Navy SEAL: Danger Brings Clarity | Joe Rogan and Andy Stumpf

I'm on his first jump off of a cliff in Italy the first time you put a wing suit on and it's uh That one stung a bit. So it's on pause Potentially forever as far as base jumping goes. I'll still skydive But it's a it's a question mark on the base jumping side So you do such risky shit the skydive was like, yeah skydiving. That's no big dust skydive I'll jump out of a fucking plane that I would do with my eyes closed every day That's the my risk ratio on that one is we're all set. What is the risk ratio on skydiving? Like what percentage of those things go wrong? Incredibly low So that you have a main parachute and a reserve parachute, I don't think there has been a true double failure meaning your main parachute malfunctions you cut it away properly and Deploy your reserve parachute and have that also fail in 20 some years People die skydiving all the time. Well, not all the time because I guess it you know, the population of people that do it is Not huge, but I would say the vast majority of people who die skydiving they they kill themselves. They make a poor decision And most people who die skydiving die under perfectly functioning equipment really, so the The canopy size the main canopy that you're flying the wing over your head the smaller it is the faster it goes the faster It descends but also quite frankly the more fun it is but with fun, there's consequence. So there are canopies that you can initiate a turn and If you initiate the turn too low you cannot pull the canopy out of the turn You will impact the ground at a high rate of speed regardless of what you do And if you get under that canopy with not enough experience, obviously your odds of making a bad decision You're going to go through the roof So most injuries and fatalities at least from the stuff I have seen is from people making poor decisions Under good equipment or choosing to execute an emergency procedure, which would be cutting away your main parachute into playing reserve Either out of sequence or doing it too low where the reserve parachute doesn't have time to open to me That's not a failure of the parachute system. That's the failure of the individual who is driving that parachute system So if you have a main parachute and you jump out and you hit the main parachute and there's a malfunction How do you cut it off to put to get the other one? So there's two pillars one on each side the right hand side you literally Need to do this in the correct order even though people have killed themselves by going backwards. So you pull to full arm extension You it's literally just a pillow with velcro that has two cables and the cables are what's actually holding the parachute on your shoulders If you pull that out a three-ring release system, which is basically just a load reduction system Unwinds itself and your parachutes gone and you're going back into freefall and you just pull the other pillow It sounds worse than it is and before I had my first cut away It was terrifying and then after you have four or five, you're like, okay, I got this you had four or five Main parachutes fail. I think I'm at about seven Well, I've been jumping for 20 years I started jumping in 99 Statistically, I'm actually I think under Uh, I think it's like one in every 888 jumps you'll have a malfunction or a gear failure It's honestly like it's your first one is an emotional experience. I would imagine your what was the first one? Deploying a parachute and just sitting there looking at it as it's because they want to open and You can I can tell now Within an instant of trying to deploy my parachute whether or not it's going to open or not just by looking at the shape By sometimes listening to it and just seeing how it opens Sometimes I mean so packing a parachute people think is really difficult if you can fold a t-shirt you can pack a parachute Sometimes though you you know You just get off of a jump and you only have 10 minutes to make the next jump So you skip a few steps or you rush through a few steps. Is that what happened with you? Potentially I may have skipped all of the non-essential steps and a few of the essential steps to get the parachute really I was just rushing and I didn't have a lot of experience So I was stuffing the thing in there and when I tried to deploy the parachute it just it was asymmetrical. So Sometimes it'll it'll open and it'll start spinning and then you're flying with your back to the it's that would be Considered an exciting moment. I would say so what happened with you what exactly went wrong? It just came out asymmetrically the parachute wasn't opening and we spinning no I wasn't I actually was able to recognize just by it should come out It looks like a rectangle more than anything But if you look like a rectangle that's twisted there's no way to fix that no way So just get rid of it. And that's what I did. I looked up and I said, okay, that's not gonna work Reach pull reach pull and your reserve opened so fast like by the time I felt like by the time I had pulled the reserve handle Because I had a handle that point by the time I had moved my arm to three quarters of extension it had fired off. Wow. Yeah Dude But the difference and you're asking the difference like why is risk skydiving lower? It's because you have time thousands of feet whereas base jumping you might have hundreds or if you're Really pushing the envelope you might have sub 10 feet because you're