Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX51Wwv2GM0
why am i at this point and how the hell has someone died under my watch you can't even go and kill yourself you can't even go hurt yourself you're [ __ ] useless and i'm beneath the surface and you can hear the thumps overhead like and i turned around and looked at vice and he went [ __ ] run now [Music] wow this is the most gripping inspiring twisting conversation i've ever had on this podcast ever if you're squeamish i'm gonna have to ask you to prepare but even if you are i'm begging you to follow this story my guest grew up in a broken home one plagued with domestic violence with abuse with heartbreak and he moved to five six seven different schools as he stumbled through his childhood trying to find his way trying to find out who he was and then stumbled through his adolescence looking for purpose in life and he was met with rejection with pain with confusion with barriers and as he spiraled into daily drug abuse into addiction and into purposelessness a job that he hoped would give him that sense of purpose ended in a manslaughter case and this tragedy only caused him to spiral further and as he reached the depths of his despair he made that decision one day that he was going to leave his house go for a drive and end his life for whatever reason and thankfully he didn't go through with it and by fate or luck or faith or whatever you want to call it whatever you believe a short youtube advert that popped up one day out of the blue would be the catalyst for him to pull himself out of his darkest most desperate moment to give up drugs to overcome his mental challenges to brush himself off and to pursue his childhood dreams he went from suicidal drug addict to elite commando developing what he calls the commando mindset a mindset and a set of values that you can learn
but his story doesn't stop there his time as a commando is riddled with graphic violence with heartbreak with being injured by the taliban while at war he'll describe the moments after he was blown up and turning around and seeing his friends laying there behind him in pieces and losing some of those friends being discharged from the military because of his injury grappling with ptsd finding comfort in alcohol and addiction again getting himself in trouble with the law finding himself in court facing four years in prison and then rebuilding himself once again launching an incredible coaching company and working with elite performers harry kane gareth southgate and the whole england team before they went off to the world cup and then the pandemic comes and his coaching business collapses but in typical ben williams fashion adversity doesn't dictate his outcome thanks to the values ingrained in his commando mindset he bounces back to launch an incredible tech company what a wild emotional gripping ride you're about to go on honestly congratulations for choosing to listen to this episode without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire of a ceo i hope nobody is listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] ben from doing this podcast over the last couple of years one of the things that i've been reminded of and an idea that's been reinforced in my mind is how important all of our childhoods are in influencing what we then become and i studied childhood psychology between the age of like 16 and 18 and it blew my mind to understand especially in those early years how that sort of fundamentally shapes who we then become as adults and it's and it's in some respects often quite hard to shake right um you know that old adage of not being able to teach a new dog new tricks because we're so we learn most of our behaviors when we're young so my first question for you is tell me about your childhood
tell me about that experience how did that shape you yeah my um my parents had quite a rough divorce when i was around i think six seven years old um and i never speak about that divorce i never go into detail never talk about what it was but it wasn't nice and we sort of didn't see dad for a while and then the mortgage wasn't paid and mom had to take everything on and we had to move and we went from this lovely house to a very small house on a sort of council estate and i think at that age i didn't really see it too much i just it was part of the journey it was part of the process i didn't recognize her problems i didn't recognize what was happening it was just our dad's gone we're probably young enough to just get on with this and it's funny because my kids are the age now and i think about what are they processing now what they're going through how they seeing this what do they see every angle like um and then i think as i got a little bit older and i began to understand their separation a bit more and how it was not a clean break it i felt like i was a young child who almost wanted to protect his mum i had my younger brother that i thought i wanted to or knew i wanted to look after and protect and then she found a boyfriend who wasn't a father figure and i hope you wouldn't mind me saying that as well he was just there in the background so when you said it wasn't a clean break [Music] you mean there was domestic violence issues or there was it was uh it was an aggravated separation that's pretty much as far as i'll go on it um but we witness things we witness things and i think that stays with you quite clearly in your mind as you move through and when we go and move and transition into this kind
of new phase of our life in a new house with a new man in the house who wasn't really acting up as dad it was probably the most problematic area to be mum's dad and mum um and you can actually fall out with mum because she's trying to be dad and vice versa as well and i have probably the closest relationship in my entire family is with my mum because i recognise everything she's been through and she's an extremely resilient lady who's got herself to where she is today but it is true and i'm listening to your podcast and looking back on my own journey you see every single little thing begins to affect you i think later down the line rather than what you're going through at that moment it's all about that process and i don't think that processing happens very well when you're a child as i just said it's kind of next phase next phase next phase you know then all of a sudden six seven schools later um and you don't fit in and you know i'm not the broken wing story if you don't if you come to school and you don't know anyone you're the kid they're gonna pick on so that was part of the experience and then then you find your feet a little bit in the system like my sort of final school that was kind of my make or break moment and i think i went more towards break you said that when you're young you don't really know what things mean so you're kind of experiencing them but you're not like consciously processing them yeah but they are still sitting with you and having an impact on your world view then they're telling you what a relationship looks like and what a relationship with you know your siblings or someone else or authority looks like for example but you don't have that time to process it and i think as is the case in my life i like didn't process a lot of this stuff until i was like 29 or like 28 or whatever yeah um
and i guess that's the same for you right it just feels normal i think if you've not experienced anything before what you then go through feels normal um well this must be reality this must be how we do things and then you just kind of crack on and i think actually it was during my military career and then been sort of immersed in what that throws at you that i kind of describe it as like almost the eddie stabard lorry that you're just putting things in along the way every now and then you just stop and put things in and then you're just traveling at high speed and then something will happen and you bang the brakes on and then everything comes flying forward and that's what i kind of found over the sort of my mid-20s was why am i thinking of this again why is this coming back what's this all about and trying to work out a way of beginning to process what i should have processed years ago talks about six or seven schools um so you you were expelled or you were moving no we moved a lot all right yeah we moved a lot so we moved from guildford and then up to beds area and went to some schools in bucks and it was just house to house so we moved from school to school which is difficult for a kid and i found i found myself leaning more towards listening to certain music types such as heavy metal very heavy metal actually and dressing with it and i think back then you know early naughties is oh there's there's a kid in the corner with the black nail varnish on the spiky hair and the dog color and he's new let's throw exit him oh wow um so i suppose maybe i didn't help myself as well but that was just it was a real strange one because that's what i was into that's i still like that stuff now um yeah i felt like i wasn't accepted for liking what i liked you know that's how i kind of didn't fit in for a while at school
and is that is that a coping mechanism was was the music a coping mechanism was was being different in school or whatever it's some form of a coping mechanism because heavy heavy metal is pretty emotional sometimes i think it is uh i think it does become a coping mechanism [Music] i but i found it was the start of things it was the start of escape and it started with metal and then it moved to more sinister things such as drugs and at one age so i started smoking weed around 12. um um you know i tried weed before i tried cigarette weed got me with people i always wanted to be with or thought i always wanted to be with and all of a sudden i was smoking with the cool kids and oh this is all right you know i'm finally fitting in but it's only because you're all using weed and you're all focusing on this one thing that your togetherness is your little unit um but then yeah i think drugs took a little bit more of a hold of me than i expected it to and it was weed for several years and it just got more and more weed until i started to progress into my late teens where i start to pick up on other things which is when it all gets a bit cloudier going into the clouds what age did you did you start experimenting or using other drugs so i think just to give you even more of an insight of what i was thinking is i think because what happened between my parents and then not really having a father figure when we moved i actually began this sort of hatred towards males um i just didn't like him i just it seemed like it was the guys at school who would pick and then i didn't have father figure and it was am i the male who where is the male here and i just began this almost sort of disliking to to males when i started at school i started to have anger
management around 16 and then i i was going to ditch everything at school i wanted to join the marines and leave and my mum god bless her was no you've got to stay on the path you're on do you relate do your a-levels and then move on and then if you fancy doing it do it then and that then left me quite bitter because i was like i want to go and do this this is my destiny i'm going to go and join the military and that sort of no from her was that moment where i was like well [ __ ] you i want to do what i want but i still stayed in school and it was like what's the next best option i don't know why becoming a bouncer suddenly becomes the next best option but i wanted to fit in and i wanted to live a more macho alpha male lifestyle and i thought that was going to throw myself in the deep end and become a bouncer and so i managed to get my sia license so prepped for my sie license which is the badge you got to have as a bouncer when i was about 17 and a half the moment i turned 18 i was on the door and very quickly learned what the real world was all about and it didn't go very smoothly for me in the first instance whatsoever so to try and skip my almost youthful growth i started injecting steroids i started on started taking steroids orally and then moved on to injecting and then bulked up and got angrier and a bit more difficult to be around you talked about wanting to be a bouncer because it would make you feel like an alpha male or whatever um and it would make you feel and why why did i'm really like intrigued by that i thought where did the desire come from to be considered an alpha male whether in your own mind or to external to other people so i think part of it is the fitting in is why can't you fit in around that time you know lock stock was quite old but snatch and certain other films were out which
they were quite they're almost in the limelight it seemed like that way a life seemed to be normal uh not normal but what you should aspire to be like uh aspirational the aspirational like gangster um and i watched a bit too much of that you know i read lenny mclean's book and roy shaw's book and thought oh you've got to be hard to fit in in this world but i take to take you that moment where as basically mum said no you're not joining in the marines until you're 18 or at least do your a-levels when we did sort of begin to have every fortnight weekend with dad again the marines museum is somewhere where he used to take us we also went to the parachute regiment and uh to the imperial war museum here used to just take us around these military museums for some reason i remember being a young sort of nine-year-old in inata or as well looking at these pictures of these really incredible people i thought because this is what inspired me i thought i want to be a marine and you know as back as sort of nine years old 10 years old and then when it's kind of many years later when you suddenly almost pluck up the courage to be like let's do this it's a no it turns you quite bitter and quite angry and why not this is what i've always wanted to do and it and it does feel like that someone suddenly puts a blocker in the way of what you've always wanted to do your sense of purpose yeah that can that can make you um think in rather negative ways and i that for me was when it was what else can i do this is it this out is it this alpha male thing you know that's is that what a marine is is what's the closest to that then and where can i fit in and that's kind of what led me to the path of i'll go where everyone seems to respect you know i'm not going to sneak into the nightclubs like we used to do by putting our socks over our trainers at 17 to get in i'm going to work on it and those kids
