes as possible, you would have ended up with the kind of outcome that you're looking to have.
- [15:17]
DJ Shipley
I say the same thing. If you live the routine, if you look at every rep they've ever burned throughout their entire life and you just replace with a different medium, that is the recipe for success. If there's 10,000 hours, they've logged so much more than, I mean, you break 10,000 hours down four hours a day. Was that roughly eight years? Break down eight hours a day, roughly four years. That's why I tell guys, once you get into your lane, if you sacrifice everything else for the first four years and you lay down those 10,000 hours, you can find a balance point for the rest of your career. That's just not what I did. That's what most of the guys didn't do. Drinking, partying, chasing women, doing the whole thing. Just set your hair on fire and run around throughout your early 20s. Not what I wish I would have done. So you gotta make that time on the backside. Just be a pro, be a pro early.
- [16:04]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. A lot of the time at the live shows that I do, young guys typically come up and they hear me talking about, well, I'm trying to use other fuel sources than just putting my foot on the gas pedal. I'm trying to give myself time to be creative because there's leverage in creativity that there isn't in white knuckling it. In fact, we did manage to white knuckle something today, which is one of the few times in my history that I've white knuckled creativity. But it's very rare and that's huge step changes because of what I do. Maybe if you were somebody that's doing a special kind of battle plan for you guys that's in the intelligence side and they're trying to come up with the perfect operation to reverse engineer. Exactly. That's it. That's the guy that you probably actually need in a hammock for a couple of hours a day just thinking about shit. But for the most part, and in most industries, and even him back in the day, when he was learning exactly how intelligence assets move and what the different ways that this geographic region relates to this particular culture and what this guy did in his background, he was doing his eight hours a day. And young guys come and ask because they're hearing me talk about I'm trying to use different leverage functions as opposed to what I did for best part of two decades, which was like nose grindstone, just like, just doing that eating shit. And I'd be, I'd typically ask them, you look pretty young, how old are you? He goes, I'm 22. Like, bro, I don't mean to be that patronizing asshole. That was to me when I was 22, but you're made of rubber and magic at the moment, like you're indestructible. You can do 14, 16 hour days for multiple days in a row. Then have one day where you have a bit more sleep and then run it back and run it back and run it back and yeah, the gains of front loading, your skill acquisition and setting down those paths of least resistance. What do I expect? You know how many guys that end up in the seals were probably in some form of sport as a kid? Some degree of disciplined routine? Probably many now. I know that there's some. Andy's told me, just total tearaways. Seemed like, how the fuck is this redneck guy that never did. But even within them, you can see something. There's some sort of spark that seems to sort of lock them in. But, yeah, defining your paths of least resistance by setting your habits early, I think is a superpower. It's a superpower that you can give yourself.
- [18:38]
DJ Shipley
And it becomes routine, it becomes easy. You don't even realize you're doing it. I have. I have an amazing support group on social. It's amazing. I'm shocked with the amount of people that hit me up and they say this phrase, I just can't get up that early. You have a $1,200 phone in your pocket. The simplest feature on it is the alarm. Just set it. And he goes, I can't, man. I always hit snooze. I've never hit snooze my whole life. I have no idea what you mean. So I'll give him a tip. Instead of putting it next to your nightstand, because I know where it is, put it in the wall eight feet off your bed. Once you swing your feet out to unplug the phone, just continue the movement. Next day, lay out your clothes the night before. Get your bottle of water next to your bed, get your pills all laid out. Everything you have to do in the exact order you're going to get dressed. You watch how fast your morning routine closes. Like, I can be in and out of that house rushed or not rushed, four and a half minutes. I mean fast. But I've also had to live my life like that the whole time. It's like as soon as you feel the momentum getting created, you're like, I just have to follow the routine very easy. Like, I gotta get here early. I jumped in an Uber and I drove here last night just to make sure I knew where the building was, make sure I knew where the stairs were. Right? I don't wanna walk around. I don't be unprepared. So that's why I'm not late for anything. I show up. I dirt dive the night before. I know the traffic patterns. I know everything's gonna happen and then I just show up and do it. Simple.
- [20:03]
Chris Williamson
Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health, and regulates your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, they have a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US Right now you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com modernwisdom that's drinklmnt.com modern wisdom is it exhausting to have that on at all times and be unable to switch it off?
- [21:04]
DJ Shipley
I've been working the last couple years gonna dial it down. I talk a lot about dialing it down.
- [21:08]
Chris Williamson
Really doesn't sound like it.
- [21:10]
DJ Shipley
You should have seen me before.
- [21:12]
Chris Williamson
Tell me what was before.
- [21:13]
DJ Shipley
Like you wanna see a panic attack? Grab somebody who is living that alert. Surgeons have it. ER docs have it. Like if that phone rings, you have to go watch a dude who lives his life like that go to zero bars or his phone panic at the disco. Because if that thing goes off and your phone is dead, there's no excuse for it. Just constantly checking it all day. If, if your phone goes off in the next room, I jump and grab my phone. Everybody else does too. Put it back away. 2:30 in the morning, try to fall back asleep. It's so hard to sleep because you're such on edge. You're waiting for that moment to come. You're waiting to spring out of it. Just gotta learn how to power down. It takes a long time though.
- [21:54]
Chris Williamson
How exciting is being on a plane going out to do an operation when you've only had 30 minutes to get ready, but you've been thinking about it for a couple of months or years.
- [22:02]
DJ Shipley
It's amazing. I mean even on the helo flight, on a Normal deployment. It's the greatest thing you'll ever do. It is. There is nothing that I found so far that can replace that feeling of sitting on the helo, flying. 30 seconds out, you get the call and you just watch all the guys. Thousand yard stares. I mean, they might as well be smoking cigarettes with their feet kicked up. They are so calm, so ready to send. Makes you feel eerily comfortable. I don't care what happens when that ramp drops. We are golden. This is great. But the pressure to get there, that's all it is. A lot of it's. It's kind of like meditating. You sit on that hilo, the whine of the engines, the smell of the fuel, nobody's talking. Guys will put in ipods or they won't. They'll just sit there and they'll kind of just blink, stare out, and you'll think about everything you're about to do. The moment you land, when you get off the hilo, where you're going to sit, the hilo back blast blowing all the dust all over your hair. Everything you think about every single detail. So when you get there, if anything happens. I've rehearsed this 50,000 times. It feels like I've. It feels like you're omnipotent at a point. There's not a single detail you have not thought of that I haven't thought of that we all collectively have not thought of. So if anything goes wrong, switch. Just make it happen. But you have to think about it a lot. You have to be obsessed. You don't find a lot of guys that do that job who have extracurricular activities. I mean, when I got there, they made you sign a piece of paperwork. Not going to try to get a college degree. You're not going to try to get a real estate license for your first four or five years. I forget what it was. We just want you to do this, nothing else.
- [23:39]
Chris Williamson
So they realize the price of obsession and the benefits of obsession.
- [23:43]
DJ Shipley
And even if you don't, once you get there, when you see the guys that have been doing it, it confirms it. They are amazing. They just are. You think growing up in that community, spending all that time in the teams and then getting to the varsity level, that it would be roughly the same. It couldn't be further apart. Everything they do is purpose built. Everything they don't do is purpose built. Their morning routine, the workouts, the recovery, what they drink or don't drink, and then how they compartmentalize stress. I've never seen anybody do it. Better how? So they can block it out. No matter what happens, you're on. You're on the middle of an op, you come back, you've been gone for four and a half months and you have an email. Your wife just left. You took two kids and moved to Missouri. They go right back to work. I'll solve that when I get home. They won't even care. They don't even think about it. You've seen that happen more times than I can count. Compartmentalization is like number one strength. How bad's it going right now? I don't know. I don't even think about it. Just block it out. It's hard to do, though. When you get a family and you get all the other people that are drawing your time and attention, your bandwidth, it becomes hard to block out.
- [24:54]
Chris Williamson
I'm surprised in some degrees that there isn't a rule that you are not going to get married or start a family while you're inside of the forces.
- [25:03]
DJ Shipley
I said that for years, in a perfect world, they wouldn't.
- [25:08]
Chris Williamson
K pop stars aren't allowed. They sign away on their contract when they get created as a group. I think it might even be to be celibate, but it's certainly to not have a partner. Absolutely. To not get married. Absolutely. To not have kids. One of the interesting things, South Korea's got the lowest birth rate in the world. And one of the reasons that some demographer friends of mine think that that's the case is that the single most powerful cultural export and cultural influence in Korea is K pop. And all of the K pop stars are, by contract, unpartnered and childless. But if you can do it to people that do coordinated dances on stage, I would expect that there would be a tier that you would get to where the government says, hey, while you're here, I'm afraid you're in K pop mode.
- [26:05]
DJ Shipley
I used to always say, if you could build a lab and you could build nothing but premium assaulters, what would you want them to be? Like James Bond orphans. No wife, no kids, no external commitments. Just focus on this craft. I mean, that's why when you look at James Bond, he's like, nah, he's
- [26:21]
Chris Williamson
focused on fucking women.
- [26:22]
DJ Shipley
He is. But he's not. He's not getting married. He has nothing. So you get the hybrid between him and Neil McCauley from Heat. Can't get attached to anything. You can't walk away from 30 seconds, you feel a hit coming around the corner. It's that kind of comparison. But then what do you want them to be able to do? Because you can't have it both. You can't have people that have no empathy. Because you want this Captain America, this superhero figure that saving babies and killing the bad guy and rescuing the princess and all this nonsense. Is that really what you want? It's not what the enemy have. They don't have that at all. What do you want? And I feel like people can't make up their mind.
- [26:56]
Chris Williamson
It's really interesting. You know, the last few years we've seen walk at that in. You go on.
- [27:04]
DJ Shipley
I've been waiting so long to drink one of these things.
- [27:06]
Chris Williamson
I'm going to allow you to enjoy this without me distracting you.
- [27:10]
DJ Shipley
Just in case you're wondering, you can't find these in Virginia Beach.
- [27:16]
Chris Williamson
There it is, cousin.
- [27:17]
DJ Shipley
That's good. Good for you. Congrats.
- [27:20]
Chris Williamson
Thank you. You know, we've never seen kinetic encounters be as widely broadcast as Russia, Ukraine, Middle east, even this year. This year. Rockets going through Dubai, hotel windows and stuff being shot down over airports. I'm kind of fascinated by the collateral damage that has always been a part of war. Or another way to put it would be sort of the ugliness. Even forget the collateral damage because I'm aware that with modern war techniques you would like to think we can minimize those. There can be precision that's done. And I think you get into a discussion that's probably pretty honest there. But another one would just be there are certain elements of war, many elements of war that are just messy and very ugly. And that includes the people that are doing it. And it's strange now to think that there's a level of sort of sanitization that many people from a country who wouldn't want to be invaded or attacked are also unhappy with the people who are doing it on their behalf, who are the shield or the spear that are ensuring that they stay safe. I don't like the way that they're doing it. It's being done in a manner that seems uncouth or barbaric or insufficiently empathetic. And I'm just interested in what you think about this additional level of scrutiny around not just what happens, which is one part of it, but the way that it happens too. I want you to care more about this and you go for every percent that I care. My effectiveness goes down by however, much more than a percent, I would imagine. How do you come to think about that?
- [29:35]
DJ Shipley
From the US side, and I'll say from the five eyes side. So uk Same way you put These soldiers at such a disadvantage tactically because you're trying to mitigate all the risk to civilian populace. They put that first and foremost. So anything like collateral damage, that is the number one thing they're concerned with. They don't want to kill women, they don't want to kill kids, they don't kill innocent bystanders. And they put you at significant risk to try to avoid that. They didn't do it in World War II, they didn't do it anywhere else, but they're doing it now. I just wish people would shut their TV off and just say thanks. You don't really want to see what happens. You don't. You're not going to pick up a gun and go do it. You want to sit here and shine a bright lights at us and point fingers. I see what they're doing in Australia to Ben Robert Smith, and I watch the UK do with my buddy Jamie and just. You string these guys up like they're criminals.
- [30:24]
Chris Williamson
What is it that's happening with this? No examples.
- [30:27]
DJ Shipley
War crimes and stuff like that. Like my buddy J22SAS, him and his whole team got wrapped up on a triple murder charge saying they killed innocent Afghans who had AKs, were shooting at them and enemy fighters. And they spun up this whole campaign. They gave him a Silver Star equivalent for the operation. And then two years later he can't come to the US because he's got a record. Yeah. So we've been trying to fight. We're trying to fight it right now. We're trying to get someone to give him a visa to let him come to the us and right now they won't. It's crazy. Now Ben Robert Smith and SASR in Australia, they're doing the same thing. He got the Medal of Honor. Like he is a legitimate war hero. And they're trying to string him up because they're saying he murdered Afghan civilians. I haven't seen anybody get. I've never seen a murder. Never. People don't do that. It's not a thing. And people think it is. And World War II is a thing. World War I is a thing for sure. Vietnam, probably a thing. It's not a thing now.
- [31:25]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [31:27]
DJ Shipley
Too much technology, Too many eyes in the sky. You can't do it.
- [31:30]
Chris Williamson
You feel like you're under CCTV surveillance the whole time.
- [31:33]
DJ Shipley
100% you are.
- [31:34]
Chris Williamson
So you're saying that it's not necessarily that guys wouldn't want to or that guys wouldn't. It's that the likelihood of you being caught is so high that, you know, if I do this.
- [31:45]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, and I don't want to confuse murder with actual war, but what you would classify as murder to me isn't murder. That guy has an ak. He's shooting out of a second story window at us. And if we go in there and kill him and he threw the gun six feet that way, you're saying he's unarmed? No, cousin, he was just shooting at that window. He just shot one of our dudes. And now you're saying because I plugged him, that gun's six feet over there, that he's not an enemy combatant. Yes, he is. They know how to play the game. They're screwing with you because you've never played it.
- [32:16]
Chris Williamson
Okay, tell me about what's happening from an enemy combatant standpoint where they're trying to manipulate those rules.
- [32:23]
DJ Shipley
Because now they know. Because we fought that war for way too long. Started in Afghanistan, it spilled over to Iraq. So you'd see these guys, they'd shoot out of the windows. You'd run in, you do a whole raid. You can't find a single gun in the house. And you're like, how is this?
- [32:36]
Chris Williamson
When I was outside the house, I saw you with a gun. Now I'm inside the house. I don't know where the fuck they are.
- [32:40]
DJ Shipley
I don't know where it is. And you find a false wall with RPGs, explosives, everything in there. Oh, wait, yeah. He's got a drop cloth, pulls it down, throws it on there, slams it back up. There's a big poster or a painting behind it, and you just don't check. And now we get really, really good at searching houses. Now we really get to see him. But somebody else comes in there. You plug a guy in the corner, you take your photos. There's no gun next to him. You're going to jail for that. There was a gun in here. No. His wife grabbed it and shoved it in there. That's how it happened.
- [33:06]
Chris Williamson
Why do you need to take photos? To justify the kill.
- [33:09]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Because ultimately, you're gonna pay them money. At the end of the day, every person you shoot in Iraq or Afghanistan gets a cash payout.
- [33:16]
Chris Williamson
Well, they don't.
- [33:18]
DJ Shipley
The family does.
- [33:19]
Chris Williamson
Right?
- [33:19]
DJ Shipley
Yeah.
- [33:21]
Chris Williamson
It's crazy whether they're a combatant or not.
- [33:24]
DJ Shipley
Whether they're a combatant or not.
- [33:26]
Chris Williamson
How much is the money?
- [33:27]
DJ Shipley
I don't remember off the top of my head. I mean, for a while, I think we were paying like $5,000 for a door. If you blew their door, you had to Pay them money.
- [33:33]
Chris Williamson
It might be an expensive door in Afghanistan. I've seen some of the doors on video in Afghanistan. They don't look like $5,000.
- [33:37]
DJ Shipley
No, they don't. But I mean, to them it's Monopoly money. They just throw it out there. Winning hearts and minds. Winning hearts and minds? Why? Why are we winning hearts and minds? I'm not here to win hearts and minds. I'm not here for that at all. I'm not. Not a bit. I don't care about hearts and minds. And I know that makes me sound cruel. I'm not cruel. I'm one of the nicest people I know. But you can't play the game like that. You can't unless you go both hands tied behind your back. It's crazy, because now they've been in the system so long, they know exactly how to manipulate it. They know what to say. They're going to get thrown in jail for two weeks. They're going to get fed three times a day, more than they ever have in their whole life. Hot shower, clean bed, air conditioning, tv. They'll get released. And now they know the exact process.
- [34:17]
Chris Williamson
When do they get thrown in jail?
- [34:19]
DJ Shipley
Whenever you arrest them.
- [34:20]
Chris Williamson
Right. Okay, so you're basically glorified police.
- [34:24]
DJ Shipley
Yes. Unless it's Osama bin Laden, somebody else. An actual terrorist network. If you're just out there door to door, gangbuster style, Baghdad 2005, just hitting every house, you're just wrapping up as many military age males as you can. You find the AKs, you have all the atmospherics, you know what they're up to. And if they don't have a gun, you're wrapping them up.
- [34:45]
Chris Williamson
What's atmospheric?
- [34:47]
DJ Shipley
I mean all their deep. So everything they're saying on cell phones, emails, radios, you have all that. So you build out your profile. So I know exactly who you are, I know exactly who your neighbor is. I know you're banging his wife. I know everything. So when I get there, you don't have a gun. I wrap you in, take you in for questioning, you don't give us anything. But now you know exactly what our tactics are. You know where I have to put you. You know exactly what to say to get released in 48, 72. Two weeks, whatever it is, they go back out there, they spread the gospel to all their friends, and now they know and they get really good.
- [35:16]
Chris Williamson
It's like the Somali daycares of the Middle East.
- [35:19]
DJ Shipley
I don't get me started on Somalia. Yeah, that's a place you never want to visit why?
- [35:27]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [35:29]
DJ Shipley
You ever seen Black Hawk Down? Most realistic war movie I ever seen. That's exactly how it is.
- [35:35]
Chris Williamson
How so?
- [35:37]
DJ Shipley
It's lawless. Do whatever you want to. It's like Lord of the Flies. They can do whatever they want to. Like if I dropped you in Mogadishu right now, Bakara market, right now, they cut your arms and legs off.
- [35:49]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [35:49]
DJ Shipley
Because you're white. Nobody's gonna stop them. Why wouldn't they cut your head off? Put on Al Jazeera, burn American flag. They'll go off and chew a bunch of cotton, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow and do it again. They don't care. It's lawless.
