Suicidal Drug Addict To Elite Military Commando with Ben Williams
嘉宾：Ben Williams
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§01Transcript — part 1
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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 fucking useless. And I'm beneath the surface and you can hear the thumps overhead. And I turned around and looked at Vaisey and he went, "Fucking run, now!"
Wow. This is the most gripping, inspiring, twisting conversation I've ever had on this podcast, ever. If you're squeamish, I'm going to have to ask you to prepare. But even if you are, I am 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 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 him 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 Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
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 in some respects often quite hard to shake, right? You know that old adage of not being able to teach a new dog new tricks because 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 parents had quite a rough divorce when I was around I think six, seven years old. 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 Mum 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, but we're probably young enough to just get on with this.
And it's funny because my kids are at that age now, and I think about what are they processing now? What are they going through? How are they seeing this? What do they see every angle like? 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 he wouldn’t mind me saying that as well. He was just there in the background.
When you say it wasn't a clean break, you mean there were domestic violence issues or there were...
It was a... it was an aggravated separation. That's pretty much as far as I'll go on it. Okay. But we witnessed things. We witnessed 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. 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 recognize 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 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 processing. I don't think that processing happens very well when you're a child. It's 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 and you don't fit in and, you know, I'm not the broken wing story. But if you don't... if you come to school and you don't know anyone, you're the kid they go and pick on. So that was part of the experience. And then then you find your feet a little bit in the system. And 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 worldview. 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 the stuff until I was like 29 or like 28 or whatever. 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. "Oh 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 being sort of immersed in what that throws at you, that I kind of describe it as like almost the Eddie Stobart 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-twenties 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.
You talk about six or seven schools. So you... you were expelled or you were moving?
No, we moved a lot. Yeah, we moved a lot. So we moved from Guildford and then up to the 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 noughties is, "Oh there's... there's a kid in the corner with the black nail varnish on and the spiky hair and the dog collar and he's new, let's throw eggs at him." Oh wow.
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. I still like that stuff now. 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 the music a coping mechanism? Was being different in school or whatever at some... some form of a coping mechanism? Because heavy, heavy metal is pretty... pretty emotional stuff sometimes.
I think it is. I think it does become a coping mechanism. 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, well, sinister things such as drugs. And...
At what age?
So I started smoking weed around 12. You know, I tried weed before I tried a cigarette. And 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 alright, 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. 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 started 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 of 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. I just didn't like them. It seemed like it was the guys at school who'd pick, and then I didn't have a father figure and it was, "Am I the male? Where... where is the male here?" And I just began this almost sort of dislike to males.
And 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 your... 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, fuck 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, because 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. I prepped for my SIA license, which is the badge you've 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 is 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, and it would make you fit in. Why... I'm really like intrigued by that. That thought... where... where did the desire come from to be considered an alpha male? Whether in your own mind or external to other people.
So I think part of it's 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 were almost in the limelight. It seemed like that way of life seemed to be normal. Not normal, but what you should aspire to be. Like an... aspirational. Aspirational, like gangster. 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 this world."
But I take... I take you back to that moment where essentially Mum said, "No, you're not joining the Marines till 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 he used to take us. We also went to the Parachute Regiment and to the Imperial War Museum here. He used to just take us around these military museums for some reason. I remember being a young sort of nine-year-old in... in utter awe 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, it was 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. If 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 think in rather negative ways. And I... that for me was when it was, "Well what else can I do?" Is it this alpha male thing, you know, that's what a Marine is? What's the closest thing 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 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. I don't know where it came from.
And my second point was there is a stigma in society that bouncers 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 older I got and the more I was on the door and the bigger I was getting, and I was working five nights a week, you know. This was my full-time job.
And you were getting feedback and validation from women and, I imagine.
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." And you don't see the animal you're becoming. Even at that age, you... you can be 20 years on the 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, then you're... you're an animal.
It's like the frog in the frying pan gradually being cooked. It doesn't realize.
That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. 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 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 filling a hole. In your story though, I read about an incident when you were a bouncer that kind of changed everything for you.
Yeah. I remember we had a neighbor, a little Irish lady. She’s lovely, she’s still with us. She's still with us. And I think she knew the underworld better than I did from where she was from. And I remember her saying... she said to me, she literally sat me down when she found out I was joining... well, I was going to work on the door. She came and knocked on our 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 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. There was an incident which happened at one of the nightclubs in Milton Keynes where... it was around 3:00 AM and I was leaving the venue. I was literally signing off at three, and the rest of the team were signing off at 3:30. And I was literally about to hand my radio in, and there was just like this massive scream down the radio. And we had a door team I think of around 15. It was a big nightclub 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, another... one of the doormen, and we were literally like, "What should we do?" And just chucked the radios and ran to where it was. And we ran down the fire exit. It's in the Escape building—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... 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 a dam of bouncers and people scrapping.
And it was just carnage. There were just people fighting all over the place. You couldn't even work out what was going on. And then I recognized this massive guy who earlier 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, 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... as they were trying to force him to the ground. There was about three of the other lads on him, big guys. And then his brother and then two other people fighting in this... this area of the team. And I just grabbed his arm and he was just like flailing me around. And we 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, "Oh 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 was a big lad himself.