that have always taken the mick those kids that have always thrown the odd thing at me are going to respect me and there i was 18 years old on the door two questions the first is what did your dad do professionally and was your desire to be macho in any way influenced by um wanting to also be accepted by him at all i would want to say yes but i think i'll say no i i don't know where it came from um i don't know where it came from and my second point was there is a stigma in society that bounces have power complexes and what you've described there sounds like a power complex yeah and it's this thinking that mum was dad and there was no other male in the house apart from her boyfriend who didn't really really be dad to us so do i need to be dad do i need to be the alpha here and the the older i got and the more i was on the on the door and the bigger i was getting um and i was working five nights a week you know this was my full-time job and you were getting feedback and validation from yeah women yeah and you know you get into the you get into the fights you you get better at it you get more switched onto it you get more aggressive with it and all of a sudden that validation comes in you think yeah well maybe this is my purpose maybe i am supposed to be here um and you don't see the animal you're becoming even at that age you can be 20 years on a door or you can you can do it within a couple of years if you start doing it every night and becoming almost laser focused on being there for the violence you're you're an animal it's like the frog in the frying pan gradually being yeah cooked it doesn't really it's a good way of putting it yeah i i it's particularly intriguing to me i've actually never talked about this but one
of the people closest to me in the world followed almost an identical path and they went through school i i think in my view lacking validation probably in the top four people closest to me in my life lacking this validation they then started using steroids at 18 17 18 years old i found the steroids in their drawer and then they went and became a bouncer and they were doing it for they told me for the attention from girls on one hand but then also because i think it did something for their self-esteem and this person is the single smartest person i know in the world but being getting that validation from being a tough guy on a door and injecting steroids and going to the gym and eventually he even started doing some fighting like ufc fighting stuff i think was um filling a hole in your story though the i read about an incident when you were a bouncer that kind of changed everything for you yeah i remember um we had a neighbor a little irish lady she's lovely she's still with us she's still with us and uh i think she knew the underworld better than i did from where she was from and i remember saying she said to me she literally sat me down she not when she found out i was joining i was gonna work on the door um she came and knocked on the house and sat me down no one was in as well and she was like you don't know what you're getting yourself into i was like i do know and strangely as a young male and you may have experienced this yourself when someone says you can't do something or you don't know what you're doing you're very quickly like i know exactly what i'm doing i've watched all the films i've read all the books i know how to do a some sort of kick i'll be fine and she's like you don't know what you're getting yourself into okay so she was right um there was an incident which happened uh at one of the nightclubs in milton keynes where it was around 3 am and i was leaving the venue as literally i was signing off
at 3 and the rest of the team of signing off at 3 30. and i was literally about to hand my radio in and there was just like this massive screen down the range and we had a door team i think of around 15. it was a big night club and it was still pretty packed for this time and yeah there was just this sort of scream down the radio and then you heard black black and that was like so you had code red which was like it's kicked off code black is like we've lost control and you just kept hearing black black down the down the mic and i was with a friend of mine uh another one of the doormen and we were literally like what should we do and just chuck the radios and run to where it was and we ran down the fire exit it's in the escape builder i don't know if you know the escape building in milton keynes it's like it's just like a maze you go through one exit and you're just in a maze of concrete tunnels and we were running down the stairs and then sort of round the corner and as we were running towards coming in the back of this part of the nightclub the doors just bomb burst open and everyone just fell through it was like a dam of bouncers and people scrapping and it was just carnage there was just people fighting all over the place who couldn't even work out what was going on um and then i recognized this massive guy who early that evening had just been a pain and he gave me a massive kiss on the lips and everything and like ruffled my hair when i had some um and was really patronizing towards me and and just he put me in my place that's what he was doing and they were fighting and it was inevitable they were going to kick off on this evening and they did and i just remember seeing like his arm dangling as they were trying to force him to the ground there was about three of the other lads on them big guys and then there was brother and then two
of the people fighting in this this area of the team i just grabbed his arm and he was just like flailing me around and we i was just slapping into the wall and then back on and then we all hit the floor and there was this almost like crunch sound but no one thought anything of it because he just he went almost even stronger and i just had this arm i was lying there thinking this is he's really trying to get up here this is going to get out of control and you could hear his brother screaming down the corridor who's a big lad himself um and we're probably on the floor probably about a minute trying to subdue him you know calm down calm down um and his face was facing back across me and it was just staring at the wall and then i noticed some sort of pulling underneath his head and uh it just didn't look right the blood itself was not a nosebleed it was purpley and i just said said to one of the lads was like i don't [ __ ] think he's well and everyone literally just massive breath came off him and he was still lying there didn't get up and then one of the bouncers was a fireman and i was like roll him over and then began trying to resuscitate him but to no veil and he'd passed away there and there on spot remember standing there watching it all unfold suddenly going from this big alpha male we're here to fight to what the [ __ ] has just happened and then they closed the club and they nicked everyone and then we were on man or charged for about a year as they tried to determine what happened um he'd lost his life you know as a man had come into a nightclub whether he was a pain or not had lost his life and worse than that uh five kids had lost her dad through an act of violence through actually no one's fault he fell and the way everyone landed on him unfortunately broke a bone in his
neck which caused him to go away and it was um it was put down as an accidental death there was no malice in it there's guys trying to defend themselves and and the court recognized that and i'm glad of that as well because things like that don't always get recognized and people all do get in trouble for defending themselves um but for me it was a serious point in my life where i thought wow we're not in deep here we're [ __ ] way past deep um which became quite a hard thing to deal with and then you lose your job and by that point i was already using cocaine and steroids and you're trying to keep up this addiction and all of a sudden becomes an escape and then you can't afford the steroids you see yourself get skinnier and it's what do i need to do i just i'll just do more i just need more coke but cokes are expensive and smoking more and more weed and i just became extremely lost you know i was uh i was cleaning school toilets at one point because that was the only job i could get was to be a cleaner and for me i felt like i was very much lying on rock bottom you lose your sense of purpose at that point right like you lose your sense of orientation and this i've you know in writing my book and doing tons of studying over the last two years i've really grown to understand the importance of especially men having a sense of purpose and orientation and as i did some reading about why the life expectancy has dropped over the last two years in the uk and the us i think i've mentioned this before the data suggests that it's because of opioid addiction and then you say why are people getting more addicted to opioids and the data suggests because men specifically are losing their sense of purpose and i think jordan peterson's the one that says there's a purposelessness epidemic sweeping the world which is why the life expectancy has started to decline
and it sounds exactly like that when i when i read that in your story and as you've said it then sounds like one of the the worst things that can happen to someone a man or a woman is they lose their sense of as i say in my book their sense of like chaos because that chaos and that having stuff to strive for and aim for seems to be our act our stability um how bad did it get for you at that time in terms of drug use and and um your mindset so i've written about it quite openly in my book um i was using it on tuesday mornings you know in my mom's spare bedroom using coke right um and it got really bad it got really bad to sort daily use always that was it that was all that the focus of the day did like get cleaning work done or or if i wasn't doing that just like oh soon my mate i literally had two mates which i did it with and i'd just wait for him to finish work and then we'd go and pick up and then we go and see my course until midnight just sat there just looking at the stars thinking it's a chill sesh really just [ __ ] wasting my time um and it was on one of those very lonely days where i just sort of thought i don't even know who i am and actually i have a girlfriend at the time who's now my wife you want to meet a resilient woman my wife has put up with me for so many years i've got a lovely family and yet here i am sat with like half pulled blinds [ __ ] everywhere in my room no purpose don't know where i'm going in life taking drugs why like i'm from a nice background why am i at this point and how the hell has someone died under my watch how's this even happened and for me that kind of was a moment of obviously give up so i took the i took the courser which i shared with my brother and i just went for a drive and i had it in my head this sort of ambition that i was just going to go and drive off something or drive into something or
go and do something stupid and uh try and escape what i thought was this internal pain it never happened it never prevailed i never did it i actually ended up back at home after losing track of time sat there feeling sorry for myself oh you can't even do that you can't even go and kill yourself you can't even go hurt yourself you're all [ __ ] useless um which lo and behold is when i sort of flicked on youtube the old clunky version and that advert appeared and i thought i don't know if it's fate i don't know if this is some sort of sign from above as the advert for the royal marines yeah and it just came up it was an old advert and it was just there just appeared as part one of the videos that i should watch and it was a young lad and i reckon he must have been about the age i was at the time i sort of 1920 i think it was at a time still quite loose on my time into that one and he goes he's going through the endurance course which is one of the commando tests and one of the four commando tests and the endurance course is a two mile bogs tunnels um just just just a muddy hell that's the kind of way of crazy muddy hell yeah and then a four mile run back to camp and to get to that point you have to have done the 32 weeks of training and that's the first test and i remember watching it and and he's running through wood wood breeze on where it is would be common he's running the stops and said would you stop here and then it goes again and it goes through the tunnel would you stop here and then they have this obstacle in there called the sheep dip and the sheep dip's about three meters long and it's fully submerged and you have no control what happens is um someone will put you under they'll force you through and then someone else is the other side and they have to pull you out you can't swim you just go
through like a torpedo and it's a bit dramatic but this kid goes under the water and gets his trousers stuck on some jagged bit of metal and he's like hanging out for breath and then it's going it freezes would you stop here and then it freezes again and it does it again does it like two or three times and then it says if yes don't even bother filling out the form and then the next cut scene is him with his green beret at night on uh a speedboat offshore raiding craft just going along no music just this weird sort of tone it was like and then it goes 99.99 need not apply and that for me took me back to that young child in the royal marines museum in portsmouth who was looking at the pictures of old guys of moustaches in the falklands and the early iraq's people who had become something and i thought what else have i got to lose what else have i got to lose here than to just go and do it and that week was a turning point so you applied yeah i can tell how much that particular video influenced you because you can describe it i mean it must have been decades right since you said yeah and you can describe it in such graphic detail i still watch it now oh really i still watch it now only because it just it reminds me of that sort of transition in my life that courage you know i always thought that i had a lot of courage i think a lot of men do they what is courage to us what what is courage and it was something that i thought i could establish or find on the door or in like a violent world and be that alpha male where actually courage now i look back over my years i look back and think courage was the ability to go downstairs you know after sitting there for hours shall i shine shall i not i'm going mom you know you said no thinking of doing it and she went thank [ __ ] for that because i've done my a levels and i think she'd