- [36:04]
Chris Williamson
Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue. But recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Mitipure from Timeline contains the only clinically validated form of urethylene, A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying Strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, There is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com sl modern wisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout that's timeline.com modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. The like mutual level of danger that you need to be able to match on both sides. But if you are made to adhere to a particular set of rules, that basically makes you less effective at your job and more likely to be injured or killed. All in the name of optics. It's a weird one, man. It's a weird one because I understand that you're supposed to be better, right? You're supposed to go in adhering to the law. It's the same reason that seeing a police officer who's texting while he drives feels particularly egregious. Like, hey, dude, you enforce the law, okay? I feel like you're supposed to adhere to it.
- [38:10]
DJ Shipley
Come on, baby. You're better than that.
- [38:11]
Chris Williamson
Yes.
- [38:11]
DJ Shipley
Put the phone down. Yes.
- [38:14]
Chris Williamson
However, I wonder whether or not the modern world is incompatible with some of the ugly things that need to happen in war.
- [38:29]
DJ Shipley
And anybody who's been to Afghanistan, anybody who's been to Iraq or any of the wars, they know if we really wanted to win that war, we could win it fast. They don't want us to win it fast. I don't know who doesn't.
- [38:43]
Chris Williamson
Tell me more about this. What do you mean?
- [38:46]
DJ Shipley
If you grabbed all the five eyes. So us, uk, Australia, Canada, New Zealand. If you just grabbed us and dropped us into Iraq and said you have six months to close out the entire thing, could we. 100%. They don't want us to. And I think that's for a bunch of different reasons, but one of them is you don't want to see what that actually looks like. Like, you don't want to watch special Operations and all of this. The whole military might push through Fallujah and clear it all out. They don't want to see what clearing Fallujah actually means. When you hear the Marines cleared Fallujah, they don't know what that means.
- [39:23]
Chris Williamson
What does it mean?
- [39:24]
DJ Shipley
They went door to door and killed every single male that was still there. Everybody who's willing to fight. They killed them all. That's how you clear the village. So they gave him, told him the time, get out by this day. If not, we're pushing through, and anybody who's left the fight, we're going to kill. That's what he did. Until you do it, people don't want to see that. People don't want to live that. They don't want to realize that's a reality. So all your grandfathers are fighting in World War II? I promise you, they weren't handing out Hershey kisses and handshakes. It's not what they did. They had flamethrowers, for God's sake. You think they're giving us a flamethrower now? No. We can't even use claymore mines. Just a whole bunch of stuff we used to use back in the day. And because it's now, it's too cruel and unusual. Geneva Convention threw it out. A bunch of munitions. You can't use rounds. You can't shoot people with a bunch of different weird stuff.
- [40:11]
Chris Williamson
Is that being adhered to by the other Side?
- [40:13]
DJ Shipley
No, no, they're blowing you up. They're doing whatever they want to. Suicide vest on children, they do whatever they want to. That makes it very, very hard to fight. So for you, you run in, you're a dad, you're a husband, you're a friend, you're an uncle. Little kids all around, you have no idea if they have a suicide vest on. Now, are they holding grenades for their father? You have no idea. It really makes you lose trust in people because now you don't know. As soon as you drop your guard, one thing happens. You're like, I'll never let that happen again. Technology advances, you get new pieces of tech and now you can see through clothing. You can buy down the risk a little bit, but they get very, very smart. See the smart bombs they try to sneak through TSA all the time. They understand exactly what we're trying to do and you're trying to counter it every single day.
- [41:01]
Chris Williamson
How frustrating is that as someone whose life's on the line and also is trying to dedicate their career to doing this?
- [41:07]
DJ Shipley
Well, it's a big cat and mouse game. I move my piece here, you move your piece here.
- [41:11]
Chris Williamson
So you've kind of accepted this as the cost of doing business that you're going to have to adhere by a set of rules that the other side doesn't have to. You're not allowed to pick the ball up, you have to kick it, but they're allowed to pick it up and run with it.
- [41:23]
DJ Shipley
That's exactly what it is. It's like, do you really want us to win or do you really want us to engage in this 20 year war because of all the technological advancements that are coming out of that war, Advancements in armament, ISR platforms, body armor, life saving medical devices. But really, war creates a lot of money. A lot of people became billionaires really, really fast because of the war, which is it? All these companies sprung up and Raytheon, Boeing, everybody is involved, everybody's making just piles and piles of money.
- [41:53]
Chris Williamson
And he's saying that protracting out, extending an enmeshment between two different sides, that's the sort of thing that would continue to grease the wheels of that and blasting through quickly would end the money printer.
- [42:11]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, I mean, it's like what Trump's doing in Iran right now, he doesn't want to be in there for 20 years. I want to go in, I want to smash you, show you. I'm not going to take this shit anymore. And then I want to leave. Is it going to work? I have no idea. We've never tried it before. We always get put in these long, drawn out conflicts that we know you don't need to.
- [42:28]
Chris Williamson
What would you do if you wanted to end the war in Iran quickly?
- [42:32]
DJ Shipley
Oh, you don't know what I'd do.
- [42:35]
Chris Williamson
You're allowed to. This is hypothetical only. We're playing Sydney as civilizations and you need to end it quickly.
- [42:44]
DJ Shipley
Nobody's gonna like my answer. It's just not. It's not. If I say one thing, then I'm on the Israel side. If I say this and I'm against it. Okay, you're always gonna do it.
- [42:55]
Chris Williamson
Let's forget that. Let's say imaginary country in somewhere that's in the Middle east that doesn't exist.
- [43:04]
DJ Shipley
Are they building nuclear weapons? Sure. Use them?
- [43:07]
Chris Williamson
Sure.
- [43:07]
DJ Shipley
And we know they have them?
- [43:09]
Chris Williamson
Sure. Press a button.
- [43:15]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Yeah. There's no other way. Just isn't drawn into a 20 year campaign doing the entire thing or all the countries all come to alignment. Like, we can't let this happen. We can't. We can't. Everybody in agreeance. Okay. Can't do it anymore.
- [43:36]
Chris Williamson
And what if you. What if that's not a threat?
- [43:41]
DJ Shipley
How would it not be a threat?
- [43:42]
Chris Williamson
They don't have it. They don't have the materials. They're not able to make it. The nuclear armaments on the other side is not a concern. If you're unable to use that unless you can drop the fat man equivalent, then it becomes a much more difficult operation because then it does look a lot more like presumably door to door stuff.
- [44:06]
DJ Shipley
Or you could just fly in black ops with some really cool dudes in multicam and snatch a president out of their house in the middle of the night and call it a day.
- [44:12]
Chris Williamson
That's happened recently.
- [44:15]
DJ Shipley
Pretty cool job.
- [44:16]
Chris Williamson
Do you know much about. Did you. Were you excited sort of tracking that?
- [44:19]
DJ Shipley
Oh, I was. No. But nobody jumped up faster out of their chair and cheered than I did. I was so stoked for him. That is a. That's a cool op to do.
- [44:27]
Chris Williamson
Why
- [44:29]
DJ Shipley
snatch the President out of his house in the middle of the night? Like no one else is pulling that off. Nobody. Do you think anybody's going to fly a Blackhawk and land in the White House lawn and run in and grab Donald Trump and bring him out? No.
- [44:40]
Chris Williamson
I think lots of people have probably thought about doing that.
- [44:43]
DJ Shipley
Nobody's going to pull that off. Nobody's pulling that off. That. That is a unicorn raid.
- [44:47]
Chris Williamson
Are you? Yeah. Are you surprised by what was done? What? You know about how it was done.
- [44:55]
DJ Shipley
No.
- [44:56]
Chris Williamson
Pretty standard procedure. Just done at a very, very elite, precise level.
- [45:01]
DJ Shipley
That's what they do. That's what they do. Everybody, Everybody who was involved in that was like me and everybody else who ever did a job. You are praying that that is going to happen. You are praying.
- [45:13]
Chris Williamson
That's your Super Bowl.
- [45:13]
DJ Shipley
Oh, my God. If you had an opportunity, and I promise you, they'd all say the same. No, Andy'd say the same thing right now. You want to be on the Hilo. Yep. Cut off a finger. Done. I cut it off right now. Jump on Hilo and I die. 100%. Yeah. I mean, that's the only reason you're on the planet. You want to do things like that because no one else can pull them off. It is. But it shows the. Really, the strength in the military. He will do it. He will. My last rotation was Trump's first one. And I don't know what he says on those phone calls. I don't know how he avoids conflict. And I think everybody thinks he just wants to go to war. Wants to go to war. We got spun up on a really big op that I ain't going to talk about. So don't ask me. He canceled us on the ramp. We were getting ready to jump in and send it, and they canceled us on the ramp because he worked it out with a phone call. I don't know what he says. I don't know what he does, but he does something. Probably says something like, don't make me do it. I'll do it. Don't make me. Somehow they come to their senses and somehow they solve it.
- [46:18]
Chris Williamson
That's one of the kind of catch 20twos of having a leader who seems to be at least somewhat predictable and a bit bombastic, that he actually might press the button. People are severely concerned that he might run for a third term. Right. That would be kind of the domestic equivalent of doing this. But even the fact that you think that he might be the sort of guy that would go for a third term, that's internally. What do you think he would do to someone that's the enemy? And I don't know whether anybody on the planet has the IQ to play like seven dimensional chess of I'm going to construct this incredibly unpredictable, very gregarious, outgoing guy who seems to say things that almost might be like a WWE character if they were the president. And then what that means by playing that game is that people will believe that I'm going to be like that, so that then I Don't actually need to use the threat because they believe the threat more, not because they think that I'm aggressive, but because they think that I'm kind of crazy.
- [47:35]
DJ Shipley
Mm. I mean, that's what I don't realize. Is he crazy, or is he just crazy enough to make you believe he'll really do it?
- [47:43]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Crazy or genius is the question.
- [47:45]
DJ Shipley
It's hard to know. But, I mean, you know, we said
- [47:47]
Chris Williamson
effective is what matters most, right?
- [47:50]
DJ Shipley
Effective. He's avoided more conflicts than anybody I ever served under. He just has. If people knew the amount of conflicts he's avoided, they'd give him more praise than I do.
- [48:01]
Chris Williamson
But he's not able to talk about them.
- [48:02]
DJ Shipley
He just doesn't. I don't know why you think that
- [48:05]
Chris Williamson
it would be something that he could flex, that he would be able to talk about. This was how close we got to this thing. We have come to a deal.
- [48:11]
DJ Shipley
I think he's done that so many times, it's just lost in the ether. Like, he didn't even think about it.
- [48:15]
Chris Williamson
It's just a Thursday.
- [48:16]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. He's like, eh. Like the whole Maduro raid thing, he's like, yeah, send him. Do I think he lost sleep over that? No, I mean, like, he has full trust and confidence in the force. Yeah. You know what? I'm sick of it. Send them. Knocks them out. Great job. Get some all cheeseburgers and. Yep. See you guys on Tuesday. I think it's. Yeah.
- [48:38]
Chris Williamson
I don't. Based on what I know about Trump, he's not the picture of health from a physical training standpoint.
- [48:45]
DJ Shipley
No.
- [48:46]
Chris Williamson
Psychologically, do you think that he would make a good special forces operator?
- [48:49]
DJ Shipley
No.
- [48:50]
Chris Williamson
Why?
- [48:54]
DJ Shipley
His ego gets in trouble quite a bit. I don't know. If he wasn't a leader, I don't know how good he'd be as a follower. If you don't have overall say, how well can you get in line and perform?
- [49:11]
Chris Williamson
That's why the ego gets in the way.
- [49:12]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. If it's not your plan, will you still adopt it as your plan? That's the thing a lot of guys have an issue with. That's where you see the ego come in. And I had a mentor, actually, really good friend. His name's Brad. Gary. Retired out of the teams not too long ago. An amazing guy, but he says a quote, culture eats strategy for breakfast every day. It does. You can have the good.
- [49:34]
Chris Williamson
Is he running the mind gym? Does he run the Navy Seals mind gym?
- [49:38]
DJ Shipley
He was definitely there when it came on Brad Gary. He was on Shawn Ryan, not too
- [49:42]
Chris Williamson
long ago, I want to say, is it Brad Jacobs that did some mental training stuff? We had a. No. Who's the guy that works with SciCom? Rob Moore, helped to publish his book. Fuck Brad Simon. Anyway, yeah, culture eats. Strategy for breakfast is so true. It's just aligning the incentives, but it's aligning the incentives at a group level. Hey, this is how we do things. Not we need to just enforce these things. This isn't happening top down, it's happening bottom up. But we also have the routines that are built in. Top down.
- [50:18]
DJ Shipley
Exactly. I don't know how well he'd do if he wasn't the one coming up with a plan. If he disagreed at all, how loud would he vocalize it? I don't know.
- [50:25]
Chris Williamson
As an only child, I can fully empathize with Donald Trump in that regard. It's my way or the toys are going out of the pram. I've had to learn to desensitize, deprogram that. What do you think's the biggest misconception that civilians have about what special operations looks like day to day?
- [50:49]
DJ Shipley
I think a lot of them watch the Expendables and think that's what you do all day. Picking your teeth with a bowie knife, throwing stuff in there, or it looks like zero dark thirty walking around playing horseshoes with pop collars and cammies. Just more routine than you think it was, more structured than you think it was, but a lot more lawless than you think it would be more like a. More like a professional sports team than a military organization.
- [51:19]
Chris Williamson
That's what it feels like.
- [51:20]
DJ Shipley
Oh, yeah. I mean, you're rarely in uniform unless it's a promotion or unless you're at a funeral. You don't put them on. Most guys in relaxed grooming standards, long hair, big beards, you don't take your photo. You're not on social media, you're not writing books, you're not. You just live that life. And to them, it's no different than playing on a professional baseball team, football team. They show up every single day trying to earn their seat at the table every single day. And they put the group before themselves and everything to do. If you do that, you'll be a successful player. And I've never met anybody that was worth his weight, that was not obsessed, nobody that I would ever clone, that didn't wake up every day, go, I can't believe I get paid to do this. You don't get paid a lot, but if I'm honest now, and I think Everybody would say it too. 90% of the time, if you had the financial means you'd pay to do that job. Like if there was a. If there was a club you could join and do that, I'd swipe plastic so fast. It's an amazing experience. But I think a lot of people think that you're kind of like a caveman. There's no empathy. You know, people aren't well educated, they're not well read, they're just grunts. Too many tattoos, Say too many cuss words, dip too much Copenhagen, spit on your floor. They're kind of just brutes. All the guys I worked with, all the guys I looked up to, they are more philosophers than anything else. Some of the conversations we've had around those tables have absolutely changed my life. Just training methodology, just thought provoking conversations. The way they analyze targets and people and navigating human terrain. Like, I've never seen anything else like it.
- [53:00]
Chris Williamson
This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. Gymshark makes the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And here is something I realized a few years into training. When you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently. You train harder, you stay longer, you get way more high fives. Their hybrid shorts are unreal. They're the perfect length, they're super lightweight, they're easy to wash and dry. And their sleeveless T shirts are basically what I've trained in every day for a year now. They're the ideal fit, they're breathable and they hold their shape perfectly. So no more looking like Adam Sandler's your stylist. Basically, everything they sell is unbelievable. Well designed, high quality, and you get 30 day free returns globally with global shipping plus a 10% discount site wide. Right now you can get 10% off everything by going to the link in the description below or heading to Gym Shmodernwisdom and using the code ModernWisdom10 at checkout. That's Jim ShModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom10 at checkout. Have you seen this chart before?
- [54:06]
DJ Shipley
I have seen that chart.
- [54:08]
Chris Williamson
I'll explain it to you. So it's the prevalence of violence perpetrated by IQ standard deviation. So 70, 79, 80 to 89 all the way up. And basically it's asking the following question. Have you been in a physical fight or deliberately hit anyone? In the past five years. That's the question. And the prevalence as a percentage is linear going down. And when you get to the middle of the distribution, it's somewhere between 11.4 and 7.9%. So what's that? Let's call it 10%, something like that. 10% of people with 100 IQ have hit somebody or been in a physical fight within the last five years. And it goes down and down. But if you're talking about wanting somebody who has got quite elite mental capacities as well. 5.2% between 110 and 119, 2.9% between 120 and 129. And I saw this tweet that said the percentage of guys with 130/ IQ who both enjoy books and bar fights is incredibly small. And that is why you can't mass produce elite special operators for the military.
- [55:22]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, trucks. I don't have 130 IQ for sure, but I do like reading books and punch people in the face for sure. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. They're way more constrained than you would imagine. And then sometimes they, a lot of times you don't want them to be like, to me, my special operations guys don't have flat top haircuts. They don't blouse their boots, they don't say sir, they don't salute. They have all the ability to do those things. But the job's filthy. Like, why would I, I don't want a Ken doll doing that job.
- [55:57]
Chris Williamson
Is it seen as sort of unnecessary pump and circumstance and. Ritual that doesn't contribute to the outcome? To jump through those hoops to do
- [56:13]
DJ Shipley
the, oh, you can play the song and dance.
- [56:16]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, of course, yeah. Yes. No. So the clean shaven, the no tattoos and stuff like that, they only do
- [56:22]
DJ Shipley
that as a punishment. Anytime anybody does anything wrong, cut your hair, shave your face. That's why we hate it. That's why most guys, when they get out, they grow a beard, grow their hair out. They're like, I am sick of this, I'm never doing that again.
- [56:31]
Chris Williamson
Okay?
- [56:31]
DJ Shipley
They run that for a year and then they shave it all and whatever, they go back to normal. But no, I mean, it's the you
- [56:38]
Chris Williamson
can't tell me what to wear mum equivalent of being in the special Forces.
- [56:42]
DJ Shipley
Have you ever seen the meme? It's got a bunch of green berets sitting around, hands in pockets, hands in pockets. The only reason I went this selection, I wouldn't be able to put my hands in my pockets and spit Copenhagen on your floor. And grow a beard and. No, like, I want to be a 1 percenter.
- [56:55]
Chris Williamson
And you're allowed to do special things. You said it's more lawless than people might realize. What do you mean by that?
- [57:03]
DJ Shipley
Everything's black and white. Special operations. Find a way to live in that gray area. Gray area Navigation tours running every 30 minutes. We will find a way to navigate through the gray area to get to the end state. As long as we know what the why is, what we have to get accomplished, we'll find a way to get there. And sometimes it's not pretty. But I mean, I'm pretty honest. I'll break every rule in the book right now. If it puts a team in a better position, even if it puts myself at a disadvantage or threatens my career, maybe even my life. If it's good for the group, I'll do it anyway. But not lawless in a sense. Like people don't. People aren't murdering people. There's no rape. Not a lot of drugs anymore. But there's not a whole lot of guys who transition to be police officers.