And we were probably on the floor probably about a minute trying to subdue him, "You know, calm down, calm down." But then his face was facing back across me and it was just staring at the wall. And then I noticed some sort of pooling underneath his head and... and 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, I was like, "I don't fucking 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 was like, "Right, roll him over," and then began trying to resuscitate him, but to no avail and he'd passed away there and then on the spot. Remember standing there watching it all unfold, suddenly going from this big alpha male, "We're here to fight" to "What the fuck has just happened?" And then they closed the club, and they nicked everyone. And then we were on manslaughter charge for about a year as they tried to determine what had happened. He'd lost his life, you know. There’s a man had come into a nightclub, whether he was a pain or not, had lost his life. And worse than that, five kids had lost their 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... 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 always do get in trouble for defending themselves. But for me it was a serious point of my life where I thought, "Wow, we're not in deep here, we're fucking way past deep." 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. All of a sudden it becomes an escape. And then you can't afford the steroids, you see yourself getting skinnier and it's, "Oh what do I need to do? I'll just... I'll just do more. I'll just do more coke." But coke’s so expensive. And smoking more and more weed. And I just became extremely lost, you know. I was... 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 in doing tons of study 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 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 actual... our stability. How bad did it get for you at that time in terms of drug use and and your mindset?
So I... I’ve written about it quite openly in my book. I was using it on Tuesday mornings, you know, in my Mum's spare bedroom.
Using coke?
Right. And it got really bad. It got really bad to sort of daily use. Always that was it, that was all the focus of the day. It was like getting cleaning work done or... or if I wasn't doing that, just be like, "Oh soon my mate..." I literally had two mates which I did it with and I'd just wait for them to finish work and then we'd go and pick up and then we'd go and sit in my Corsa until midnight. Just sat there, just looking at the stars. Thinking it's a chill sesh, really just fucking wasting my time.
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, shit everywhere in my room, no purpose, don't know where I'm going in life, taking drugs. Like I'm from a nice background. Why am I at this point? And how the hell has someone died under my watch? How has this even happened? And for me that kind of was a moment of... I'll just give up.
So I took the... I took the Corsa 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 try and escape what I thought was this internal pain. But 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. "Like oh you can't even do that. You can't even go and kill yourself. You can't even go and hurt yourself. You're fucking useless."
Which learn 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."
What advert was it?
It’s the advert for the Royal Marines. Really. Yeah. And it just came... 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 reckon sort of 19, 20 I think it was at the time. Still quite loose on my timings of that one. And he goes through... he's going through the endurance course which is one of the commando tests, one of the four commando tests. And the endurance course is a two-mile bogs, tunnels, just... just a muddy hell. That's the kind of word I'm... a 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 Woodbury Common is where it is, and he's running and it stops. It said, "Would you stop here?" And then it goes again and he goes through the tunnel, "Would you stop here?" And then they have this obstacle in there called the sheep dip. The sheep dip’s about three meters long and it's fully submerged. And you have no control. What happens is someone will put you under, they'll force you through, and then someone else is at 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 he 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 then it does it... it 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... a speedboat, a hawk offshore raiding craft, just going along. No music, just this weird sort of tone, there was like a "mmm" and then it goes "99.9% 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 with mustaches in the Falklands and the early Iraqs, 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 saw that 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.
But 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. "Should I? Should I? Not? Should I? Should I not?" and go, "Mum, you know you said no? I'm thinking of doing it." And she went, "Thank fuck for that!" Because I'd 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 acknowledgment that "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 in realizing I was the one ruining my life. And the other hard part was, you know, my girlfriend who I'd been with for some time, 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... and I describe it 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... in the toilet and flushed it. And it didn't flush. I was like, "Oh fuck, that wasn't as dramatic as I thought it would be." It’s like a "cut." Yeah. And I was like, "Oh shit, where am I going to put that?" Admittedly I kept smoking weed for a little bit because it... it was my progression off everything. But you know, the steroids were done—partly because I couldn't afford it—but you immediately begin to learn about what being fit means.
And I remember this moment, I... 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 a... I don't know if you've seen it, I think it was Sean Penn, *Run Fatboy Run*. That moment when 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 these really crap kit, yeah. And I... I felt like that guy. And I stood at the doorway of my house and I was like, "I'm going to go for a run. Let's see what happens here." First day of the rest of your life.
Yeah. But it was this... it was like the weather we have now and it was just this hit of fresh air. And running and the endorphins and the exercise, feeling like it was purifying me. And I thought, "This is what it feels like. 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's the right thing to do. And then I began to... to start the application process and yeah, it was about a year's process of fitness tests, medicals, what else did they do, 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 beast-in where they just make you cry for three days and see who survives it. And I got food poisoning the night before. Oh shit. Yeah. I literally threw the eye of a needle and out the mouth and I was... I was in a shit state, real shit state, like a corpse in my bedroom. And I remember my Mum saying again, she's like, "Why don't you get them to see if they'll move it?" Like in that Mum-sy 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, "Corporal, I feel poorly." Like two, three days into becoming a Royal Marine, it wouldn't have gone down well. 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?