grown tired of me yeah yeah and i was like what and it was like this just acknowledgement like yes please go and do that because we can see what's happening here and you're ruining your life and you're only just about realizing it and i was like last to the party and realizing i was the one ruining my life and the other hard part was you know my girlfriend had been with some for some time [Music] who had been through all of this up to this point i'm now leaving her to go on this journey and become a royal marine and i think that was for me the hardest part to build that courage up and say can i go and do this and she was like yeah i support you with whatever you want to go and do and that was it it was literally i described in my book like a couple of days later i literally just threw i had a pack of coke in the house and just threw it in the um in the toilet and flushed it and didn't flush i was like that was dramatic because i thought admittedly i kept smoking weed for a little bit because it was my progression off everything but uh you know the steroids were done partly because i couldn't afford it but you immediately begin to learn about what being fit means i remember this moment i am i didn't i didn't really have too much physical training kit i just had the odd sort of football shirt and horrible jogging bottoms lying around and it was uh i don't know if you've seen it i think it's sean penn run run fat boy run at the moment when he he steps out the doorway for his first training run for his marathon and he's all overweight and he's like stretching off in his really crap yeah and i uh i felt like that guy and i stood at the doorway of my house i was like i'm gonna go for a run over the rest of your life yeah but it was this it was like the weather we have now it was just this hit of fresh air and running and the endorphins and the exercise feeling like it was purifying me i
thought this is what it feels like this is is this what success feels like is this what progression feels like is this what it feels like and that was that week alone of just feeling myself getting slightly fitter and healthier you know simple things like tidying up my room i was making myself homemade meals like lasagnas and pastas because it was carby and it felt like that was the right thing to do um and then i began to to start the application process and yeah it's about a year's process of fitness tests medicals well psychometric tests and stuff like that and then you go down and you do this three-day course before you start training you have to go and do a potential royal marines course which is what i can only describe as a three-day bee sting where they just make you cry for three days and see who survives it and um i got food poisoning the night before oh [ __ ] yeah i literally threw the eye of a needle and out the mouth and i was like i'm in a [ __ ] state a real [ __ ] state like a corpse in my bedroom and uh i remember my mum's saying again she's like why don't you get and see if they'll move it like in that mumsy way yeah let's ask the marines if they'll move it mum i just thought i've just got to go and i went down and i was last on every test but i managed to scrape the times but i couldn't put my hand up and be like feel poorly like two three days into becoming a royal marine it wouldn't have gone down well um but i passed and that for me was just this incredible moment of i've just managed to kick my bad drug addict habits i think i've overcome some sort of suicidal tendencies here to now be passing a course that's going to give me the ticket to begin training with one of the world's most elite and respected regiments and that i didn't need anyone else around me for that one to say well done
or that validation that was a look in the mirror and go nice one how did it feel when you got that like was it a letter or an email or it's uh it was literally there on the spot you know you do the last day of the three-day course and then they go hey you passed or they go you [ __ ] you failed off you go and i had this letter which said uh which said uh you passed you you'll hear from your careers officers soon you also get given this t-shirt i cringe when i think about it now but this t-shirt says potential royal marines commander on the back yeah and when i see people wearing them now i'm like and uh i put this t-shirt on and i was on the train just like hold it and it was freezing and i'm traveling through i actually came back through london because i was living in milton keynes at the time and so i was on the tube just like that no coat on just a t-shirt yeah but i was so proud of it and i trained in that t-shirt every day and uh and then yeah i got my letter in the post saying you'll be starting on this date uh get yourself ready this is your kit list this is what you're gonna need and that date came round but your mum was proud right yeah yeah she was really proud i think my girlfriend was a bit confused and a bit oh there he goes off on a journey what happens to me now um which is why i work so hard now so which i'll come on to later but you know being stood i've been sat on that train um for day one of training and going from milton keynes and i went up to birmingham and then i caught the birmingham all the way down to exeter i remember looking at people on the train behind sort of newspapers and that those glum sort of mp3 playing faces with the listening to their music looking out the window and sort of cheap suits and you know tapping away on laptops and i thought i wonder if these people are happy i wonder if these people are on the journey i'm about to go on and that train ride in itself was extremely
fulfilling and then the royal marines training center's got its own train line which is super scary to turn up to and then uh yeah i pulled up sort of five hours later and there's the first instructor awaiting you and you you walk through the gates you're carrying all your kit quite bewildered but i remember thinking i've arrived it's crazy that you went from being i almost have this vision in my head of this young man who was looking around for for something and finding nothing in terms of his purpose and then obviously going within himself and using you know cocaine and other substances to try and take to try and escape and then suddenly it's like this north star just becomes illuminated in the distance and it's this sense of orientation and direction and purpose for your life and um and that seems to be what you know changed changed everything obviously it takes a ton of resolve because you know the way you've described it sounded i've got to be honest even though you had these challenges along the way between like the moment when you decided you saw that youtube video to when you actually showed up at the training camp but it's tough for a lot of people to um to even see the north star and then pursue it and especially when they're holding the baggage of like addiction and i find that pretty miraculous i'm like a lot of people wouldn't be able to do even that part going from addiction and suicidal ideation to putting on those shorts and going for that run i feel like that's that's the biggest mountain to climb right like yeah that was uh i think that was part of the rush for me was actually just arriving at the camp and i'd watched a documentary by chris terrell um commando on the front line and it followed a troop through commando training which was quite
it wasn't an old grainy one it was you know a year or so before i was going to go there and i just obsessively watched this and at the time afghan had just kicked off as well and so they were getting combat footage of what is happening out there right now mix of this training and and i remember watching this thinking i'm going to be there soon i'm going to be there i'm going to be there and it took you know that's a year's worth of sort of preparation and then i remember standing in the foundation block which is where you spend your first two weeks with 60 guys i've never met before all of us have shaved heads or just look bewildered and a little bit worried about what's next and i remember looking around thinking this is the room they filmed that first episode in i'm in it wow and you do think like what legends have walked through here what heroes have come through everyone comes through that door over there and i think even that itself was a real moment of pride like i really enjoyed the first few weeks of training and then it got quite hard to realize that all right yeah it's quite a long course and this is going to take a lot of resolve as you say but um you know those even those initial first few days of just excitement and looking around and just being surrounded by excellence you know the values have written on the wall your corporals your troop sergeant your captain they wear the green barrier of pride and they're stood there immaculately dressed i'm gonna become you one day i'm and we're having this conversation today but something happened uh in my life yesterday in fact so this is i think why i'm really dwelling on this point of like how you go from the youtube video to putting on that pretty ugly gear that you found and then going for the runners i've got a very good friend of mine who i know what miami saying this because we talk about it openly um who is going through tough times at the moment he sounds very very similar to the guy that you described who was
having those negative thoughts and was looking for purpose in life and i'm almost searching for the advice to give him i think that's why i'm asking you the question because he is that guy that sat in his car looking up at the sky wondering what's the point in living what is it that takes you from that place to putting the shorts on and saying do you know what i'm going to do something for me for once i'm going to help myself no one else is going to get me out of this situation but me that bit there feels like the hardest mountain to climb i guess for you it was that sense of purpose and prestige and that was you know this had been your childhood dream or like there's also this quote i sometimes ponder on which is change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change like when life becomes sucks so much that would ease it would be it would suck less to go and be beasted yeah yeah you've got to want something that's what i looking back out having learned everything along the way it was the desire to want something what is it i want um and it wasn't the validation of being a tough guy at all it was to be part of my dream you know and you think back to that nine-year-old he'd almost made his mind up on the spot there that he's going to join the marines and that kind of got taken away and then i took it away from myself anyway and i think almost further away it gets it becomes less tangible so when the incident of the nightclub happens and you find yourself becoming wrapped around the wrong axle completely you think it's getting further away i'm losing control i haven't got it i'm losing that thing i want to that that finally that day of something that reminds you to go remember what you want to go [ __ ] it i'm going to go and do it and you know what i found i know a lot of people like this i still have a few of them my close friendship group um and i've worked with a lot of people
like this as well where it's actually the courage to go and do it somewhere in your friend's head he'll be thinking something that i wanna he may look at you yeah but you're successful it's easy for you to say it look how well you're living the dream [ __ ] you you can't give me advice and you're like oh dude come on switch on in there somewhere is something he wants in there somewhere it's a desire in there is a child who had an ambition for doing something and the older we get what i found with my experience it it feels like it gets slightly further away and that gap gets bigger and all of a sudden you've got to take a bigger step or a bigger leap but if you have that ability to go no i do have the courage with it that that gap closes and it takes steps it takes baby steps and people think it's overnight you know you may have found this oh you're an overnight success that's like 10 years worth of hard work you know messi says it took 15 years to become an overnight success that's because deep down in the shadows those people which are fighting every day the addiction the difficulty the desire to go out in the piss with our friends in the normal world to do the drugs to eat unhealthy food whatever it is is is that fight right there to go yes or no should i follow the easy option or should i follow the hard option and sometimes the hard option isn't the challenge sometimes the hard options the courage you have to build within yourself to take the steps you know that um is there anything that i could have said to you when you were in that point in your life when you were doing the drugs and having suicidal ideation if i was your friend is there anything that i could have said to you that would have helped you get out of it because as friends and family members we're always trying to change you know help
right and i sometimes doubt the power of a mate turn into you and being like pull your [ __ ] together you know it it strangely happened to me so uh i won't mention his name because he's doing sneaky beaky things these days but there's a close friend of mine what's sneaky beaky you know appearing from curtains working for special forces okay fine and things like that right not perfect no no no no no no yeah can't do that one again no he's not perfect that's why i won't mention his name a friend of mine was within this lifestyle i was with him and um he decided to join the marines and he got out of what we were embroiled in and i i remember ringing him like what's it like what's like you know sort of inquisitive about it and he just said come and do it and for me that was like this guiding light it was someone within my life who actually had come away from what we'd all been doing and plucked up the courage to go and do it and it wasn't some millionaire entrepreneur it wasn't my mum it wasn't my dad it wasn't a really senior marine it was a friend who was probably about 15 weeks ahead of me on the process who's not even made it himself and is still going through the hardest parts of training to say come and do it come and give it a go you've got this and that was almost that not validation but that boost to be like yeah all right because that's a relatable role model yeah he's just like you yeah it's someone i know it but it's so real it's so hang on he was with us 15 weeks ago i know him i bring him and i'm like wow okay i'm gonna i'm gonna follow in your way which in turn becomes quite uh intimidating because you're sort of social groups looking at it going well the marines is really hard to get in now two of them are there one of them's guaranteed to fail aren't they shortly and i'm looking at him going wow he's stronger and tougher than i am is it me and