- [57:51]
Chris Williamson
Too constraining.
- [57:52]
DJ Shipley
Too constraining. I don't want to be constrained. I don't like it because everybody asked me when I got out. I don't want to be a cop. You can go to FBI. Absolutely not. I love those guys. They're amazing. Nothing but respect. I can't do that job. I'm in the gray area too much. Just saying. But I'm open and honest about it. I don't hide that a bit.
- [58:10]
Chris Williamson
I think this is what I was trying to get at before when I said the modern world being incompatible with some of the ugly parts of war. That if you're focused on outcome, if you're focused on the ends, the means can sometimes become up for debate. And the ends are often not scrutinized. But the means are by people. Does that make sense? Yeah.
- [58:35]
DJ Shipley
And I'm trying to find a way to word this. I've never seen anything in my military career that I would even put morally questionable on any level. Not for a cop, not for a fireman, not for a schoolteacher. Everything has always been above board. But there are times where you just want to hoist a black flag and start slitting throats. You just do. I can't believe we're going to put this dude in the back of his helicopter and let him lose. I can't believe we're going to let
- [59:05]
Chris Williamson
him do it because you know that he's a bad guy.
- [59:08]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Or some of the Things you see, some of the things you know that you're doing, you have. Because it's not an assault on you, but some of the stuff they do with children. It's. It's so disgusting that if I. If I didn't have that flag in my arm and I was just a tourist, I'd kill you. If I get away with it right now, I'd just kill you. But because I have this flag on my shoulder now, I can't. And now I resent the flag because I can't do to you what I know needs to happen to you.
- [59:31]
Chris Williamson
How does that feel, that systemic constraint when you've got righteous anger?
- [59:41]
DJ Shipley
It's hard, man. It is. It's hard. Especially when you've lost friends or, you know, extortion. 17 happened in August of extortion. 17 had a whole troop get killed. Kilo got shot down, killed Everybody on board. 31 guys. Having to back those guys up on deployment in that exact same place, living in their beds. If I'm being totally. I just wanted to kill everybody and to not be able to do it, it's hard because you have the opportunity. It's like, he's not doing anything bad now. Okay, I guess you gotta put you in handcuffs or you're on a Hilo. Drop you off here. They'll put you in a detention center for 10 days. They'll release you like, okay. They wouldn't do that to me. If they wrapped me up and put me in handcuffs, they would saw my head off in 15 minutes. Now we all know it. It's not fair.
- [60:34]
Chris Williamson
Have you been tracking this fallout after Rob was on Andy's show talking about the Osama raid?
- [60:42]
DJ Shipley
Yeah.
- [60:43]
Chris Williamson
What do you make of that?
- [60:49]
DJ Shipley
I hate the fact we're even talking about it, if I'm being honest. Like, they did such a good job about not talking about it. I mean, Rob is my first team leader, so I know Rob. I owe a lot to Rob because Rob drafted me and brought me in. I wish nobody would have ever said a word. When they left to go on the raid, I didn't know where they were going.
- [61:12]
Chris Williamson
Were you on compound or whatever it's called?
- [61:15]
DJ Shipley
I was in his team, yeah.
- [61:17]
Chris Williamson
So you didn't get chosen?
- [61:18]
DJ Shipley
No.
- [61:18]
Chris Williamson
Motherfuckers.
- [61:19]
DJ Shipley
Two juniors? Yeah. How you know, we'll see. We rack all the teams. We'll say there's seven guys, one to seven. They took twos and above and took them all from every team. Those are the guys.
- [61:30]
Chris Williamson
Oh, interesting.
- [61:31]
DJ Shipley
It's the first time they ever did It.
- [61:33]
Chris Williamson
So it's closer to being. And how many. How many people in total?
- [61:39]
DJ Shipley
Can't talk about it. No. Okay, fine. We'll talk about off screen. Way less than you think.
- [61:42]
Chris Williamson
Cool. So it's closer to me what it sounds like. I'm loving the sports analogy. It's more like having a league of teams and then you've got the Steph Curry or the Kevin Durant from each team.
- [61:57]
DJ Shipley
Yep.
- [61:58]
Chris Williamson
And then you're able to take the top filtering. Does that not create that. Surely that must create a lot of
- [62:05]
DJ Shipley
animosity, a lot of resentment.
- [62:08]
Chris Williamson
Some of that. But yes. Yeah. Because you know, hang on, who the fuck. What? I'm number six. Am I more so complexity that the verticals of the teams have got culture baked in. And as you start to take people. I mean, perfect example, when players come together to play for their national team, when they've played for rivalrous local teams, that doesn't always work well. Sometimes a team which has the maximum player stats for each individual player but not the cohesion doesn't necessarily perform as well as a vertical team that does have the cohesion with somebody that's got less experience or whatever. Look at me, sat in the stands talking about how the special forces should be run.
- [63:03]
DJ Shipley
I mean, that's how it's always been ran. Take a team, take a troop, take a squadron, whatever it is. And you go out and do the thing they cherry pick from inside of the same squadron.
- [63:12]
Chris Williamson
And.
- [63:12]
DJ Shipley
And none of us knew. I didn't know if we knew they were spinning up on something and they would tell us like it's some bullshit training mission, like it was my first cycle, I had just gotten through selection and all of them are like, enjoy your first rotation. He's like, you ain't missing shit. Trust me. This is going to be a dog and pony. We're going to waste our time and nothing's going to happen. Promise you. About five days before they went to go do the thing, we all came in, had a big blowout. You know, dudes are buying new watches, buying thousand dollars sunglasses because they didn't think they were going to come home. We all thought they were going to go get Gaddafi. So when Obama walked out and did the new announcement, I was in my living room with my wife with my shooting buddy on speakerphone. And as soon as they said it, screaming like so proud.
- [63:54]
Chris Williamson
Because you knew that that was.
- [63:55]
DJ Shipley
Oh yeah, so happy. Never been more proud in my fucking life. Oh my God. And then we came back and everything started to roll out. News cameras Everywhere they're coming to people's houses throughout in town. You go get a beer, they'd bump into you. Like they're constantly trying to dig in to see who you are. They're trying to film you. I mean, it became a zoo. And it stayed like that for a long time.
- [64:17]
Chris Williamson
Has it ever been more highly scrutinized than around then?
- [64:22]
DJ Shipley
No. It was unlike anything else I've ever seen.
- [64:25]
Chris Williamson
That kind of launched the SEALs to some degree, I think in the public consciousness.
- [64:29]
DJ Shipley
I mean, they had a couple big ones before then. You know, they had June 28th with Marcus Luttrell, lone survivor that got into fanfare. I mean, that was an operation gone wrong. In 2009, they had Captain Phillips, they rescued Maersk Alabama. That was another huge one. Same squadron. So yeah, like been knocking these things out for a bit. So when that thing happened, the thing that pissed us off the most is right after you got to think, May 2011, that happened. August 2011. Another squadron gets shot with an RPG, whole troop goes down. The amount of people and the people today that say that was an inside job. I wish I could launch you in Afghanistan to a raid and kill you. It is the most disrespectful thing I've ever seen in my life.
- [65:13]
Chris Williamson
Why do they think it was an inside job?
- [65:15]
DJ Shipley
Because apparently that squadron knew too much about the UBL raid and we gotta kill em off. The fact that people say that you got 95% of those guys are all married. So now all their kids, they all read that shit. They read those comments, they watch those YouTube videos of these disgruntled fat army guys talking all this nonsense and now they don't know. It's like, mom, did the government kill dad? No, no, no. He's like, this guy's a green brain. He says they did like, oh my God, here we go. It's the spins is hateful narrative.
- [65:43]
Chris Williamson
It's the Sandy Hook parents equivalent in reverse for war.
- [65:49]
DJ Shipley
It is. Caused a lot of doubt though. Causes a lot of doubt in people. You're like, that's absolutely not possible. It's not possible. No one would ever do it. Nobody.
- [66:02]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, it seems to me, I mean again, sat in the rosette of the stands talking about what the fuck goes on in the American military, a country that I've only just moved to. The fact that things are heavily scrutinized, that war stories have got a kind of allure and romance and sort of sexiness to them means that the dose response of information being put out is so unusually magnified. And yeah, with the Osama bin Laden raid, you have every single second of potential information is going to be just. It's game tape. It is like game tape in some World cup final. And there's a critical mass that you can reach of information. And when you get even close to that, you basically have a kind of nuclear self sustaining reaction where it just generates more and more and more. And yeah, I watched Rob talk on Andy's show and I'm like, if nothing else, this is going to create an awful lot more nuclear reactions.
- [67:10]
DJ Shipley
Really wish you wouldn't have said it. You think about all those guys that are still in. They're the ones that are going to have to deal with that. I had to deal with it. And Rob does Rob things. Guys got out and they wrote books. If you weren't in that command when those books dropped, you have no idea the hell we all went through.
- [67:29]
Chris Williamson
Why
- [67:31]
DJ Shipley
Anybody who had association with them. We had guys combing the ceilings for bugs. You know, they leave listening devices. I mean, it was so. Because nobody knew who was feeding them information. So once they separated out and they started writing the book, they're like, okay, well somebody's communicating with them. They knew too much active information that is happening now. And you could tell with some of the emails going back and forth, they were following guys home.
- [67:54]
Chris Williamson
Oh, there was. I didn't realize this. Some of the people who had been in and then got out and were then allowed to talk about what had happened included information that they couldn't have known had it not have been passed on from people who were still inside. Wow.
- [68:13]
DJ Shipley
So now you got everybody just pointing fingers and shit.
- [68:15]
Chris Williamson
Like Spiderman meme.
- [68:17]
DJ Shipley
You're talking to him. You're talking. Can we just go back to work, man? Let's just go back to work. I wish nobody would have ever said a thing. Just kill him. Put it up on news. He's dead. Don't say how, don't say it was a compound raid. Don't do any of that.
- [68:28]
Chris Williamson
Don't say how, don't say who.
- [68:29]
DJ Shipley
But then on the same side, we gotta be honest. Everybody who's in special operations right now, today serving. The only reason you're in there is because you read a book, you watched a movie or something from somebody in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Black Hawk Down. That's the only reason.
- [68:45]
Chris Williamson
Isn't that strange that you've got.
- [68:47]
DJ Shipley
You're telling them not to, but the only reason we're all in this building is because somebody.
- [68:51]
Chris Williamson
How many people have wanted to become Navy SEALs how many people have become Navy SEALs?
- [68:56]
DJ Shipley
Because not many, but a lot of people have tried.
- [69:00]
Chris Williamson
Yep.
- [69:00]
DJ Shipley
I mean, somebody asked me the day about David Goggins and they're like, what do you think about David Goggins? I'm like, when I was in the teams, he was different because he was a, he was a poster child. He was an athlete for the Navy. I'll say between David Goggins and Jocko, those two people have probably put more people in the services over the last 10 years than anybody else in the last 50. They just have. Millions and millions of people have read their books, seen all of that. They've become cops, firemen, Navy seals, they've joined a coast guard. Yeah, they all do. Like, they did it right. They did a good job. They put them up on a pedestal. They weren't talking about war stories. They weren't doing all this stuff. But you take that and then you take the actual operational side of it and you're like, well, you're okay with. They do that, but you can't do that. Why?
- [69:48]
Chris Williamson
I don't know if people are okay with anyone. There's a degree of. And I only. I'm on the real periphery of this shit, but my YouTube every so often feeds me veterans talking about veteran drama shit. And it seems like there is a kind of noble silence that's expected of anybody, especially as you get up toward the higher tiers too. And it would be an interesting question to ask those people. Would you rather people adhere to the noble silence? Would you rather veterans adhere to the noble silence? Or would you rather have however many more million able bodied men trying to serve their country or their community and the police or the FBI or the special forces?
- [70:43]
DJ Shipley
It's hard to figure out because you look like the uk. Very, very small.
- [70:48]
Chris Williamson
Only very small. Not very, very small.
- [70:51]
DJ Shipley
Very, very small. Small.
- [70:52]
Chris Williamson
I'm not going to disagree with you.
- [70:53]
DJ Shipley
But England is small. And how they conquered all of that. Pretty, pretty incredible.
- [71:01]
Chris Williamson
Yep. The accent helps.
- [71:02]
DJ Shipley
They do. The accent helps. They don't give their military enough credit. There's not enough people growing up in England that want to grow up to be in the services.
- [71:10]
Chris Williamson
Dude, there isn't. I need to. It is unbelievable to me. I remember the first time that I started coming to America and the first time that I got on an internal domestic flight from somewhere in America to somewhere else in America. And you hear them come over the tannoy and they say, we would like to invite active military and first responders to or whatever it is to get on the Plane first. I'm thinking, I have never ever heard that the idea of a veteran community. I once wore a black rifle, coffee shirt getting onto a plane. This is a few years ago, and it's khaki green with gold print, like classic sort of military thing. And it's got the American flag on one arm. And as I walked past, there was an older gentleman, really nicely dressed, one of the early rows. And as I walked past, a bigger guy, short hat, said, thank you for your service. I'm like. And you know, there's all of these people behind me and I'm like, my T shirt has just given me stolen valor and I have no idea how to fucking wipe this. I wanted to. I must remind I'm actually British. Like, there was no way for me to. But I remember thinking, there is such a reflexive response, especially maybe among older generations, to just revere people who served in the military. And it is whatever the opposite of that is. Like actively ignored or kind of looked down on as if you did something a bit stupid, like you weren't smart enough to go into whatever else.
- [72:46]
DJ Shipley
That's why you joined the military.
- [72:47]
Chris Williamson
That's precisely. That is exactly how the British military veterans are seen. Exactly how they're seen.
- [72:55]
DJ Shipley
Big population in America, same thing. But now they appreciate it because we got attacked here and 9, 11. A lot of people have forgotten about that. But I mean, I try to remind the guys often the only reason we're not speaking German is because of our military. Like we are. The only reason we're all actually free is just because of the military. Nobody really wants to uncork that. So the reason we're free right now is because nobody really wants to fly over here and find out. That's it. Yeah, they just don't. If we did not have the military that we do, we would have been taken over a long time ago.
- [73:25]
Chris Williamson
This episode is brought to you by whoop. According to my whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day. Your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't. And the Whoop 5.0 is the best version yet. It's 7% smaller. You get more than two weeks of battery life from a single charge. It's got health span tracking to see how your daily habits affect your pace of aging. It's even got hormonal insights for the women that are listening. I'm a huge fan. This Thing Rules. It's been a huge part of my health journey and it's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. Best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap and and you get your first month for free. And there's a 30 day money back guarantee so you can buy it for free. Try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.commodernwisdom that's join.whoop.commodernWisdom can you try and find. It's going to be a little tough to find. It's a short, a YouTube short and it's a guy talking about do you know who has the number one Navy in the world? And do you know who has the number two navy in the world? Do you know who has the number three Air Force in the world? And the number one and the number two. It's a guy kind of ranking all of the different things. He's on a podcast and it is so fucking cool. I think the US Coast Guard is the fourth biggest Navy in the world and then the Navy is the first biggest Navy in the world and then something else is the second biggest. It's like this country has got. And he basically makes the point the reason America as a country is so overpowered militarily. And every time that I think about that, I also think about that video. I can't remember who the admiral is, but the someone else will raise your mothers and daughters for you. You know that video? Yeah, it is. There's a metro boom in like hip hop edit of that which is kind of a bit gratuitous, but it's holy shit. I mean, if you want to talk about what the sort of best elements of American culture. Yeah, let's go. Let's go on that one actually, with the black rifle edit. I'm sure this will be good.
- [75:57]
DJ Shipley
We have been honed into a machine of lethal moving parts that you would be wise to avoid if you know what's good for you. We will not be intimidated. We will not back down. We've seen war. We don't Want war. But if you want war with the United States of America, there's one thing I can promise you, so help me God, someone else will raise your sons and daughters. Bro.
- [76:22]
Chris Williamson
Bro.
- [76:22]
DJ Shipley
I got goosebumps. Oh, burn them to the ground. Dude, I love that.
- [76:27]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, that's it, bro.
- [76:30]
DJ Shipley
Fix bayonets.
- [76:31]
Chris Williamson
That's one of the. That's one of the sickest lines.
- [76:35]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, I mean, freedom isn't free. Freedom ain't free. You have to be a formidable adversary. If not, they're going to take everything you have based on, you got to be ready, stay ready.
- [76:49]
Chris Williamson
What are some of the adaptations that normal people might not realize Special Forces operators go through when you become hyper optimized for combat?
- [77:00]
DJ Shipley
Depends on how far they take it. Some guys adjust their entire lifestyle, everything people they associate with, the time they wake up, the time they go to bed. The majority of the guys are suffering through something. It could be alcohol, it'd be prescription pills, it could be injuries, everything.