It was... it was literally there on the spot. You do the last day of the three-day course and then they go, "Yep, you passed," or they go, "You're shit, you failed, off you go." And I had this letter which said... which said "You passed, you'll hear from your careers officer soon." You also get given this t-shirt. I cringe when I think about it now. But this t-shirt says "Potential Royal Marine Commando" on the back. I suppose. Yeah. And when I see people wearing them now I'm like, "Err." And I put this t-shirt on and I was on the train just like holding... 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 with this t-shirt on. Pride of Britain. Yeah. But I was so proud of it and I trained in that t-shirt every day.
And and then yeah, I got my letter in the post saying you'll be starting on this date, get yourself ready, this is your kit list, this is what you're going to 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 like, "Oh, there he goes off on the journey. What happens to me now?" Which is why I work so hard now so... which I'll come onto later. But you know, being stood... being sat on that train 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 in 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 yeah, I pulled up sort of five hours later and there's the first instructor waiting you. And you walk through the gates, you're carrying all your kit...
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Completely 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... 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 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 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?
Yeah. That was... 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 called *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, mixed 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, 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 with shaved heads, all just looked 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. Suddenly realized that, "Oh right, yeah, this is quite a long course and this is going to take a lot of resolve as you say."
But you know, those... even those initial first few weeks of just excitement and looking around and just being surrounded by excellence. You know, the values are written on the wall. Your corporal, your troop sergeant, your captain, they wear the green beret of pride and they're stood there immaculately dressed. I'm going to become you one day.
I'm... you know we're having this conversation today, but something happened 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 run is, I've got a very good friend of mine who I know won't mind me saying this because we talk about it openly, 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 where 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, "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 this had been your childhood dream.
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 it would be... it would suck less to go and be beasted.
Yeah. You've got to want something. That's what I... looking back, I having learned everything along the way, it was the desire to want something. 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 the further away it gets, it becomes less tangible.
So when the incident at 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 finally that day of something that reminds you to go, "Remember what you want" to go, "Fuck it, I'm going to go and do it." And do you know what I've found, and I know a lot of people like this—I still have a few in my close friendship group 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 want."
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. Fuck you, you can't give me advice." And you're like, "Argh, dude, come on, switch on." In there somewhere is something he wants. In there somewhere is a desire. In there is a child who had an ambition for doing something. And the older we get, what I've 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 within..." 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." Nah, that's like 10 years worth of hard work. Lionel Messi says it, took 15 years to become an overnight success. That's because deep down in the shadows, those people which are fighting it every day—the addiction, the difficulty, the desire to go out on the piss with our friends in a normal world, to do the drugs, to eat unhealthy food, whatever it is—is... is that fight right there to go "Yes or no?" Shall I follow the easy option or shall I follow the hard option? And sometimes the hard option isn't the challenge, sometimes the hard option is the courage you have to build within yourself to take the steps. You know that.
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... help, right? And I... I sometimes doubt the power of a mate turning to you and being like, "Pull your shit together," you know?
It strangely happened to me. So I won't mention his name because he's doing sneaky-beaky things these days.
Sorry, what's sneaky-beaky?
You know, appearing from curtains, working for special forces and doing things like that.
Okay, fine. Right. Not... not a pervert.
No, no, no. No, no. Okay, yeah cut. Do that one again. No he’s not pervert. That's why I won't mention his name. A friend of mine was within this lifestyle I was within and 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 it 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 the validation but that boost to be like, "Yeah, alright, I'm going to go and do it."
Because that's a relatable role model. You can... he's just like you.
Yeah, it's someone I know, but it's so real. It's so, "Hang on, he was with us 15 weeks ago. I know him, I ring him and I'm like, 'Wow, okay, I'm going to... I'm going to follow in your wake then.'" Which in turn becomes quite intimidating because your social group's looking at it going, "Well the Marines are really hard to get in. Now two of them are there. One of them's guaranteed to fail, aren't they, surely?" 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.
As you were saying that, I was thinking that people will now look at you after being in the Marines for, you know, it was almost 10 years wasn't it? 10 years. 10 years. They'll see 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, look he's a big strong man, he's disciplined, he's got this mindset." There'll be a kid sat in his bedroom glancing at that YouTube video of the, you know, Marines advert, and then looking over at Ben and thinking, "Ah 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, "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 bridge that I'm going to 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 knows 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 get people thinking that a commando mindset is a particular way of thinking within our world. You know, to have 100% of the commando mindset you have to become a commando, you have to go through the process and join up. But everyone has to get themselves to the gate. And I become quite interested in the "getting to 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 stands giving it the bigger, 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 cringeworthy, but "Potential Royal Marine Commando." Yes! At least I'm a Potential Royal Marine Commando instead of a potential civilian, which I don't want to be for now. I want to go and live and and enjoy the world in different parts of it. Some you wouldn't go to a holiday on, but I wanted to go and see it. And 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 Commando 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 "Oh 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 of seeing them go from civilian to commando and... 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." Where, you know, it's a bit hard up to that point. It's like, "Good effort mate." And you have a beer with them and you tell them a little bit about your story, they go, "Whoa, I thought you were like this sort of thing." Untouchable. Just yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. Instead they realize you're a human.