flying close to the ground as fast you can go Did your friend Alex who died did he die base jumping or he died wingsuit base jumping something that I? was I mean, he was my main base jumping partner. What is the difference between wingsuit base jumping and regular base jumping regular base jumping You just have a quick deploy parachute, right? So you have one parachute system when you base jump instead of two because there is not time for a reserve to open So that is just taken out of the system, right? So you pack your Primary or only parachute very similar to a reserve. It's designed to open rapidly. It's designed to take a lot of load But so base jumping is just jumping off of a static object base stands for building antenna span or earth So four types of object the addition of the wingsuit is really the only difference which allows you to Like for myself personally, I'm not a huge fan of jumping off buildings and cliffs Without a wingsuit because I don't like being from me to that flag when a parachute opens Because if it doesn't open exactly in the direction you want it to you better be johnny on the spot Or you're gonna have a fucking problem So it's to me if you have enough altitude you put a wingsuit on in two or three seconds The suit is mocking forward So then you're hundreds if not thousands of feet away from the object then your parachute can open up however you want it to Have they made any improvements in the technology of this stuff since you first started jumping huge improvements I mean the first wing suits were literally just fabric that had like the little thumb loops You'll find on like cold weather long sleeve shirts sometimes seriously Like patrick day kept it on That's how they kept it on. I didn't jump any of those goddamn things But I mean, I think patrick day garden is how you say his name He was one of the first and they would just sit there and just they would just jam their appendages and lock them out and use their entire musculature To sail this fabric as far out as they could get fuck and then the suits now are unbelievable So each wing like the wing between your legs and the wing between each of your arms. So there's three of them They're totally independent. They have a ram air opening so the air rushes into that and makes the wing semi-rigid So it reduces the stress on your body And they their flight characteristics are insane. You can go You can get the suit flying faster. You can fly it flatter. You can float everything about it is Improved except for the decision making process of the monkey who's actually jumping it That's the original one jamie, oh that guy's dead for sure Yeah It says uh manus Mickey morgan wearing a he's 100 that wing suit. Is that ridiculous? Well, who is the first fucking psycho that thought that this was something that they should try it could potentially have been this Oh my god, this guy's like he looks like he's living in the 1800s. When did they invent these fucking things? I don't know. I know one of these guys died going off the eiffel tower in an exhibition. This is 1900 right here 1900 Why in the fuck look at that guy? Strong, you know what man if you were living in 1900 you probably like listen, I let's just get this over Fuck living in 1900. Everyone has syphilis. Fucking whiskey's illegal. I'm just jumping off. Look at that That is crazy. So that's yeah, I mean that's I mean honestly i'm not gonna lie. I would probably jump that out of an airplane 1895 yeah, oh he's the inventor earl stein. He died in the first attempt Oh jesus christ He died in the first attempt honor to a modern hero. All right, settle down. But here's the thing joe There's like 60 some people who are associated with uh, the modern day wing suit and testing and evaluating to get it to this point They're all dead. All of them are dead every one of them But that suit like I mean that suit and the difference between that and where we are now, it's it's night and day But everyone involved in the creation of these wingsuits died in a wingsuit. Yep. Fuck, man Yeah, that is not good Like there wouldn't be a whole lot of black belts in jujitsu with everyone who got to a certain point died You know what i'm saying? It's hard to justify or rationalize the behavior for sure. I'll be the first person to admit that What is it like what what is it about? Oh this guy jumped with his dog. That's dean potter jumping with his dog Oh the poor dog. So the dog the dog's fault. The dog I believe is that looks like switzerland crazy asshole fucking owner So dean was insane, right? He was a world-class, uh rock climber. He's also dead from jumping a wingsuit. He died in Yosemite um it's Like I said the technology advances Uh, I am not I was not there the day the dean died. I've talked to people who have looked at it uh as to the conditions that led up to it and uh One thing people generally don't want to do is place the Responsibility on the individual making the choice But what from everything that I have seen he made a choice to jump at a time when he should not have been jumping Due to visual conditions So even though the suits are amazing Really, the only thing that doesn't seem to be evolving is the person that's that's jumping at it most of the time just like skydiving It's just a human being making a very poor choice to include Alex what is it about people and I mean particularly people like yourself that love these thrills like what are you getting? What are you getting out of that