- [77:18]
Chris Williamson
And what are they typically coping with? What? What's the thing that is causing them to use? The injuries obviously make sense, but psychologically,
- [77:31]
DJ Shipley
I'd say for me, I'm probably the quintessential dude, kind of represent everybody. I'm not a unicorn by any means. I'm a product of the culture. Hard time sleeping. So you start taking Ambien every night and that doesn't work. Your memory starts getting shot. Too many tbis, you get put on Adderall. Now you're taking uppers and downers, and then all the pain elements and start avoiding surgery. And then you have a hard time trying to balance being a full time husband, a full time father, being a full time Navy SEAL or pilot or whatever else you're trying to do. So you start to compartmentalize everything. I can't be a husband, I can't be a father right now. I can't be a best friend, I can't be an uncle, I can't be a son. I can only do this one thing. So I'm going to compartmentalize everything else. I'm going to shift it away, and then when I get done, I'll reintegrate. As soon as you try to reintegrate, you can't. The wife's off her routine. You're late for the bus stop, she's got her whole schedule set, and now you drop back in and you just screwed it all up. Now you don't feel like you're at home, so what do you do? You just run back into work, start pouring all your time back in there and you feel this big dissociation between a thing you're actually fighting for. Because now I can't even be around it because I don't feel at home there. I feel like I'm staying in Airbnb. I feel like I'm staying at my aunt's house. Like I'm trying to keep creep through the kitchen. Like I open up the refrigerator. Didn't have anything that I want in here because I haven't been grocery shopping in eight months. Well, now I'm too ashamed to ask her to buy this or buy that. And you're on another trip. I think people will be shocked with how much the guys are on the road. Minimum 270 days, 325, 350 a year. I mean, they are gone, gone, gone. And even when you're there like that typical morning, we'll call it day in a life. Random Tuesday in Virginia beach. Up at 5, clearing the gym, 5:30 workout, 5:30 to 6:30, eat breakfast, go do a recovery session. That could be a float tank, a cryo chamber, E stem, cold plunge, whatever, go back up. 10am briefing, train for three, four hours, eat lunch, train three, four hours, eat dinner, drink a couple beers in the team room, go back home. 9pm, kids are already in bed. Your wife started taking a shower, she's watching Netflix. You go in, you're asleep in 20, 30 minutes or at least half asleep. You wake up four, five, six times a night. Can't really fall asleep. Wake up five o', clock, do it again, over and over so your kids don't see you for pretty much the entire week. If you're lucky, you'll come in 6:30 at night during bed. By 8, you're two hand texting, frantic. You're trying to pack your stuff, trying to do laundry, about to leave in a day, you're just never really truly present. And that's when everything else starts to happen. The injuries stack up. Sleep deprivation stacks up. You're on a shitty diet now. You're drinking, drinking too much. You're popping these pills and it doesn't feel like you're doing the excess. The doctors have given you this stuff. You just keep eating them. Like, oh, I feel better. Three or four days, you feel worse. Like, eat another Adderall, wake up and do it again, do it again, do it again. And a lot of it is, it is egocentric because everybody around you is better than you are. And you feel like I have to see them see me work. Like I want you to notice that I am in here before you, I'm staying here after you. And I want you to know that I know I'm not great, but goddamn, I'm trying. It won't be for a lack of effort, it won't be for a lack of commitment or discipline. I'm going to show up every day trying to be better than I was yesterday. And that's what everybody has. You just get really used to just being inside of that thing. And you sacrifice guys become the best at hiding injuries. Catastrophic injuries.
- [81:04]
Chris Williamson
What are the most common injuries?
- [81:05]
DJ Shipley
Shoulders, hips, knees, tbi. Neck, low back.
- [81:10]
Chris Williamson
And what's this from? From shooting everything.
- [81:13]
DJ Shipley
Skydiving, climbing the boats, everything. It just. It's rough, man. It's rough on the body. And now you don't sleep. When I say don't sleep, I mean realistically, like actual sleep. Two hours a night. Like you don't sleep. And a lot of that is you think when you get overseas, we're on vampire hours. So you don't see the sun for three to six months, however long you're going to be overseas. But you wake up at five in the afternoon and you drink coffee all night. You get back home at 5am, you eat breakfast and you try to go to sleep. Now the sun's up, your body gets that dose of vitamin D and now you're just chasing it.
- [81:50]
Chris Williamson
Are you using light therapy, sad lamps, or any sort of equivalent when you're over there?
- [81:56]
DJ Shipley
We didn't have WI fi for my first three or four deployments. No, it should be better now, but back in the day they couldn't even prescribe you vitamin D because it was a hormone replacement. That's what they classified in the military. Now it's different. But I mean, fingernails falling out, hair falling out. Why not seeing the sun for six months, like literally not seeing it.
- [82:15]
Chris Williamson
He turned into a bat.
- [82:16]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. And you feel like death face all sucked in. Food's terrible. Like you got a food allergy or like, dude, I can't. I couldn't eat a boiled egg right now if you gave me a million dollars. I've eaten thousands and thousands of hard boiled eggs. I'm not exact. Thousands of them. You get a receipt. You're like, I can't eat this food, dude. I can't. What are you eating? Hard boiled eggs and white rice three times a day. I'm just gonna keep going. It's exhausting, man.
- [82:42]
Chris Williamson
But it's surprising to me that everything would be so optimized in the buildup and then seemingly so, like under optimized once you get out there. Like. And also why. Why is no. 1 the probably the single biggest performance enhancer for anybody is sleeping?
- [83:02]
DJ Shipley
Because you don't always get to dictate when you're gonna go, but when you're
- [83:06]
Chris Williamson
at home and you're training, how come that's not my prioritized.
- [83:10]
DJ Shipley
You gotta think about. So see, on a training schedule, we'll say you get up at 5, you run through the entire day, and we'll say you're doing a night profile at night. You're not even gonna get geared up for that night profile until 8:30 at night. That's gonna go until 2 or 3 in the morning. So when you wake up, you're still gonna clock in and do a full normal day. So you can either come in at 6, you can come in at 7, or you can come in at 5 and just live the exact same routine. So a lot of guys have hammocks in their cage area. They'll just sleep in the cage. They'll come in two. The cage probably a quarter size of this room. Everybody has their own. So all your gear's in it. Guns, bullets, bombs, all the stuff is in there. But they'll string up a hammock and they'll just sleep in it. Guys tempurpedic mattress on the floor and they'll just sleep in it.
- [83:52]
Chris Williamson
Because it's easier than having to commute to go back home to then come back because you're losing half an hour each way or maybe.
- [83:57]
DJ Shipley
Exactly. I go in, I wake up my wife, my alarm clock goes off, she's like, why are you getting up? You gotta have this awkward conversation, jump back in the car, just drive back in, rinse and repeat again. So a lot of time guys just stay there. You get used to it. But when it's happening in the moment, you don't realize what it's doing. Like, you'll watch your weight fluctuate. Like, you know, everybody gets overseas, everybody tries to get big and jacked on deployment. You come back home and it's like, I can't maintain this. I'm not sleeping, I'm not eating right. All the stuff starts to happen to you. You start to erode a little bit of yourself. When you go on these stints where you get really, really jacked in great shape, like, oh, I can maintain this, but your sleep is garbage because you're pushing too hard. Yeah. And it's one of the, like, if I talk to anybody else, like, you're doing too much. You need to Break it down. You need to take two weeks off. Don't do anything physical. My mental health will just spiral out of control so fast. I have to stay on the routine, because if not, then my confidence drops. So I know I need to sleep. I know I shouldn't do anything in the gym today. I know I shouldn't, but if I don't, my confidence drops. Then what? Then what do you want me to do?
- [85:00]
Chris Williamson
Just constantly chasing your vicious feedback loop.
- [85:02]
DJ Shipley
Vicious?
- [85:04]
Chris Williamson
Is your mood and health better when? Because it seems like being overseas in some ways might be a little bit easier because there aren't the distractions. You're sort of locked in, but you're also vampire mode with shitty food and all of the other issues.
- [85:21]
DJ Shipley
Best time you ever had in your life, being overseas. Most guys will tell you they sleep better now when I. Now, because I'm out. I've got a bunch of different modalities that help me sleep better now, but I sleep way better overseas than I do when I'm in town.
- [85:34]
Chris Williamson
Even now.
- [85:35]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, way better. Always. You just do.
- [85:40]
Chris Williamson
I can't remember what movie it is. Maybe it's Rambo or maybe it's the Expendables or something. And I know it's a cliche, but it sounds like it might be true that there's a guy who comes back home after he's been on deployment or he's been on some sort of operation, and he's struggling to sleep in the bed, so he decides to sleep on the floor and just put his arm under his head. And it kind of feels a little bit like that. You become conditioned to have one particular type of environment, and one that's objectively better is subjectively. Kalian.
- [86:12]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, man. I miss it. You make me time travel right now. It is the most fun you'll ever have in your entire life. It is. Like, even all the bullshit, the sleepless nights, Ambien, whatever else, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Give me $10 million right now to erase those memories. I wouldn't touch it. Not a chance, dude. But in the moment, it all seems like it's worth it. I just wish I was able to find a better balance. One, because for me, I wasn't able to. I had too many things that were weighing on me. Too many things in the family. And it became so much easier to be overseas and to isolate, not throw up family photos. Limited times you're going to FaceTime. Limited times you're going to call home. Because in the moment, the last thing I want is for that window to light up. I've got to run over there and deal with it. And I don't want to think about orphaning my kids, making my wife a two time widow. I don't want to do that. I can't have that inside of me. So it sounds selfish, but I've had a lot of amazing mentors that have said the same thing. If you think that I'm thinking about my wife on that Hilo flight in, I'm not. If you think I'm wondering what my kids are doing, I'm not. I'm only thinking about that dude because I've been staring his face the last 72 hours. That's the only thing I'm thinking about. The Hilo flight in, the walk in, the patrol, atmospheric, everything. That's the only thing I'm thinking about.
- [87:30]
Chris Williamson
So compartmentalization again, it's an interesting study that I learned about that was looking at attachment styles. And they brought people into a lab and in classic psychological study fashion, the study began before people realized the study began. They're in this waiting room together and over the far side is a computer. And the computer begins to just drift a little bit of smoke out, just a small amount, like it might be about to catch fire, something like that. Before they'd gone in, they'd done an attachment style assessment on all of the people that were in there. And there were some that were anxious, some that were avoidant, and there were some that were securely attached. What was interesting was the anxious people were the first ones that noticed that the smoke was coming out of the computer. But the avoidant people were the first ones out the door. And that explains why you need in a Dunbar number 150 person tribe, why you need a variety of attachment styles. You need someone, the type are vigilant, who's always watching that ridge where sometimes the animals or the enemies come over. But you need other people that are decisive. And one of the skills that the avoidance side seem to have is an ability to compartmentalize. So the anxious people would be more likely to think, it's okay, should we, can we leave? Are we allowed to? Whereas evo people are like, it's just a wily coyote. It's just a puff of dust and they're gone. And what I thought was interesting about that was I imagined that I was putting together a, a police force or something. And you want the SWAT guys and the ers, you want them on average to be avoidant, you want them to be able to compartmentalize what it is that they've got going on. Like, nope, I don't need you right now. This person needs me to look after them. But you want the detective to be anxious. You want him to pay a level of attention to things where they can't switch you out. They're thinking and ruminating and ruminating. It was behind the kitchen door, you know, like that's. And it's. It's just interesting to me that the things which you are praised for in public, you pay for in private. And your inability to switch that sort of stuff off, you know, like those adaptations that you've gone through and the same traits and focus that make elite operators effective can probably make normal life in relationships extremely difficult.
- [89:54]
DJ Shipley
It does. Because at a certain point you start to think that everything is just a time sucker, a bandwidth suck. Like right now, this conversation we're having, it doesn't make me better at work. It doesn't. In fact, it just makes me want to go to work to avoid this right now. It really makes me just want to stay on deployment, not come home so I don't have to deal with this shit. And then you start to spit and venom, talk about trauma. Like it stacks up inside you, gets the right. You guys got yards of beer in the uk? Yeah, that's just trauma starts to come out of your mouth. It's hate, it's hostility, it's all this stuff. Before you know it, you can't control it. Every time you go home, just launching it. Well, the only place I never launch it is at work. Because everybody else is the same as me. We talk about the same things, we only speak in movie quotes. We're on the same workout routine. We fight together, shoes together, sleep together, do everything together. And I never feel like I'm outside the group. I never feel like I'm a bother, ever. Every time I come home, I feel like this is not my place. It's not my place because I'm never here. You don't realize that while you're inside it. Like I don't realize that I've been gone for 300 days this year. I wonder why I don't feel like this is my house. Like every time I come home, you change the. You change up. Why do I have all these pillows? Every time I come home there's another pillow. Change the bedspread and all this stuff. Like you just. You never really feel like you're there to just recompartmentalize right back to work.
- [91:10]
Chris Williamson
Also, you're asking an awful lot of A partner, Right? You're saying, hey, this connection, that is going to be almost entirely severed, except for a few brief moments here and there across an entire year. When I come back, I want you to immediately drop into this. I've got my problems to go through, but I don't want to have to deal with the problems that you've got because that's additional capacity that I've already blown.
- [91:34]
DJ Shipley
Well said. This is exactly what it is. So now when I talk to the guys, I tell them, like, unless you lasso a unicorn, which I did. I mean, she was into it. She was in a Navy. She was married to a SEAL that got killed. Her dad was a seal. She knew the culture. She knew what she was getting into. I wanted.
- [91:50]
Chris Williamson
It's like she was bred to be the wife of a SEAL for sure. Yeah.
- [91:54]
DJ Shipley
It's like I wanted that picture perfect life. I wanted my dream job. I wanted the house, the 2.5 kids, the Labrador, the white picket fence. I want everything taken care of. And every time I come home, I just resent it. Like, I know this is what I want, but you need so much attention from me that I cannot give you. And she just kept going. She'd show up. If tree fell on the house, she fix it.
- [92:18]
Chris Williamson
Navy SEAL of wives.
- [92:19]
DJ Shipley
I don't know how to do anything. I don't know who cuts my grass. I don't know who to call. If a tree does fall in the house, she does. She handles it all. So I got to focus on my craft the whole time. What sucked is trying to reintegrate. Because now it's like, hey, job's done. I've got a couple weeks off. Let's all be a happy family. And I don't know how to do it because I can't shut off. You're too hyper, vigilant. I'm on a 10 all day long. I'm two hand texting. Just checking my phone, checking my phone, check my phone. Hey, let's go on a vacation. I can't go on a vacation. No, you just came back from diploma. Let's go on vacation. I'm not going on a vacation. I'm going on a jump trip. I got to get better at skydiving, not sitting in the Bahamas. I don't know what that does. It doesn't make me better at cqb. No, not doing that. So we avoided that for the majority of our marriage. We just said that couldn't justify it. That doesn't make me better at work. Doesn't. I wish I would have done it. But I tell the guys, if I would have spent my first four years really focused on the craft, I probably wouldn't have thought that I needed to burn all that time and all those reps later on in my career.
- [93:20]
Chris Williamson
I don't know, man. I understand what you're saying. I get the feeling that that might be a comforting myth to tell yourself that if only I'd done it another way, I could have made it work in this manner later on. I get the sense that it is less like the pursuit of mastery and more like an addiction to work, that I just need to keep it going. Obviously, again, I'm now in road Triple Z at the fucking back of the stadium. I know enough people. I know people in bands and bands are the same. You're on the road for 180, 200, 250 days of the year. Jimmy Carr is. I think he's doing 425 shows this year.
- [94:07]
DJ Shipley
What?
- [94:07]
Chris Williamson
Because he matinees the shows? So he'll do a 6pm show and then an 8pm show. He did. How many fucking dates did he do? He did like 100 and something dates just in Australia. It's absurd. It's absurd, but has to be obsessed.
- [94:24]
DJ Shipley
Have to be.
- [94:24]
Chris Williamson
You do. And the same thing goes for. The interesting thing about the comedian thing is typically they're traveling on their own. Are traveling with one warm up, warm up and tour manager. And I think there's a minimum, minimum sort of group size that you need in order to be able to make a micro culture. And I think that's what really embeds people into it might make it easier in some ways, but probably makes it harder to integrate. Makes it easier when they're on the road, but harder to integrate when you get back. And that's where if you look at people that are in bands, people that are in sports teams, professional sports teams, that is what's particularly difficult, I think, because you have created this new light where it's you and your five bandmates, it's you and squad of 15, and that's us. And this is what we do. And that reintegration is incredibly difficult, I think, to bring that back across. I think that's where the struggle comes in. But yeah, man, the prospect of trying to come back and doing this thing that you know, that you care about and that you know is noble and that you're doing for the right reasons and that you're trying to make the world and your country a safer place and to then come back and to have struggled to. I mean, again, as you said, you've got it sounds like as close to a gold standard partner fucking bred for this. That maybe bred more to be a seal's wife than you were to be a seal, by the sounds of things. It really does surprise me. I'm not suggesting this, but it does surprise me that if the military cared that much about the integration and the performance, because presumably if there'd been, if everybody had had a partner like yours, which still had shit ton of difficulties, the guys, there have to be many, many levels of hell below the one that you did when it comes to what's happening relationally that can't improve their performance when they're away. So if that's the case, why. Why aren't the army trying to have some sort of X factor pop idol thing for, hey, we are going to help you find a partner and we're actually going to help you and your partner to make sure that for the person that gets into a relationship with a special operator, they have the psychological accoutrements that are appropriate for them to actually be able to deal with this and they're going to be able to support you, which would make you into a better person. It seems to me in very few areas it's such an overbearing, like, incursion into somebody's life, right? Like, who the fuck you mean that you're going to try and like screen partners so that I get that. But when you're talking about, oh, the most important military operations on the planet, I mean, if you're covering everything from, you said, I's are dotted, t's are crossed, every single bullet and bomb and tactic. And I've worked thousands and thousands and thousands of jumps and I've drilled this thing over and over again. A huge impact on your performance is going to be your relationship to your kids, what reintegration looks like when you get off duty, who it is that you choose as a partner, all of those things. So I don't know, maybe this is too softly softy skills. And you can always just like spit and sawdust and grit your teeth and Ambien and Adderall your way through it. And it kind of doesn't really matter that much because like, okay, whatever, there's going to be some collateral damage that occurs relationally, but fuck it, the guys will just show up anyway. That's why we select people who can compartmentalize and put that stuff to one side. But it seems to me that even the capacity for compartmentalization could be used more effectively if it wasn't being drained relationally. Does that all make sense?
- [98:05]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Do you know what the divorce rate in the SEAL teams are?
- [98:07]
Chris Williamson
No.
- [98:08]
DJ Shipley
Over 100%
- [98:11]
Chris Williamson
because people get remarried and then run it back and then get out again. Brilliant.
- [98:15]
DJ Shipley
The first guy, first Troop Chief I had on his fifth.
- [98:18]
Chris Williamson
That's impressive.
- [98:20]
DJ Shipley
My business partner is now on his third. Totally normal. Most guys have been divorced at least once. At least once.
- [98:26]
Chris Williamson
Wow.
- [98:28]
DJ Shipley
It's cost doing business. And a lot of that is because guys come in so young. We did a thing where we didn't take any guys that were in the Navy prior. You had to come in basically off the street or straight out of college. We didn't want guys had any fleet time. So you think the majority of the kids that show up are between 18 and 21, 22 years old. What do the majority of those guys do? They marry their high school sweetheart, some chick they met in college, some chick they met in San Diego, who's there on college, whatever. And then you move her to a place she's never been, no support system, and then you leave her there for an entire year by herself. You come back home, you're distant, you're not connected with her, and you just keep putting her through it over and over. She has one deployment, maybe two, and she's like, I need for you to get out. He ain't getting out for you. No. He didn't even know your middle name, if we're being honest. Beat it. Get a divorce. It's like, you're not worth it right now. I'm on this speeding bullet train on my fingertips right now. I'm not jumping because of you. I'm not. Sacrifice must be made. And usually you sacrifice the ones you love the most. That's what I did. Those are the times I regret it. I wish I would have had a better balance point. But in that time, I couldn't justify it. I couldn't. I didn't have it in me. And I think that's kind of the excuse I come up with. If I would have lived, if I would have had the mentors I had later in my career, when I first got in and I would have followed their path, would have found the role models. I'm going to sit there, I'm going to ride your coattails, and I'm going to live your routine. I think I would have found a balance point.