What is the commando 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, and we can all have that commando mindset, I guess in the home or in work. What are the... what is the commando 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, Determination, Excellence, Self-discipline, Integrity, Cheerfulness, and Humility. And 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, "Oh courage, yeah, a bit of excellence, I'll have a bit of that."
Integrity's 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, 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 to stop swearing, and you've got to take your hands out of your pocket, and, you know, let's set an example for people who are below us," to even, you know, being able to say that to a senior commando, like "Uh, should we have our hands 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'd been on the... we'd flown into an area in the Green Zone and told "The Taliban are here, you're just going to have to go and find them." Which is like finding a needle in a 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 shit, they can see us as well. Where are they?" And they said they... "We can see them, we can see them, they're heading towards the melon now. They're heading towards the melon." Melons was their code word for IED (Improvised Explosive Device), a homemade bomb.
So the Taliban are saying across the radio that they can see you.
So 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, "Maybe they're trying to egg us on, maybe it's not real." And 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. They said they'd 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 them on the way out. So you're looking at the poor farmer thinking, "You're getting a knock on the door later you don't need."
But also we're in the safety of this small compound that we're going to step out back into the open soon, and they're going to see us. And we stepped out in the open and straight away, "Can see them again, can see them again." And you again you kind of... are they trying to pull our bluff? Because they know we can hear them, they know we listen to them. And 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 they're 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... it was 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 spraying 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 weighing 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 *thump, thump, thump*. Split seconds under the water, split seconds. 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 shit, someone's shooting at us. What do we do? Jump in the ditch." That seemed to be like the cleverest thing to do. And I jumped in the ditch and I remember this thought coming through my head going, "Oh you fucked 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, I've dodged that one."
And the way we were looking was down the track. So everyone's sort of looking across each other down... down the ditch and down the track. And there was one person still on the track returning fire on his own. Stood up. Literally you couldn't make it up, it... it looked like that sort of Call of Duty image where he's just firing away on the track. And it was our commando, Vaisey. And he just looked over all of us in the ditch and went, "Check your fucking flashes!" And that is this internal system which just goes *snap* like that. Because your flashes are what you wear on your shoulder and it says the words "Royal Marines Commando."
And everything those three words mean is related to the ethos, related to our values, related to those 32 weeks of 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 fucking 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 got 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 that moment or not, you're there to do a job. And that's what it looks like.
And those values, as you described them, go back through that list again. So cheerfulness, courage...
Determination.
Determination. Excellence.
Talk to me about cheerfulness. Why is that so important? That’s the one that struck me most. I was like, that sounds like smiling.
Cheerfulness in the face of adversity. If you... if you don't laugh at it, it will laugh at you. And that 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 wouldn't go amiss. And you look over to the right and all you can see through this... this muddy face is teeth, someone else looking back at you, and you just go, "Heh," and you giggle and you're like, "This is shit, isn't it? Yeah, heh. 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 them going, "Ha ha, 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, "Fucking hell, 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 shit 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 were the other words again? So cheerfulness, courage, determination...
Determination, excellence...
Talk to me about excellence. Why is that so important? Because I know the... I've got to be honest, I feel like I've watched every documentary ever on like the SAS and the Marines and the other special forces across different countries. 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 kit—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 on your flashes?
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 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. My corporal in training said, "If you do 0.1% better every day, at least you're heading in the right direction." And his way of looking at that was you can 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 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—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 used to say 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 high standard.
How do... in our culture at the moment, there's a narrative emerging which is like... "At least you did your best." You know, there's a kind of a fluffy soft... you hate it, I can see it in your face. There's this kind of like fluffy soft, "It's okay that you're not that good, at least you participated," or "Take a rest, well, you know, good is... 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 canceled because 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. Go ahead.
Yeah. This podcast is over. 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 he won a race in Sports Day. And I was like the Marine Dad on the edge, you know like, "Go on, Zach! Come on, you got this!" And he's flying down and he's miles ahead of everyone else. I was 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: Participant.
And I looked at it and instantly in my head I twigged and I thought... "Rip it off. Okay, good. Oh they're handing out them ones are they?" And he went, "I won! I won!" and he was over... over the moon. Me and my wife and I were like, "Well done mate, it's amazing." And he went, "Why did everyone else get a sticker?" and he was pissed off. And I was like... and I could almost hear the parents around me, I could hear their ears turn towards me like, "Oh how's this parent going to approach this one?"
And I did think in my head, I was like, "Shall I go down the... well, it's good that everyone had a go and everyone took part?" and then this kind of the stoic commando went, "Fuck that." I went, "Listen here, no one else should have gotten 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 medal. 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. "But why do they get a sticker though, Dad?" and I'm like kind of looking around again at the parents. "I don't know. I've not worked this one out yet."
