"why am i at this point and how the hell has someone died under my watch you can't even go and kill yourself you can't even go hurt yourself you're [ __ ] useless and i'm beneath the surface and you ca..."

"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 ..."

"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 ..."

"emotional gripping ride you're about to go on honestly congratulations for choosing to listen to this episode without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the dire of a ceo i hope nobody is li..."

"[Music] ben from doing this podcast over the"

"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 influ..."

"this and it's funny because my kids are the age now and i think about what are they processing now what they're going through how they seeing this what do they see every angle like um and then i think..."

"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 t..."

"so that was part of the experience and then then you find your feet a little bit in the system like my sort of final school that was kind of my make or break moment and i think i went more towards bre..."

"at high speed and then something will happen and you bang the brakes on and then everything comes flying forward and that's what i kind of found over the sort of my mid-20s was why am i thinking of th..."

"mechanism because heavy heavy metal is pretty emotional sometimes i think it is uh i think it does become a coping mechanism [Music] i but i found it was the start of things it was the start of escape..."

"experimenting or using other drugs so i think just to give you even more of an insight of what i was thinking is i think because what happened between my parents and then not really having a father fi..."

"and that sort of no from her was that moment where i was like well [ __ ] you i want to do what i want but i still stayed in school and it was like what's the next best option i don't know why becomin..."

"because it would make you feel like an alpha male or whatever um and it would make you feel and why why did i'm really like intrigued by that i thought where did the desire come from to be considered ..."

"can make you um think in rather negative ways and i that for me was when it was what else can i do this is it this out is it this alpha male thing you know that's is that what a marine is is what's th..."

"two questions the first is what did your dad do professionally and was your desire to be macho in any way influenced by um wanting to also be accepted by him at all i would want to say yes but i think..."

"dad do i need to be the alpha here and the the older i got and the more i was on the on the door and the bigger i was getting um and i was working five nights a week you know this was my full-time job..."

"a door or you can you can do it within a couple of years if you start doing it every night and becoming almost laser focused on being there for the violence you're you're an animal it's like the frog ..."

"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 ..."

"yourself into okay so she was right um there was an incident which happened uh at one of the nightclubs in milton keynes where it was around 3 am and i was leaving the venue as literally i was signing..."

"to where it was and we ran down the fire exit it's in the escape builder i don't know if you know the escape building in milton keynes it's like it's just like a maze you go through one exit and you'r..."

"like his arm dangling as they were trying to force him to the ground there was about three of the other lads on them big guys and then there was brother and then two of the people fighting in this thi..."

"itself was not a nosebleed it was purpley and i just said said to one of the lads was like i don't [ __ ] think he's well and everyone literally just massive breath came off him and he was still lying..."

"through an act of violence through actually no one's fault he fell and the way everyone landed on him unfortunately broke a bone in his neck which caused him to go away and it was um it was put down a..."

"control what happens is um someone will put you under they'll force you through and then someone else is the other side and they have to pull you out you can't swim you just go through like a torpedo ..."

"back to that young child in the royal marines museum in portsmouth who was looking at the pictures of old guys of moustaches in the falklands and the early iraq's people who had become something and i..."

"courage was the ability to go downstairs you know after sitting there for hours shall i shine shall i not i'm going mom you know you said no thinking of doing it and she went thank [ __ ] for that bec..."

"build that courage up and say can i go and do this and she was like yeah i support you with whatever you want to go and do and that was it it was literally i described in my book like a couple of days..."

"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 then you go down and you do this three-day course before you start training you have to go and do a potential royal marines course which is what i can only describe as a three-day bee sting where ..."

"nice one how did it feel when you got that like was it a letter or an email or it's uh it was literally there on the spot you know you do the last day of the three-day course and then they go hey you ..."

"your kit list this is what you're gonna need and that date came round but your mum was proud right yeah yeah she was really proud i think my girlfriend was a bit confused and a bit oh there he goes of..."

"that train ride in itself was extremely fulfilling and then the royal marines training center's got its own train line which is super scary to turn up to and then uh yeah i pulled up sort of five hour..."