- [99:49]
Chris Williamson
What would have been the biggest differences,
- [99:54]
DJ Shipley
really? Just being a pro. I'm going to live a routine from the day I Show up to the day I leave, not going to drink the excess. And that's really the difference is There was so much 80s and 90s special operations spillover when I came in the early 2000s. Drinking, fighting, fucking. That's what you did. You traveled around like you were in the Rolling Stones. Every bar you went into, beating up college kids, stealing their girlfriends, doing that over and over and over because you're single. It's fun, it's normal, but you're not training at full capacity like we're training hard and then we're going to burn this thing to the ground. Later on in my career, the guys that were just, they set the standard for the most lethal people you have never met in your life. Two drinks in a single sitting, that's it. You never saw them drunk, they never wore flip flops, they beat the brakes off you 24, 7, 365. They could always perform on demand and they truly just lived it. Were they the best husbands and fathers? No, I hope they are now. But it certainly appeared that a lot of them had a balance point. But they had been living this professional life like a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant the whole time, from 19 years old. Exactly. They were a monk. Like you never saw them at a bar, they were never shit faced, they never got a DUI and they could send it.
- [101:06]
Chris Williamson
You don't need to say who it is that might be active or out. Now who is the person that, what is the archetype of the person that's been most impressive to you, the single operator that you've seen? What are they like?
- [101:21]
DJ Shipley
Probably the most cloneable. Oh, man, I can't even say that. Like the best guy. I don't know how, I don't know how they are at home. You think you know how they are at home because of how they interact. Because you got to think, man, the majority of those people you spend a decade together with, new guys will come in and out, but most of the guys you're spending seven to eight years unbroken, just together, hopefully gets a ten year mark. And then you have to rotate out. The best guy I have ever seen, the most well rounded, in amazing shape, an amazing high school wrestler, transitioned over to mma. An amazing skydiver, amazing shooter. Culturally, if you could mass produce and make a thousand of him, I would press that button right now and I drop him on every corner of the earth. Just the best. But he lived that routine, his routine. And here's where you know the difference, everybody. You talk to, anybody who's ever worked With a seal. If we get overseas, we come to a new base. Very first thing we ask for, where's the chow hall? Where's the gym? Chow hall and gym. I'll figure out everything else after that. Chow hall, gym, where is it? Everybody shows up and everybody does a lift. Everybody. I don't care if you're a marathon runner, whatever. They all do fitness first thing in the morning. And then we focus on hard skills the rest of the day. That dude and a bunch of other guys would show up, they would get that lift in, they'd go straight over to Fight Club. They do Muay Thai or BJJ for an hour. They jump in a cryo chamber, they jump in a float tank. They get E stem work done, soft tissue work. They'd go eat breakfast, then go upstairs to the 10am meeting, then do CQB for a four hour block, eat lunch, another CQB for a 4 hour block, eat dinner and go home and be a husband or father. They did that unbroken the entire time. I've known them long before it was cool. Long before you could look at guys like Michael Phelps or Steph Curry for inspiration. They live that routine unbroken because you go on these pockets like you go on these trips, shooting trips, jump trips, whatever. And we'll say you go to Arizona on a three week trip. The guys who hate jumping might do 50 to 75 jumps in three weeks. The guys who are really into it will do 250. They jump all weekend, 10, 12 jumps a day, every single day, unbroken. And they're just stacking their resume over and over and over. So when you call them, you're like, hey, I need you to pull this off. There's no warmup, there's no mulligan. I can't go back and reju, like I can just send it all day long. That's how they lived. And when you look at them like if I could just press the clone button and make a thousand of you, I could do anything. Yeah. You want to end the Iranian regime? Done right there.
- [103:57]
Chris Williamson
That's a good question. For most, for most conflicts, what is the number of special operators, Tier one special operators that you need to be able to topple pretty much any regime in the world.
- [104:10]
DJ Shipley
How big is the regime?
- [104:15]
Chris Williamson
Let's say the size of it can't be Russia or China because it's going to be insane. Like the size of any normal mid sized country with a like semi competent military like Middle east type stuff.
- [104:27]
DJ Shipley
It's not even really the operator. It's supporting Assets. It's the helo pilots, it's the drone pilots, it's the air coverage overhead. It's everybody in between that makes the whole mechanism role. But when we get off camera, I'll tell you how many guys there are. It's so very small. Like if people knew how small it was, they wouldn't even think it's cool. They're like, it can't be like that. It's somewhere in between astronauts and F1. There ain't many, dude. I mean there's not. If you look at the whole scope of the military.00001%. Like we're not talking hundreds of people. It's very small.
- [104:57]
Chris Williamson
Wow.
- [104:58]
DJ Shipley
So when you get them in there, it's like you don't need a whole lot. I mean on your typical, you know, I'm dating myself with Afghanistan and Iraq, but I mean your typical assault on however many people in a four story compound. 12 people. 12 people. You do anything? You don't need a lot. You just need 12 really badass dudes. They can get it done. Just let them loose.
- [105:21]
Chris Williamson
Who were you the day after you retired? Who were you the day after you retired?
- [105:28]
DJ Shipley
Lost and alone? I was coming off a pretty bad injury. I had a really cool transition. Got out on a Friday, and on Monday morning I was starting a contract with the Air Force. Three weeks before that I'd been electrocuted. So went through a bunch of surgeries and got really.
- [105:45]
Chris Williamson
You've been electrocuted?
- [105:47]
DJ Shipley
Oh, God. Have you not heard that?
- [105:48]
Chris Williamson
No. Tell me the story.
- [105:49]
DJ Shipley
God. Okay. I get in a bad jump accident, dislocate my shoulder. It spins through shreds, the entire thing. And now I'm on a medical retirement board. So I've got to get all these surgeries. In the process of that, they found out I was taking all these medications. A bunch of them you couldn't take together. So this new doc comes in, he's like, hey, we got a serious problem, dude. I was like, what is. He goes, you can't take these four medications together. It'll give you a stroke and you'll die. Well, I've been taking those for nine years now. They ain't had a stroke yet. And he went, okay, here's the deal. I'm going to send you to Walter Reed. This nice program, you'll love it. It's a. It's a medical detox facility. So you're going to go there, we're going to wash you out all the meds. We'll put you on a Couple ones you maintain long term. We got to get you off these meds. What it really is is a psych ward. So I show up there, bright eyed, bushy tailed, really just a shell of myself, but not realizing what I'm going to do. And they start taking my shoestrings, take all my stuff. And I'm looking around, I'm like, what is going on here? And then, you know, had these nice nurses, but they were fighter pilots in there, There were green Berets in there. There were all these people in there and you could see them. One of the guys had really bad Parkinson's. He had an injection right out of a fighter jet. I mean, jammed up, like, couldn't speak, non verbal. And I'm looking around like, why am I in this room? Like I'm good dude. Like I didn't realize how far I had fallen. Like what I look like at the time, face all sunk in, 185 pounds, just like not who I used to be. So he put me in this hospital bed, essentially strapped me down for 31 consecutive days. And I do a full med washout. By day three, three or four, I'm in full detox mode. I don't realize it. I think I have food poisoning. I'm throwing up in the bed, I piss all over myself. They're changing my sheets, blotting me with the wet napkins. I mean doing the whole thing. I just keep apologizing. I'm so sorry. I don't know what I ate. I don't know what I ate. You know, day four, five, six. Got this pretty black nurse and she's like, oh honey, you don't know what this is? No. And she's like, it's going to be okay. I was washing out of all those medications I was on.
- [108:02]
Chris Williamson
Can you say what the meds were?
- [108:03]
DJ Shipley
Everything from atabol, Cymbalta, Zoloft, Prazosin. Who are the big pain meds? Tramadol, Toradol, Percocet, Vicodin, everything. Everything and anything you could be put on. I was safe.
- [108:19]
Chris Williamson
That sounds like something that might give you a stroke.
- [108:20]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, yeah. Well, I wasn't taking an excess, I wasn't chewing them up, I wasn't snorting them. But I'd wake up and I'd take them all day long. But I had such bad TBI after this injury. Really photophobic. I wore sunglasses basically all day, every day. If I looked at those things, I get a crazy headache. I'd get sick, I'd throw up. So we're Going through all these different protocols, they washed me out of these meds and I wanted to die. When I finally felt what true sobriety was. And because I was under this illusion, because I'm not drinking excess like I did when I was in my teens and twenties, I'm good. I didn't realize popping all these pills is the equivalent of drinking a 12 pack every three hours. And that's what it is. I was stoned under the influence of a narcotic or under prescription medication. 247365 from 10 until 22. So this is 2018, 2019. Now, something like that, we get washed out of these meds. And while I'm in there, it's probably day 15 or 20, the Red Cross comes in, they're bringing in dogs, I mean dog therapy, all this stuff. And she goes, can I get you anything? And I was like, I don't know. She's like, hey, we're doing art therapy next door. What about a skateboard? Can you give me a skateboard? She's like, yeah. She brings me a change of clothes, they sneak me out of the hospital. And there's a skateboard shop right outside of Bethesda, Maryland. I can't remember the name of it. I think it's Siren or something. We walk in there, she sees my arm bandage. He's like, what's going on? I was like, you have a skateboard in here? He gave me two off the wall, I sanded them down, went back, painted them, paper mache, all this stuff. And that's what started into what Tribe skates was. It was my transition out of the military. I'm going to make my mental health version was instead of painting mask or anything else, I'm going to paint skateboards. So going to get a skateboard team, going to start mass producing these things, all this stuff. But for me it was the creativity of doing that in that process. I found fracture burning. You ever seen that? You take a microwave transformer, you pop it out and you splice jumper cables into it and then you hooked it to an octopus outlet and you flicked a switch. So if I sanded down all the lacquer off this table and I drove a 10 penny nail in there and there I clipped these two things on and I poured Coca Cola across this table. It would burn the wood grain and they would all connect. Right?
- [110:32]
Chris Williamson
You're making a cool pattern.
- [110:33]
DJ Shipley
Oh, a sick pattern, right. I burnt everything. So I'm burning these skateboards and I'm knocking out some of the coolest pieces I'VE ever seen ever. Getting really good at it. I don't realize how dangerous it is though. I'm not an electrician. I don't know.
- [110:48]
Chris Williamson
I'm not an electrician either. But it sounds dangerous.
- [110:51]
DJ Shipley
It looks more dangerous than it sounds. If you see the machine I was running with, it is so sketchy. But you know, I'm not on Google, I'm not on YouTube, I'm not looking how dangerous it is. There's no chat. GPT.
- [111:02]
Chris Williamson
Where are you doing this?
- [111:03]
DJ Shipley
Anywhere and everywhere. In my garage, in my backyard, everywhere. I'm just burning hundreds of skateboards at this point. And I've got my retirement date. It's supposed to be like August 31, 2019. We're on Father's Day. So what is that? July, June, July, whatever that is, June, it's Father's Day. Morning. I've been burning since 4, 5, 30 in the morning, something like that. Got up early, knocking them all out. I mean I got stacks of these things and around, I'll call it 8 o' clock in the morning. My mind isn't the sharpest anymore. I get a call from an EOD guy. It's a bomb tech in the Navy. Explosive Ordinance Disposal. They have a retirement ceremony that's going on and he's got these huge paddles, like these eight foot oars. And they wrap them all up, this decorative string and do all this stuff. And he's like, hey, can you burn them for me? I was like, yeah dude, come over. He comes over. One of the critical elements on fracture burning is you can't have lacquer, no stain. It's got to be bare wood. If not, it'll melt the lacquer. It screws up the entire piece. He comes over this eight foot oar. I'm like, oh brother, you gotta, you gotta sand that off. So I unplug my machine. He plugs in a sander and starts sanding it down, getting all off. I'm cleaning up my boards and part of that process. I've got them on easels and I'm spraying them with the hose. I got a big wire brush and I'm knocking off the ash out of them to clean them all out, Hose them off, hose them off, hose them off. So you can imagine my backyard. I've just got skateboards everywhere, drying in the sun. I've already washed off. There's standing water all over it. I'm essentially sit on a concrete pad burning these things. And we get done. My wife bangs on a window and she's like, hey, it's Father's Day. Gotta go eat breakfast. Last burn. Both my kids are in a bay window for me to that TV away, watching me. I turned around, he had finished sanding. He'd unplugged his machine and plugged mine back in. And it flicked the breaker. So they're laying on the ground live. I don't know it because I never let anybody be around me when I burn. So, I mean, you can put these things in your mouth. It's not hooked to any electricity. So I grab them, I go to readjust them and lights me up. I got them in both hands. I contracted so hard, it shattered my collarbone. It shattered my scapula. It blew out of my finger, blew out of my palm. Top of my head came out of my thighs. One next to my ass. And right when I held it, right when it popped, I took a step back and I landed in that giant pool of water, ankle deep. Blew me up in the air and shot me across the yard. Still holding on to these things. Him, because he's an EOD guy and he's smarter than me, had the wherewithal to unplug the machine. So when I wake up, I'm on the flat of my back. He's right in my face. He's like, do you know where you are? On the ground. And I remember exhaling and seeing smoke come out of my mouth. My hair was real long at the time. It's all standing up, hair, smoking. Hands are all smoked out. I'm like, jesus Christ. He's like, how do you feel? And I was like, shoulders dislocated, something. I mean, shoulders like hanging down, the hair, the whole thing. Shattered pieces. I stand up, I try to walk. I try to walk around for a bit. I tell the old lady, go get my keys. I'm going to drive myself to the hospital. Typical team guy fashion. She's like, you're an idiot. She's yelling at me. I'm telling her to shut up. Kids are running around, everybody's screaming. He's trying to break down the machines. My kids don't run out. We get around to the corner and I've probably got to walk maybe 30, 40ft to my car. Not far. Date myself a movie quote. You seen Kill Bill? Do you know the five finger death touch he does? He takes five steps and he falls over and dies. That's what happened to me. I stood up, I walked on the side of my house. I took one big step. She's inside. I can hear her run around with the kids, trying to tell them all, like, hey, dad got hurt. You got to take him to the hospital. Your mom, your grandma's going to come over. He's trying to break down the machine. I take a step, and everything goes jet black on the periphery. I'm like, fuck, fuck, fuck. I take another one, close in again. I'm like, I don't want to die in Virginia Beach. If you ask anybody who's ever met me, that is my number one fear. I do not want to die in Virginia Beach. No matter what. Don't let me die there. I take my third step. I'm in a toilet paper, too. This is going to be it. I take one more. Total blindness. I can't see anything. And my eyes are as open, as big as I can get them. I can't see anything, dude. Ears start roaring. I'm on the side of this house. Panic at the disco. I'm not screaming. I'm just freaking out. Like, I'm looking up. I can't see an ounce of daylight. Oh, my God. This is it. I'm blind. Oh, my God. I start hyperventilating over and over and over, as loud and as deep as I can. Probably 30, 40 seconds in my mind, kind of drifting off. And I see a little pinhole of light. Yep. I just stare at it, keep power breathing. And it opens up, opens up, opens up. And then boom. Like, I have superhuman vision. I can see everything. I can see the texture from the brick. From 40ft away. I mean, I can see anything and everything. And I can feel everything. Like, I can feel my wife walking through the house, Living a big brick house. I can feel her walking through it. Like, it's. Ask anybody who's ever been electrocuted. You start to feel weird stuff. He gets me up in that car. Not let me drive to the hospital. We drive. It's probably three miles from me to our local hospital. Like, the big one. Hit every single pothole in Virginia Beach. It was like he doubled back to try to get it. If you ever had a collarbone broken or shattered, that's the move, man. You can feel it. You can move around. The whole thing's just hinging. Arm's basically just swinging around. It's terrible. We get in, get into the burn unit. And that was a time during COVID So everybody in there has a mask on. Virginia beach has probably the most gorgeous nurses on the planet, but you can only see their eyes. Beautiful mascara, crystal blue eyes. And now I can see it all now. So I'm processing it Fingers are inside you. I mean, they're doing all this stuff. They're moving my shoulders around. I'm screaming at them, tell them to stop. And I'll never forget. I tell this. They all laugh at me. This nurse swings her beautiful eyes in front of me, and she goes, Mr. Shipley, I am so surprised you still have a penis. Jesus Christ. And she's like, oh, honey, when guys get electrocuted, everything comes off. Fingers go off, your nose, your ears. Like if you hit it with one side, your whole opposite arm will get blown off. Like, it opens up your rib cage. And she goes, from what we can tell right now, outside of what's blown up on you, like, you're good. So I make it through that, make it three or four more hours. They've got to lift me to a different burn unit, very specific. And when I get inside that one, this. This ER doc comes in. He's like, hey, dude, I'm probably two, 230 pounds at the time. I just rebuilt from this gnarly shoulder surgery. Been in the best shape I've been in very long time. So I feel like Superman, except now I'm at a hospital bed. He comes in, he goes, hey, do you know what rhabdo is? I said, yeah. And he goes, when you get electrocuted, your body goes through it, produces an enzyme very similar to rhabdo. All your muscles liquefy, they go septic. I gotta cut em out or you'll die, okay? And he goes, so I gotta come back every hour. And when your blood marker, that enzyme hits a certain level, I gotta start cutting you up. And I'm sitting there, I'd been through so much, so many injuries, so many surgeries and all this stuff. I'm like, when you say, cut me up, what does that mean? He goes, pecs, lats, quads, hamstrings, delts, biceps, triceps, shoulders, everything has to go. The bigger I got to get it out quick because once it liquefies, it's gonna go fast. I'm like, how sure? And he goes, as sure as I know. The sun's about to set in three hours, like happens to everybody. Like, oh, my God. He leaves the room, I start hysterically crying. My wife is bawling, and I just wanted a gun next to me so I could shoot myself. I the lowest I'd ever been. I was already struggling with depression, everything. I'd leave that hospital bed, comes back in an hour later, checks my blood. So far, so good. Be back in an hour. Back in an Hour, back in an hour, back in an hour, doing the whole thing. And he came back in probably five, six hours later. And he's like, hey, dude, for whatever reason, not only is your enzyme marker not getting bitter, there's not a trace up in your whole body. He's like, we scheduled you for surgery next Tuesday. Gonna put in a plate and like, 15 screws in your collarbone. You can go home. I mean, I was in a hospital for four or five days, but, yeah, survived that. Survived the electrocution, did all that stuff. And that was really kind of the premise for tribeskates. That's how the whole thing started, was all art therapy. And, yeah, that. That was the worst, man. I had to rebuild my thumb. My tendon got attached to the nerve bundle, so my thumb got fused like this for about a year. We had to do a Z lengthening, open the whole thing up so I could actually move my thumb again. Caught my shorts on fire like, it was. It was dicey, dude. That was. That was my transition. So when I transitioned out of the military, that's what I had to do. So by the time I actually got my DD214, you are retired on a Friday. Here's your retirement paperwork. I started a job the very next Monday. I couldn't even put on body armor because I just had surgery. So I had foam plates and trying to teach these guys CQB arms and two slings. Just trying to pretend like it wasn't there. So I'd show up with double slings. I'd take them both off, and I'd just stand there holding my kit like this because I couldn't move my arms. That's how I had to teach. That was my transition.