that sort of creeps in every now and then but it was that role model to have seen i was as you were saying that i was thinking that people will now look at you after being in the marines for you know almost 10 years 10 years 10 years they'll see that that marine a decade in they'll see ben and they'll think oh god i can't i can't do that he's you know like he's a big strong man he's disciplined he's got this mindset like there'll be a kid sat in his bedroom glancing at that youtube video of the you know the marines advert i think and then looking over at ben and thinking oh no i'm not i'm not ben he's all polished and it's funny that it sometimes takes a relatable role model to be the bridge where you go do you know what there's a guy that's halfway through the journey who i know and i'm like him and he's not special or smart or whatever or rich and that can that's the the bridge that i'm gonna use to get in there myself it's one of the things when i do the podcast and when i talk about my story i always want to let people know that the guy you see now that can talk and that can do this business stuff and no social media was like an idiot who like got kicked out of school can't spell still can't do maths well it's just like you but as you say maybe the defining thing was courage and that courage came from just a delusional belief that i could this is what i talk this is why i wanted to write my book commando mindset because i wanted to um get people thinking that a commando mindset is a particular way of thinking within our world you know to have a hundred percent of the command of mind say you have to become a commander you have to go through the process and join up um but everyone has to get themselves to the gate and i become quite interested in to get into the gate part to start and who doesn't get to the gate you know the biggest critics never stand on the start line with you they're always the ones in the stand
given at the beginning aren't they it's those on the start line who get to the gate now i got to the gate and i was really proud of getting to the gate you know how cringe-worthy but potential royal marines commando yes at least i'm a potential royal marines commander instead of a potential civilian which i don't want to be for now i want to go and live and enjoy the world in different parts of it um some you wouldn't go to holiday on but um i wanted to go and see it and that that for me was a really interesting point and you know fast forward many years later i managed to get the prestigious job of going back to the commander training center as an instructor and get to see those people get to the start line and see them go on their journey and listen to their stories you know you're a bit of a tough guy over them at times but listen to their stories and hear them say that they had drug problems and this happened within their family and or this person lived on the street for this long but now you're in my world and i'm going to try and take you from what you were and turn you into something that we need you to be but you have the ability to be as well and that process seeing them go from civilian to commando and that's really empowering because i get to stand there on the last day of training when they finally do it and you can finally call them mate when uh you know it's a bit hard up to that point it's like good effort mate and you have a beer of them and you tell them a little bit about your story they go whoa i thought you were like this sort of thing yeah untouchable [ __ ] just yeah yeah yeah that's it yeah yeah pretty much but instead they realize you're a human what is the commander mindset are there principles to it what's the philosophy you know you talk about it being something that we can all sort of reflect on in our own lives we
can all have that command in mindset i guess in the home or in work what other what is the commanding mindset and well we have an ethos that was the sort of thing that first jumped out at me when i got there and we have values and the values is pretty much what makes us courage courage determination excellence self-discipline integrity cheerfulness and humility and um these words they're very human words aren't they they're very you could put that in almost any walk of life and i think people can acknowledge it and go courage yeah excellence i have a bit of that integrity is the biggest one we say integrity in the marines is your virginity you can only lose it once and so when you have that way of thinking and you have that ethos amongst your peer group and your leadership group um you know most of the time what's coming out of people's mouths is true and that whether that's moral courage to say we're the same rank and you've got stop swearing nests and you've got to take your hands out your pocket and you know let's set an example for people who are below us um to even you know being able to say that to a senior commander like oh should we have rounds in our pockets right now sir but it's this ethos within us that enables a particular way of thinking and it's when you're in the most extreme circumstances when bullets are coming at you i remember my first ever combat engagement i was we're in a quite a large patrol of 12 and we've been on the we'd flown into an area in the green zone and told the taliban are here you're just gonna have to go and find them which is like finding a needle in the haystack sometimes and we were on the ground for about four hours and we always take an interpreter with us and they have a radio that intercepts taliban frequencies so they can actually hear what the taliban are saying and it was the first time i think i heard the taliban as well you hear these
voices and it's quite squiggly over the net you can't really hear it properly but you just think that's our foes that's oh [ __ ] they can see us as well where are they and they said uh we can see and we can see them they're heading towards the melon now they're heading towards the melons was their code word for um ied improvised explosive device a homemade bomb so the taliban is saying across the radio that they can see you they're talking to one another saying they can see us and that we're heading towards the bomb they've planted and you start thinking well maybe they're trying to egg us on maybe it's not real we went into this farmer's compound and we stayed in there for about half an hour to gain our breath and have some water and then they came back on so they've gone in person they said his name as well they've gone in his compound we'll pay him a visit later we'll get him on the way out so you're looking at the poor farmer thinking you're getting a knock on the door like you don't need but also we're in the safety of this small compound that we're gonna step out back into the open soon and they're gonna they're gonna see us and we stepped out the open [Music] and straight away we can see him again we can see him again and you again you kind of are they trying to pull our bluff because they know we can hear them they know they know we listen to them um you kind of take it sometimes with a pinch of salt but you have to take it seriously but then we had assets in the sky which was a drone saying that it can see fighting males coming towards us all carrying weapons and then moving down this street and that was like okay this is actually real and we hadn't been hit by this point in the tour and this was about to get very very real and your whole everything changes you know the adrenaline's quite the adrenaline's high but it's controlled you've got control and you think i know how to deal with this
stay focused and we came up to a ditch which there was it's almost like a t-junction ditch where one met another and then to cross it it was probably about four foot deep and then you had to pull one another out of it and you get onto a track and then there was a wall and the track sort of went left and right from us and about three of us got out the ditch got onto the track and then just a hail of bullets came flying down the track and they all spat off the wall and off the floor and off the trees around us and what you're taught to do when you're shot at you're taught to do something called rtr which is return fire whether that's from the hip shoulder whatever just spray in a direction take cover return accurate fire rtr i nose dived into the ditch don't blame you yeah like quickly as well and just completely flopped into the water my kit's probably wearing about 100 pounds so i've just gone straight to the bottom of the ditch and i'm beneath the surface and you can hear the thumps overhead like a split second you're underwater split second but it's long enough to go ah that wasn't the right thing to do that i've just done everything against what i do in training and what i've been taught to do you panicked right yeah massively like oh [ __ ] someone's shooting us what do we do jump in the ditch that seems like the cleverest thing to do and jumped in ditch and i remember this thought coming through my head going oh you [ __ ] up big time there get out the ditch and i in that second came up out of the water and noticed everyone had done the same thing so i was like right mark dodged that one um and the way we were looking was down the track so everyone sort of looking across each other down down the ditch and down the track and there was one person still on on the track returning fire on his own stood up literally you couldn't make it up it was it looked like that sort of call of duty image where he's just firing away on the
track and it was our commander vicey um and he just looked over all of us in the ditch and went check your [ __ ] flashes and that is this internal system which just goes like that because your flashes are what you wear on your shoulder and it says the words raw marines commando and everything those three words mean is related to the ethos related to our values related to those 32 weeks training related to every person that's died for those flashes and we're all hiding and he doesn't need to say get out the ditch come on on the track or anything like that he just screams check your [ __ ] flashes and that's your reminder to go oh i need to switch on and be a marine here as opposed to hide cowardly in the ditch and then we go out and you get into the fight and that's what the mindset the mindset isn't necessarily just down to skill and ability it's that ability to tap into what you're programmed to do what your dna is what your value system is have courage have excellence have determination all these things that were just words up to that point have true meaning for you to get into the fight whether you lose your life in the moment or not you're there to do a job and that's what it looks like and those values as you describe them go back through that list again courage one of them was joyful not just cheerfulness in the face of adversity why is that so important that's the one that struck me the most i was like that sounds like smiling if you uh if you don't laugh at it or laugh at you and i i can't i've lost count the amount of times where i've been soaked in mud i'm absolutely hanging out and you know a domino's pizza and being at home and going miss and you look over to the right and all you can see through this this muddy face is his teeth someone else looking back at you and you just go and you giggle and you know this is [ __ ] isn't it yeah let's get on with it
because if you don't laugh at situations that get tough it is going to laugh at you and the moment it starts to laugh at you you're going to begin to suffer now it's not in the case of when people lose lives you're stood over there going ah having a giggle but it is those moments of extreme warfare where rounds are pinging off the wall in front of you and you look at one another and go [ __ ] you know that was close wasn't it and you have the ability to laugh at situations maybe other people wouldn't laugh at cheerfulness in the face of adversity is is what we all need i've been saying it to people all last year and this year you know this is [ __ ] what we're going through but if you don't smile in some way or another and find that sort of courage to have a bit of morale within yourself it's going to laugh at you that's where your mental health starts to take a knock that's where you start to have that sort of negative downward spiral and that was something i never had before the marines the ability to laugh at difficulty and the marines encourages it out of you what the other words again so cheerfulness courage determination determination excellence talk to me about excellence why that's so important because i know from the i've got to be honest i i feel like i've watched every documentary ever on like the sas and the marines and um the other special forces across different countries i i got so obsessed you know when i was younger and one of the things that you see in training is this obsession with the the soup you know your uniform being clean and your gun being clean and things being in order and it seems like from my outside perspective they're like training excellence and organization into you is that is that why they use the word excellence in your flashes um you can never achieve perfection everyone looks at the military as in
they're perfect everything's shiny everything's ironed everything's clean but it's not perfect if you if you think you've got perfection you've hit arrogance or you've let your standards down because excellence is that ability to continuously keep striving towards something um my corporate training said if you do not put 0.1 better every day at least you're heading in the right direction and his way of looking at that was you could have the worst day ever you could fail every test but if you do something extra that day that just boosts that 0.1 at least you're making a little bit of a more positive impact on that day than maybe yesterday you can always strive and that word excellence is is embellished in that it's a it's the ability to say i can never achieve perfection but as long as i strive to do my best effort that's what excellence really means that the the ability to strive to put in your maximum effort on everything you do you could be the slowest guy in the troop and not be able to keep up with everyone but if you are hanging out i always just said to my recruits i don't want to see you just giving me the face for the sake of it i want to see your face that you are fully inserted in the locker then i know you're giving me the best effort because they're striving for excellence they're striving to just be the best they can be do we do enough of that we do in the military and that perfection doesn't exist you can't aim for perfection you have to aim for something a little bit more tangible you have to aim for something that does exist and what does exist is the ability to keep doing it at a high standard how do you in our culture at the moment there's a narrative emerging which is like at least you did your bet you know there's a kind of a fluffy soft so you hate it i can see it in your face yes it's kind of like fluffy soft it's