other than this mad adrenaline rush? I mean, what is it like what motivates you to keep doing that? uh So I look back at it objectively I think when I initially started pushing hard down that path I was trying to replicate a headspace or a feeling or a sensation that I had in my old job so if you want to talk about Clarity of thought and I think you know, we might have talked about this the very first time that we sat down Stripping away all ancillary bullshit that has absolutely no meaning But for me at least spends I spend 99 of my time worrying about things that have no impact whatsoever Right. So you sit on a helicopter pick the battle space that you're in and you get a five minute warning And you really stop worrying about whether or not you have enough money in your checking account to cover your mortgage And then you get a three minute warning and then you kind of stop worrying about whether or not you just had an argument with your wife Or you just sent off some snarky email Then you get a one minute warning and a 30 second warning and the closer and closer and closer you get everything is gone and it is Still to this day the the sensation and state that I have been in that is by far I had no question about uh My purpose and I had the utmost clarity that i've ever experienced in my life And you get you get used to operating in that headspace of just being in the moment the first one to three seconds in front of you Nothing else matters. I'm going to solve this problem and move on to the next one this problem and move on to the next one well, then I lost that ability to do that and It sucked because I liked operating in that headspace because it it helped me deal with all the other bullshit in my life because it reset For me my what matters and what doesn't matter ratio? I was able to get rid of like I would describe it as just the white noise in my head or another way i'll describe it is Like jamie's got a bunch of levers that he can push up I think in this i'm included in this. I think most people are pegged out at a 10 almost all the time They're fucking white knuckling through life But if you can get into that state Where you have that clarity of purpose clarity of focus? I felt like it pulled everything back to a three And so that state helped me in things that had nothing to do with that activity and it lasted for a long time So when you're base jumping and you're standing on a cliff And you're scared out of your mind and you can't talk as your mouth is so dry and you have a p-ring on your suit Which is why you always get dark suits. So people can't see your p-ring and Every alarm bell in your body is telling you don't jump and it had the same experience. I wasn't worried about checking count I wasn't worried about what was going on in life. I was just living in that moment and it helped me Be a better dad. It helped me be a better Husband it helped me be better at any business decision that I need to make because it allowed me to pull all of those Stereo levers back down so it's less for me and I can only speak for me It's less about thrill seeking because I get that all the time like you're an adrenaline junk. I'm like, ah I enjoy i'm an adrenaline enthusiast. I certainly enjoy that But I actually like what I get from the activity more than the activity itself What do you think is going on where people are pegged at 10 all the time with nonsense? And that's something that's life threatening can bring it back to a three and offer clarity I mean there has to be something that you've discussed or thought about in depth. I just think it helps you Control alt delete Your hard drive a little bit it helps By not having like when i'm standing on a cliff right before I get ready to jump There is absolutely nothing that I am thinking about other than Where I want to be in the next three seconds And by being able to focus on something so singular and maybe I don't I don't meditate But i've heard people talking about and by being able to clear your mind it helps them deal with everything else I think there might be some connection there um, but I just I just think that The removal of the noise that bombards everybody all day long even for a little bit Helps you It's uh, you know, you you have uh, ipod or not ipod I phone and head so headphones for sure, right? Have you ever noticed like when you're listening to it you listen at the same volume level, but then it doesn't seem to be as loud So what do you do you click it up a notch? Right, and then you get used to that volume level and then you click it up a notch and then you get used to that volume Volume level you know receptor downgrade phenomenon your body gets used to it. So it adapts to it but if you pull that stimulus out And leave it at that high volume but listen to it like two weeks later. It's going to blow your ears out Mm, it'll seem louder. It's not gonna blow your ears out But it's gonna seem much louder than it would if you slowly just incrementally started adding that volume So if it's there's something in there that is allowing me and i'm not recommending that anybody pursue therapy via the directions that I do But there's something in there that's allowing me to Instead of add and add and add and add That activity allows me to detach and then when I come back to it, I realize you know, it just it just feels different for me That's I don't know if that's a good Description of the mechanism, but that's the best that I can probably describe it