- [120:29]
Chris Williamson
Heightened injuries, about as gold standard as you could get for making it worse than it already was.
- [120:34]
DJ Shipley
The worst thing that's ever happened to me. I had the best transition. You know, working with the Air Force was an amazing experience. That transition, that fall from grace, was nothing I've ever seen. No one ever told you about it. I thought it was going to be the best thing that ever happened to me. Grow your long hair. I'm going to smoke weed. I'm going to do whatever I want to. Military doesn't own me. Yes, yes, yes. I've never craved anything more than I wanted to be back in. I knew exactly what everybody did. I do not want to be a civilian. I need to get back into work as soon as humanly possible, and it wasn't an option. Now what do I do? What do I do? Now I don't know how to do anything else. And that's when you really realize I've been developing a skill set that is useless to everyone else. Nobody needs this. You think Elon Musk's gonna call me, like, hey, I'm thinking about building a tier one assault team. Wanna be on it? That phone call's not coming, dude. Nobody needs you. And now if you get out and you get on social media and you ever talk about what you did, then you get bastardized by the community. You write a book. Now everybody hates you. Open up a podcast, Everybody hates you. What am I supposed to do? I don't know how to do anything. I didn't go to college, didn't get a real estate license. I don't have a relationship with my wife, don't have a relationship with my kids. I've sacrificed everything to try to be as good at this one thing as humanly possible. And I was trying to do it for 30 years, and now at 17, I don't have it. I don't have any transferable skill set. What do I do? Spiral. Spiral. Spiral. Yeah. You didn't have any sanity check. I had no group, no reason to get out of bed at 5am I didn't have anything else. So when I'm laying there in rehab, I'm at my house all gimped up. I get a knock at the door. I answer the door. It's my strength coach, Vernon Griffith. Best strength coach in the world. Oh, I love this guy. He was my guy that brought me back after the. The shoulder injury from Scott. Ivan brought me all back. And he shows up and he's like, oh, God, are you still milking it? Shut up. We like gimping in my kitchen. I sit down and I am. I'm really feeling sorry for myself. Like, I do not want to play the game. If my hands weren't as bad as they were, I probably would have killed myself. I couldn't do anything. Like, I couldn't even pull a trigger, Mic. I don't even know how I do it. And he's like, well, if you're done making excuses, what can you do? Nothing, dude. I can do nothing. He's like, can you walk? I was like, I can barely walk. Yeah, I mean, I can walk. He said, can you move your hands? Hands are all bandaged up. And I was like, yeah. He's like, can you curl your wrist? I said, yeah, but I'm in double slings. I can't do a bicep curl. I can't do anything. He's like, cool. Pulls out this blue 2 pound dumbbell about that big and puts it in my hand. He goes, extend it, curl it up, print at your wrist. Same thing. Looks like we can do wrist curls and 20 minute walks. And we did that every single day, multiple times a day, until I could pressurize my upper body. And then we got back in the gym, belt squatting, doing nothing but belt squats and lunges for eight weeks. Surgery all healed. Now we can do upper body. And then we just stayed on that exact same routine. So as low as I was, the only reason I was as low as I was is I didn't have the group. I don't have a group now. What do I have? I've got my family now. I don't have my routine. Get back on the routine, back in the gym, living the exact same routine I've lived my entire life surrounding myself with people better than me. Naturally started to pull me out of the depression. Anytime I've ever hit that bottom again, it's because I've been outside of my routine where I put my individual needs for needs, my group. And the guilt started to really affect me. So I don't try to overcomplicate anymore. So my transition out was terrible. My rebuild looked exactly like it's been every day since I was 15 or 16. Back on the routine, don't break it, no matter what. Yeah, that's me. That's me getting electrocuted. Terrible.
- [124:19]
Chris Williamson
And what about the psychological changes? You know, I understand that physiology and psychology are very closely linked for you, But I think 50% of pro athletes get divorced within one year of retiring from their sport. I would imagine that the same thing is true for bankruptcy. I would imagine that the same thing is true for drug use, for reckless driving incidents or deaths. What were the biggest challenges that you were facing psychologically?
- [124:56]
DJ Shipley
I wanted to kill myself from probably 2013 up until 2020, 2021. Every day, every day, all day. And I didn't have a reason for it. I didn't know why. I was always a guy. I always looked down on people who committed suicide. Just always I'm like, what a selfish thing to do. Like, cry me a river. Because you see these guys, you're like, you've got your dream job, your wife's a 10, 10 fingers, 10 toes on both your kids. Like, they're star athletes. Like, there's nothing for you to be upset with. Like, how could you do that? Why would you do that? And he never even knows. He never know, until it happens to you. It's just so hard to wrap your head around. I just woke up every day. I just didn't want to play the game. I want to hit the big reset button on Nintendo and start over in a different life.
- [125:42]
Chris Williamson
And that was both in service and out of service. And during transition, the medication helped for
- [125:48]
DJ Shipley
a little bit, too. It was like. It was that quiet noise in the back of your head, just kind of subsided. It was always there. I'd wake up in the morning, like, nope, nope, Just override. Go to the gym. Override and go to the gym. Go to the range, do this. Stay active like a shark. Just keep swimming. Every time I stop, things got bad. Don't stop. Just keep going.
- [126:05]
Chris Williamson
Yeah,
- [126:08]
DJ Shipley
but once everything happened, we came off all those meds. I still had to be on quite a few of them. I wasn't. It wasn't a full med washout. We came off the hard, like painkillers, so I could feel all the pain. I was still on Cybaltus, still on Adderall, still on a bunch of these things. Blood pressure medications to stop nightmares, all this stuff. It's hard to quantify with how bad it was. Just everything you loved before, you didn't have anymore. Didn't have the group. There's no group chat. No one ever can tell you to put it on again. There's no purpose. And now I don't have a job. What am I supposed to do now? I never planned on getting out. I never planned on not doing anything less than 30 years. I was going to do it forever because there's nothing else for me to do. I don't like anything else. I don't have another hobby. I'm not a scratch golfer. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. I don't want to do a podcast, don't want to write a book. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to do this. And now I can't. What do I do now? I don't know. Circling the drain over and over. But, I mean, now that you're out smoking a bunch of weed, doing a bunch of stupid shit, started cheating on my wife, started doing all the things that I shouldn't have done, all the things I didn't do in the past, I started doing during that transition, and it just. It ruined everything. Everything I tried to avoid my whole time in, I did as soon as I got out, right? Like, everything. Like everything that everybody does to get them divorced. They've usually been doing their whole career I'm the opposite. I didn't do any of it until I got out. And I was like, yeah, I have no purpose. Might as well just burn it to the ground. I wanted to be divorced because I didn't know how to reintegrate with my family. I loved her, love the kids, didn't want to lose what I had, but I did know how to integrate because I didn't have any practice. And I never looked at it like, obtaining a skill set. When you talk about being a good husband, being a good father, being a good friend, it's a skill set. You need repetition in order to be good at that. Like, how are you going to. How do you raise kids? You got to be there. You got to show up. How are you going to be a good husband? You have to be there. Like, the pen pal thing doesn't work in reality. You have to live together. And I didn't have any experience doing it. So when I transitioned, like, what's a job I can get right now that is going to get me out of Virginia beach and away from this? Not because I don't want to be there, but because I don't know how. And in that version of myself, in that moment, the easiest thing to do was to separate. Let me get a job that's got me back in Arizona, skydiving as much as I can, working these contracts. Like, let me just stay busy. Yeah, it's safe. Let me get out of here. Worst thing could happen. Started a spiral. She got to the point where she was going to shit can me. She was over it all inside of a year, just like everybody else. And that's when I found out about Mexico. I began 5 Meo, DMT and all the things. And that was really like, her last call for prayer. If you love me, you'll go to Mexico and do psychedelics.
- [129:04]
Chris Williamson
She find it or you?
- [129:05]
DJ Shipley
She found it.
- [129:05]
Chris Williamson
No way.
- [129:06]
DJ Shipley
She sent over to me. It was a friend of mine, Marcus and Amber Capone. Amazing. We were in teams together and he went out to the west coast and started preaching the gospel about ibogaine and five meo. And everybody on the east coast said the same thing. You know, we're all wearing Carhartts and flannels dipping Copenhagen. And we're like, typical West Coast. Yep. He left the east coast, he left the motherland, he went out west and now he's crazy. Now I'm so glad I went. So glad I went. We sit there and we watched this little infomercial. We knew their whole story. Like, we knew the ugly truth and everything they had been through. And he was so open, so honest, so transparent. You're like, okay, well he seems okay. He seems like he's got a really good balance point. And you call him on the phone and he sounds amazing. He was one of those dudes back in the days when I knew him, his eyes were as black as your shirt. If you wanted to topple a regime with just a single individual, like no rules, no mercy, you just launch him. He was vicious, like one of those things. Like, you ever walk through the SPCA and you see these pit bulls faces all scarred up. You're not going to stick your hand in that cage and try to pet it. That's what he was. He ain't like that anymore. He can still be that guy, but he has full control over it. And I think that's what everybody wanted. Like, I don't want to lose my edge. I don't want to be a pacifist. I don't want to regret everything I've done. But I can't control this version of me that I've now created.
- [130:30]
Chris Williamson
I just don't want to be at the mercy of it.
- [130:32]
DJ Shipley
Exactly. He found control. Maybe if I go down there and lick this poison dart frog or whatever they're doing, maybe it'll work for me. So that's why we went.
- [130:41]
Chris Williamson
What was that experience like?
- [130:46]
DJ Shipley
My life was unraveling in the moment. Like everything that could be going wrong in my life was going wrong right then. Like everything. I was leading multiple affairs. One of the girls was pregnant. Everything that could be going wrong in my life was happening right then. At that moment. I went down to Mexico with no intention of coming back. I didn't want to. I have a picture of my phone post Mexico of me standing on a cliff's edge looking down about 80ft, jagged rocks underneath it. I came this close to jumping. That's after Mexico, after. Because I knew what I was going home to. I was like, this isn't going to work. I'm just going to jump. There's no reason. If I slip in a fall right now, she'll get all my, all my medical, she'll get my life insurance. It'll just be an accident because I am not going home to face this music. But we went down there. I went down with a bunch of heavy hitters, probably eight, 10 guys. This little compound in Tijuana, they had a bunch of team. Guys call it holding space. They're cooking the meals, they're sitting with you, kind of walking you all through it, but it's a five day process. You get down the first day, they give you a drug test, which is kind of ironic. Go make sure you're not on Adderall stimulus. So you have to come off of all the meds. That was the thing that I didn't realize was going to be just like being back in that detox hospital. Coming off Cymbalta, if you've ever been on.
- [132:05]
Chris Williamson
What is that?
- [132:06]
DJ Shipley
It's an ssri, but it's really for pain management, for everything else. But I was on that heavy doses of gabapentin. So when you're on that combination of gabapentin and Cymbalta, they call it the jolts. When you come off of it, your nervous system starts firing again. So you'll sit there and you'll just do this. Just driving around, you're just jolting.
- [132:25]
Chris Williamson
Hypnic jokes. In a way.
- [132:26]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. But it's super frightening because you can't control it and you don't know they're coming on. So you'll go to get a cup of coffee and you'll get jolt. She's like, what the is going on with you? And I was like, I don't know. I don't know. It's happening. But now there's no Adderall, there's no stimulants, there's no pain meds, there's no Ambien, there's nothing. So now I'm a shell of who I thought I was. And now I know I am really, truly dependent on these meds I was probably on at the time I went down there, probably 40 to 50. The overall, I was taking 60 pills a day. We weaned off a couple of those things, the prazosin for nightmares, a couple of those things. But the core remained. A lot of pills.
- [133:05]
Chris Williamson
This is after you'd been washed out of them previously.
- [133:07]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Because a lot of them, you have to stay on them, like, for them. Like, you're never getting off Adderall, you're never getting off Cymbalta, you're never getting off this, never get off that. So we're still on them all. But now I have washed off of everything completely. And when you're truly sober for the first time, you get to realize the life you've lived and the injuries you've taken. Because now there's nothing masking it. Feeling myself get up in the morning was humbling, Gimping around, limping, just everything hurt. Fibromyalgia. I could barely hold a pencil. Like Hands just shaking all day. Like, I. It's embarrassing from who I was a year and a half ago to who I am now. A shell. Like, I don't want to do this, dude. I don't. I didn't want to go to Mexico. I kind of went just to shut her up. But, yeah, I had no intention of going back. We get around there, they give you the piss test. You get one night of sleep. The very next day is, you're going to do ibogaine. So it comes from the aboga plant in West Africa. Grant, this little shrub, you take these two pills, you write down some nonsense on a piece of paper. You want to burn things you're trying to get rid of. And I can't write down any of my stuff because nobody in my group knows that I've been cheating on my wife. Nobody. They don't know I've got a girl pregnant. They don't know any of this stuff. It's just me now. I dropped that thing in a fire.
- [134:22]
Chris Williamson
Can you remember what you wrote
- [134:25]
DJ Shipley
self? Like, what am I trying to get rid of? Myself? Dropped in a fire and let it go boom. We go upstairs. They've got this sound booth going. Like these disco lights are going crazy. They've got this yoga practitioner in this white linen thing. She's gorgeous, but she's playing these bowls. She reminds me of Ursula and the Little Mermaid. Just playing. Whoa. Doing the whole thing, like, it's a lot to take in. And for us, it's so out there. It's so foo foo, like, looking around the room at all the people that are in there. And everybody's from your old line of work. You're like, did you ever think we'd be doing this? Like, I'm so glad nobody knows we're down here. I lay back down, and if you ask the guys, I probably made it 15 minutes, started snoring, dead asleep, thought I was asleep. That's when the whole thing started to happen. And it's so weird because some guys don't see anything. But the medicine goes through your body regardless. It kills all your addictions in a single shot. I don't care if it's heroin, gambling, sex, porn, women, whatever it is, all your addictions are gone in a minute. So I dipped. Just for reference, I dipped two cans of Copenhagen. Every single day. From the time I was 18 up until that morning, every single day, I dip two cans of Copenhagen. When I woke up from ibogaine, I've never touched it again. I love Copenhagen. I would put in Copenhagen right now, I can't even get it to form in my mouth. It's like my body is auto rejected. I can't do it. I miss it. I didn't drink coffee for six months. I want to drink coffee. I'd get it right to my mouth line. No, I just wouldn't drink it. Weird. So I'm laying there, this whole experience starts to happen. You hear these bees buzzing, all this stuff. And I remember parts of the dream and it'll. It'll flash back every now and then, but it was like I was free falling through a vertical wind tunnel and these dresser drawers were opening up and they were just distant memories. But you could shift your body over and fly and fall into it. And now you're inside. Like, it's realistic as studio ish. Like I could feel the temperature, the humidity, the weight of the T shirt, everything. It was so bizarre. And you could just sit there and relive it. Like whatever's happening right now, I could just sit here, be in third person, just watch it. I could drop into who I am and watch the interaction. I could drop into the other point of view and live it through their eyes. Even if they're yelling at me or whatever. I could be them and feel the rage, understand why they were that mad and agree with them. Like, you fucked that up. You deserve that. I'd be doing the exact same thing. And it builds a lot of empathy. You're like, I totally get it now. I get why you were so mad. I get why I did this. I get why I did that. And it made you come to terms with a lot of your mistakes. That lasts for 16 hours. I mean, like, you were in. You were in the medicine. I woke up the very next day and I have never wanted to teleport home so bad in my whole life. I've never been homesick. I've said I'm homesick. I don't get homesick. I don't now. I get homesick because I've got a good relationship. But back then, never. And that was the weirdest thing because I knew how much chaos was waiting for me back at home. Because all this stuff is going to uncork. She's going to find out about all this stuff. There's no other way around it. And that was really. The realization is, I'm going to have to go home and if she doesn't know, I'm going to have to tell her. That's just not going to be met. Well, they give you a full period. It's called the Gray Day, where you're kind of navigating the medicine. You do group circles and all this stuff. And we sit around this big group. I Woke up, like 8am the next morning. Like, fired up, ready to go. I'm Chatty Cathy now. Like, I didn't want to talk before. Now I want to talk. I want to know what happened to you inside of that medicine. Because the shit that happened to me, I got to let out. We sit around that room and all the guys started talking. And I'd known most of these guys for my entire career. Like, my best friend was in there, My business partners were in there. I mean, like, we really know each other. And only a couple dudes knew how bad it was. Like, I mean, I had episodes while I was still active where I was sitting in my guest room with a trash bag sitting next to me. I was gonna put it over my head and shoot myself in the head to not make a mess so she could resell the house. Like, I've told that in confidence to several people. They were all in that room and they were like, oh, man, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I can't believe that was happening to you that next morning. Me too. Me too. Me too. And I was pissed. I was like, you were going to let me shoot myself my guest room, and you were never going to say, me too. What's going on with you? And they start to open up and they start to talk about past trauma, childhood stuff, sexual abuse, everything. You've been carrying that for 40 years. He's like, my wife doesn't know. My kids don't know. My parents don't know. You start to see the correlation, the compartmentalization to the ultra extreme. Like, at a certain point, you have to be able to share something. And we got so used to just not doing it, you just held it inside. Then you do 5 Meo DMT. You ever done 5 Meo DMT? You should. You should. It's not like anything on this planet. It is. It's super fast. It takes no time to build up, but they set you down. And it's supposed to be a purge. And knowing everything I know now, and I've been down quite a few times now, and I've taken guys down and hosted a medicine for them. Everything that conjured up from ibogaine. If I would not have done five meo and I would have went home in that state, I probably wouldn't be here. I had not come to terms and accepted everything that I did. I wanted to go home and confess and do all this stuff. I was disgusted of myself. Every vile thing I had ever said to my wife or my kids or relationships I had sacrificed and compartmentalization. I felt so guilty for it. And it was like that yard of beer, just trauma. It was coming out of my mouth. It's like those moments where you're sitting there brushing your teeth, looking yourself in the mirror, and you're like, dj, I can't believe you've done this. I can't believe this is your reality. Like, you've actually done this. You have to live with this shit now. How. How did you get so far off track from where you were to this point now? And you're sitting there literally staring in the mirror just like this, in disbelief, like, I can't believe you fucking did this. Like, this is. You're really gonna have to live through this. I can't. I can't do it. I don't want to go home. I don't want to look at her. I don't want to break her heart. I don't want to lose the things I have right now. I don't want to face reality. And it kind of gets you worked up in a 5 Meo DMT and we laid back there and you smoke out of this crack pipe and it looks so intimidating, like it's in a little glass vial. I mean, you're heating it up like you're smoking a crack rock. And as soon as you lay your head back, when you exhale, it's like your whole body consolidates into a single spark. And then it explodes. It feels and it looks like, you know, when Star Trek has taken off those trails, it's like that. And then you end up in stratosphere, just surrounded by whatever it is. The craziest thing. But the guy told me when you go, he's like, hey, whatever happens, let it happen. If you think you're going to die, die. If you think you're going to explode, explode. If you think you're going to drown, just drown. Just one big exhale and let it take you in the moment. You don't do that in the moment. You're trying to hold onto it, hold onto it. So I would throw my arms out, I would scream, and then I'd ball up and I'd cry. 10, 15 minutes of, like, the ugliest crying you've ever seen. Uncontrollable, like, throwing out crying. Like, cry so hard you throw up. I woke up and I sat up and he looked at me. And he went, that wasn't it. What do you mean, that wasn't it? Like, that was everything I had. He's like, hit him again. You want me to do that again? He's like, hit him again. I did six rounds of that, dude, back to back to back, over and over. And on the sixth one, this nurse came over. Little Mexican nurse, super cool. And it was a team guy sitting off to my left or right. And he's like, you want to die, right? I said, yeah. And he goes, then kill yourself. Do it right now with the medicine. Like, stop messing around. Stop with all the theatrics. Stop crying. Just do it. Kill yourself right now. It is true. I don't want to go home. I don't want to confess this. I am. I'll do it right now. I'm going to smoke this with the intention to kill myself, and I'm going to hold my breath until it kills me, because I'm not going home. Give me that thing again. And now I went through with the intention. I'm going to close this whole chapter out. So I envisioned the smoke was purple, and as I'm smoking this thing, I can feel it going through my whole body. I'm trying to push it down on my tippy toes. I'm trying to coat my whole self. I held back, and I held that thing as long as I could. I could feel my eyes starting to flutter, like, it's really coming on. It feels like there's a. It feels like there's a cell phone this big behind your sternum, and the whole thing starts to vibrate, and you're like, you can't take it anymore. As soon as you exhale, the whole blast off happens. And when that one happened, it killed me, killed my ego. It reset the whole baseline. And when I opened up from that one, he looked at me and goes, that was it. How you feel now? And I was like, I've got to get home. I got to get home right now. I got to see my old lady. Got to see my old lady, Got to see my girls right now. I've got to get home. Got to get home right now. And then everything else kind of fell apart from there, and we brought it all back together. And it was rough, man. It was so rough. It was so worth it, though. If I wouldn't have gone down there, I wouldn't be here 100%. There's not a chance. Not a chance. You got to go.