But I did, I wanted to let him know that there was that parent in me, there was almost those two voices to 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 Marine's values is 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 liked that.
People will listen to that and they'll think... some people might think, "Oh you're toxic," that... those values. "Pushy parents," and "You're training your kid to, you know, he'll end up like Michael Jackson changing the color of his skin" 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 a North 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 mountain tops, 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. 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, "I'm 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 and were like, "Oh 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.
Or your friendship group. "Oh just... you know, see what happens. Oh 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 another cake. I didn't want to say it, you said it for me. I don't care about being canceled at this point. You're not canceling my episode. No, no, that's fine.
But it's... it is that. 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? "Oh you just turn up, you know, and get everything else everyone else gets anyway." No. Like you and I, people who have had to work hard, fight hard. The reason the green beret is so well respected is because it's so fucking 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... "Oh yeah, well done, you've done everything you need to do in these couple of months." It's "Good effort you've done all this and this." That's what we look for.
It's funny because the "just turn up" state of mind and the kind of soft fluffy cultural narrative that's kind of breaking through, especially on social media, I think is designed to try and protect your mental health. But I think that the argument we're saying is 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 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 mountain top 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. 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'd 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 it was the catalyst for sort of the end of my career.
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 Huel and how much it's been a key part of my life in 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 production of the podcast and the team, I wanted a partner who I could talk about authentically without having to bullshit you, and Huel is that partner. So I reached out to Huel and said, "Listen, I'm starting my podcast 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 will know he actually came onto this podcast and he will be coming back on in the future—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 in the holdout for great. And when Julian had the conversation with me, I said yes to joining Huel's board in less than a second. I knew what he was going to end the sentence with so I said yes before he ended it. And 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 in 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'd 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 it was the catalyst for sort of the 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. And yeah, it was called the Hornet's 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, alright. Good luck, I'll see you later. I'll see you... I'll do my postcards now. But 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. The tree lines are sort of every 100 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 we landed on... the Americans gave us a lift in in the morning, dropped onto target and within about four or five hours we'd had 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. We then took attack—well we started to receive attack from three different angles. So they were firing at us from the... let me get my bearings right, north, west and south. And they were firing at us 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 would drop off. And we were 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 things would explode and you'd wait... wait for a scream or wait for something and then the fire would start again. Everyone's alright, just carry on. It was just the most surreal situation.
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. 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 managed to push them back and kill a few. And it just kind of leaves you with the feeling next day thinking, "Oh we've got another six days of this, seven-day operation, another six days." You know, that first day we're there, it got that bad that mortar fire 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-to-hand combat.
And 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 sort of ornaments which were on a shelf, just like being the 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 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, "That’s a bad omen for the day, isn't it?"
And there was just these like weird tiny little events that happen. And I think they only seem weird now because I look back and be like, "Because there was an incident." And one of the Marines, Darlo, Luke, he... 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. I carried a light machine gun which is... you know, it's between the 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, "Do you want to swap today?" and he's like, "Nah, I'll stay where I am." I was like, "Yeah, I'll go with 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 which was probably about 200 meters from our sort of base, I suppose you could call it an occupied compound. 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 what intelligence we can get out of them. And I... I was with Jordan at the front and with us was a dog handler. And we had the dog handler because they sniff the bombs. And we came to the edge of the cornfield and there was just no one around. Call it "atmospherics." So positive atmospherics are 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. And I looked over my shoulder and you could feel it. We call it "spidey senses." It's when, you know, the skin and the hair sort of starts to stand up on your neck and you could just sense it after yesterday's fighting. No villagers around, they're here. Taliban are here, it's just where are they?
And I looked over my shoulder and Vaisey was behind me, my commander. He 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 a load of Marines suddenly stood there in the street and just we were like, "Dresh," 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 all felt a bit weird.
And we got nearer to this... we literally came up to this crossroads. And myself, Jordan and the dog handler were on top of the crossroads now, or just just slightly just before it. Jordan was on it and I was just slightly back from it. And these two guys walked round 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 they used trainers for obvious reason of getting around quicker. And they were just stood there as you are to me, in front of us. And it was like, "Fuck hell." And you couldn't do anything. Like they're not armed, they're 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, oi, oi, oi, stop!"
And they ran to our right behind a short wall but into the field and you could hear them like traveling through the field, like the snapping of the corn and everything. And like "Why the fuck are they just running to the field? Why don't they run down the track or just stop?" And all this is starting to go in your head. And I turned round and looked at Vaisey and he went, "Fucking run! Now!" And we started to run and 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. And 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, 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 I shrugged off a bomb, it was just the shock of it. Everything just went through you—all the rubble, all the frag, fragmentation, so the shards of metal just just went through your bags, helmet, everything. And the pain in my leg was enough to 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.