"for your life and um and that seems to be what you know changed changed everything obviously it takes a ton of resolve because you know the way you've described it sounded i've got to be honest even t..."

"and i'd watched a documentary by chris terrell um commando on the front line and it followed a troop through commando training which was quite it wasn't an old grainy one it was you know a year or so ..."

"there and i think even that itself was a real moment of pride like i really enjoyed the first few weeks of training and then it got quite hard to realize that all right yeah it's quite a long course a..."

"almost searching for the advice to give him i think that's why i'm asking you the question because he is that guy that sat in his car looking up at the sky wondering what's the point in living what is..."

"something that reminds you to go remember what you want to go [ __ ] it i'm going to go and do it and you know what i found i know a lot of people like this i still have a few of them my close friends..."

"but there's a close friend of mine what's sneaky beaky you know appearing from curtains working for special forces okay fine and things like that right not perfect no no no no no no yeah can't do that..."

"your way which in turn becomes quite uh intimidating because you're sort of social groups looking at it going well the marines is really hard to get in now two of them are there one of them's guarante..."

"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 comman..."

"fast forward many years later i managed to get the prestigious job of going back to the commander training center as an instructor and get to see those people get to the start line and see them go on ..."

"what is the commander mindset are there principles to it what's the philosophy you know you talk about it being something that we can all sort of reflect on in our own lives we can all have that comma..."

"and so when you have that way of thinking and you have that ethos amongst your peer group and your leadership group um you know most of the time what's coming out of people's mouths is true and that w..."

"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 ..."

"was a drone saying that it can see fighting males coming towards us all carrying weapons and then moving down this street and that was like okay this is actually real and we hadn't been hit by this po..."

"bottom of the ditch and i'm beneath the surface and you can hear the thumps overhead like a split second you're underwater split second but it's long enough to go ah that wasn't the right thing to do ..."

"flashes and that's your reminder to go oh i need to switch on and be a marine here as opposed to hide cowardly in the ditch and then we go out and you get into the fight and that's what the mindset th..."

"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 lau..."

"and his way of looking at that was you could have the worst day ever you could fail every test but if you do something extra that day that just boosts that 0.1 at least you're making a little bit of a..."

"in our culture at the moment there's a narrative emerging which is like at least you did your bet you know there's a kind of a fluffy soft so you hate it i can see it in your face yes it's kind of lik..."

"and uh he won a race in sports day and i was like the marine dad on the edge and they're like godzilla you got this and he's flying down and he's miles ahead of everyone else it's like yes and he cros..."

"and i did think in my head i was like shall i go down there well it's good that everyone had to go and everyone took part and then this kind of the stoic commander went [ __ ] that i went listen here ..."

"and he likes that people will listen to that and they'll think some people might think oh you're toxic that's yeah those yeah pushy parents and you're training your kid to you know he'll end up like m..."

"won't put the effort in um and he will either go through a process in life like i did or he won't and he may look at my life lessons and others around him and go we're not going to do that i'm going t..."

"effort who came in last give him or her something as well you know well done that's a good effort we had um another cake yeah yeah i didn't want to say you said it before um i don't care about being c..."

"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 i..."

"argument we're saying is it it actually has the adverse effect because it takes away that sense of like striving and accomplishment which is so clearly important for people to live fulfilled lives and..."

"yeah it was the catalyst for sort of end of my career um i've got something really exciting to share with you last week as many of you might have seen in the press it was announced that i would be joi..."

"you know that i'm actually in the building so yeah just wanted to share that with all of you back to the podcast you mentioned the word melons earlier on the taliban talking about they planted their m..."

"it's like a jungle in the desert and then we landed on the americans gave us a lift in the morning dropped onto target and within about four or five hours we'd had um five guys taken out the game alre..."

"um and we ended up fighting with the enemy pretty much all day that day and then we needed to push patrol out in the morning and that morning that morning just had this weird feeling about it you know..."

"tiny little events that happened and i think they only seem weird now because i look back and like because there was an incident and um one of uh one of the marines uh darlow luke he um we usually rot..."