- [144:01]
Chris Williamson
You're really not selling it to me, bro. Okay, let's say somebody's. Somebody's listening and they go, I'm not on 60 mads a day.
- [144:08]
DJ Shipley
No need.
- [144:09]
Chris Williamson
Me, I'm not ex war veteran with a ton of PTSD from being shot at and shooting at people and stuff like that.
- [144:17]
DJ Shipley
I don't have PTSD from that at all. Not an ounce of my experience. Not a single piece of it, had anything in the military. It went from my childhood 0 to 16, gapped it and then it picked me up when I transitioned up. Gapped the entire experience. I've been down, I've done ibogaine 4 or 5 times and 5 Meo DMT. I've never had a military experience, ever. Nothing. Trauma's trauma. The last time I went down, down with co ed males, females, civilians, women, everybody. Everybody's on the exact same path. You got trauma. That's how you get through it. That is 15, 20 years of therapy in five days. It's unreal.
- [144:56]
Chris Williamson
We've recently seen Trump sign that bill to fast track research, and he's got. Literally got X seals stood around him.
- [145:04]
DJ Shipley
Did you not watch our film? Okay, so Marx and Amber, they're all part of that thing. They're really one that kicked off that whole initiative. We did a documentary, it's on Netflix, called In Ways in War. And that's really where the whole thing started from. Everybody got hooked up on there and got a bunch of Green Berets and a bunch of regular military fighter pilots are all in there. And we just keep success after success after success. And you see it and you're like, why are we not doing this? They've been doing it for thousands of years. Like, why are we not letting us go? And it's often a bunch of spillover stuff. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, psychedelics are bad and they'll rot your brain. And I don't know, man, but I know it works. And I know that I'm not on a single medication. Nothing. Not a pain pill, not an ssri, not an Ambien, nothing. Nothing.
- [145:53]
Chris Williamson
What do you think happened?
- [145:56]
DJ Shipley
It killed everything I had inside me that was bad. All my addictions, everything. I'm not addicted to anything. Anything I do now, it's because I want to. Which isn't necessarily always a good thing because I like to do some bad shit too. But it resets the whole baseline. Like everything that I was struggling with, it swiped it all away. That becomes an issue if you try to reintegrate. And that's what I tell the guys now. The version of me that came back from Mexico was so far out from the person my wife had come accustomed to for the last 10 years, she didn't believe it. If you watch the film, you'll get to see it in real time. When I was going through the ibogaine, my wife hacked my phone and found out about all the affairs simultaneous. So I don't have my cell phone for five days. So the whole time I'm going through, she's getting lawyers and divorcing me. Boxed all my stuff, took it to the shop, dropped it off, drew up divorce papers.
- [146:51]
Chris Williamson
It's a hell of a reintegration.
- [146:53]
DJ Shipley
Cousin got an ultrasound photo. She's got it all. She saw everything I had done. Now action. So when I come out of the medicine, they give your cell phone right before you cross the border. They give you a little script to say, like, hey, I'm. I'm so happy to be on the other side of the medicine. I can't wait to come home and see you and explain everything. It's just too much to put into a text or into a phone call. So I'd rather just not talk until I see you live. That's what you're supposed to say. So everybody goes out. They all call their wives. Hey, hey, hey. Straight to voicemail. Well, typical. My wife never answers her phone anyway. Text her, doesn't go through, call her, nothing, nothing, nothing. Like, three, four hours, nothing. I'm getting ready to fly home. We're going from San Diego to Atlanta, Atlanta to Norfolk. We leave, we land in Atlanta. As soon as I power my phone in Atlanta, I get a notification, the password, your Instagram has been changed. And I flick it over, and it's my ghost account. I'm like, oh, now the password, email has been changed. I was like, oh, no shit. I'm not even gonna have a chance to tell her now. Like, now there's no integration. Now I've lost everything. I went out to Mexico. I've got this new version of myself, but I'll never be able to show it to her. She's not taking me back after this. And then everything kind of went from there. Dicey, dude, dicey. You want to hear about it? We land in Norfolk, we drive into the shop. I get out my other two business partners. Time. All their families are out there, all the employees are out there. Hugs and kisses. And I can feel the tension. The other wives, now a couple of the employees, they know because they've seen my wife bringing in boxes for the last three days, stacked in my office, still haven't got A hold of her, but I'm still not totally sure. Like there's a chance that by some freak mystery. And then I get into the building and I walk upstairs and I open up my office and I mean floor to ceiling. There must have been 25, 30 boxes. Every one was perfectly folded. Socks, underwear, black T shirts, normal T shirts, jeans, this, this military. Everything I owned was in those boxes. I'm like, I looked over and the other two wives are standing out there with my two business partners. I'm like, what's going on? They had no idea. I just looked at him, I was like, gave him a hug, kiss him on the cheek. I was like, see you on Monday. Fist bump. Knowing I was never gonna see him on Monday. Went straight downstairs. We got a big armory, grabbed my pistol, shoved them with my waistband, jumped in my truck and drove. Got in my car and I was driving out to. It's a private beach on the backside of this military base. We used to have a house, we lived out there into one shot road. And it's probably about a 20 minute drive. And I was probably 10 minutes into this drive and it terminates, it's a dead end. And she was tracking my cell phone. We had share my iPhone. So she knew where I was going. And I got about 10 minutes down and she called my phone and my heart rate's at 190. It's like I can't pick it up. And I almost didn't. It's like they pick it up. And I was like, hello? She goes, where are you and what are you doing? And I said, patsy, I. Honey, I don't have the strength to. Me, I don't have the strength to see you right now. And she's like, where are you going? I said, I don't want to talk about it. I'm just so fucking sorry. And I hung up the phone, made it down there and backed into a parking spot and I put on a song. And I told myself at the end of the song, as soon as it was done, I was going to get out. I was going to walk down the beach to the water's edge. Waist deep water. I was going to shoot myself in the head, close the whole thing out and just be done. No, no goodbye, no sad story, no nothing. Just let me close this thing out and be done. And as soon as I backed in, she had already told two or three of the wives that lived on that road that I was driving down there. They had jumped out with their husbands and had flanked me and were staged all around the vehicle, because they didn't know what I was going to do. I guess they were going to try to apprehend me or something.
- [150:58]
Chris Williamson
What was the song you chose?
- [151:00]
DJ Shipley
Experience by Ludovico. You ever heard it? Yeah. You have guarantee it? We'll pull it a little bit. That song had probably. God, man. 30 seconds left. Maybe. Maybe 30 seconds left. And she called again. And I looked up and she was right there. Driving down the road, it's like, oh, fuck. Sitting on the back of my truck. She's got a pistol right next to me, just waiting for the song to end. Here we go. She pulls right up, walks over. I've never seen anybody as strong as her, ever. And she walked right up, opened my legs up and walked up, essentially, crotch to crotch, and leaned over and pulled my sunglasses off. And then exploded in hysteria. My eyes were crystal clear. They were green. For the first time in a decade. She saw it. She knew that something had happened. And we just laid there or stood there, held each other and just bawled. And she backed up and she goes, how the could you do this to me? I don't know. I don't know. I don't have any excuse. Went through the whole thing. And, you know, I told her. I was like, I know there's no way we're going to work this out. I know there's no way you're ever going to let me see my kids again. I know this, I know this, I know this. I just want an opportunity to say goodbye to them. And she said, dj, we've come so far right now. Like, we've been through so much together. We've been together since I was 22. We've been through so much right now. We don't have to stay married. You can't close this out right now. We'll solve it tomorrow. Let's go get in the car. Let's go home. Let's see the girls. Let's pretend like this hasn't happened and we'll deal with it tomorrow. Let's not ruin this for them. They're excited to see you. Let's just. We'll shelf it. She put all that shit on the back burner Right after that. She goes, but before we do, I want to hear it. I want to hear everything. Everything what? Every detail, every ounce of it. Every single person, every single date. Tell me everything right now. That way I never have to ask you again. And I did. We sat down and we went through everything. I had done all the affairs, everything. And we got through it right Then we went back home that night, reintegrated with the kids, and we sit down on the edge of my bed, and I scrolled to my phone, and every person who was of conflict or potential conflict, I blocked and deleted their contact. Everybody, family members, anybody, anybody who had been toxic in my life, that I'd been trying to foster that relationship or anything else. No different than seal teams. I need to control the controllables. And right now, all of this is a bandwidth suck, and I'm not doing it ever again. That one guy that every time he calls, my heart kind of drops a little bit. Like, God, what does this guy want? Block and delete, Block and delete. Probably 150 people gone. And then I told her. I was like, we don't have to stay married. We can get divorced. We can do whatever we want to. I'm just asking you for one singular day to show you that I've changed. And then the day I don't, I want you to shit can me as soon as it happens. We went and signed paperwork, signed a postnup, all this stuff. I'm like, as soon as I do anything, she's got the house, she's got this. All my assets, giving her, take it all. I don't want a single thing. I just want one day. And I take it set. I take it one day at a time. Every single day. It's been the greatest thing to ever happen to us. Our relationship is so badass now it. If you sit in a room with me and her together, we'll be your two favorite people. She is a fucking unicorn, man. She is. She is truly my best friend now. And I feel so guilty because I put her on the back burner for so long because I knew that I could. She never left, never strayed away. She is the ultimate team wife. And I just. I refuse to see it for the longest time. That is the thing that haunts me now. I don't have any ptsd. People like, oh, thank you for your service. Like, don't think of me for my service. Like, I would have paid to do that job. Nicole, you must be so torn up on the things you had to do. Like, no, no, not a bit. I loved every ounce of it. Even the bad stuff. I loved it. I loved the people I sacrificed to be able to do the selfish things I wanted to do. Her most of all hard, man. But I'll tell you what, that medicine, that is. That's the only reason you don't get to navigate through that with marriage counseling and Talk therapy and date nights every Tuesday. That ain't going to get you through that. It's not. And that was our big conflict is I had changed so much over those five days that she thought it was bullshit. She's like, there's no way you went from that guy to this guy in five days. I don't know how else to show you except you gotta go do a journey. I got her to go down and do psilocybin and fib meo. Dmt.
- [155:43]
Chris Williamson
Why the, why not the ibogaine?
- [155:46]
DJ Shipley
She thought ibogaine would be too strong for her. I'm gonna get her to go do ibogaine with me. We're gonna do a couple's journey together. But I got her to do essentially the same people, psilocybin, 5 Meo. And then we did it one together with psilocybin, MDMA and 5 Meo. By the time we finished those, she knew exactly what it was. She's like, he's changed for sure. She's like, you can't. Like I just did psilocybin. And she is so different from the person she was that everything made sense.
- [156:15]
Chris Williamson
Now why are you continuing to go back to do more ibogaine if you think that you've already made the realizations that you needed?
- [156:23]
DJ Shipley
The second time I went down there is because I was taking somebody else. One of my buddies, really on struggle bus, about to end it all. And I was like, hey man, I'll go with you. I had no intention of doing the medicine with him. And when I got down, he's like, what do you mean you're not going to do it? I'll do it. Give it to me. I threw it right down, no prep, no warmup, and just sent it. Hey man, I told you there's nothing to be afraid of.
- [156:45]
Chris Williamson
You cold barred ibogaine.
- [156:47]
DJ Shipley
Send it. I've gone down there two or three times to host like, you'll cook meals, you'll be dishes. And then this last time we did it for the film. I had a buddy of mine that got shot up really bad on my second deployment. He was like an idol to me and he was just struggling really, really hard, man. And I convinced him to go down there and I told him, I was like, I'll stop whatever I am doing, it's in the film. But I was like, anything, I don't care what I'm doing. If I'm gonna sit a fucking Rogan and you call me, I'll get up in the middle of the interview. I'll fly to San Diego and we'll go together. And he did. I couldn't believe he did. He called me, he goes, whenever you're ready, I'm ready to go. How Saturday? And he's like, if you'll fly out here, I'll go. I was on a plane in 24 hours. I flew out there, took him down to Mexico, did the whole thing.
- [157:30]
Chris Williamson
It's funny, you're on a hair trigger alert to go and kill people around the world for quite a while. And you're on hair trigger alert to go and save people. And I began now, Amen.
- [157:36]
DJ Shipley
Like, I get so much more benefit out of saving people through mental health than I ever did killing people. And I love killing. Best job you'll ever have. But now, you know, he got through that whole experience and then we made it probably another year and a half and he was ready to go again. And same thing, he's like, I don't know if I could do it again. I'll send it. It's all right. We went down again. I flew out to San Diego and I. I cold called him and I was like, hey man, do you remember when you said you needed me to go to Mexico with you? He's like, yeah, I'm in San Diego. The bus leaves from Mexico in 30 minutes. Don't let me down. He did. His girlfriend dropped him off, gave him to me. Nothing but a backpack. We went down to Mexico and he's never been better. I don't know, man. But I do know that it's magic. When you take that medicine. You cannot believe it grows in the earth. You can't believe it. I can't believe that people been using that for thousands of years and it has not been more mainstream. You can't quantify it. There's nothing on this planet. I've taken every drug there is, everything. I've taken a bunch of weird stuff too. During the transition. There's nothing like that. Every ounce of your addiction is gone instantly. It's crazy.
- [158:49]
Chris Williamson
What about for people who don't have addictions?
- [158:51]
DJ Shipley
Everybody has addictions. Sometimes it's your own ego, whatever you have going on, depression, suicide, ideation, substance abuse, women, whatever it is, whatever your thing is, you just don't feel right anymore. I'd go do that.
- [159:06]
Chris Williamson
What's the case for not doing it
- [159:09]
DJ Shipley
if you're not healthy enough to do it? You got some pre existing heart condition, you weigh 500 pounds, can't go do it because it drops your heart rate really, really low. I got a low Heart rate anyway, like in the low 40s and mine drops in the high 30s. I mean, it drops low, but man,
- [159:26]
Chris Williamson
I'm telling you, how many people come out and have had an experience that's so difficult that they're not themselves anymore in a bad way? Because I've heard about this psychic fracturing where people take LSD or psilocybin, THC can do this for some people.
- [159:43]
DJ Shipley
I've never seen that happen unless people reintegrate back into the same toxic situation. So that's what I really try to encourage guys now. Like if you think you can go down and take these four pills, ibogaine, and smoke around a DMT and go back to that same toxic marriage and go back to drinking a 12 pack a day and it's going to iron out. It won't, won't. So that's what a lot of guys don't realize is you get. A lot of guys come back from there and they get divorced. They realize, like, I've been married to this toxic chick who hasn't been my partner for 20 years. They get back to like, it has been you. I've been miserable this whole time, not because of me, but because of you. And they get divorced and they flourish or they come back and they realize that their addictions got their alcohol got there. Most of the guys quit drinking completely. Like Rob quit drinking completely. Like I was professional alcoholic for a long time and it doesn't serve you. It's not a superfood. It's not going to make you better. I'm about social drinking. I enjoy consuming alcohol. I just don't do it right now for a variety of different reasons. But if you do the work, especially the work, going up to it, talking with the therapist, really getting your mind right. Really, really thinking about your intention of what you're trying to get accomplished and really lean in heavy. Like, no different going to a yoga retreat. Like really, really live it. Like be a method actor. Like if Daniel Day Lewis was going to take ibogaine, live it like that, the benefit far outweighs the risk. It's those. I could not imagine not having it. I couldn't imagine. You gotta go. I'll go with you. You, dude, you, me, huberman. Come on, baby. I told him the same thing. I was like, you want to go down there? I'll snap my fingers. I'll get you down there.