okay that you're not that good at least you know take rest well you know good is a good good is fine which is kind of infiltrating our culture in a very pc almost in my opinion toxic way if i post this on instagram as i've said before i'll get like cancelled because people that sense of like doing less than your best and being negative seems to be comforting for people in a way that keeps their self-esteem and ego smothered with cotton wool so that they don't have to take personal responsibility i can see you're very pissed off good go ahead yeah this podcast is over um my lad took part in so i have a boy zach he's seven and i have layla who's three going on 18. and uh he won a race in sports day and i was like the marine dad on the edge and they're like godzilla you got this and he's flying down and he's miles ahead of everyone else it's like yes and he crosses the line i'm like yeah and he comes running over and he's got this massive grin on his face and he's got a big sticker winner and there's another sticker next to it participator and uh i looked it and instantly in my head i tweaked and i thought rip it off okay good are they handing out them ones are they and um he went i won hold on when he's over over the moon and my wife and i were like well mate it's amazing and uh he went why did everyone else get sticker and he was pissed off and i was like and i could i can almost hear the parents around me i could hear their ears turn towards me like oh how's this parent gonna approach this one and i did think in my head i was like shall i go down there well it's good that everyone had to go and everyone took part and then this kind of the stoic commander went [ __ ] that i went listen here no one else should have got another badge right you're the
one who earned that that's the reason you've got that winner's badge don't worry about that participation meter what i want you to always strive just do your best every time and you can win the race like you did today don't worry about everyone else and he was like yeah but why do and it kind of the conversation went off in child language sure um but why do they get a sticker though dad and like kind of looking around again at the parents i don't know i've not worked this one out yeah but i did i wanted to let him know that that there was that parent in me there's almost those two voices to go go along with it because other people are listening and this is now the new cultural thing to do of just praise effort and sorry praise taking part over anything else or let my son you know one of the marines values his integrity i'll let him know what i truly think of it i don't agree that they're handing out those stickers mate you won you won the race and you deserve that one make sure you do that every time and he likes that people will listen to that and they'll think some people might think oh you're toxic that's yeah those yeah pushy parents and you're training your kid to you know he'll end up like michael jackson changing the color risk or whatever like but if we look at the importance of purpose and forward motion and orientation i think that removing accomplishment removing north stars and just saying nothing's an all-star and everything's a north star is actually really really dangerous because then if we don't have things to strive for if there's no winner if there's no accomplishment if there's no mountaintops then again we lose our orientation and that for me is where people get depressed and have opioid addictions and then they end up killing themselves or you know whatever else it's also it's also maintaining a
standard for not what i expect of my child i want him to put the effort in if if he doesn't want to put the effort in he won't put the effort in um and he will either go through a process in life like i did or he won't and he may look at my life lessons and others around him and go we're not going to do that i'm going to do this i run a business you've run a business if your staff or employees sorry turned up i'm like i'm just here to you know get paid and nine to five hit five and i'll go home you know that turning up attitude what what does that do for the culture of that business you know you have too many of those people within your environment your business is a car crash waiting to happen you know it is the people within it or your friendship group your friendship group oh just you know see what happened i'll just turn up you know the just turning up attitude is what we're encouraging when we say well done everyone for taking part in this race today you know i i personally think you you reward the top two and and the one who's putting in maximum effort who came in last give him or her something as well you know well done that's a good effort we had um another cake yeah yeah i didn't want to say you said it before um i don't care about being canceled at this point yeah you're not cancelled my episode but it's it is that it's if if we almost reward this participation now that's all you get rewarded as the winner gets as much as the loser gets and everyone in between gets rewarded this participation we are encouraging this just turn up just all you have to do is just turn up and you get praise you win you know it's what simon sinek talks about this kind of entitlement where does it come from well you just turn up you know you get everything everyone else gets anyway no like you and i people who've had to work hard fight hard the reason the green beret is so well respected is because it's so [ __ ] hard to achieve
the moment they drop the standard you know it's not going to be the value that it is at the moment maybe that will happen maybe society will push it through i know training was very different to when i actually took recruits through training you know i have seen that difference in culture society is having an impact on that we are rewarding people for just turning up simply just turning up and that to me is it's not we're not breeding this michael jordan attitude we just want you to come and give your best effort the excellence turn up and strive don't just turn up and tick boxes that's a big thing that i took away from the military is do not tick boxes you know you can get your report we were always encouraged with our reports to be way better on it you know don't just you know well done you've done everything you need to do in these couple of months it's good after you've done all this and this that's what we look for it's funny because people just her state of mind and the kind of soft fluffy cultural narrative that's kind of breaking through especially on like social media i think is designed to try and protect your mental health but i think that the argument we're saying is it it actually has the adverse effect because it takes away that sense of like striving and accomplishment which is so clearly important for people to live fulfilled lives and uh it goes back to the point i made about you know chaos being stability and stability being chaos if if even in my industry there was no competition there was no podium there was no nothing to aim for my life would descend into some form of like probably some form of depression because i would have no there would be a purpose and although you know the mountaintop or the podium actually isn't the moment of purpose the journey is like the striving the training the whatever it's important to have it there um and i i'm glad we had that conversation because i think a lot of people don't melons you mentioned the word melons
earlier on the taliban talking about they planted their melons so i heard that it was in fact one of those melons one of those ieds that took you out of the military yeah it was the catalyst for sort of end of my career um i've got something really exciting to share with you last week as many of you might have seen in the press it was announced that i would be joining the board of huel and for you guys that know me well and know how much i drink you all and how much it's been a key part of my life and running my business and staying healthy will know why this is exciting to me because it's a product that i absolutely love and the reason why they sponsored the podcast in the first place was because when i knew that i was going to be bringing it back and investing in the you know the the production of the podcast and the team i wanted a partner who i could talk about authentically without having to [ __ ] you and heal is that partner so i reached out to huell and said listen i'm starting my podcast um up again and i'd love you to be the sponsor of it and so as i've got closer and closer to julian some of you all know he actually came onto this podcast and he will be coming back on in the future um we realized that there was a lot professionally we could do together and upon leaving social chain i got a ton of offers to join boards to join companies to be an advisor a consultant you can imagine what my inbox looked like immediately after the announcement and i said no to everything i'm a firm believer in rejecting good and the whole doubt for grey and when julian had the conversation with me i said yes to joining hughes board in less than a second i knew what he was gonna end the sentence with so i said yes before he ended it and um i've started working with the team now on products on their comms on the wider business on the brand everything and it's amazing i absolutely love it so
what started as a little podcast sponsorship what started as a conversation with a remarkable entrepreneur and julian has now become a more formalized relationship and i'm a board member of huel and i think it's important to be honest with you about that because when you hear me talking about it now you know that i'm actually in the building so yeah just wanted to share that with all of you back to the podcast you mentioned the word melons earlier on the taliban talking about they planted their melons i heard that it was in fact one of those melons one of those ieds that took you out of the military yeah i was the catalyst for sort of end of my career um yeah we we were deployed on an operation around three or four weeks before the end of this particular tour in 2011 um and yeah it was called the hornets nest it was just an area i've heard that before yeah it's not it's not nice when your commanders say you're heading into the hornet's nest and when they follow that up with we're going to go and hit the nest okay all right good luck i'll see you okay postcards now um but it it the idea was to go in and disrupt the taliban an area they thought they were untouchable within and we knew it was going to be heavily contested and they had the civilians on hand there they they had it all and it was really deep in the green zone as well which i think this is sort of end of august beginning of september so the crops are at seven eight foot um the tree lines are sort of every hundred meters and the trees are very high it's just a really difficult place to operate in it's like a jungle in the desert and then we landed on the americans gave us a lift in the morning dropped onto target and within about four or five hours we'd had um five guys taken out the game already by a grenade which came into the compound and just detonated at their feet taken out of the game yeah so injured
and put back on stretchers and put straight back on the helicopters um we then took attack well we started to receive an attack from three different angles um so they were firing us from the bearings right north west and south um and there were firings from two different angles from a distance to distract us from an attack which was coming in from this third angle which was to sneak up to the gate and try and get into the compound so we were sort of really trying to fend off and and this came sort of every half an hour it would just pick up and then it'd drop off and move scrapping all day it got to the point that if you weren't on the roof fighting you were trying to get your head down to get some sleep and then ready yourself to go up and things would explode and you'd wait wait for a scream or wait for something and then the firearm has started going oh everyone's alright just carry on it was just the most surreal situation um and we ended up fighting with the enemy pretty much all day that day and then we needed to push patrol out in the morning and that morning that morning just had this weird feeling about it you know the day before five guys had been blown up by a grenade you know covered in frag um we'd had some injured civilians come in it was just just quite a chaotic day the taliban had got right up close to the gates and we've managed to push them back and kill a few and it just kind of leaves you the feeling the next day thinking oh we've got another six days of this seven day operation another six days of this um you know that first day we were there it got that bad that mortifier was getting called in over us landing literally 50 meters in front of the compound to stop them advancing on our position and that's frightening that's you know you're close to that sort of hand-hand combat and um the next day i remember waking up thinking i didn't have a great night's sleep
you don't really get good night's sleep out there and this really weird thing happened i i was sort of messing around with the some ornaments which were on a shelf you know just like being a nosy sort of brit having a look around this compound and i ended up flicking this sort of like weird dish thing it had a car battery like just a half a car battery in it and i poured it and it had all the acid in it and it leaked onto my head and then onto my face and then onto my body i was like oh my god i've got battery acid on me and i even said to myself i was a bad omen for the day isn't it um and there was just these like weird tiny little events that happened and i think they only seem weird now because i look back and like because there was an incident and um one of uh one of the marines uh darlow luke he um we usually rotate on patrol so on one patrol he would go at the front or second from the front because of the weapons we carried um i carried a light machine gun which is um you know it's between the we have two machine guns we have the gpmg and then we have the lmg and the lmg's slightly smaller and i had the lmg and so you go that second person to cover the first person who's a rifleman who is literally with a metal detector looking for the bombs so you're there on their shoulder and you work as a pair and it was actually my turn to go in the middle of the patrol and it was luke's turn to go up to the front and neither position really is any skin off your nose i was like doing a swap today and he's like now stay where i am i'll go jordan up the front and we came out the compound and literally straight away into a ditch and then into a cornfield and we kind of navigated our way through the cornfield and the idea was to get up to this village was which is probably about 200 meters from our sort of um base i suppose you could call it an occupied compound um and we just wanted to get in there and talk to some of the locals and