And 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 anything, you just hear that sort of muffled thudding sound. You can smell the cordite, you can smell horrible things, you know, when you come to terms with what happens next. But I remember looking down thinking, "Ah it's fucking me!" and I was screaming going, "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 thought "Fucking hell I've lost my leg." And I had this moment sat, literally must be 30 seconds long, sat there on the floor thinking, "Fuck, I've lost my fucking leg. Where is it for a start?" 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 fucking sat on it. I'm sat on my foot. I'm 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, "Yeah it's all there." And you do have those really surreal moments. It... it's a real thing where people check themselves.
And I was like... but 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 round that the the orange dusty smoke was clearing that everyone was just lying on the floor. Three of which were just out cold completely. And it was just this stark realization like, "Fuck, we've been hit hard there." And the wall, this little small wall which obviously the device was hid behind, you know, you quite quickly know what's happened is 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 Vaisey. Out. Blood coming from his neck, blood everywhere, kit, weapons, clothes just ripped to pieces. And you just think, "Oh fuck." 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 think... I thought to myself, "I've got to get to Vaisey." 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 near 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 I'd been in these moments before. I'd been around people which lost legs, I'd been there for people which have been injured. But there were people left and right, you know. Your team were there. On this occasion everyone's just fucking out cold. And as I was just getting to Vaisey 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 leant into him. And he started shouting at me going, "Get your fucking kit out now! Get your kit out!" And so I started fiddling around for my medical kit. And what we were trying to get out was this thing called Hemclot which is like a... it's like a bandage but it's... it basically you stuff it into a wound and it expands. Um, and I needed to get my Hemclot out but you have to throw it... it's like this technique that you take it 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 shit in around them.
And he was like, "Get your fucking Hemclot 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 I remember looking at it thinking he's trying to hold onto his artery there and he's trying to pinch his artery going, "Stop fucking looking, stop putting it in there!" I was like "Argh!" trying to do it. And he grabbed it off me and went, "I'll do it, hold that." And then you're there like... fucking hell. 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 the way and just start... started treating him on the spot. And all I could do was just hold his hand and was just like, "Pray for your kids, stay for your kids, stay with us, stay with us." And I this sort of 45 minutes flash by and we're on the helicopters and we're back at Camp Bastion and they were going through triage and I don't know, miraculously they're still with us today.
Vaisey lost his leg in that moment as well which is unfortunate. Darlo 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 is still great fun to be around, still Marine at heart definitely. And a few other lads taken 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 "Bang-iversary." 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. Vaisey always says to me, he's like, "You were crying when I was dying, weren't you?" I was like, "Yeah, fucking right I was." But it's... it's a part of that journey, you know. And it was a real intense moment. But we signed the dotted lines. We put ourselves in that position and that's what happens in war.
And at some point you decide that you're going to leave or you were discharged medically?
Yeah. It was... I was discharged because of my hearing and it was something I had hid from that day. I knew my hearing had been affected but the way the sort of hearing test 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 several years later and I got caught out trying to blag it. And the doctor was like, "What are you doing?" I was like, "Uh, hearing test." He went, "Yeah, stop doing the three-second rule." "Ah, alright." Did it properly and did it properly and then it was like, "You can't hear in your left ear can you?" I was like, "I can hear some." He went, "Hmm, 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 changes very different.
Have something to aim for. That's what I decided the moment they told me... I think I'd been through enough stuff up to that point to go, "Okay, this is what happens now, adversity strikes and you've got to work out how to get through it." 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 can 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, "Duh, this commando 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 and 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. Was that a...
I think I had that relapse, or I know I had that relapse actually not long after Afghanistan. And I think the 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. It 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 the Queen Elizabeth Hospital up in Birmingham and it had been 36 hours since we triggered or since 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 suddenly in this sort of crisp 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 don't want to speak to you, I don't want to speak to you, I don't want to speak to anyone. Leave me alone." Because I was still in 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 rehabbed and I was fit and I could go back to the unit, I would drink, fight, I ended up getting court-martialed and I was suddenly spiraling back to that Ben 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, "Argh, back at square one. Done this career all the way... 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... it was defending someone else where 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 maybe the naive way of looking at it.
But it was a difficult moment. I had to begin to process what had happened in Afghan and 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 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 them, so you would walk out on the ground and think, "I wonder where I'm going to 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-fiancee we moved into the flat together, I was really mad at her for the way she stacked the bean cupboard. I was like, "What the fuck aren't they facing the same way for?" And she was like, "Why are you being like this?" "They need to be because..." then when you go to say "because," you've got nothing for that. Because they... just fucking do it. And 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.
And 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. 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 know, I meet so many people now it's like, "Wow it's amazing to meet you, thank you so much for what you've done for the country." And you get to this humble point now where you're like, "Yeah, thanks, I signed the dotted line. I'm so pleased you appreciate it." 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 was like, "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 was such a valuable thing for me to do. Um, we ended up moving the family, well my wife moved down pregnant, we had Zach down there, we made a life and I really felt like 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 then even that comes to the England football team, it’s like "You can do this if you put your mind to it." And they got that close.
They did, they did amazingly. Let's talk about that then. So where does Gareth Southgate and you ending up sort of working with the England football team just before they went off to Russia?