"sort of um base i suppose you could call it an occupied compound um and we just wanted to get in there and talk to some of the locals and see what the problem is with the taliban and where they are an..."

"from it and these two guys walked around the corner dressed in full black trainers on which is a massive indicator for taliban they used to wear trainers where most of the people just wore flip-flops ..."

"mean that heroically like shrugged off a bomb it was just a shock of it everything just went through you all the rubble um all the um frag fragmentations to the shards of metal just just went through ..."

"moments it's a real thing where people check themselves and i was like [ __ ] but then it real then you realize you're on patrol and there's other people on that patrol and there's 12 of us out on the..."

"myself i've got to get to vicey so i started crawling i was in utter agony as well i just knew i had to get to him and as i was getting nearer i could see that he'd been struck in the neck and it was ..."

"still marine at heart definitely and a few other lads taking it in the throat all over their bodies and you kind of we meet up every now and then you know not so much now but we meet up we call it the..."

"not easy to leave as they say life change is very different yeah have something to aim for that's what i decided this moment they told me i think i'd been up threw enough stuff up to that point to go ..."

"was that a i think i had that relapse or i know i had that relapse actually not long after afghanistan and i think this sort of trauma you go through the way you may handle it and what you've seen and..."

"done this career all right just i've just fought for my country and now i've got to go and stand in front of the judge which ironically was over an incident now i was defending someone else for when s..."

"um and it's it's so hard to they call it decompression it's so hard to decompress from that and you feel so pent and i remember coming back thinking no one respects us like it seemed like the civilian..."

"the england football teams like you can do this if you put your mind to it and they got that close very close let's talk about that then so where is gareth southgate and you ending up sort of working ..."

"a little fire talking about uh what it's like to score in front of 80 000 people what's it like to wheel away and you turned into a fanboy yeah massively and even when i was asking i was like ah don't..."

"and i think they did i think they did and there's been a lot of press around it as well so yeah they did well would have been awesome i i've read one of your uh your podcast all your interviews whatev..."

"helicopters at sort of 4 30 in the morning we were going to take a village and helicopters went trooper crossing the ditch to get into the village stepped on an ied blew him up and he was gone um and ..."

"or you go in there angry and when you go and they're angry you make serious mistakes and you don't have to look far and oppressed to see that happened and that happened on our tour um and that emotion..."

"to go well i'm not doing it then just i'll just turn up sympathy can sometimes show up as well too much sympathy maybe a victimhood the except is it's happened what is the next move what is the next t..."

"do you know what we'll do we'll deal with that later no we've got to deal with that correctly as well this is where some people make the mistake of bottling up i'm going to come back to that later but..."

"i'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 m..."

"and being proactive and as you said as the sort of military values being cheerful because that is uh optimism is a very important uh emotion to experience in times of real chaos you have to believe th..."

"found this on your own business journey is it's so full on all the time it's just someone wants you for something your phone pings or you know i'm i use social media i don't have the biggest following..."

"um but for me being out running is that ability to escape i live in a wonderful part in the southwest you you know that area very well up onto dartmoor up onto the southwest coast um you just just inc..."

"in trouble and things didn't go to plan and then finally i put my hand up to one of the lads and said i think i've got issues here and he went yeah same here i have as well what you've been seeing and..."

"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 pu..."

"and i think what the pandemic's actually showing us is we can embrace this sounds amazing and i even know someone ran an organization with many hundreds of people um being able to see sort of an early..."

"amount of time so incredibly impressive you've lived many lives in your in the one that you've experienced and i actually was thinking as you're telling the stories today how honored i am that someone..."

"going just i listened to the ones this morning i was thinking about this struggle that you guys were talking about and i was like sometimes struggle's good yeah it gets you to dig deep and sits in the..."

"ben and you you know you said it was a um a high moment for you to come on this podcast but i feel that um going the opposite way and i really really mean that i really mean that because you're an inc..."

"and get that pre-order and everybody that pre-orders the book because pre-orders in this crazy publishing industry count as way more than just a normal sale if you get that pre-order i'm gonna put you..."