see what the problem is with the taliban and where they are and see what intelligence we can get out of them and i i was a jordan at the front and with us was a dog handler and we had the dog handler because they sniffed the bombs and we came to the edge of the cornfield and there was just no one around call it atmospherics so positive atmospheric women and children out in the streets farmers in the fields you know normal life pattern of life happening there was no one nothing like literally you had the tumbleweed going down the street um and i looked over my shoulder and you could feel it we call it spidey senses it's when you know your skin and your hair so it starts to stand up on your neck and you could just sense it after yesterday's fighting no villagers around they're here the taliban are here it's just where are they um i looked over my shoulder and vicey was behind me my commander it was just like yeah push up the track let's go and we came out onto the track and began walking up towards where we needed to be very slow pace you know you're checking for these bombs in the ground and a tractor appeared in front of us probably about 20 minutes 20 meters to our front and this this farmer just looked at us and he must have just seen load of marines suddenly stood there in the street and just we were like thresh you know stop and he just like floored the tractor as much as he could it kind of just chugged off and he disappeared and it just it just all felt a bit weird and we got nearer to this um we literally come up to this crossroads and myself jordan the dog handle were on top of the crossroads now or just just slightly just before jordan was on it and i was just slightly back from it and these two guys walked around the corner dressed in full black trainers on which is a massive indicator for taliban they used to wear trainers where most of the people just wore flip-flops and these trainers for obvious reasons getting around quicker
and they would just stood there as you are to me in front of us and it was like [ __ ] out and you couldn't do anything like they're not armed they just stood there looking at you and they're as wide-eyed as you are and you think this is taliban and then they just bolted literally just ran straight from us as we're like stop stop and they ran to our right behind us a short wall but into the field and you could hear him like traveling through the field like the snapping of the corn and everything and why the [ __ ] are they just running to the field why didn't they run down the track or just stop and all this is starting to go in your head and i turned around and looked at vice and he went [ __ ] run now and we'd start to run and we'd we must have taken two three steps and the wall next to us just obliterated and this this plume just covered us all like i've never heard anything that loud i've been around a few loud things but it was so close and i remember this something hit me in the back of the head um which my helmet must have deflected and then something went through my leg and i just felt like this almighty pain in my leg and but i was still stood there and i don't mean that heroically like shrugged off a bomb it was just a shock of it everything just went through you all the rubble um all the um frag fragmentations to the shards of metal just just went through your bags helmet everything and the pain in my leg was enough for me to like scream out in agony and then drop to the floor and the way i dropped i actually ended up sitting on my foot so my injured leg had come back under me and i had this right leg out to the front i smile because it was mildly amusing when i look back on it but all this you know your ears are ringing you can't hear it you just hear that sort of muffled sudden sound um you can smell the core diet you can
smell horrible things you know when you come to terms with what happens next i remember looking down thinking oh it's [ __ ] me and i was screaming i've lost my leg i've lost my leg because i just i was concussed i had the pain here i couldn't see it there's lots of smoke and dust everywhere and [ __ ] i've lost my leg i had this moment sat literally must be 30 seconds long sat there on the floor thinking [ __ ] i've lost my [ __ ] leg where is it for a start um and then it was like this weird sensation of like my foot trying to come back round underneath me and it and then i was like oh [ __ ] sat on it i'm sat on my foot i sat on my foot and i did look down and there was blood all down my legs but my foot was there my leg was there it was all intact and you check other bits which are quite required for a man and i was like all right it's all there and you do have those really surreal moments it's a real thing where people check themselves and i was like [ __ ] but then it real then you realize you're on patrol and there's other people on that patrol and there's 12 of us out on the ground right now and that thing which just happened was very very close and it was almost at the moment i turned around that the the orange dusty smoke was clear in that everyone was lying on the floor uh three of which were just out cold completely and it was just this stark realization like [ __ ] we've been hit hard there and the wall had this little small wall which obviously the device was hid behind you know you quite quick quickly know what's happened as they've planted a device behind the wall which is facing the path and they've run into the field at the end of a wire and just connected the battery and it's detonated on our patrol and what it is is called directional fragmentation so it sprays across the patrol instead of coming up from under the ground
and everyone had been hit everyone and behind me was my corporal vicey out blood coming from his neck blood everywhere kit weapons clothes just ripped to pieces and you just think [ __ ] and there's no one else around like it's just you guys on the track and most of them are lying unconscious on the floor and i started thinking i thought to myself i've got to get to vicey so i started crawling i was in utter agony as well i just knew i had to get to him and as i was getting nearer i could see that he'd been struck in the neck and it was doing as you would see on casualty coming out at an angle and you'd i've been in these moments before i've been around people which lost legs have been there for people which have been injured but there was people left and right you know there was your team were there on this occasion everyone's just [ __ ] out cold and as i was just getting to visey a marine came sprinting up the track from right at the bottom and just jumped onto his neck like with his knee literally jumped onto his neck and just lent into him and he started shouting at me going get your [ __ ] kit out now get your kit out and so i started fiddling around for my medical care and what we were trying to get out was this thing called hemclot which is like um it's like a bandage but it's uh it basically you stuff it into a wound and it expands um and i needed to get my henclot out but you have to throw it's like this technique that you take out throw it over your shoulder so it doesn't get caught in the dust and you have to keep it over your back so you can then put it in but you're not packing all the [ __ ] in around them and uh he's like get your [ __ ] head glow out now and he's now obviously removed his knee from his neck and he's got his fingers in the wound and he's trying to hold on and so i remember looking at her thinking he's trying to hold on to his artery there and he's trying to pinch his artery
going stop [ __ ] looking start putting it in there i was trying to do it and he grabbed it off me went i'll do it hold that and then you're there like [ __ ] now i'm holding it literally pinching it together going don't go don't go don't go and then the medic came up from the back and barged me out of the way and start started treating him on the spot um and all i could do was just hold his hand and was just like pray for your kids stay few kids stay with us stay with us and i just sort of 45 minutes flashed by and we were on the helicopters and we're back at kambastian and they were going through triage and i don't know miraculously they're still with us today um vice lost his leg in that moment as well which is unfortunate darlow who i was meant to swap with took fragmentation through the temple and is now disabled because of it but he's still with us and uh it's still great fun to be around still marine at heart definitely and a few other lads taking it in the throat all over their bodies and you kind of we meet up every now and then you know not so much now but we meet up we call it the bangiversary and you look at these kind of reprobates which are still just got scars all over them and you share the stories and you take the piss out of one another and vice always says to me he's like you were crying when i was dying when you know i was like yeah [ __ ] was but it's it's a part of that journey you know and it was a real intense moment but um we signed the dotted lines we put ourselves in that position and um that's what happens in war at some point you decide that you can leave or you would discharge medically or yeah it was um i was discharged because of my hearing and it was something i'd hid from that day i knew my hearing had been affected but the way the sort of hearing tests work in the military you can kind of blag it you press it every three seconds and it'll
it'll look roughly like you can hear it and i could never hear properly in my left ear and they changed the test uh several years later and i got caught out trying to blag it and the doctor was like what are you doing hearing test yeah stop doing the three second rule all right do it properly and did it properly and then it was like you can't hear any left ear can you i was like i can hear something then let's have a chat and yeah we sort of that was the ball rolling between being elite military to leaving the forces not easy to leave as they say life change is very different yeah have something to aim for that's what i decided this moment they told me i think i'd been up threw enough stuff up to that point to go okay this is what happens now adversity strikes you've got to work out how to get through it um i i had a i had this ability to coach people like that's what i did with my young marines and then when i worked with the rehabilitation troops as well i thought i could do something outside here and fortunately as i was sort of in my year of discharged gareth southgate brought his motley crew down to meet us at the commando training center and i got to meet some pretty cool characters within the england football team before they went to the world cup and that's where i realized that no this commander mindset thing can actually be transitioned and help people way away from the military how do i do this but between that gap of leaving and you know starting your next sort of chapter i was reading that you had you suffered with ptsd and you were you know because it would be conceivable that someone would then fall back into the old patterns right like losing your purpose again and then like losing your sense of orientation and was that a i think i had that relapse or i know i had that relapse
actually not long after afghanistan and i think this sort of trauma you go through the way you may handle it and what you've seen and all these things it's it's hard to get your head around is really hard especially when you come home so quickly it's like bang explosion you're back in the uk i remember being at um the queen elizabeth hospital up in birmingham and it had been 36 hours since we triggered well since the taliban triggered the device on us you know literally two days ago we're fighting them coming up to our doorway and then i was sending this sort of crisp white sheet bed white sheet bed looking out over birmingham and my mum came in you know this woman who i admire so much and i didn't want to speak to her i was like i don't want to speak to you i want to speak to you i want to speak to you i don't speak to anyone leave me alone because i was still an afghan and i genuinely think even to this day a part of me still stayed there and i could never get my head around it so when i when i you know rehabbed and i was fit and i could go back to the unit i would drink a fight i ended up getting court-martialed and i was suddenly spiraling back towards that bend before the royal marines you know using that violent way of being and taking a substance to sort of numb the pain which in this case was drink and again it was this ah back at square one done this career all right just i've just fought for my country and now i've got to go and stand in front of the judge which ironically was over an incident now i was defending someone else for when someone pulled a knife out you know it was just it kind of felt like really i'm actually trying to do something good here and i'm getting punished for it but that's uh maybe the naive way of looking at it but it it was a difficult moment i had to begin to process what happened in afghan and it's
it was just another moment of processing as we keep almost coming back to is how we process stuff and afghan was tough you know we lost people we we lost lives we lost people lost limbs a lot of people lost limbs there was this constant battle in your head because of the ied threat you can never see him so you would walk out on the ground and think i wonder where i'm gonna put my foot today and that that's like seven hours long every day that that has its toll on you like constantly looking like that everywhere you go i remember when my then fiance we moved into the flat together i was really mad at her for the way she stacked the bean cupboards i was like what the [ __ ] aren't they facing the same way for and she was like why are you being like this they need to because then when you go to say because you've got nothing for that because they just [ __ ] do it and now that's me still like packing my kit regimently at the end of my bed what if we get attacked we need to be good to go um and it's it's so hard to they call it decompression it's so hard to decompress from that and you feel so pent and i remember coming back thinking no one respects us like it seemed like the civilian world didn't care the london riots were happening you know i can't even get it right on our own shores let alone trying to help other people out and you just felt forgotten and it wasn't you who felt forgotten you felt the lives had been forgotten and everything which isn't the case you you know i meet so many people now it's like wow that's amazing to me thank you so much for what you've done for the country and you get to this humble point now we're like yeah thanks i signed the dotted line i'm so pleased you appreciate it um but back then it was this kind of bitterness of why don't you care i've just done this why don't you care and it took me about a year to get through that