Yeah. Yeah. Um, they came down to get a taste of our world, that’s how it was literally put. And the idea that they would come down and be immersed in some activities that we do, they'd 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 look like, self-discipline, humility, integrity, all those words.
And it was... it was very surreal, you know. I felt like a giddy kid most of the time, you know, knowing that they're in the buses, they're almost at the training area. We were up in one of the woods that we train in and there was me and four other corporals, five other corporals and then our sergeant. And you could see the bus turning up and we were all like, "Ooh they coming?" Literally like we were like that, then you're in tough-guy mode when they jump off.
Yeah, that was it.
Yeah, Taff our troop sergeant was like, "Right when they come over that wall, don't forget that you've got to put it all on though, boys, alright?" And we be like, "Yeah, Roger, no worries, Taff," laughing. And then Harry Kane appeared first and we were like "Pft" tough-guy. Literally like staring him down. And then I just remember Taff our 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. "Go on then, Southgate, start moving!" And it was brilliant. You throw that for a little while, but actually they're there to understand you and that's not actually who we are.
I was in a surreal moment 1:00 in the morning drinking, or sharing a cup of tea with Harry over a little fire talking about 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 it, I was like, "Argh, 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 could hear it. He was like, "There's nothing like it." You know, the way he just the way he just expressed it. And sort of you can see him staring at the floor a bit as he's saying it, as he's thinking about those moments. He’s visualizing.
Yeah, but then he asks you, he's like, "You know, what's warfare like?" And you it... again that sort of stumps you a little bit like, "Wow, the England captain's just asked me what it's like in Afghan." And you have this conversation and it was just so normal. It got that normal that I started moaning to him about holiday prices. Because I'd just paid for the family to go to Lanzarote on an all-inclusive and I was like, "Ain't... ain't holiday prices through the roof at the moment? I just paid three grand to go Lanzarote!" And then I'm thinking he's just got back 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 brought the whole set-up with them, kit man to Gareth 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 shit," but when someone's going "This is what courage looks like, this is what this looks like, this is 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 and 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. And 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 read one of your podcasts or interviews or whatever where you said, had they beaten I think it was Croatia wasn't it? You were set to go on Piers Morgan's show the next day and explain exactly how you helped them get there. But then they lost.
We had a phone call. Literally yeah. So I'm cheering going, "Come on England! We're made after this. Come on, lads."
Yeah, you get to go on Piers Morgan.
Yeah, we're going to give Piers a hard time. But it didn't happen but hey, you know, later I think it was January 19 I went and did the 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 brought football home. And I think it's really unfortunate that we didn't have it this year, you know, the Euros or last year. Whenever it was meant to be.
2020 it was, yeah. Summer 2020 Euros, yeah.
So, but it it... I thought I thought it brought the nation a little bit closer personally.
The other thing I was intrigued by was I read this, I think it's ARA sort of strategy per se, which 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 I've written ARA's quite a focus within my book because we all encounter adversity, we all encounter challenges. 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. They're like, "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... "Uh, don't know what to do."
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, Dino. We lost Dino within five minutes of a 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, troop across the ditch to get into the village, stepped on an IED, blew him up and he was gone. 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... what do we do?" And I remember 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, 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 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 in there angry, you make serious mistakes and you don't have to look far in the press to see that happen.
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?" And 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 at 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 how you should be processing it. What is still the strategic operational part of what we're doing here? And the accept part is very difficult for a lot of people to do. It's very... and I still struggle with it now myself.
§02Transcript — part 2
But actually having that little framework to go ARA, okay, this isn't good. How do I accept this situation is happened or happening? How can I process it?
And without dwelling on blame or...
Exactly. Or you know, or bitterness is another one. Like say your business is shut down because of COVID, you're angry at Boris Johnson, you're angry at everybody and you dwell on that. So that's the first hurdle as as you say, accepting, which is tough. Tough. But it's the mindset. You know, this isn't for me this is not something we should shy away from. You know, the moment you say "It's tough," does that then allow people to go, "Oh, I'm not doing it then, I'll just... I'll just turn up"?
Sympathy can sometimes show up as well. Too much sympathy maybe. Victimhood.
The "accept" is it's happened. What is the next move? What is the next thing I need to do? We lost almost all of our work with our business last year. 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, "Ah what the fuck? Like 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 COVID as well. The pandemic alone. Like 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 plain 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 emotionless. It's for me in combat it happens, you've got to deal with it then and there, 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.
We've got to deal with that correctly as well. This is where some people make the mistake of bottling up. Like, "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 were trying to come up on that final operation. The person calling in that mortar fire was Vaisey, my commander. And he's not a mortarmen, he is not trained on the radio to do that. The day before when we lost those five guys, we were by that grenade, one of them was the mortarmen 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 mortarmen, we're fucked 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 toe is like the quickest like "Argh!" And you just want to go banzai on the table, don't you? But you just go, "Stop. I've stubbed my toe." Yeah, yeah. "It does hurt. I need to be a little bit less emotional with this table and now I need to adapt the fact that my toe's facing in a different direction."