- [161:16]
Chris Williamson
I've been talking to him. I mean, he, he knows he's been. Conor McGregor just went, that is a really interesting one. So I knew I knew firsthand or second hand, third hand that Conor had gone. And then I had it in the back of my mind, I was like, I heard that the way that he was convinced to get across there wasn't that he was going to go and do ibogaine. I also heard that he didn't have a particularly good washout period in advance of it. Now what was interesting was that video, a bunch of videos that were on Twitter went pretty viral of Connor coming back. I have been saved. The Lord has spoken to me. And. And I was like, that's my beginning talking.
- [162:07]
DJ Shipley
Everybody's like that when they get back. Everybody wants to become a psychic healer. Like they want to do all this weird. They just do, man. I'll be honest, 50% of the people that leave ibogaine, they get their coaching license to integrate people either pre integration or post integration.
- [162:24]
Chris Williamson
Well, you've done it and I mean, you're front end of the funnel for it now, right?
- [162:27]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, I mean, I didn't go to any. I don't want to go down the rabbit hole with the whole thing. I don't do the whole coaching thing. But I mean, I've coached dozens of people to go down there now because I know it works. I mean, I've tried everything. I've done stellate, ganglion blocks. I mean 14 inch needle.
- [162:42]
Chris Williamson
I've done. I've done two SGBs.
- [162:45]
DJ Shipley
I've done everything. Dude, I've done everything that you could possibly do. Yeah, right. That's better. That one actually worked. Stella ganglion block didn't do anything for me except give me a droopy eye for eight hours.
- [162:57]
Chris Williamson
It is kind of funny. The droopy eye is funny.
- [162:59]
DJ Shipley
Yeah.
- [163:00]
Chris Williamson
Do you get both sides? Do you one after the other or do you just get one? You would have done it on separate days. You wouldn't have done them together.
- [163:07]
DJ Shipley
I did three total.
- [163:09]
Chris Williamson
You must have got both sides. There's no way that they would have done three on the same side.
- [163:12]
DJ Shipley
No, no, they didn't. Three on the same side.
- [163:13]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [163:15]
DJ Shipley
I didn't feel much benefit, but I was also heavy doped up then too.
- [163:20]
Chris Williamson
That might have managed to counteract it a little bit. Yeah, it was an interesting one for me with the stellate. One thing that I wish that I hadn't done, I was using laughing gas. I was using nox while it was happening and I wish that I hadn't because I wish I was able to feel the onset more. That transition, I think would have been interesting. But I mean, you're not Able to think about much when you're like
- [163:45]
DJ Shipley
sucking
- [163:45]
Chris Williamson
on a hookah that's filled with fucking nos.
- [163:47]
DJ Shipley
Yeah. Do you remember the needle going in?
- [163:51]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [163:51]
DJ Shipley
The pop?
- [163:52]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [163:53]
DJ Shipley
Dicey. That'll wake you up, Dicey. He came in, he broke that needle out and showed it to me. I was like, you're going to shove that through my throat? And he's like, oh, yeah. It's when I get it up on the TV screen.
- [164:02]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, you can watch it. I was turned face to ultrasound watching homeboy slotted in between two vertebrae. Yeah, yeah, it's fun. One thing that I did get from that, which was interesting, my HRV went up by about 40% overnight and it held for months. Wow, that was pretty interesting. May also explain just how tuned up some bits of my nervous system were. It's interesting. It's interesting, man. You know, I'm in Austin, which is kind of the home of the psychedelic spiritual tourist. And it's given me an interesting relationship, I think, to using psychedelics for healing. In some ways it has made it more normalized, but in other ways it's made it feel a little bit more like a fashion accessory. And to anyone else that's ever been in a communal sauna here in Austin, they know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fucking ancestral trauma that they felt through their animus. I'm like, ah, I saw you in here two months ago and you're the same asshole that you were from back then. And that's the integration side. But I don't think I've ever heard anybody talking about ibogaine. So there may be a dose or a compound or a plant that you can take, which is inescapable from a. That one is from an integration perspective. But what made me think about the SGB was the integration window that you have for the SGB is real important. Right. Six weeks after that, within six weeks after that. That's sort of re. Imprin. Yeah. It's interesting to me to think about this sort of stuff, especially as someone who cares an awful lot about mental health, who thinks about it a lot, who is a proponent of people going and doing therapy, of doing CBT or act, of people doing talk therapy and getting in touch with their emotions. I wonder whether part of it is. Almost certainly part of it is fear. Like, fuck, that sounds scary. That sounds really scary. What if something bad happens? Which is exactly what you're going to try and work through, which is the ambient fear of what if something bad happens? Which is exactly how you're existing through the rest of your life.
- [166:27]
DJ Shipley
No balls, no blue chips. Anything worth doing, it's got to have a risk component to it. It's not worth doing at all. I mean, what are you afraid of? You're gonna keep being the same depressed version of you that has been for the last decade. I mean, you gotta be willing to make a change. And that's what a lot of people won't do. They won't drop their ego. They go to the medicine, they come back and they're like, there's nothing wrong with me. Like, I can drink, I can drink. I'm totally in control. You probably should know. He's like, I'm only gonna have two or three every now and then. Two to three turns to six, really, really fast. Ask me how I know. Don't do it if you're not really, really gonna lean in hard. Don't waste your time. Don't take up somebody's slot. It already costs a lot of money. There's thousands of veterans and first responders that are on a lift to try to go down there, right? You have an AMX card are going to jump the line and you're not going to take it serious and you're going to give Ibogaine a bad name. Don't. If you really want to do it, do it like a professional and go the whole way. Like really, really do it. I've never seen anybody who is really focused on all the, all the training going up into it and really focused on the post treatment integration who hasn't had a phenomenal outcome.
- [167:34]
Chris Williamson
What's the percentage of success and what's the amount of change?
- [167:39]
DJ Shipley
Ooh, they have the numbers for sure. I would say depression is. God. You probably pulled up on chat. GBT, I'd say, I'd say as far as depression, PTSD symptoms, they're reduced by 80 or 90% instantly. Like people that they can't even get out of bed. They couldn't even sit in his room because they're sitting behind him. I mean, just so hyperventilated you can't even be around them that to baseline normal, you'd never even tell who they are. Never tell. I mean, guys who, they break out in hysteria just crying all day, they don't know why. They won't tell you why. Baseline normal, 12 hours.
- [168:22]
Chris Williamson
How long does it feel?
- [168:24]
DJ Shipley
It feels. You mean how, how long does the high last? Like when you're done, the trip, Depending on how you are, your body weight, 12 to 18 hours. Some guys go Longer.
- [168:34]
Chris Williamson
What's the felt sense of that many years? Or does it feel like you're there for 16 hours?
- [168:39]
DJ Shipley
It. You lose track of time pretty quick for me. It feels like it's by quick, but it also feels like you've been there for a lifetime. But, man, you can stand up. You know where you are. But here's the interesting thing. And everybody who's going down there will probably tell you the same thing. You wear eye shades. You can sit up, lift up the eye shades, look around the room, know that's you. Know that's him. I can see the nerves. I can wave like, hey, I need to take a piss. They'll unplug your leads. You're hooked to our EKG machine, all this stuff. They'll hope you go in the bathroom.
- [169:08]
Chris Williamson
Like, then you can go back in, so to speak. So you can't. There's a little bit of a pause.
- [169:12]
DJ Shipley
Well, some guys will have inexperience. They're trying to take a piss, and now they're, like, swirling around. They're screaming like they're in the thing. But the weirdest thing is, guys will talk about it. You'll be sitting there, and all of a sudden, you'll hear your neighbor. He'll say something, and you'll look over at him. You're like, what? You have a full conversation, and then you realize you have the eye shades on. You look at. You can see him. You lift him up, and he is in the position. You can see with the eye shades. And you'll watch everybody do this. Lift him back up. I can see right through. I swear to God, you can have a full conversation. That guy will wake up, he's like, what are you saying? I don't know. Put the eye shades back on you. Like, were they on, were they off? Like, you can't tell. You can see right through them.
- [169:57]
Chris Williamson
It's the difference between a boga and ibogaine.
- [169:59]
DJ Shipley
A boga is the root plant. It comes from essentially the same thing. I don't know if it's the chemical makeup or whatever, but.
- [170:04]
Chris Williamson
Okay.
- [170:05]
DJ Shipley
But it's the root of the boga
- [170:06]
Chris Williamson
plant, and it's two capsules.
- [170:10]
DJ Shipley
If you want to take a boost, you can take two or three, right?
- [170:12]
Chris Williamson
But it's just literally two pills.
- [170:15]
DJ Shipley
You go in, you take them, like 15 minutes. You burn your little paper. By the time you walk upstairs, you're like, man, I don't feel anything. And then. And you watch everybody do this. Okay, better sit down. They'll give you, like, a maraca. You start banging this thing, you're staring in a mirror and you can watch your whole face start to move around.
- [170:34]
Chris Williamson
Typically, staring in a mirror is bad advice when you're on psychedelics.
- [170:37]
DJ Shipley
You think it would be, but that's how you reconnect with yourself. That's how you know the experience is happening. But you'll see everybody, they're sitting there beating this maraca and they'll come by and like you feel anything yet. And you're like, I'm not sure. And you're like, you've been here for an hour and a half. You're definitely in. I better lay down. You better lay down. Put the eye shades on. You lay down. Funny, but for me, I don't move. Most guys purge quite a bit. I had a guy just went down, he threw up so hard, he threw his back out like couldn't walk. They're not throwing anything up, though. It's all their trauma. But anybody in that room, they'll give you it's like a big bronze bowl and you'll throw up and you'll hear them, you'll hear it bounce. And you're like, there's nothing in there. All the practitioners will tell you about it. He's like, that's your trauma. Hitting the bowl, it feels like you're throwing up buckets of vomit. There's nothing in there. You've been fasting the entire day. There's nothing in your system. You're not throwing up at all. That's all your trauma, purging it over and over. Same thing with five meal. You get me? Just purging this bucket. Nothing's coming out, but it feels like it is. You feel like, I'm filling up this five gallon bucket. You better dump it.
- [171:43]
Chris Williamson
What's the relationship between the ibogaine and the 5 Meo?
- [171:47]
DJ Shipley
24 hours of separation. I don't know if they have any correlation. They've just paired these two together at this one particular clinic. It's amazing.
- [171:55]
Chris Williamson
What's this you mentioned if I'd just done the first one, the second one. What is it that the five MEO does that you didn't get from the ibogaine?
- [172:03]
DJ Shipley
Think about everything you've compressed, everything you've compacted down your trauma. You just buried it way down deep. Like stuff that happened. You were five or six that you don't even remember you've buried. And ibogaine, it all comes to the surface. It gives you a photographic memory from the past. Like you relive it all, like it's on the forefront of your things you never thought you'd remember. You relive them right then, right there. And now it's flipped. So all the present traumas now at the bottom, all the stuff in the past is up top, and now you can't get away from it. I would just go home with that. I don't want to go home with that. The five meal lets you strip it all away. So when you smoke that, it empties your cup, it dumps it all in one shot. It's like you feel 15 pounds lighter. You wake up next morning, you're like, I. I feel amazing. I'm not on any drugs. I'm stone cold sober. I got no nicotine, no caffeine, no drugs, no alcohol. I've never felt better in my entire life. Even though my life's in chaos, I feel like that meme, everything's just on fire. I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm good. Yeah, man, it's cr. It is so wild, dude. It is.
- [173:08]
Chris Williamson
I'm really happy, Finland. I'm really, really happy that you found something, a new mission as well. Not only something that seems to have improved your life, but that you've been able to dedicate yourself to making other people's lives better as well.
- [173:19]
DJ Shipley
That's great. I just came back from Moody Air Force Base down in Georgia talking to those guys. The whole base talked about mental health and all those guys. And it's cool because they expect you to be a certain thing. And when you get out there and you're like, we're just going to talk about mental health, nobody wants to talk about it. Same thing when you're in teams. Like, I asked them all, how many guys in this room ever struggle with mental health? It's over a thousand people in the audience. Nobody raised their hand. Yep, I'm used to this. I was the only Navy SEAL with PTSD or trauma or depression or anything, so this will go over well. But we talk. But, I mean, the amount of DMs I've gotten, even from the Sean Ryan thing and now all the other ones, it's only mental health. And it's some of the craziest stories. But I'm glad, because when I was on my island alone, when I was in that guest room with that trash bag and that pistol about to do that thing, no one came for me. No one ever said, me, too. No one ever stood up, got in front of the microphone with the bright lights on and said, it's okay not to be okay. No one ever said it to me. And we talked about everything. Not that when you think every. We've talked and done everything together except talk about that shit. And I wish we would have. It would have made us so much better. Would have made us truly a dynasty. I just. I want everybody else to be better than me. I want you to understand that is perfectly normal. And that is part of the game you play. If you're in the military, you're a first responder. And those are the guys I really get to see the most now. I mean with GBRs we probably train 1500 to 2000 cops a year. But I do speaking engagements for firemen. The stuff those guys deal with day to day. I feel guilty inside the military. I always love firemen, always love cops. I love people of service. I love doctors. I love nurses. I love all those. I never knew what they dealt with. Not cops, especially not firemen. Thank you for your service. I appreciate you guys. If anything happens, I'll call 91 1. I never thought about the horrible things they would see. And then they're going to be home within 25 minutes. Firemen fishing kids out of a bathtub because the mom ran out of her pain meds and drowned all the kids in the bathtub. 45 minutes later he's giving his own daughter a bath. Compartmentalizing that. Not telling his wife, not talking about with anybody. The boys at the station ain't talking about it. They just same thing we did. That's when I go and I reintegrate with those guys. This is your super team. This is your dynasty. You could potentially be in the same department for 20 years. Why are you not having open dialogue conversations? Why am I not able to tell you every one of my deepest darkest secrets? You're not leaving tomorrow. It's just us. It'll make you a super team. You could build a dynasty right here. But you got to do it through open communication. You have to be able to say the shit nobody else is going to say. And it only takes one of you. That's why I push those 20 minute walks. I push the routine. I push mental health, the importance of it and say it. It's totally normal. This is part of the game. You can't run into burning buildings for 20 years and not be scarred by something. Can't do it. Can't walk around with a gun in your hip arresting bad guys and seeing the terrible things that people do. And it not affect you. It's supposed to for you to think that you're just going to override that because you're such an alpha male, that's not going to work, dude. Ask me how I know. Like, I thought I could override anything. I've seen zero, patient zero. I've seen some terrible things, dude. And I have very interested me that
- [176:40]
Chris Williamson
when you're going through a journey on plant medicine, the classic sort of overachiever, I will be able to hold this down mentality. Now, Andy was talking about this when he came through. He was saying he'd created an identity of never being the guy who quit. I don't quit. That's not what I do. And that caused him to stay in a marriage for like a decade that he shouldn't have done. But it's interesting that when you get to a situation like you're in ibogaine, that pattern that you've spent an entire career and a life putting together, which is that clenching, that tightness that didn't come in or it wasn't able to hold on.
- [177:28]
DJ Shipley
I tell the guys now that's why I recommend ibogaine for the alpha male types, the guys with a super strong ego, because that's. Because I've tried them all. That's the only thing stronger than the ego.
- [177:40]
Chris Williamson
You can usually try to wrangle it when using something else.
- [177:43]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, I mean, I can power through anything else. Mdma, weed, whatever, ketamine, I can power through all that. Not that you are not going to be able to power through that. Just can't. Like, whatever it's going to show you, it's going to show you can't steer it, you can't navigate it, you can't go, okay, cool. I'm going to sit in this black box and I'm going to think about nothing for 18 hours. Can't do it. You can't think about the things you want to think of. I try to put myself in a black helicopter with all my friends and try to relive all this stuff and see dead friends. Zero. Zero. That's all I wanted to see because I thought that is where my trauma lies. I was like, well, clearly it was my love of the job. It was because I was so professional and I was such a patriot. And now the loss of that, that's why it's caused all this. Nope, not a bit. Nothing was traumatic about my service. Nothing. I think the majority of the guys, it's not the service, it's the fact you left it. You lost your number one love. That's what it is. You're suffering from a heartbreak, not from ptsd. I didn't do anything that I'm ashamed of that ever really messed me up. I mean I've seen a lot of terrible stuff. It doesn't keep me up at night, not a bit. That medicine, not saying it's a cure all but if you've tried everything else and you haven't tried plant based medicine, probably give it a shot.
- [179:04]
Chris Williamson
Where should people go if they want
- [179:06]
DJ Shipley
to find out more about plant based medicine? If you're a veteran, I would go to Veteran solutions or ambio life sciences for straight ibogaine 5 Meo, Trevor and Jonathan. The best clinic I've ever been to, it's on a private compound right over the border. They've got shuttles running back and forth. It's super safe. Best food you're ever gonna eat. I mean Michelin quality food, amazing in ground pools overlooking the ocean. It's an amazing facility but it's probably a 25 person staff. They've got multiple houses that are running consecutive and they do it all week. It's a cure all men. They do the sweat lodge, they do everything. If I had to give anybody a gift to be the power of a 20 minute walk and if you have tried everything, call ambio Life sciences changed my life. That and marry a unicorn.
- [179:58]
Chris Williamson
It's a beautiful story man. I'm really glad that you're still here.
- [180:01]
DJ Shipley
Yeah, me too.
- [180:03]
Chris Williamson
Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you're doing as well?
- [180:07]
DJ Shipley
You can check out gbrs group on all the social channels, YouTube, Instagram, all that. If you're trying to find me personally, it's DJ Shibley. I am only on Instagram, I don't do anything else.
- [180:15]
Chris Williamson
Okay man, I really appreciate you.
- [180:18]
DJ Shipley
I appreciate you.
- [180:19]
Chris Williamson
Thank you. All right, see you next time everyone. Dude, If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the modern wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.