and i i look back now and think i think that's actually quite natural for a lot of the marines that they went through and soldiers and then i got that turning point of picking up my leadership courses to then go and work with recruits and that was it for me i was like even though i was dodging and weaving the hearing tests i get to invest something back now and i get to make the next breed of marines come through and that became your new sense of purpose right that was yeah and it's such a valuable thing for me to do um we ended up moving the fam well my wife moved down pregnant we had zach down there we made a life and i really felt like it was just it was just brilliant to be part of their journey and see them progress and that's what the purpose became it was seeing people go from a to b and being part of their journey to say i believe in you you need to believe in yourself and you see them progress and even that comes to the england football teams like you can do this if you put your mind to it and they got that close very close let's talk about that then so where is gareth southgate and you ending up sort of working with the england football team just before they went off to uh russia yeah russia yeah yeah um [Music] they came they came down to get a taste of our world that's how i was literally put and the idea that they would come down and be immersed in some activities that we do they do some of our assault courses but they'd also be introduced to the mindset that's what gareth wanted to do most and he wanted to introduce them to our values again that was a really important part of their whole trip was to know what courage looks like what does excellence looks like self-discipline humility integrity all those words and um it was it was very surreal you know i felt like a giddy kid most the time you know knowing that they're in the buses they're almost at the training era we were
we were up in one of the woods that we trained in and there was me and four other corporals five other corporals and our sergeant and you could see the bus turning up and we were like oh they're coming literally like we were like that like then you had a tough guy yeah that was it yeah troop sergeant was like when they come over that wall don't forget like you gotta put it all on though boys all right yeah roger no worries taff laughing and then harry kane appeared first and we were like like staring him down and then i just remember tafar sergeant just went why are you staring at kane and just started bellowing at him and get on your kit then and then we all jumped in oh god then south gate start moving and um it was brilliant you've thrown that for a little while but actually they're there to understand you and that's not actually who we are um i was you know surreal moment one o'clock in the morning drinking or sharing a cup of tea with harry over a little fire talking about uh what it's like to score in front of 80 000 people what's it like to wheel away and you turned into a fanboy yeah massively and even when i was asking i was like ah don't ask the question but you know what he answered it in a way that it wasn't to the fans it wasn't to the press he genuinely answered it which i've you could hear it was like there's nothing like it you know the way you just the way you just expressed it and so you can see him staring at the floor a bit as he's saying it as he's thinking about those moments yeah he's visualizing and so yeah that was amazing and but then he asks you is like you know what's warfare like um and again that sort of stumps you a little bit like wow the england captain's just asked me what it's like in afghan you have this conversation it was just so normal it got that normal
that i started moaning to him about holiday prices because i just paid for the family to go to lanzarote on an all-inclusive and i was like and then and in holiday prices through the roof at the moment i just paid three grand today and then i'm thinking he's just got that from dubai he's probably just done all these things but he was so humble with it and it was a really genuine organic conversation and we found that with a lot of the guys and girls which came you know they bought the whole set up with them kit man to gary southgate and everyone in between and they just wanted to see our world and see what values mean when you're going through different things you know when you're in the mud and water it's very easy to be in that position and feel like oh this is [ __ ] but when someone's going this is what courage looks like this is what this looks like this was what this looks like you know it helps frame it in a different way and it helps show you what your ability is what you can do what what that meaning of that word is and that was something that we kind of encouraged them to take to the world cup and i think they did i think they did and there's been a lot of press around it as well so yeah they did well would have been awesome i i've read one of your uh your podcast all your interviews whatever where you said um had they beaten i think it was croatia wasn't it you were set to go on pierce morgan's show the next day and explain yeah exactly how you how you helped them get there but then they lost we had a focus literally yeah so i'm cheering going come on england we're made after this come on yeah yeah yeah it's a hard time um but it didn't happen but hey you know later i think it was january 19 i went and did the keynote for gareth at the football writers awards at the savoy and i did mention and and i know a lot
of people phrased it but there was an element of pride to be part of that journey and say you know they didn't bring the trophy home but they definitely bought football home and i think it's really unfortunate that we didn't have it this year you know that oh gosh they were last year so much whatever it's meant to be last year wasn't it 2020 it was yeah some wasn't yeah yeah it's almost 20 20 euros yeah so but it i thought i thought it brought the nation a little bit closer personally you the other thing i was intrigued by was i read this i think it's a r a um sort of strategy per se which um you've adopted to help you deal with difficult situations could you could you explain that a little bit yeah so ara was almost kind of made up on the spot when i was trying to think of some things to deliver to people and and i've written ara's quite a focus within my book because we all encounter adversity we all encounter challenge and one of the biggest things i've noticed with myself and then when you look at it objectively with other people when people encounter adversity there's almost that fight flight or freeze mode people go into there's oh i'm going to take this on or i'm going to bail out and hide in the ditch or i'm just going to stand there and there's a lot of research around most of us actually freeze we just don't know what to do um and for me going through a lot of experiences you know where i really go back to is when we lost our first person in battle d we lost eno and we lost dina within five minutes of the 24 hour operation we literally ran off the back of the helicopters at sort of 4 30 in the morning we were going to take a village and helicopters went trooper crossing the ditch to get into the village stepped on an ied blew him up and he was gone um and he died there and then on the spot
and two of the other guys were injured severely with him as well and you just i've used it a lot within football i call it three nil down within one minute and it's that moment of wow we're on the ropes already we've only just started this thing we're on the ropes how do we deal with it what do we do and i remember you know these incredible emotions go through you when someone gets killed you know you feel anger you feel rage you feel you want to cry you do you want to just take a knee and look at the floor and go i can't believe he's dead let's mourn it right now but you've got 16 17 quite hungry taliban on the other side of the wall who want to kill you as well and the worst thing you can ever do is is go into a village or an area such as that emotionally charged if you go in emotionally charged you're going to make cataclysmic errors that could be that you're so sad or overwhelmed that you're not concentrating you miss that person in the corner they then take you or someone else out or you go in there angry and when you go and they're angry you make serious mistakes and you don't have to look far and oppressed to see that happened and that happened on our tour um and that emotion gets in the way of dealing with the situation and what i like to more frame as thinking with clarity it's so hard to think with clarity during adversity and that's why i spent quite a bit of time thinking well what is a quick framework we can just jump to what have i used an ara simply stands for accept remove adapt the moment something happens then on the spot it's happened and then it's instantly gone so someone dying on the spot in combat is there's nothing you can do about it there's nothing you can do about it the most effective thing you can do is be it your highest standard strive for excellence get up on that roof and do what you need to do to the people which have hurt
your comrade that's that's that's how you should be posting it what is still the strategic operational part of what we're doing here and the the accept part is very difficult for a lot of people to do it's very and i still struggle with it now myself but actually having that little framework to go alright okay this isn't good how do i accept the situation has happened or happening how can i process it and without dwelling on blame or exactly or you know or bitterness is there another one like say your business is shut down because of kovid you're angry at boris johnson you're angry at everybody and you dwell on that so that's the first hurdle is as you say accepting which is tough tough but it's a mindset you know this isn't for me this is not something we should shy away from you know the moment say it's tough does that then allow people to go well i'm not doing it then just i'll just turn up sympathy can sometimes show up as well too much sympathy maybe a victimhood the except is it's happened what is the next move what is the next thing i need to do um we lost almost all of our work with our business last year we we were working in talks and coaching and doing workshops overnight gone like i could have sat there which i did for about half a day going oh what the [ __ ] where's that all gone but you can't how long do you sit there doing that for before you just start to take a spiral down or where do you actually go right what can i actually do with this where can i make a decision we could become so emotionally wrapped up in covert as well the pandemic alone like i've i've expressed a hell of a lot of empathy and sympathy to everyone i work with saying this is probably one of the toughest things we've all been through collectively in a long time we're literally playing stuck in the mud for real
you know we're grounded and it does become quite an emotional place doesn't it people losing jobs things going wrong but part of ara is this remove emotion is not becoming emotionless like not asking you to be motionless it's for me in combat it happens you've got to deal with it then and then remove the emotion get the anger and the sadness out the way do you know what we'll do we'll deal with that later no we've got to deal with that correctly as well this is where some people make the mistake of bottling up i'm going to come back to that later but i need to get on with my job and that part is that adapt part okay how do we adapt to this situation how do we adapt to loss of life there what was his role not who is he as a human what was his role what do we need to do to fill that role for now while we're here um i was telling you about that time when we were having to use mortar fire as almost a curtain as the taliban metroid commerce on that final operation the person calling in that mortifier was vice my commander and he's not a mortiman he is not trained on the radio to do that the day before when we lost those five guys who were by a grenade one of them was the mortiment and he was the one who needs to call that stuff in we didn't have him you have to learn to adapt and we could sit around and say oh we've lost our morton and we're [ __ ] now or we can go right he's gone let's not cloud our judgment let's think with some clarity and get the emotion out the way okay how do we adapt to this situation and i've had so many people which is really genuinely humbling because i kind of didn't make it up i just wanted to put a little bit of an acronym on what i use and give it to other people and i have so many people get in touch saying ara because it's a simple process maybe in the morning you know when you stub your toe stub your toes like the quickest like ah you just want to go band's eye on the table don't you but you just go stop i've stubbed my toe yeah yeah it does
hurt yeah i need to be a little bit less emotional with this table and now i need to adapt to the fact that my toes facing in different directions so we all look at the table now but it is it is something you know something just happens and you have to be able to go all right that's happened how do i remove the unwanted emotion i call it unwanted emotion what's the bit that's going to get in your way if you're making the right decision the anger the um the sadness whatever's there and then you have to adapt i always think that the first l you take and when i say l i mean loss the first l you take is often involuntary nothing you could do whatever the second l you take is often voluntary so like the pandemic happens wasn't your fault we get that but then you dwell on it so much and you refuse to adapt and you you become a victim of circumstance you become bitter and blaming and you don't adapt as you say which was your choice and that leads to another l which is your business goes bankrupt and so i always think like the first i always say that's like you don't have to take the l twice the first l is you know involuntary the second one is your choice and that's i think the similar sentiment to the importance of like getting rid of that unwanted emotion focusing on the task at hand finding that calm within your within the chaos and being proactive and as you said as the sort of military values being cheerful because that is uh optimism is a very important uh emotion to experience in times of real chaos you have to believe that there is a way out um and that's super interesting i i i was reading through your story as well more recently i read about i think you touched on this earlier this joy that you've now found in running during the pandemic yeah yeah tell me about that i don't like it as well do i just say well i started training in march as well and i've been training all year so i thought that was really interesting