Then we all look at the table now.
But it is something, you know, something just happens and you have to be able to go, "Alright, 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 of you making the right decision? The anger, the the sadness, whatever is 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 have done, 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 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, 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 I think that's similar sentiment to the importance of like getting rid of that unwanted emotion, focusing on the task at hand, finding that calm within within the chaos and being proactive, and as you said as the sort of military values, being cheerful because that is a... optimism is a very important emotion to experience in times of real chaos. You have to believe that there is a way out.
And that's super interesting. I when I was reading through your story as well there more recently I read about and 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 look it, do I? I just...
Well no I started training in March as well and I've been training all year. So I thought that was really interesting. And you mentioned it earlier, that getting out and feeling the air and the endorphins and yeah.
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.
Your son could give you some tips.
Yeah, that's who I train with now. Um, I just I really I like the idea of just... it sounds so Forrest Gump, but just running. There is 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 you're locked inside all the time. Uh, you're on Zoom call after Zoom call, the kids are downstairs, and um you just need that moment to yourself. 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 was like, "I don't know." You know, then it got me pondering so I think maybe I'm a little bit better prepped to answer your question.
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 with 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 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 reserved lifestyle, but I have to give you something to show you what I do. Um, which I was listening to I think it was Jake talk about on your podcast this morning and it was really interesting it pricked my ears up 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 out running" um and and post maybe some times, but I just like being out there. 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. "Oh we've done this within the business have we? Oh that's good. Oh something else come along which is difficult to deal with now? That’s brilliant." Um, but for me being out running is that ability to escape. I live in a wonderful part in the southwest, 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 my pace up at the end because I'm like, "Ah I cannot forget that!" You end up running back home to get 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 round 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? And I think when I was in the military that was all the time. And now it's not.
When I left... 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, like don't really like using it, but there's this it's 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 blubbering. 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 excitement that I was going onto this new phase of my life, but also that's it now. Never going to do that again. And that made me who I am today. And 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. I'm never I'm never going to go to Afghan again. I know it as difficult as it was, it's an adventure."
And then crying, crying, crying. And my wife kicked my foot. She was actually literally hoovering next to me, she's like, "You going to get up?" and I was like... looked at her. She went, "Oh," and we had this little moment together and I kind of like gave it all on the plate. And then I went and booked Marathon des Sables. Of course you did. Yeah, because I thought I've got to have something, I've got to have a challenge which will um fulfill that.
So now you're running this business, Lupin.
Mm-hmm.
What is Lupin doing? I'm guessing you've really felt the pain of running a business and and starting a business because it's a startup, right? During the pandemic. What is Lupin 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 might be wrong." And 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 that 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 Afghan, we crack on. Come on then, lads." And I'm inside I'm like, "Ah I don't feel too good at the moment." And things happened and as I said I got in trouble and 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 been seeing? What you 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.
Couple of beers doesn't always help, but couple of beers for us at that moment was like, "Oh wow are you... 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 and do 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 team's amber, straight on the phone, "You alright?" "Yeah, 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, I'm okay." And then on the odd occasion we get "No I'm not feeling too good today." Take today off then. And that person's 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 shown us is we can embrace this.
Sounds amazing and I even as someone that, you know, ran an organization with many hundreds of people, um being able to see sort of an early warning sign for situations developing, 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 losing good people costs you a ton of money. Sounds amazing and it sounds like a very long way from Afghanistan. Do you know what I mean?
Tech is a beast in itself. It's a whole another I've worked in tech in in San Francisco and stuff and it's a whole another 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 short amount of time, so incredibly impressive. You've lived many many lives in your in the one that you've experienced and I actually was thinking as you were telling these stories today how honored I am that someone like you listens to my podcast. I was I was like I need to listen to your fucking podcast!
You’re... I hit a low moment last year when we dropped investment and we took these overheads. Like we went from like three three each, so about six grand a month overheads to suddenly thousands and thousands of pounds because we got a team in an office. And we're looking at our reserves going "That's like two months worth." Then we got four months. And we were getting "No" after "No" after "No" 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-Serter's to just take inspiration and "I don't know this world well enough and you guys do." and I was listening to it going "They've done it. They've done it. They can do it, I can do it. Right, okay." And low fucking 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 shit. It's better 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 just over half a million.
And it's listening to your stories, listening to others was the moment for me where I'm like "Just keep going. Just keep..." I listened to the ones this morning 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 "Ah, good!"
That’s a massive compliment. 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 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 and you know you said it was a an an 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. Because you're an incredibly impressive guy. Thank you. Cheers.
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 in 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 you spend so much time pouring your heart and soul into it and everything you know and all 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 ghostwriter, I wrote every single word by 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 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 going to put you into a group with everybody that's pre-ordered it, and I'm going to send you some exclusive stuff. So the first thing I'm going to do is a series of voice notes, which I think are um are going to be pretty powerful. I'm going to give you access to some tickets which nobody else will have, and I'm going to 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.
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