you mentioned earlier that getting out and feeling the air and the endorphins and yeah i um i was never a great runner in the marines not really no i was more the one who'd put the big backpack on and just be able to plod on um your son could give you some tips yeah that's who i train with now um i just i i really i like the idea of just it sounds so forrest gump but just running there's i have no reason to run i i think during the pandemic i found it a nice bit of an escape you know we're locked inside all the time uh you're on zoom call after zoom called the kids are downstairs and um you just need that moment to yourself and and i just love being out there running i just it's interesting my business partner and um his wife asked me the other week she's like why why do you run i don't know you know it got me pondering so i think maybe i'm a little bit better prepped to answer your question um but it was i use this word escape loosely because i think i've used the word i i've escaped before in the past through drink and drugs and the more sinister things escape now is actually just to be of myself for a while and i find that and and you would have found this on your own business journey is it's so full on all the time it's just someone wants you for something your phone pings or you know i'm i use social media i don't have the biggest following but i use social media because it's part of what i have to do you know promoting a book and things like that i don't really want to be on it i actually kind of like my reserve lifestyle but i have to give you something to show you what i do um which i was listening to i think as jake talked about on your podcast this morning it was really interesting it put my ears about thinking about it
but running is i don't have my social media on when i run i'll if i need to i'll record a video to be like oh i'm not running um and post maybe sometimes but i just like being out i like feeling a bit of the pain in the shins and in the feet and i like running further than other people do not for time but that idea of what my corporal said to me in training 0.1 better every day i i really enjoy just striving for that excellence and i have found since leaving the military it's really difficult to feel like you're constantly striving for excellence it seems like there's more challenges there than there is success to be honest it's like one thing after the other i've done this within the business are we oh that's good oh something else come along which is difficult to deal with now isn't it brilliant um but for me being out running is that ability to escape i live in a wonderful part in the southwest you you know that area very well up onto dartmoor up onto the southwest coast um you just just incredible places to be and take the dog out running and i actually found in probably the last year or so it's an incredible space to think and i run back and i actually pick my post pace up at the end because i cannot forget that yeah you're not running back home through the door and you're like what about this with this yeah that might work but it's um it's just a place to be free you know and i'm not real a gym bunny i don't really i go to the gym i kind of walk around it look at a few things do the odd pull up and then go home i love being out on the road and i love being out on the muddy trails as well slipping around getting wet getting muddy it's just fulfilling isn't it i think when i was in the military that was all the time and now it's not when i left when i when i got binned from the military my last final day i came home i laid on the floor and it sounds i say that about social media i don't really like using it but
there's this this is almost like tradition in the modern military now that when you leave you post like your favorite pictures of your career and then a post um and you acknowledge the lads and then and then you post it out and i was writing my post and i was picking the photos and i was blubbing i was just like crying on the floor but to myself and i'd kept it in for so long i didn't think i was going to do this and then i was just in utter tears because it was this just this excitement that i was going onto this new phase of my life but also that's it now i'm never going to do that again and that made me who i am today i lied on the floor and i think part of the tears was i'm never going to go mountain training again i'm never going to go out to the states and go in the mojave desert again i'm never i'm never going to go to afghan again i know it's difficult as it was it's an adventure and then crying crying crying and my wife kicked my foot which she's actually literally hoovering next to me she's like you're going to get up but i was like oh we had this little moment together and i kind of like gave it all on the plate and then i went and booked marathon to sarbs yeah of course you did because i thought i've got to have something i've got to have a challenge which will uh fulfill that so now you're running this business looping what is lupin doing you i'm guessing you've really felt the pain of running a business and starting a business because it's a startup right during the pandemic what is lupine doing and how's that process been so what will help me explain lupin even more is probably stepping back into the marines for the first time when i put my hand up and said i don't think i'm that well at the moment i think there's something that might be wrong i'm bottling it up for so long you know come back from operations keeping it all inside guilt you know two ieds which went off behind me
injured people and you carry that with you and so you feel like you can't talk out and there's a stigma of don't talk just keep walking forward and i remember that moment of thinking everyone around me looks really strong and tough and they just seem to be shrugging it off they're like yeah we did after i'm crack on come on then that's and i'm inside i'm like ah i don't feel too good at the moment and it things happen and as i said i got in trouble and things didn't go to plan and then finally i put my hand up to one of the lads and said i think i've got issues here and he went yeah same here i have as well what you've been seeing and what you've been hearing and it was like whoa just instantly like you're not you're not alone and you feel this as well and like having this big conversation a couple of beers doesn't always help but a couple of beers for us at that moment was like are you do you feel weak and all these things and um that forever has stuck with me you know marines one of our values is integrity and integrity means to be able to go i don't feel too good today it doesn't mean you don't go into your job but if you have an awareness of how i'm feeling you know maybe you can back me a bit more or you can help me a bit more and that's going to come back i'll help you out which was where it began with how can we show it better and that's all it was was let's make lupin something that just asks someone in the morning how they are they respond on the platform they already use so slack teams integration it records that data pushes it through to the dashboard you then log into your dashboard you see your graph of how you've been recently compared to last week as well and then you get to see the close people within your team as well not the organization you can see every team in the organization if you want to but you only get to see the people within your team
and even within our own workforce and also with our alpha and beta testing people are reaching out to other people because they see their amber and it's i did one this morning one of our teams amber straight on the phone you're right yeah i just had a long night with the kids last night i'm okay i just need a coffee but all she wanted was that question of all good yeah and it's yeah i'm okay and then on the odd occasion we get no i'm not feeling too good today take today off them and that person is going to be more productive next week we can't bend over for it we know that in the business world people have to be in stress states we have to be under high pressure other times we don't but it's how more transparent can we be and i think what the pandemic's actually showing us is we can embrace this sounds amazing and i even know someone ran an organization with many hundreds of people um being able to see sort of an early warning sign yeah for situations developing call it the pulse is that what you call it yeah it would have been super super valuable you think about it from a business perspective you stand a chance of losing good people because you weren't aware that they were potentially on a bit of a downward spiral in terms of morale yeah and uh losing good people cost you a ton of money sounds amazing and it sounds like a very long way from afghanistan do you know what i mean going into tech because tech is a beast in itself it's a whole nother i've worked in tech in san francisco and stuff and it's a whole nother language and culture and philosophy and stuff so to go from you know your early years to to bouncer to afghanistan to you know helping the england team to now working in tech is one hell of a journey in a short amount of time so incredibly impressive you've lived many lives in your in the one that you've experienced and i actually was thinking as you're telling the stories today how honored i am that someone like you
listens to my podcast i was like i think i need to listen to your [ __ ] podcast you're i hit a low moment last year when we dropped investment and we took these overheads like we went from like what was it three so about six grand a month overhead to suddenly thousands and thousands of pounds because we've got a team in an office and we're looking at our reserves going outside two months worth then we got four months and we were getting no after no afternoon because everyone just shut up didn't they no one wanted to invest because protecting your money and i listened to yours and dan murray certains to just take inspiration i don't know this world well enough and you guys do and i was listening to it going done it they've done it they can do it i can do it right okay and low [ __ ] moments crying into my wife's arms going why have i done this i've put the house at risk kids at risk this is [ __ ] it's better to be worth it but i want to make it happen i want to see a change out there i want to see a change in business i want to see your businesses be more open it's not about raising the money it's about fighting to raise that money so i can make that happen and we raised the money seven days before missing payroll we raised half a million just over half a million and it's listening to your stories it's listening to others was the moment for me where i'm like just keep going just i listened to the ones this morning i was thinking about this struggle that you guys were talking about and i was like sometimes struggle's good yeah it gets you to dig deep and sits in the trenches and i've been in the trenches and we've now been through the trenches and yeah it's inspiring you know when i got the nod last week i was like huh that's a massive compliment i i think i you know i've learned a ton from speaking to you today
um i know you produce content yourself you've got your book which is awesome um so i just wanted to say thank you because it's been one hell of a conversation and i think this when i reflect on it this is really the reason why i started this podcast was to hear these stories and and the just the diversity in struggle and overcoming and persisting and purpose and reinventing yourself is the reason this podcast exists and you exemplify all of that so thank you so much for your time today ben and you you know you said it was a um a high moment for you to come on this podcast but i feel that um going the opposite way and i really really mean that i really mean that because you're an incredibly impressive guy thank you people ask me for book recommendations all the time and i finally got one for you it's a book called happy sexy millionaire which is authored by me um i spent the last almost two years in jungles around the world in costa rica and indonesia in solitude writing this book it's the most important thing i've ever created and there's this crazy thing when you write a book because you spend so much time pouring your heart and soul into it and everything you know and all of the revelations you've had in your life and then there's this barrier which is that people have to buy the thing in order for them to get that thing that means so much to you i wish that wasn't the case it's just the way the industry is and in order to get that distribution and to get it on shelves you need a publisher so please please please if you can if you've ever liked anything i've ever produced this podcast my instagrams anything i've ever said read this book there was no ghost writer i wrote every single word myself there's some real surprises in there it's an honest sometimes hilarious incredibly vulnerable hopefully valuable recount of my life my
journey everything i've learned across across the way and really the answer to being fulfilled to being happy and to achieving success it is the most important important thing i've ever created so i implore you to go to amazon now or wherever you get your books and get that pre-order and everybody that pre-orders the book because pre-orders in this crazy publishing industry count as way more than just a normal sale if you get that pre-order i'm gonna put you into a group with everybody that's pre-ordered it and i'm gonna send you some exclusive stuff so the first things i'm gonna do is a series of voice notes which i think are um are gonna be pretty powerful i'm gonna give you access to some tickets which nobody else will have and i'm gonna do everything i can to thank you for for giving me that sort of nine quid of your money or whatever it is happy sexy millionaire you can pre-order it everywhere now and if you do get that pre-order please do dm me because i'd love to thank you myself [Music]